Page 32 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 93, No. 1 Fall 2012

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REVIEWS
The End of Your Life
Book Club
by Will Schwalbe ’80
Knopf, 352 pages, $25
Reviewed by Ben
Loehnen ’96
Will Schwalbe is a book editor-turned-
entrepreneur (and disclosure: longtime
mentor and friend of mine). His new book,
The End of Your Life Book Club, is a mem-
oir of a death foretold. His mother, Mary
Anne Schwalbe, an educator and human-
itarian advocate for refugees, died of
pancreatic cancer in September 2009.
One day, as mother and son wait at a
care center for her chemotherapy to start,
he notices that she is reading Wallace Steg-
ner’s Crossing to Safety, a book Will has
long hoped to read. They decide to start a
book club, just the two of them. “But don’t
people in book clubs cook things?” his
mother asks. “We’ll have the world’s only
foodless book club,” Will decides.
Their club may not have food, but there’s
plenty of sustenance. They read widely,
from sacred to profane, from fict to fact,
from local to far: Russell Banks’s Conti-
nental Drift, John O’Hara’s Appointment
in Samarra, Mary Wilder Tileston’s Daily
Strength for Daily Needs, Moshin Homid’s
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and on and
on. The books themselves provide unex-
pected alleyways of conversation. They
talk about faith (his mother is devout; Will
is not). They talk about who will inherit
her frequent flier miles. They talk about
the plight of the dispossessed. They talk
about menus and schedules. They talk
about regrets and hopes, fears and fate.
As his mother tells him, “That’s one of the
things books do. They help us talk. But they
also give us something we all can talk about
when we don’t want to talk about ourselves.”
The conversations become palliative
for both of them. Two months after his
mother’s diagnosis, Will writes, “I couldn’t
for the life of me figure out how to live
her dying.” His logistical concerns – How
much time does she have left? How do I
accommodate her death into my life? –
are ulterior to the devastation of his grief.
His mother, it is clear, may be even more
confused about how to die her son’s living.
Many books and conversations later,
the confusion abates, even if it never dis-
appears. As they discuss Muriel Barbery’s
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Mary Anne
is parsing the novel when talk of that book
gives way to talk of herself: “‘I’m not scared
to die,’ she said suddenly. ‘But I would like
this one more summer.’” That final sum-
mer would include more books, and more
conversations, sustaining her until the
end. Her son’s memoir is not only a won-
derful memorial, but vital sustenance for
the rest of us.
The Snake Eaters:
An Unlikely Band of
Brothers and the Battle
for the Soul of Iraq
by Owen West ’87
Free Press, 352 pages,
$26
Reviewed by Steve Baker
SPS Development Staff
(Steve Baker served in the Marine Corps
from 1989 to 1996. He was deployed to
Operation Desert Storm as an artillery
officer with the First Marine Division.)
The Snake Eaters details a seldom-
reported component of Iraq’s rebuilding:
the importance of military advising by
the United States in the reconstitution
of the Iraqi army. U.S. Marine Corps
Major West’s authentic narrative of
his experiences as a military advisor to
Iraqi Battalion 3/3-1 (a unit self-identi-
fied as the “Snake Eaters”) is combined
with research of his predecessors and
conclusions into the successes and
failures of American military advising
in Iraq.
West introduces readers to Habbaniyah,
an oasis located between two of the most
strongly contested cities of the Iraq War
in 2003. The military advising team from
the United States Army includes an
eclectic collection of reservists, led by
an officer whose civilian employer is the
Drug Enforcement Administration. West
describes with great detail this team’s
challenges in establishing itself on equal
footing with their supported unit: Iraqi
Battalion 3/3-1.
Over time, the military advisors do
just that, eschewing traditional advising
methodologies by proving themselves
as warriors unafraid of high-tempo com-
bat operations. The Iraqis soon begin to
see their advisors as partners and role
models. The officers and “jundis” of the
Iraqi Battalion 3/3-1 begin to admire
their American counterparts, mimicking
their mannerisms and methods. West’s
Spring Conroy Visitor Gloria Steinem,
the iconic feminist, journalist, and social
activist, recommends The Mermaid
and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinner-
stein “because it makes you see that
men being divorced from childrear-
ing creates a culture of masculinity,
and men raising children as much as
women is the key to world peace.”
Ms. Steinem also recommends At the
Dark End of the Street by Danielle L.
McGuire, “an amazing
and wonderful re-
telling of the civil
rights movement,”
and Exterminate All
the Brutes by Sven
Lindqvist “about
the invention of
racism.”
What are you reading?
CHARLIE LEMAY