The Whore of Akron

The Whore of Akron, by Scott Raab, is not for everybody.  Not because it’s not interesting or written well enough, but because the topics covered here won’t necessarily resonate with anyone who hasn’t suffered through the historically unfulfilled and unlucky life of a Cleveland sports fan.  Having grown up a couple miles west of Cleveland and having done my undergraduate work at CWRU in Cleveland, I know the story and the feeling all too well.

I left Cleveland in 1990, but I’ve carried my loyalty and passion for Cleveland sports with me ever since, including the self-loathing and “Why me?” attitude that accompanied watching my beloved Indians take a lead into the bottom of the ninth inning of the 1997 World Series against the Florida Marlins only to see one of the best closers in the game blow it and then witness the Tribe lose it in extra innings.  Cleveland has not won a sports title since 1964.  We’ve come oh so close, but haven’t sealed the deal.  And it’s been a painful journey.

Raab now lives in New Jersey, but he grew up in Cleveland and was actually at the NFL Championship Game that the Browns won in 1964.  In this book, he addresses the cult of Cleveland sports through the city’s experience with LeBron James.  And he does not pull any punches.  As a journalist who’s fortunate enough (or not) to be able to get media credentials to sporting events, and as a lifelong Cleveland fan, he got to come along for the seven-year ride LeBron had through Cleveland, starting with the Cavs winning the lottery and selecting the local superstar from Akron with the #1 overall pick in the 2003 NBA draft and then “culminating” (for lack of a better word) with “The Decision”, LeBron’s primetime special in the summer of 2010 in which he ended months of suspense by announcing that he was “taking his talents to South Beach”, gathering the world together to witness him driving the proverbial dagger through the collective hearts of Cleveland fans.

Excuse me — I started talking like Scott Raab for a second there.  But that’s what this book can do to you, particularly if you’re from Cleveland, or if you’re the type of sports fan who can empathize and appreciate the struggles the city has gone through.  Raab engages in a look back, re-examining some of the things LeBron did during his tenure in Cleveland and casting doubts upon LeBron’s motives all along the way, portraying him as a selfish, greedy, unsympathetic villain who never cared for or wanted to be in Cleveland in the first place.  And Raab uses the events that unfolded around and after The Decision, including LeBron’s first season with the Miami Heat, to corroborate the suspicions he raises.

This book is clearly an indictment of LeBron James, and no one should go into it expecting any sort of objectivity.  But if you’re in the mood for some scathing, claws-out, vilification, this is your book.

Inside Scientology

I’ve always been curious and perversely fascinated by Scientology; not in the sense that I want to join, but rather that I want to understand what exactly it is and how it came to be.  We’ve all heard stories about L. Ron Hubbard and how the religion he invented was actually the result of a lark stemming from a bar bet or something like that, where he succeeded in tricking people into buying into a theory that we’re all the spawn of aliens who landed in a volcano millions of years ago, etc.  Inside Scientology:  The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman, is the result of years of painstaking research and analysis by the author in her attempt to publish the first-ever comprehensive history of Scientology.

Reitman’s book starts with a biography of Hubbard, the science fiction writer who invented Dianetics in the early 1950′s as an alternative to psychotherapy and then lost Dianetics through bankruptcy but re-emerged by repackaging his theories as Scientology.  Based on how his life is described by Reitman, how anyone believed anything Hubbard said or wrote is absolutely beyond me.

While he may have been a charismatic and engaging guy, he is portrayed as a pathological liar who never even came close to doing one tenth of the things he claimed to have done.  He told people he was a former explorer, researcher, war hero, sea captain, and a multitude of other glamorous titles, none of which were true.  But that didn’t stop people from buying into his theories of self-exploration and self-help.  After his health began to deteriorate, he secluded himself in a secret compound in California.  When he passed away in 1986, the organization was taken over by David Miscavige, by all accounts a less “crazy” but seemingly more ruthless leader, who seems to have focused far less on thinking of Scientology as a religion, but instead as a business.  And he appears to use and abuse his power to exercise unrelenting control over the Church and its members.

While this book is heralded as the first full journalistic history of Scientology and as an evenhanded account, even the most objective, evenhanded reading of it can’t mask the fact that Scientology seems to fit every stereotypical characteristic of a cult.  It is absolutely terrifying to read what people who’ve been indoctrinated into Scientology have gone through, and even more terrifying to think that sane people can be held captive the way that they are.

The Church of Scientology has got money coming out its eyeballs.  It was able to get itself classified by the IRS as a religious organization and thereby achieve tax exempt status (and the ability to maintain its books as confidential).  If you think you’ve felt pressured to tithe beyond your means by your church, you have no idea.  Individuals pay freakish amounts of money to be “audited”, something they must do to reach “Clear” status and advance along “The Bridge to Total Freedom”.

As members advance, more and more secrets of Scientology are revealed to them, and they apparently become even more eager to learn what’s behind the next level of advancement.  I would say that you can’t make this stuff up, but apparently you can, and apparently people will buy into it.  And all along the way, the Church of Scientology is just collecting that money and supposedly using it to further its mission to “clear the planet”.  But as you read this book, you see how that money is used for selfish, crazy purposes to satisfy the whims of Church leaders, and how the hierarchy of the Church fosters corruption and abuse of power.

There’s an entire chapter in the book dedicated to Tom Cruise, the most outspoken of the celebrities who’ve joined the Church of Scientology.  Celebrities have long been an avenue the Church has used to grow its appeal, and the things it does to court celebrities would blow your mind — complete with spending millions of dollars to renovate one of its compounds before Cruise’s first visit there.  The leaders who meet with Cruise fake their way through a bunch of stuff specifically to make it look like Scientology is perfect for Cruise, and they continue to cater to him outside of the normal protocols until he’s hooked.  Of course, when he reaches OT3 level and learns that the stuff about the aliens is actually for real, he freaks out and backs away.  But they get their hooks back into him and allegedly mastermind his divorce from Nicole Kidman.  It’s just bizarre — even more bizarre than you can imagine.

Scientology has reportedly used spies and secret operatives (including the largest domestic espionage case in history), fraud, frivolous litigation, and all sorts of other unscrupulous means to continue its growth, gain more power, and build more wealth.  This book explains it all through anecdotal evidence and data collected from current and past members.  Absolutely fascinating stuff.  A must read for anyone with any interest in American culture.  If you’d like a taste of what the book has to offer, check out Reitman’s original article for Rolling Stone that lead to this book.

Steve Jobs

(This is a guest post by our friend Debbie in San Francisco.  She couldn’t stop talking about this book. )

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and Albert Einstein: His Life and Universe) is everything a reader could want and more. It appeals to those interested in the formative years of Silicon Valley and personal computing.  It also appeals to those who like to read success stories of groundbreaking corporate founders and even has something special for readers who just like a well-crafted biography.  But the most rewarding thing to take away from the experience of reading this book is the feeling that we have a front row tour of the history of our beloved Apple products.  We learn how the iPod’s continuous scrolling functionality came to be.  We read about who’s idea it was to make the earbuds pure white on the iPod (hint: it’s not Jobs).  Credit where credit is due is another reason this book should be required reading for anyone who uses Apple products.

Do not be fooled by the author’s seemingly breathless and gossipy tone.  While off putting at first, we realize that this is necessary to tell the tale from multiple viewpoints after many exhaustive personal interviews with major players.  The only way to tell the story is to tell what others say and how they feel and that cannot help but read like “he-said/she-said” gossip.  However, since most all the players are living, the device works.

The ultimate triumph of the book is that Isaacson was able to speak to Jobs himself while there was still time.  Over the course of two years, Isaacson conducts over forty in-depth interviews with Jobs.  During the process it’s clear the two develop a friendship of sorts. Jobs implored his biographer to tell the whole story, even if it made him look bad, which it often did.  The perspective gained from these sessions is infinitely rewarding.  Add hundreds of interviews with others and the resulting prose is dramatic and compelling.

And yet, and yet.  The same reader could feel that something was missing in the story.  The book leaves us wanting to know a little bit more about how Mr. Jobs became so brash and narcissistic in the first place, as these traits are usually visible at a very young age.  We never really learn where in his formative years this behavior was allowed to take root and take over.

We get a glimpse of his earlyish years and the fascination with electronics (remember Heathkits?).  We see the willfull youth pushing back on hapless adults (and maybe not so hapless as in the case of Bill Hewlett who ended up offering the 13-year old Jobs a summer job after the kid looked him up in the phone book and called him to inquire about an electronic part).  We see a friendship of youths forged of mutual interests from different perspectives between Mr. Jobs and Wozniak (“Woz”).  The symbiotic (maybe opportunistic?) nature of this coupling is apparent when we read about Woz’s interests (tinkering, hacking, open systems, freeware) and Jobs’ (closed systems, marketing, aesthetics, revenue streams).  These opposing worldviews remain firmly in place throughout the book and professional careers of these gentlemen.  They never really meet in the middle even though they created something significant together.

The best part of this book is the wild ride and we are in the front seat with Jobs (or at least Isaacson).  The adventure that is creating the epic masterpiece that is Apple, which is the world’s most valuable corporation on some days, next to Chevron.  This is no small feat, and the story is transfixing.  Mr. Jobs outsize personality dwarfs most other players, making reading this book exhausting.  But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Creating something this successful IS exhausting, so the reader really gets a sense of the drama and hard work and human interplay that gets inserted to each corporate situation and strategy.

Jobs’ lack of interest in the trappings of vast personal wealth is fascinating.  He and his family seem grounded and as normal as they could be under the circumstances.  Opulence was not something to which he aspired.  He aspired to seeing Apple’s ideas manifest in physical reality of useful and pleasurable objects that serve and entertain.  Mr. Jobs is the Chief Architect of this unprecedented bout of forward motion in manufacturing excellence. As stated elsewhere, he deserves a seat in the pantheon of America’s best business leaders.

After all this, we really want to see the protagonist (is Jobs the protagonist?) personally redeemed.  Sadly, this is not the case. That is one of the great disappointments about the book, and perhaps his life story.  We see the fractured relationship he has with his children which the author describes in painful detail.  The heartbreak of the youngest daughter when a long-promised trip to Kyoto is cancelled by Dad  was especially hard to read.  Also hard to read was Jobs’ clear favoritism toward  his son Reed.

Jobs has been identified as having a narcissistic personality disorder.  Author Wendy T. Behary  in an Oct 06, 2008 article offers the best definition of a narcissist I have seen:

A quick definition of a narcissist: someone who has an exaggerated sense of self-worth, is highly self-absorbed, entitled, condescending, superior, show-off-ish, competitive, and approval-craving. They do not appreciate the impact of their often obnoxious behaviors on others. They have a lot of trouble with empathy and with the notion of give and take.

In the end, we are left with Mr. Jobs’ outsize personality and its effect on those in his family, friends and colleagues.  Much of it is gut wrenching.  How much was necessary?  Given what was created in its wake, maybe all of it.  The reader is left not with a feeling of disgust toward Mr. Jobs’ obvious personality handicaps, but a feeling of gratitude for all that was created under the sheer will of Mr. Jobs.  He has made millions upon millions of lives better, and reading a book about this remarkable evolution is a reward in itself.

Thank you. Jobs and Isaacson.  I am going to read Steve Jobs a second time.

Unbroken

I unintentionally jumped from the Vietnam War (Matterhorn by Karl Melantes) right into World War II by listening to Unbroken by Laura Hildebrand.  I had heard it was a great story without being aware of the subject matter.  If I had known I may not have listened to it, but I am certainly glad I did.

The book chronicles the epic transformation of Louis Zamperini.  His life story is so compelling that Ms. Hildebrand (Seabiscuit) decided it was worth telling.  Louis is a young boy being raised in Torrance California. He spends much of his youth during the 1920′s stealing from people and getting into all kinds of trouble.  For being so mischevious, his personality is bright.  He is perennially upbeat.  He lets no one discourage him; he does what he wants.  His saintly and high-achieving older brother Pete saves Louis several times, but the last time he had to make a deal with the high school principal.  Louis wouldn’t be punished if he ran on the school’s Track team.  This turning point in Louis’ young life gave him a passion he didn’t know he had and he ultimately breaks the mile record all the way to the 1936 Olympics.

World War II breaks out in time to cancel the 1940 Olympics and Louis becomes an airman, flying for the US Army Air Corps, the precursor to the US Air Force.  During an air fight, Louis’ plane goes down in the Pacific Ocean with two other men.  The details of their 46 day survival are too impressive and creative to give any spoilers – it’s unbelievable but true.  In fact it should be said that this entire story is true, which makes it that much more incredible.

After a dramatic water shooting scene, Louis is captured by the Japanese.   We are filled with relief and joy when he’s captured because life in a POW camp has got to be better than life on sea.  Not so in Japan.  Throughout Louis’ two year stay in several Japanese POW camps, he is consistently beaten, starved and injected with unknown substances.  The Geneva Convention had drawn up international laws for POWs which the Japanese chose to ignore.  In fact many of their camps were hidden and unknown to anyone other than the Japanese military.   The worst abuser of all is a man named Watanabe. He is noteworthy because he chooses Louis out of hundreds, to beat daily. It is as if he recognizes Louis’ strong spirit and takes it as a personal mission to squash it.

It is said that man can survive without a lot of food and water, however, if a man loses his dignity there is no hope.  While being held captive, the prisoners find various ways to keep this dignity: they steal and share food, and communicate with fellow prisoners by addressing the Japanese guards, knowing the guards do not understand. The communication is for fellow prisoners.  In one camp in which they aren’t allowed to speak at all, they communicate in Morse Code with their fists.  In so many ways they learn how to trick the guards.

After the war when it seems everything should be going well, Louis and his friends continue to struggle through psychological turmoil.  Although Louis marries and tries to live a conventional life, he has nightly flashbacks and dreams of Watanabe and the horror he inflicted.   His wife works hard to be supportive, but even she starts to lose hope.  One evening, Louis has an encounter that changes his life – and that’s all I’ll say.   It is possible to Google Louis to learn the rest of the story, but I didn’t.  I wanted to listen to it via Ms. Hildebrand.

Ms. Hildebrand brings us a shocking tear jerker – tears of sadness and horror and tears of joy.   Louis Zamperini is an amazing man.  He endured torture that none of us can imagine. Throughout it all, when he thought he couldn’t take another lashing, he found a way to keep his dignity and he lived on.  Louis didn’t just survive the camps, after the war he eventually found a way to flourish and use his experiences to help others.  He remained positive and upbeat. According to his brother Pete, everyone loved Louis.  He truly was unbroken.

My respect for our troops and veterans that was renewed while listening to Matterhorn, only deepened after listening to this magnificent story.  So many combat veterans have and survived by the skin of their teeth, ready to sacrifice it all for America.  I am grateful to Ms. Hildebrand for bringing us this detailed chapter of World War II.   I’m also thankful that she researched every character’s life after the war.  So often after reading these stories I’m left with an emptiness of not knowing what happens.  I’m happy to learn the rest of the stories in Unbroken.

Moonwalking with Einstein

As I grow older, my memory seems to be eroding at an alarming rate.  And don’t think for one second that my wife hasn’t noticed this fact.  So when we were marauding through one of the closing Borders locations and she saw a book entitled Moonwalking with Einstein — The Art and Science of Remembering Everything at a bargain basement price, she marched right over to me and put it in my basket.

This book, by Joshua Foer, wasn’t exactly what I expected, but was nonetheless an enjoyable and pleasant surprise.  (Joshua Foer is brother to Jonathan Safran Foer and New Republic editor Franklin Foer – that last name seems to have some magical writing ability attached to it, no?) It’s a mix of journalism, scientific commentary, and memoir.  Foer is a freelance journalist who sort of accidentally stumbled onto some information about the “sport” of memory and subsequently secured an assignment for Slate to attend and write about the 2005 U.S. Memory Championships (yes, Virginia, such an event exists).  He met a fascinating cast of interesting characters at the event, and before he knew it he found himself caught up in the subculture of memory competition and began training to compete in the following year’s U.S. Memory Championships.

He wrote this book as he was training and being mentored by some of the folks he met in this quasi-secret society, and his story is a mix of research into the origins and historical significance of memory, the techniques used by competitors to memorize decks of playing cards, series of random digits, and poetry, some of the characters throughout past and present history who have either naturally or through the use of techniques shown incredible skill at remembering information, and his recounting of his own personal experiences.

As it turns out, they say that anyone can compete in memory competitions — you don’t have to be a savant or have a photographic memory (which many of the members of this subculture don’t believe actually exists).  There are a variety of techniques for memorizing data, which date back to ancient times.  The most popular (if that’s the right word) is the concept of the “memory palace” — the use of the brain’s ability to remember spacial and visual images as a tool to remember data and facts.  As you process data, you envision a physical location that you know by heart (your childhood home or the street you grew up on), and as data enters your mind, you place each piece of data along a path through that location with some sort of visual image that ties back to the data point.  Then when you are required to recite the data back, you do a tour through that location in your mind and see those images, in that order.  Bizarre, but apparently effective.

Other techniques for remembering other types of data include assigning people, places, or things to the numbers and suits of playing cards or assigning images to sets of digits.  It sounds like hard mental work, but these people are brilliant at it.  At present, at least two Europeans have demonstrated the ability to spend less than thirty seconds looking through a shuffled deck of playing cards and then recite them back in order (apparently the best of the best memory competitors seem to come from Europe).

This book is an easy read, and I would share more details here if I could remember them.  Sadly, by the time I recognized the importance of building a memory palace to remember all of the information in this book, I was too far along to start.  And I almost forgot,  you can read Foer’s cover story on competitive memory for The New York Times magazine here.

See a Little Light

I felt compelled to check out Bob Mould’s See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody.  First, I’m a big fan of his music.  Second, the last time I had read about Mould was in Michael Azerrad’s seminal underground rock history tome, Our Band Could be Your Life (My review).  As BGB’s Shaft pointed out specifically in his review of the book, Bob Mould does not come off in a very positive light in Azerrad’s telling.  Imagine my surprise then to learn that See a Little Light was co-written with none other than Michael Azerrad.  What gives?

Our Band Could be Your Life focused almost exclusively on Bob Mould’s time with indie rock pioneers Hüsker Dü.  However, Hüsker Dü occupied only about eight years of the life of a man now in his fifties.  The lion’s share of See a Little Light, accordingly, is about all the other aspects of Mould’s life.   He is also keen to squash any and all hopes of a Hüsker Dü reunion.  Ever.

If you have an original ticket stub dated 1979-87, you saw Hüsker Dü.  If not, you missed out.

See A Little Light goes back and explores Mould’s childhood and gives more backstory on where Hüsker Dü came from, works through the Hüsker Dü years, and then dives into the years that followed, which includes everything since 1988.  It turns out that quite a bit has happened in Mould’s life, professionally and personally, since then.  He’s performed all over the world as a solo performer, formed a new band (Sugar) that outsold the band he’s ostensibly most known for, branched out in new musical directions, worked as a scriptwriter for WCW Wrestling (!),  and found a way to be happy in his personal life.  He’s had drug ans alcohol problems and found his way clean.

Much of the latter part of the book involves Mould’s coming to grips with being a gay man and deciding to finally live his life openly and in a way that makes him happy.  Sadly, this realization does not come until much later in his life than for most.  A theme that runs throughout the book is how uncomfortable Mould has been within his own skin, worrying about the acceptance of others – of being found out and losing everything that he had worked for.  Occasionally Mould’s fears sound irrational to the straight ear, but then the reader is reminded of the story that he tells early on about a gay teen getting beaten to death in his home town.

The book also serves up a steady diet of tour stories and lengthy discussion on albums being made.  I love that kind of stuff, but it may not be for everyone.   At the beginning of the book, there were sections where I couldn’t believe Mould’s arrogance.  I was sure that See a Little Light would paint a similar picture of the aging rocker that Michael Azerrad portrayed in Our Band Could be Your Life.  By the end, somehow, Bob Mould completely wins over the reader on his own terms.

Mould’s biggest accomplishments with this book may be getting the average straight male indie rock fan to read and experience a gay man’s story of coming out and finding joy in his life.  I finished reading See a Little Light on the evening that New York’s Senate cast its historic vote to legalize gay marriage.  It seemed fitting.  I was happy for the implications for several people in my life, and I was happy for Bob Mould.

Audio Bonus:

The first Hüsker Dü song I ever heard was the title song on the album New Day Rising.  The entirety of the lyrics are “new day rising” repeated over a bed of howling guitars, driving drums, and visceral howls.   The repetition and conviction of the lyrics – a mantra – sold me on the idea that a new day was in fact rising.  This was 1984.   This is what rage and melody sound like.  

Hüsker Dü - New Day Rising

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Bob Mould’s first solo album Workbook was an impressive effort from beginning to end.  The opening instrumental track served notice that Mould was breaking new ground.

Bob Mould – Sun Spots

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This is the track from the same album that gave the book its name:

Bob Mould – See a Little Light

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Bossypants

I’ve been a fan of Tina Fey’s since he first appearances behind the SNL Weekend Update desk and watch 30 Rock religiously.  When I saw the early reviews, I knew that I would need to check out Fey’s Bossypants.   It did not disappoint.  Someone get this woman her own TV show.  Oh, wait…

Some reviewers seemed put out that the book is not as revealing as they’ve apparently come to expect from celebrity memoirs.   But Bossypants isn’t really a memoir.  It’s a collection of humorous essays about experiences in her life.  Think female David Sedaris and you won’t be far off.  Fey mentions her scar and explains why she won’t talk about it.  She says that there was the occasional jerk hosting SNL, but she doesn’t feel the need to name names. Good for her.  What’s left are some hilarious glimpses into the unexpected celebrity life of a self-described nerd with David Foster Wallace references and fart jokes.

Fey does not shy away from describing the ingrained misogyny of comedy – something that she hopes has changed.  As a performer in Chicago’s Second City, it was understood that NO ONE wanted to see two women alone in a sketch together.  That’s not how comedy works! Fey offers her and Amy Poehler’s classic SNL skit as Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton as Exhibit A of the fallacy of this idea.  She also wonders if the old sexism isn’t behind the personal attacks she received for portraying the reality TV star while her male counterparts eviscerate other politicians with little fallout.  (Have you seen Will Ferrell’s George Bush?)  Maybe. Or maybe it upset some so much because it was so believable.  (See: This.)

Fey seems surprised that Bossypants would be read by men.  On purpose.  In one passage she describes the relative “quease-making” of sticking a contact lens in your eye by relating it to a rather graphic gynecological experience and a breast self-exam.   Then she clarifies the comparison for those of us who may not get these references:

If you are male, I would liken it to touching your own eyeball, and thank you for buying this book.

No, thank you, Tina!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Like many people, when the doctor hands me a consent form, I just sign it, not giving it much thought.  After reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Kathryn Skoot, I think I may actually read the next one.

Many of us have heard about this book, it appeared on everyone’s “Best of 2010″ lists.  Born in 1920, Henrietta Lacks grew up in poverty, working in the tabacco fields of Virginia.  After marrying her first cousin and moving to Baltimore, her doctors discovered in 1951 that she had cervical cancer.  Before the days of consent forms, her doctor asked if he could take a sample of her cells.  According to her doctor, Henrietta and her husband said  yes, and when her doctor placed her cancerous cells in a petri dish he shockingly discovered that they multiplied.  They kept multiplying – they never stopped unless they were frozen

….as long as they had food and warmth, Henrietta’s cancer cells seemed unstoppable.  Soon, George (the doctor) told a few of his closes colleagues that he though his lab might have grown the first imortal human cells. To which they replied, Can I have some? And George said yes.

Henrietta died from her cancer.  She left behind the immortal HeLa cells that would change medical history.  Less important to everyone at the time, were a husband and small children who were also left behind.  Henrietta’s family never broke free of the poverty into which they were born.  Since their parents were first cousins and their father had given their mother syphilis, the children began life at a disadvantage with medical issues.  When their mother died and their father remarried, they were subjected to the worst kind of abuse by family members and close “friends”.

Not until 20 years after Henrietta’s death did her family discover that something had happened with their mother’s cells.   But even then, not one medical professional took the time to explain to her uneducated family what cells were, and what this meant for medicine.

When Ms. Skoot began her research, she was met with reluctance from Henrietta’s famiy. You can’t blame them, though. Many people had come around over the years asking about Henrietta’s life, adding more confusion to what they believed was the truth about their mother.  Fortunately, Ms Skoot had the patience and dedication to tell this story.  She also took the time to introduce family members to medical professionals who were able to explain the HeLa cells in a clear and simple manner. (I was also grateful to these people, not being clear on the subject myself.)

At first, I didn’t want to read a book about medical discoveries.   I just wasn’t interested in reading a science book.  The Immortal Life is science at its best for someone like me who wants a good story and a history lesson.  While educating me about the miracle of the HeLa cells, Ms. Skoot uncovers the life of Henrietta, her family and the medical scene several decades ago.  Ms. Skoot unveils the history of Johns Hopkins Medical Center and the truth behind the rumors of the day when black people feared the employees of Johns Hopkins, believing that they snatched black people off the streets for medical research.

During Ms. Skoot’s unexhaustible search for the woman behind the cells, she developed a relationship with the family that is invaluable to the entire story.  Henrietta’s daughter only wanted her mother to receive the credit she deserved. Other family members wanted some sort of compensation.  The question that was continuously asked by family members was   “if our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?”   There was never an answer to this question.

Ms. Skoot has set up a foundation to benefit the the descendents of Henrietta with their medical insurance and education .

Henrietta Lacks’ cells were responsible for so many cures and research that we now take for granted. I’m happy Ms. Skoot is able to share the real story behind these cells.  It’s important for all of us to be aware of the pain and heartache of their origins.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker.  Not only are they three women who’ve never been in my kitchen, they are also three notable female authors that I’ve never read.  As a chapter in my ongoing quest to try to read many of the classics that the cool kids probably read in high school or college, I figured I’d investigate these three.  First stop, Sylvia Plath.

Plath herself is regarded as a tragic heroine, having found herself in a failing marriage to another poet, with two children, in a foreign country, struggling with depression and (I think) borderline insanity at times, eventually taking her own life in 1963.

The Bell Jar is her semiautobiographical novel about a young writer who battles depression and insanity while in college.  The term “the bell jar” is used by Plath in the book to describe the feeling of madness, as if a glass bell jar is constantly hovering over you, sometimes completely surrounding you and stifling you.  Critical note:  this reminded me of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Bauby’s absolutely spellbinding and emotionally riveting story of his life after suffering a massive stroke that left him fully functional mentally, but physically unable to move anything except one eyelid, circumstances he likened to a butterfly in a diving bell, unable to interact with the outside world.  Second critical note:  everyone should read Bauby’s book; if it doesn’t move you, you aren’t human.

Now that I’ve started down the path, I suppose I’ll continue to draw parallels between The Bell Jar and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  The most significant common thread to me is that both books are fundamentally legitimate.  Legitimate in the sense that the authors actually went through the circumstances described in their works, and so they both speak from a place that most of us have never been and will never be.  So, unlike fictionalized accounts of strange events, or fantastical tellings of difficult situations, as you read these works, you know that the authors aren’t making it up.  And that gives their writing so much more credibility and leads their stories to resonate with the reader so much more than they would if they were told from the third person by someone who hadn’t experienced these things.

With Bauby’s book, this is pretty easy to understand, as each of us can imagine — or more properly, can’t possibly imagine — what it would be like to be trapped in your body with no ability to move, but with full recognition of your surroundings, full use of your brain, full recall of your memories and experiences, etc.  Plath’s situation is more complicated to me, because plenty of writers have written stories told from the perspective of a “crazy person”.  But Plath is able to tell her story and describe the emotional rollercoaster, feelings of paranoia, and skewed perspectives of a person who is losing it from the perspective of a person who was truly losing it.  And so going in to the book, you can’t help but lend a much deeper sense of meaning to what she says.  It’s not a psychiatrist trying to discern what’s going on inside the mind of an unstable person — it’s an unstable person with a gift for prose describing it directly.

The story that takes place in The Bell Jar is not, in my opinion, in and of itself, a particularly ingenious tale.  While the story of a young woman from the Boston area interning in NYC for a summer and then finding herself up against writer’s block when she returns home and eventually being admitted to an asylum isn’t necessarily your everyday run-of-the-mill plotline, it’s also not as clever or unique as some other masterworks.  However, what you know about Plath, and the knowledge that she is really talking about herself and her own feelings pushes this to another level.  In other words, if you read this in a vacuum (i.e., without knowing anything about Plath’s backstory), you’d probably give it a B, if only based on her simple but engaging style of prose.  But when you know the whole story, you understand why this book has earned its place in history.

Encore Paris

Paris Was Ours is a collection of reflections of Paris by 32 writers, compiled by Penelope Rowlands.  I was excited to read all of these memories since I have many of my own from my time spent as a student at the Sorbonne in the late 1980′s.

Radioactive

I picked up Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie – A Tale of Love and Fallout on a whim.   I had an Amazon credit to burn and so I ordered up the book based on a half-read/half-remembered review from somewhere.  I thought it would be a cool graphic novel.  It turns out it’s not a graphic novel at all.  It’s something else entirely.  Radioactive is a difficult book to describe, but here’s my best shot:  it’s a non-fiction science history biography art project. My mind was blown.

Radioactive succinctly tells the story of Marie and Pierre Curie’s lives together and apart.  Both won Nobel prizes.  Marie was the first woman to win a Nobel and the first of either gender to win two.  Marie’s daughter and son-in-law also won the Nobel.  The story would be a happy one if it ended there, but all of them died of cancers caused by their work with radioactive materials.  That’s part of the titular fallout of the title.  The book also frequently shifts to the larger fallout of the couples work.  Nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, victims of radiation and nuclear bombs, nuclear landscapes, and the radiation that we all carry around inside of us as a result of nuclear testing are all a part of the Pandora’s box that the couple innocently opened.

It’s the art project part that sets this book apart.  It’s also full of radiation-related ephemera, such as pages from FBI files, esoteric photographs, and maps of the destruction of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the Chernobyl exclusion zones.   The real standout are the author’s illustrations and artwork that appear throughout the book.  She uses a process called cyanotype printing that makes the art appear luminous.  Redniss even created the font used in the book.  The letters are non-uniform in size and width and are seldomly placed in book normative rigid line spacing and alignment.  The pièce de résistance only made itself apparent when I turned the lights out to go sleep.  Elements of the clover glow in the dark.  Fantastic.

For a book about the work of two famed scientists, it is Redniss’s non-scientific approach to telling the story that really drives her themes home and gives the book depth, warmth, and humanity.  One of the great things about this strange and wonderful book is that it firmly affirms the role of the book as a story-telling medium.  Radioactive is not available on the Kindle and would look ridiculous if it did.  It’s also not available as an audio book. This is a book that demands to be held and pored over for its endless details. This is a one of a kind book that is simply amazing.

Side note: I am a long time fan of Madame Curie as nerdy as that sounds.  Have you seen this image in a header cycling through from time to time at the top of our page?

That’s Marie Curie’s radium burned hands holding open a book next to an Erlenmeyer flask that comes from this portrait.

Wicked River

I forget now what first steered me towards this non-fiction tribute to the Mississippi. Maybe it was because Huckleberry Finn has been in the news so much recently. Or maybe it was because I grew up near the levees of the lower Mississippi River.  Either way, I  didn’t expect to be wowed by Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild by Lee Sandlin.  I wrongly assumed that since I had read John Barry’s Rising Tide and I was born within site of the river, I must know a thing or two about the river and its history.  Wrong.

The first revelation comes early in the book when Sandlin reports that Mark Twain’s great Mississippi River novels were essentially nostalgia pieces by the time they were written.  The Mississippi river had largely been tamed by the time Twain, a former riverboat pilot, got around to writing it all down, much to his dismay.  Twain noted that the wild river was crowded with river traffic, but the newly tamed river, in stiff competition with the emerging railroads, was virtually empty by comparison.

Sandlin paints a picture of lawlessness and civic mayhem as the general rule of the river prior to the Civil War.  There are bands of pirates patrolling the river.  Duels.  Land grabs/land disputes.  Civic law was minimal as the country began expanding westward.   Courts were few and there were no police departments, even in the biggest cities.  When official court proceedings produced unsatisfactory results, the citizen’s along the river reverted to “Lynch’s Law.”  I found it interesting that “lynching” wasn’t usually racial and didn’t necessarily result in hanging until much later.  Certainly, lynch law was no less harrowing for its defendants.

While its inhabitants were certainly wild, it is the river itself that was most wild and unpredictable.  The river was full of snags and would frequently change course, to the detriment of river traffic.  The river could change course so suddenly that one could go to sleep in a “slave state” and wake up in a “free state”.   Of course, the river also routinely swelled well beyond its banks, wiping out all who built or farmed too near its course.  The river could also travel downstream with so much force that it could wipe islands of solid rock in days.  It took a certain amount of bravery to venture on to the river and a blend of luck and expertise to survive a trip down its length.

The river was ultimately tamed by the U.S. Corps of engineers who set out to make it safely navigable, to control flooding, and to otherwise make it  less dangerous to life and property.  The Corps set to work after the Civil War on what was at the time the largest Federal program ever attempted.  The “taming” of the Mississippi and its consequences are covered in great detail in Barry’s Rising Tide, which is highly recommended.

I also highly recommend Wicked River for all with an interest in the Mississippi and/or the strange goings-on of our young country. Sandlin is a fantastic story teller, and the historical nuggets he’s mined are nothing short of fascinating.   So far I’ve given two copies of the book as gifts and my copy is out on loan.

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.

99 Problems

This will be, perhaps, the least objective review of a book ever to appear on BGB.  99 Problems: Essays on Running and Writing is written by Ben Tanzer, a friend of the bog and of mine.  That’s usually not a big deal, I’ve reviewed books by by people that I know before.  Any chance of an objective review, however, was nixed when I got name checked in the essay What I Talk About When I Talk About Bad Television Movies.  That Tanzer fellow, he’s alright.

What’s interesting about this collection is that Tanzer went all New School for its release.  It is only available in e-book format (you can buy it here).  He’s also using the “Radiohead” pay model.  You pay want you want. If you want to check it out for free, go ahead.  I’m sure that the author would love payment, but I think that he’d be happy if you just read it.

For this collection, Tanzer drew inspiration from novelist Haruki Murakami’s ode to running, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. (Do you see what he did there with the essay wherein I get name checked?  Nice.)  The collection draws it’s name from the Jay-Z song:

“99 Problems” by Jay-Z comes on as I coast down the last half-block towards home, and I can’t help but smile. This is a good way to finish a run. So is catching a big fat snowflake on my tongue on my first attempt, Karate Kid style.

An of course, he’s talking about the original Karate Kid for you youngsters out there.  What I enjoy most about Tanzer’s writing are the nods to high and low culture (and mostly the “low culture” of shared pop culture).

The essays were all designed around a central theme.  Ben decided to write a series of essays about long runs that he’s taken while traveling for work or with his family. The essays highlight the creative outlet that running can provide. Tanzer reflects on the projects that he’s working and the various thoughts that pop in and out of his head while running.  If you’ve ever been a long runner, you know the luxury of time alone with your thoughts that it can provide.  If you’ve never been a distance runner, Tanzer may well inspire you to give it a try.

99 Problems is a gem of a book.  You’ll learn a lot about the author and his creative processes, which highlights the level of introspection that can come from time alone pounding the pavement.  Of course, my favorite essay is about a run that Tanzer takes in Atlanta.  I met up with Ben and some literary scenesters that he assembled at Twain’s Tavern after the run, and we talked over beers about books and bad TV.   Here’s how Ben characterizes the book scene in Atlanta:

Inside the Outbreaks

Ronald Reagan once said (paraphrasing) that the government is populated by mediocrity because if the employees were any good they would be working for private companies for more money.  (I tried to find the exact quote, but sifting through Google searches of “Reagan quotes” is depressing.)  This sentiment is echoed by many in today’s political climate who see all government employees through the Department of Motor Vehicles lens.   It was a breath of fresh air then to see the cover for Mark Pendergrast’s Inside the Outbreaks: The Elite Medical Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service portraying government scientists as super heroes.  Look!  It’s science man!

Inside the Outbreaks is a history of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Epidemiology Intelligence Service (EIS).  The EIS is an elite training and surveillance division of the CDC that provides “boots-on-the-ground” scientists to investigate outbreaks of disease.  As one scientists notes, “A disease outbreak is a sign that something has gone wrong…it’s like a giant arrow pointing, PROBLEM HERE!”  The EIS’s job is to figure out what the problem is and solve it.

Members of the EIS have helped to eradicate smallpox by chasing it to the far ends of the earth. EIS scientists performed the “shoe leather epidemiology” necessary to identify HIV/AIDS.  (The group’s unofficial logo is a shoe with a hole in the sole over a globe.)  Polio is a thing of the past in the US thanks to EIS efforts.  They’ve been on the front lines of Ebola, SARS, flu epidemics, and other emerging diseases.  You can bet that they are in Haiti helping to contain the current cholera outbreak there.  It sounds like an incredibly rewarding job to a science nerd like myself, but it’s not all glamour as evidenced by this tidbit on a EIS scientist involved in the smallpox effort:

Six-foot-tall Jordan had lost 60 pounds, down to 134. An American lab identified seventeen kinds of parasites in his stool.

Yikes.  It would seem that the EIS’s work would enjoy wide bi-partisan support.  Pendergrast shows that this is not always the case.

…the 1956 [polio] epidemic in Chicago was concentrated in the black ghett0, where the children were not getting vaccinated.  The American Medical Association had fought free immunization as “socialized medicine.”

Ah, the more things change…  The CDC also ran into opposition when they started to treat gun-related deaths as an epidemic that could be investigated using proven epidemiological techniques.  The Republican-led Congress at the time was so outraged that they passed a law that specifically prohibits the CDC from issuing recommendations for curbing gun violence.  That prohibition remains in place today.

Administrations on both sides of the aisle have also made cuts or reallocated the CDC’s funding over the years, which can have direct impacts on national and international public health efforts.  To help insulate itself from changing political winds, the CDC Foundation was formed.  The CDC Foundation is a non-profit organization that “helps the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do more, faster by forging effective partnerships between CDC and others to fight threats to health and safety.”  Even though I live in Atlanta, the headquarters of the CDC, I hadn’t heard of the CDC Foundation until reading Outbreaks.  It’s a fascinating approach to a real problem for government agencies with long-term missions.

It tackling the history of the EIS, Pendergrast interviewed hundreds of EIS graduates.  If Inside the Outbreaks has a weakness, it’s that the material to cover necessarily limited the amount of space that could be spent on what are individually fascinating topics in their own right.  And the fascinating topics Pendergrast briefly hits upon are legion. Indeed, there are a number of prize-winning books that are entirely dedicated to topics that get only brief mention here - Polio: An American Story (Pulitzer) and And the Band Played On come to mind.  Laura Garrett’s doorstop The Coming Plague covers the emerging diseases aspect of Outbreaks in great detail and the best seller The Hot Zone delves more deeply into Ebola and other “sexy” diseases.  If you’re looking for a nice overview of the history of a largely unknown group of government scientists that are tops in their field, Inside the Outbreaks is the book for you.  However, if you’re looking for detail on a specific disease or outbreak, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Teaching Children About Slavery

No doubt about it.  The concept of slavery in America is a difficult thing to teach children about in the multi-cultural 2010 that some of us live in.

There are a few methods that I’ve come across in books that I own.

In The Pirate Lafitte and the Battle of New Orleans (link goes to actual text) by Robert Tallant (published in 1951), the author uses the “different time” and great men did it”  approaches:

Back home in Virginia his father owned many slaves.  Now that Mr. Glasscock had moved with his wife and two sons to a plantation in Louisiana, not far from New Orleans, he needed many more slaves to work the fields.  Esau new that even George Washington had owned slaves, and so did that other great Virginian, Thomas Jefferson.  It was a custom of the time.

In Adventures on Amelia Island:  A Pirate, A Princess, and Buried Treasure by Jane R. Wood (2007), the author uses the “different time” tack but adds the dubious “black people owned slaves, too” and “but you got free stuff” arguments:

“And there was a lady here who started out as a slave and then owned some slaves of her own?  That’s weird.”

“You have to remember it was a different time.  People thought differently then,  Planters needed slaves to be able to work their plantations.  Slavery was a terrible thing, but the plantation owners provided them with homes, food, and security, and sometimes even gave them their freedom.”

Now in the news, the author of a 2010 vintage Virginia state history book (who is notably not a historian but a self-described “fairly respected writer”) adds the “made up stuff I found on the internet” approach:

“thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.”

In the limited discussions on the topic that we’ve had with our six year old, we’ve gone with the “level with her” and “don’t sugar coat it” approaches with some success.  Give it a shot authors.

This Just In (10/26): The publisher of the VA history book is going to correct the factual error and issue new text books.

J’adore Paris

A few years ago I discovered Ruth Reichl, former New York Times Food Critic, and three of her books:   Comfort me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, all three of which masterfully combine funny real-life anecdotes with amazing recipes.  I recently found a similar book to add to my collection:  The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz.

Pastry chef Mr. Lebovitz left everything behind in San Francisco to start fresh in the city of many, many people’s dreams:  Paris.   He tells humorous stories of his adventures as his life unfolds in the City of Lights.  At times I laughed out loud.  Because I lived in Paris for a glorious spell in the 80′s, his experiences brought back memories for me.  Some things never change though, the French can upgrade their toilet paper but they are still French.

One afternoon while sitting around in his sweats and a t-shirt, with uncombed hair, Mr. Lebovitz has an epiphany about his attitude in his new home of Paris.  The trash needs to be emptied.   The elevator is three steps from his front door and the trash bin is exactly five steps from the elevator in the basement.  In America, people go shopping in their pajamas so who would care about what to wear to take out the trash?  This American realizes he cares.

“I extracted myself from the sofa, shaved, changed into a pair of real pants, tucked in a clean wrinkle-free shirt and slipped on a pair of shoes and socks before heading toward the door with my little plastic sac for the poubelle.  God forbid I should run into someone from my building while wearing my Sunday worst.  And that, mes amis, was when I realized I had become Parisian.”

The French can be hard to get to know. Not famous for being overly friendly, if you are determined you can find a way to get past that stoic exterior.  Mr. Lebovitz spent five years shopping at the same store with the same clerk before he managed to earn a smile from her - of course his brownies helped.

Learning your way around a new city can always be a challenge, being in a different country where the language is new could also cause frustration.  Mr. Libovitz attacks his challenges with humor and never forgets that he chose to live there.  After five years he sums it up:

“Parisians have a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes kindness seems to be a priceless commodity, doled out parsimoniously to the lucky few. Yet I’ve managed to survive any wrath I’ve invoked with my special brand of American optimism (and brownies).  I’m also grateful that I’m probably treated better than someone who moved to America would be, not speaking a word of the native language, trying to get by in a foreign land.”

Personally, I’m not a great dessert chef, but Mr. Lebovitz’s recipes appear simple to make, yet elegant. I can’t wait to try many of them (especially the chocolate cake).

Mr. Libovitz has a casual writing style that is easy to read and lucky for me he throws in plenty of French words.  He has a fun blog where you can check him out daily www.davidlebovitz.com.

I would definitely recommend you pick up The Sweet Life in Paris, tout de suite, if you appreciate the French, like to laugh and enjoy desserts.

Talking to Girls About Duran Duran

On paper, Rob Sheffield’s new book Talking with Girls About Duran Duran is right up my alley.  I loved Sheffield’s first book, Love is a Mix Tape, which is a powerful look at personal tragedy and the healing power of music.  (See my review, the BGB Interview with Sheffield, and a recap of Sheffield’s appearance at the first edition of the BGB Reading Series.)  Sheffield is a year older than me, so we grew up listening to the same music.  It seemed a near certainty that I would love this latest effort.  So I’m left wondering where it all went wrong for me.

Each chapter is titled after an 80′s song.  Sheffield uses the song as a loose jumping off point to tell a story from his life. Sometimes the song is a focal point of the piece, other times the connection is tenuous.  For example, the chapter Bonnie Tyler, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” features a girl with Bonnie Tyler hair and no mention of the song at all.  The results of this approach are mixed.  After mulling it over for some time, here’s what I think my personal issues are with the book:

1. I may be too close to the time period in question to accept some of Sheffield’s assertions at face value.  For example, R.E.M. is a “girl’s band.”  Maybe in Massachusetts, where Sheffield grew up, but in the south R.E.M. were the cornerstone of any self-respecting male music lover’s existence.  They gave us hope that southerners, as a group, could be seen as cool.  I’m truly baffled by this declaration.  Another one: no one remembers anything about 1985.  Because of Rambo.  Really?  How about: we all have a favorite Hall and Oates song.  No.  We don’t actually.  I hated those guys from the get go.  See what I mean?
2. Most of the stories, while interesting enough, lack the emotional punch of Love is a Mix Tape.  Granted, that book was tied to a specific life-changing event, but a chapter about Sheffield’s summer as an ice cream man seems hollow in comparison.  OK. I suppose there’s not much that he could do about that one.
3. While all of the the chapters are tied to 80′s songs, Sheffield doesn’t seem to actually like much of the music from the decade.  This is almost certainly a misreading on my part.  Yet, I was dismayed that he often resorted to  focusing on the cheese factor and knowing ironic winks.  I love the music of the 80′s, maybe not all of these particular 80′s songs…but still.  Maybe my real problem is that I wanted Sheffield’s memories and touchstones to more closely mirror my own.   I’m pretty sure that’s not a  fair criticism.

I’m afraid that this review is coming off as a hatchet job.  It’s really not.  My expectations for the book were obviously way out of line to begin with. There is much to enjoy in the book.  I particularly wish that I had Sheffield’s line “I liked both kinds of music, Echo and the Bunnymen” at the ready when my college roommate asked me what kind of music I liked our first day of freshman year in 1985 (the year no one remembers).  Sheffield also does a great job of mixing high and low culture, dropping Diff’rent Strokes references as easily as nods to Gatsby and Odysseus.  If you’ve got a strong personal connection and ironclad opinions to 80′s music though, you may want to temper your expectations.  If someone had given me a heads up before reading this, I may have come away with a completely different perspective. Govern yourself accordingly.

Audio Bonus: After writing this review, I was feeling pretty crummy about dissing a book that is not bad.  Can you tell I’m horribly conflicted?  So I went out and set up a “radio station” that includes the inspiration for all of the chapter titles (except the one about Haysi Fantayzee, which I couldn’t find and may be just as well if you’ve ever heard them) and some others songs and bands that get mentions in the book.  Take a trip down memory lane here.  It’s collaborative.  So feel free to add any songs that I missed or your own 80′s favorites.

It would also be fair to share the video for Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes, which blew Sheffield’s young mind as much as it did my own back in the day.  It predated “videos” by years and has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art.  But the geniuses at EMI won’t let us share.  So check it out here.

It was supposed to be funny

Reading the comments on the cover of I’m Down (“hilarious” “laugh-out-loud”) including the picture of a young white girl with a big afro by Mishna Wolff, it would appear this book could be a natural extension of my Chelsea Handler summer reading material since I love to laugh. Not so. In fact, I found this memoir to be a bit unsettling.

I’m Down is about Ms. Wolff, a white girl growing up in the proverbial black ‘hood of Seattle. She does not fit into the neighborhood as completely as her father would like. He wants her to be “down” – to act like all the other kids on their block. To please him, she tries her best. At one point she does enjoy some success with ‘capping (public insults similar to “yo moma” jokes). She feels almost accepted by the kids in the neighborhood – but is suddenly moved to a more academic school where the population consists of smart, rich, white kids. She finds she is not a natural fit there either. Ms.Wolff can not believe that these white, presumably privileged kids are not happy either. She is introduced to a world of depression and cutting by girls who are also crying for acceptance and love from their parents.

At first glance, I was a bit insulted regarding the race issue. Normally I’m not the most politically correct person but reading that her dad wants her to be more “black” made my blood boil. Ms. Wolff claims that her father thinks he’s black because he has permed his hair into an afro, doesn’t have a job, begins but never finishes construction projects on the house and plays a lot of poker with the other unemployed men who live nearby. Is this being black? Or is this being economically disadvantaged (a.k.a. “poor”) in an urban neighborhood? It’s curious to me because my husband is black (I am not) and no one in his family acts like the people in this book. If you don’t go deeper into the book, then it’s just more of the same stereotypical trash that never seems to end.

At second glance however, race isn’t the real issue. The issue is acceptance and love. I was reminded of my childhood and the difficulties I encountered trying to ‘fit in’ being the fat kid from divorced parents that no one wanted to hang around. Whether racial, socio-economical, educational or even appearance, most children experience similar challenges. Unfortunately for Ms. Wolff, she didn’t have parents to whom she could trun to sort all of this out. My heart broke for Ms. Wolff and her endless effort to please her father. Ms. Wolff overhears her father’s girlfriends commenting on her new classmates:

They are not gifted unless gifted is another word for bad……….That girl is no more gifted than any of my kids and she’s disrespectful, thinking she knows more than grown folks.” Her dad then replies “ But even before she went there [to the school] Mishna thought she was better than everyone. She’s just snotty like her mother.

Ms. Wolff (and I) cringed at her father’s response. She aches for her father’s acceptance and love but she never measures up to “his” world. Even during her parents’ divorce, she was hoping the judge would ask her who she liked better so she could say:

Mom. Not because I liked her better, but because I knew I was cool enough for Mom. And I felt that not being quite good enough for Dad might cause problems down the road – like I’d cramp his style and maybe he’d decide to leave me at a party.

Although she felt cool enough for her mom, her mom is emotionally absent. She left the family to take care of her own personal issues. Later Ms. Wolff does move in with her, but it’s because she feels she causes too many problems in her dad’s new family with his new wife, not because her mother gives her any emotional support or positive guidance.

The story ends with hope that everything will eventually work out. When I Googled Ms. Wolff, I found that she had dropped out of high school at 16. I can only hope that by writing the memoir and speaking about her life she can understand the reasons for her father’s behavior and break that emotional abusive cycle with her future children.

All in all, a decent collection of childhood experiences – just don’t expect to laugh.

The Last Hero

On the heels of Dr J’s excellent post delving into the DeLillo archives to research “Pafko at the Wall” and the two big baseball news stories yesterday (the death of Bobby Thomson and the new medical paper that suggests that Lou Gehrig may not have died of the disease that bears his name), it seems appropriate that I finally get around to posting about one of the best baseball books I’ve read: The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant.

If you’re not from Atlanta or Milwaukee, maybe you haven’t thought of Hank Aaron in awhile.  Here in Atlanta though, Henry Aaron is difficult to miss.  Hank Aaron Drive is a walking distance from my house. A visit to Turner Field yields virtually unlimited references to number 44.   Hank Aaron owns several car dealerships in town (I once bought a car from Hank! Well, not Hank exactly…).  Hank Aaron also remains active in our city and in baseball, often serving as a spokesman for both.  It’s clear that the man long-ago reached hero status in this town.

Bryant’s previous book, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, addressed the slow path to integration taken by the Boston Red Sox.   Last Hero focuses on racial issues, too, in explaining the man Henry Aaron.  The book traces Aaron’s journey from the Jim Crow south to the pinnacle of American sport, where he was not always welcome.  Along the way, Bryant highlights how Aaron was shaped by his experience and how his outward expression of those experiences shaped how he was perceived by others, often to his detriment.

Aaron’s number 44 has been retired at Turner Field

The book begins before the beginning, in 1884, with the birth of the first Henry, Aaron’s grandfather in the rural post-slavery south in a geographically isolated corner of lower Alabama called Gee’s Bend.  Henry’s father Herbert left Gee’s Bend for the relative prosperity of Mobile, Alabama.  Bryant describes what racial segregation was like for the young Henry Aaron.  It was a time when a boy going to the grocery store would watch as white people would cut in front of his father at the checkout store line and societal norms dictated that Herbert would have to endure the public insult in silence.  Bryant points to these daily humiliations of segregation as formative in the psyche of Henry Aaron and the man that he would become.

Henry is soon discovered by a scout while in high school playing for a local team made up mostly of adults.  Major League Baseball was newly integrated at this time, but he was signed by the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro League team. Aaron would be the last Major Leaguer to begin his career in the soon to be defunct Negro League.  His stay in the Negro Leagues was short-lived. He moved on to the minor leagues, playing first in the South Atlantic League, and eventually making it to the big club, the expansion team Milwaukee Braves.  While his rise through the ranks was in some ways meteoric, Bryant points out the indignities that Aaron endured at each step.

Coincidence?  Aaron’s 755 home runs is also the address of Turner Field

In the South Atlantic League, which Aaron integrated, he was greeted in many cities with the worst kind of racial epithets.  Of course, he was also unable to lodge with his team mates in the integrated south.  Even after escaping the South Atlantic League for the big club in Milwaukee, racism was persistent.  During spring training Henry Aaron and the other black Braves players were not allowed to lodge at the beach side resort where the white players stayed with their families, staying instead at a lodging house in the black part of town. The black players were assigned lockers together that were separate from the white players and were expected to shower separately.  Despite being a star player for the Milwaukee Braves, Aaron was expected to live within the boundaries of the tightly controlled black part of town in his early years.

Despite these injustices, Aaron was expected by the media to have a “just glad to be here” attitude.  Media reports of the day would describe the young Aaron as quiet, aloof, and bitter.  Charges that would stick to him throughout his career.  Aaron had never finished high school and had a southern accent, so he was often portrayed as a simpleton.  The legendary AJC sportswriter Furman Bisher penned a high-profile magazine piece on Aaron that quoted the slugger in phonetic “dialect” that would go a long way in cementing this view of Aaron.  The press also routinely compared him to the much flashier and media-savvy Willie Mays, usually to Aaron’s detriment.  In the face of this public criticism, Aaron became determined to let his playing do the talking and to be among the best that ever played the game.

All that’s left of the outfield wall of the old Fulton County Stadium where Aaron sent record breaking 715 into the stands

As an Atlanta Braves fan, I found it interesting that Aaron wanted no part of the team’s move from Milwaukee to Atlanta.  He feared that he would be forced to backtrack  on the relative racial equality that he had scratched out for his family in Milwaukee. It was also an interesting side note that Atlanta’s progressive civic boosters desperately wanted Hank Aaron and the Braves to serve as a center piece of their “City to busy to hate” marketing campaign.

The historic chase of Babe Ruth’s record and the racially-charged death threats that Aaron received is well documented, but it underscores the difficulty Aaron would always have in simply being allowed to enjoy the game.  When Aaron ultimately retired, he found that the expected jobs in the front office or managing within the ranks of the organization were not forthcoming.  His reputation as being embittered would once again stand in his way.  Interestingly, it  would be Bud Selig, a long-time friend from the Milwaukee days, who would be instrumental in finally reconciling Aaron with Major League Baseball.  It’s only relatively recently, Bryant notes, that Henry Aaron has found peace with himself and with the game.

If my enthusiasm for this book has not been self-evident so far, let me be clear: this is an incredible book.  It is guaranteed to appeal to any fan of the Braves in particular or baseball history in general.  Henry Aaron’s life-long struggle with institutional racism and a game that never really let him just be himself is an epic story of heroism. The Last Hero does that story incredible justice and deserves a wide audience.  It should be mandatory reading in Atlanta public schools.  But you should check it out, too.