What I’m Reading: Tunneling to the Past

It’s been a while since I did a “what I’m reading” roundup. (After the newsletter went to once a week, it became harder to slot them in.) But today I wonder if you’re feeling like I am, worried about the state of the world and eager to find answers — or at least a way to escape searching for them — in books.

Some of that means reading work that’s new to me, including “Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict” by Eli Berman, Joseph H. Felter and Jacob N. Shapiro.

Covering the war in Gaza has inevitably brought reminders of other conflicts, including the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. If, as the saying goes, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, the battles for control of Mosul and Helmand feel like previous couplets in a long, grim poem that now also includes Gaza City and Rafah. I picked up this book as a way to get a more grounded perspective on those past conflicts and others.

One paragraph from an early chapter of the book seems particularly relevant. (For context, “asymmetric” wars are those fought between groups that are very different in size and capability, often involving guerrilla warfare against a more traditional state military):

I have also been drawn to reread a book that I first looked at long ago. Not, I think, because I’m longing to rediscover the familiar prose, but because I feel compelled to go back and interrogate the now-unfamiliar version of myself who turned its pages a long time ago.

I first read “The Berlin Novels,” by Christopher Isherwood, the book that inspired the musical “Cabaret,” in college after watching a particularly compelling production of the show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Oddly enough, when I looked it up I realized that it was the precursor to the show currently playing on Broadway, and starred a young Eddie Redmayne, but I had no idea — at the time he was just a guy, rather than an internationally famous star.)

That Fringe production’s staging of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a sweet-sounding folk song that is eventually revealed as a Nazi anthem, was one of the most intensely memorable experiences I’ve ever had at a play. At first, the song was staged as a delicate melody sung by smiling youths, and I remember smiling and wanting to hum along with it, not realizing what turn was coming. Then in a later act, cast members embedded in the audience belted it out in a much uglier, martial tone.