TWNW Special: What to Read This Summer 2023

MCMAHON:
Welcome to The World Next Week's special summer reading episode. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anne Robbins. Every year we look forward to sitting down to discuss books we've read and plan to read, as well as other movies, TV and podcasts we'd like to recommend for these slightly more laid back months. And joining us today for this summer podcast spectacular is author, columnist, podcaster, and professor, Rosa Brooks. This is Rosa's debut appearance on The World Next Week. Rosa holds the Scott K. Ginsburg chair in law and policy of Georgetown University Law Center and is an associate dean for Centers and Institutes. Rosa's also an adjunct senior scholar at West Point's Modern War Institute, and you can listen to her on weekly foreign policy podcast, Deep State Radio. So Rosa, welcome to The World Next Week.

BROOKS:
Thanks for having me.

MCMAHON:
And just one reminder about one of our summer reading show ground rules, we do not tout the books produced by our CFR colleagues. Now all year long, we highlight the stellar CFR publications on our usual programming, which includes our fellow podcast, The President's Inbox. But today we'd like to spotlight the fantastic authors and creators we've come across outside of the Council.

ROBBINS:
So Rosa, as our guest, you get first dibs on sharing a book you've recently read and that we should be adding to our summer list.

BROOKS:
Yeah, I thought I would talk about a book called Seventy Times Seven by Alex Mar, and I'm trying to remember actually what the subtitle of Seventy Times Seven is. I found it. It's a true Story of Murder and Mercy. And it's a book by a Rolling Stone journalist. It's actually sort of hard to say what it's about. What's interesting is that if you read a lot of the reviews, and I reviewed this myself for the Post, and if you read a lot of the other reviews, they'll tell you that it's a story about redemption and mercy. 

It's about a young woman who was accused of committing a terrible crime. She murdered an elderly woman, stabbed her to death over a botched $10 burglary. She was sentenced to death. This was in the 1980s. She became the youngest female death row prisoner in American history. She was fifteen years old at the time of the crime, and a lot of the reviews pitched this as being a book about the relationship that the girl in prison develops with the grandson of the murdered woman who ends up becoming a campaigner both for her release and an anti-death penalty campaigner nationwide. 

What was so fascinating to me about the book, though, is that that description of it, which a lot of the reviews focused on, really doesn't capture the book's complexity because it's not a feel good story about nice man forgives person who's done something terrible and in his forgiveness, she too forgives herself and everybody lives happily ever after, and the spirit of mercy and love and forgiveness. It's a much more complicated book in many ways. It's a book about the limits of empathy as well as about the promise of empathy. 

And it's a hard book to read. It's painful and wrenching to read about this girl, to read about this terrible crime and to read about all the various characters. But what's most striking about it is how imperfect all of them are and how their efforts at empathy never quite go all the way, but do more than nothing. So it's in many ways a really profoundly difficult and painful book to read. It's not a book that leaves you feeling like, "Oh, life is simple after all. We have to do is love one another and forgive." It's a book that leaves you thinking, is that enough? When there are enormous barriers in gulfs of class, of race, of gender, of age, of behavior, of experience, how much can we bridge those and does it matter that we can't bridge them perfectly?

So I found it very striking. It's in some ways a really messy book. It's got way too many minor characters. It sort of gets a little confusing at times, but at the same time, I found myself literally lying awake at night thinking about it and sort of struggling with it over and over and over again. So I really recommend it.

MCMAHON:
Rosa, I'm curious, the U.S. capital punishment system, like many other parts of its society, get held up as distinctly different from other advanced democracies and as well as its pattern of imprisoning and everything else. Was there anything about this book that you thought was like, this is a uniquely American context, or it was more broad than that? The title of the book obviously is I think quoting one of the gospels about the power of forgiveness and everything.

BROOKS:
Yeah, yeah. No, the title references a line of the gospels that someone says to Jesus, "Well, how much should I forgive this particular offense against me?" And Jesus says, "Not just once, but seventy times seven." A major theme in the book is the role and impact of activists around the world. The Vatican sends representatives to speak out against the death penalty for this young woman, other international activist groups speak out, human rights groups speak out. And so certainly a major theme that runs through the book is that the rest of the world is just stunned that the U.S. would even consider executing someone for a crime committed as a fifteen-year-old, a child as a matter of international law. And in the end in a small and rare victory for international law at the U.S. Supreme Court, the Supreme Court decision that declared that the death penalty for crimes committed by people as minors violated the eighth amendment of the U.S. Constitution did end up citing in its footnotes things like the International Convention on the rights of the child.

ROBBINS:
So putting on your legal scholar hat for just one minute, there are so many things that this court is willing to roll back. Is there any conversation about rolling that back or is that our last bastion of humanity?

BROOKS:
I don't think that is going to be rolled back. The court has waffled back and forth a little bit on the question of life sentences without parole for offenses committed by minors. But I think that by and large, the trend, at least on the death penalty, I think is likely to hold. The court not only declared that the death penalty was unconstitutional, a violation of the eighth amendment for crimes committed by minors, but also for people with what, at the time of the decision, was referred to as mental retardation, today we talked about it as cognitive disabilities, they said the same thing. I think that the court's decisions have really in the last few decades recognized that the finality of the death penalty is such that we need to be aware that there are populations that generally have reduced culpability, reduced moral culpability, including those with cognitive disabilities, children, et cetera. So I don't think that's likely to be rolled back. They haven't taken a whole lot further. It hasn't had an impact in any significant way on the length of sentences, but I'm optimistic that that is going to hold.

MCMAHON:
And the grandson, do we hear anything more from him and how he turns out, is he still an activist in this field?

BROOKS:
He passed away not that long ago, and he really devoted his life to being an anti-death penalty activist, co-organized a group made up of the family members of murder victims. But there too, part of why I love this book is that it doesn't give you any heroes or villains. The villains have their moments of heroism and the heroes have their moments of villainy. And this is what is so great about the book, that it never lets its characters or the reader kind of get away with anything. It never lets you get away with sloppy thinking and with sort of wishful thinking and everything is fine now. It keeps sort of pushing you to say, yeah, and yet and yet. This is bad and yet. This is good, and yet. It's a book of great moral complexity, as the world is, and it doesn't let you get off easy.

ROBBINS:
Sounds like really great journalism.

BROOKS:
It really is. I would love to hear, Carla, what have you been reading? Is there something that stands out for you in the same way that Seventy Times Seven has stood out for me?

ROBBINS:
So I'm a nuclear nerd, and this year I finally got around to reading the much heralded biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, that won, I can't believe it took me this long, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for best biography. So the title of course is fabulous and it really captures the genius and the tragedy of Oppenheimer who oversaw the Los Alamos laboratory during the secret Manhattan Project and the race to build the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was herald as a national hero. And then nine years after the Trinity test and the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the McCarthy era and the Atomic Energy Commission stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance because of, well, as the book shows, professional jealousies, his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. I mean, Truman called Oppenheimer that "cry baby scientist" and his associations with people affiliated with the American Communist Party.

And that's one of the really interesting things about the book because there's always been this sort of pall around Oppenheimer. Was he a little bit questionable? We find out his wife Kitty was a former member of the party, as was his brother Frank. And like many liberals in the thirties, he contributed to the party and attended one meeting. But after pouring over Oppenheimer's FBI files Bird and Martin say definitively, quote, "Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise, as the FBI learned to its frustration over many years."

After reading the book, I came away with a lot less sympathy for Oppenheimer than I expected. Of course, we all should feel enormous sympathy for anyone who was blacklisted, but he seemed far too tortured for someone born into such luxury, someone who was gifted with such talents and someone who was surrounded by such genius. I mean, Niels Bohr was his mentor. He had an incredible list of mentors. He just seemed like a really tortured guy and not just because he was involved with producing this absolutely horrifying weapon. But the book provides incredible historical sweep.

And I really appreciated the recounting of the immediate post-war scientific and political debates over how the leading powers now that they had seen the awesome destructive power of these weapons might cooperate to stop the world from blowing itself up. And of course, instead we got an arms race. And that's something that Oppenheimer saw, that Bohr saw, that all of these geniuses saw as much as they were committed, not Bohr, but as much as they were committed to beating the Nazis with the bomb, they knew what they were doing and they wanted to try to figure out a way to control this awesome technology. And I think there's some caution in there for today's discussions about how to control new and barely understood technologies like AI.

BROOKS:
You know, Carla, that's right, it's impossible thinking about Oppenheimer not to think about the recent discussion of AI. And everybody knows Oppenheimer's famous, I don't know if this is a real quote or not, but famously attributed to Oppenheimer after the first nuclear test, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds." I've always found it a little bit hard to have sympathy for him because on the one hand, wow, that's rough. On the other hand, hey, this is what you did. You decided to do this and nobody put a gun to your head and made you do it. I've had a similar reaction in recent weeks looking at the creators, for instance, the head of OpenAI that create... brought us ChatGPT, which is now busily destroying various worlds, not to mention the legal careers of various lawyers, rashly relied on it.

ROBBINS:
Journalists next?

BROOKS:
Yes, journalists next. A few weeks after getting fabulously wealthy in this case off this technology, they all go out and they say, "Oh goodness, everyone, we must all be very careful. We must warn you this could destroy humanity." And you think, well, thanks a lot fellas, now you tell us. And I wonder what is the lesson for us now from Oppenheimer's experience, the experience of Oppenheimer and other nuclear scientists?

ROBBINS:
Well, they of course were working in the midst of a world war, which we are not involved in right now. If there's any world war brewing, it's probably against our robot overlords. And they were utterly and completely persuaded that the Nazis were going to get the bomb first. And so it wasn't this sense from them that if we don't do it, nobody will do it. And that's why the post dropping the bombs' conversation then becomes, we know inevitably that someone else will get the bomb. How can we try to control it? And the politicians kept thinking that we, who destroyed the earth like giants, we will control the bomb forever. But the scientists knew this, they knew they'd figured it out and other scientists would figure it out and they were trying to figure out how to contain it, how to share it, how to convey to everybody else the horror of this. And to use the greatest cliche about nuclear weapons of all times, the genie would never be forced back into the bottle. 

But the gap between what the politicians wanted after the bomb was dropped and what the scientists knew grew greater and greater and greater, and Oppenheimer was a victim of that. So I have more sympathy for him and for all the scientists who worked on it than that, I don't think they could have avoided creating it, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for him about his agonizing in every other aspects of his life, including the relentless cheating on his wife.

BROOKS:
Aha.

MCMAHON:
I was going to ask the same exact question as Rosa, but I actually will ask one that's kind of-

ROBBINS:
You weren't going to ask about his cheating on his wife, Bob?

MCMAHON:
I was not, I was going to save that one. But in relation to the so-called extinction event we've all been warned about with AI, and meanwhile, hey, you know what? There are lots of nuclear weapons still out there and capable of creating close to extinction events as well, and the system is fraying like never before. I'm just wondering, this Oppenheimer moment we're about to experience with the movie and all the discussion going on and Putin's occasional dangled threats of use of nukes, whether or not this goes beyond the book, obviously Carla, but your thoughts about what was going through your mind in reading this and reading about our present moment and whether or not there's the cognizance of what leaders still possess in terms of this incredible destructive capability.

ROBBINS:
As I said, when they were racing toward this, it was really all about getting there first before the Nazis did. But once they've created it and then the whole focus is between different scientists who want to create bigger bombs like the hydrogen bomb. And this is of course is where Oppenheimer starts getting into trouble, and this arms race that is pushed by some scientists, but mainly by politicians. From the height of the Cold War, there were like 60 plus thousand nuclear weapons in the world, which is just an unimaginable number and absolutely unimaginable. I mean, one nuclear weapon can really mess your day up. But I think certainly Oppenheimer got that and he has an enormous amount of blood on his hands, as all of them do, but he certainly saw where this was going and a lot of them did. So Bob, are you recommending something happier?

MCMAHON:
In a way, yes. I have an autobiography that almost reads like a novel. It was a completely new discovery for me and I was kind of shocked I had never heard about this book before, but I think it's the type of thing that a lot of people have discovered this past year because there is a new translation of what they would call a lost classic. And this is The Story Of A Life by Konstantin Paustovsky. This was originally a six volume work that was completed in the 1960s. It received a great deal of attention earlier this year because there's an acclaimed new translation of about half of those volumes, so about three of those volumes, by Douglas Smith. And the first review I read was in The Financial Times. It was so enthusiastic, I clipped it out old-fashioned newspaper clipping style and had it there and actually was able to request it as a gift and got it and opened up eagerly and was immediately immersed in it and absolutely loved it.

It turns out that this book was actually in the running for a Nobel Prize back in 1965. One of the main reasons it was not offered up for one was that the Nobel Committee was being warned strenuously to steer away from Soviet authors because Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize from a few years earlier had so incensed Soviets that it caused major frictions. And so Paustovsky sort of suffered because of that comparison, although many critics will rate this as the more superior book covering a very similar time period by the way. And Pasternak and Paustovsky were almost contemporaries born about the same time in the early 1890s and their life had encompassed the sweep of the first World War, the disintegration of imperial Russia and the crazy period of the revolutionary Russia. And then what happened in Soviet Russia, World War II and so forth.

The person who's writing about it is writing in a very almost romantic style, but his writing, and again this goes to the translation I believe as well, his writing is just so gripping and so engaging that first of all you're just captivated by what he's going through and he experiences everything, and he experiences the sweep of the wonders of youth in Russia. He was actually growing up in what was imperial Russia in what is now Ukraine, went to school in Kyiv. A lot of the cities he mentions, although they have Russian names are evoked today because we're hearing them in terms of the ongoing war. And he writes about all these experiences in such a vivid way. He was a paramedic sort of in the first World War on the front, so saw all sorts of incredible things and all sorts of tragedies and is basically shunted all over the front before he goes back to Moscow and then ends up becoming a newspaper reporter and ends up writing about the revolution that's unfolding in the country.

The book ends in 1920 when the Soviet Red Army is sweeping into Odessa and the opponents in the civil war are the last vestiges of them and their families and so forth have chaotically crowded onto a bunch of steamers and are sailing away. And I just want to read it to give a sense of the type of writing that permeates this book, just to give you a sense. So the third to last graph in the book is describes the scene. "A jet of steam spurted it up into the murky sky over the bridge of one of the steamers, followed by a heavy shuttering whistle. Immediately taking up the sound, all the other ships began whistling in various keys. This was the chorus of departure. It sounded like a prayer for the dying for those who were departing their homeland and their people, leaving Russia's fields and woods, her springtime and winters renouncing their share in our common suffering and joy in our past and present, in the genius of Pushkin and Tolstoy, and that great filial love, we all feel for our beautiful land."

So he's a Russian, he's passionate about Russia even though in the preceding 800 pages he has described all sorts of unspeakable cruelty and dysfunction and just sort of wildness that's unfolding, and yet he still has this love for his country. For me, I found it very poignant and very human as I'm continuing to grapple with Russia and what's going on in Ukraine. But just as an experience in and of itself, I can't recommend this book enough. It's just a great ride.

BROOKS:
It's interesting. It sounds like the books that we each picked, one element that they all have in common is a embrace of ambiguity and complexity, a refusal to tell a simple story with good guys and bad guys and an insistence that violence and hope and despair and joy, courage and cowardice can all be bound up together, even in the same person in the same society.

MCMAHON:
I was thinking the same thing as you both were speaking. It's like yeah, we've all come at it from a different angle, but that's exactly the case. And when you look at the three individuals that are the focal points of the books that we've read, it is very interesting to see how different they are. And yet the world is in all its craziness and complexity is the same world. Again, I think as a historical take from a perspective that I don't think certainly a lot of Americans are not familiar with, I would also recommend it. Because it's covering this period, I think when you hear about World War I for example, recently got a lot of attention with the movie All Quiet On The Western Front. Carla and I talked about on a recent podcast, and then typically the literature is all about the western front and not about the German Russian front.

And that was eyeopening as well. And just these people going through the meat grinder on that front and all the people caught up in it in the little villages and everything else, it's very eyeopening. I'll add one other thing. There was a gripping scene. He describes when their little field hospital is suddenly approaching this very ominous place where they see all these soldiers kind of deployed outside of it and meanwhile they're allowed to go in and then all of a sudden the soldiers kind of cordoned behind them and they realize they're trapped. And the reason they're trapped is that the village has been quarantined because it's smallpox has broken out. And so they're basically expected to treat the people who are suffering in silence in these little homes.

And he describes these incredible scenes and also their anger at not being sort of let in on basically saying everybody in his unit would've gone in voluntarily and treated the people, but instead they're trapped there without all of their supplies. Again, it's one of these many moments of incredible tragedy and sadness and yet he moves on and he's got this literary soul and he just keeps on rolling with it and it's just, you can't help but just sort of carry on with him.

ROBBINS:
So I asked for a happy book, Bob.

MCMAHON:
And I think you got it. You've got the human spirit, I'll give you, Carla. That's what I can give you.

BROOKS:
Here's a question for you both. When we talk about foreign policy, whether it's journalists or policy makers, are we any good at capturing complexity and ambiguity or do we all tend to fall prey to the desire to have a simple narrative in which there are good guys and bad guys and so forth? And I worry about that a lot. On the one hand, I recognize that complexity can lead to paralysis, that if you spend all your time saying, oh, on the one hand, but on the other hand it's really complicated, it becomes very difficult to make any decisions. And in the world of foreign policy, people need to make decisions, they need to act.

But on the other hand, when your narrative is U.S. good, Chinese bad, or Ukrainians brave and good, Russians evil, that can lead to terrible mistakes as well if you're refusing to grapple with the complexities. What is your sense as people who spend all of your time in a world where people are constructing narratives? I mean, foreign policy analysts and advocates don't think of themselves as constructors of narratives most of the time, but that's part of what they're doing. And do we tend to squeeze out all the complexity?

ROBBINS:
I think you're right, Rosa, and I think that even in the way newspapers are constructed, we have our narrative stories, on the ground stories, and then you've got your analytical stories, which are your policy stories, and they are really quite separate. I can tell you when I worked at the Wall Street Journal, it was one of the great delights of my life in which they let me report in Washington and then actually go to a country where U.S. policy was being implemented to see what the relationship was, the vertical integration between Washington and policy on the ground. But that doesn't happen very often, and that gap between the reality on the ground and the debate in Washington is where we mess ourselves up all the time. And so that's not just we as journalists or we as policymakers, it's I think part of it is bandwidth issues and part of it is it's just different functions. Part of it is this sort of emotional narrative and part of it is, "I want to make a decision." They're separate and that's where we get into our trouble.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, I would second that and just add that it's also unfortunately the nature of media today and allowing us to be able to do nuance. It's the ongoing death of newspapers is a really big problem. The one silver lining maybe is these things like this, podcasts. I think podcasts are allowing people to get into nuance. And the question is that they become so niche that you don't have the mass distribution that you have in your big newspapers that used to be in every major U.S. city, for example, as well as global cities. But maybe there's another way that podcast networks can help bridge that.

BROOKS:
And novels, everyone should read more novels.

MCMAHON:
So that's a troika of books we recommended our listeners should reach for first this summer. But what about on our to read list? Carla, what's on your book stand?

ROBBINS:
My husband and I have been talking about why the U.S. military has been struggling with recruitment. And as you both know, the army missed its recruitment targets by 20 percent last year and he was drafted during Vietnam, but he said one of the best books he ever read that captured the psychology of peacetime enlistees is James Jones' From Here to Eternity. It was published in 1951, I might add I was not alive then. It won the National Book Award the following year. And the movie, which is perhaps what most people have seen, had a truly all-star cast and that won eight Academy Awards. But let's talk about the book first. 

I'm already 150 pages in, but I don't think I'm violating our rules here because it's a really long book, more than 800 pages. So I think it still counts for my to read list. It's set in 1941, it focuses on several members of the U.S. Army Infantry Company stationed in Hawaii, and it's in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. And the protagonist is Private, he's got a great name, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, or "Prew", who signed up in '35 at seventeen. And in the midst of the depression, he'd been a hobo and he repeatedly describes himself as a thirty-year man. From what I can so far tell the book explores the strength of that commitment. The army's going to be his entire life, but the army's frustrations and really the brutality test his innate, if not especially articulate, sense of justice. And of course there's the illicit love affair between First Sergeant Milton Warden and the beautiful Karen Holmes to look forward to. And that's the most famous scene from the movie with Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr making love in the surf, but I haven't gotten there yet, so I'm looking forward to that part too. But so far it's completely engaging and particularly engaging because what's to come and they don't.

BROOKS:
It sounds fascinating to read, especially at a moment when once again, we have a peacetime military here in the U.S. but we are watching a very non-peace time army in Ukraine. And thinking about the contrast between, we have another conventional war in Europe that is in our newspapers and our television screens every day, but here at home we're trying to decide if do we ever need to fight again?

MCMAHON:
And things in the Pacific are getting a little bit tense, shall we say, and that only gets more and more curious and worrisome as places like Hawaii to this day as well as Guam are on greater alert and alarm.

ROBBINS:
So this book just really captured people. I mean, Joan Didion wrote about it in her collection of essays. She said that Honolulu for her was all about James Jones. For me, it was always the movie and I didn't realize how much this captivated people. And the other thing that I discovered is that Scribner's, which published this, expedited it. Made Jones take out several references to homosexuality that were in the book, that the world wasn't ready for that at the time. And they were particularly concerned that the U.S. Postal Service wasn't ready for it at the time and wouldn't send the book out and that the Book of the Month Club, wouldn't accept it at the time. So Kayleigh Jones, who's a novelist, who's Jones's daughter, released a new version sixty years after publication in 2011 with scenes put back in, including Magio, who was the Frank Sinatra character. I know I keep referencing back to the movie, but I think people probably have seen the movie who actually has sex for money with men in the book. 

And it just gives you a sense of a world that was different in its own complexity there. But people also the sense that they're waiting. They're waiting for something for their lives to unfold, but we also know they're waiting for something else, which is World War II, which is about to hit them in a really big way. So Rosa, what's next on your list?

BROOKS:
Well, I am sitting here talking to you from a renovated one room schoolhouse in very rural part of Wyoming where I spend a lot of time and I'm in the very early stages myself, very, very, very early stages of a book project on land, power, and belonging in the American West. And the book that I am just started maybe fifteen pages into it and want to read is a book called Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone by a guy named George Black. And I'm reading it partly as research for my own project, but this is a moment, as we all know in which we're facing in the U.S. unprecedented partisan hostility and political division, divisiveness, people raising real questions about can America make it as a country or are we just so divided that this great experiment isn't going to work? 

And lots and lots of polls and studies suggests that partisan division isn't just superficial. Support for political violence is higher than we've seen it in many, many decades. We have the background debates about Donald Trump and various indictments and so forth and threats from major party leaders of not abiding by the law, encouraging supporters to potentially even take up arms. And in that context, there's one piece of America that seems to work, or at least when you're there, you think to yourself it works. You go to a national park and everybody is as friendly as can be. And I go to a lot of national parks and you talk to strangers and they're from all over the country and they're every skin color and every religion and so on, every age, and everybody is happy and everybody is nice to each other. And it sort of makes you think, oh, it's all going to be okay. Maybe there is an America there, right? There's an America there that transcends all of this and our national parks sort of symbolize that.

But at the same time, of course I'm keenly aware that our national parks themselves, especially places like Yellowstone, really are the products of some pretty nasty history. They're the products of violent conquest, of theft of land, of war and disease and misery and suffering in all kinds of ways. And Empire of Shadows, George Black's book, is a serious effort to kind of grapple again with the complexities of this period of time, the mid-nineteenth century, early to mid-nineteenth century that brings us the National Park System. And I'm really interested in learning more about how the author grapples with that, what that history looks like and thinking about what lessons it holds for us today as we collectively are sort of grappling both with the sins of the past and with the possibilities of coming together as a nation. Are we still able to do that as we move forward?

ROBBINS:
So lots of historical places are now recognizing the complexity of their own past. I mean, you go to a place like Williamsburg or you go to Monticello and Mount Vernon, they now were much more willing to tell more of the story than when we were growing up and we would go to these places. Is the park system doing that yet?

BROOKS:
A little bit. Not a whole lot, I would say, and I won't pretend to be an expert on the National Park System. Frankly, that's partly for lack of money. It actually costs money if you want to have an exhibit that talks about the revisionist history of the park, whether it's Yellowstone or any other place, and a series of administrations have not exactly been pouring resources into the National Park Service, but I think also the National Park Services has precisely because it's sort of one part of the U.S. that works despite that lack of money, everybody loves it, conservatives love it, liberals love it, everybody loves it that have been very hesitant to sort of wade into what increasingly have become a cultural war issue. Do we shut Yellowstone down and give it back to the descendants of the Native American group from whom the land was essentially stolen, many of whom were slaughtered to make it possible? Well, what do we do about that? 

And I think this is one of the great struggles of every society, is how do you deal with wrongs? What does it mean to have justice many, many, many years later, sometimes 100 or 200 years later? Do you need to grapple with the past in order to have a good future? Or do you need to forget the past sometimes? Or do you need to agree to pretend to forget the past? What are the costs of pretending to forget the past? And I think it raises all of those questions. And I don't know that the Park Service wants to be the ones to take the lead in struggling with them. I have chosen a whole bunch of books that don't really have anything to do with foreign policy, Bob. So I'm hoping that you have a book that you want to read that does.

MCMAHON:
Well in a way, I think we're getting at the human condition though here. That's something that's more universal. And so that's how I'm going to describe the book that caught my attention because it deals in part, although it's best known by most people as a book about gaming, and this is the book called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Now why Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? I am not a gamer. I never have been. I was never into Pacman or any of those things and sort of turn the other way when people start playing them. Doesn't mean I don't understand why people are into them. And in fact have newly gotten into some of aspects of the gaming world through this series that my daughter's talked me into watching called The Last of Us, which was outstanding on Home Box, about what happens when there's a future in which a future dystopia of a fungal virus that sort of takes over the world.

But back to the book. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its name from the tragic soliloquy in Macbeth where he's sort of laying out the futility of life basically. But the author of this book, Gabrielle Zevin, is in fact taking it in a more hopeful direction, basically saying through the prism of gamers in particular, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, this means there's another, a new day to create a new game, to create a new chapter in your game to change the story arc. I know that because I just listened to a podcast with her talking about it a bit, and it's clear from her podcast and from other descriptions that this is far from just a book about gaming. But I decided I wanted to learn more about this world because she's a fascinating storyteller in her own right, and this is a world that my daughters are certainly going into, especially my younger daughter.

And so I wanted to learn more about it. The general storyline is that at the turn of this century, we get introduced to two college students. One is a math wiz at Harvard, Sam, and the other one is a computer science wiz at MIT, Sadie. They run into each other at a train station, realized they had met years ago at a hospital where Sam was recovering from a car crash. Sadie was visiting her sister and they bonded while playing Super Mario Brothers. And they ended up kindling this friendship and even more importantly, a creative partnership. They become very successful gamers.

And the story, from what I've read and heard, wraps in all these other aspects of life and really gaming becomes kind of a metaphor for dealing with life's mishaps, challenges, tragedies and so forth. And I've heard from and read from the reviewers that it was the kind of book that people couldn't put down as well. So I'm kind of looking forward to a book like that for this summer, that's a different type of thing. Take me out of my comfort zone a little bit, but also maybe open up a new world for me and see where things go.

ROBBINS:
Well, that sounds like, I think we are dating ourselves saying, "We all need to read this book to understand our kids." But my daughter, of course, The Last of Us was very fabulous. Clearly with your endorsement, I'm going to have to watch it, but the fact that there are women, because for the longest time this was supposed to be absolutely the most anti-female of worlds. The notion of a woman writing about this is reassuring and perhaps should be quite eyeopening.

MCMAHON:
Yes, that was another attraction for me as well. And Gabrielle Zevin, I haven't read anything by her yet, so I'm actually interested in kind of stepping into her world a little bit more after this book.

BROOKS:
I was quite good at Ms. Pacman in my day.

MCMAHON:
Okay, all right.

ROBBINS:
Of course you were.

BROOKS:
I would just like to state that. But as an adult, I realized I'd always been rather snobbish about video games. I thought of them as a thing children do. And when I met adults who played video games, that's ridiculous. That's telling me that you sit around and play make believe with your teddy bears. But I'm married to a man, a retired army officer who loves to play video games, and he made me realize that I really was being quite inexcusably snobbish about it. I had not really realized the extent to which many modern video games are essentially kind of immersive movies in which you're a character in an immersive movie in which you have the ability to fundamentally change the plot.

And both the technological sophistication of these games and the sophistication of their characters and plots really did stun me, although it also worries me a little bit because as our world gets more and more complex and appalling, the escapism, the ability to literally slip entirely into another world... And I say that as a kid who spent my childhood with my nose buried in a book, quite familiar with the instinct to hide from reality in a invented universe. And it sounds like this book, it really explores both the promise and the downsides of these astonishingly complex immersive worlds.

MCMAHON:
And the other thing that caught my attention was, and this has come up in some of the reviews, is apropos our conversation on AI, is it's a book about humans who are involved in storytelling, which is one of the most human things there can be. And one of the things that people are especially worried about with the ChatGPT phenomenon. And so it is going to be important to have humans be able to tell stories and infuse some of their humanity into that as we sort of grow. But also an interesting way of seeing just the incredible evolution of technology in the gaming sphere. 

I was wrong before, I actually did have a game I used to play. And I think about the evolution from then. If you recall the game Pong, it was an early Christmas gift that I would sit and play with my friends and you can't believe how primitive this is. I tell my kids about it, they're dumbfounded. Let's take a break from talking about the game Pong. But when we come back, Carla, Rosa and I will share more great recommendations to fill your summer.

Foreign Affairs Interview Ad:
Foreign Affairs magazine invites you to join its editor, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, as he talks to influential thinkers and policymakers about the forces shaping the world. The Foreign Affairs Interview, a new biweekly podcast, helps you dive deeper into the issues covered in the magazine, whether that's the war in Ukraine or how technology is disrupting how we live. It also gives you a chance to hear directly from our authors as they explain the history behind today's geopolitics and how current events could shape our future. Subscribe to the Foreign Affairs Interview wherever you listen to podcasts.

MCMAHON:
Welcome back to The World Next Week's special summer reading episode where we share what we've been reading and want to read.

BROOKS:
We also wanted to talk about some things that are not books. Carla, are there any movies, podcasts, video games, music that you are particularly loving?

ROBBINS:
So I'm looking forward to seeing what Christopher Nolan does with the Bird and Sherwin book with his new film, Oppenheimer, which premieres in late July. And Nolan is just a fabulous director of multiple hits, several of which are highly cerebral, including some of my favorites. Okay, it's not highly cerebral, but I really like the Dark Night trilogy. But he also did Inception and he did Dunkirk and Tenet. And this, I don't know if you guys have seen the trailers, it stars Cillian Murphy, the Scarecrow in Batman and the star of Peaky Blinders, as J. Robert Oppenheimer. And he really looks tortured in this. So I suppose he'll make a great Oppenheimer. It's got Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, which looks like a great casting there. It's got Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, one of his ultimate nemesis', and it's got Florence Pugh as his lover, Jean Tatlock. And Gary Oldman is Harry Truman. So we'll get to, I think, see him call him a crybaby scientist. So I'm looking forward to that. 

So I also recently watched the cheesy but very fun two season TV serial, continuing the theme, Manhattan, which is a soap opera version of life among the Los Alamos scientists as they compete and commit adultery as they race to build the bomb. It didn't get a lot of attention when it first came out in 2014, but I really enjoyed it, especially for the paranoia instilled by the military control of the project. The clothes are great, the furniture is great, the whole ambience is great. If you're in the mood for a real opera about the making of the bomb, there is John Adams' Dr. Atomic, which I have never seen, but I'm now determined to. The libretto is drawn from a mix of primary sources about the making of the bomb and poetry and the first act unfolds in the months before the Trinity Test. And the second is in the early morning before the test, a time when no one is really sure whether it will work or will work so well that it could set the atmosphere on fire. 

And finally, I recommend an alternate reality TV series, which goes back to our discussion about whether or not they should have done this, the questions Rosa raised, The Man in the High Castle, which is based on the 1962 Philip K Dick novel in which Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan win World War II and occupy the United States after the Nazis get the bomb first and drop it, God forbid, on Washington, DC. I play the trailer for this for my students when we talk about nuclear weapons, and it opens the debate about whether Roosevelt made the right decision to build the bomb and whether Truman made the right decision to drop it.

MCMAHON:
Carla, you're really indulging your nuclear nerd on this podcast, I must say.

ROBBINS:
I know, but everyone will be a nuclear nerd this summer once Christopher Nolan's movie comes out.

BROOKS:
How about you, Bob? If it's not Pong, what is it?

MCMAHON:
Well, if it's not Pong, it's of course podcasts. I just can't get enough of them and I'm discovering new ones all the time. And one that caught my interest recently was the rather simply named Conversations with Tyler. It is hosted by the unique form of Tyler Cowan, who's an economist at George Mason, prolific writer, what people call a polymath because he can take conversations in many directions. And he has, from what I've heard so far in his discussions with authors, entrepreneurs, preservationists, what have you, what caught my attention on this podcast was again, back to our ChatGPT discussion, was his team engineered a version of Jonathan Swift so that he could interview Jonathan Swift, the seventeenth, eighteenth century author on a whole variety of questions. And the writeup about that episode on the show notes page kind of captures this because it's a fascinating interview. Basically, ChatGPT was able to kind of sweep the vast published work of Swift and come up with these responses that aren't bad.

But as the description says, "GPT Swift discusses his support for the Church of Ireland, his shift from the Wigs to the Tories, his opposition to William Woods' copper coinage in Ireland. He also talks about his works, including Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal, and his skepticism of moral and intellectual progress. Swift addresses rumors about his relationship with Esther Johnson and his fascination with Scatological themes in his works. He also discusses his early life in England, his intellectual mentor, Sir William Temple, and his jovial attitude towards death." I recommended it if you get a chance, if you want something different. Again, it's what makes this podcast interesting. And Tyler Cowan, of course, is fascinating.

BROOKS:
That sounds fascinating. I myself am deeply grateful to Tyler Cowan for public service he performs, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but he has something called Tyler Cowan's Ethnic Dining Guide. And he is one of those people who cannot resist going into every hole in the wall restaurant, every strip mall in the greater Washington metro area.

MCMAHON:
Of which there are many, by the way.

BROOKS:
Of which there are many. And asking for whatever is not on the menu that the people who run it would eat at home or eat in their home country and don't normally serve. And he has this blog where he reviews little hole in the wall restaurants. So if you're thinking to yourself, "Gee, I don't think I've ever had Tibetan food, or I don't think I've ever known the differences between Bangladesh and Pakistani cuisine," Tyler Cowan is your man. I have found many wonderful restaurants by reading his blog.

ROBBINS:
So Rosa, can you close us out with your non-book recommendations?

BROOKS:
Yeah. Well this won't be a surprise because since you're nerding out on nukes, I'm nerding out on national parks in Yellowstone. So I decided I would, for research purposes, watch the entirety of Yellowstone, the TV series.

ROBBINS:
Oh, yay.

BROOKS:
I'm not quite done. I think I'm towards the end of season four, so I have more to go, but I have been enjoying it. If any of our listeners have not watched it, the conceit of the show is that Kevin Costner, who's wonderful in it, plays a guy named John Dutton who is the owner of Montana's largest contiguous ranch, which probably exists in a sort of strange little fold of space-time where Helena, Bozeman, Yellowstone National Park are all within about a twenty-minute drive apparently. And various forces ranging from Californian real estate developers who want to build condos and make amend to Native American tribes who want their land back are all attempting to pry this ranch out of Kevin Costner's hands. And he has three children, each of which is dysfunctional in their own special way, and who vie with one another.

It's completely improbable. But what I sort of found fascinating about it, consistent with what I said about my interest in reading the book Yellowstone and Empire of Shadows, is that you would think watching Yellowstone the series that the body count in Montana politics, the actual physical body count is three or four people a week are getting shot, blown up or tossed off cliffs in Wyoming. And of course that's ridiculous. It's actually a reasonably peaceful place. But what is fascinating to me about it is that this is false about the present, but it was true about the past. And the very violence that we've never really as a nation, I think, fully acknowledged about that region's past is manifest in Yellowstone's fictionalized version of the region's future, which I just find really interesting the way, in a sense, the whole series is like a effort to say, "This is what it's all built on, people," even though of course it's not very true to most people's current lived experiences in the region.

ROBBINS:
So are you going to move on to 1932 after this?

BROOKS:
I haven't decided yet. I might. We can keep going.

ROBBINS:
I mean, Kevin Costner is fine, but Helen Mirren, Harrison Ford? I mean, really.

BROOKS:
Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I have a lot to look forward to this summer. I mean, the world is going to hell, et cetera, but there is a lot of good stuff on TV and a lot of good books to read.

MCMAHON:
And that after all is the purpose of the summer reading episode of this podcast. This wraps up our summer reading episode with Rosa Brooks. To all our regular listeners, we hope you enjoyed this special episode. Carla and I will be back next week with our usual programming. Rosa, thanks so much for joining us.

BROOKS:
Thanks so much for having me.

ROBBINS:
Please subscribe to The World Next Week on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it. We appreciate the feedback. And Rosa, we really do appreciate your joining us. The publications mentioned in this episode, as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for The World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on the world next week are solely those of the host not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Our theme music is provided by Miguel Herrero and licensed under Creative Commons. This is Carla Robbins saying so long.

BROOKS:
And this is Rosa Brooks saying thanks for having me. And it's been great to talk to you all and I'm looking forward to more good books.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and happy reading.