A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

A peculiar entry in the field of apocalypse prepper books, written by a risk management and game theory specialist whose narrative voice sounds like a bizarre cross between a tech bro, a leftist, and a character from Sex and the City.

The book is pretty scattershot, but its general thesis is that humanity has been through many apocalypses before, we should consider the idea of apocalypse as a disaster like many other disasters rather than the One Thing That Ends Everything, it is better to prepare in a low-key manner than to either move into a bunker or not prepare at all, and building community is not only a better survival method than planning to shoot your neighbors but is the single best prep you can do.

There are two parts of this book that I've never seen anywhere else, and I think both of them could be extremely useful to certain select groups.

One is an explanation of game theory - something which tech bros, right-wing preppers, libertarians, and other anti-social types love, as it says that stabbing people in the back is the ideal strategy - which goes on to explain that most human interactions don't work that way, and it's not a useful model for human interaction or prepping. She instead proposes a different but equally abstracted model that shows how two hunters who cooperate will do better together than if they either don't cooperate or actively sabotage each other. I liked this very much and think it might be very useful to anyone who would otherwise fall prey to the deceptive logic of game theory.

The other thing she does, which again I have never seen in a survival book, is lay out step by step instructions for how to build a community that will work during a disaster. She gets into issues like who to approach, why, and how. She points out that asking for help with some small matter is a great way to start community-building, and also to find out who is interested in being helpful. This part is great and while it's only a chapter, it's a chapter I've never seen before.

My big issue with the book is her tone, which is pretty annoying. And a lot of the book is stuff you've seen before. But those two chapters are useful and unique, and well worth the whole book for people to whom they'd be useful.

Park ranger and search & rescue leader Andrea Lankford gets interested in three seemingly unrelated disappearances of hikers on the PCH, and launches a multi-year effort to find them.

This is conceptually very up my alley and is an interesting topic, but I didn't love the book. Some of the details were intriguing, but Lankford's style bugged me. It's a bit melodramatic and promises things that are not quite delivered. For instance, early on she makes a big point of "ARE these cases unrelated? Isn't it suspicious that three unmarried young men vanished on the PCH, exactly one per year?"

No. No, it isn't. Hiking the PCH is an extremely strenuous, time-consuming, and male-dominated hobby involving being gone for up to six months. It self-selects for people who are young, unmarried, and male. That's not victimology, that's statistics. Also, there are others who vanish on the trail but eventually get found in very non-suspicious circumstances, and it's not uncommon for people to die on this fairly dangerous hike, so... no! It's not weird that some bodies don't get found.

Lankford makes a big deal of there being criminal activities and cults in the area, but the cult turns out to be pretty benign and not kidnapping anyone, and the big crime she uncovers is mushroom poaching. There's interesting stuff going on - her effort helps to uncover two other missing people, one dead and one mentally ill - but it feels like she wants to write a true crime book when there's nothing suggesting there ever was a crime. She also comes across a bit self-congratulatory.

The book is also not very well-organized. I kept losing track of which hiker they were doing what to find.

In the end, ( Read more... )

I file this with The Cold Vanish as a "missing persons in the wilderness" book that could have been better.

These are a set of beautifully produced one-color graphic novels (each book has a different color, in addition to black and white) about history, with the frame device of Nathan Hale playing Scheherazade for his hangman and a British officer. (The author really is named Nathan Hale and is a descendant of the original.) They're fun and often funny without being trivializing; the end of Above the Trenches is a real gut-punch.

I got them for my shop and read them on a slow day, and was completely engrossed. In particular, the one on the Donner Party made the events more clear to me than they'd ever been before. The graphics there were excellent.

Thanks to everyone who recced them! I hope they sell so I can have the excuse to buy more, because I would like to read more.

This book is very worthy, which is undoubtedly why it's gotten such good reviews. But good politics do not a good book make. This is yet another book that should have been an article. Let me summarize the book for you:

1. Climate change is caused by humans. It's bad beyond belief. We have approximately ten years to put on the brakes before apocalyptic levels of catastrophe. (The book was written in 2019, so we now have about five years.)

2. Technological solutions to remove carbon from the atmosphere are impossible, will make things worse, and are morally bad because they give us permission to emitting carbon that we know it'll be removed. The only solution is to stop emitting. Completely. Not reduce, go to zero.

3. There are THREE things you need to do to stop producing carbon. They are more important than anything else you can do. Stop fixating on stuff like recycling or planting trees, and focus on these:

3A. Stop flying.

3B. Stop driving.

3C. Stop eating all animal products, especially meat.

There, now you have all the actual information in the book.

Seriously, I hope her intended audience reads it and takes it to heart. But on a personal level, I found it obnoxious. Here's why.

1. Could have been a feature article.

2. It's entirely individualistic. The closest it comes to suggesting larger solutions is to suggest talking to your friends and writing to your representatives.

Why is it so hard for Americans to just stop driving? Yes, yes, we suck. But the other issue is that there are vastly powerful and absurdly wealthy forces which have prevented and continue to prevent any non-car form of transportation from being safe, usable, or even existing in many parts of America. "Stop driving" is literally impossible for many individuals. This is a collective, political problem, not an individual one. New Yorkers are way more likely to not drive than Angelenos. Is it because Angelenos are selfish and bad, and New Yorkers are unselfish and good? No, it's because New York has subways!

Nicholas herself was able to stop driving because she MOVED TO SWEDEN. Now there's an accessible, practical, and easily scalable solution!

Yes, it would be great if every American found some way to stop driving, like by moving to Sweden. But if you really want Americans to stop driving, the way to make it happen is a political movement to institute safe, affordable, accessible, and widespread public transportation. If it's there, people use it. If it's not there, they just drive while feeling guilty.

For not flying, she gives the example of a friend who stopped attending scientific conferences because he was just flying out there for one hour, presenting a paper, and going home. Great, that saved his personal flights. How about lobbying to make those conferences wholly or partly virtual? That's a collective action that would do a lot more. (Also, her friend group is REALLY not representative of most people - not even most upper-class Americans are in the habit of flying for a one-hour meeting or presentation!)

3. By narrowing down all the possible things a person could do to three and by making them 100% individual consumer choices, it leads climate-concerned people down the path of becoming Chidi Anagonye having a nervous breakdown over whether his almond milk is ethically sourced. If you have more than two eggs per week, you are personally destroying the world!

The eggs are a good example of the absolutism that's more likely to give people a nervous breakdown than to be helpful. I eat more than two eggs per week. I assume those eggs still account for less carbon than the average two eggs, because my eggs come from my own chickens. Obviously keeping backyard chickens are not practical for most people. But what if you ate more eggs because you got them from someone else who keeps backyard chickens? What if you make sure to get them from a small, well-kept, flock from a small farmer? What if you eat more eggs to make up for eating less meat?

These are not issues which are addressed. Two eggs per week or bust!

4. She leaves out important details. For instance, she says coffee and chocolate are particularly carbon-intensive, and we should to eat berries instead of chocolate, and drink tea instead of coffee. Why is coffee worse for the environment than tea? What's so bad about chocolate specifically? Nicholas doesn't say. If you're trying to make people quit coffee and chocolate, you really ought to back it up with results.

5. The author's style is insufferable. (Thanks, peeps! Well, that was a bit heavy, now, wasn't it?! After we've made it through All The Climate Feels... Reader, I am a turkey heiress.) It's like Carrie Bradshaw writing about climate science. She goes by Kimmy, and her friends are named Colty and Puddy. I kept expecting them to say, "Tally-ho good chap, let's toddle off to see the sunset over the Raj."

6. Which brings me to the fact that it is 100% focused on upper-class white Americans. And, yeah, very worthy, it is indeed all largely our fault and we should change. But it's also centering white upper class Americans and the individual things we do individually, which I don't think is the best lens through which to look at the problem.

The next time I pick up a climate book, if the author is a white American, I am going to put it down.

Not long ago, I spent a week in a vast, sprawling Mexican resort. On one side, the ocean was a glimmering, nonnegotiable border. Inland, the resort was a green network of undulating paths--like a golf course without any holes. There were swimming pools everywhere. It was like being trapped in a David Hockney painting. I was lost for a week. One hot afternoon, lost yet again on my way back to our room, I realized that, earlier that day, I had used an iguana as a landmark--and it had moved.

A fascinating and beautifully written book on the neuroscience of how humans (and some other animals) find their way and get lost. Christopher Kemp is a molecular biologist specializing in neurodegenerative diseases, and has absolutely no sense of direction and significant anxiety about getting lost.

Driving into an unfamiliar city evokes sweaty, dry-throated, full-bodied, hyperventilating, white-knuckled, existential dread. Doom. Baroque panic. Gargoyles circle overhead.

Research shows that people tend to accurately estimate their sense of direction. Amusingly, every time Kemp quotes or refers to a scientist he spoke to himself, he puts their self-estimated ability to navigate in parentheses.

This is a fairly dense book so any attempt to summarize will be simplified at best; if you're interested, you should read it. The things I found most interesting were various examples of the brain having specific sets of cells or specific areas that do extremely specialized navigational work, like one set of cells that fires for being in a specific area (ie, in the kitchen) and another set that fires for directions (ie, north), and how much of this had been discovered relatively recently, as in the last 5-10 years.

A lot of neurological experiments involve doing bad things to rats, mice, and in one instance, ants, so there's a fair amount of that referenced. I was relieved when we got to an experiment recent enough that it was mentioned that the experimenter had to rework part of their experiment because the review board decided that the first draft would break rules about cruelty to animals.

If you're OK with that, this is a pretty great book, with lots of fascinating information and interesting anecdotes ranging from death by GPS (don't drive into a lake just because your GPS told you to) to attempts to train people with severe directional problems to get better at mental mapping. Directional issues are largely hereditary; Kemp's mother has the same problems he does, but his children don't, probably because his wife is far above average at navigating. (He tries the directional training, but it doesn't do much.) He also profiles several impressive cases of people getting lost, such as Amanda Eller, who was also profiled in The Cold Vanish for getting lost for 17 days in Maui.

It's hard to read this book without pondering one's own directional (4 out of 10) and mental rotation (7 out of 10) abilities. This is unusual; typically that group of spatial abilities clusters together, so the majority of people are either good or bad at both. I'd also give myself a 8 out of 10 in visualization, but a 1 out of 10 in knot-tying - both of which are also spatial abilities which tend to cluster together with mental rotation and sense of direction.

A collection of interviews with plane crash survivors (both crew and passengers), plus some excerpts from cockpit recorders. The interviews are excerpts from the ones the NTSB does as part of its investigations. There's no way I wasn't going to like this book... right?

Surprise, surprise. It's almost willfully disappointing.

How, you are probably wondering, could this go wrong? What possible choices could an editor make to create a boring oral history of plane crashes?

The main issue is a near-total lack of context. Each chapter is a set of extracts from interviews of survivors of a particular crash. There's an opening paragraph that says more-or-less what happened in the crash, but they're along the lines of "Flight 182 departing from Houston to Miami crashed while taking off. Three of the 102 passengers were killed." There's not enough details given in advance to understand what exactly happened during the crash, and there's no explanatory material other than that. He doesn't say what caused the crash - ever!

The excerpts are broken up into more-or-less chronological order, so you might get a bit of a flight attendant and a bit of a passenger saying what happened before the crash, then they come back later to give accounts of what happened during. There may be as many as ten or twelve different people appearing in a single chapter, with each of them getting 1 - 5 segments of an interview. But MacPherson doesn't name the passengers (sometimes, apparently at random, he doesn't name the crew either), but rather gives them random anonymous headings like "male, seat 23" or "female, age 45" or just "male passenger" so it's impossible to keep track of who is who. He's not even consistent within the same chapter/crash at identifying them by seat number, age, gender, or all of the above!

Seat number IDs are not helpful as there's no diagrams.

There are excerpts of cockpit transcripts, but with no context and editing applied apparently at random, they're almost impossible to follow. I strongly suspect that MacPherson didn't understand enough about the subject to know what was and wasn't relevant, so just threw in a couple pages with no idea how they related to the incident at hand.

It's difficult and at times impossible to tell what's actually going on in any given crash as there's no context, no care is given to selecting excerpts for clarity, and most of the passengers had no idea what was going on at the time.

There's no follow-up whatsoever. In multiple chapters, unnamed people say things like "And then I realized that I couldn't see my husband" and you never learn whether the husband survived or not.

I have read a lot of plane crash books and while this is not the worst, it takes the prize for biggest waste of potential.

I was sitting on my surfboard 20 feet to side of Neil Strauss, author of The Game.

Enough name-dropping, you say; what about the 34 lbs of muscle?!

How Did I Do It?

First, I followed a simple supplement regimen:

Morning: NO-Xplode, Slo-Niacin

Each Meal: ChromeMate, alpha-lipoic acid

Pre-Workout: BodyQUICK.

1. Five supplements five times daily at different times is not simple.

2. When you find yourself swallowing something called NO-Xplode, you really ought to take stock of your life choices.

Similarly to the 15-minute orgasm, the 4-hour body is wildly misleading but has a surprising quantity of actually reasonable techniques mixed in with the bullshit.

How he ACTUALLY gained 34 lbs of muscle in 28 days with 4 hours of exercise per week (IF he did):
He's a very experienced bodybuilder and kickboxer doing the bulk phase of a bulk/cut cycle. He already spent years building the foundation of muscle and fitness, so to bulk he eats a ton of protein and works out intensely. He's not spending a ton of time on exercise because he's doing full-body exercises with very heavy weights, which is a lot of bang for your buck, but you can't start out that heavy unless you've already worked up to it. The supplements may or may not be doing anything other than making sure he doesn't explode. I seriously doubt the time span though.

Once again, I reluctantly found myself thinking that his bulk out techniques make a lot of sense. It's just that you can't do it in one month unless you've already done it a bunch of times, like he had (and I doubt that even he really did do it in one month). But his advice to eat lots of protein, make sure you're getting enough total calories, and to focus on whole-body lifts, working up to heavy ones, is standard weightlifting advice. I'm currently doing the Casey Johnston "Swolewoman"Lift Off protocol, and she advises those exact principles only without a specific timespan.

Casey Johnston has a post on the 4-Hour Body. She also thought it was 38 lbs of bullshit with a surprising scattering of actually good advice:

Ultimately what encapsulates my experience of this book ten-plus years on, is this ur-example of a basically harmless and maybe even qualitatively good but quantitatively impractical recommendation: Macadamia oil.

Macadamia oil is the new and improved olive oil. Since several high-level bodybuilding coaches introduced me to this new kid on the block, I’ve been hooked.

Has anyone ever heard of Macadamia oil before or since? It sure didn’t take the place of olive oil.


Ferriss has a lot of brief rundowns of specific exercises recommended by star weightlifting coaches, some of which sound bogus or impractical but most of which sound fun and/or worth a try. Unusually for this sort of bro-y book, several of the coaches work with female athletes, so he's using women for some of his good examples. Some of this is "if this 16-year-old girl who weighs 120 lbs can be trained to lift this, so can you," but some of it is just "Here's what this athlete achieved with these techniques" and the athlete is a woman. I sincerely appreciated this.

For the bullshit quotient, meet the "Slow Carb" diet. This is for weight loss, unrelated to his build strength/bulk out advice. It bans white foods and fruit, supplements with lemon juice and garlic, and advises eating the exact same meals every day selected from a limited list of foods, plus unlimited "eat whatever you want" every Saturday. I suspect that it does work for weight loss temporarily, just like basically every diet works for weight loss temporarily. It's dumb but honestly, I've come across much dumber diets. At least he doesn't say cavemen never ate carbs.

A New York Times nonfiction bestseller, which is not necessarily an indicator of quality.

I read this book because while looking up something else entirely, I came across a review mentioning that it concludes with a very raw and honest account of the author's mental health issues. I'm not much interested in longevity, but I'm very interested in raw and honest accounts of mental health issues. I checked out a copy intending to only read the last chapter, but after I read that (which is as described) I got curious, went back to the beginning, and read the whole thing.

Attia is a doctor with a podcast. Outlive has some interesting/useful material, but also a distinct whiff of wealthy techbro who hangs out and creates startups with other wealthy techbros. Attia mentions a friend of his in a way that made me feel certain that the friend was a deeply obnoxious wealthy techbro, so I looked up the friend and discovered that he wrote this book:



Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women. It’s the wisdom Tim used to gain 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time.

• How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested
• How to produce 15-minute female orgasms
• How to triple testosterone and double sperm count

How much would you guys pay me to read and review the "turn into a testosterone-fueled orgasmatron muscleman in 4 hours" book?)

Here is a short summary of Outlive: Most doctors do Medicine 2.0, which is focused on treatment. Attia advocates Medicine 3.0, which is focused on prevention. He's interested in staying healthy and happy into old age, not in old age regardless of health and happiness. If you can avoid infectious diseases and violence/accidents, most morbidity and mortality nowadays is caused by four categories of diseases: cancer, heart disease/stroke, neurodegenerative disease (like dementia), and Type 2 diabetes/metabolic issues. Mortality and morbidity from those is often preventable or delayable, though more for heart disease and diabetes than the other two.

The first part of the book is a deep dive into those four conditions and their causes. While I and probably you know the general overview, he also drops a bunch of little bits of information that I was not already aware of, and when I looked up the new bits, I found that while he has his opinions, he was not just making them up. (Just making up stuff is a significant problem in health literature.) He's not a weight loss evangelist, and he admits that there's a lot of genetic and random/unknown factors involved in these diseases, so the book came across as a bit less victim-blaming than these sorts of books usually do.

The second part of the book is his advice on how to prevent/delay those diseases, and how to live to an old age while staying healthy. Imagine whacking a pinata and having advice spray out in a mix of good, possibly good, a good idea in theory but impossible unless you are his personal patient and very wealthy and have unlimited time on your hands and no disabilities or chronic illnesses, probably batshit, and so vague as to be completely useless. So that was a wild ride.

His section on diet has some good points (different people have different dietary needs) but others that are dubious (we should cut calories but also eat WAY more protein) and his method for figuring out what your personal dietary needs are is impossible for most people (experiment with your diet and use extensive blood tests, continuous glucose monitoring, DEXA scans, and other fancy stuff to see how you react). I appreciated that he was honest about how little we really know about the relationship of diet to health, and how complex it is. He says he used to be really sold on various types of fasting but has now decided that it's mostly not worth it as you lose too much muscle mass. He's agnostic on keto.

What he's most sold on is exercise. I liked this aspect of the book, as I enjoy exercise so it was pleasing to have him tell me that regardless of my crummy genes and fondness for fresh-baked bread, I might live to a very healthy old age by doing activities I enjoy anyway. He had some specific tips on types of exercise that I will probably try out at some point. (TOE YOGA.) Finally, he suggested figuring out what physical activities you want to be able to do when you're in your 80s, and focus on maintaining the skills and strength you need for those specifically. This seems very reasonable.

However, he could not resist a long foray into "a good idea in theory but impossible for most people," which was that since aging causes a loss of physical capacity in fairly predictable ways, if you want to be strong in old age, you need to get exceptionally strong now. If you want to lift 40lbs when you're eighty and you statistically lose 50% of lifting capacity by then, you can't just work on lifting 40 lbs now, you need to work up to lifting 80lbs now.

He goes on to advocate preventing age-related decline by aiming to hit the top 10% of the capability of people 20 years younger than you, so as you age you'll be declining from a much higher point. This is a brilliant idea if you're independently wealthy, have lots of time on your hands, and also have outstanding athletic potential. Otherwise, not very practical. To say the least.

He really underestimates the issue of unpredictable injuries or illnesses. He says you can avoid training injuries by learning "stability," which is tautologically defined as the ability to exercise without injuring yourself. This is good in theory but even if you could get the training he suggests which is only via a specific and no doubt wildly expensive personal trainer, no type or amount of training is a certain preventative for injuries. To say the least. And that's not even getting into the very common wild card factor of illnesses that can affect your physical fitness.

The last chapter was about how he realized that he was a ragey asshole, was forced to address his childhood trauma, and how he uses DBT to manage his issues. It was indeed raw and honest though WOW do I feel sorry for his wife. He makes very good points on how it's pointless to be focus on physical health if you're ignoring your horrible mental health. But it also had the "impossible for most people" issue in that he did several stints of month-long voluntary inpatient treatment at a fancy private facility and has three private therapists who are all famous in their own right.

Reading the entire book, you get a real sense of him as a person: obsessive, intense, perfectionist, prone to flinging himself into a concept like keto or fasting and then abandoning it with equal fervor. DBT does seem like a good choice for him.

He's probably a good doctor for his patients, because the only people who can afford his $90,000/year fees and would find them worthwhile are the sort of people who can and would follow his advice. But the guy has absolutely no idea what it's like to not have unlimited money, time, and energy to devote to your health. Some of what he advises would be a more practical in countries other than America, but a lot of it is wildly impractical anywhere. Most people are not capable of reaching the top 10% of athleticism of people 20 years younger than them!

I'm fascinated that this is such a big bestseller, because there's such a tiny fraction of the population that could follow his regime. As far as I can tell, his ideal audience is very rich, very athletic techbros who are obsessively dedicated to hacking their health. It's a real population which includes the author, but in a global sense a very small one.

My favorite part of the book is when he tells the story of rapamycin, which I hadn't heard of before and it's WILD. It's used for various purposes, most commonly to prevent organ rejection, but may increase longevity. Attia confesses that he prescribes it off-label to himself and a few of his patients for that purpose. Good luck, medbro! Hope it doesn't give you any of the very long and scary list of side effects noted in its black box warning!

ETA: Forgot to mention that doing 30 minutes of a dry sauna four days a week reduces mortality by 65%. Being immortal is a full-time job.

In honor of the snowpocalypse, I listened to a podcast series, "Trapped on Mount Hood," which was so interesting that I read the book it was based on the same day. That was a mistake. (Because the book was bad, not because Iw as traumatized by snow.)

I had not previously heard of the Mount Hood incidents, which was one of the worst alpine disasters in US history. A group of students were taken hiking up Mount Hood students from a private high school is part of a mandatory wilderness program, got caught in a storm, and seven of them died. Two adults also died. I find this particularly awful because it was mandatory for the students, but the disaster happened because the teacher leading them made a series of absolutely terrible decisions.

There was a storm coming, which he knew about, but did not factor into his decision-making. They started too late to avoid at, continued hiking under poor weather conditions, were poorly equipped for getting caught in a storm, ends didn't turn back until long after it would have been prudent to do so. They had to dig into a cave, which wasn't big enough for all of them so they kept having to rotate who was inside and who was outside. Conditions got so bad that a hired guide finally decided to leave and go for help in a blizzard, and took the only student who was willing or strong enough to go with them. They made it out, but got so lost in the blizzard that they had a hard time figuring out where the cave was. Meanwhile the cave got completely buried in snow. By the time the cave was found, several days later only two of the people inside survived.

The behavior of the teacher leading them is a bit mysterious. The author of the book says that he made such bad decisions that he must have been hypothermic. However, the decision to start the hike late when he knew there was a storm coming happened before the hike began, so he couldn't have been hypothermic then. There's also the matter of not taking equipment that should have been taken under the circumstances – also a decision made long before the hike began. However, he previously did not have a pattern of doing reckless things, so it's not really clear why this particular height was different. In previous hikes, they turned back without reaching the summit two out of every three times.

Code 1244 is an incredibly frustrating book. The author interviewed literally everyone who would agree to talk to him who was involved in the incident, and he did get to speak to most of the people who were and who are willing to talk at all. (One of the main people involved, the girl who survived the case she hiked out, has never publicly spoken about it at all.) He had an incredible amount of access so you would think he could have used that to write an interesting book. He did not. It's emblematic that I still don't know what a code 1244 is.

I wishvhe had done an oral history of the event, because I bet that would have been fascinating. What he instead did, as far as I can tell, was to write down every single factual detail that everybody told him, but put in his own words rather than theirs. His own style is extremely dry. He occasionally mentions what people felt or thought, but not all that much. So it's a recital of incredibly minute details. This book has more citations than I think anything I have ever read. About every third sentence is footnoted. I applaud his integrity but it also means that about one third of the book consists of citations.

There are so many details that the overall story often gets lost. It was much harder to follow what was going on in his book then it was in the podcast. I got the book because I was curious to learn more details then the podcasts gave, but when I finished his book, I felt that I knew less, not more. In particular, it was very hard to tell what was going on with the rescue operation and whether or not it was mismanaged, and whether that made a difference. The author obviously felt that one person in particular was to blame for the cave not getting found sooner, but I'm not sure if that was correct.

Based on the podcast, it sounds like he thought that guy was responsible for the guide who hiked out not having been taken up in a helicopter soon enough to search. But in his book, I couldn't tell whether that was a problem or not, or who had made that decision. One thing I really wondered about was why no one ever asked the girl who had hiked out with the guide to go up in a helicopter and see if she could recognize something. It seems to me that two people following the same route might notice or remember different things, so why not ask her if they were going to ask him? This never comes up in either the podcast or the when they finally did let the guide search, it's possibly important because he led the helicopter to the wrong spot five times before he did finally get locate the right spot on his sixth a try. So there was a lot of time wasted searching in the wrong areas, even after he got involved.

It's a very sad story, and also a very interesting one if you're interested in survival and wilderness rescue. If you are, listen to the podcast.

Against the Odds podcast.

My opponent fell, shot through the head, one hundred and fifty feet behind our line. His machine gun was dug out of the ground and it ornaments the entrance to my dwelling.

The memoir of the Red Baron himself, the greatest flying ace of WWI, with 80 planes shot down. He painted his plane red, and the pilots in his squadron also painted theirs, so they were known as the flying circus. (If you thought clowns were scary...) He won a ton of medals, was a celebrity at the time, ordered trophy cups to be made for himself to commemorate his victories, and collected bits of the planes he shot down to decorate his room.

He was shot in the head while flying, but returned to duty with a bandage covering a wound that exposed his skull. At the age of 25 he was shot through the heart, probably by an Australian rifleman, while chasing a very inexperienced Canadian pilot.

Von Richthofen's memoir is quite short. It recounts his early life and how he began in the cavalry and then became an observer before becoming a fighter pilot. There's some good anecdotes of funny occurrences and snapshot portraits of other pilots, plus some dog stories which remarkably do not all end tragically. He endearingly refers to another pilot's dog as "doggie" and to his own enormous hound as "my lap-dog." (Given that, he might have been more amused than offended by Snoopy's battles with the Red Baron.)

He wasn't a good pilot immediately, and struggled with it early on. He's very dismissive of acrobatics and says that courage and a cool head is much more important than being a fancy flyer or even a good shot, noting that Boelke was a terrible shot on the ground but a master in the air. The bright, individually painted planes of his circus wasn't done as a showoff or intimidation tactic (though it definitely became the latter) but because you can't camouflage a plane in the air anyway, so it made more sense for his squadron to be individually recognizable to each other as they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses, and could make use of that when fighting.

But most of the book goes basically like this: "I bagged an Englishman today. He was my 33rd. I was very happy. I ordered a silver trophy cup to commemorate it, and I took the aeroplane's serial number and put it up in my bedroom."

He was an enthusiastic hunter, and he writes about combat exactly as if he was writing about hunting animals for sport. It's especially noticeable because he enjoys hunting on his days off, so you get an account of shooting a bison and an account of shooting a man and they're identical in all but the details.

He doesn't hate his enemies, and he respects the ones who fight well. When he lands beside a plane he downed where both pilot and observer are uninjured, he's pleased to be able to talk with them. (The best hunters respect their prey and appreciate their qualities even as they stalk them.)

I've read war memoirs where people take trophies, enjoy the adrenaline rush of combat, or find war an overall good and rewarding experience--that's all pretty common--and I've read a couple, mostly by colonial-era Englishmen, who find war a tremendously fun game. But I've never read anything quite like this. It's like "The Most Dangerous Game" from the point of view of the hunters, and it takes the cake for the creepiest war memoir I have ever read.

The context for its writing is that the German government asked him to write it as propaganda. They sent him a stenographer and had him talk to her. She took down his stories, which were edited into a manuscript and apparently heavily censored. And I read it in translation. So that's already at least three layers of distance and distortion between whatever von Richthofen actually said, let alone what he actually thought, and what I read. I'd be very curious to hear from anyone who read it in the original German, because with a translation I always wonder about accuracy and tone.

If the war hadn't happened, I don't think he'd have become a serial killer; he doesn't like hunting humans more than he likes hunting animals, just equally. (For me, that made it more chilling rather than less. And also, I have read a lot of war memoirs, and this is the first one I've read where that thought even crossed my mind.) I think he'd have been your basic rich kid who spends his life hunting and playing sports, and is admired within his circle of similar friends. But the war did happen, and so his particular attributes made him ideally suited, useful, valuable, and remembered.

Von Richthofen wrote an essay about a year afterward, which is included in some editions, in which he says he regrets the "insolent" tone of his memoir and isn't finding war quite as fun anymore. I wonder how he would have felt about it all if he'd survived the war, but considering Germany's next war effort, probably it's just as well he didn't.

On the other hand, people don't change until they do. The war memoir I've read that's closest in tone to this one was Lahore to Lucknow by Arthur Lang, by an English officer in India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It was his private diary, not intended for publication and only discovered after his death. To him, it's all a wonderful, thrilling game.

It continues in this tone right up until literally the last two pages, in which his best friend is caught in an accidental explosion and is horrifically burned but stays conscious. Lang remains with him until he dies that night. The last diary entry is a eulogy concluding by saying that his death ruined his enjoyment of the entire war. A postscript says that Lang became a public works engineer, and spent the rest of his life building roads in India.