Jim's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 18 Nov 2023 07:13:28 -0800 60 Jim's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Ninth Hour 34949016 A portrait of the Irish-American experience in the 1940s and 1950s, by the National Book Award-winning author

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife that the hours of his life belong to himself alone. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.

In Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man s brief existence, and yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable lucidity and intelligence, Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.]]> 240 Alice McDermott 0374712174 Jim 0 currently-reading 3.78 2017 The Ninth Hour
author: Alice McDermott
name: Jim
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/18
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Spinoza's God 21069076 264 Franklin Lonzo Dixon Jr. Jim 0 currently-reading 4.67 2013 Spinoza's God
author: Franklin Lonzo Dixon Jr.
name: Jim
average rating: 4.67
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/11/09
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder]]> 61854923 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. With the twists and turns of a thriller Grann unearths the deeper meaning of the events on the Wager, showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death--for whomever the court found guilty could hang.

The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.]]> 352 David Grann Jim 0 4.34 2023 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
author: David Grann
name: Jim
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2023/06/06
date added: 2023/06/06
shelves:
review:

]]> The Midnight Library 53568397
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.]]> 288 Matt Haig 0525559485 Jim 0 currently-reading 4.16 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Jim
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2023/05/29
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Small Mercies 61468872 Instant New York Times Bestseller

"Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can't-put-it-down entertainment." -- Stephen King

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling writer returns with a masterpiece to rival Mystic River--an all-consuming tale of revenge, family love, festering hate, and insidious power, set against one of the most tumultuous episodes in Boston's history.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessy is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the housing projects of "Southie," the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to old tradition and stands proudly apart.

One night Mary Pat's teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn't come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances.

The two events seem unconnected. But Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her missing daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched--asking questions that bother Marty Butler, chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don't take kindly to any threat to their business.

Set against the hot, tumultuous months when the city's desegregation of its public schools exploded in violence, Small Mercies is a superb thriller, a brutal depiction of criminality and power, and an unflinching portrait of the dark heart of American racism. It is a mesmerizing and wrenching work that only Dennis Lehane could write.]]> 320 Dennis Lehane 0062129503 Jim 5 4.42 2023 Small Mercies
author: Dennis Lehane
name: Jim
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/05/08
date added: 2023/05/08
shelves:
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 59016923 "A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." --Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 70 Claire Keegan 0802158757 Jim 5 4.22 2021 Small Things Like These
author: Claire Keegan
name: Jim
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2022/12/03
date added: 2022/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Words No Bars Can Hold: Literacy Learning in Prison]]> 41817557
The students� work, through which they probe and develop their identities as readers and writers, illuminates the transformative power of literacy. Appleman argues for the importance of educating the incarcerated, and explores ways to interrupt the increasingly common journey from urban schools to our nation’s prisons. From the sobering endpoint of what scholars have called the “school to prison pipeline,� she draws insight from the narratives and experiences of those who have traveled it.]]> 160 Deborah Appleman 0393713679 Jim 5
But the long-term prisoners with whom Appleman worked were not going anywhere, let alone to a career where a great deal of money was to be earned. The question for them was not where they were going, but who they were, how they got there, and what to make of themselves within the walls that will hold them for the rest of their lives. Their questions are the same that the Greek philosophers asked, that Montaigne asked, that Jean-Paul Sartre asked: how should we live our lives? That is the question that is best addressed by the twin practices of critical reading and honest creative writing. And that is what Appleman taught her students.

The constraints were considerable, of course. If the major goal in studying the liberal arts is to freely explore a range of ideas, to think critically about accepted truth, and to challenge the authority and rationale of power, the last place we might expect it to thrive is in prison, where freedom, criticism, and challenging authority are not honored concepts. There, even the most basic practices of good teaching are diminished or forbidden outright. In Appleman’s words,

“There is no opportunity for student conferences, no office hours, no individual attention. We can’t bring in books we know our students would like, something that English teachers consider to be a central part of their teaching. All materials for the classroom need to be ordered well in advance, sent directly to the facility, and vetted by the correctional officers in the mail room�..This restriction also affects teachers� ability to bring in the tools of the trade to students, to offer them books, pencils, pens, notebooks. These items are viewed as potential vessels of contraband rather than potential vessels of renewal. � (p. 38)

But these restrictions are locked in place across the US Penal System. The Washington post recently reported on a PEN American study which found that , “A prison in Ohio blocked an inmate from receiving a biology textbook over concerns that it contained nudity. In Colorado, prison officials rejected Barak Obama’s memoirs because they were “potentially detrimental to national security.� And a prison in New York tried to ban a book of maps of the moon saying it could “present risks of escape.� In his brilliant expose� of prison life, American Prison, Shane Bauer observes that in prisons in Texas Hitler’s Mein Kampf and David Duke’s My Awakening are allowed, but books by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright are banned.

But restricting how and when teachers may talk to their students and restricting the books that they can talk about are just two of the many constraints that must be navigated. The most startling to me-so much so that I had to put the book down and process the fact—was that teachers were not allowed to address their students without including their status. So it couldn’t be Mr. Hall It had to be Offender Hall. . His very identity thus placed under erasure by his position as an incarcerated human being. As Appleman puts it,

“Dehumanization is one of the required tactics of “successful� incarnation. Individuals are reduced to virtually nameless prisoners known and directly addressed by their Offender Identification Number.�

But in spite of, or perhaps because of, everything that has been taken away from them, her students do learn to write and thus find themselves. One of the best features of this book, and the one that I think Appleman is most proud of, are the pieces of student writing she is able to share with her audience. Pieces like this:

Prison Is

By Ross

Prison is an ancient hairless cat
Hissing, angry
A disturbing, raw experience

It is a weeping wound
Gaping, unhealed
Bleeding out its poison

It is a cracked fun-house mirror
Confusing, twisted
Deluding its masters

It is an aged stepmother
Pretending, bitter
Smiling at her companion

It is a diseased heart
Gutted, ruined
Waiting to beat its last

And yet�

It is an unyielding anvil
Pitiless, cruel
A tool on which I’m remade

It is a bulky, steel hammer
Destructive, creative
Reshaping my moral essence

It is a fiery crucible
Scorching, consuming
Burning away all impurities

It is a paint-chipped house of worship
Holy, haunting
Inspiring me to greatness

It takes enormous courage, character, and grit to find inspiration, as Ross did, in the experience of prison. But in Deborah Appleman’s both large-hearted, and intellectually incisive book, we can see how she helped him find it. A liberal arts education, as Appleman practiced it, shouldn’t be an elective or a reward for good behavior. It should be a requirement for everyone who lives behind walls. She writes,

“If, as a society, we choose to keep alive those who commit serious crimes, then we need to keep them human. The humanities are well named. Through education, through reading and writing, the incarcerated can reclaim their humanity, learn empathy, and find creative and constructive ways of expressing and facing the pain that was a part of their journey to their crimes.�

This is a book for teachers, for prison officials, and for all of us who need to be reminded of the tools we always have at our convenient disposal. They weren’t convenient for Appleman’s students, but she put them in their hands anyway. And they learned well how to use them.






]]> 4.05 Words No Bars Can Hold: Literacy Learning in Prison
author: Deborah Appleman
name: Jim
average rating: 4.05
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2019/10/07
shelves:
review:
What place should literacy claim in the lives of prisoners who have little if any chance of release? How can the teaching of critical reading and creative writing enhance the lived lives of those prisoners? What outcomes can be expected? How will we know that we are making a meaningful difference in their lives? Ten years ago Deborah Appleman went to a nearby high security prison for men in order to find answers to these questions, or rather, to fine tune the questions themselves. A Distinguished Professor of Educational Studies at Carleton College, Appleman had spent her entire professional career making the case for the power and importance of literacy studies and of the liberal arts in general. But even outside prison walls, even in large research universities and some small, prestigious liberal arts colleges, critical reading and creative writing are losing ground and funding to more ‘practical � subjects like engineering, business management, or computer technology. The educational emphasis is moving swiftly to a utilitarian model that rewards those who knew where wealth can be found and are keen to go there.

But the long-term prisoners with whom Appleman worked were not going anywhere, let alone to a career where a great deal of money was to be earned. The question for them was not where they were going, but who they were, how they got there, and what to make of themselves within the walls that will hold them for the rest of their lives. Their questions are the same that the Greek philosophers asked, that Montaigne asked, that Jean-Paul Sartre asked: how should we live our lives? That is the question that is best addressed by the twin practices of critical reading and honest creative writing. And that is what Appleman taught her students.

The constraints were considerable, of course. If the major goal in studying the liberal arts is to freely explore a range of ideas, to think critically about accepted truth, and to challenge the authority and rationale of power, the last place we might expect it to thrive is in prison, where freedom, criticism, and challenging authority are not honored concepts. There, even the most basic practices of good teaching are diminished or forbidden outright. In Appleman’s words,

“There is no opportunity for student conferences, no office hours, no individual attention. We can’t bring in books we know our students would like, something that English teachers consider to be a central part of their teaching. All materials for the classroom need to be ordered well in advance, sent directly to the facility, and vetted by the correctional officers in the mail room�..This restriction also affects teachers� ability to bring in the tools of the trade to students, to offer them books, pencils, pens, notebooks. These items are viewed as potential vessels of contraband rather than potential vessels of renewal. � (p. 38)

But these restrictions are locked in place across the US Penal System. The Washington post recently reported on a PEN American study which found that , “A prison in Ohio blocked an inmate from receiving a biology textbook over concerns that it contained nudity. In Colorado, prison officials rejected Barak Obama’s memoirs because they were “potentially detrimental to national security.� And a prison in New York tried to ban a book of maps of the moon saying it could “present risks of escape.� In his brilliant expose� of prison life, American Prison, Shane Bauer observes that in prisons in Texas Hitler’s Mein Kampf and David Duke’s My Awakening are allowed, but books by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright are banned.

But restricting how and when teachers may talk to their students and restricting the books that they can talk about are just two of the many constraints that must be navigated. The most startling to me-so much so that I had to put the book down and process the fact—was that teachers were not allowed to address their students without including their status. So it couldn’t be Mr. Hall It had to be Offender Hall. . His very identity thus placed under erasure by his position as an incarcerated human being. As Appleman puts it,

“Dehumanization is one of the required tactics of “successful� incarnation. Individuals are reduced to virtually nameless prisoners known and directly addressed by their Offender Identification Number.�

But in spite of, or perhaps because of, everything that has been taken away from them, her students do learn to write and thus find themselves. One of the best features of this book, and the one that I think Appleman is most proud of, are the pieces of student writing she is able to share with her audience. Pieces like this:

Prison Is

By Ross

Prison is an ancient hairless cat
Hissing, angry
A disturbing, raw experience

It is a weeping wound
Gaping, unhealed
Bleeding out its poison

It is a cracked fun-house mirror
Confusing, twisted
Deluding its masters

It is an aged stepmother
Pretending, bitter
Smiling at her companion

It is a diseased heart
Gutted, ruined
Waiting to beat its last

And yet�

It is an unyielding anvil
Pitiless, cruel
A tool on which I’m remade

It is a bulky, steel hammer
Destructive, creative
Reshaping my moral essence

It is a fiery crucible
Scorching, consuming
Burning away all impurities

It is a paint-chipped house of worship
Holy, haunting
Inspiring me to greatness

It takes enormous courage, character, and grit to find inspiration, as Ross did, in the experience of prison. But in Deborah Appleman’s both large-hearted, and intellectually incisive book, we can see how she helped him find it. A liberal arts education, as Appleman practiced it, shouldn’t be an elective or a reward for good behavior. It should be a requirement for everyone who lives behind walls. She writes,

“If, as a society, we choose to keep alive those who commit serious crimes, then we need to keep them human. The humanities are well named. Through education, through reading and writing, the incarcerated can reclaim their humanity, learn empathy, and find creative and constructive ways of expressing and facing the pain that was a part of their journey to their crimes.�

This is a book for teachers, for prison officials, and for all of us who need to be reminded of the tools we always have at our convenient disposal. They weren’t convenient for Appleman’s students, but she put them in their hands anyway. And they learned well how to use them.







]]> <![CDATA[Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy]]> 36927955 A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey’s Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the U.S. slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection in 1822.

As early as 1865, former slaveholders and their descendants began working to preserve a romanticized memory of the antebellum South. In contrast, former slaves, their descendants, and some white allies have worked to preserve an honest, unvarnished account of slavery as the cruel system it was.

Examining public rituals, controversial monuments, and whitewashed historical tourism, Denmark Vesey’s Garden tracks these two rival memories from the Civil War all the way to contemporary times, where two segregated tourism industries still reflect these opposing impressions of the past, exposing a hidden dimension of America’s deep racial divide. Denmark Vesey’s Garden joins the small bookshelf of major, paradigm-shifting new interpretations of slavery’s enduring legacy in the United States.]]> 448 Ethan J. Kytle 1620973650 Jim 5
The good white people of antebellum Charleston were not overly endowed with moral intelligence, but they could count. Blacks, most of them slaves, outnumbered whites by a factor of nine to one from 1800 until at least emancipation in the low country. The idea of an armed slave rebellion was for several reasons a recurring nightmare for the white population, especially for those wealthy enough to own slaves. First, of course, that population understood that they would probably lose their lives in such a rebellion. But they also knew that they would lose their wealth since most of that wealth was embodied in the slaves that they traded, raped, and overworked to maintain their life style. Slaves, in other words, not only produced wealth for their owners, they were themselves a form of human currency.

Denmarck Vesey’s Garden is a remarkably insightful and detailed history of slavery as seen through the very specific lens of Charleston’s white and black populations. It moves from the late 18th century, by which time Charleston had become the largest slave-trading center in America, through the Civil War when Charleston lost its wealth, to Reconstruction, the long Jim Crow era, the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, all the way to the Obama administration. It is a complicated and tortured history, but what makes the book worth reading is that it documents how the city’s leaders, newspapers, intellectuals, and citizens spent more than 150 years denying that its actual history was real. Through multiple acts of willful amnesia, erasure, and outright deceit, the city of Charleston literally whitewashed its fierce commitment to slavery and its long abuse of black citizens. Most of Charleston’s history of itself is, in other words, a carefully crafted fantasy that has more in common with Disney World than with the lives people actually lived there.

The revisionist history began, of course, with the need for money. The Civil War was not kind to Charleston. The Union Army never forgot that the war began in the Charleston harbor when Confederate soldiers fired at Fort Sumter or that South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. So it seemed to take special care to attack the city as vigorously as possible. Union ships fired on Charleston almost continuously throughout the conflict. Houses were burned or otherwise destroyed, public buildings and private businesses were left in ruins, the slaves were freed, and Confederate currency was rendered worthless. From the end of the Civil War until the end of Reconstruction in 1876, whites were almost as poor as blacks and were no more likely to hold political office than their former slaves. All that ended however, when Union soldiers left the south—a moment that the south called “Redemption.� Blacks were stripped of their right to vote, arbitrarily arrested, tethered to jobs without compensation as punishment, and, of course, lynched with horrifying frequency.

But that didn’t solve the money problem. To address that issue, Charleston had to cast off its reputation as the Wall Street of slave sales and reinvent itself as a “lost cause� theme park. Starting in the 1890’s, tourism became the major industry. Homes were rebuilt, sometimes with cheap materials, to resemble the look of the Old South. Some lucky blacks were hired to serve as token “darkies� in the streets and on the rehabilitated, but unproductive plantations. They told scripted stories of how happy they had been as slaves and how kindly their masters had treated them. The map of the city was changed. What was the center of the slave trade, the centrally located Ryan’s Market, was erased from the city’s grid. It had never existed. The slave quarters that were a part of every plantation and many of the large houses in town became “carriage houses.� Slaves were actually “servants.� And the cause of the Civil War was never slavery. It was about states� rights, about freedom of choice, about honoring community and tradition, about old time religion, and about protecting and supporting the poor, illiterate black people who couldn’t really look out for themselves.

The revisionist project was the work of many hands. In order to protect the young, history textbooks had to be re-written by southern scholars, many of them sons and daughters of confederate veterans, who would tell the truth about slavery, about the Civil War, and later about Jim Crow. Newspapers were at pains to make black crime, ignorance, and sexual danger as visible as possible. Tours of the city and the surrounding plantations always emphasized the period before the Civil War. In Charleston, it was as if history stopped in 1861.

Beginning in 1910, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of South Carolina’s secession from the Union, white Charleston held its first annual “Secession Ball� at which women dressed in southern belle fashions complete with parasols while men wore plantation era suits, and all drank mint juleps in quantity. Blacks in white jackets were allowed to serve.

Some white social clubs, nostalgic for the old days of contented slaves, sought to revive the musical spirituals that blacks had created in their communities as a stay against despair. Those spirituals were in fact, beginning to be forgotten because they had seldom been written down and even more seldom set to written music. So the white clubs learned the words from their servants and wrote down the music as their servants sang them, and then gave concerts around town, again dressed in plantation chic.

These social clubs had names, of course—the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sons of the Confederacy, and perhaps the most chilling, the “Children of the Confederacy.� In meetings of the latter, children beginning at about the age of 8 would be told to memorize answers from “The Confederate Catechism� (2014), a copy of which I was able to easily find on the web. This review is going long, so I’m only going to quote one question and answer.

“Was slavery the cause of secession or the war?�

“No. Slavery existed previous to the Constitution and the Union was formed in spite of it. Both from the standpoint of the Constitution and sound statesmanship it was not slavery, but the vindictive, intemperate anti-slavery movement that was at the bottom of the troubles. The North having formed a union with a lot of States inheriting slavery, common honesty dictated that it should respect the institutions of the South, or, in the case of a change of conscience, should secede from the Union. But it did neither. Having possessed itself of the Federal Government, it set up abolition as it’s particular champion, made war upon the South, freed the Negroes without regard to time or consequences, and held the South as conquered.�

Over the last ten years (roughly corresponding to the election of a black person as president), Charleston has become much more inclusive in the stories it tells about itself. The slave trading center that for a 100 years had never existed can now be visited, bus tours can be taken that focus on the African-American experience in the city, and concerts can now be heard where African-Americans themselves sing the spirituals that their forbearers created. Still, Charleston is a place where one can study how history really is a story that can always be revised. This book is a good place to begin that study.



]]> 4.38 2018 Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
author: Ethan J. Kytle
name: Jim
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2018/07/17
date added: 2018/07/17
shelves:
review:
Denmarck Vesey was a free black man living in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina in the 1820’s. He had a job and a few resources, but he was fiercely angry about the slavery that poisoned the lives of his fellow blacks. And so in 1822 he used his meager earnings to buy weapons in the hopes of beginning a slave rebellion that would spread quickly, much like the one that John Brown planned 30 years later. His small conspiracy was soon discovered, however, the conspirators were killed, and Denmarck Vesey himself was publicly executed. But his name and story lived on in Charleston, as a cautionary tale to white slave owners and as a model of resistance to the blacks who were to remain in slavery for another 40 years.

The good white people of antebellum Charleston were not overly endowed with moral intelligence, but they could count. Blacks, most of them slaves, outnumbered whites by a factor of nine to one from 1800 until at least emancipation in the low country. The idea of an armed slave rebellion was for several reasons a recurring nightmare for the white population, especially for those wealthy enough to own slaves. First, of course, that population understood that they would probably lose their lives in such a rebellion. But they also knew that they would lose their wealth since most of that wealth was embodied in the slaves that they traded, raped, and overworked to maintain their life style. Slaves, in other words, not only produced wealth for their owners, they were themselves a form of human currency.

Denmarck Vesey’s Garden is a remarkably insightful and detailed history of slavery as seen through the very specific lens of Charleston’s white and black populations. It moves from the late 18th century, by which time Charleston had become the largest slave-trading center in America, through the Civil War when Charleston lost its wealth, to Reconstruction, the long Jim Crow era, the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement, all the way to the Obama administration. It is a complicated and tortured history, but what makes the book worth reading is that it documents how the city’s leaders, newspapers, intellectuals, and citizens spent more than 150 years denying that its actual history was real. Through multiple acts of willful amnesia, erasure, and outright deceit, the city of Charleston literally whitewashed its fierce commitment to slavery and its long abuse of black citizens. Most of Charleston’s history of itself is, in other words, a carefully crafted fantasy that has more in common with Disney World than with the lives people actually lived there.

The revisionist history began, of course, with the need for money. The Civil War was not kind to Charleston. The Union Army never forgot that the war began in the Charleston harbor when Confederate soldiers fired at Fort Sumter or that South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union. So it seemed to take special care to attack the city as vigorously as possible. Union ships fired on Charleston almost continuously throughout the conflict. Houses were burned or otherwise destroyed, public buildings and private businesses were left in ruins, the slaves were freed, and Confederate currency was rendered worthless. From the end of the Civil War until the end of Reconstruction in 1876, whites were almost as poor as blacks and were no more likely to hold political office than their former slaves. All that ended however, when Union soldiers left the south—a moment that the south called “Redemption.� Blacks were stripped of their right to vote, arbitrarily arrested, tethered to jobs without compensation as punishment, and, of course, lynched with horrifying frequency.

But that didn’t solve the money problem. To address that issue, Charleston had to cast off its reputation as the Wall Street of slave sales and reinvent itself as a “lost cause� theme park. Starting in the 1890’s, tourism became the major industry. Homes were rebuilt, sometimes with cheap materials, to resemble the look of the Old South. Some lucky blacks were hired to serve as token “darkies� in the streets and on the rehabilitated, but unproductive plantations. They told scripted stories of how happy they had been as slaves and how kindly their masters had treated them. The map of the city was changed. What was the center of the slave trade, the centrally located Ryan’s Market, was erased from the city’s grid. It had never existed. The slave quarters that were a part of every plantation and many of the large houses in town became “carriage houses.� Slaves were actually “servants.� And the cause of the Civil War was never slavery. It was about states� rights, about freedom of choice, about honoring community and tradition, about old time religion, and about protecting and supporting the poor, illiterate black people who couldn’t really look out for themselves.

The revisionist project was the work of many hands. In order to protect the young, history textbooks had to be re-written by southern scholars, many of them sons and daughters of confederate veterans, who would tell the truth about slavery, about the Civil War, and later about Jim Crow. Newspapers were at pains to make black crime, ignorance, and sexual danger as visible as possible. Tours of the city and the surrounding plantations always emphasized the period before the Civil War. In Charleston, it was as if history stopped in 1861.

Beginning in 1910, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of South Carolina’s secession from the Union, white Charleston held its first annual “Secession Ball� at which women dressed in southern belle fashions complete with parasols while men wore plantation era suits, and all drank mint juleps in quantity. Blacks in white jackets were allowed to serve.

Some white social clubs, nostalgic for the old days of contented slaves, sought to revive the musical spirituals that blacks had created in their communities as a stay against despair. Those spirituals were in fact, beginning to be forgotten because they had seldom been written down and even more seldom set to written music. So the white clubs learned the words from their servants and wrote down the music as their servants sang them, and then gave concerts around town, again dressed in plantation chic.

These social clubs had names, of course—the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sons of the Confederacy, and perhaps the most chilling, the “Children of the Confederacy.� In meetings of the latter, children beginning at about the age of 8 would be told to memorize answers from “The Confederate Catechism� (2014), a copy of which I was able to easily find on the web. This review is going long, so I’m only going to quote one question and answer.

“Was slavery the cause of secession or the war?�

“No. Slavery existed previous to the Constitution and the Union was formed in spite of it. Both from the standpoint of the Constitution and sound statesmanship it was not slavery, but the vindictive, intemperate anti-slavery movement that was at the bottom of the troubles. The North having formed a union with a lot of States inheriting slavery, common honesty dictated that it should respect the institutions of the South, or, in the case of a change of conscience, should secede from the Union. But it did neither. Having possessed itself of the Federal Government, it set up abolition as it’s particular champion, made war upon the South, freed the Negroes without regard to time or consequences, and held the South as conquered.�

Over the last ten years (roughly corresponding to the election of a black person as president), Charleston has become much more inclusive in the stories it tells about itself. The slave trading center that for a 100 years had never existed can now be visited, bus tours can be taken that focus on the African-American experience in the city, and concerts can now be heard where African-Americans themselves sing the spirituals that their forbearers created. Still, Charleston is a place where one can study how history really is a story that can always be revised. This book is a good place to begin that study.




]]> <![CDATA[The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East]]> 9073427 With a new afterword by the author, and a sneak preview of Sandy Tolan's new book, Children of the Stone

In 1967, Bashir Al-Khayri, a Palestinian twenty-five-year-old, journeyed to Israel, with the goal of seeing the beloved old stone house, with the lemon tree behind it, that he and his family had fled nineteen years earlier. To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Ashkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student, whose family fled Europe for Israel following the Holocaust. On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the aftermath of war and tested over the next thirty-five years in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967. Based on extensive research, and springing from his enormously resonant documentary that aired on NPR's Fresh Air in 1998, Sandy Tolan brings the Israeli-Palestinian conflict down to its most human level, suggesting that even amid the bleakest political realities there exist stories of hope and reconciliation.]]> 409 Sandy Tolan Jim 5 4.12 2006 The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
author: Sandy Tolan
name: Jim
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2006
rating: 5
read at: 2018/06/16
date added: 2018/06/16
shelves:
review:

]]> The Son 16240761
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.

Spring, 1849. The first male child born in the newly established Republic of Texas, Eli McCullough is thirteen years old when a marauding band of Comanche storm his homestead and brutally murder his mother and sister, taking him captive. Brave and clever, Eli quickly adapts to Comanche life, learning their ways and language, answering to a new name, carving a place as the chief's adopted son, and waging war against their enemies, including white men-complicating his sense of loyalty and understanding of who he is. But when disease, starvation, and overwhelming numbers of armed Americans decimate the tribe, Eli finds himself alone. Neither white nor Indian, civilized or fully wild, he must carve a place for himself in a world in which he does not fully belong-a journey of adventure, tragedy, hardship, grit, and luck that reverberates in the lives of his progeny.

Intertwined with Eli's story are those of his son, Peter, a man who bears the emotional cost of his father's drive for power, and JA, Eli's great-granddaughter, a woman who must fight hardened rivals to succeed in a man's world.

Phillipp Meyer deftly explores how Eli's ruthlessness and steely pragmatism transform subsequent generations of McCulloughs. Love, honor, children are sacrificed in the name of ambition, as the family becomes one of the richest powers in Texas, a ranching-and-oil dynasty of unsurpassed wealth and privilege. Yet, like all empires, the McCoulloughs must eventually face the consequences of their choices.

Harrowing, panoramic, and vividly drawn, The Son is a masterful achievement from a sublime young talent.]]> 561 Philipp Meyer 0062120395 Jim 5
The story is compelling and well worth reading, but the major reason for spending time with the book is the quality of the prose. I haven’t seen anything as good in a long time, so I’m going to take the unusual step of quoting one passage at some length so you can get the feel of the sentences. It’s not for everyone, probably, but Philip Meyer, the author, sure knows what he’s doing. The speaker is Eli after he has been with the Comanche for several months. The tribe has just finished a very successful buffalo hunt.

“…The fallen buffalo were butchered where they lay, though butchering is not the right word. The Comanche were like surgeons. The skin was cut carefully along the spine, because the best meat and the longest sinews were just underneath, and then the hide was peeled off the animal. If the village was close, by this point a group of optimistic children would have gathered and would be pestering the butcher for a piece of hot liver with the bile of the gallbladder squeezed over it. The stomach was removed , the grass squeezed from it, and the remaining juice drunk immediately as a tonic, or dabbed onto the face by those who had boils or rashes. The contents of the intestines were squeezed out between the fingers and the intestines themselves either broiled or eaten raw. The kidneys, kidney tallow, and the tallow along the loins were also eaten raw, as the butchering continued, though sometimes they were lightly roasted along with the testicles of the bull. If grass was scarce the contents of the stomach was fed to the horses. In winter, in the case of frostbite, the stomach was removed whole and the frostbitten hand or foot thrust in and allowed to warm; recovery was generally complete.�

If you want to be in a familiar but very different place for awhile, go here.


]]> 4.01 2013 The Son
author: Philipp Meyer
name: Jim
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2013/08/17
date added: 2016/11/14
shelves:
review:
The Son is a large, multi-generational old-fashioned novel, and I mean that in the best possible sense. It doesn’t sprawl across the years. It threads a steel needle and weaves the years together so tightly that you can’t tell where one starts and the other begins, making a pattern that becomes a tragedy that has no clear end. The “son� of the title is not the central character, but a weak, quiet, and scholarly man whose wife leaves him and who doesn’t recognize the moment when oil replaces cattle as the means to becoming rich in Texas. It is his father, Eli, who dominates the novel. Dry-ice cold, leather tough, thoroughly amoral, Eli is captured by the Comanche soon after witnessing his sister and his mother being raped and murdered by a hunting party. He manages to stay alive, and with astonishing skill and intelligence, he learns the ways of the Comanche and they adopt him as one of their own.

The story is compelling and well worth reading, but the major reason for spending time with the book is the quality of the prose. I haven’t seen anything as good in a long time, so I’m going to take the unusual step of quoting one passage at some length so you can get the feel of the sentences. It’s not for everyone, probably, but Philip Meyer, the author, sure knows what he’s doing. The speaker is Eli after he has been with the Comanche for several months. The tribe has just finished a very successful buffalo hunt.

“…The fallen buffalo were butchered where they lay, though butchering is not the right word. The Comanche were like surgeons. The skin was cut carefully along the spine, because the best meat and the longest sinews were just underneath, and then the hide was peeled off the animal. If the village was close, by this point a group of optimistic children would have gathered and would be pestering the butcher for a piece of hot liver with the bile of the gallbladder squeezed over it. The stomach was removed , the grass squeezed from it, and the remaining juice drunk immediately as a tonic, or dabbed onto the face by those who had boils or rashes. The contents of the intestines were squeezed out between the fingers and the intestines themselves either broiled or eaten raw. The kidneys, kidney tallow, and the tallow along the loins were also eaten raw, as the butchering continued, though sometimes they were lightly roasted along with the testicles of the bull. If grass was scarce the contents of the stomach was fed to the horses. In winter, in the case of frostbite, the stomach was removed whole and the frostbitten hand or foot thrust in and allowed to warm; recovery was generally complete.�

If you want to be in a familiar but very different place for awhile, go here.



]]> <![CDATA[How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer]]> 7624457
This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and more than four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment--and in search of themselves.

This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, travels, and friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers--who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?']]> 387 Sarah Bakewell 0701178922 Jim 5 3.97 2010 How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
author: Sarah Bakewell
name: Jim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/11/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis]]> 27161156 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062300546.

Hillbilly Elegy recounts J.D. Vance's powerful origin story...

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate now serving as a U.S. Senator from Ohio and the Republican Vice Presidential candidate for the 2024 election, an incisive account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.'s grandparents were "dirt poor and in love," and moved north from Kentucky's Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.]]> 264 J.D. Vance Jim 5
“By almost any measure, American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world. Consider, for instance, Mom’s revolving door of father figures. No other country experiences anything like this. In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent. The second highest share is 2.6 percent in Sweden. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent—about 1 in 12—and the figure is even higher in the working class. The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle�. For many kids, the first impulse is escape, but people who lurch toward the exit rarely choose the right door. This is how my aunt found herself married at sixteen to an abusive husband. It’s how, my mom, the salutatorian of her high school class, had both a baby and a divorce, but not a single college credit under her belt before her teenage years were over…Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.�

Vance remains fiercely loyal to the independent spirit that shaped his family and neighbors, but he is frustrated and angry that they have not found ways to use that independence to help themselves. He escaped precisely because he took advantage of mentors and teachers who showed him a different path, first in the Marine Corps, then through a string of fine professors at Ohio State, and finally, as a law student at Yale. He is writing his memoir as a 31-year-old Yale Law School graduate, who is married to a strong and deeply intelligent woman and who has already developed a successful career. He realizes that he is a statistical anomaly, that it could have easily gone another way. But in writing this important book, he has helped us see a world that we rarely notice and that we have ignored for far too long.


]]> 3.81 2016 Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
author: J.D. Vance
name: Jim
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/08/01
date added: 2016/08/20
shelves:
review:
I’m not sure that J.D. Vance will vote for Donald Trump come November, but in his powerful and bracing memoir, he draws a devastating picture of where many such voters probably live. Vance grew up in a largely white, rustbelt town in southern Ohio, where manufacturing jobs disappeared about 20 years ago, with meth and pain killers, crime and alcoholism, divorce and obesity settling in soon thereafter. Vance’s own mother had a recurring addiction to pain killers accompanied by a self-destructive habit of replacing live-in boyfriends on an annual basis. Vance sought what security he could find in his grandparents, who themselves suffered from depression, and for several years, from alcoholism. But many in his town lacked even that kind of protection. He was surrounded by multiple cases of comparable family dysfunction—sisters, cousins, neighbors, uncles, aunts—all were bound by an economic and cultural nexus that combined a fierce pride in independence and personal freedom married to an all-too-common inability to make good life decisions. As he writes,

“By almost any measure, American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world. Consider, for instance, Mom’s revolving door of father figures. No other country experiences anything like this. In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent. The second highest share is 2.6 percent in Sweden. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent—about 1 in 12—and the figure is even higher in the working class. The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle�. For many kids, the first impulse is escape, but people who lurch toward the exit rarely choose the right door. This is how my aunt found herself married at sixteen to an abusive husband. It’s how, my mom, the salutatorian of her high school class, had both a baby and a divorce, but not a single college credit under her belt before her teenage years were over…Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.�

Vance remains fiercely loyal to the independent spirit that shaped his family and neighbors, but he is frustrated and angry that they have not found ways to use that independence to help themselves. He escaped precisely because he took advantage of mentors and teachers who showed him a different path, first in the Marine Corps, then through a string of fine professors at Ohio State, and finally, as a law student at Yale. He is writing his memoir as a 31-year-old Yale Law School graduate, who is married to a strong and deeply intelligent woman and who has already developed a successful career. He realizes that he is a statistical anomaly, that it could have easily gone another way. But in writing this important book, he has helped us see a world that we rarely notice and that we have ignored for far too long.



]]> <![CDATA[White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America]]> 27209433 In her groundbreaking history of the class system in America, extending from colonial times to the present, Nancy Isenberg takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing––if occasionally entertaining–�"poor white trash."

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement. They were alternately known as “waste people,� “offals,� “rubbish,� “lazy lubbers,� and “crackers.� By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters� and “sandhillers,� known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery.

Reconstruction pitted "poor white trash" against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics�-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, "white trash" have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.]]> 460 Nancy Isenberg 0670785970 Jim 5
I mention all of this because those working class origins were absolutely invisible to me until I was in my early 20’s. Trailers weren’t working class dwellings, let alone underclass dwellings. They were my family’s dwellings, as natural and normal as my dad’s can of Hamm’s beer every evening after work and my mom’s biscuits and gravy every Sunday after church. It was just how things were.

Historian Nancy Isenberg tells the 400-year-long story of social class in America, especially the white social class that we never read about in high school. We heard about the founding of Jamestown, for instance, but we never learned that most of those people brought here in the 17th century were not adventurously seeking a newer world. They were criminals and vagrants, unemployed and often-homeless people rounded up from London and elsewhere in order to get rid of them. In the words of John White, a landowner in early America, “Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States, to drayne away the filth.� The New World promised easy wealth, for those willing to take financial risks, but it also offered a landfill to dump those who had no resources and who were a financial liability for the English homeland.

150 years later, when Andrew Jackson came to office, the descendants of this “filth� were still around. “They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty. To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down anywhere and everywhere. …They were to be spread about as scrub foliage, or in bestial terms, mangy varmints infesting the land.� Poor whites were “squatters,� “crackers,� and sometimes, before the Civil War, the "N" word.

But mostly they were without land, and thus without economic security or political agency. We have to remember, in spite of the ringing words that follow from “We hold these truths to be self-evident,� that “all men� while obviously not including women or blacks or natives, also did not include white men who were landless. And that was most of white men, all of their wives, and all of their children. Perhaps 70-80% of the people who were here before the Civil War were disenfranchised. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t useful. Almost all of those who fought in the Civil War never had a say in whether it would or would not be fought. In the north Teddy Roosevelt’s father bought himself a substitute to fight for him since he didn’t want to hurt his wife, who was born in the south. Teddy never got over that, which may partially explain his extraordinary eagerness to go to war. In the south, no landowners were required to fight, or even to pay for a substitute. White landless men, who had absolutely no stake in the outcome, were drafted and killed in large numbers. Gentlemen plantation owners, meanwhile, could serve as officers if they chose. After all, they had something to lose.

And so it went on, through two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and Iraq. Those mostly in the direct line of fire were working class men and women, without college educations, without financial resources, without political power. The working class, both black and white, has served as cannon fodder for most of America’s military actions. Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, George Bush, not so much.

I want to make a turn here, because this history of social class is so relevant to what is happening right now. In another new book, “Hillbilly Elegy,� J.D. Vance, a Yale law school graduate, recalls growing up in poor white southern Ohio. In a recent interview he applies what he had learned about “his people� and the places where they live as the 2016 election approaches.

“What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad� only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank. Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth, the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.�

The ascendency of Trumpism, in other words, has been 400 years in the making. By hardwiring wealth and social class into our constitution, our educational system, and our cultural assumptions, we have ourselves created a moment of serious crisis.

So why didn’t I learn about all this in school?







]]> 3.75 2016 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
author: Nancy Isenberg
name: Jim
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/07/08
date added: 2016/07/29
shelves:
review:
While reading this extraordinary history of the white underclass in America, I was reminded of how much of my life was spent in and around house trailers. I’m not talking about those doublewide, wannabe condos with designer touches, landscaped lawns, and air-conditioned club houses a short golf-cart ride away. I’m talking about 10-12 feet wide, 60-80 feet long pill-shaped homes that still have the tires attached. My mom and dad brought me home to such a trailer when I was born. Almost all of my cousins lived in trailers until they left home. All of my grandparents lived in trailers when they left their small Missouri farms or their small Chicago apartments. My last two years in college, I lived in a trailer manufactured in 1950 that my grandmother bought for me for $1000 in 1970. I paid $35 for a lot to park it on near Indiana University where I was an undergraduate. It made it possible for me to graduate debt free in spite of my working class origins.

I mention all of this because those working class origins were absolutely invisible to me until I was in my early 20’s. Trailers weren’t working class dwellings, let alone underclass dwellings. They were my family’s dwellings, as natural and normal as my dad’s can of Hamm’s beer every evening after work and my mom’s biscuits and gravy every Sunday after church. It was just how things were.

Historian Nancy Isenberg tells the 400-year-long story of social class in America, especially the white social class that we never read about in high school. We heard about the founding of Jamestown, for instance, but we never learned that most of those people brought here in the 17th century were not adventurously seeking a newer world. They were criminals and vagrants, unemployed and often-homeless people rounded up from London and elsewhere in order to get rid of them. In the words of John White, a landowner in early America, “Colonies ought to be Emunctories or Sinkes of States, to drayne away the filth.� The New World promised easy wealth, for those willing to take financial risks, but it also offered a landfill to dump those who had no resources and who were a financial liability for the English homeland.

150 years later, when Andrew Jackson came to office, the descendants of this “filth� were still around. “They lived off the grid, rarely attended a school or joined a church, and remained a potent symbol of poverty. To be lower class in rural America was to be one of the landless. They disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down anywhere and everywhere. …They were to be spread about as scrub foliage, or in bestial terms, mangy varmints infesting the land.� Poor whites were “squatters,� “crackers,� and sometimes, before the Civil War, the "N" word.

But mostly they were without land, and thus without economic security or political agency. We have to remember, in spite of the ringing words that follow from “We hold these truths to be self-evident,� that “all men� while obviously not including women or blacks or natives, also did not include white men who were landless. And that was most of white men, all of their wives, and all of their children. Perhaps 70-80% of the people who were here before the Civil War were disenfranchised. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t useful. Almost all of those who fought in the Civil War never had a say in whether it would or would not be fought. In the north Teddy Roosevelt’s father bought himself a substitute to fight for him since he didn’t want to hurt his wife, who was born in the south. Teddy never got over that, which may partially explain his extraordinary eagerness to go to war. In the south, no landowners were required to fight, or even to pay for a substitute. White landless men, who had absolutely no stake in the outcome, were drafted and killed in large numbers. Gentlemen plantation owners, meanwhile, could serve as officers if they chose. After all, they had something to lose.

And so it went on, through two World Wars, Korea, Viet Nam, and Iraq. Those mostly in the direct line of fire were working class men and women, without college educations, without financial resources, without political power. The working class, both black and white, has served as cannon fodder for most of America’s military actions. Dick Cheney, Bill Clinton, George Bush, not so much.

I want to make a turn here, because this history of social class is so relevant to what is happening right now. In another new book, “Hillbilly Elegy,� J.D. Vance, a Yale law school graduate, recalls growing up in poor white southern Ohio. In a recent interview he applies what he had learned about “his people� and the places where they live as the 2016 election approaches.

“What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad� only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank. Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth, the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.�

The ascendency of Trumpism, in other words, has been 400 years in the making. By hardwiring wealth and social class into our constitution, our educational system, and our cultural assumptions, we have ourselves created a moment of serious crisis.

So why didn’t I learn about all this in school?








]]> <![CDATA[The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District]]> 22856150 320 James Rebanks 0385682840 Jim 5 Like many English majors of a certain age, I’ve maintained a long, distant, but deeply sentimental relationship to England’s Lake District for many years. When I was young, the poets I tried to imitate in my own writing (“tried� is a euphemism here) were the usual suspects from the 60’s: William Carlos Williams, e.e cummings, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot. But my school experience of poetry began with the Lake District Romantics: Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Coleridge. This began in high school and continued into college. I took courses about these guys, I wrote innumerable five-page papers about them. My master’s thesis was a close reading of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads for god’s sake. Jeesh! It was that bad.

So when I found this book, written by James Rebanks, a shepherd whose family had worked as shepherds in the District for four generations, I was interested to see what it was like for someone who actually lived and worked there. But this is far more than homely memoir about the simple life. It is, first, a bracing critique of social class distinctions that begin with the assumption that working with your hands always means that you can’t work with your brains. It is also a sharply chiseled, warmly rendered description of a location that is usually experienced as “landscape� rather than workplace. Sheep are an iconic part of the view as you drive or walk through the District. But what we miss on those outings are the shearing and birthing and healing of the sheep, the buying and selling of the sheep at auction, (with is something of an arcane art), the great care and responsibility assumed by the family dogs, the great sense of loss when a sheep is killed by a strange dog or is lost in the snow. Rebanks’s book is an effort, really, to take back the District for those who have made their lives there. He understands that the place now “means� something different to those who visit, Wordsworth in hand. But he wants it also to mean home to those who live there, who often feel that they have been reduced to cardboard images from someone’s idea of a bucolic pastoral. Rebanks explains,

“Later, I would read books and observe the other Lake District, and began to understand it better. Until around 1750 no one from the outside world had paid this mountainous corner of northwest England much notice, or when they had, they found it to be poor, unproductive, primitive, harsh, ugly and backwards. No one from outside thought it was beautiful or a place worth visiting. Then within a few decades all that had changed. Roads and railways were built, making it much easier to get here. The Romantic and the picturesque movements changed the way many people thought about mountains, lakes, and rugged landscapes�.From the start this obsession was (for visitors) a landscape of the imagination, an idealized landscape of the mind. It became a counterpoint to other things, such as the industrial revolution, which was born less than a hundred miles to the south, or a place that that could be used to illustrate philosophies or ideologies. For many it was a place of escape, where the rugged landscape and nature would stimulate feelings and sentiments that other places could not.�

I could quote at greater length, but instead I want to say that I could not stop reading this book, or rather, I could not stop listening to it since I ‘read� it on my iPhone. Either way, it is compelling, making me reconfigure my sentimental beliefs about the Lake District, but also to look again at long standing assumptions about work, tradition, family, and the value of knowing yourself and your place well.
]]> 4.12 2015 The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District
author: James Rebanks
name: Jim
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2016/04/01
date added: 2016/06/23
shelves:
review:

Like many English majors of a certain age, I’ve maintained a long, distant, but deeply sentimental relationship to England’s Lake District for many years. When I was young, the poets I tried to imitate in my own writing (“tried� is a euphemism here) were the usual suspects from the 60’s: William Carlos Williams, e.e cummings, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot. But my school experience of poetry began with the Lake District Romantics: Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Coleridge. This began in high school and continued into college. I took courses about these guys, I wrote innumerable five-page papers about them. My master’s thesis was a close reading of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads for god’s sake. Jeesh! It was that bad.

So when I found this book, written by James Rebanks, a shepherd whose family had worked as shepherds in the District for four generations, I was interested to see what it was like for someone who actually lived and worked there. But this is far more than homely memoir about the simple life. It is, first, a bracing critique of social class distinctions that begin with the assumption that working with your hands always means that you can’t work with your brains. It is also a sharply chiseled, warmly rendered description of a location that is usually experienced as “landscape� rather than workplace. Sheep are an iconic part of the view as you drive or walk through the District. But what we miss on those outings are the shearing and birthing and healing of the sheep, the buying and selling of the sheep at auction, (with is something of an arcane art), the great care and responsibility assumed by the family dogs, the great sense of loss when a sheep is killed by a strange dog or is lost in the snow. Rebanks’s book is an effort, really, to take back the District for those who have made their lives there. He understands that the place now “means� something different to those who visit, Wordsworth in hand. But he wants it also to mean home to those who live there, who often feel that they have been reduced to cardboard images from someone’s idea of a bucolic pastoral. Rebanks explains,

“Later, I would read books and observe the other Lake District, and began to understand it better. Until around 1750 no one from the outside world had paid this mountainous corner of northwest England much notice, or when they had, they found it to be poor, unproductive, primitive, harsh, ugly and backwards. No one from outside thought it was beautiful or a place worth visiting. Then within a few decades all that had changed. Roads and railways were built, making it much easier to get here. The Romantic and the picturesque movements changed the way many people thought about mountains, lakes, and rugged landscapes�.From the start this obsession was (for visitors) a landscape of the imagination, an idealized landscape of the mind. It became a counterpoint to other things, such as the industrial revolution, which was born less than a hundred miles to the south, or a place that that could be used to illustrate philosophies or ideologies. For many it was a place of escape, where the rugged landscape and nature would stimulate feelings and sentiments that other places could not.�

I could quote at greater length, but instead I want to say that I could not stop reading this book, or rather, I could not stop listening to it since I ‘read� it on my iPhone. Either way, it is compelling, making me reconfigure my sentimental beliefs about the Lake District, but also to look again at long standing assumptions about work, tradition, family, and the value of knowing yourself and your place well.

]]> <![CDATA[At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails]]> 30335517
‘It’s not often that you miss your bus stop because you’re so engrossed in reading a book about existentialism, but I did exactly that... The story of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger et al is strange, fun and compelling reading. If it doesn’t win awards, I will eat my copy�
Independent on Sunday

‘Quirky, funny, clear and passionate� Few writers are as good as Bakewell at explaining complicated ideas in a way that makes them easy to understand�
Mail on Sunday

‘Bakewell shows how fascinating were some of the existentialists� ideas and how fascinating, often frightful, were their lives. Vivid, humorous anecdotes are interwoven with a lucid and unpatronising exposition of their complex philosophy� Tender, incisive and fair�
Daily Telegraph]]> 440 Sarah Bakewell 0099554887 Jim 5
When I finished college and became a teacher, I didn’t have much use for free-floating philosophy, even if it was cool. And when I went back for my doctorate, Foucault and Derrida had cleared out the existentialist underbrush and established their own overlapping empires—at least in the literacy studies world I inhabited. So existentialism went into the same long-term memory box where I kept my really terrible college poetry and my unread copy of Remembrance of Things Past.

Much of this came flooding back several months ago when I read a strong review of Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. I had greatly enjoyed Bakewell’s earlier book, How to Live, which is a smart and deeply generous reading of Montaigne. She writes about thinking with a light hand and a human touch. Like the existentialists and Montaigne, Bakewell works from the assumption that philosophy begins, not with questions about what is true, but with questions about how we should live our lives. As the existentialists put it, in a fancy way, “existence precedes essence.� That is, we are not already something essential, something finished, something we can reveal in its fullness to the world. We are always becoming who we are, shaped in part by genes, geography, and history but always free, always burdened by a freedom, to make alternative choices.

In the group portrait Bakewell provides in Café—a portrait that includes Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty—and many others, she gives us lucid and persuasive readings of their works, but she works up to their thinking through their lived lives. The existentialists are mostly comprised by a generation that came of age around WWI and began to thin out in the student revolts in the 60’s. In other words, during arguably Europe’s darkest years. In a world where Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Franco controlled millions of lives, freedom was not just another word. It was the most important word. And learning what freedom meant, what it demanded from us, was the most important intellectual task facing that generation.

Reading Bakewell’s wonderful book was a reminder to me that my younger self was probably right in wanting to be an existentialist. You don’t have to use their language, and you don’t need to smoke a lot of cigarettes. But you do need to figure out who you are becoming and to use your freedom to choose wisely among the many paths that await you.



]]> 4.22 2016 At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails
author: Sarah Bakewell
name: Jim
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at: 2016/05/30
date added: 2016/06/10
shelves:
review:
When I was in college I wanted to be an existentialist. I wanted to be other things as well, but I thought I could be an existentialist version of those other things. Like most of the other things I thought about in college, I didn’t actually know much about who existentialists were or what they thought. I knew they were mostly French, that they smoked a lot of cigarettes, that they were often Depressed about very important things, and that they were incredibly smart. They wrote books with titles like Being and Time and Being and Nothingness. I didn’t go anywhere near those door stops. I managed to read about half of Sartre’s Nausea. I read Camus’s The Stranger twice, once for a class and once on my own. I also read Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, parts of which I think I understood. One time I was trying to read Sartre’s What Is Literature on my green campus lawn when one of my professors went by, asked what I was reading, and said that he was impressed. I thought that was a sign that I was on the right track.

When I finished college and became a teacher, I didn’t have much use for free-floating philosophy, even if it was cool. And when I went back for my doctorate, Foucault and Derrida had cleared out the existentialist underbrush and established their own overlapping empires—at least in the literacy studies world I inhabited. So existentialism went into the same long-term memory box where I kept my really terrible college poetry and my unread copy of Remembrance of Things Past.

Much of this came flooding back several months ago when I read a strong review of Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café. I had greatly enjoyed Bakewell’s earlier book, How to Live, which is a smart and deeply generous reading of Montaigne. She writes about thinking with a light hand and a human touch. Like the existentialists and Montaigne, Bakewell works from the assumption that philosophy begins, not with questions about what is true, but with questions about how we should live our lives. As the existentialists put it, in a fancy way, “existence precedes essence.� That is, we are not already something essential, something finished, something we can reveal in its fullness to the world. We are always becoming who we are, shaped in part by genes, geography, and history but always free, always burdened by a freedom, to make alternative choices.

In the group portrait Bakewell provides in Café—a portrait that includes Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty—and many others, she gives us lucid and persuasive readings of their works, but she works up to their thinking through their lived lives. The existentialists are mostly comprised by a generation that came of age around WWI and began to thin out in the student revolts in the 60’s. In other words, during arguably Europe’s darkest years. In a world where Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Franco controlled millions of lives, freedom was not just another word. It was the most important word. And learning what freedom meant, what it demanded from us, was the most important intellectual task facing that generation.

Reading Bakewell’s wonderful book was a reminder to me that my younger self was probably right in wanting to be an existentialist. You don’t have to use their language, and you don’t need to smoke a lot of cigarettes. But you do need to figure out who you are becoming and to use your freedom to choose wisely among the many paths that await you.




]]> The Book of Negroes 24004398 Lawrence Hill’s award-winning novel is a major television miniseries airing on BET Networks.


The Book of Negroes (based on the novel Someone Knows My Name) will be BET’s first miniseries. The star-studded production includes lead actress Aunjanue Ellis (Ray, The Help), Oscar winner Cuba Gooding Jr. (Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men), Oscar and Emmy winner Louis Gossett Jr. (A Raisin in the Sun, Boardwalk Empire), and features Lyriq Bent (Rookie Blue), Jane Alexander (The Cider House Rules), and Ben Chaplin (The Thin Red Line). Director and co-writer Clement Virgo is a feature film and television director (The Wire) who also serves as producer with executive producer Damon D’Oliveira (What We Have).


In this “transporting� (Entertainment Weekly) and “heart-stopping� (Washington Post) work, Aminata Diallo, one of the strongest women characters in contemporary fiction, is kidnapped from Africa as a child and sold as a slave in South Carolina. Fleeing to Canada after the Revolutionary War, she escapes to attempt a new life in freedom.

]]> 502 Lawrence Hill 0393351572 Jim 5 4.56 2007 The Book of Negroes
author: Lawrence Hill
name: Jim
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2016/03/13
date added: 2016/03/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Go Set a Watchman 24817626 To Kill a Mockingbird. Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch�"Scout"—returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past—a journey that can be guided only by one's conscience. Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor and effortless precision—a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context and new meaning to an American classic.]]> 278 Harper Lee 0062409859 Jim 5
From the mid-1960’s on, To Kill a Mockingbird was the most frequently taught novel in American schools. It has held its place for half a century, and it is still a dominant presence in the curriculum. Why? It has a sassy, observant narrator, a cast of colorful characters, a courtroom drama, and a deeply moral, dignified giant of a man who strides through the swamp of racism with a clear-eyed vision of what is right and what is just. There are a few problems with the book. The “N-word� is sprinkled liberally throughout, and though the use of the term has gotten many books in trouble—Huck Finn, in particular—TKAM seems to have escaped censure on that ground. There is also the less visible problem of how racism is represented in the book. In TKAM’s version, it seems mostly an issue of social class. It is the Tobacco Road, redneck, poor, white trash who are the bad racists. The Finches are not racist, even though they live and participate in a community where blacks are relegated to third-rate housing, serf-like labor, and no education. There is no exploration or question raised about the structural racism that pervades Maycomb. Scout, Jem, and Dill never play with black children, and their aunt would thrash them if they tried. Tom Robinson gets in trouble because he feels that he has no choice when he is asked to do some yard work for a young white girl. Blacks sit at the back of the courtroom during Robinson’s trial, and when Atticus leaves at the end of the case, the black minister tells Scout to stand because “your father’s passing.�

For all of its charms, and they are many, To Kill a Mockingbird is a kind of narrative primer we might call “Racism for Children.� Most of us first encountered the book in school when we were 13, 14 or 15. It gives an account of racist behavior that we were ready for, but it is a morally simple account, set 30 years in the past when it was written, in a place where few of us young readers lived. It made us feel bad about what happened to Tom, made us feel the injustice of what happened to him in spite of Atticus’s noble effort. But it did not make us feel bad about us. In fact, Atticus made us feel good about us. He was not participating in all the racism around him, and neither were we. He couldn’t stop bad things from happening, no matter how hard he tried, and neither could we.

So why has To Kill a Mockingbird maintained its important place in the American curriculum? There are and always have been better books. Certainly there are ways to structure a literature curriculum so that many perspectives about race are offered—perspectives that might allow students to construct a critique of the perspective we find in Mockingbird. But such an approach would undermine the cultural work TKAM has done and continues to do. For all of its strengths, Mockingbird is a fable that alleviates the anxiety and guilt that white readers feel about the pervasive racism that holds our country in its grip. Like other savior figures in other fables, Atticus takes upon himself all of our sins and does the hard work that few of us are able or willing to do. He is flawless, self-less. He cannot save Tom. But he can save us.

But of course this powerful fable was not the book that Harper Lee originally wrote. Her first version of her Maycomb story was Go Set a Watchman, which centers on Jean Louise’s return to Maycomb from New York in what was then the present—the late 1950’s—only to find that the Atticus she thought she knew as Scout has become a deeply racist old man.

“Atticus turned to her. “Scout, you probably don’t know it, but the NAACP-paid lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen’’�
“You mean colored lawyers?�
“Atticus nodded. “Yep. We’ve got three or four in the state now. They’re mostly in Birmingham and places like that, but circuit by circuit they watch and wait, just for some felony committed by a Negro against a white person—you’d be surprised how quick they find out—in they come and…well, in terms you can understand, they demand Negroes on the juries in such cases. They subpoena the jury commissioners, they ask the judge to step down, the raise every legal trick in their books—and they have ‘em aplenty—Above all else, they try to get the case into Federal court where they know the cards are stacked in their favor�.�

This, remember, was written in the mid-1950’s. That the legal maneuvers that so enrage Atticus are still today necessary to obtain justice for Blacks in southern courts is testimony to Lee’s courage in writing as she did when she did, but also to her prescience in anticipating the slow progress that would be made in solving the problem.

So what would have happened if Go Set a Watchman had been published in 1960 instead of To Kill a Mockingbird? My guess is that few, if any of us, would have read it in school. It would have probably been labeled a “race novel� just as black music of the time was labeled “race music.� If it was read much at all, it would have ignited deep controversy in the south, seasoned with a heavy dose of denial. But this is the story about the south that Harper Lee originally wrote. This was her young woman’s take on her home, and reading it, I can not help thinking that it was important to her in bone-deep ways. It was a cry of independence, of speaking truth to the past, of coming to terms the blindness of her youth. In Watchman, Jean Louise confesses that she had worshipped Atticus, is fiercely angry the he did not reveal himself honestly when she was growing up, and feels betrayed because she didn’t want to face the hard truths of homegrown racism. In the end, under the tutelage of her uncle, Jean Louise is able to embrace her father, not because of his beliefs, but in spite of them and with her eyes finally open to what he is and what he always has been.

So why was the editor to whom Lee brought the manuscript of Watchman so eager to change the story in such fundamental ways? Though the writing in Watchman has some rough spots, it remains the work of a strong writer. And though Watchman doesn’t include Boo Radley and Dill or much about Calpurnia, it does include a number of characters who might show up in a Flannery O’Conner story.

I don’t know the answer to the question I just asked. I have read that the editor was a very strong progressive who advocated for the civil rights movement that was taking shape in the south when Lee brought in her manuscript. But from here on, I am speculating. If the editor wanted to sell a lot of books, she would know that Watchman would be too dangerous, too controversial to find a wide readership, let alone make its way into schools. But she would also know that a book that dealt with the subject of race, but in a softer way, more distant in time, would be easier for white readers to accept. In a move of editorial genius, she suggested that Lee shift her perspective to a younger, more innocent, less knowledgeable self--that she see Atticus through her nine-year old eyes, thus erasing the grumpy racism that appears when she sees him as a young woman.

I’m not sure what it cost Harper Lee to make such fundamental changes to her first major work. Certainly she benefited financially by making the changes. And she made a lot of young readers and a lot of teachers happy because To Kill a Mockingbird remains a great story. But she also never wrote another book. That’s a long and sad silence for a writer who has now given us both of her books. Two books that tell one, rich, complicated, and important story about who we are.


]]> 3.28 2015 Go Set a Watchman
author: Harper Lee
name: Jim
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/11
date added: 2015/08/18
shelves:
review:
I want to talk about To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman together because, having recently read them both in succession (TKAM for the second or third time), I can no longer think of them as two books. They are one book written from the perspective of a single character (Scout/Jean Louise) set in the same place at different times, and featuring many of the same characters, again at different times. If each of us were to write two stories—one about our parents as we saw them as children, the other as we saw them as young adults—they would become one story about how time has changed both our parents and ourselves. And so it is with Harper Lee’s two books. Many of the reviews of Watchman have claimed tendentiously that it gives us the “real”Atticus, and several people I’ve spoken to say that they did not want to read Watchman because they didn’t want to “lose� Atticus. This makes me think that responses to the two books are not about the books, but about the readers of those books, and that proposition seems worth exploring.

From the mid-1960’s on, To Kill a Mockingbird was the most frequently taught novel in American schools. It has held its place for half a century, and it is still a dominant presence in the curriculum. Why? It has a sassy, observant narrator, a cast of colorful characters, a courtroom drama, and a deeply moral, dignified giant of a man who strides through the swamp of racism with a clear-eyed vision of what is right and what is just. There are a few problems with the book. The “N-word� is sprinkled liberally throughout, and though the use of the term has gotten many books in trouble—Huck Finn, in particular—TKAM seems to have escaped censure on that ground. There is also the less visible problem of how racism is represented in the book. In TKAM’s version, it seems mostly an issue of social class. It is the Tobacco Road, redneck, poor, white trash who are the bad racists. The Finches are not racist, even though they live and participate in a community where blacks are relegated to third-rate housing, serf-like labor, and no education. There is no exploration or question raised about the structural racism that pervades Maycomb. Scout, Jem, and Dill never play with black children, and their aunt would thrash them if they tried. Tom Robinson gets in trouble because he feels that he has no choice when he is asked to do some yard work for a young white girl. Blacks sit at the back of the courtroom during Robinson’s trial, and when Atticus leaves at the end of the case, the black minister tells Scout to stand because “your father’s passing.�

For all of its charms, and they are many, To Kill a Mockingbird is a kind of narrative primer we might call “Racism for Children.� Most of us first encountered the book in school when we were 13, 14 or 15. It gives an account of racist behavior that we were ready for, but it is a morally simple account, set 30 years in the past when it was written, in a place where few of us young readers lived. It made us feel bad about what happened to Tom, made us feel the injustice of what happened to him in spite of Atticus’s noble effort. But it did not make us feel bad about us. In fact, Atticus made us feel good about us. He was not participating in all the racism around him, and neither were we. He couldn’t stop bad things from happening, no matter how hard he tried, and neither could we.

So why has To Kill a Mockingbird maintained its important place in the American curriculum? There are and always have been better books. Certainly there are ways to structure a literature curriculum so that many perspectives about race are offered—perspectives that might allow students to construct a critique of the perspective we find in Mockingbird. But such an approach would undermine the cultural work TKAM has done and continues to do. For all of its strengths, Mockingbird is a fable that alleviates the anxiety and guilt that white readers feel about the pervasive racism that holds our country in its grip. Like other savior figures in other fables, Atticus takes upon himself all of our sins and does the hard work that few of us are able or willing to do. He is flawless, self-less. He cannot save Tom. But he can save us.

But of course this powerful fable was not the book that Harper Lee originally wrote. Her first version of her Maycomb story was Go Set a Watchman, which centers on Jean Louise’s return to Maycomb from New York in what was then the present—the late 1950’s—only to find that the Atticus she thought she knew as Scout has become a deeply racist old man.

“Atticus turned to her. “Scout, you probably don’t know it, but the NAACP-paid lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen’’�
“You mean colored lawyers?�
“Atticus nodded. “Yep. We’ve got three or four in the state now. They’re mostly in Birmingham and places like that, but circuit by circuit they watch and wait, just for some felony committed by a Negro against a white person—you’d be surprised how quick they find out—in they come and…well, in terms you can understand, they demand Negroes on the juries in such cases. They subpoena the jury commissioners, they ask the judge to step down, the raise every legal trick in their books—and they have ‘em aplenty—Above all else, they try to get the case into Federal court where they know the cards are stacked in their favor�.�

This, remember, was written in the mid-1950’s. That the legal maneuvers that so enrage Atticus are still today necessary to obtain justice for Blacks in southern courts is testimony to Lee’s courage in writing as she did when she did, but also to her prescience in anticipating the slow progress that would be made in solving the problem.

So what would have happened if Go Set a Watchman had been published in 1960 instead of To Kill a Mockingbird? My guess is that few, if any of us, would have read it in school. It would have probably been labeled a “race novel� just as black music of the time was labeled “race music.� If it was read much at all, it would have ignited deep controversy in the south, seasoned with a heavy dose of denial. But this is the story about the south that Harper Lee originally wrote. This was her young woman’s take on her home, and reading it, I can not help thinking that it was important to her in bone-deep ways. It was a cry of independence, of speaking truth to the past, of coming to terms the blindness of her youth. In Watchman, Jean Louise confesses that she had worshipped Atticus, is fiercely angry the he did not reveal himself honestly when she was growing up, and feels betrayed because she didn’t want to face the hard truths of homegrown racism. In the end, under the tutelage of her uncle, Jean Louise is able to embrace her father, not because of his beliefs, but in spite of them and with her eyes finally open to what he is and what he always has been.

So why was the editor to whom Lee brought the manuscript of Watchman so eager to change the story in such fundamental ways? Though the writing in Watchman has some rough spots, it remains the work of a strong writer. And though Watchman doesn’t include Boo Radley and Dill or much about Calpurnia, it does include a number of characters who might show up in a Flannery O’Conner story.

I don’t know the answer to the question I just asked. I have read that the editor was a very strong progressive who advocated for the civil rights movement that was taking shape in the south when Lee brought in her manuscript. But from here on, I am speculating. If the editor wanted to sell a lot of books, she would know that Watchman would be too dangerous, too controversial to find a wide readership, let alone make its way into schools. But she would also know that a book that dealt with the subject of race, but in a softer way, more distant in time, would be easier for white readers to accept. In a move of editorial genius, she suggested that Lee shift her perspective to a younger, more innocent, less knowledgeable self--that she see Atticus through her nine-year old eyes, thus erasing the grumpy racism that appears when she sees him as a young woman.

I’m not sure what it cost Harper Lee to make such fundamental changes to her first major work. Certainly she benefited financially by making the changes. And she made a lot of young readers and a lot of teachers happy because To Kill a Mockingbird remains a great story. But she also never wrote another book. That’s a long and sad silence for a writer who has now given us both of her books. Two books that tell one, rich, complicated, and important story about who we are.



]]> All the Light We Cannot See 19398490 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book, National Book Award finalist, more than two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list


A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). Open your eyes, and see what you can with them before they close forever. Marie-Laure has been blind since the age of six. Her father builds a perfect miniature of their Paris neighbourhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When she is twelve, the German Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure’s agoraphobic reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner Pfennig grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an master at building and fixing these crucial new radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. The story Illuminates the ways, against all odds, that people try to be good to one another.

At the same time, far away in a walled city by the sea, an old man discovers new worlds without ever setting foot outside his home. But all around him, impending danger closes in.

Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill� (Los Angeles Times).]]> 552 Anthony Doerr Jim 5 4.38 2014 All the Light We Cannot See
author: Anthony Doerr
name: Jim
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2015/01/03
date added: 2015/01/03
shelves:
review:

]]> Redeployment 18114068
In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people "who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died." In "After Action Report", a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn't commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Morturary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains - of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic "Money as a Weapons System", a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier's daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier's homecoming.

Redeployment is poised to become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.]]> 288 Phil Klay 1594204993 Jim 5
“We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.
First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, “Jesus,� and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs.
At the time, you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies. You’re going block by block, fighting with rifles good to 550 meters, and you’re killing people at five in a concrete box.
The thinking comes later, when they give you the time. See, it’s not a straight shot back, from war to the Jacksonville mall. When our deployment was up, they put us on TQ, this logistics base out in the desert, let us decompress a bit. I’m not sure what they meant by that. Decompress. We took it to mean jerk off a lot in the showers. Smoke a lot of cigarettes and play a lot of cards. And then they took us to Kuwait and put us on a commercial airliner to go home.
So there you are. You’ve been in a no-shit war zone and then you’re sitting in a plush chair, looking up at a little nozzle shooting air-conditioning, thinking, What the fuck? You’ve got a rifle between your knees, and so does everyone else. Some Marines got M9 pistols, but they take away your bayonets because you aren’t allowed to have knives on an airplane. Even though you’ve showered, you all look grimy and lean. Everybody’s hollow-eyed, and their cammies are beat to shit. And you sit there, and close your eyes, and think.�

Not easy stuff, but of course, that’s the point. This is not an anti-war book, and it is certainly not an anti-soldier book. In Klay’s telling, these soldiers are brave, fiercely loyal to the men in their unit, well trained, and all but broken by the that task they have volunteered to take on. Their sense of what is real and what is right have been narrowed and intensified by the white hear of combat, and the demons that scurry through their lives with gleeful spite are not easily escaped. But in spite of those demons, they strive for decency and friendship, for courage and peace of mind. They strive even for a kind of normalcy that their experiences in battle have made almost unimaginably foreign. In one of the stories, the soldier narrator attends a showing of a documentary about soldiers serving in Iraq. After the presentation, the director of the film makes a few comments and stays behind to answer questions. The narrator approaches the director and thanks him for making a film that “allows the soldiers to tell their own stories,� and to tell them without shame or political cover. And this is what I think Klay is up to in this book.

Most of the great war books with which I’m familiar (Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Heller’s Catch-22, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) tell stories about soldiers that have been fairly heavily mediated by a strong, authorial third-person voice. The soldiers are visibly characters in someone else’s plot. Klay’s great achievement here is giving readers the powerful sense that these soldiers are not constructed by other another hand, but are speaking directly to us, telling us “their own stories.� And therefore the stories seem more authentic, more “true,� than just about anything else I’ve read about war.

In an interview, Klay had this to say about war stories and the way America currently sends fellow citizens into war to fight for us:

“Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility � it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don't honor someone by telling them, "I can never imagine what you've been through." Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels.... [I]n the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means.�

Reading this book is like “listening to their story.� It is both “hard and uncomfortable.� And the book itself is a noble piece of art.
]]> 3.95 2014 Redeployment
author: Phil Klay
name: Jim
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2014/12/15
shelves:
review:
Redeployment, by Phil Klay, won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction and was named by the New York Times as one of five best works of fiction for the same year. It is composed of twelve short stories, each told in the first person by a different soldier, all of them male, most of them Marines, some of them home, most of them still deployed. Here are the first few paragraphs to give you a sense of what to expect:

“We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I’m a dog person, so I thought about that a lot.
First time was instinct. I hear O’Leary go, “Jesus,� and there’s a skinny brown dog lapping up blood the same way he’d lap up water from a bowl. It wasn’t American blood, but still, there’s that dog, lapping it up. And that’s the last straw, I guess, and then it’s open season on dogs.
At the time, you don’t think about it. You’re thinking about who’s in that house, what’s he armed with, how’s he gonna kill you, your buddies. You’re going block by block, fighting with rifles good to 550 meters, and you’re killing people at five in a concrete box.
The thinking comes later, when they give you the time. See, it’s not a straight shot back, from war to the Jacksonville mall. When our deployment was up, they put us on TQ, this logistics base out in the desert, let us decompress a bit. I’m not sure what they meant by that. Decompress. We took it to mean jerk off a lot in the showers. Smoke a lot of cigarettes and play a lot of cards. And then they took us to Kuwait and put us on a commercial airliner to go home.
So there you are. You’ve been in a no-shit war zone and then you’re sitting in a plush chair, looking up at a little nozzle shooting air-conditioning, thinking, What the fuck? You’ve got a rifle between your knees, and so does everyone else. Some Marines got M9 pistols, but they take away your bayonets because you aren’t allowed to have knives on an airplane. Even though you’ve showered, you all look grimy and lean. Everybody’s hollow-eyed, and their cammies are beat to shit. And you sit there, and close your eyes, and think.�

Not easy stuff, but of course, that’s the point. This is not an anti-war book, and it is certainly not an anti-soldier book. In Klay’s telling, these soldiers are brave, fiercely loyal to the men in their unit, well trained, and all but broken by the that task they have volunteered to take on. Their sense of what is real and what is right have been narrowed and intensified by the white hear of combat, and the demons that scurry through their lives with gleeful spite are not easily escaped. But in spite of those demons, they strive for decency and friendship, for courage and peace of mind. They strive even for a kind of normalcy that their experiences in battle have made almost unimaginably foreign. In one of the stories, the soldier narrator attends a showing of a documentary about soldiers serving in Iraq. After the presentation, the director of the film makes a few comments and stays behind to answer questions. The narrator approaches the director and thanks him for making a film that “allows the soldiers to tell their own stories,� and to tell them without shame or political cover. And this is what I think Klay is up to in this book.

Most of the great war books with which I’m familiar (Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Heller’s Catch-22, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried) tell stories about soldiers that have been fairly heavily mediated by a strong, authorial third-person voice. The soldiers are visibly characters in someone else’s plot. Klay’s great achievement here is giving readers the powerful sense that these soldiers are not constructed by other another hand, but are speaking directly to us, telling us “their own stories.� And therefore the stories seem more authentic, more “true,� than just about anything else I’ve read about war.

In an interview, Klay had this to say about war stories and the way America currently sends fellow citizens into war to fight for us:

“Believing war is beyond words is an abrogation of responsibility � it lets civilians off the hook from trying to understand, and veterans off the hook from needing to explain. You don't honor someone by telling them, "I can never imagine what you've been through." Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels.... [I]n the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means.�

Reading this book is like “listening to their story.� It is both “hard and uncomfortable.� And the book itself is a noble piece of art.

]]> <![CDATA[All Quiet on the Western Front]]> 355697
In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war�. With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier� experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.]]> 296 Erich Maria Remarque 0449213943 Jim 5
Here’s one scene that might have pissed the Nazi’s off. The narrator and main character, Paul, has found himself in No Man’s Land during a firefight. He has fallen into a shell hole for shelter, it’s dark, and he can’t see his own front line. Soon after he resigns himself to spending the night, a wounded French soldier falls into the same hole. The Frenchman is too injured to fight Paul, but he is awake enough to be scared of him. He can’t speak, but his eyes, Paul says, indicate that he knows he could be killed at any moment. Paul refuses his soldierly duty. He gives his hole-mate water and smiles at him. He actually covers him when there is random bombardment, but before morning, the French soldier dies. Paul goes through his pack, finding his identification papers and pictures of his family. Then Paul says this to him,

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, and abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth an appropriate response. It was that abstraction that I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying, and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform, you could be my brother�.Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.�

Clearly the Nazi’s did not want this kind of peacenik crap sullying up the purity of their citizens� resolve. But what this passage, and passages like it, did for me was to raise the issue of how very specific and hateful perspectives are pushed upon us in times of war. Today’s release of the U.S Senate report on CIA torture after 9/11 pulls into sharp and terrifying relief the fact that good people can become really bad when they are taught by their leaders that someone else is worse. What Paul said to the French soldier in that shell hole seems always true in war: we have trouble sympathizing with those whom we’ve been told are our enemy because they are “abstractions� without context, history, or relation to us. They are the frightening “other,� and we commit no crime, no sin in destroying them. So we win the war, but lose much of what makes us human.

I want to close with this last quotation. It comes very near the end of the book, just before we learn, in the third person, that Paul was killed in October 1918. I read it several times before I moved on.

"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly obediently innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?"



]]> 4.04 1928 All Quiet on the Western Front
author: Erich Maria Remarque
name: Jim
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 2014/11/01
date added: 2014/12/09
shelves:
review:
It was never taught as part of the regular curriculum in my high school, but All Quiet on the Western Front sat alphabetically atop every summer reading list I was handed beginning in 8th grade. It always appeared just before All the King’s Men, which also made no appearance during the school year. I suspect King’s Men didn’t make the cut because it deals so candidly with racial politics and because, the main character, Willie Stark a.k.a. Huey Long, says some things about capitalism that might make the Better Business Bureau twitch. All Quiet was absent, I think, for comparably interesting political reasons. First, its author, Erich Maria Remarque, was neither American nor British, which made him a kind of invisible man in America’s high school canon. More importantly, Remarque was German and told his story of the Great War in the voice of a smart, scared, and deeply sympathetic German soldier bravely fighting British, French, and later American troops. Ask yourself how many times you have read a book or seen a movie that took the perspective of one of America’s enemies and told their soldiers� story with respect and admiration. It doesn’t play well here, especially not in school. At least, however, the book was recommended in the U.S. In Nazi Germany, it was banned and burned.

Here’s one scene that might have pissed the Nazi’s off. The narrator and main character, Paul, has found himself in No Man’s Land during a firefight. He has fallen into a shell hole for shelter, it’s dark, and he can’t see his own front line. Soon after he resigns himself to spending the night, a wounded French soldier falls into the same hole. The Frenchman is too injured to fight Paul, but he is awake enough to be scared of him. He can’t speak, but his eyes, Paul says, indicate that he knows he could be killed at any moment. Paul refuses his soldierly duty. He gives his hole-mate water and smiles at him. He actually covers him when there is random bombardment, but before morning, the French soldier dies. Paul goes through his pack, finding his identification papers and pictures of his family. Then Paul says this to him,

“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, and abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth an appropriate response. It was that abstraction that I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying, and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform, you could be my brother�.Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up—take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.�

Clearly the Nazi’s did not want this kind of peacenik crap sullying up the purity of their citizens� resolve. But what this passage, and passages like it, did for me was to raise the issue of how very specific and hateful perspectives are pushed upon us in times of war. Today’s release of the U.S Senate report on CIA torture after 9/11 pulls into sharp and terrifying relief the fact that good people can become really bad when they are taught by their leaders that someone else is worse. What Paul said to the French soldier in that shell hole seems always true in war: we have trouble sympathizing with those whom we’ve been told are our enemy because they are “abstractions� without context, history, or relation to us. They are the frightening “other,� and we commit no crime, no sin in destroying them. So we win the war, but lose much of what makes us human.

I want to close with this last quotation. It comes very near the end of the book, just before we learn, in the third person, that Paul was killed in October 1918. I read it several times before I moved on.

"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly obediently innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?"




]]> Let Me Be Frank With You 20828358 The Sportswriter, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner winning Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land

In his trio of world-acclaimed novels portraying the life of an entire American generation, Richard Ford has imagined one of the most indelible and widely-discussed characters in modern literature, Frank Bascombe. Through Bascombe—protean, funny, profane, wise, often inappropriate—we’ve witnessed the aspirations, sorrows, longings, achievements and failings of an American life in the twilight of the twentieth century.

Now, in Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford reinvents Bascombe in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. In four richly luminous narratives, Bascombe (and Ford) attempts to reconcile, interpret and console a world undone by calamity. It is a moving, wondrous, and extremely funny odyssey through the America we live in at this moment. Ford is here again working with the maturity and brilliance of a writer at the absolute height of his powers.]]> 240 Richard Ford 0061692069 Jim 5
The only other character that I consider a life-long companion is Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. Like Ford, Updike took Rabbit through four books and four decades, beginning in 1960 with Rabbit Run, then Rabbit Redux, in the early 70’s, Rabbit is Rich in the early 80’s, and Rabbit at Rest in the early 90’s. Rabbit was less an uncle to me than an older brother who was always getting into trouble. One of his problems was that he was unable to articulate most of what he felt so he would probably have been a bad narrator. Thus Updike wisely told the story in the 3rd person and was able to render the hapless but somehow likeable Rabbit in his exquisitely graceful prose that never fails to dazzle.

We often speak of growing up with a series of books—Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but I think that I have grown older with these two guys, Rabbit and Frank. I never failed to learn from them, even when, especially when, I saw them making serious mistakes. I was always sorry for their pain and glad for their joy. They have helped teach me why we should always read fiction.
]]> 3.59 2014 Let Me Be Frank With You
author: Richard Ford
name: Jim
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2014/12/01
date added: 2014/12/05
shelves:
review:
The title of this book is annoyingly cute, but I could not not read it. It is probably the last (the author is 70) of Richard Ford’s richly textured, deeply observant Frank Bascomb books. Beginning with The Sportswriter in 1986 (when I was a newly minted professor and a father-in-training) through Independence Day (1995), The Lay of the Land (2006), and this year’s Let Me Be Frank with You, Ford has given us a decade by decade accounting of the life of Frank Bascomb—a sportswriter turned real estate agent who lives most of his life in Haddonfield, New Jersey. If that sounds fairly pedestrian, it is meant to be because Ford’s project is less about world-shattering events that it is about Frank’s honest if often mistaken impressions of those events. He is cynical, flawed, lustful, kind, hurt, eager, and disarmingly candid. All the books are narrated by Frank, and all are marked by Ford’s magnificent command of the cadences of the human voice in highly specific contexts at very specific times. Each of the four books, published near the middle of a particular decade, takes on the colors of that decade and centers on a Frank who has aged 10 years since the last book. We grow older with him over four decades in real time. He loses a son to illness and a first wife to grief. He fails as a sportswriter and finds, to his surprise, that he is good at selling houses. He is careful with friendship, with clients, with family, but quietly honest with himself about how distant he feels when intimacy in possible. Over time, I found myself thinking of him as a slightly cantankerous but beloved uncle who cracks wise at family gatherings, takes nephews like me to baseball games, asks us about our sex lives, gives unwanted advice about money, and knows when to keep his mouth shut. I grew into and through middle age with him—he is three years older than me and beginning to fail a bit—and I am tempted to start the quartet again to see how each of us have changed since the first one.

The only other character that I consider a life-long companion is Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom. Like Ford, Updike took Rabbit through four books and four decades, beginning in 1960 with Rabbit Run, then Rabbit Redux, in the early 70’s, Rabbit is Rich in the early 80’s, and Rabbit at Rest in the early 90’s. Rabbit was less an uncle to me than an older brother who was always getting into trouble. One of his problems was that he was unable to articulate most of what he felt so he would probably have been a bad narrator. Thus Updike wisely told the story in the 3rd person and was able to render the hapless but somehow likeable Rabbit in his exquisitely graceful prose that never fails to dazzle.

We often speak of growing up with a series of books—Little House on the Prairie, Harry Potter—but I think that I have grown older with these two guys, Rabbit and Frank. I never failed to learn from them, even when, especially when, I saw them making serious mistakes. I was always sorry for their pain and glad for their joy. They have helped teach me why we should always read fiction.

]]> Joe 377993
Joe Ransom is a hard-drinking ex-con pushing fifty who just won’t slow down--not in his pickup, not with a gun, and certainly not with women. Gary Jones estimates his own age to be about fifteen. Born luckless, he is the son of a hopeless, homeless wandering family, and he’s desperate for a way out. When their paths cross, Joe offers him a chance just as his own chances have dwindled to almost nothing. Together they follow a twisting map to redemption--or ruin.]]> 368 Larry Brown 1565124138 Jim 5
And yet. There is an austere dignity, naïve courage, and a shy tenderness about the relationship between Joe and Gary. Though we would be sorely tempted to turn away from them if we met them in real life, Brown makes us turn toward them, with a language like raw blues and a sympathy that makes them something much more than wrong. We find parts of ourselves in them, despite our best efforts to deny it, and the experience of identifying with characters so alien to us may be the most powerful effect a story can provide. There are traces of Faulkner and Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy here, and the brutal naturalism of the landscape would make Frank Norris and Stephen Crane sit up and take notice. It wasn’t an easy or comfortable read, but it’s not one I’m likely to forget.
]]> 4.18 1991 Joe
author: Larry Brown
name: Jim
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at: 2014/10/24
date added: 2014/10/28
shelves:
review:
I want to recommend this book, but I’m not sure of the language I can use to praise it or of the audience I could praise it to. It is a dark, violent, painful book centered on poor, white, trailer-dwelling people in contemporary, rural Mississippi. One of the main characters, Gary, is fifteen years old and has to be taught how to brush his teeth by a whore who has been bought for him by Joe, other main character, who makes a living by driving a team of black men to poison first growth scrub trees in isolated woods. Joe drinks whiskey for breakfast, chain smokes, keeps a gun beneath the front seat of his pick up, gets in fist fights with police officers on a regular basis, has spent three years in a penitentiary, and becomes the only caring adult in Gary’s young life. Gary has never been to school, does not know how to read, has wandered with his family across the poorest states of the south picking crops, while losing three siblings to careless death or even more careless abandonment. Gary’s father beats him regularly, takes whatever money Gary is able to make, and ends by selling his own daughter to two men for $30 each. Taken together, the characters make Faulkner’s Snopes family look like the Cleavers, and I would understand if readers pulled away from the book after 20 or 30 pages simply because the stench and the naked, ragged lives of the people Brown shows us are almost too much to bear.

And yet. There is an austere dignity, naïve courage, and a shy tenderness about the relationship between Joe and Gary. Though we would be sorely tempted to turn away from them if we met them in real life, Brown makes us turn toward them, with a language like raw blues and a sympathy that makes them something much more than wrong. We find parts of ourselves in them, despite our best efforts to deny it, and the experience of identifying with characters so alien to us may be the most powerful effect a story can provide. There are traces of Faulkner and Jim Harrison and Cormac McCarthy here, and the brutal naturalism of the landscape would make Frank Norris and Stephen Crane sit up and take notice. It wasn’t an easy or comfortable read, but it’s not one I’m likely to forget.

]]> <![CDATA[Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877]]> 16247974 736 Brenda Wineapple 0061234575 Jim 5
It’s a also a long book, so instead of attempting to summarize the many events Wineapple relates (there are hundreds, most of which I’d never heard about), I’ll provide a few items that might give you a sense of what’s here.

“In 1851, there was strong support among leaders of the slave-holding states to invade and annex Cuba. Because the island was controlled by Spain at the time, the public reasoning was that we would “free� the native Cubans from colonial rule. But the real reason was that the southern states were fearful that Cuba might soon free its slaves, as Britain had done in the West Indies in 1833. This would mean that Cuba could become, according to John A. Quitman, the brash governor of Mississippi, a “strong negro or mongrel empire� that would undoubtedly set off a wave of slave uprisings in the southern U.S. If we invaded, in other words, we could keep the Cuban slaves from being released. This in the name of freedom. �

“After the war, President Andrew Johnson asked Major General Carl Schurz, who had fought for the Union army, to travel to the former Confederacy to investigate the results of Reconstruction…His report told of the countless Southerners who still believed in the right of secession despite their swearing of loyalty oaths; …he told how bands of highway men ruled the roads, and how cotton, horse, and cattle stealing went unchecked. Large numbers of freedmen still worked on plantations but were not remunerated; they were subject to unfair contracts, poor working conditions, and physical force. The white planters thought, in any case, that the system of free labor would never work—one Georgia planter, to prove his case, said that his black employee had actually refused to submit to a whipping.�

“The Thirteenth Amendment had not addressed the issue of granting blacks the rights of citizenship, which left the door open for the Black Codes that soon followed, which prevented the almost four million freedmen and women from making contracts, filing lawsuits, appearing in courts as plaintiffs, assembling—and, of course, voting. Thus the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery also managed to perpetuate the fatal compromise of the Constitution, which counted the slave as only three-fifth of a person.�

The book is not only about the lead-up and aftermath of the Civil War. It also casts a harsh light on the depredations visited upon the Native American tribes after the War, mostly by former soldiers who had fought in that war.

I found myself feeling angry at times as I read this book—angry not at the people animating its pages (their lives were extraordinarily hard)--but at the powerful political forces that keep important and true stories about our past largely out of our public discourse. I felt the same way when I watched �12 Years a Slave.� There is obviously much more to the American story than this book can include. But the cruel racism, grotesque imperialism, and downright moral squalor that Wineapple chronicles are part of that story. We need to tell it to ourselves, I think, in order to remember how complicated we have been and how complicated we remain.

]]> 3.91 2013 Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877
author: Brenda Wineapple
name: Jim
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/03/08
date added: 2014/03/12
shelves:
review:
This is not the history you learned in 11th grade. If you believe in American exceptionalism or in the disinterested wisdom of our forefathers, you might want to stick with Glenn Beck. Brenda Wineapple gives us a powerful, bare-fisted brawl of a book—both a dark pageant and a steely argument. It bears a close family resemblance to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, but with a tighter, more concentrated focus on the years between 1848 and 1877. It isn’t a pretty story.

It’s a also a long book, so instead of attempting to summarize the many events Wineapple relates (there are hundreds, most of which I’d never heard about), I’ll provide a few items that might give you a sense of what’s here.

“In 1851, there was strong support among leaders of the slave-holding states to invade and annex Cuba. Because the island was controlled by Spain at the time, the public reasoning was that we would “free� the native Cubans from colonial rule. But the real reason was that the southern states were fearful that Cuba might soon free its slaves, as Britain had done in the West Indies in 1833. This would mean that Cuba could become, according to John A. Quitman, the brash governor of Mississippi, a “strong negro or mongrel empire� that would undoubtedly set off a wave of slave uprisings in the southern U.S. If we invaded, in other words, we could keep the Cuban slaves from being released. This in the name of freedom. �

“After the war, President Andrew Johnson asked Major General Carl Schurz, who had fought for the Union army, to travel to the former Confederacy to investigate the results of Reconstruction…His report told of the countless Southerners who still believed in the right of secession despite their swearing of loyalty oaths; …he told how bands of highway men ruled the roads, and how cotton, horse, and cattle stealing went unchecked. Large numbers of freedmen still worked on plantations but were not remunerated; they were subject to unfair contracts, poor working conditions, and physical force. The white planters thought, in any case, that the system of free labor would never work—one Georgia planter, to prove his case, said that his black employee had actually refused to submit to a whipping.�

“The Thirteenth Amendment had not addressed the issue of granting blacks the rights of citizenship, which left the door open for the Black Codes that soon followed, which prevented the almost four million freedmen and women from making contracts, filing lawsuits, appearing in courts as plaintiffs, assembling—and, of course, voting. Thus the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery also managed to perpetuate the fatal compromise of the Constitution, which counted the slave as only three-fifth of a person.�

The book is not only about the lead-up and aftermath of the Civil War. It also casts a harsh light on the depredations visited upon the Native American tribes after the War, mostly by former soldiers who had fought in that war.

I found myself feeling angry at times as I read this book—angry not at the people animating its pages (their lives were extraordinarily hard)--but at the powerful political forces that keep important and true stories about our past largely out of our public discourse. I felt the same way when I watched �12 Years a Slave.� There is obviously much more to the American story than this book can include. But the cruel racism, grotesque imperialism, and downright moral squalor that Wineapple chronicles are part of that story. We need to tell it to ourselves, I think, in order to remember how complicated we have been and how complicated we remain.


]]> <![CDATA[The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism]]> 17334495 Team of Rivals, captures the Progressive Era through the story of the broken friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, culminating in their running against one another for president in 1912.]]> 910 Doris Kearns Goodwin Jim 5 Doris Kearns Goodwin has an uncanny knack for locating and describing historical events that anticipate and illuminate the present. In 1994, she gave us No Ordinary Time, a study of the complicated marriage between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, just as Bill and Hillary Clinton were making their own power-marriage all too visible. In 2005, Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals, which described the political dynamics of Lincoln’s cabinet just as the decision on freeing the slaves was being debated in congress. Barak Obama publically announced that the book had a shaping influence on his own cabinet choices in the lead up to his inauguration. And now she has written The Bully Pulpit, a biographical study of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, presidents at a time when the U.S economy bore a striking resemblance to what we see today. The Robber Barons (Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Leland Stanford, and more) were the original one-percenters, forging enormous, spider-web like monopolies (they called them, with no irony whatsoever, “trusts�), refusing to recognize government regulation of employment practices (this was before 8-hour work days, laws governing child labor, and protocols outlawing unsafe working conditions), and making enormous contributions to state and federal politicians to keep the wheels greased. Sound familiar? Laissez-faire economics was revered as both a pre-Keynesian religion and as a mathematical truth, and no political leader, no matter how well-intended, could break its strangle hold on American economic policy. Mark Hanna, a political operative for big money in those days, is Karl Rove’s acknowledged hero.

Teddy Roosevelt was too often an egomaniacal imperialist who gleefully invaded the Philippines, Cuba, and Panama in the name of liberty. But he also tried everything in his power to break the trusts. That he succeeded at all was due largely to his strategic relationship with a group of journalists, later called muckrakers, who wrote long-form investigative reports on the unseemly business practices of the trusts and the harsh working conditions to which they led for millions of Americans. Centered on the incredibly popular magazine, McClure’s, Ida Tarbell, Ida B. Wells, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and others spoke over the heads of the politicians, directly to the people, and allowed Roosevelt to draw on the dissatisfaction generated by their work to re-craft economic policy. Given the current political bifurcation among the media, which mirrors the bifurcation in the nation’s capital, it is unlikely that such a group could come together again. But that they did once provides a small measure of hope that things really don’t have to be the way they are.
]]> 4.12 2013 The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
name: Jim
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/02/01
date added: 2014/02/06
shelves:
review:

Doris Kearns Goodwin has an uncanny knack for locating and describing historical events that anticipate and illuminate the present. In 1994, she gave us No Ordinary Time, a study of the complicated marriage between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, just as Bill and Hillary Clinton were making their own power-marriage all too visible. In 2005, Goodwin wrote Team of Rivals, which described the political dynamics of Lincoln’s cabinet just as the decision on freeing the slaves was being debated in congress. Barak Obama publically announced that the book had a shaping influence on his own cabinet choices in the lead up to his inauguration. And now she has written The Bully Pulpit, a biographical study of Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, presidents at a time when the U.S economy bore a striking resemblance to what we see today. The Robber Barons (Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Leland Stanford, and more) were the original one-percenters, forging enormous, spider-web like monopolies (they called them, with no irony whatsoever, “trusts�), refusing to recognize government regulation of employment practices (this was before 8-hour work days, laws governing child labor, and protocols outlawing unsafe working conditions), and making enormous contributions to state and federal politicians to keep the wheels greased. Sound familiar? Laissez-faire economics was revered as both a pre-Keynesian religion and as a mathematical truth, and no political leader, no matter how well-intended, could break its strangle hold on American economic policy. Mark Hanna, a political operative for big money in those days, is Karl Rove’s acknowledged hero.

Teddy Roosevelt was too often an egomaniacal imperialist who gleefully invaded the Philippines, Cuba, and Panama in the name of liberty. But he also tried everything in his power to break the trusts. That he succeeded at all was due largely to his strategic relationship with a group of journalists, later called muckrakers, who wrote long-form investigative reports on the unseemly business practices of the trusts and the harsh working conditions to which they led for millions of Americans. Centered on the incredibly popular magazine, McClure’s, Ida Tarbell, Ida B. Wells, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and others spoke over the heads of the politicians, directly to the people, and allowed Roosevelt to draw on the dissatisfaction generated by their work to re-craft economic policy. Given the current political bifurcation among the media, which mirrors the bifurcation in the nation’s capital, it is unlikely that such a group could come together again. But that they did once provides a small measure of hope that things really don’t have to be the way they are.

]]> Men We Reaped: A Memoir 17286683 '...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet Tubman

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own.

Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue high education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity.]]> 256 Jesmyn Ward 160819521X Jim 5
In a previous review, I warmly praised Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward’s painfully beautiful novel about a poor black family struggling to find communion in the 12 days before Hurricane Katrina tore their lives asunder. Men We Reaped is a work of non-fiction that tells the story of five young black men, including Ward’s brother, who died much sooner than they should have because of the structural racism that seeped into their lives from birth. But the book also provides a larger account of Ward’s own life and her community, of her mother who cleaned houses and yet managed to raise four children, and of her friends, who mixed intelligence, and strength, and humor with a good deal of alcohol and weed. In many ways, the non-fictional treatment of Ward’s early years is a kind of source book for Salvage the Bones. It is raw, unmanaged by narrative protocols, full of hurt and bitter anger, but also wisdom and unabashed love. Full disclosure: I like this writer. I want to meet her, listen to her stories in her own voice, hear her laughter. She knows things that I’ve never known, hard things, and she has turned them into an art that often astonishes in its grace.

A sample passage, almost randomly chosen. Ward is struggling with the decision to move away to college. She has been given a scholarship to the University of Michigan

“They’d even invited me on a trip to visit in school, and though I knew racism was everywhere and the dearth of Black faces at their boarding schools scared me, I wanted to apply, to leave Mississippi, to escape the narrative I encountered in my family, community, and my school that I was worthless, a sense that was as ever present as the wet, cloying heat. “You can’t leave,� my mother said to me. “You have to help me with your siblings.� When she said that, I felt all the weight of the South pressing down on me and it was then that I resolved to leave the region for college, but to do so it in a way that respected the sacrifices my mother made for me. I studied harder. I read more. How could I know that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me.�

These aren’t just words. Ward has struggled with her southern roots, and still does. After Michigan, she won a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship to Stanford. When she won the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, she could have probably taken a faculty position almost anywhere. Instead, she is teaching at the University of Southern Alabama. You’ll find her telephone number and email address on their website.

]]> 4.28 2013 Men We Reaped: A Memoir
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Jim
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2014/01/10
date added: 2014/02/06
shelves:
review:


In a previous review, I warmly praised Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward’s painfully beautiful novel about a poor black family struggling to find communion in the 12 days before Hurricane Katrina tore their lives asunder. Men We Reaped is a work of non-fiction that tells the story of five young black men, including Ward’s brother, who died much sooner than they should have because of the structural racism that seeped into their lives from birth. But the book also provides a larger account of Ward’s own life and her community, of her mother who cleaned houses and yet managed to raise four children, and of her friends, who mixed intelligence, and strength, and humor with a good deal of alcohol and weed. In many ways, the non-fictional treatment of Ward’s early years is a kind of source book for Salvage the Bones. It is raw, unmanaged by narrative protocols, full of hurt and bitter anger, but also wisdom and unabashed love. Full disclosure: I like this writer. I want to meet her, listen to her stories in her own voice, hear her laughter. She knows things that I’ve never known, hard things, and she has turned them into an art that often astonishes in its grace.

A sample passage, almost randomly chosen. Ward is struggling with the decision to move away to college. She has been given a scholarship to the University of Michigan

“They’d even invited me on a trip to visit in school, and though I knew racism was everywhere and the dearth of Black faces at their boarding schools scared me, I wanted to apply, to leave Mississippi, to escape the narrative I encountered in my family, community, and my school that I was worthless, a sense that was as ever present as the wet, cloying heat. “You can’t leave,� my mother said to me. “You have to help me with your siblings.� When she said that, I felt all the weight of the South pressing down on me and it was then that I resolved to leave the region for college, but to do so it in a way that respected the sacrifices my mother made for me. I studied harder. I read more. How could I know that this would be my life: yearning to leave the South and doing so again and again, but perpetually called back to home by a love so thick it choked me.�

These aren’t just words. Ward has struggled with her southern roots, and still does. After Michigan, she won a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship to Stanford. When she won the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, she could have probably taken a faculty position almost anywhere. Instead, she is teaching at the University of Southern Alabama. You’ll find her telephone number and email address on their website.


]]> <![CDATA[Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation]]> 15811496 Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements - fire, water, air, and earth - to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world, standing squarely between nature and culture. Both realms are transformed by cooking, and so, in the process, is the cook.

Each section of Cooked tracks Pollan's effort to master a single classic recipe using one of the four elements. A North Carolina barbecue pit master tutors him in the primal magic of fire; a Chez Panisse-trained cook schools him in the art of braising; a celebrated baker teaches him how air transforms grain and water into a fragrant loaf of bread; and finally, several mad-genius "fermentos" (a tribe that includes brewers, cheese makers, and all kinds of picklers) reveal how fungi and bacteria can perform the most amazing alchemies of all. The listener learns alongside Pollan, but the lessons move beyond the practical to become an investigation of how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, the soil, farmers, our history and culture, and, of course, the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Cooking, above all, connects us.

The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching. Relying upon corporations to process our food means we consume huge quantities of fat, sugar, and salt; disrupt an essential link to the natural world; and weaken our relationships with family and friends. In fact, Cooked argues, taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the American food system healthier and more sustainable. Reclaiming cooking as an act of enjoyment and self-reliance, learning to perform the magic of these everyday transformations, opens the door to a more nourishing life.]]> 468 Michael Pollan 1594204217 Jim 4 4.06 2013 Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
author: Michael Pollan
name: Jim
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2014/01/25
date added: 2014/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl―A National Book Award Winner]]> 72223
In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet� (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.]]> 340 Timothy Egan 0618773479 Jim 0 4.04 2005 The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl―A National Book Award Winner
author: Timothy Egan
name: Jim
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2014/01/25
date added: 2014/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Testament of Mary 13547234
In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel—her keepers, who provide her with food and shelter and visit her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it;� nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,� were holy disciples. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died—she fled, to save herself), and is equally harsh on her judgment of others. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes, in Toibin’s searing evocation, a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. This tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.]]> 81 Colm Tóibín 1451688385 Jim 5
But the book would be a treasure even if read more conventionally. Told entirely in the voice of Jesus’s mother, Toibin gives us a Mary who is wise, wary, often confused, and sometimes frightened by the public figure her son has become. She describes events just before, during, and soon after the crucifixion, but she doesn’t know what the events mean or who to ask about them, and she finds herself surrounded by strangers who give her directions without explanations. She is in danger, she is told. She cannot go to Jerusalem to see her son (though she goes anyway). She must leave the city right after his death, but even as she does she realizes that she is being watched and whispered about, as if she herself had become someone else. She has a disorienting encounter with her son at the wedding in Cana, she hears from Mary and Martha about their brother Lazarus, and she watches in horror as her son is killed, but seen through Mary’s motherly eyes these events, familiar to us, are frightening, raw, unsettled, and unanticipated. They are not yet a story told many times. They are a nightmare with sharp edges whose end is unknown.

The book remains agnostic about the divinity of Christ, about the good intentions of his followers (Mary is distrustful of most of them), and about the reality of the miracles. But it implies fairly clearly that Jesus was killed because he was a threat to the powerful in Judea, both Romans and the elders of the temple, and that murky political calculations were driving events forward. Whatever your perspective on these matters, I would strongly recommend this book because it gives us a fresh sense of what these events might have looked like to those living through them.
]]> 3.65 2012 The Testament of Mary
author: Colm Tóibín
name: Jim
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2014/01/16
shelves:
review:
I listened to this book on my iPhone, and that may have partially shaped my admiration for it. The reader was Meryl Streep, and timbre, pacing, and nuance of her voice is everything you would expect from her.

But the book would be a treasure even if read more conventionally. Told entirely in the voice of Jesus’s mother, Toibin gives us a Mary who is wise, wary, often confused, and sometimes frightened by the public figure her son has become. She describes events just before, during, and soon after the crucifixion, but she doesn’t know what the events mean or who to ask about them, and she finds herself surrounded by strangers who give her directions without explanations. She is in danger, she is told. She cannot go to Jerusalem to see her son (though she goes anyway). She must leave the city right after his death, but even as she does she realizes that she is being watched and whispered about, as if she herself had become someone else. She has a disorienting encounter with her son at the wedding in Cana, she hears from Mary and Martha about their brother Lazarus, and she watches in horror as her son is killed, but seen through Mary’s motherly eyes these events, familiar to us, are frightening, raw, unsettled, and unanticipated. They are not yet a story told many times. They are a nightmare with sharp edges whose end is unknown.

The book remains agnostic about the divinity of Christ, about the good intentions of his followers (Mary is distrustful of most of them), and about the reality of the miracles. But it implies fairly clearly that Jesus was killed because he was a threat to the powerful in Judea, both Romans and the elders of the temple, and that murky political calculations were driving events forward. Whatever your perspective on these matters, I would strongly recommend this book because it gives us a fresh sense of what these events might have looked like to those living through them.

]]> <![CDATA[Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth]]> 17568801 No god but God comes a fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.� The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

Within decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God.

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs wandered through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. This was the age of zealotry—a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction; a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret; and ultimately the seditious “King of the Jews� whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime. Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of Jesus of Nazareth’s life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.]]> 296 Reza Aslan 140006922X Jim 5
Aslan’s most significant observation is that all the gospel material—all that we think we know about Jesus’s life and ministry--was written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple that anchored it, that is, after the Jewish people had been entirely dispersed from Palestine. That meant that the Jewishness of Jesus had to be dissolved, even rendered invisible, so that a non-political, ahistorical, god-like individual could be presented to a Gentile audience. That Jesus, the one called Christ, would be unrecognizable to the historical Jesus and his immediate followers. Theirs is a different story, grounded in reason and carefully rendered scholarship.


]]> 3.83 2013 Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
author: Reza Aslan
name: Jim
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2013/08/08
date added: 2014/01/09
shelves:
review:
I was raised and educated as a Roman Catholic, so I don’t know if people from other faith traditions would be as surprised and grateful as I am for the insightful revelations made in this book about the historical Jesus. Aslan is careful to distinguish this Jesus—the historical Jesus—from the Christ who was constructed almost entirely from the writings of Paul, who had never met or seen Jesus, and whose epistles were written between 20 and 40 years after Jesus was killed. The historical Jesus is the one who was born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem, who had sisters and brothers, one of whom was the most important leader within the Jesus movement in Jerusalem after Jesus died. The historical Jesus was a Jew speaking to Jews his entire life with a mission to reform the toxic relationship between the ruling Romans and the high priests of the Jewish temple. This Jesus was tortured and killed because he represented a threat, not only to the Romans, but also to the high priests who profited so well from doing the Romans� bidding. Aslan makes his arguments through the close reading of the Old Testament Prophets, the gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, and the extant non-bibical manuscripts that describe the history and politics of Judea during and just after Jesus’s short life. It is detailed, compelling scholarship, balanced in its judgments but sharply critical of scholars who have chosen to ignore the evidence he has produced

Aslan’s most significant observation is that all the gospel material—all that we think we know about Jesus’s life and ministry--was written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple that anchored it, that is, after the Jewish people had been entirely dispersed from Palestine. That meant that the Jewishness of Jesus had to be dissolved, even rendered invisible, so that a non-political, ahistorical, god-like individual could be presented to a Gentile audience. That Jesus, the one called Christ, would be unrecognizable to the historical Jesus and his immediate followers. Theirs is a different story, grounded in reason and carefully rendered scholarship.



]]> <![CDATA[Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom]]> 8715809
Among the people Bateson engages in open-ended, in-depth conversations are a retired Maine boatyard worker who has become a silversmith and maker of fine jewelry; an African American woman who explores the importance of grandmothering; two gay men finding contentment in mutual caring; the retired dean of a cathedral in New York City who exemplifies how a multiplicity of interests and connections lead to deeper unity; and Jane Fonda, who shares her ways of dealing with change and spiritual growth.

Here is a book that presents each of us—at any age—with an exhilarating challenge to think about and approach our later lives with the full force of imagination, curiosity, and enthusiasm. At the same time, it speaks to us as members of a larger society concerned about the world that our children and grandchildren, born and not yet born, will inherit. "We live longer," she says, "but we think shorter." As adults find themselves entering Adulthood II, making the choices that will affirm and complete the meaning of the lives they have lived, they can play a key role, contributing their perspectives and their experience of adapting to change. In our day, wisdom is no longer associated with withdrawal and passivity but with engagement with others and the contribution that Bateson calls "active wisdom."]]> 0 Mary Catherine Bateson 1400168848 Jim 0 to-read 3.54 2010 Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom
author: Mary Catherine Bateson
name: Jim
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2010
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2014/01/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral � plus plenty of valet parking! � in America's Gilded Capital]]> 15814168 386 Mark Leibovich 0399161309 Jim 4
Someone once called Washington, “Hollywood for ugly people.� It’s hard to disagree after reading this gossip-rich tear through our nation's capital.
]]> 3.44 2013 This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral — plus plenty of valet parking! — in America's Gilded Capital
author: Mark Leibovich
name: Jim
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2013/09/26
date added: 2014/01/05
shelves:
review:
If your cynicism concerning American politics has grown flaccid from lack of exercise, this lacerating book will tone you right up. Mark Leibovich, a reporter for the New York Times, represents Washington as a non-stop petting party of self-promotion, double-dealing, shameless ass-licking, and stomach-wrenching pieties. The three-sectioned revolving door that connects elective offices to the lobbying leviathan to the airport world of 24-hour cable news never stops spinning, and the players never have to explain their beliefs or their behaviors. Thus William Bennett, former Education Secretary and Drug Czar under Reagan, moves from that gig to author, peddling a series of a hollow arguments for a moral diet of reading for children, and from there becomes a talking head on CNN, and from there to an exposed gambling addict who lost hundreds of thousands in Vegas before going back to speak sonorously about the moral force of John McCain. Just about every media creature you’ve seen on cable TV--CNN, Fox, MSNBC—is here as well the big hunks like Tom Brokow and Brian Williams. Andrea Mitchell, who tells us about political events for NBC, attends every party in town always trailed by her catatonic spouse, Alan Greenspan. Ben Bradley is here, now in his 90’s, and sadly losing it. At one soiree, Katie Couric is spotted getting an intimate foot rub from Morgan Freeman. The book provides a robust aggregation of events from the funeral party (it was a party) celebrating the life of Tim Russert to the second inauguration of Barak Obama (which was less like a party). Leibovich was interviewed on NPR shortly after the book came out, and he was asked if he’s getting any dirty looks from the people he wrote about. He said not really. More people were upset if they were not included in the book. He refused to build an index because of a phenomenon he called the “Washington read.� You go into a bookstore, peruse a book about events in the capital, and then turn immediately to the index to see if your name is there. If it isn’t, you put the book back. If it is, you read the pages where you are mentioned. Then you put the book back. Leibovich wanted to sell some books.

Someone once called Washington, “Hollywood for ugly people.� It’s hard to disagree after reading this gossip-rich tear through our nation's capital.

]]> Americanah 15796700 477 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Jim 4
So says Ifemelu, a young, articulate Nigerian woman at a party full of Americans who do not understand what she means. The book she is narrating is in large measure an attempt to school us in what she means. Though nominally a love story describing the long-term, long-distance relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze, who meet in secondary school in Lagos, then immigrate to America (Ifemelu) and Great Britain (Obinze), the book is mostly an ethnographic account of the role place plays for young adults who have little or no history with racism. Ifemelu comes to a prestigious American college on a scholarship, but quickly learns that her accent, clothes, hairstyle, and physical carriage rub uncomfortably against the expectations of her American peers, both white and black. What she is told time and again is that she is not doing black right. She is not angry enough, not suspicious enough of what others are secretly thinking. Thought haughty by black acquaintances and exotic by white ones, she has a hard time finding anyone with whom she can be close. She runs into serious financial difficulty because her lack of the appropriate visa makes it almost impossible to find work, and when she does answer an ad, it is to provide unseemly massage services for a foul-smelling store owner. The experience of taking his money even once keeps Ifemelu from re-connecting with Obinze for several years, breaking his heart until he gives up and marries another. Ifemulu, meanwhile, finds that she has a talent for blogging about her experience as a non-American black, and some of the best parts of the book are excerpts from her blog.

I liked these characters a good deal and admired Ifemulu’s feisty impatience with American racial mores. But in the end, the plot was too often tangled in distracting events that led nowhere and were connected to almost nothing. The argument about race, however, was to me fresh and intellectually engaging. Yet another reminder that race is a socially constructed, thoroughly historicized concept, and everything we think we know about it is probably false at some other place in some other time.
]]> 4.32 2013 Americanah
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Jim
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2013/10/01
date added: 2013/11/07
shelves:
review:
“I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America.�

So says Ifemelu, a young, articulate Nigerian woman at a party full of Americans who do not understand what she means. The book she is narrating is in large measure an attempt to school us in what she means. Though nominally a love story describing the long-term, long-distance relationship between Ifemelu and Obinze, who meet in secondary school in Lagos, then immigrate to America (Ifemelu) and Great Britain (Obinze), the book is mostly an ethnographic account of the role place plays for young adults who have little or no history with racism. Ifemelu comes to a prestigious American college on a scholarship, but quickly learns that her accent, clothes, hairstyle, and physical carriage rub uncomfortably against the expectations of her American peers, both white and black. What she is told time and again is that she is not doing black right. She is not angry enough, not suspicious enough of what others are secretly thinking. Thought haughty by black acquaintances and exotic by white ones, she has a hard time finding anyone with whom she can be close. She runs into serious financial difficulty because her lack of the appropriate visa makes it almost impossible to find work, and when she does answer an ad, it is to provide unseemly massage services for a foul-smelling store owner. The experience of taking his money even once keeps Ifemelu from re-connecting with Obinze for several years, breaking his heart until he gives up and marries another. Ifemulu, meanwhile, finds that she has a talent for blogging about her experience as a non-American black, and some of the best parts of the book are excerpts from her blog.

I liked these characters a good deal and admired Ifemulu’s feisty impatience with American racial mores. But in the end, the plot was too often tangled in distracting events that led nowhere and were connected to almost nothing. The argument about race, however, was to me fresh and intellectually engaging. Yet another reminder that race is a socially constructed, thoroughly historicized concept, and everything we think we know about it is probably false at some other place in some other time.

]]> Salvage the Bones 10846336 Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart—motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce—pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, "Salvage the Bones" is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.]]> 261 Jesmyn Ward 1608195228 Jim 5
“If one of daddy’s drinking buddies had asked him what he’s doing tonight, he would have told them that he’s fixing up for the hurricane. It’s summer, and when it’s summer there’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six mile man made Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guest houses before running over the bayou through the pines to lose wind, drop rain, and die in the north. Most don’t even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left to Texas, brush past and glance off us like a shirtsleeve. We ain’t had one come straight at us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need�.Daddy usually filled a few jugs of water. Canned goods were the only kind of groceries that Daddy knew how to make so we were never short on Vienna sausages and potted meat. We ate top ramen every day, soupy, added hot dogs and drained the juice so it was spicy pasta; dry, it tasted like crackers. The last time we had a bad storm hit head on, Mama was alive; after the storm, she barbequed all the meat left in the silent freezer so it wouldn’t spoil, and Skeetah ate so many hot sausage links that he got sick. Randall and I fought over the last pork chop, and Mama had to pull us apart as Daddy laughed about it�.�

I’ve been telling friends that the book reminds me of the wonderful film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild.� But there’s a touch of Faulkner here too and the sharply etched portrait of family poverty—harsh and loving at the same time--that Frank McCourt gave us in his still masterful “Angela’s Ashes.� I listened to the book on my iPhone and the sentences and the metaphors that drove them forward were so powerful and rich that I sometimes had to stop and play them black so the images wouldn’t slide away.

Ward and her family lived the story she tells in “Salvage the Bones�. Living in southern Mississippi, they lost their home and had to stay in a shelter for several months before they could find something for themselves. That lived experience, though, can’t fully explain such a novel. It is probably the best book I will read this year, and I am very glad it came my way.
]]> 3.95 2011 Salvage the Bones
author: Jesmyn Ward
name: Jim
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2013/10/15
date added: 2013/11/05
shelves:
review:
This book took me to places I’ve never seen and taught me things about being human that I didn’t know I didn’t know. It is a story narrated by Esch Batiste, a black, pregnant, fifteen year-old girl living in southern Mississippi with her alcoholic father and her three brothers, one of whom fights his dog, China, against dogs raised by other boys in the neighborhood. Esch’s voice is lyrical, brave, resilient, and fiercely intelligent, so much so that it is hard to believe that pain and fear and hunger can create this kind of beauty. The setting is southern Mississippi in the ten days before Hurricane Katrina as the family struggles to prepare for the storm with few skills and almost no resources. Let me give you a sense of what the language sounds like. This is from early on:

“If one of daddy’s drinking buddies had asked him what he’s doing tonight, he would have told them that he’s fixing up for the hurricane. It’s summer, and when it’s summer there’s always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six mile man made Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guest houses before running over the bayou through the pines to lose wind, drop rain, and die in the north. Most don’t even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left to Texas, brush past and glance off us like a shirtsleeve. We ain’t had one come straight at us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need�.Daddy usually filled a few jugs of water. Canned goods were the only kind of groceries that Daddy knew how to make so we were never short on Vienna sausages and potted meat. We ate top ramen every day, soupy, added hot dogs and drained the juice so it was spicy pasta; dry, it tasted like crackers. The last time we had a bad storm hit head on, Mama was alive; after the storm, she barbequed all the meat left in the silent freezer so it wouldn’t spoil, and Skeetah ate so many hot sausage links that he got sick. Randall and I fought over the last pork chop, and Mama had to pull us apart as Daddy laughed about it�.�

I’ve been telling friends that the book reminds me of the wonderful film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild.� But there’s a touch of Faulkner here too and the sharply etched portrait of family poverty—harsh and loving at the same time--that Frank McCourt gave us in his still masterful “Angela’s Ashes.� I listened to the book on my iPhone and the sentences and the metaphors that drove them forward were so powerful and rich that I sometimes had to stop and play them black so the images wouldn’t slide away.

Ward and her family lived the story she tells in “Salvage the Bones�. Living in southern Mississippi, they lost their home and had to stay in a shelter for several months before they could find something for themselves. That lived experience, though, can’t fully explain such a novel. It is probably the best book I will read this year, and I am very glad it came my way.

]]> <![CDATA[Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America]]> 4837181
A journalist-adventurer, Benjamin packed his bags and embarked on a 26,909-mile journey throughout the heart of white America, to some of the fastest-growing and whitest locales in our nation. Benjamin calls these enclaves "Whitopias." In this groundbreaking book, he shares what he learned as a black man in Whitopia.

Benjamin's journey to unlock the mysteries of Whitopia took him from a 3-day white separatist retreat with links to Aryan Nations in North Idaho to exurban mega-churches down South, and many points in between. A compelling raconteur, bon vivant, and scholar, Benjamin reveals what Whitopias are like and explores the urgent social and political implications of this startling phenomenon.

Benjamin's groundbreaking study is one of few to have illuminated in advance the social and political forces propelling the rise of Donald Trump. After all, Trump carried 94% of America's Whitopian counties. And he won a median 67% of the vote in Whitopia compared to 46% of the vote nationwide.

Leaving behind speculation or sensationalism, Benjamin explores the future of whiteness and race in an increasingly multicultural nation.

"A thoroughly engaging and eye-opening look at an urgent social issue.� -- BOOKLIST (starred review).

]]> 368 Rich Benjamin 1401322689 Jim 5 3.64 2009 Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America
author: Rich Benjamin
name: Jim
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2013/09/01
date added: 2013/09/05
shelves:
review:
With the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington in 1963, the Civil Rights Movement has been getting a lot of attention lately, at least in the PBS/NPR world many of us inhabit. Remembering the March, and the Freedom Riders, and the dogs in Birmingham gave reading this book now a sharper edge. Rich Benjamin is an African American journalist with a Ph.D. from Stanford and a sociological bent. His project is to explore those communities that have shown the largest proportional increase in their white population over the last several years. In three of these—St. George, Utah, Cour D’Alene, Idaho, and Fairfax County, Georgia—Benjamin spent three months each interviewing community leaders, attending churches, hanging out at Rotary Club meetings and high school football games, shopping at the mall, eating at local restaurants and most important, playing golf with the locals. The prose is jaunty; the incidents he describes are funny when they’re not appalling, and his conclusions—that integration is moving swiftly backward, at least for well-off White Americans—is unsettling. He meets a few out and out racists, but his major argument is that racism doesn’t actually need racists in order to thrive. It can be hard-wired into cultural assumptions and institutional arrangements that lead to racist outcomes without any use of the n-word. People move to white gated exurbs because they are “safer,� because the schools are “better,� because their property is more likely to hold its value. They join exclusive golf clubs because of the business-related networking that takes place there, and they drive expensive SUV’s because they are quite literally “built like tanks� when one has to make a foray beyond the gates out into the world where people are different from you. Benjamin is treated with a friendly courtesy almost everywhere he goes; he even finds golf partners everywhere he goes. He says that racist communities contain some of the nicest people he has ever met. The racism he encounters is not personal, it is structural. It is the reason that Treyvon Martin is dead, while his murderer is petitioning the state to pay his legal expenses. It is the reason young black men have a greater chance to be in jail than to be in college. It is the reason black workers make 75 cents for every dollar made by their white counterparts. The grainy television images of white people screaming and spitting in Birmingham, Jackson, and Montgomery 50 years ago are no longer something we have to watch in real time. That, of course, is a good thing. But Benjamin would argue that such change is mostly cosmetic. Racism has cleaned up its act, but it is still our national disease.
]]> <![CDATA[The Big Truck that Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster]]> 15794250
More than half of American adults gave money for Haiti, part of a monumental response totaling $16.3 billion in pledges. But three years later the relief effort has foundered. It’s most basic promises—to build safer housing for the homeless, alleviate severe poverty, and strengthen Haiti to face future disasters—remain unfulfilled.

The Big Truck That Went By presents a sharp critique of international aid that defies today’s conventional wisdom; that the way wealthy countries give aid makes poor countries seem irredeemably hopeless, while trapping millions in cycles of privation and catastrophe. Katz follows the money to uncover startling truths about how good intentions go wrong, and what can be done to make aid “smarter.�

With coverage of Bill Clinton, who came to help lead the reconstruction; movie-star aid worker Sean Penn; Wyclef Jean; Haiti’s leaders and people alike, Katz weaves a complex, darkly funny, and unexpected portrait of one of the world’s most fascinating countries. The Big Truck That Went By is not only a definitive account of Haiti’s earthquake, but of the world we live in today.

]]> 320 Jonathan M. Katz 023034187X Jim 5 4.11 2013 The Big Truck that Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
author: Jonathan M. Katz
name: Jim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/07/19
shelves:
review:
I wanted to review this book briefly because I think it might have been overlooked when it first came out several years ago. Written by Jonathan Katz, an AP journalist stationed in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the book chronicles the devastation of the hurricane and earthquake that nearly destroyed Haiti in 2010. The post-disaster images were widely seen of course, as were the famous people showing up in front of cameras to convince us of their sincere support (see Bill Clinton, Bono, Sean Penn, etc.). But what I didn’t know, and what I’m not sure most people know, is that less than 10% of the money that was promised to Haiti ever arrived. Even more depressing, most of the money that did arrive went into the pockets of NGO’s or other, already established aid groups, some of which were affiliated with the US government. Almost none of the money went to Haitians who could use it to rebuild their country. Because of problems with property records, construction materials, and lack of organization among competing groups there to help, almost no sanitary housing was built, almost no permanent medical infrastructure was developed, and few productive efforts were made to provide employment for the people who lived in Haiti and still live there. Haiti, according to Katz, is no better off today for all the promises and all the unfocused good will that was invested there. It’s a depressing story, especially since it can leave you cynical about the nature of the help that follows major disasters.
]]> <![CDATA[Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald]]> 15994634
When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame.

Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.]]> 464 Therese Anne Fowler 1250028647 Jim 5 3.86 2013 Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
author: Therese Anne Fowler
name: Jim
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/07/14
shelves:
review:
Z is a better novel than you might expect, and I don’t mean that as faint praise. Narrated in the voice of Zelda Fitzgerald, would be dancer, aspiring writer, and the enabling spouse of the lavishly gifted, lavishly flawed Scott, the book gives us an incisively intelligent perspective on a group of people who were often too drunk to remain incisive. In fact, as she goes deeper into Scott and Zelda’s relationship, you get the feeling that Fowler is herself learning how Zelda was both growing and dying as one Scott-based disappointment followed another. This is a book that does not belong with the recently developing sub-genre we might call ‘fictional narratives of famous men by their sort-of-famous wives� (see Nancy Moran’s Loving Frank about Frank Lloyd Wright, Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife about Hemingway, and Curtis Sittenfeld’s edgier American Wife about Bush II). The novel, like Zelda herself, can stand on its own without the nagging burden of a famous author who keeps pushing for the spotlight.
]]> Jackie Robinson: A Biography 726760
Born in the rural South, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was reared in southern California. We see him blossom there as a student-athlete as he struggled against poverty and racism to uphold the beliefs instilled in him by his mother--faith in family, education, America, and God.

We follow Robinson through World War II, when, in the first wave of racial integration in the armed forces, he was commissioned as an officer, then court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of a bus. After he plays in the Negro National League, we watch the opening of an all-American drama as, late in 1945, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers recognized Jack as the right player to break baseball's color barrier--and the game was forever changed.

Jack's never-before-published letters open up his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Rachel, whom he married just as his perilous venture of integrating baseball began. Her memories are a major resource of the narrative as we learn about the severe harassment Robinson endured from teammates and opponents alike; about death threats and exclusion; about joy and remarkable success. We watch his courageous response to abuse, first as a stoic endurer, then as a fighter who epitomized courage and defiance.

We see his growing friendship with white players like Pee Wee Reese and the black teammates who followed in his footsteps, and his embrace by Brooklyn's fans. We follow his blazing 1947, Rookie of the Year; 1949, Most Valuable Player; six pennants in ten seasons, and 1962, induction into the Hall of Fame.

But sports were merely one aspect of his life. We see his business ventures, his leading role in the community, his early support of Martin Luther King Jr., his commitment to the civil rights movement at a crucial stage in its evolution; his controversial associations with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Humphrey, Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, and Malcolm X.

Rampersad's magnificent biography leaves us with an indelible image of a principled man who was passionate in his loyalties and a baseball player who could focus a crowd's attention as no one before or since; an activist at the crossroads of his people's struggle; a dedicated family man whose last years were plagued by illness and tragedy, and who died prematurely at fifty-two. He was a pathfinder, an American hero, and he now has the biography he deserves.]]> 561 Arnold Rampersad 034542655X Jim 5
But it’s not quite the whole story, as the deeply researched and cleanly written new biography from Arnold Rampersad makes clear. Robinson did what Rickey asked him to do, but he resented it most of the time, was angry most of the time, and worried about money most of the time. He was a deeply religious, deeply conservative man who admired Richard Nixon greatly, who was critical and fearful of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, who sold his name to a range of business interests after leaving baseball, and who engaged in a number of sharp business practices himself when he opened ventures on his own. Even to his wife, who loved him loyally and with very clear eyes, he was often insensitive, even cruel.

None of this undermines what Robinson did for baseball in his playing days nor does it tarnish the courage he showed as he walked on to the field every afternoon, especially in southern cities like St. Louis and Baltimore. But by reducing Robinson’s story to something that could be printed on the back of a baseball card, we are leaving out the very complicated reality that makes Robinson’s role in baseball history so human and so important. Robinson overcame so much in himself to do what he did; he had to conquer his own demons as well as the shitheads who were screaming at him. To render those demons invisible is to make his accomplishments a cartoon instead of an important part of history. Rampersad has fixed that for Robinson, and as the author of definitive biographies of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Arthur Ashe, he is doing a great deal to tell true stories about the African American past before those stories, like Robinson’s, slip into the limp legends that everyone knows.

Full disclosure: I took a class with Arnold Rampersad when he was a new professor at the University of Virginia in 1975. He doesn’t remember me—I got a B+--but I’ve been trying to follow his scholarship ever since.


]]> 4.17 1991 Jackie Robinson: A Biography
author: Arnold Rampersad
name: Jim
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/07/14
shelves:
review:
I am often struck by the way American popular culture cherry picks the virtues of its heroes. We all know the story of Jackie Robinson—a stellar African American athlete who starred in multiple sports at USC and was selected by Brooklyn Dodgers� manager Branch Rickey to be the first African American to play major league baseball. Robinson was taunted and threatened, hit in the head with fastballs on multiple occasions, and often the victim of clear rule violations. Yet he remained cool, unshaken, unperturbed, and played a graceful, playful game of baseball. That is the story that the recent movie �42� gave us, it’s what Ken Burns gave us in his documentary about baseball, and it’s what the bits and pieces of oral history you might have heard at a bar and tap your father frequented when you were growing up. It’s a great story in that it bravely shows the racist side of our character while giving us a disarmingly safe and non-violent hero who withstands every challenge he faces. It’s a liberal, Rosa Parks kind of story, and it makes us feel good about how far we’ve come.

But it’s not quite the whole story, as the deeply researched and cleanly written new biography from Arnold Rampersad makes clear. Robinson did what Rickey asked him to do, but he resented it most of the time, was angry most of the time, and worried about money most of the time. He was a deeply religious, deeply conservative man who admired Richard Nixon greatly, who was critical and fearful of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, who sold his name to a range of business interests after leaving baseball, and who engaged in a number of sharp business practices himself when he opened ventures on his own. Even to his wife, who loved him loyally and with very clear eyes, he was often insensitive, even cruel.

None of this undermines what Robinson did for baseball in his playing days nor does it tarnish the courage he showed as he walked on to the field every afternoon, especially in southern cities like St. Louis and Baltimore. But by reducing Robinson’s story to something that could be printed on the back of a baseball card, we are leaving out the very complicated reality that makes Robinson’s role in baseball history so human and so important. Robinson overcame so much in himself to do what he did; he had to conquer his own demons as well as the shitheads who were screaming at him. To render those demons invisible is to make his accomplishments a cartoon instead of an important part of history. Rampersad has fixed that for Robinson, and as the author of definitive biographies of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Arthur Ashe, he is doing a great deal to tell true stories about the African American past before those stories, like Robinson’s, slip into the limp legends that everyone knows.

Full disclosure: I took a class with Arnold Rampersad when he was a new professor at the University of Virginia in 1975. He doesn’t remember me—I got a B+--but I’ve been trying to follow his scholarship ever since.



]]> State of Wonder 9118135
As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle.

Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness.

Stirring and luminous, "State of Wonder" is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss beneath the rain forest's jeweled canopy.]]> 353 Ann Patchett 0062049801 Jim 5 3.88 2011 State of Wonder
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jim
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2013/01/03
shelves:
review:
I listened to this one and didn't want it to be over. A lushly imagined and compelling story, it takes the reader to places few people have been and somehow makes them familiar. It is, of course, a story of self-discovery--the characters have to learn what they are and what they are not, what they can never be. But the journey takes place in the Brazilian jungle, propelled by a missing colleague, by an exceptionally talented scientist, and by a deaf boy named Easter. The best book I've read in the last year.
]]> <![CDATA[Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life]]> 15808241 Plato and a Platypus travels to Greece with a suitcase full of philosophy books, seeking the best way to achieve a fulfilling old age. Daniel Klein journeys to the Greek island Hydra to discover the secrets of aging happily. Drawing on the lives of his Greek friends, as well as philosophers ranging from Epicurus to Sartre, Klein learns to appreciate old age as a distinct and extraordinarily valuable stage of life. He uncovers simple pleasures that are uniquely available late in life, as well as headier pleasures that only a mature mind can fully appreciate. A travel book, a witty and accessible meditation, and an optimistic guide to living well, Travels with Epicurus is a delightful jaunt to the Aegean and through the terrain of old age led by a droll philosopher. A perfect gift book for the holidays, this little treasure is sure to please longtime fans of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar and garner new ones, young and old.]]> 176 Daniel Klein 0143121936 Jim 4 3.78 2012 Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life
author: Daniel Klein
name: Jim
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2012/12/21
shelves:
review:
A 73 year old man travels to Hydra, a small island in Greece, to read about and meditate on the question of how to live well as an older person. It's relatively short, smart, and written with a kind of earnest charm that makes you pay attention to the observations. I wouldn't have enjoyed it much in my 40's, but I did now.
]]> Madame Bovary 2175 329 Gustave Flaubert 0192840398 Jim 5 3.70 1856 Madame Bovary
author: Gustave Flaubert
name: Jim
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1856
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2012/12/21
shelves:
review:
I hadn't read this in 40 years. This time I listened to it, and was able to pay attention to the long sentences and wonderfully chosen words. It is something to savor.
]]> <![CDATA[A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion]]> 10373917
Based on a real case whose lurid details scandalized Americans in 1927 and sold millions of newspapers, acclaimed novelist Ron Hansen’s latest work is a tour de force of erotic tension and looming violence. Trapped in a loveless marriage, Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless, and altogether irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her husband but that he die—and the sooner the better. No less miserable in his own tedious marriage is Judd Gray, a dapper corset-and-brassiere salesman who travels the Northeast peddling his wares. He meets Ruth in a Manhattan diner, and soon they are conducting a white-hot affair involving hotel rooms, secret letters, clandestine travels, and above all, Ruth’s increasing insistence that Judd kill her husband. Could he do it? Would he? What follows is a thrilling exposition of a murder plan, a police investigation, the lovers� attempt to escape prosecution, and a final reckoning for both of them that lays bare the horror and sorrow of what they have done. Dazzlingly well-written and artfully constructed, this impossible-to-put-down story marks the return of an American master known for his elegant and vivid novels that cut cleanly to the essence of the human heart, always and at once mysterious and filled with desire.]]> 256 Ron Hansen 1451617550 Jim 4 3.34 2011 A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion
author: Ron Hansen
name: Jim
average rating: 3.34
book published: 2011
rating: 4
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date added: 2012/12/21
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]]> <![CDATA[The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln]]> 12953517 From the best-selling author of The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White, a daring reimagining of one of the most tumultuous moments in our nation’s past

Stephen L. Carter’s thrilling new novel takes as its starting point an alternate history: President Abraham Lincoln survives the assassination attempt at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865. Two years later he is charged with overstepping his constitutional authority, both during and after the Civil War, and faces an impeachment trial . . .

Twenty-one-year-old Abigail Canner is a young black woman with a degree from Oberlin, a letter of employment from the law firm that has undertaken Lincoln’s defense, and the iron-strong conviction, learned from her late mother, that “whatever limitations society might place on ordinary negroes, they would never apply to her.� And so Abigail embarks on a life that defies the norms of every stratum of Washington society: working side by side with a white clerk, meeting the great and powerful of the nation, including the president himself. But when Lincoln’s lead counsel is found brutally murdered on the eve of the trial, Abigail is plunged into a treacherous web of intrigue and conspiracy reaching the highest levels of the divided government.

Here is a vividly imagined work of historical fiction that captures the emotional tenor of post–Civil War America, a brilliantly realized courtroom drama that explores the always contentious question of the nature of presidential authority, and a galvanizing story of political suspense.]]> 516 Stephen L. Carter 030727263X Jim 4 3.68 2012 The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln
author: Stephen L. Carter
name: Jim
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2012/10/10
date added: 2012/12/03
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]]> The Quiet American 3698 Graham Greene's classic exploration of love, innocence, and morality in Vietnam

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas. As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler's beautiful Vietnamese mistress.

First published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, The Quiet American remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition includes a new introductory essay by Robert Stone.]]> 180 Graham Greene 0143039024 Jim 5 3.97 1955 The Quiet American
author: Graham Greene
name: Jim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2012/11/21
date added: 2012/12/03
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]]> The End of the Affair 29641 "A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..."

"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles.

Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.]]> 160 Graham Greene Jim 5 3.91 1951 The End of the Affair
author: Graham Greene
name: Jim
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1951
rating: 5
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]]> The Art of Fielding 10996342
Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life.

As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment - to oneself and to others.]]> 512 Chad Harbach 0316126691 Jim 5 3.98 2011 The Art of Fielding
author: Chad Harbach
name: Jim
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2012/09/19
date added: 2012/12/03
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I listened to this one, as I did with A Hologram for a King. The Art of Fielding is innocent in a warm, heartbreaking kind of way, and the characters are young people--college students--that you'd want to spend time with.
]]> A Hologram for the King 13722902 312 Dave Eggers 193636574X Jim 5 3.29 2012 A Hologram for the King
author: Dave Eggers
name: Jim
average rating: 3.29
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Swerve: How the World Became Modern]]> 12599811
In the winter of 1417, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties plucked a very old manuscript off a dusty shelf in a remote monastery, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. He was Poggio Bracciolini, the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His discovery, Lucretius� ancient poem On the Nature of Things, had been almost entirely lost to history for more than a thousand years.It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous that the universe functions without the aid of gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions. Its return to circulation changed the course of history. The poem’s vision would shape the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and—in the hands of Thomas Jefferson—leave its trace on the Declaration of Independence.From the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the dark chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical, competitive court of a corrupt and dangerous pope, Greenblatt brings Poggio’s search and discovery to life in a way that deepens our understanding of the world we live in now.“An intellectually invigorating, nonfiction version of a Dan Brown–like mystery-in-the-archives thriller.� —Boston Globe]]> 377 Stephen Greenblatt Jim 5 4.12 2011 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
author: Stephen Greenblatt
name: Jim
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2012/10/20
date added: 2012/10/30
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The Swerve, like Will in the World, Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare, is an incredibly rich story from someone who knows more about a particular time and a particular place than most scholars I know. It was a pleasure to read.
]]> <![CDATA[Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work]]> 6261332
Called "the sleeper hit of the publishing season" (The Boston Globe), Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.]]> 241 Matthew B. Crawford 1594202230 Jim 5 3.74 2009 Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
author: Matthew B. Crawford
name: Jim
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It]]> 5948644 Award-winning writer Maile Meloy's return to short stories explores complex lives in an austere landscape with the clear-sightedness that first endeared her to readers.

Meloy's first return to short stories since her critically acclaimed debut, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It is an extraordinary new work from one of the most promising writers of the last decade.

Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields-and fields of victory-that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly- and reluctantly-in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.

Knowing, sly, and bittersweet, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It confirms Maile Meloy's singular literary talent. Her lean, controlled prose, full of insight and unexpected poignancy, is the perfect complement to her powerfully moving storytelling.]]> 240 Maile Meloy 159448869X Jim 5 3.83 2009 Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It
author: Maile Meloy
name: Jim
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/10/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed]]> 20186 ujamaa villages in Tanzania, collectivization in Russia, Le Corbusier’s urban planning theory realized in Brasilia, the Great Leap Forward in China, agricultural "modernization" in the Tropics—the twentieth century has been racked by grand utopian schemes that have inadvertently brought death and disruption to millions. Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?

In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.]]> 461 James C. Scott 0300078153 Jim 5 4.21 1998 Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
author: James C. Scott
name: Jim
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity]]> 11869272
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter - Annawadi's "most-everything girl" - will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call "the full enjoy."

But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.

With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.]]> 278 Katherine Boo 1400067553 Jim 5 3.97 2012 Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
author: Katherine Boo
name: Jim
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2012/10/04
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]]> Canada 12872236
When fifteen-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed.

His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border, in hopes of delivering him to a better life. There, afloat on the prairie of Saskatchewan, Dell is taken in by Arthur Remlinger, an enigmatic and charismatic American whose cool reserve masks a dark and violent nature.

Undone by the calamity of his parents' robbery and arrest, Dell struggles under the vast prairie sky to remake himself and define the adults he thought he once knew. But his search for grace and peace only moves him nearer to a harrowing and murderous collision with Remlinger, an elemental force of darkness.

A true masterwork of haunting and spectacular vision from one of America's greatest writers, Canada is a profound novel of boundaries traversed, innocence lost and reconciled, and the mysterious and consoling bonds of family. Told in spare, elegant prose, both resonant and luminous, it is destined to become a modern classic.]]> 420 Richard Ford 0061692042 Jim 5 3.50 2012 Canada
author: Richard Ford
name: Jim
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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]]> Let the Great World Spin 5941033
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.� A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent� (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.]]> 351 Colum McCann 1400063736 Jim 5 3.95 2009 Let the Great World Spin
author: Colum McCann
name: Jim
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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]]> The Marriage Plot 10964693
As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.]]> 406 Jeffrey Eugenides 0374203059 Jim 5 3.46 2011 The Marriage Plot
author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Jim
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)]]> 13049569 The Passage of Powerfollows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career�1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark.

By 1958, as Johnson began to maneuver for the presidency, he was known as one of the most brilliant politicians of his time, the greatest Senate Leader in our history. But the 1960 nomination would go to the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. Caro gives us an unparalleled account of the machinations behind both the nomination and Kennedy’s decision to offer Johnson the vice presidency, revealing the extent of Robert Kennedy’s efforts to force Johnson off the ticket. With the consummate skill of a master storyteller, he exposes the savage animosity between Johnson and Kennedy’s younger brother, portraying one of America’s great political feuds. Yet Robert Kennedy’s overt contempt for Johnson was only part of the burden of humiliation and isolation he bore as Vice President. With a singular understanding of Johnson’s heart and mind, Caro describes what it was like for this mighty politician to find himself altogether powerless in a world in which power is the crucial commodity.

For the first time, in Caro’s breathtakingly vivid narrative, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks—grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery—he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam.

In its exploration of this pivotal period in Johnson’s life—and in the life of the nation�The Passage of Poweris not only the story of how he surmounted unprecedented obstacles in order to fulfill the highest purpose of the presidency but is, as well, a revelation of both the pragmatic potential in the presidency and what can be accomplished when the chief executive has the vision and determination to move beyond the pragmatic and initiate programs designed to transform a nation.]]> 712 Robert A. Caro 0679405070 Jim 5 4.36 2012 The Passage of Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #4)
author: Robert A. Caro
name: Jim
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[Sacred Hunger (Sacred Hunger #1)]]> 239592 Sacred Hunger is a stunning and engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed. Filled with the "sacred hunger" to expand its empire and its profits, England entered full into the slave trade and spread the trade throughout its colonies. In this Booker Prize-winning work, Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.]]> 630 Barry Unsworth 0393311147 Jim 5 4.11 1992 Sacred Hunger (Sacred Hunger #1)
author: Barry Unsworth
name: Jim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1992
rating: 5
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]]> The Submission 10364994
Claire Harwell hasn't settled into grief; events haven't let her. Cool, eloquent, raising two fatherless children, Claire has emerged as the most visible of the widows who became a potent political force in the aftermath of the catastrophe. She longs for her husband, but she has found her mission: she sits on a jury charged with selecting a fitting memorial for the victims of the attack.

Of the thousands of anonymous submissions that she and her fellow jurors examine, one transfixes Claire: a garden on whose walls the names of the dead are inscribed. But when the winning envelope is opened, they find the designer is Mohammad Khan - Mo - an enigmatic Muslim-American who, it seems, feels no need to represent anyone's beliefs except his own. When the design and its creator are leaked, a media firestorm erupts, and Claire finds herself trying to balance principles against emotions amid escalating tensions about the place of Islam in America.

A remarkably bold and ambitious debut, The Submission is peopled with journalists, activists, mourners, and bureaucrats who struggle for advantage and fight for their ideals. In this deeply humane novel, the breadth of Amy Waldman's cast of characters is matched by her startling ability to conjure individual lives from their own points of view. A striking portrait of a city - and a country - fractured by old hatreds and new struggles, The Submission is a major novel by an important new talent.]]> 300 Amy Waldman 0374271569 Jim 5 3.66 2011 The Submission
author: Amy Waldman
name: Jim
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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]]> <![CDATA[1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created]]> 9862761
More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans.

The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet.

Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.

As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.

In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination]]> 557 Charles C. Mann 0307265722 Jim 0 4.12 2011 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
author: Charles C. Mann
name: Jim
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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]]> The Year We Left Home 8979518 In The Year We Left Home, Thompson brings together all of her talents to deliver the career-defining novel her admirers have been waiting for: a sweeping and emotionally powerful story of a single American family during the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century. It begins in 1973 when the Erickson family of Grenada, Iowa, gathers for the wedding of their eldest daughter, Anita. Even as they celebrate, the fault lines in the family emerge. The bride wants nothing more than to raise a family in her hometown, while her brother Ryan watches restlessly from the sidelines, planning his escape. He is joined by their cousin Chip, an unpredictable, war-damaged loner who will show Ryan both the appeal and the perils of freedom. Torrie, the Ericksons' youngest daughter, is another rebel intent on escape, but the choices she makes will bring about a tragedy that leaves the entire family changed forever.
Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago to the coast of contemporary Italy—and moving through the Vietnam War's aftermath, the farm crisis, the numerous economic booms and busts—The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change. Ambitious, richly told, and fiercely American, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character.]]> 325 Jean Thompson 1439175888 Jim 5 3.37 2011 The Year We Left Home
author: Jean Thompson
name: Jim
average rating: 3.37
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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]]> A Gate at the Stairs 6076387
As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes� are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.

Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.

The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.

As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.]]> 322 Lorrie Moore 0375409289 Jim 5
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. This quiet, unassuming book centers on a young college student who stumbles into a babysitting job for a troubled couple who have adopted a mixed-race child. And then hell opens. The sentences are so well tuned that you can move past one and then three beats later realize you need to go back--you've got to savor the observation longer.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. If you want to know what Katrina was "like" for someone who lived through it, and if want to know how cruelly incompetent our government's response was, don't miss this book. Zeitoun himself is a family man hero, and when he is taken into custody without trial as a presumed terrorist after days of saving others you begin to understand once again "why they hate us."

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. This is a rich, multi-layered, deeply researched book that centers on a fictional young man who finds himself as a cook and later as an assistant to Mexican painter Diego Rivera, a confidante to Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo, and then secretary to Lev Trotsky, who lived with the Rivera's when he was banished almost everywhere else. Maybe the best book Kingsolver has written.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. A kind of follow up to her masterful memoir The Glass Castle, this book tells the extraordinary story of Walls's maternal grandmother--a rancher, a teacher, a horsewoman, a pilot, a survivor--from her grandmother's point of view and gives us a world that is seldom made visible through women's eyes. Could not stop reading it.

Jeff in Venice/Death in Varana by Geoff Dyer. If you haven't had a chance to read Dyer yet, you may want to start here. Part travelogue, part meditation, part personal history and memoir, Dyer has a terrific way of bringing you with him as he explores spaces well off the tourist maps and well below the site lines of most people's self awareness. He's an unapologetic avoider of safety and common sense, and that allows him to get inside places most of us steer clear of.

Methland by Nick Reding. A non-fictional account of how chrystal meth devastated a small town in rural Iowa, told through the stories of the local doctor, the mayor, and the chief of police. The stories are heartbreaking, but the prose is like a carefully sharpened knife that opens everything to view.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. A series of interrelated short stories about a morally ambiguous, often cranky, sometimes insightful 8th grade math teacher working in Somewhere Else, Maine. You can't really love Olive, but you find yourself glad that you know that such complicated people are out there.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. In my review, I called this a 'muscle car of a book," and I continue to think that's true. It's a churning exploration that moves from the Dominican Republic to New York, from the present back to the past, with shifting narrative voices and authorial footnotes that historicize events in helpful and often ironic ways. An incredible read.

Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker. This volume is an extraordinary collection of spoken and written language--excerpts from Winston Churchill's diary, from Roosevelt's speeches, from soldiers' letters home, from Japanese newspapers--that are juxtaposed in ways that help us see how complicated and fragmented the "good war" actually was. I couldn't stop reading it.

West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary. A memoir by a Afghan man who moves back and forth between the U.S. and home, trying hard to understand and embrace both cultures and making clear why that is virtually impossible to do.
]]> 3.18 2009 A Gate at the Stairs
author: Lorrie Moore
name: Jim
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2010/01/02
date added: 2012/04/30
shelves:
review:
Moving into the dean's office has kept me from writing reviews of most of the books I've read this year, but there have been a number of really fine stories published, and I wanted to share a list of ten that I think you might enjoy:

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. This quiet, unassuming book centers on a young college student who stumbles into a babysitting job for a troubled couple who have adopted a mixed-race child. And then hell opens. The sentences are so well tuned that you can move past one and then three beats later realize you need to go back--you've got to savor the observation longer.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. If you want to know what Katrina was "like" for someone who lived through it, and if want to know how cruelly incompetent our government's response was, don't miss this book. Zeitoun himself is a family man hero, and when he is taken into custody without trial as a presumed terrorist after days of saving others you begin to understand once again "why they hate us."

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. This is a rich, multi-layered, deeply researched book that centers on a fictional young man who finds himself as a cook and later as an assistant to Mexican painter Diego Rivera, a confidante to Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo, and then secretary to Lev Trotsky, who lived with the Rivera's when he was banished almost everywhere else. Maybe the best book Kingsolver has written.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls. A kind of follow up to her masterful memoir The Glass Castle, this book tells the extraordinary story of Walls's maternal grandmother--a rancher, a teacher, a horsewoman, a pilot, a survivor--from her grandmother's point of view and gives us a world that is seldom made visible through women's eyes. Could not stop reading it.

Jeff in Venice/Death in Varana by Geoff Dyer. If you haven't had a chance to read Dyer yet, you may want to start here. Part travelogue, part meditation, part personal history and memoir, Dyer has a terrific way of bringing you with him as he explores spaces well off the tourist maps and well below the site lines of most people's self awareness. He's an unapologetic avoider of safety and common sense, and that allows him to get inside places most of us steer clear of.

Methland by Nick Reding. A non-fictional account of how chrystal meth devastated a small town in rural Iowa, told through the stories of the local doctor, the mayor, and the chief of police. The stories are heartbreaking, but the prose is like a carefully sharpened knife that opens everything to view.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. A series of interrelated short stories about a morally ambiguous, often cranky, sometimes insightful 8th grade math teacher working in Somewhere Else, Maine. You can't really love Olive, but you find yourself glad that you know that such complicated people are out there.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. In my review, I called this a 'muscle car of a book," and I continue to think that's true. It's a churning exploration that moves from the Dominican Republic to New York, from the present back to the past, with shifting narrative voices and authorial footnotes that historicize events in helpful and often ironic ways. An incredible read.

Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker. This volume is an extraordinary collection of spoken and written language--excerpts from Winston Churchill's diary, from Roosevelt's speeches, from soldiers' letters home, from Japanese newspapers--that are juxtaposed in ways that help us see how complicated and fragmented the "good war" actually was. I couldn't stop reading it.

West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary. A memoir by a Afghan man who moves back and forth between the U.S. and home, trying hard to understand and embrace both cultures and making clear why that is virtually impossible to do.

]]> Kindred 60931 The visionary author’s masterpiece pulls us—along with her Black female hero—through time to face the horrors of slavery and explore the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now.

Dana, a modern Black woman, is celebrating her 26th birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.]]> 288 Octavia E. Butler 0807083690 Jim 5 This was a find for me, and one I’m really glad for. Octavia Butler was, for most of her career, an African-American writer of science fiction—one of the first to achieve widespread recognition, winning many awards and writing a good many books along the way. Kindred was published in 1979, and I only came upon it while looking for something else. It centers on Dana, an African-American writer in her 20’s who is married to Kevin, a white man, also a writer. They live in Los Angeles, but their lives are sundered one day—and here’s where the science fiction part comes in—when Dana becomes dizzy, falls the floor of her apartment, and awakens in 1815 Maryland at the edge of a pond where a young white boy is drowning. Not knowing what else to do, she rescues the boy and resuscitates him, delivering him to his mother who is screaming by the shore. What Dana doesn’t realize right away, however, is that given the time and place, she is now a slave. She has a college education and highly liberated political spirit. Moreover she is wearing slacks, which causes more confusion than you might think. But she is most of all black, and thus she is most of all owned.

The book’s premise is that Dana will be called back to the past each time the boy who was drowning—Rufus is his name—gets in some kind of physical trouble. And she is called back because Rufus, as an adult, will sleep with one of his slaves, and Dana will be a direct descendent of the child that comes from that union. As it happens, Rufus gets into a lot of trouble. He is abused by his father and so disfigured by the slave system itself that he becomes a cruel man and a ruthless overseer. But Dana returns again and again—she has no choice—and the real richness of the novel comes in Butler’s exploration of what it would be like for a 20th-century woman of color to be forced into the role of slave woman, compelled to accept some parts of that role in order to survive. Some of it is graphically brutal—Dana herself is whipped and beaten several times, and we witness the beatings and rapes of other slaves as well. In spite of the violence, I want to make a case for this book as an adolescent novel, as a book that students might read next to To Kill a Mockingbird or Frederick Douglass or The Watsons Go to Birmingham. It raises exceptionally important questions, and its time-travel premise offers a promising invitation to young readers. It’s not easy emotionally, and it has no unambiguously happy ending. But precisely for those reasons, I think it deserves a wide readership in schools.
]]> 4.30 1979 Kindred
author: Octavia E. Butler
name: Jim
average rating: 4.30
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2009/05/01
date added: 2009/05/25
shelves:
review:

This was a find for me, and one I’m really glad for. Octavia Butler was, for most of her career, an African-American writer of science fiction—one of the first to achieve widespread recognition, winning many awards and writing a good many books along the way. Kindred was published in 1979, and I only came upon it while looking for something else. It centers on Dana, an African-American writer in her 20’s who is married to Kevin, a white man, also a writer. They live in Los Angeles, but their lives are sundered one day—and here’s where the science fiction part comes in—when Dana becomes dizzy, falls the floor of her apartment, and awakens in 1815 Maryland at the edge of a pond where a young white boy is drowning. Not knowing what else to do, she rescues the boy and resuscitates him, delivering him to his mother who is screaming by the shore. What Dana doesn’t realize right away, however, is that given the time and place, she is now a slave. She has a college education and highly liberated political spirit. Moreover she is wearing slacks, which causes more confusion than you might think. But she is most of all black, and thus she is most of all owned.

The book’s premise is that Dana will be called back to the past each time the boy who was drowning—Rufus is his name—gets in some kind of physical trouble. And she is called back because Rufus, as an adult, will sleep with one of his slaves, and Dana will be a direct descendent of the child that comes from that union. As it happens, Rufus gets into a lot of trouble. He is abused by his father and so disfigured by the slave system itself that he becomes a cruel man and a ruthless overseer. But Dana returns again and again—she has no choice—and the real richness of the novel comes in Butler’s exploration of what it would be like for a 20th-century woman of color to be forced into the role of slave woman, compelled to accept some parts of that role in order to survive. Some of it is graphically brutal—Dana herself is whipped and beaten several times, and we witness the beatings and rapes of other slaves as well. In spite of the violence, I want to make a case for this book as an adolescent novel, as a book that students might read next to To Kill a Mockingbird or Frederick Douglass or The Watsons Go to Birmingham. It raises exceptionally important questions, and its time-travel premise offers a promising invitation to young readers. It’s not easy emotionally, and it has no unambiguously happy ending. But precisely for those reasons, I think it deserves a wide readership in schools.

]]> <![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)]]> 1736739
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life � sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty.]]> 270 Elizabeth Strout Jim 5 3.85 2008 Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Jim
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2009/05/01
date added: 2009/05/25
shelves:
review:
In this extraordinary collection of interrelated short stories, Elizabeth Strout explores a territory so carefully mapped by Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Richard Yates, and Raymond Carver. It’s a space where grown up, unexceptional people hide from themselves, from their families, from their pasts, from whatever future they can imagine. Tragedies and sadnesses here are not presented as garish events, but as quiet, unnamable tremors felt deep underground, disturbing the familiar order of things. Connecting the stories is Olive Kitteridge --large, ornery, demanding, often rude—a retired 7th grade math teacher married by habit to Henry, a mousy but gently loving pharmacist in a small coastal town in Maine. Starting here, with Olive and Henry, Strout creates a network of characters, bound to each other by geography, weather, and time, but more importantly by the secrets they keep or don’t, by the failures they can’t help, by the small gestures of dignity or sympathy that are as often ignored as acknowledged by others. An aging red-headed piano player in a local watering hole, who provisions herself with several bolts of vodka before each night’s performance, finds the courage to break off by phone a decades-long affair with a married man who has made her life hell. But she lets him into her apartment later even as he calls her a cunt and tells her never to do that again. Olive herself visits her long-alienated son Christopher, his unyet-met wife, and their two children (neither Christopher’s) in a small Brooklyn apartment only to receive from Christopher a carefully-scripted, therapeutically-larded lecture on her failures as a mother. A young man returns to the small Maine town with a sad, crowded past and an intention to end his life. Olive sees him sitting in his car, and since she had taught him in 7th grade, imposes herself into his front seat and begins a long conversation that leads him finally away from despair. The lines connecting these stories are distinctly non-linear, but as you read them one after the other your understanding of the characters deepens while your sympathy for the lives they are crafting is like warm sunlight on your face. This is an astonishing book.
]]> A Room with a View 3087
Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her, until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George.

Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?]]> 119 E.M. Forster 1420925431 Jim 2 3.91 1908 A Room with a View
author: E.M. Forster
name: Jim
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1908
rating: 2
read at: 2009/04/27
date added: 2009/04/27
shelves:
review:

]]> The White Tiger 1768603
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life—having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly ("Love -- Rape -- Revenge!"), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive.

Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers; the prostitutes and the worshippers; the ancient and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations.

The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation —and a startling, provocative debut.]]> 276 Aravind Adiga 1416562591 Jim 5
In addition to Balram’s voice, the book also gives us an answer to the gee-whiz-ain’t it-great cheerleading for globalization that has driven so much of the talk about India for the last 10 years. Take a look behind the image of crisply dressed young people driving Japanese cars on rapidly constructed highways, and you find the India Balram inhabits—an India of everyday petty corruption, astonishing inequality, widespread servitude, and the kind of poverty that breaks people into pieces. Balram's story helps us know why he needs to escape his world, but we’re all diminished by the kinds of choices he makes. The book is an incredible read. It won the Man-Booker Prize in 2007.


]]> 3.76 2008 The White Tiger
author: Aravind Adiga
name: Jim
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2009/04/20
date added: 2009/04/20
shelves:
review:
This novel offers many pleasures, but the most immediate, I think, is the voice of its narrator. Born far away from India’s more prosperous coastal cities, Balram comes from what he calls “The Darkness—the desperately poor villages along the shit-filled Ganges, where people live on pennies day as rickshaw drivers or waiters at tea shops, far away from the Tom Friedman world-is-flat paradise of outsourced call centers and high rise condo development. But though Balram comes from the darkness, he’s got his eye on much more, and he tells his story in the form of email messages to the premier of China, who is coming soon to Balram’s new urban home for a state visit. Balram is shrewd, funny, candid, street smart, and finally dangerous. Determined not to live the life that every demographic has pressed upon him, he finds a way out. But the way includes murder and theft and the betrayal of his family—a loss of innocence painful precisely because there is no other way, given the world he describes.

In addition to Balram’s voice, the book also gives us an answer to the gee-whiz-ain’t it-great cheerleading for globalization that has driven so much of the talk about India for the last 10 years. Take a look behind the image of crisply dressed young people driving Japanese cars on rapidly constructed highways, and you find the India Balram inhabits—an India of everyday petty corruption, astonishing inequality, widespread servitude, and the kind of poverty that breaks people into pieces. Balram's story helps us know why he needs to escape his world, but we’re all diminished by the kinds of choices he makes. The book is an incredible read. It won the Man-Booker Prize in 2007.



]]> <![CDATA[Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation]]> 2319322 A groundbreaking and irresistible biography of three of America's most important musical artists -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon -- charts their lives as women at a magical moment in time.

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Each woman is distinct. Carole King is the product of outer-borough, middle-class New York City; Joni Mitchell is a granddaughter of Canadian farmers; and Carly Simon is a child of the Manhattan intellectual upper crust. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, a great swath of American girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Their stories trace the arc of the now mythic sixties generation -- female version -- but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliche. The history of the women of that generation has never been written -- until now, through their resonant lives and emblematic songs.

Filled with the voices of many dozens of these women's intimates, who are speaking in these pages for the first time, this alternating biography reads like a novel -- except it's all true, and the heroines are famous and beloved. Sheila Weller captures the character of each woman and gives a balanced portrayal enriched by a wealth of new information.

Girls Like Us is an epic treatment of mid-century women who dared to break tradition and become what none had been before them -- confessors in song, rock superstars, and adventurers of heart and soul.]]> 584 Sheila Weller 0743491475 Jim 4 Album covers featuring their young, pretty faces were stacked next to every stereo in every funky apartment that we inhabited from �67 to �75 or so. Along with the Mateus-wine candelabra, the day-glow Jimi Hendrix poster, and the not-so-discreetly-hidden roaches in ashtrays on low-rise tables, the music made by these young women—Carole King was 19 when she wrote her first big hit, Joni Mitchell 21—were part of what we carried when we moved. We scattered those album covers in plain sight and played their music almost endlessly as a way of saying who we were: young, of course, but also independent—sexually if not always financially—and decidedly not ready to enter into the world of conventional responsibility occupied by our parents. A lot of it was image and wonderfully naïve self-delusion (“attitude dancing� Carly Simon would call it in a later song), but it seemed right enough for its time.

What we learn in this smart if sometimes breathlessly written book is that the music might not have happened at all. Pregnant and married at 19, Carole King was turning out hits like “Up on the Roof,� “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,� and “The Locomotion� in the now famous Brill Building in New York—a fairly grim sweatshop for song writing talent--baby on knee. Joni Mitchell, on the other hand, was pregnant at 21 when she was still making the rounds in the Village and in clubs around Canada. She gave the baby up for adoption, which left any number of scars, not all of them soothed when she was reunited with her daughter some 30 years later. Carly Simon, already rich pretty much beyond measure and from a family with a complicated sexual history, was a little late getting started on her own career, but she managed to have fun with just about every male star of the time that you might like to name—from Cat Stevens to Warren Beatty to James Taylor (whom she married, although not until after he had also navigated significant affairs with Carole King and Joni Mitchell while managing a fairly serious heroin addiction.) It’s gets complicated and you kind of need a scorecard.

Which is part of the problem with this guilty pleasure of a book. It’s like Simon’s “No Secrets� with footnotes. We meet just about everyone these women sleep with, then the women the men slept with before, then a fade-out explained usually by a simple, “but things didn’t work out finally.� Too much information, or rather, too much information coming at you in a rush, with little time or attention paid to what is important, to what we really need to know.

But if you were in your 20’s when these women were at their best—or even if you weren’t—you might want to take a look. If nothing else, the book took me back to the music, and now our iPod has a long playlist called “The Girls� which is rich with the music these three amazing artists gave us.


]]> 3.74 2008 Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - and the Journey of a Generation
author: Sheila Weller
name: Jim
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2009/04/05
date added: 2009/04/12
shelves:
review:

Album covers featuring their young, pretty faces were stacked next to every stereo in every funky apartment that we inhabited from �67 to �75 or so. Along with the Mateus-wine candelabra, the day-glow Jimi Hendrix poster, and the not-so-discreetly-hidden roaches in ashtrays on low-rise tables, the music made by these young women—Carole King was 19 when she wrote her first big hit, Joni Mitchell 21—were part of what we carried when we moved. We scattered those album covers in plain sight and played their music almost endlessly as a way of saying who we were: young, of course, but also independent—sexually if not always financially—and decidedly not ready to enter into the world of conventional responsibility occupied by our parents. A lot of it was image and wonderfully naïve self-delusion (“attitude dancing� Carly Simon would call it in a later song), but it seemed right enough for its time.

What we learn in this smart if sometimes breathlessly written book is that the music might not have happened at all. Pregnant and married at 19, Carole King was turning out hits like “Up on the Roof,� “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,� and “The Locomotion� in the now famous Brill Building in New York—a fairly grim sweatshop for song writing talent--baby on knee. Joni Mitchell, on the other hand, was pregnant at 21 when she was still making the rounds in the Village and in clubs around Canada. She gave the baby up for adoption, which left any number of scars, not all of them soothed when she was reunited with her daughter some 30 years later. Carly Simon, already rich pretty much beyond measure and from a family with a complicated sexual history, was a little late getting started on her own career, but she managed to have fun with just about every male star of the time that you might like to name—from Cat Stevens to Warren Beatty to James Taylor (whom she married, although not until after he had also navigated significant affairs with Carole King and Joni Mitchell while managing a fairly serious heroin addiction.) It’s gets complicated and you kind of need a scorecard.

Which is part of the problem with this guilty pleasure of a book. It’s like Simon’s “No Secrets� with footnotes. We meet just about everyone these women sleep with, then the women the men slept with before, then a fade-out explained usually by a simple, “but things didn’t work out finally.� Too much information, or rather, too much information coming at you in a rush, with little time or attention paid to what is important, to what we really need to know.

But if you were in your 20’s when these women were at their best—or even if you weren’t—you might want to take a look. If nothing else, the book took me back to the music, and now our iPod has a long playlist called “The Girls� which is rich with the music these three amazing artists gave us.



]]> <![CDATA[Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It: Essays]]> 378581
This isn’t a self-help book; it’s a book about how Geoff Dyer could do with a little help. In these genre-defying tales, he travels from Amsterdam to Cambodia, Rome to Indonesia, Libya to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, floundering in a sea of grievances, with fleeting moments of transcendental calm his only reward for living in a perpetual state of motion. But even as he recounts his side-splitting misadventures in each of these locales, Dyer is always able to sneak up and surprise you with insight into much more serious matters. Brilliantly riffing off our expectations of external and internal journeys, Dyer welcomes the reader as a companion, a fellow perambulator in search of something and nothing at the same time.]]> 272 Geoff Dyer 1400031672 Jim 5
Dyer as a writer has several layers, and so I want to recommend another of his books that I read last year. It was a gift from daughter Laura entitled But Beautiful, and consists of about a dozen lightly fictionalized portraits of jazz artists from the classic age—Ellington, Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Art Pepper and others. Like Yoga, the writing here is almost flawless, and Dyer makes you want to listen to the music again, hear it again, but differently maybe.

]]> 3.52 2003 Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It: Essays
author: Geoff Dyer
name: Jim
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/24
date added: 2009/03/24
shelves:
review:
The only serious flaw in this otherwise extraordinary book is its title, which, in an attempt to seem playfully ironic, may mislead readers who would otherwise be glad to find it. It is decidedly not a talk-show-Dr. Phil-co-dependent no more sort of thing. It is rather a deeply meditative travel book, with chapters set in Paris, Cambodia, Libya, Amsterdam, and southern Thailand, and a narrative voice that is sly, lyrical, self-cynical, and painfully funny. The funny parts (which are always also painful) involve Dyer himself in a deeply stoned condition (he periodically seeks out powerful varieties of skunk weed, mushrooms, and other assorted pharmaceuticals) trying to navigate landscapes, relationships, and his own connection to the past without losing his dignity or his sense of place. He succeeds at all of this, finally, but only after some grimly honest self-assessments followed by moral slippages followed by still more self-scrutiny. It’s not Dr. Phil, but it’s also not Cheech and Chong or Carlos Casteneda. Drugs are a part of things for Dyer, but they are mostly familiar companions that he takes along while trying to find a moral home. The prose is stunning, the descriptions of place clear-eyed and sharply rendered, the dialogue quirky and real. I couldn’t stop reading it, couldn’t stop wondering what Dyer would show me next.

Dyer as a writer has several layers, and so I want to recommend another of his books that I read last year. It was a gift from daughter Laura entitled But Beautiful, and consists of about a dozen lightly fictionalized portraits of jazz artists from the classic age—Ellington, Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Art Pepper and others. Like Yoga, the writing here is almost flawless, and Dyer makes you want to listen to the music again, hear it again, but differently maybe.


]]> Frankenstein 18490 This is an alternate cover edition for ISBN 9780141439471

'Now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart ...'

Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.

Based on the third edition of 1831, this volume contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley's preface to the first edition. This revised edition includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with 'A Fragment' by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori's 'The Vampyre: A Tale'.]]> 288 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Jim 4
But while I was right about the prose, for the most part, I was wrong about the story. The story isn't so much about Dr. Frankenstein (who snivels and rants and stays sick much of the time) but about the unnamed monster Frankenstein creates--a monster who is born into a world where he can find no one like himself, who teaches himself human language, finds comfort in the well-being of others, and wants nothing more from Frankenstein than a newly made Eve to share his lonely Adam-like life. Because the monster harms a couple of people in understandable anger and frustration and because Frankenstein, as a punishment, refuses to create a partner for him, more death and mayhem result. But the ending is less a tragedy about Frankenstein than a tragedy about the monster he creates: it is the monster who, against all odds, achieves self-knowledge, and it is he who seeks out his own self-destruction because of what he's done. The book is much smarter and much more sophisticated than what has been done to it, and I think Mary Shelley should sue. ]]> 3.77 1818 Frankenstein
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
name: Jim
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1818
rating: 4
read at: 2009/03/14
date added: 2009/03/17
shelves:
review:
I'm not sure why it's taken me so long to get to this extraordinary novel. It's probably the usual reasons: I thought I already knew the story (movies and cartoons took care of that), as well as the story's meaning (bad things happen when humans play god). I also had and have a fairly serious aversion to prose that aims for rhetorical grandeur as in "...the power of the storm was above--its echoing thunders had scarcely an interval of rest--its thick heavy rain forced its way through the canopying foliage, whilst the blue forked lightning seemed to fall and radiate at his very feet...." for instance.

But while I was right about the prose, for the most part, I was wrong about the story. The story isn't so much about Dr. Frankenstein (who snivels and rants and stays sick much of the time) but about the unnamed monster Frankenstein creates--a monster who is born into a world where he can find no one like himself, who teaches himself human language, finds comfort in the well-being of others, and wants nothing more from Frankenstein than a newly made Eve to share his lonely Adam-like life. Because the monster harms a couple of people in understandable anger and frustration and because Frankenstein, as a punishment, refuses to create a partner for him, more death and mayhem result. But the ending is less a tragedy about Frankenstein than a tragedy about the monster he creates: it is the monster who, against all odds, achieves self-knowledge, and it is he who seeks out his own self-destruction because of what he's done. The book is much smarter and much more sophisticated than what has been done to it, and I think Mary Shelley should sue.
]]> <![CDATA[Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories]]> 1753685 (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.

Tobias Wolff’s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,� as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.

Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”]]> 400 Tobias Wolff 1400044596 Jim 5
I first read Wolff at the recommendation of my friend Paul from Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City. At the store, Paul handed me a copy of This Boy's Life and then insisted that I also take The Duke of Deception, written by Toby's brother Geoffrey. The brothers were separated when their parents were divorced, Toby living with his mother, Geoffrey with his father. Both wrote memoirs about the experience, and both make clear how complicated their parents were. When Wolff published Old School in 2003, I immediately added it to the list of recommended readings in my adolescent literature class. If you haven't had a chance to read his work, I think he'll reward any time you can give him. ]]> 4.17 2008 Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
author: Tobias Wolff
name: Jim
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/10
date added: 2009/03/10
shelves:
review:
Toby Wolff is one of those writers--Richard Ford, Alice Munroe, Ian McEwan, and Phillip Roth are others--who always set me back on my heels with their unflinching, clear-eyed view of human aspiration and failure. This collection of Wolff's stories can be read front to back, and in every piece I found something to think hard about. There are some classics from Wolff's earlier work. "Hunters in the Snow"and "Desert Breakdown, 1968," for instance, are sobering reminders how characters can talk themselves out of commitment and into swamps of self-absorption, while a newer story--"The White Bible" features a middle-aged English teacher confronting the Iranian father of one of her students in a parking lot, unable to convince him that his son is not the academic star the father needs him to be. Though the characters always seem somehow familiar, Wolff consistently makes them visible in new and unsettling ways.

I first read Wolff at the recommendation of my friend Paul from Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City. At the store, Paul handed me a copy of This Boy's Life and then insisted that I also take The Duke of Deception, written by Toby's brother Geoffrey. The brothers were separated when their parents were divorced, Toby living with his mother, Geoffrey with his father. Both wrote memoirs about the experience, and both make clear how complicated their parents were. When Wolff published Old School in 2003, I immediately added it to the list of recommended readings in my adolescent literature class. If you haven't had a chance to read his work, I think he'll reward any time you can give him.
]]> <![CDATA[Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass]]> 36529
An astonishing orator and a skillful writer, Douglass became a newspaper editor, a political activist, and an eloquent spokesperson for the civil rights of African Americans. He lived through the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the beginning of segregation. He was celebrated internationally as the leading black intellectual of his day, and his story still resonates in ours.]]> 158 Frederick Douglass 1580495761 Jim 5
I read it on my new Kindle, which Peg and I gave to each other as birthday gifts. We are serious fans, using them to read both books and the NY Times every day. The device changes the reading experience, but in a very comfortable way.



]]> 4.08 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
author: Frederick Douglass
name: Jim
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1845
rating: 5
read at: 2009/03/01
date added: 2009/03/01
shelves:
review:
I'm embarrassed to say that until now I had only read excerpts from this eloquent, powerful book that has so much to say about racism, ignorance, religion, anger, and dignity. Reading it is part of a promise I've made to myself to read books that aren't new and that I probably should have read but haven't. The list of those books gets longer every time I think about it.

I read it on my new Kindle, which Peg and I gave to each other as birthday gifts. We are serious fans, using them to read both books and the NY Times every day. The device changes the reading experience, but in a very comfortable way.




]]> <![CDATA[The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America]]> 1870771 The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told--until "The Ten-Cent Plague." David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.
When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. "The Ten-Cent Plague "shows how--years before music--comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.]]> 434 David Hajdu 0374187673 Jim 4
The reading project made me want to look back to the origins of graphic texts, and this book is a first rate popular history of a particular period in their development. From the mid-1930's through the 1950's, comic books were growing in sophistication, in popularity, and in the range of genres, characters, and topics they introduced--crime, horror, romance, and the supernatural among them. In the late 40's and early 50's however, an enormously powerful political/moral backlash against comic books swept the country, with televised congressional hearings, apoplectic newspaper editorials, wide-spread censorship, and, worst of all, publicly supported book burnings in which students were offered rewards for trading in comic books, which were destined for the fire, for "good" literature which would make them all more wholesome. In one community, kids who participated in the book burning were given a letter that said in part, "Dear Young Reader. You have performed a great service to your country today, by getting rid of those crime and horror books. Those books were like enemies who were trying to destroy good American boys and girls....America is not a land of crime, horror, murder, hatred, and bloodshed. America is a land of good, strong, law-abiding people who read good books, think good thoughts, do great work, love God and their neighbor. That's America."

You get the picture. The book is a reminder of how often the books kids enjoy are used against them and how easily we assume that reading about scary, bad stuff will make kids do scary, bad stuff. ]]> 3.87 2008 The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
author: David Hajdu
name: Jim
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2009/02/25
date added: 2009/02/26
shelves:
review:
For the last two years, I've been reading graphic narratives with a small group of doctoral students, and I came to this book because of my conversations with them. We've been concentrating on 'serious' graphic narratives (Speigelman's Maus, Satrapi's Persepolis, Sacco's Palestine, Thompson's Blankets, etc.) as opposed to the 'classic' authors (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner) because we were finding that graphic narratives, though immensely rich and often deserving of the closest of readings, were not getting a whole lot of respect in scholarship or in classrooms. Too often they were represented as a bridge for 'struggling' readers or as an entertaining break from canonical literature for more successful readers. But in our discussions we found that these narratives, far from being naive or simplistic, actually raised a lot of important questions about how graphic images convey meaning and how verbal and graphic messages can both complement and complicate each other.

The reading project made me want to look back to the origins of graphic texts, and this book is a first rate popular history of a particular period in their development. From the mid-1930's through the 1950's, comic books were growing in sophistication, in popularity, and in the range of genres, characters, and topics they introduced--crime, horror, romance, and the supernatural among them. In the late 40's and early 50's however, an enormously powerful political/moral backlash against comic books swept the country, with televised congressional hearings, apoplectic newspaper editorials, wide-spread censorship, and, worst of all, publicly supported book burnings in which students were offered rewards for trading in comic books, which were destined for the fire, for "good" literature which would make them all more wholesome. In one community, kids who participated in the book burning were given a letter that said in part, "Dear Young Reader. You have performed a great service to your country today, by getting rid of those crime and horror books. Those books were like enemies who were trying to destroy good American boys and girls....America is not a land of crime, horror, murder, hatred, and bloodshed. America is a land of good, strong, law-abiding people who read good books, think good thoughts, do great work, love God and their neighbor. That's America."

You get the picture. The book is a reminder of how often the books kids enjoy are used against them and how easily we assume that reading about scary, bad stuff will make kids do scary, bad stuff.
]]> <![CDATA[The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao]]> 297673
Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.]]> 335 Junot Díaz 1594489580 Jim 5 3.89 2007 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
author: Junot Díaz
name: Jim
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2007
rating: 5
read at: 2009/02/21
date added: 2009/02/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Water for Elephants 43641
Beautifully written, Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford.]]> 368 Sara Gruen 1565125606 Jim 3 4.11 2006 Water for Elephants
author: Sara Gruen
name: Jim
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2009/02/15
date added: 2009/02/15
shelves:
review:
I think I came to this book with something of an attitude: it had gotten pretty good reviews and a number of friends had enjoyed it, but I wasn't sure if a whimsical novel about circus life was what I wanted right now. After 50 pages or so, however, I found the book was anything but whimsical. The circus life is there in all of its crushing glare (all the way down to a cruel ringmaster with a waxed handlebar mustache), but there's also a raw violence, some of it sexual, that keeps you reading through the cliches and some of the often overwrought dialogue. The episodic story line is glued together by a not entirely believable passion between the narrator, Jacob, and Marlena, who rides the elephant of the book's title. She's in a bad marriage, he's a young and idealistic virgin in search of true love. You get the picture. Interspersed with this narrative line are chapters that flash forward to Jacob in his 90's, now living in a retirement community. There are some moments of quiet humor in these sections, but I'm not sure that they carry their weight. So I'm still ambivalent. I liked it enough to finish it, but I wouldn't buy it as a gift for anyone.
]]> The Glass Castle 7445 THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.]]> 288 Jeannette Walls 074324754X Jim 5 4.32 2005 The Glass Castle
author: Jeannette Walls
name: Jim
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2009/02/10
date added: 2009/02/10
shelves:
review:
A really hard read about a young woman growing up with parents who are devastatingly smart and sometimes caring, but also searingly alcoholic, distracted, thoughtless, and cruel. The writing sings.
]]> The Indian Clerk 210113 485 David Leavitt 1596910402 Jim 4 3.56 2007 The Indian Clerk
author: David Leavitt
name: Jim
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2008/02/09
date added: 2009/02/09
shelves:
review:
A smart, tragic, and sometimes funny novel about the poverty-afflicted Indian mathematician who came to Cambridge University in the early 20th century to work with some of the best minds of the West--Russell, Keynes, Moore, and others. Very nicely done.
]]> A Box of Matches 28231
Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.]]> 192 Nicholson Baker 0375706038 Jim 5 3.72 2003 A Box of Matches
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Jim
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2009/02/09
date added: 2009/02/09
shelves:
review:
A Christmas gift from my oldest daughter Laura, the book is a minimalist, episodic, almost diary-like first person account of a father who gets up before the rest of the family every morning, lights a fire, and thinks about what matters. There a lot there that I can't really describe.
]]> <![CDATA[Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization]]> 1948985
With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, Human Smoke re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to war and in so doing challenges some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen. Baker reminds us, for instance, not to forget that it was thanks in great part to Churchill and England that Mussolini ascended to power so quickly, and that, before leading the United States against Nazi Germany, a young FDR spent much of his time lobbying for a restriction in the number of Jews admitted to Harvard. Conversely, Human Smoke also reminds us of those who had the foresight to anticipate the coming bloodshed and the courage to oppose the tide of history, as Gandhi demonstrated when he made his symbolic walk to the ocean -- for which he was immediately imprisoned by the British.

Praised by critics and readers alike for his gifted writing and exquisitely observant eye, Baker offers a combination of sweeping narrative history and a series of finely delineated vignettes of the individuals and moments that shaped history that is guaranteed to spark new dialogue on the subject.]]> 576 Nicholson Baker 1416567844 Jim 5 4.05 2008 Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization
author: Nicholson Baker
name: Jim
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2008/02/09
date added: 2009/02/09
shelves:
review:
A powerful, non-fictional work that attempts a portrait of events just before World War II by offering short, vignette like episodes involving Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, and less famous actors.
]]> Revolutionary Road 48328 355 Richard Yates Jim 4 3.92 1961 Revolutionary Road
author: Richard Yates
name: Jim
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2009/02/09
date added: 2009/02/09
shelves:
review:
Dark and Updike-lie portrait of suburban marriage. The prose is amazing--thus the Updike comparison. Maybe you had to live through this period before you can get it. It seems so odd from this distance in time.
]]> A Bend in the River 5845 336 V.S. Naipaul 0330487140 Jim 5 3.78 1979 A Bend in the River
author: V.S. Naipaul
name: Jim
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1979
rating: 5
read at: 2008/02/09
date added: 2009/02/09
shelves:
review:
A really disturbing and moving portrait of post-colonial Africa. It's 30 years old now, but still seems relevant.
]]>