Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribblers Life by Peter Hitchens

Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribblers Life Reviews

• 
  Max Berendsen

  4.5 stars
  
  Review to follow
• 
  Dan Walker

  Does Peter Hitchens really know everything he claims to know? Is he really an expert on places as diverse as North Korea, Turkey, and Iran? I'm not really in a position to judge, since I've never visited those places either. BUT, after reading this book I'm willing to bet that he understands those countries better than 99% of the "reporters" who feel qualified to comment on events occurring there every day in our mass media. I'm willing to bet he understands the situation on the ground better than our government leaders, who feel smart enough to ban trade, blockade, fund insurrection, bomb, invade, and otherwise affect the lives of millions of people, all ostensibly to make the world a better place.
  
  What is Mr. Hitchens' method? Well, apparently he does a serious amount of study on a particular place, and then he goes and physically VISITS it. During his visit he gets to know as many people as possible, and then applies a real reporter's willingness to ask tough and probing questions, trying to get to the truth of the matter. All the information he gathers is evaluated with a great deal of (un)common sense and an application of Occam's razor to provide a summary of what the situation really is. In the end, as he says of the situation in Israel, if common people were allowed to, they most likely would find a way to get along relatively peacefully. After all, regardless of faith, history, or status, most people are looking to improve their lives and the prospects for their children, and if working with their "enemies" is the best way to achieve that goal, they will do so. I think this evaluation applies far behind the troubled borders of Israel.
  
  I wish I had read this book decades ago. Often, the first time I had ever heard a place was when it hit the news that we (the US) were bombing, invading, or selling guns to some country or another. Based on what I read in the media (the now deceased and unmourned Newsweek), I could have full confidence that our leaders were acting in everyone's best interest. After all, we were the good guys. This book would have been a perfect antidote to such propaganda.
  
  However, I do warn the reader to read this book at a leisurely pace. Don't read more than about 3 essays at a sitting. This book can be quite a depressing read, since it is about often-depressing places and the poor judgment displayed by most western leaders. Perhaps Mr. Hitchens could have ended it with something a little more upbeat, say, a description of the second coming. Because after reading this book, I'm pretty convinced little else will help improve this world.
  
  Full disclosure: Mr. Hitchens' blog is the only one I read regularly (mailonsunday.com). Which is really odd, since I am an American and have never even been to the UK. I just find his analysis and commentary to be the clearest on either side of the Atlantic, and even his reviews of British politics are eerily applicable to American politics. So yes, I'm a big fan.
• 
  Colin Hoad

  Before I start, a word about Peter Hitchens. There is perhaps no journalist alive today that has been more crudely misrepresented than Mr Hitchens. He is not the right wing bogeyman that so many assume him to be. Far from it: Hitchens is a moralist, a man concerned about the future of humankind and earnest in his convictions that not all that is modern is good. I suspect that many would find they have much more in common with him than they might choose to believe.
  
  Now, to the book. Having enjoyed many of Mr Hitchens' recent columns in the Mail On Sunday (not to be confused with the Daily Mail) I thought it was time I tried one of his books. Sadly the 'Abolition of Britain' is not available in ebook format, so I decided to go with 'Short Breaks in Mordor'; and what a book it is. I had up to now been unaware of the extent of Hitchens' travels around the world. Little did I realise that when he has spoken, in the past, about other countries, he has spoken from a position of first hand experience. He lived in Moscow for several years up to the end of the Cold War; he has since been back years after the fall of the USSR. In addition, he has visited North Korea, Iran, India, Iraq, Israel, Zambia, Venezuela, Cuba, South Africa, China, Belarus, Kazakhstan and many other places besides. This book is a collection of his travelogues from his time in these various, diverse places. I have learnt so much about parts of the world, most (with the exception of China) of which I have never visited - and many of which I doubt I ever will. Through Hitchens' eyes I have walked the ghostly streets of Pyongyang, followed mullahs on their way to holy cities, been attacked by angry, poverty-stricken miners, witnessed the bizarro-world of Belarussian society and encountered people from all walks of life from all over the world.
  
  The way Hitchens writes is so very approachable. His prose is serious and urgent, but rarely ever judgmental. Such opinions as he does express are never couched in terms of what a country ought to do; rather, he takes lessons from the experiences of other countries and ponders their significance for his own. His deep sense of compassion is evident on almost every page. He even admitted in the prologue that the one word he had to edit out (due to its over-use) was 'heartbreaking'; and you can tell that that is exactly how he must have felt witnessing so many of the things that he has done over the past decade.
  
  I am grateful to him for sharing these wide, varied - and often dangerous - experiences. Like truly great travel writing, it takes you to a place you have never been and makes you feel like you have. I hope that more of his works will be transferred to ebook form soon.
• 
  Gonzo

  I'm not a fan of journalists writing books. No matter how talented the journalist, there are very few books written by them that cannot be summed up in a topic paragraph, and which might not be better as a long-form article (or maybe a pamphlet; when did pamphlets start getting such a bad rap anyway?). In the end, many of these books end up reading exactly the same (NOUN: How X is Ying Z, and What You Need to Know About It.) and rare is it that a journalist engages with ideas in such a way that really justifies the effort needed to read a book-length piece.
  
  Peter Hitchens's work is not immune from this. The War We Never Fought and A Brief History of Crime, are both well-written, polemical, and insightful, but never capture the flare and wit of Hitchens's columns and blog. Don't get me wrong--both books are well argued and deserve much more regard from the ruling class which summarily ignores them. As works of political advocacy, they are great; as works of literature, they are lacking. Given Hitchens's great talent as a writer, this is unfortunate.
  
  The scribbler Hitchens's Short Breaks in Mordor does work as a piece of fine literature. The wit, intelligence, and good humor he displays in his articles and public debates are all on display here and, when combined with his usual trenchant analysis, combine to create a book which fully justifies it length. Unlike the books noted above, this one has no real thesis. It is simply Hitchens's collected writings from "Mordor," or the backwaters either forgotten by or ruined by modernity. Hitchens is a humane and insightful travel companion, and the pieces are all brimming with insights, teaching us much that we did not know about places unknown to us, and making us look at places we thought we knew in a different light.
  
  Hitchens's travels are diverse. The most obvious provinces of Mordor are the Axis of Evil, and as a visitor to all three countries, Hitchens's descriptions of these hermit kingdoms are some of the most insightful and unique available to English-speaking audiences. Some of these images are as shocking and terrible as one would expect to come out of North Korea and Iran, but Hitchens's most interesting observation is how decrepit these places truly are. North Korea almost never appears in Western media separate from its warmaking abilities and supposed imperial ambitions; in reality, the ruling regime is weak and has so immiserated its population that it could feasibly fall over a week's time. Shame that Kim Jung Un feels the need to invest so much in propaganda when the US media are happy to create it for him! Hitchens also casts a skeptical eye on the superpower potential of China. His juxtaposition of modern Shanghai with rural areas which have not passed the Stone Age is shocking, to say nothing of a generation of missing girls...
  
  Even better are the stops which one would not immediately expect to be within the limits of Mordor. South Africa is there. The Spanish isle of Ceuta is there. Uncomfortably, Detroit is there (or, to be more precise, it is uncomfortable that Detroit doesn't seem out of place). When it comes to US locales and those which have recently felt the touch of the American boot-to-the-ass, Hitchens's foreignness shines through. It is one thing to see Detroit as a disaster, it is another to treat it as you would any other failed city in a failed state.
  
  Not everything is dire. Hitchens travels to Bhutan, a land that has, for the past few decades, managed to outlaw digital communication in the name of preserving its cultural heritage. In America, where right-wingers view "freedom" as anything in accord with Milton Friedman's economics, the so-called Dragon Kingdom is much reviled; Hitchens refers to it as a kind of conservative utopia, though one whose decay is fast approaching. Little tidbits are also thrown in along the way, my favorite being the honest-to-goodness caveman we meet in rural China.
  
  Though the pieces cover a wide range of places and topics, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is no one thesis driving the book, but this is an asset for a writer whose tastes are as eclectic and whose opinions are as sharp as Hitchens's. For all the author's talents as a polemicist, the best moments in this book are descriptive and not editorials; corpses and blood need no "ought."
  
  This review is probably longer than it needs to be. To sum up, you should read this book. If posterity is still in the habit of reading, I get the feeling that this book will be considered Mr. Hitchens's best, and one of the better documents describing the squalor of our age.
• 
  Wendelin St Clair

  Revisited this in light of the ongoing unspeakably horrific cultural genocide of the Uyghurs being carried out by the Chinese government, the first foreshadowing of which Peter describes here in one of the most memorable episodes in a book of highly memorable episodes. Alas, his pessimistic predictions proved only too perceptive in this, as in most cases. I've often thought that, for all people on the Right are derided as parochial bigots and cultural Philistines, it really only is conservatives who are able to truly appreciate other cultures, since they are the only ones who can appreciate them on their own terms, without trying to interpret them through the condescending/condemnatory lens of Western Liberalism-Marxism; without feeling the need to either excoriate or excuse their authoritarian backwardness, religious dogmatism and misogyny.
• 
  Alfred

  "If you are surprised that a communist leader demanded the swift construction of a boastful zone dedicated to rampant greed, then it is time that you realised that the world's Marxists now believe that capitalism, not state socialism, will create the classless, global, multicultural world they have always dreamed of. "
  
  "Until very recently, there was a connection between being free and being rich. It was the free, law-governed countries which prospered and the dictatorships which were poor and grey.
  But the new China has proved that police states can also be prosperous and now seeks to show that in the end they may be even richer than the West. If the world discovers that liberty is an optional extra, rather than a necessity, how long will freedom last?"
  
  "Western political leaders fail in so many things at home that they need to prove their goodness abroad."
  
  "We in Western Europe have long assumed that the world that was created after 1945 would last for ever. But we have not paid enough attention to the rising nations to our East, or to the new powers, fat with oil and gas, heedless of the old laws of liberty, which are gathering strength as America weakens. "
• 
  David McGrogan

  3 1/2 stars. Peter Hitchens reveals himself to be an essayist and travel writer of the first rank in this collection - one of the very last journalistic heirs to Didion, Capote, Wolfe, and their ilk in his commitment to writing well. He is capable of being as funny and as moving as he is angry, and the pieces are full of beautiful little vignettes. Sadly, though, there is a lot of repetition, as most of his 'short breaks' were reported on for both the Mail on Sunday and the American Conservative, and the bizarre editorial choice was made to include both the articles he wrote for most locations. The two versions are usually a little different but not much, so you gradually get the feeling you've only really got half of a book. It's still very much worth reading, but with the small sense of being ever so slightly cheated.
• 
  Mike C

  Gripping but poorly edited
  
  A fascinating book. You will find a lot of interesting facts here which are written about in an extremely poignant manner. Peter's content is second to none, backed up by real experience.
  However, the book is badly edited and formatted with no page breaks between chapters and a lot of curious repetition as if the same content was written twice in different ways. That is disappointIng.
  But nevertheless I urge you to read it as it will expand your horizons in a way you won't see elsewhere.
• 
  Martinus Eleets

  Excellent. Peter makes for an outstanding travel writer. Some elements are slightly repetitive, Russia not so bad, China's ghost cities etc... However, all in all highly readable.
• 
  Sharon Barrow Wilfong

  Many people know who the late Christopher Hitchens is, but not many, at least in the U.S., know he had a brother who is also a writer. Peter Hitchens is a writer for The Mail, a British newspaper that can be read online.
  
  He complied a number of his essays, written both for The Mail as well as an American magazine and put them together to comprise a Kindle book called Short Breaks into Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler's Life.
  
  Each essay is about a country he visited over the past ten or so years and the impressions he received there. Most of the countries are under oppressive regimes, such as North Korea, Eastern Europe, different African countries and China. He offers much thought-provoking insight to each country.
  
  For the entire review cut and paste the following link to my blog post:
  
  
  http://sharonhenning.blogspot.com/201...
• 
  Jay

  Phenomenal book. Consists of many columns previously published written (apparently) on assignment. Exposes the false Western assumption that the normal state of human government is one that respects individual rights.
  
  Particularly poignant was the chapter about North Korea. It reminds one of the underworld kingdom in _The Silver Chair_.
  
  I highly recommend this book as being informative enlightening. I felt like a better person when I was done.
• 
  Robert Balfour

  Worth the time to read through. I real education of how much of the world is living.
  
  The typos were brutal, but there you go.
• 
  Mustapha

  A excellent exposition of thought and observations around the world... insightful and essential to creating a balanced worldview.