Just got back from MacArthur announcement site and was thrilled to see that Jonathan Shay received a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship. If you haven't read it yet, stop what you're doing and go pick it up: Achilles in Vietnam is one of the best books about war you'll ever read. It is also, along with a small handful of others that combine science and literature and hard thinking about interesting problems (I'm thinking Hofstadter's Göedel, Escher, Bach and Steven Johnson's Emergence, and just about anything by John McPhee or Michael Pollan) to form a narrative that's as fascinating as it is a joy to read. Of course, there's no joy in Shay's subject matter: but his book is so effortless in its presentation that even as you are wiping a tear from your eye with one hand over the powerful stories of war that Shay is telling, you're reaching to wipe a tear from the other eye over how beautifully, how profoundly, he's told them.
Bravo!
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