New Rules

Let’s face it. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is full of naughty words and questionable authorial decisions. Mark Twain’s overuse of he H-word is only the start. (I have to use “H-word” as code for “N-word,” which is upsetting enough.) I’ve been authorized by Professor Alan Gribben of Auburn University to pick up the baton he so ably carried into the national limelight and run the novel through another round of edits. Here’s my back-of-the-publisher’s-press-release list of necessary changes:

Send the manuscript through Spellcheck™. I mean, “sivilized”?! Come on. To be honest, I can’t even understand why people think this is such a great book, when Twain couldn’t even spell.

References to events in U.S. History tending toward anything other than a reverence for American Exceptionalism that Glenn Beck would approve: Deleted.

The sarcastic parts: Out.

Suggestions that Christians and businessmen have on occasion behaved in anything less than a fully Christ-like fashion: Cut.

“Harelip” is an insensitive term for people born with cleft lips. Henceforth, change every mention of “the Harelip” to “the pre-operative plastic surgery patient.”

This is America. No one around here knows what a “Dauphin” is and can’t be troubled to look it up on dictionary.com, and the name “The Dolphin” serves only to confuse. Replace “Dauphin” and “The Dolphin” with “The Pretender—Not Royalty at All, and Certainly Not a Marine Mammal.”

“Pap” is a disrespectful way to refer to Huck’s father. Replace “Pap” with “the esteemed Chairman of the local Tea Party.” (Seriously. Check out Pap’s soliloquy from Chapter VI, which Tim flagged for me way back last year.

Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger SLAVE there from Ohio–a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger SLAVE vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin.

Sound familiar? But I digress.)

Say what you want about these edits, but Professor Gribben had it right: it will surely be easier to assign our version to 21^st-century students. Because our version will be eight pages long, and we’ll post all the answers to the test on the Internet.

(Please also see this new edition of the novel, ed.)

It’s Bowdlerizing Time, Part II

Ripped from today’s headlines!

I knew that people would have fun with the classics along the lines that Tim suggested below. I just didn’t think those people would have control of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Best Non-Fiction I Read in 2010

As always, the rule for my annual list is that for a book to make it here, I have to have read it for the first time this calendar year. It may or may not have been published in 2010.

I’ve learned something extremely important from the first two books on my list: Anyone can write a great book in two easy steps! This program is foolproof. Here are the steps:

1. Become a brilliant poet.
2. Write a prose memoir.

It’s that easy! Step 1 might be a little tricky, though.  My favorites:

Natasha Trethewey, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I’ve loved Natasha Trethewey’s poetry from the jump (full disclosure: I’m also lucky enough to count her as a friend), but as a historian I’m kind of in her wheelhouse: most of Trethewey’s poems have to do with change over time and memory. She obviously brings these same concerns to her memoir, in which she writes lyrically about regional and personal devastation–and rebuilding. How many ways can a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet break your heart? More than you think.

Patti Smith, Just Kids. OK. Enough already. The proprietor of this very blog finally wore me down and I read Just Kids last week. I didn’t think it could possibly live up to the hype, but Smith blew me away; she has earned every last letter of the praise she’s received from Tim and everyone else for this book that evokes a time and place and way of life completely and lovingly. I had always assumed that when I finally got my New York City time machine up and running I’d set the dial for 1942 so that I could bend an elbow with Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould at McSorley’s Ale House. But now the first stop might have to be the lobby of the Hotel Chelsea in 1969. I guess we all like to think that we live in ways that keep us open to all of the possibilities that life offers, but Patti and Robert set the bar a hell of a lot higher than most.

Next up, two entirely unrelated oral histories:

Terry Pluto, Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association. A cult favorite among basketball fans, it was first published in 1990. I just got around to it, and I’m glad I did. You literally couldn’t make up more than half of what allegedly went on in the ABA, which had to have set world records for financial illiteracy and profligacy (and the team owners were worse than the players). It’s important to keep in mind that much of what is remembered here couldn’t have happened as reported, but then again we don’t always have to let the truth get in the way of a fun story. Here’s a representative anecdote: Bob Costas’s first job out of journalism school was as the play-by-play man for the St. Louis Spirits. One night he was late to a game; he missed nearly all of the first quarter, so his radio station just broadcast the ambient noise from the arena. Costas was sure he’d be fired, so he was moping around the hotel afterward. The team’s star, Marvin “Fly” Barnes, tried to cheer him up by telling him, “Hey, bro, don’t worry about it. I’ve been looking for a little white dude to drive me around in my Rolls-Royce.” A tremendously fun read.

Alessandro Portelli, They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. I’m a series editor for the Oxford Oral History Series, which published this book, so its inclusion on this list constitutes a big, honking conflict of interest. But I don’t care. It’s an absolutely gorgeous book and a celebration of humanity. Calling it a labor of love doesn’t come close to describing Portelli’s relationship to the people who tell their story in these pages and the work it took to put this together over a couple of decades. Portelli, a professor of American Literature at the University of Rome, is also the best scholarly oral historian working in English.

Next, some social history:

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I won’t pretend to have read this one all the way through, but I’ve seen enough to know that it’s magnificent in a lot of ways. I don’t agree with everything Wilkerson does here, but the way she tells a macro-level, truly epic, story through the lives of three individuals is mighty impressive. I hope this book will spark conversations about how the Great Migration turned out for hundreds of thousands of the people who headed north (in short: not always so great).

Multiple authors, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is one of the most remarkable groups of people ever to assemble in the United States. Here 52 women of SNCC, people who had surprisingly little in common across the board except for a commitment to make America into a more democratic and just place, share an intensely personal collective history of the organization and the work they did from the inside out. Another tremendously heartfelt labor of love.

And finally,

Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia. I can honestly say that I’ve never wanted to visit Siberia and I still don’t, despite Frazier’s archly infectious enthusiasm for his subject. But I’m really glad that I went along for the ride with one of the best writers around.

The best work of non-fiction I read this year was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It’s thoughtful, thought-provoking, and thoroughly human, sometimes maddening and sometimes uplifting. I read it early this year and still think about it constantly. My hat’s off to Rebecca Skloot.

Dishonorable mention: Charles Pierce, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free and Michael Lewis, Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. I’ve enjoyed Pierce’s musings on NPR from time to time, and the image with which he begins this post is the funniest and truest thing I’ve ever read on a sports blog. (As a Heels fan, I have to say: Rasheed may be a head case, but he’s OUR head case.) So I was excited to find that Pierce had written on this topic. Unfortunately, saying he mailed it in would be an insult to anyone who still goes to the trouble of mailing things.

Now look at the cover of Panic. Do you notice that it says “Edited by” in tiny letters? I didn’t when I bought it. I thought I was getting what would become The Big Short–I was about six months too early–but instead I got a collection of reprinted Dave Barry columns and articles from The Economist. Boo.

The Smell of Damp Flags in a Hall

Run, don’t walk, to this article from the New York Times Magazine about Franz Kafka’s literary estate. Life imitates absurdist fiction.

To summarize, Kafka probably asked his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished papers upon Kafka’s death. But nearly a century later, the papers remain very much unburned, and are worth tens of millions of dollars. An Israeli court will soon decide whether the archive rightfully belongs to a crazy cat lady with no relation at all to Franz Kafka or to an entity, the State of Israel, that did not exist during Kafka’s lifetime. Kafkaesque!

(I wish I could link to a clip from the great movie “The Squid and the Whale” where the teenage boy who’s trying to impress a girl–and who clearly hasn’t read the book–describes The Metamorphosis as “Kafkaesque.”)

The Litigant

There’s so much to love about this story, but my favorite is this exchange:

According to Brod’s biography of Kafka, the two met at a lecture Brod gave on Schopenhauer, during which Kafka objected to Brod’s characterization of Nietzsche as a fraud. Walking home together afterward, they discussed their favorite writers. Brod praised a passage from the story “Purple Death” in which Gustav Meyrink “compared butterflies to great opened-out books of magic.” Kafka, who took no stock in magic butterflies, countered with a phrase from Hugo von Hoffmansthal: “the smell of damp flags in a hall.” Having uttered these words, he fell into a profound silence that left a great impression on Brod.

That’s some mighty fine brooding right there. But really.

In the DeLillo Papers, Part Three

Part One is here. Part Two is here.

Jim Bouton’s Ball Four is known as the first “tell-all” book about professional sports—in this case, baseball—but it’s much more than that. First published in 1970, it told the story of Bouton’s efforts during the 1969 season to resurrect his pitching career with the expansion Seattle Pilots—a team that was so ill-fated that it left Seattle after one season and became the Milwaukee Brewers.

Bouton displayed an irreverent, even subversive, sense of humor and an absolutely original view of the world around him, not to mention some serious “stuff” as a writer. There are good reasons for the book’s popularity and staying power. A lot of what he wrote in 1970 is conventional wisdom among modern fans, but it was considered radical then. Many readers then would have said to themselves, “What?! I thought baseball players visited sick kids in hospitals in their free time. This doesn’t sound like the guys I’ve read about in the sports section.” Bouton portrayed his fellow ballplayers as dumb, juvenile, moral degenerates. But he also made them seem like a lot of fun, and if you’ve ever wished you could be one of them, you’ll want that even more after reading Ball Four.

Most famously, Bouton pulled the curtains back and exposed ballplayers’ illicit practices like popping “greenies” (amphetamines, which many ate on game days the way some people eat altoids) and “beaver shooting” (if you don’t know what that means, I’m not going to be the one to tell you). I had also thought that he introduced the world to the term “road beef,” but in re-reading the book for this post I see that I was mistaken in thinking he had used that charming turn of phrase.  Bouton did allude to players’ infidelities on the road, but ironically, it looks like it may have been that Cervantes of the Weight Room Jose Canseco who first used it in print, at least in the baseball context. (Again, if you don’t know what this refers to, you’ll have to find out from someone else.)

What I’m trying to tell you is that the book is a fun read, and it made a splash in the culture beyond the shallow pool of baseball literature.  For better or worse, it quickly became iconic. There is no chance whatsoever that Don DeLillo didn’t read it before he wrote “Pafko at the Wall.” None. As you’ll see, I can’t prove that, but I know it.

Read more »

In the DeLillo Papers, Part Two

Part One is here.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” With this compact, beautiful, Whitmanian sentence Don DeLillo introduces Cotter Martin, a major character in “Pafko at the Wall/The Triumph of Death.” Cotter, a teenager from Harlem, has skipped school to watch the decisive third game of a playoff series between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ home stadium, on October 3, 1951.

Cotter can’t afford a ticket to the game so, with a group of fellow truants, takes a run at the entrance, jumps the turnstiles, and escapes a stadium cop. DeLillo achieves a slow-motion effect as he describes that action:

Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he’ll land and which way he’ll run and even though he knows they will be after him the second he touches ground, even though he’ll be in danger for the next several hours—watching left and right—there is less fear in him now. …

Then you lose him in the crowd.

Cotter finds purchase in the left-field stands; Bill Waterson, a white businessman in his early forties, strikes up a conversation and a temporary friendship with him as they endure the game together. (Lost in the collective memory of the contest is the fact that the Giants misplayed balls in the field, made base-running mistakes and otherwise had a hell of a time generating any offense. They probably didn’t deserve to win the game, and up until the last pitch it seemed certain they wouldn’t. Cotter and Bill and all the other Giants fans there that day had to have felt like they were bleeding from a thousand cuts—until they didn’t.)

Read more »

In the DeLillo Papers, Part One

I had to drive through Austin last month, and I arranged my trip so that I could spend a few hours in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas. If the HRC isn’t the most important English-language literary archive in the world, it’s close. I went there to nose around in Don DeLillo’s papers, hoping to find a smoking gun that would prove a pet theory of mine—more about which in a future post.

DeLillo published a novella under the title “Pafko at the Wall” in Harper’s in 1992. Intrigued by the cover photo, I bought the magazine off of a supermarket newsstand in Chapel Hill, N.C., and devoured it. “Pafko at the Wall” instantly became one of my favorite pieces of writing anywhere, and it still is. It later showed up as “The Triumph of Death,” the prologue to DeLillo’s 1997 master opus Underworld.  In the years since I’ve tried to put a finger on why I love this story so much. For starters, the writing is incredible; I’d put the first sentence right up there with “Call me Ishmael” in the annals of great American letters. It also has to do with the characters who show up in it—historical figures, to be sure, but I always figured that DeLillo had to have made up their being together in the same place (New York City’s Polo Grounds, the home of the baseball Giants) at the same time (on the the last day of the 1951 season, when the Giants finished a three-game series against the Brooklyn Dodgers to decide who would play the New York Yankees in that year’s World Series). How else could you explain a story in which Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover take in a ballgame together? That’s way too far-fetched to have really happened–or so I had always assumed.

It has race relations as a major subplot. That’s kind of my thing.

It obviously didn’t hurt that it takes an iconic moment in baseball history as its subject, or at least its backdrop. For a guy whose nickname on the high school baseball team was “Team Geek”—because, according to my teammates, it was unheard of for a baseball player to read books—literary fiction riffing on baseball history was pretty much a hanging curve down the middle of the plate. (Not that I could ever have done much with a non-metaphorical curveball, hanging or otherwise, anyway–which, if we’re telling the truth, probably does more to explain the nickname.)

My trip to the Ransom Center allowed me to examine DeLillo’s research materials and first drafts for “Pafko at the Wall.” The research he did was voluminous. It includes a hand-written transcript of Russ Hodges’s radio call of Bobby Thomson’s game-deciding home run, much of which ended up in “Pafko/Triumph” verbatim, and photocopies of the next day’s New York Times, in which one-half of the front page covers Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” and the other half reports on a successful Soviet nuclear test. (If you’ve read the novella, you know that this worked its way into another subplot in the story.) It includes a photomontage of scenes from an unidentified season’s spring training—clipped from a magazine, possibly Look—inscribed “From Philip Roth.”

It includes an obituary of Donnie Moore, the California Angels pitcher who never recovered mentally from a decisive home run he served up in the 1986 playoffs, alongside stories about Ralph Branca, the Dodgers pitcher who served up the game-winning homer in 1951, but made his peace with it. DeLillo wrote this note to himself in a cheap spiral notebook: “Branca was able to survive the crushing defeat because he was white—given every chance to be the celebrated figure. Compare with Donnie Moore, who killed himself after giving up a home run in a key game.”

Read more »

On plagiarism, redux

I’ve had plagiarism on my mind lately, so this news about historian Stephen Ambrose caught my eye.

Ambrose had a long history with the subject. Fortunately, he was called out shortly before he died in 2002 for his habit of repeating things that others had written without putting quotation marks around those things. That’s textbook plagiarism, but because Ambrose more often than not included footnotes that led readers back to the original sources of the words he had appropriated as his own, he did not receive much more than a slap on the wrist from the historical community or from his legions of readers. And lest you think that this problem only cropped up after Ambrose got famous and put together a factory that churned out book after book under his name, you should know that he plagiarized his dissertation and first book. I don’t doubt that a thorough review would show that he plagiarized everything in between, too.

It now appears that Ambrose’s fraud didn’t stop with plagiarism; not only did he appropriate others’ words, he flat out made shit up. And then based his entire, fabulously successful career on that shit he made up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you own a book with Ambrose’s name on the cover, you should not trust a single word in it.

Maybe Tom Hanks can start making movies based on non-fiction books that contain only non-fiction.

On Plagiarism

I make my living as a university professor—a teacher who also writes books. This semester I’m teaching US History Since 1929, an upper-division course, one of my favorite classes. I like it in part because US History Since 1932 was the one class I took in college that made me want to go to grad school and become a history professor. (Perhaps more to the point, I decided that the professor who taught it, William E. Leuchtenburg, was who I wanted to be when I grew up. More about him in a moment.) I think I like teaching this course because it’s easier for me to imagine that there’s a student like the young me whom I need to inspire in this class than in my other classes.

I put a lot of time into thinking about the books I will assign, the writing assignments, what I’ll do in a given day’s class to stimulate discussion, etc. There is no relationship that I can decipher between the amount of time I put into a given task and how well the students react to it. Some things just work and some things don’t. I slave over some ideas that land with a thud, and I pull some out of my rear end that soar. If enough things work, we’re all happy. When they don’t work, everything can go downhill very, very fast.

Earlier this semester I assigned a book about the 1932 presidential election between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It’s a good book and I thought the students might engage it because in retrospect the 1932 contest has so many parallels to the 2008 election. They found it a little dry, but I thought it would provide enough fodder for good discussions that even if they didn’t particularly care for it, everything would be OK. That’s what ended up happening. They all wrote their reaction papers and moved on.

Except for one student. I only made it through the first three sentences of her paper. The third sentence just sounded weird, so I typed it into google. Sure enough, she had lifted that sentence and 2 others from her introduction straight from an essay she found on the internet. That’s as cut-and-dry a case of plagiarism as you’ll ever see (when I looked closely at it, I even noticed that the parts she copied and pasted were in 11-point font, and the rest of the paragraph was in 12), so I gave her a 0 and didn’t bother to read the rest. But then that was the last thing I thought about that night, and it was the first thing I thought about the next morning. I was so mad about it I threw up while brushing my teeth.

I emailed the whole class and told them they had to upload their papers to turnitin.com, the site that uses plagiarism-detection software to bust cheaters. Meanwhile, I started having all these thoughts about what a failure I must be that someone would try to pull this on me. Why didn’t I explicitly tell the students that they couldn’t copy and paste their essays from internet sites that aren’t even any good in the first place? What kind of idiot must this person think I am that she thought she could get away with this? I can guarantee you that I spent 100 times as many thinking and worrying about this than the cheater did.

When the student finally ran her paper through turnitin, the software determined that she had plagiarized seven sections of her essay from two sources, which together comprised more than half of her paper. The second source, from which she pilfered an entire paragraph, was an online chapter of The FDR Years, a terrific collection of essays that I’ve assigned in previous iterations of this class. The FDR Years was written by William E. Leuchtenburg, the man who encouraged me to go to grad school and wrote my letters of recommendation.

I had to go to my class the next day and read them the fucking riot act about plagiarism. What I didn’t tell them was that if you plagiarize, I will fail you (and I will take it personally and I will take it 100 times more seriously than you will), but if you plagiarize my mentor, I will hate you. That day the atmosphere in class was as toxic as it could possibly have been. But the student realized soon thereafter that she could withdraw from the class without penalty from the university (because this was the first time she had been caught cheating, even though she’s a senior and I know damn well this is not the first time she’s done it), so she did so. Without her the class has been great. For whatever reason, I feel like I’m doing the best teaching I’ve ever done. It’s funny how quickly the dynamics of a class can turn on a dime.

I’ve reflected a lot over the past couple of weeks about who this student cheated and how. Herself and her family, obviously: her parents paid a lot of money for her to sit in this class for a month and a half and learn exactly nothing and receive zero credit for it. Her classmates, too, including one who timed the delivery of her third child for spring break so she could get her assignments in on schedule and get back to class with as little time lost as possible, and another who told me last week that he’s an Iraq War vet dealing with PTSD. They, of course, managed to turn in papers that they had written. She cheated me, but I guess I get paid in part to deal with that kind of disappointment. She cheated Professor Leuchtenburg; even though she didn’t exactly harm him materially, she stole from him the currency of his profession, his ideas and the way he expresses them.

I’ve thought about what it would feel like to have someone plagiarize from one of the books I’ve written. I’m strangely neutral about it (at least in the abstract; talk to me again if it happens in real life). It won’t be like they’re stealing from me, unless they’re publishing my words in another book without attribution, and even then, there’s so little money to be stolen from authors of academic books that “stealing” doesn’t seem like the right word to use. No, the plagiarizer steals the expectation we have as readers that what we’re reading is real, no matter the context of what we’re reading. The plagiarizer steals from us.

Let’s see you top this, Mr. Author-Interview Man

I hope Tim is taking notes. This is how it’s done.

That must be some hangover

Tim sure has been quiet lately.

In all seriousness, I wonder how any father of a son, much less the father of a newborn son, much less a native New Orleanian who’s rooted for the Saints all his life, could have watched this without melting down completely.

I don’t even like the Saints under normal circumstances, but that video gave me almost as many chills as this one did the first time I saw it. (I have a thing for the receiver.) Now I love those guys!

Back to the Future!

From the You Couldn’t Make This Up If You Tried Department.

Update:

Another great moment in civic oversight.

And a publisher drops the ball in a spectacularly racially insensitive way – for the second time!

New Edition

I am informed that Tim and Jen have successfully completed a collaborative project: a healthy baby boy. They haven’t named him yet, so I’m sure they’ll appreciate seeing your suggestions in the Comments.

I’ll put in a plug for Inman: not only does the name evoke one of Atlanta’s nicest neighborhoods, it’s the handle of one of the most memorable literary characters of the past twenty or so years, the protagonist of Cold Mountain.

Mazel tov, y’all.

Catching up with Valentino Achak Deng

In today’s column Nicholas Kristof brings us up to speed on Valentino Achak Deng’s efforts to build a modern high school in his hometown, Marial Bai.  Valentino and Dave Eggers have plowed every penny of their profits from the sale of What is the What into the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. If you haven’t bought the book yet, this would be a good time to get started.

Dr J’s Favorite Non-Fiction of ’09

OK, so my annual list of The Best Non-fiction Books I Read This Year is a little skimpy this time around, but what it lacks in sheer numbers it more than makes up for in total awesomeness. I was awful busy in 2009 putting my own book to bed (see if you can guess which one is mine), so I read less for pleasure than I normally do.

Having said that (apologies to Larry David), here’s the list:

The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965. Author Sam Stephenson is an old friend, so I’ve watched this one develop for years and I knew I would love it. I’m hardly an impartial observer.  But as Sam himself would say, “Holy f**king dogshit is this awesome.” Dwight Garner, the New York Times’ reviewer, considers it the most significant coffee table book of the year.  While I wouldn’t necessarily classify it that way, I can’t disagree. “The book is an elegiac stew of sight and sound,” Garner writes, “and a singularly weird, vital and thrumming American document.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. You can learn more about the project through a multi-part WNYC radio documentary series here. Honestly: I cannot possibly recommend this book highly enough.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, by Robin D.G. Kelley.  I’m a big fan of RDGK’s work as a historian and Monk is one of my favorite musicians. I’m the target demographic. I don’t think I was quite prepared, though, for how great this biography would be.  It’s clearly a labor of love for Kelley; he’s the only person in the world who could have written this book. This is an idiosyncratic and meticulously detailed chronicle of one of the most unique artist-geniuses the US has ever produced. (Monk arranged and rehearsed the Town Hall concert that put him on the map in Eugene Smith’s loft; see above.) The way Kelley deals with Monk’s mental illness is thoughtful, generous, and heartbreaking.

Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries.  All this one does is pull back the curtain on a too-long ignored corner of the civil rights struggle, introduce the world to some unforgettable freedom fighters, and rewrite the early history of Black Power.  Not bad for a first book.

Hopefully 2009 was the year when I read the last of the accounts of the Bush administration’s goings-on that made me as ashamed of my country as I’ve ever been in my life while I was reading them.  This year’s entries:

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins.  Filkins is dogged journalist, an incredible writer, and a good soul; he has since moved on to the Afghanistan beat and earlier this year stepped out of his journalist shoes to raise money for Afghan schoolgirls. (I can’t find the Times Magazine article about this behind the firewall, but it’s back there somewhere.) But this book about bumbling through the war in Iraq didn’t quite move me the way Imperial Life in the Emerald City did.
Angler : The Cheney Vice Presidency. Ugh. Why do I even bother? This book is an impressive display of investigatory journalism by Barton Gellman. It’s just that Gellman has a total creep for a subject.  How in the world are we going to explain this asshole to our grandkids?

Zeitoun has been covered elsewhere on this site.  I concur with all of the plaudits. Rather than seconding them, however, I want to use this space to give Dave Eggers another shout-out for What is the What? I assigned it to my graduate Oral History Theory and Methods class this semester and it led to one of the best classroom discussions I’ve ever been a part of.  Dave Eggers, you rock.

There are three books about the Amazon I meant to read this year but didn’t.  I’m pretty sure they would have made my list if I had:

Fordlandia and The Lost City of Z are the obvious choices.  What nearly slipped past my notice was Conquest of the Useless, which may be the granddaddy of them all. I haven’t exactly followed director Werner Herzog’s career, and I’ve never seen his movie “Fitzcarraldo.” That one was set in the Amazon, and according to all accounts Herzog made some… let’s just say questionable decisions while filming it, and this is his behind-the-scenes recount of that episode.

I’m curious about this book because Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man” is one of my favorite documentaries, easily the most unintentionally hilarious movie I’ve ever seen.  I can’t begin to explain it in a paragraph, but it revisits the life of Timothy Treadwell, whom we can charitably call a unique fellow who went off to Alaska to live with wild-ass grizzly bears. Treadwell believed that he had come to understand and commune with the grizzlies totally.  The grizzly bears, being grizzly bears and all, finally got sick of his shit and – no one could have possibly predicted this – ate him (and Treadwell recorded it). Herzog tells the story straight, which is funny in its own right, but he also drives the story along with his own narration: dime-store philosophy that he voices in Schwarzeneggerian English. Imagine the Terminator saying, “I believe Timothy tried to escape the bonds of humanity to become a bay-ah.”  I can’t possibly do it justice.

Surely Conquest of the Useless offers more of the same, in equal doses of self-importance and utter lack of self-awareness. (You know how they say Tragedy + Time = Funny?  No.  The formula should be Funny Accent + Self-Importance – Self-Awareness = Really Funny.) I think this one could be the laugh riot of the year.

Special bonus: Herzog has a new film that features Nicolas Cage trying on a New Orleans accent that will surely drive Tim crazy.  The man is a comedy genius!

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I’m very late to the party on this one, but I picked up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at my favorite vacation bookstore for a holiday read and was thoroughly pleased with my purchase.

Tim covered this one pretty well in his review, but he didn’t marvel at what for me is the main salient insight I gained into Swedish culture by reading this book: If Stieg Larsson’s depiction of his countrymen is even close to accurate, the average Swede drinks enough coffee in a week to reanimate the corpse of Dag Hammarskjold.

I also enjoyed the fact that Larsson, who was a middle-aged lefty magazine reporter in real life, created a protagonist who is a lefty magazine reporter.  The fictional (or not-so-fictional?) investigative reporter, Mickael Blomkvist, drinks a cup of coffee every eight minutes, routinely solves mystery capers, and has sex at least nine times a week–with all kinds of different women, including the titular heroine, a computer hacker with Asperger’s Syndrome.

I liked the book a lot for what it was: it had memorable characters, an original, fast-moving plot, and what I thought was a very strong sense of place (though I’ve never been to Sweden, so I can’t compare this to reality).  I look forward to reading the next installment in the series, but it will have to wait for next year’s vacation.

Best non-fiction I read for the first time in 2008

As is my wont, I’ll list the best non-fiction books I read in 2008.  Some of these were even published in 2008

Here’s my Top Ten:

Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.  I’m not sure why I keep reading books about the excesses and incompetencies of the GWB administration.  They just make my blood pressure go through the roof.  But this is the big one, and I think it’s going to be remembered for a long, long time.  Mayer’s subtitle says it all–and it’s worse than you think.  She’s not preachy, and I’ve been amazed at how much of what Mayer reported here, sourced anonymously, has since been corroborated.

Tony Horwitz, A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World.  Horwitz has carved out quite a niche for himself as our pre-eminent historical memory travel writer. Okay, maybe our only historical memory travel writer  In this book Horwitz retraces the steps of several European explorers who set foot in North America before the Pilgrims arrived.  As in his previous book Confederates in the Attic, Horwitz displays an incredible gift for finding interesting/wacky people and presenting their worldviews without coming across as judgmental–he leaves that up to the reader.

David Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story.  All works of history should be as well-written and revealing as this.  I had no idea that I could find a book about public health research and policy development so compelling.  I know that some of the BGB Crew are into public health research and policy development.  They should read this book.

Nicholas Dawidoff, The Crowd Seems Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball. Dawidoff’s memoir about growing up in a single-parent New Haven household–single because his mentally ill father lived by himself in New York City–is raw and bittersweet and comes across as achingly true.  When I was a grad student I sent Dawidoff a fan letter for a profile he wrote of Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the New York Times Magazine (since reworked and published here) and offered to allow him to hire me as a research assistant.  He mailed me back a very polite thanks-but-no-thanks letter.  So I’ve known for a while that he was raised well.  This confirmed it.

Eric Rauchway, The Great Depression and New Deal: A Very Short Introduction and Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics.  These are both readable, concise, and eye-opening.  I just wish they weren’t so relevant.  Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introduction series gets extra points for cool covers.

Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.  If you’re of a certain bent, you probably agree with me that Steve Martin’s standup comedy from the late ’70s is the most brilliant stuff ever produced in that genre.  I guess I had always assumed that most of his act was the result of absurdist stream-of-consciousness, but this short memoir reveals what a thoughtful, hard-working craftsman Martin was and is.  One of the better analyses I’ve ever read of how art is made.

Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution.  The transformation of the solidly Democratic South into the solidly Republican South is the big story in American political history between 1965 and 1985.  Crespino looks at how Mississippi whites went from being the most reviled group in American politics to the cornerstone of the modern GOP–a movement that’s very much at the heart of that larger story.

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Perlstein looks at the same big story from another direction.  Perlstein is at some times an empathetic biographer and at others slashing in his treatment of Nixon and his neuroses.  It’s a nice touch and makes for an interesting read.

Special non-fictiony work of fiction: Don DeLillio, Libra.  This is DeLillo’s imagining of a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.  Not having read the Warren report, I don’t know how many of the pieces of this puzzle are based on real people and actual events, but I don’t care.  According to me, DeLillo excels at creating worlds that are maybe five degrees off-center from reality, and I’m always slightly discombobulated when I’m reading one of his novels.  (In a good way.)  DeLillo’s version of events is so affecting that I’ll never again be able to think about this historic event as a historian should, drawing conclusions from empirical evidence.  That’s a pretty neat trick he pulled there.

Update: As is also my wont, I forgot to mention the one book around which I had intended to organize this post, Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. (Link to my review –  It’s written for a Texas publication so it focuses on the Texas experience even though Blackmon doesn’t; he focuses more on Alabama and Georgia.) I really thought this book would get some love from the major prize committees. Why hasn’t it?

Newsflash

I know you’ve always wondered what pirates eat. The Newspaper of Record provides the answer: “normal human-being food.”

I also learned from this article that pirates have spokesmen, though I have to assume that the Times’ copy editor deleted all the “Arrrrr”s and “Me hearty”s and “Swab the deck”s from this one’s speech for clarity.

All in all, this is probably the best newspaper article I’ve ever read.

American Pastoral

I don’t know how I missed out on the novels of Philip Roth for so long. Though I’d heard references to his work, read the occasional review, listened to the Fresh Air interviews, and thought, “Hey, this guy sounds interesting. I should read some of his books,” I never got around to reading any until Shortbus loaned me her copy of The Plot Against America soon after it came out. It mesmerized me.

I didn’t go back for seconds until last month, when I picked up American Pastoral for a beach trip. I wasn’t the least bit disappointed. In the course of this deceptively complex novel (while I was reading it all seemed so matter-of fact, but I still can’t quite explain its structure and how Roth’s alter ego, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, fits into the plot), Roth creates one of the most generous, humanistic, three-dimensional characters I can remember coming across, in Seymour “Swede” Levov.

The Swede is an all-American boy and great athlete who also happens to be a third-generation immigrant, inheritor of an industrial age family business (just as the US economy enters the post-industrial age), and father of a mass-murdering political radical. He carries way too much symbolism for one man to bear, but somehow he pulls it off. That’s The Swede for you.

I can’t get over Roth’s prodigious output over the span of forty years. So as I read this novel I couldn’t stop thinking about what Roth did to produce it. To crank these things out he must have to hole himself up for months at a time and get lost in his own fictional worlds, right? But to fill them with so much insight about the human condition and particularly American dilemmas, he has to be of the world and out in it–striking up conversations with strangers at supermarkets, mentally recording snippets of conversations from cocktail parties, devouring news–doesn’t he? How does he do it?.

The Blue Star

I fell in love with Tony Earley’s work when I was in college and he published a short story titled “Charlotte” in Harpers. If you had grown up in the Atlanta suburbs, as I did, and gone to college in Chapel Hill, as I did, with a bunch of people from Charlotte, you would have come to think of Charlotteans just as I did: nouveau riche johnny-come-latelies whose hometown rolled up the sidewalks at night, had no soul, and, in general, sucked. (I knew even then, of course, that Atlantans are the last people on earth who should think of anyone else in those terms, but back then we were fixin’ to host The Olympics and were Hot Stuff. Seems like eons ago.)

“Charlotte” was, on one level, about a guy who hung around a fern bar in the city of the same name where all the regulars moaned about the good ol’ days and lamented the fact that all the professional wrestlers had decamped from their city for Ted Turner’s filthy lucre. It captured what I disliked most about Charlotte and was, at least as I recall it, very, very snarky.

Tony Earley’s novels, Jim the Boy and The Blue Star, are the exact opposite of snarky. I love them anyway. They ease right up to the edge of nostalgia and sentimentality without quite tipping over.

If my folks hadn’t moved to Atlanta I would have been something like a 7th- or 8th-generation North Carolinian, and some of my people grew up in towns very much like Earley’s Yoknapatawphic Aliceville, N.C. The funny uncles in Jim the Boy and The Blue Star remind me a lot of my funny uncles. The pride of place and intense connection to family that Earley’s Jim feels, mixed with equal parts of the sheer boredom of small-town life and desire to get away from confining surroundings, strike me viscerally, even though my experience has been a few degrees removed from the experience Earley writes about so movingly. (I’m sure that my parents moved to Atlanta at least in part because their hometown was too much like Aliceville.)

One astute reviewer of The Blue Star pointed out that in these books Earley uses the techniques and conventions of young adult fiction to explore adult themes. I wish I’d been smart enough to notice that on my own, but I think it describes these novels perfectly and helps describe the tension that the novels create without seeming to create any tension at all. In any case, I identify with Earley’s characters totally and want to see them succeed and be happy.

Speaking of tension… I don’t know what it was–I guess the pollen count in the beach house where I read The Blue Star must have been really high or some sand blew in my face or something–but if you had watched me read the last 30 pages of this book, you would have seen a 37-year-old man struggling with all his might to contain a tsunami of sniffles.

I can’t wait to see what Jim gets up to next.