Guerrilla Warfare

This book - well, closer to a textbook really - by Ernesto Che Guevara, is the book about how to do guerrilla warfare. I mean, it's in the title. And its credentials are borne out by the reputation of its author, I would hope. Unlike the last book I read about how to do war well, this one is less full of mystical apothegms and more full of profoundly practical advice - stuff along the lines of:

• How to build a windproof bivouac shield for a campfire: here's a diagram
• Ideal places to take cover in an open bushy field
• Ideal places to take cover in a wooded hillside
• Ideal places for fireteams to cover each other moving through town streets
• Make sure you're kind to the local peasants; never steal from them, always pay them back for food and shelter when you can - and obviously never sexually abuse them or we will execute you as a traitor to the revolution
• Ensure you are familiar with revolutionary dogma in simple language so you can share it with any disenchanted locals we might befriend
• Steal every single bit of ammo from every single enemy that we kill, they have more of it than us
• Don't try and fight that tank you moron
• See that dug-in bunker? This (see diagram) is the angle you need to throw a grenade
• Develop simplistic hand-signals for silent communications when on covert action
• If you're a sniper move after every shot - obviously
• A disarmed and disoriented enemy is better for us than a dead enemy if we're behind their lines
• Get used to sleeping in mad, horrible places
• Keep moving
• Keep believing
• Keep your shoes empty, there are spiders
• Etc

   All sounds rather helpful if you're a minority force trying to overthrow an incumbent government, doesn't it? I will admit I currently have no violent revolutionary intentions - I was reading this to see if I could metaphorically derive any sociocultural tactics for making my spoken-word night (which is literally called Guerrilla) more impactful and authentic. Which is probably one of the faffiest reasons for reading this book anyone's ever had. But I still enjoyed it and learned a lot, and feel a tad more prepared if I ever do need to take up arms against the Tories some day. Which, you never know. But seriously - my list above may have taken a bit of a light-hearted slant towards the end, but I can't summate all the practical wisdom contained in this book in one blogpost - even though it's a short book, Che packs a lot in. As you would expect, from someone who took over Cuba with nothing but two notepads and an AK47.

the Prehistory of the Far Side

This book by Gary Larson is a highly interesting account of how he came to be one of the most highly-respectly and widely-syndicated comic artists of the late 20th-century (see for proof, the books of respective galleries one, two, three and four - as example).

   The first third of the book is a fairly sketchy but endearing autobiography of how Gary grew up with a fascination for nature, all its oddness and darkness; while also having a fairly odd and dark sense of humour - and naturally these things came together. He includes a few scans of drawings he did as a kid, several of which are fairly horrifyingly graphic - but you can see where the roots of the comic he become famous for came from. It's illuminating to say the least.

   The second third of the book is a dryer and more methodical walkthrough of his efforts to get published, then syndicated, then bigger - and so on. This sheds a great deal of insight into what exactly late-20th-century comic publishers were expecting from their artistic contributors and what they weren't, and it does largely seem that whatever Gary Larson was, they weren't expecting and didn't really want.* It took him a while to find his feet in the industry, and even when he did, the people managing his strips for the syndicates often didn't even understand the comics he was sending them - to the point that, if he sent in a batch of comics for a weeks' worth of newspapers, sometimes they would even mix-match captions between one or the other strip without even noticing, and often with no reader complaints that they "didn't get it" either. Gary Larson's style was simply that weird that people just took it as a given if it made close to zero sense. Though the dryest part of the book, I enjoyed this bit the most. It gives a great light into the inner and outer struggles of a cartoonist trying to get recognised and then successful; and with an honesty and humour throughout, never a bitterness.

   The final third is a compilation of Gary's favourite strips from his tenure, though most of these have already been featured in the galleries linked in the first paragraph. Anyway, if you not only have decided that you like The Far Side as a comic but are interested in the artistic, personal, and economic processes by which one becomes as weird a cartoonist as he, then this is definitely worth a read.

* I'll tell you what they wanted. They wanted Marmaduke: a dog who never made a noise or a mess or a fuss, only a vaguely sardonic thought-bubble in response to a borderline completely normal situation. They wanted Garfield: a cat with a big personality comprising of a whole four jokes under his belt that could be recycled ad nauseum at the expense of his obviously manic-depressive owner Jon Arbuckle... what they DID NOT want was a completely off-the-wall unhinged rumination on anthropology or natural history or fuck-knows-what every week with a completely different joke every time that most days even the editors wouldn't understand. But still, The Far Side remains a classic. How many people do you know that own a collection of Marmaduke strips? Exactly.

the Far Side Gallery 4

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

the Far Side Gallery 3

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

the Far Side Gallery 2

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

the Far Side Gallery

This book is a collection of 'The Far Side' comic strips by Gary Larson... if you're not familiar, then I admonish you to google the name of the comic and read a few, then once you're convinced buy a big fat book of them. They are some of the strangest, funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever to have blessed the flaps of a syndicated newspaper's cartoon page. My parents had the full collection of galleries and were having a clear-out, so naturally I ended up with the lot, and have read all four in the last few days. They just are that funny.

Tramp for the Lord

This book by Corrie ten Boom is an unexpected delight. I grew up on occasional stories about Corrie ten Boom; how she and her Christian Dutch family sheltered Jewish families throughout the Holocaust for years, right up until the end where they were captured and she and her sister Betsy were taken to a concentration camp, where Betsy died, but Corrie survived just long enough to see the camp's liberation at the end of the war. They were inspiring stories, and form the backbone of her more famous work The Hiding Place - but I'd never read that myself. But somehow I found myself drawn to what she found herself doing with her life after so much trauma. And man, is it remarkable.

   The autobiographical chapters in this book span decades, recounting historical events as she grows up through and past them, all with an unshakeable faith in Christ that carries her through everything as she persists in a singular quest to share the joy and hope she has in Jesus with as many people in as many place as she can. It's truly inspiring. And not just the task of it - the bulk of these chapters is comprised of a variety of hindrances, from lost airline tickets to localised epidemics to terrorist attacks to you-name-it - but Corrie's immediate instinct is always to retreat and to pray, and to continue doing so, while blessing those around her however she can, until something rights itself. And in these chapters, it always seems to. A cynic may easily say these are the miraculous wishings of a senile woman with nothing in her head but the dregs of a meaningless faith. But I do not think a woman of her calibre could have been what she had without developing a hard shell of robustness and fortitude in telling what is mere coincidence or genuine miracle or both; and more often than not, both IS both - that's the point. Her faith and her prayer and her patience sees her through so many strange and stressful situations in this book that she not only makes her global tour appointments as a speaker to congregations more or less on time, but she touches and brightens the lives of many random folks around the world as she does so. I found this a genuinely inspiring book - if not necessarily for how I think my life could ever go, then insofar as I may have faith, patience and prayerfulness. Lord give me the strength to be the kind of tramp Corrie was.

Against the Flow

This book by John Lennox is an examination of the core themes of the biblical prophetic book of Daniel, and extrapolating ideas from this to apply to how we as God's people might continue to live faithfully in a world that is increasingly secular and idolatrous. I bought this book as a gift for my dad's birthday, so I'm actually quite late in vetting it (which usual readers will know I do for all books I intend to give people, to make sure they're up to scratch) - but I've not seen him since the actual occasion so it's probably alright.

   Anyway, sorry, the book, yes. It's okay, I guess. The scholarship is rigorous - both in biblical and historical terms; Lennox demonstrates having done a great deal of thinking into the text of Daniel and the ancient context of 1200ish BCE Babylon, which makes for a great deal of well-footnoted and illuminating insight into exactly why certain points in the text work well. He also spends a fair amount of effort explicating why and how certain themes in the original prophet's writings apply to trends in modern society - I think his heart is in the right place here, but in my opinion most of these arguments come across as a bit heavy-handedly out-of-touch with the pulse of secular culture. Almost as if this were a book written to aid people in apologetics by someone who hadn't actually needed to apologise for over a decade because everyone else he knows is a devout and well-read biblical scholar. I mean, I don't know you, John Lennox, so forgive me if that seems like a harsh reading, but that's how it came across to me. I can't really imagine any non-Christian perusing this text to have a mind-blowing revelation of "wow that's what I'm missing from God", nor any juvenile believer studying your book to pick up anything from it that makes them think "wow now I can really convert all my apostate friends". It's deep yes, but it's scholarly more than anything; and while that is far from worthless - especially with a book as prophetic and rich as Daniel - Christians, study that all you can - I don't think this would be the top of my list of recommendations for people of any or no faiths.

   At least my dad doesn't read this blog. He's still getting it (albeit late) for his birthday.