Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes. The founders of Huckberry gifted me this book over a decade ago, and it sat on my shelf unread until a few weeks back when I finally cracked it open. It’s the first novel I’ve read about Vietnam, and man, it was brutal. Marlantes captures the relentlessly unromantic misery of that war and puts you right in Nam. You get detailed descriptions of leeches burrowing into skin, the jungle rot eating through feet, and the violence that arrives suddenly and without any sense of meaning behind it. He also does a bang-up job of capturing the social dynamics of the war, particularly the racial tensions between black and white soldiers, as well as the tensions between the guys in the bush and the leaders in the rear. Marlantes was a Rhodes Scholar who volunteered for Vietnam, served as a Marine lieutenant, and earned the Navy Cross, so it’s a book based on very firsthand experience. Took him 30 years to write it. Fair warning: lots of f-bombs and graphic violence throughout. Again, it’s brutal, but if you want to understand what Vietnam actually felt like for the guys on the ground, I don’t think you’ll find a better book.
Double Indemnity. After watching The Apartment and seeing Fred MacMurray play the sleazy philandering executive, I decided to go down a MacMurray rabbit hole with my movie picks. 1944’s Double Indemnity was the obvious next stop, and it didn’t disappoint. This is filmmaker Billy Wilder at the top of his game. Insurance salesman Walter Neff (MacMurray) gets tangled up with Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet-wearing femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, and the two of them hatch a scheme to murder her husband and collect on his accident insurance policy. The dialogue is razor sharp. Every line between Neff and Dietrichson crackles with a mix of flirtation and menace that keeps you off balance the whole film. And Edward G. Robinson as the claims adjuster Barton Keyes does a great job playing an insurance adjuster; the guy treats insurance fraud investigation the way a homicide detective treats a murder case. The whole movie has this inevitability to it that’s like watching two people walk toward a cliff they can both see but refuse to acknowledge. Insurance fraud has never been so suspenseful. Straight down the line, baby.
Jetboil Stash Cooking System. When we go backpacking, one piece of gear that has been consistently useful — and gives me a surprising amount of joy to use — is the Jetboil Stash. The thing boils water in about 100 seconds. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until you’ve been hiking for eight hours with a 40-pound pack and you’re so hungry you’re tempted to eat your dehydrated beef stroganoff as is. With this Jetboil, you click the igniter, turn the knob, and by the time you’ve gotten your spork out and torn open the Mountain House bag, the water’s hot and ready. Everything nests together — burner, fuel canister, stabilizer — into one compact unit that slides into your pack without taking up much real estate.
The Death of Bar Soap in America. Dan Kois over at Slate wrote a fantastic deep dive into the decline of bar soap in America, which traces the whole cultural history of soap — from Louis XIV taking only two baths in his entire life, to the rise of Procter & Gamble scaring people about germs to sell Ivory, to the invention of Softsoap in 1980, to body wash outselling bar soap for the first time in 2009. Many people have switched to body wash because they think it’s more sanitary than a bar of soap. But Kois did his own study on this: he took a used bar of soap and a shower pouf used to lather body wash to a bacteriological lab to see which one harbored more bacteria. The pouf had 43,000 colony-forming units per square inch. The soap? 2,500. Advantage: bar soap. Of course, a lot of guys just use body wash directly, sans pouf, but then it doesn’t lather all that well. We still use bar soap in our house (Irish Spring, baby), and I hate going to hotels where all they’ve got is body wash bolted to the wall in some refillable dispenser. The lather is weak, you have to keep pumping the thing, and I’m always vaguely suspicious that housekeeping is filling those branded bottles with whatever’s cheapest. Can’t beat a good old-fashioned bar of soap. May it endure.
On our Dying Breed newsletter, we published Sunday Firesides: Turn on Your Inner Lights and Confessions of a Digital Backslider.
Quote of the Week
There are two ways to interest a man or arouse his curiosity. One is to tell him something that he didn’t know. The other is to remind him of something he has forgotten.
—A.E.N. Gray
