Off we go

I just took a caravan to Afghanistan, didn’t buy an airline ticket, and thank heavens didn’t get shot at. Rather, I’ve been snuggled under the cover of my very own down comforter, reading about other people getting knifed, mummified by desert winds, running off with tribal chieftains, and marrying men who already have several other wives in tow. Sometimes you just have to get out of yourself, know what I mean? If you want to know a whole lot about any number of countries, check out James Michener’s oeuvre. Chances are, he wrote about it.



The Michener book that’s been keeping me up nights is Caravan, published in the early sixties. It just goes to prove that if you do enough research, you can look prescient, even if the information was there all the time. Michener accurately predicted tribalism resulting in near civil war, Soviet invasion, extreme abuse of Afghani women, and a whole host of stuff you can read about any day in your newspaper’s front page. And if you want to get a really good perspective on why a war in Afghanistan is probably even more unwinnable than one in Iraq, why, look no further than this 40 year old book. The Afghanistan of Caravan makes other messed up countries, like Somalia and Nigeria, look like child’s play to get organized.



Nobody will ever accuse James Michener of intricate plots, psychodrama, or brevity (my soul mate!), but he knows how to amass a mountain of data as high as the Hindu Kush, twist it into a forthright yarn that shadows real characters, and by the time you plow through 300 to 1,000 pages, you know everything he knows about the subject. He wrote big books, but ones where the storytelling is so engaging that you find yourself reading over lunch, carrying the brick into the bathroom, and, in my case, burning yourself because you were stirring something with one hand while holding the book in the other.



In addition to Caravan, I’ve read Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii and Caribbean. Hawaii is fun and poignant (don’t bother with the awful movie they made from part of it). After reading the horrifying Caribbean, I don’t think I’d ever be able to vacation there again. Best of all, though, was Michener’s autobiography, The World Is My Home. It was a pleasure to visit with this seemingly kind, self made guy who seldom has a bad word to say about anyone. Whether he was really that way in person (hmmm, he was married 3 times), we’ll never know. It’s a big book, but it leaves out perhaps as much as it includes. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for an easy read that will give you more entertainment than whatever you just rented from Netflix, check out Michener, any Michener. Years ago any of his books was eagerly awaited and an instant bestseller. You don’t hear about his work much since he passed away. More’s the pity.