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.
“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.
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.
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The idea of ‘summertime’ reading always sounds so romantic to me: lying on a beach or next to a pool, drink on the table and book in hand for some undisturbed reading. Fat chance. For me, summer is when my kid, who is normally in school, is with me almost 24/7 and “needs” me every ten minutes. Thus, my summertime reading must be a book that I can pick up and put down without missing a beat. I have found a few such books by Chelsea Handler.
If you are a member of the Moral Majority or if you take pride in always being politically correct, then you probably won’t find these books as funny as I did. There is a lot of alcohol, drugs and sleeping around and I have no problem laughing at her mishaps (whether they are true or not, I don’t care.)
My Horzontal Life was my favorite of the three and of course none of it can be quoted here. The book delivers exactly what the title suggests, supposedly her experiences with many one-night stands as well as with men she did actually date. What I really admire most about Ms. Handler is her ability to create elaborate lies – on the spot! While working as a waitress, she sees a man with whom she just spent the night walk in with his wife. Chelsea becomes her own twin sister, Kelsey, and proceeds to make up several stories about her “loose” twin, Chelsea. He’s pretty ‘smart’ too, he says “wow, you look just like her” and she responds, “that’s usually what happens with twins.”
Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bangwas written after she became famous with her E! late-night show and she reminisces more about growing up with her nutcase family. We all need a retired, widowed father who dates the 22 year old Jamaican cleaning women to keep us laughing.
Next up, Are you there Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea? My 6-year old daughter promptly informed me that Vodka is a drink and thus the title makes no sense. Once again, this book is loaded with short stories of Ms. Handler’s supposed life. At one moment, someone emails her a picture of their dog in front of Niagara Falls. She confesses that pictures of people’s children are ok by themselves, but a pet? She has a great response that I may try:
“I clicked reply and sent a picture of my cleaning lady. Standing next to the toilet, alone. I attached a message that read, “’Not interested? Me neither.’”
Certainly this is not high-brow, award-winning literature, but once in a while it’s just fun to laugh.
Once again digging into material that many of you probably read long ago, I decided to readThe Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, since it cost a pittance on my handy new Nook. Two quick points: (1) I loved this book, and (2) I blame my Nook for the brevity of this review. I shall address each of these in more detail.
Having been born and raised in the U.S., I’ve certainly heard Ben Franklin’s name bantered about and therefore thought I knew as much about him as the next guy. Well, a quick read through this short work proved that point to be utterly wrong. As much as I thought I knew about how Franklin was an important historical figure in the history of this nation’s politics and diplomacy, the depth to which he was also quite the inventor, philosopher, and humorist (not to mention that he was apparently a highly-skilled printer — a trade that in modern times it might be easy to dismiss) was eye-opening to say the least.
Reading his recollections of traveling from Boston to Philadelphia reminds the reader of how difficult it was in those times to accomplish things that today seem trivial. There were no guarantees on such journeys as to when you would leave, when you would arrive, or even if there would be enough food for everyone on the trip. Yet old Ben didn’t seem to fret about those things. Perhaps this was the case because his autobiography was written years later, when he knew in hindsight that everything would work out just fine; regardless, the way he recounts his trials and tribulations during the period when he was trying to find a vocation and establish himself makes clear to you that he was a special person, not just in how he did these things, but in how he tells about it.
He was a hard worker in his youth, both physically and mentally. Without any requirement to do so (such as school), he spent every waking moment either working or engaged in self-study, trying to better himself mentally and psychologically. And this hard work paid off, in ways that we continue to reap the benefits of to this day.
Now to point #2 above. I had used the “highlight” function on my Nook to track bushels of mind-blowing quotes and anecdotes that I intended to share as part of this review. Unfortunately, I’ve now learned that one of the issues with the Nook is that you can lose all of these highlights during a firmware upgrade of the device. And I did. And I’m too frustrated to go back and try to find all of those wonderful nuggets. The Nook’s overall ledger is still on the positive side, but any more of that nonsense and I’m going to have to have a nice little talk with it.
But don’t let that dissuade you from reading this book if you haven’t already, or from re-reading it if you read it long ago. Fascinating account of a fascinating individual.
If you loved Michael Lewis’s Moneyball because it showed you a whole new way to look at baseball, then you are going to love The Baseball Codes by Jason Turbow (with Michael Duca). The premise is simple: the authors set out to document, once and for all, the unwritten rules of baseball.
Turbow and Duca answer all of the big questions: When is it okay to lay down a bunt to break up a no hitter? Can announcers talk about a perfect game while its in progress? Is it a good idea to stand at home plate and admire your home run? How many runs must your team be ahead before stealing a base becomes a bad idea? When pulled from a game as a pitcher should you head to the dugout before the skipper gets to the mound? Is it okay to watch a fight from the dugout? These are all important questions in the game baseball. Not knowing the answer to a particular question can cost you your spot on the roster or a fastball in the ribs.
Of course, all pitchers deny intending to hit a batter. In the post game interview the pitcher says “that one got away.” However, the authors point out that the intent of the pitch was usually understood by both parties. It’s part of The Code, a well understood system of rules and punishment that have become ingrained in how the game is played. Even if no one talks about it openly (also part of the code – keep it in the clubhouse).
Cheating (stealing signs, looking back at the catcher from the batter’s box, juicing balls, etc) is not only tolerated, it’s expected:
“Everyone cheats,” said White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen. ”If you don’t get caught, you’re a smart player. If you get caught, you’re cheating. It’s been part of the game for a long time. If you’re doing whatever you’re not supposed to do and you don’t get caught, keep doing it.”
and
Leave the definitive sentiment to Dick Williams, the Hall of Fame manager who won two championships with the A’s,and pennants with Boston and San Diego. ”Anything short of murder,” he said, “is okay.”
It’s part of the code!
An added bonus of checking out this book is that it caused me to stumble across my new favorite blog, The Baseball Codes. The blog picks up where the book leaves off and delivers day to day interpretations of The Code. I especially enjoyed their evaluation of the Alex Rodriguez/Dallas Braden imbroglio from earlier this season, which is also a nice primer for the book:
I’ve read two of Michael Lewis’s recent books, Home Game and the baseball economics classic, Moneyballand loved both of them. I knew that I had to read his latest, The Big Short, after reading two of his excellent essays (link and link) about the financial meltdown for Portfolio Magazine almost two years ago.
Lewis leads the way through the global financial meltdown by telling the story of those who saw it coming in the first place. While many claim to have seen the dangers of the subprime mortgage meltdown, only a few said anything about it before everything went south. Even fewer put their money where their mouths were and took short positions against the bonds that were based on the U.S. subprime mortgages (i.e., they bet enormous sums of cash that the system would fail spectacularly).
Realizing that virtually everyone else on the globe was wagering on the success of what were perceived as (and marketed as) zero risk bonds, the handful of clear-eyed money men who saw the situation for what it was began to take short positions on every financial institution that they could. They were ultimately proven right and made tremendous sums of money along the way.
The short side buyers described seem to be alike in striking ways. While maybe not iconoclasts exactly, they all seemed to be socially inept and didn’t really care what other people though of them. They all looked deeply into the small print and wanted to know exactly what they were investing in. They collectively couldn’t understand why anyone would want to buy these crappy subprime mortgage bonds and felt that they must be missing something. Then they talked to everyone hat they could to find out why they were wrong. And they listened:
The more they listened to the to the people who ran the subprime market, the more they felt the the collapse of the double-A-rated bonds wasn’t a longshot at all, but likely. A thought crossed Ben’s mind: These people believed that the collapse of the subprime mortgage market was unlikely precisely because it would be such a catastrophe. Nothing so terrible could ever actually happen.
The financial meltdown that these short siders were all betting on is incredibly difficult to understand, even in retrospect. Lewis describes the fiasco as well as anyone else I’ve read, but I’m still not sure that I understand all the details completely.
In a nutshell, piles of crappy mortgages were lumped together and rebranded as mortgage bonds that were given ratings much higher than they deserved. At each step of the way, risk was passed along to the next guy. The people who go screwed were at the front and end of the line.
At the front end, consumers were encouraged to take out loans that they were unlikely to be able to pay back (e.g., interest only for 3 years and 12% interest after that). Since home prices only go up, the homeowner could refinance before the loan became onerous (generating more fees for the originators). When home prices did go down (or just stop going up), the house of cards collapsed leaving you, the taxpayer, on the hook for billions of dollars in losses. Everyone in between those two points made money hand over fist. Sure, they may have caused their firms to go bankrupt, but as individuals, they did just fine.
A few charts, graphs, or other infographics to help aid understanding would have been nice. Not being able to understand the full complexity and magnitude of this wholly manufactured bond market is largely Lewis’s point though. No one knew what was in the bonds or what the other financial instruments were that grew around them. Not really. Unfortunately, it was their job to know. The lack of understanding coupled with the greed, short-sightedness, and outright fraud driving the financial engine almost led to the collapse of our entire financial markets. Reading this book will make you very angry. As it should.
I have a journalist friend who is not a fan of Michael Lewis. One of his issues is that Lewis wrote this book and provided no end notes or other detailed accounting of his sources. I doubt that the general reader will miss those, but he finds it professionally unconscionable. For my part, I found it a gripping account of an important part of our recent history. It reads almost like a thriller. It’s just too bad that it’s all true.
I think that it’s safe to say that David Masciotra, author of Working on a Dream: The Progressive Political Vision of Bruce Springsteen, has spent a lot more time reflecting on the music of The Boss than any of the rest of us. Several years ago now, I wrote a post about songs as short stories. I included several Bruce songs among a shortlist of examples that I called “so lyrically strong that they could be the basis of a prize-winning short story.” Masciotra takes this idea and carries it many steps further making the case that Springsteen’s body or work is a tool for progressive political change and social justice.
Working on a Dream is a timely look back on an impressive career by a musician dedicated to writing songs aboutsomething. It is pretty clear that The Boss could have decided to take the easier career path and make songs that would serve as the soundtrack for Chevy truck commercials. Instead, Springsteen consciously took the less commercially certain route. Masciotra highlights Springsteen’s work that explores the space “between the American Dream and American reality” and gives voice to the plight of people that are often invisible in our society.
The saying goes that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” In support of this notion, the author’s descriptions of the actual music can be strained at times:
Piano notes are set against the wailing trumpet to evoke action and fill in the gaps. If the trumpet sounds like observation, the piano rings of movement. As a piano riff takes control, opening up room for the singer…
Masciotra is on firmer ground when analyzing lyrics. He takes a literary criticism approach, interpreting lyrics in their larger temporal and political contexts. The author name checks St. Augustine, Noam Chomsky, Confucius, Cornell West, Studs Terkel and others to bolster his interpretations of what is presented as Springsteen’s over-arching progressive political philosophy.
In one of the strongest chapters, the book quotes Bruce Springsteen as saying that his ideal concert is “part circus, part spiritual meeting, part political rally, part dance hall.” Masciotra follows up with examples to support each of these components. Springsteen is also quoted as describing his career as:
a community in the making…It’s not just my creation. I wanted it to be our creation. Once you set that in motion, it’s a large community of people gathered around a core set of values. Within that there’s a wide range of beliefs, but you still gather in one tent at a particular moment to have some common experience, and that’s why I go there too.
Masciotra persuasively argues that this idea of the importance of community is a pervasive theme in Springsteen’s work and is a striking counter to the “me first” mentality that permeates our culture and “I vote my pocketbook” political discourse.
Working on a Dream largely preaches to the choir. The book is likely to appeal most to Springsteen fans and/or those left of center politically.It is not likely that those who dislike Springsteen’s songs for whatever reason or those who feed on a steady diet of Fox News will find anything here that will convert them to Masciotra’s view. Working on a Dream also doesn’t supply many detailed arguments to bolster political statements that some would argue are controversial but are self-evident to the author and like-minded readers. Occasionally I found myself wondering if Masciotra had forgotten about the Boss when several pages of political discussion would go by with scant mention of Springsteen or his songs. But these are minor quibbles.
Overall, Working on a Dream is a unique book of musical/political scholarship. I am unaware of any similar books that examine a particular artist and his political philosophy at this level of scrutiny. Fans of Springsteen interested in viewing the Boss’s work through a new filter will definitely want to pick this up. Progressive political types that may have somehow missed Springsteen’s career or just “don’t get it” may also want to give it a look.
For your listening pleasure:
I should also note that I wore out my Springsteen collection on the iPod while reading this book.
Of the songs that Masciotra singles out in the book, two seem especially noteworthy.
Springsteen recorded the theme song for Philadelphia at a time when recording a song about AIDS was not an intuitively strong career move for a straight rocker with a blue collar fan base.
Relatively recently, Springsteen’s song American Skin (41 Shots) put the singer at odds with the NYPD
Springsteen’s The River will always stand for me as the pinnacle of Springsteen doing what he does best.
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And I love this Raul Malo cover of Downbound Train
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J. Todd Moye’s Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II was a lock to jump atop my reading stack. Dr. Moye’s a friend of mine and an occasional contributor to BGB. It is safe to assume that this will be one of the least objective reviews that we ever post here. Should you doubt my sincerity when I tell you that it’s an excellent book that you should check out? No way! This is just one of those “full disclosure” things that I feel you should be aware of as you read my praise for Freedom Flyers. But don’t book just take my word for it. The book is out on Oxford University Press, which is about as big deal an academic press as there is.
The basic story of the Tuskegee Airmen is well known. World War II was, in many ways, the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The Tuskegee Airmen were notable because they were among the very first African-American officers in the U.S. Army (there was exactly 1 black officer prior to World War II). They were also among the first black men entrusted with more than just menial labor jobs in what was an institutionally segregated fighting force. Given an opportunity to prove their worth in what was disparagingly called “an experiment,” they found themselves fighting “Adolf Hitler and Jim Crow simultaneously.” For these reasons and many others, the Tuskegee Airmen have become a justly celebrated pillar of the Civil Rights Movement.
However, Moye’s book is not the usual hagiography of the Tuskegee Airmen that gets dusted off each February for Black History Month. It’s the story of real, imperfect men, who found themselves in an unprecedented position at a pivotal point in world history. Often lionized as civil rights warriors, they were more often than not simply trying to work their way into a better job with prospects for a better future. Moye also points to recent scholarship that shows that the popular myth that the Tuskegee Airmen never lost a plane under their escort is almost certainly untrue. The real history of these men is so intriguing that embellishments of their story are hardly necessary.
What separates this book from other histories of the famed airmen (and the movie starring Laurence Fishburne) is the thoroughness and depth of Moye’s account. Dr. Moye was the director of the Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project, a National Park Service project that set out to collect oral histories from all of the surviving airmen. This incredible access to the men behind the myth provides a layer of humanity and realism that is often missing from other historical accounts.
A few years ago, I went to see a talk that Dr. Moye gave on his Tuskegee Airmen scholarship. A few of the Airmen were present in the auditorium and answered questions from the audience. Someone asked one of the pilots what part of their legacy was he most proud of. He paused for a moment and answered the question with a story about seeing a black female pilot landing a military plane in the background of a news story recently. The Airman said that he was most proud that the news story was about something else entirely – that a black woman piloting an Air Force plane was no longer a newsworthy event. It was an incredibly heartfelt and moving moment.
The mark of a well written history is that it casts current events in a new light. The reasons that the Army put forward for not integrating the service before and during World War II – “the Army is not a social laboratory,” “there are questions of morale,” “it’s not the right time to make these changes” – are the very same reasons that were trotted out to deny women equal opportunities in the armed forces and they are the same arguments used to deny gay soldiers from serving openly. History not only repeats itself, it blatantly plagiarizes itself. Fortunately, the lessons of the Tuskegee Airmen make it clear that a ghetto-ized military doesn’t work. The way to a diverse and equal-for-all military is to have a policies in place that are serious about effecting change and making promotion incumbent upon implementing and respecting the letter and the spirit of those policies.
Freedom Flyers captures a moment in our history that is important for what it tells us about ourselves and our past, as well as the insight it provides to our future. Do check out Freedom Flyers, and if you want to pick up a few extra copies for your friends and family members, I’m sure that my pal Dr Moye,won’t mind.
A few weeks ago I posted about the sweet novel-related shirts available from Out of Print clothing. Well, it’s a big internet out there, and I stumbled across more cool book themed t-shirts. You can be the nerdiest kid on your block. Check out the collection at Novel-T. The shirts are designed around the theme of “The Word Series”. Each author gets a numbered jersey with a character/author name on the back and his/her own logo on the front. The Vonnegut shirt made me laugh out loud (you have to be a fan to get the joke). I was all set to order that one until I saw the Huckleberry Finn shirt. H. Finn is the namesake of my son (Finn), so that sealed the deal.
Since there isn’t a good way to link directly to a particular shirt (boo!), here’s the tag that came on my shirt. It’s gives a pretty idea of the basic design. There’s a log raft on the front with the initials HF (XL and quote not on the shirt).
Finn and the number on the back (copy at the bottom not on the shirt…)
It’s a really nice soft cotton T that is begging for lots of wear. The fine print at the bottom says that a dollar of each sale goes to 826 NYC, a fine organization that I’m happy to support. (The exception is the Vonnegut shirt which goes to Doctors without Borders).
Tim hasn’t mentioned Just Kids by Patti Smith in about a week, so I’ll do it for him. There have been many reviews on this book and I’m throwing my hat in the ring as well. Fantastic! First, be sure and check out Tim’s original review that inspired me to read a book about people that I didn’t know much about and frankly didn’t think I cared anything about. Patti Smith’s account of her life with Robert Maplethorpe moved me to explore their work. I googled Patti’s music and Maplethorpe’s photography to familiarlize myself with these two amazing artists.
Maybe it was the era or maybe just youth, but both Patti and Robert were incredibly dedicated to their art. They truly believed that some day each of them would make it. Preferably together. They inspired each other and they completed each other.
“No one sees as we do Patti,” he [Robert] said again. Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world.
No one can see the future so no one knew who would succeed and who would be dying soon. But to be in that moment, during that particular time period when everything was new – the drugs, the music and the art. Certainly it was amazing at the time, but right now it blows our minds because we know what happened.
Just imagine what Patti and Robert saw on a regular basis:
At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe and the Fish. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendirix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on , acrosss from a blonde. There were musicians everywhere…
Just Kids is one of those books that you don’t want to skim through. You’ll want to read every single word. Since Patti Smith is a poet, all these magical words probably naturally flow from her. But I’m sure that if analyzed closer, every single word has a deeper meaning than what is first thought. I’m not that insightful, but it sounds like a good exercise for a high school English class.
Check out all of Tim’s links to Patti Smith’s interviews. Truly fascinating.
Ignorance is bliss. These words could not ring more true after reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer’s prior novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, rank among some of my favorite books so I was eager to read his foray into non-fiction. I was even more excited that his new book was about something near and dear to my heart – food. Food has always been a huge, wonderful part of my life.
I am one of those few people who spent their childhood eating dinner with my entire family and now my kids sit down and eat with their parents every night. Common conversation around the table is what we are eating at our next meal, the opening of a new restaurant, or a great recipe we saw in Bon Appetit. You get the idea. That being said, I am very cognizant of what my family consumes and buy local, sustainable products as much as possible. Until I read this book, I thought I was doing a pretty good job. Well – my pride in being a conscientious consumer has been tossed away now that Foer has seared into my brain the horrors of the poultry, pork, and fish industries.
Foer decided to write this book once his son was born and he wanted to fully understand how he was going to raise his child and what sustenance he was going to provide him. Foer had drifted in and out of being a vegetarian most of his life but was by no means one of these hard-core vegans. His grandmother was a big influence in his life and all of his memories of her were related to food and therefore he recognizes and talks a lot about how food is so much more than sustenance. Food represents family, love, friends, and community which makes our choices much more difficult. Unfortunately, 99% of animals consumed in this country are factory farmed which is a inhumane, unhealthy, and ruining our environment. This is the focus of the book. Foer gives detailed descriptions of how chickens, turkey, pigs and fish are factory farmed and I found every chapter upsetting and revolting. From an ethics and moral standpoint, the abuses that take place in these factories are horrifying especially after you read the descriptions of how intelligent pigs are (much more intelligent than a dog) and realize the fear and pain that they endure. Pain and suffering which is caused my man’s desire for cheap, tasty meat.
Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.
And from a hygenic standpoint, it is nauseating to read the accounts of these animals wallowing in their own shit.
Every week, millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by heart and lung infections, cancerous turmors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers.
Foer’s brilliance in writing this book is that he never comes across as proseletizying. He addresses the horrors of factory farming with eye-witness accounts, interviews with workers, health experts and scientists. And all the information is presented in clear, concise terms. When I was only half-way through the book, I made the decision that I would NEVER buy pork, chicken or turkey from the Smithfields or Tysons of the world ever again. And that I would also try to significantly cut-down on my families’ consumption of animals. But then I came to the ending of the book where Foer basically says that doing those things are not enough. His view is that every time you are dining with friends who are serving factory farmed animals or eating in restaurant, then you are contributing to the on-going demand for these animals. As he states, it is a lot easier to tell your friends when they invite you over to dinner that you are a vegetarian rather than ask where the chicken came from.
This is one of the few books that I have ever read that truly could impact my life. I haven’t decided at this point how I am going to proceed. In the short-term I am going to stick to my original plan and just do my best but it’s not so easy. As I was making my lunch this morning, I stopped and threw out the Boar’s Head turkey
[Turkeys]…..are given more antibiotics than any other farmed animals. Which encourages antibiotic resistance. Which makes these indispensable drugs less effective for humans. In a perfect direct way, the turkeys on our tables are making it harder to cure human illness.
I can’t say happy reading but I can assure you that this will be one of the more thought provoking books you’ve read in a long time.
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.
I was driving home a few weeks ago and heard Terry Gross interview Patti Smith about her new memoirJust Kids. It was one of those interviews where you sit in your car and keep listening well after you get where you’re going. I picked up the book days later and dove in as soon as I could. It was the right choice.
Just Kids focuses on the unusual and enduring relationship that Smith had with photographer/artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith, at the age of 20, had set off to New York City to try to make her mark as an artist and poet. On her first day there, she met Mapplethorpe, himself a struggling artist. The two eventually developed a romantic relationship and move in to a Brooklyn hovel together. It’s the Summer of Love, but neither is much into the hippie thing. They are each preparing for the Next Thing.
Their early New York days are the archetypal starving artist experience: constant struggling to pay rent, going hungry when money is tight (and money is always tight), getting lice from seedy lodgings, etc. And if that sounds romantic to you, consider this: Patti’s first hint that her soul mate might be gay surfaces when Robert begins street hustling to help pay the rent. Even as Smith describes her dismay at seeing her boyfriend go out into the night, she can sense your judgement and offers simply:
Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?
Difficult as it was, Patti and Robert make unlikely and important connections within the art world almost from the very beginning of their life in New York. For example, Patti first met Beat poet Allen Ginsberg when he bought her a sandwich in a Manhattan automat. It turns out that Ginsberg thought that she was a very pretty young boy. Ginsberg would later champion Smith’s poetry and he provided introductions to Gregory Corso and William S. Buroughs. Corso teaches Patti how to avoid giving boring poetry readings, and Burroughs is among the earliest attendees of Patti’s rock shows at the nascent CBGB’s. She meets Hendrix and provides relationship advice to Janice Joplin. After the romantic side of her relationship with Robert runs its course, Patti dates Jim Carroll, Sam Shepard, some guy in the Blue Oyster Cult, and Fred “Sonic” Smith (who she would eventually marry).
The young couple eventually found themselves residents of the famed Chelsea Hotel, all but sealing their fates as artists of renown. Patti became famous first. Just as their career trajectories were primed to seriously take off, the pair landed their first and only joint art show. Patti describes the show:
We chose to present a body of work that emphasized our relationship: artist and muse, a role that for both of us was interchangeable.
And that’s the point of this book. This is the story of a relationship that was greater that the sum of its parts. Neither would have realized their artistic potential had the other not been in their life. Each provided what the other needed in support and nurturing companionship to get through the crisis at hand and strive to create another day.
The book also provides a fascinating look at tortured process through which art comes into the world. Smith did not set out to be a rock star and Mapplethorpe had less than no interest in the field of photography. Robert Mapplethorpe took the now iconic cover picture for Patti’s first album (listen to the Fresh Air interview to find out why the record company hated the picture). From there he went on to become a controversial giant of the art world. The books ends after Robert’s death with AIDS, as it must. Smith promised Mapplethorpe that one day she would write their story. She has made good on that promise, and it is quite a story. This is a beautifully written book that is sure to top many year-end “best of” lists. It will be on mine.
Post Script:
As a fortuitous accident, I read Just Kids not long after finishing Helen Weaver’s The Awakener (see my review), a memoir of Weaver’s relationship with Jack Kerouac. Between the two books, a picture emerges of the avant garde art scene in New York from the 1950s through the 1980s. A direct line between the Beats and the punk scene that would emerge from CBGB’s can be clearly drawn, which was a revelation for me. The two memoirs have notable similarities. Both authors write about transformative relationships with men who certainly had their demons. Each woman survives their subject’s death – deaths that were caused to an extent by “lifestyle” choices. Both credit/blame their subject’s Catholicism for important aspects of their personalities. It’s an interesting comparison and progression through the decades.
But wait, there’s more:
Clearly this a book that begs to have some music to accompany the review. Let’s start with my favorite Patti Smith song that’s not Because the Night.
Patti Smith – Dancing Barefoot
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I have no idea why that’s my favorite. It just is. Another of my favorite Patti Smith recordings is her backing vocals on the R.E.M. song E-bow the Letter. Her spooky and ethereal keening is so emotive, it kills me every time. I saw Patti Smith join R.E.M. for a live performance of the song just last year. If I had any hair, it would have stood on end.
And some songs by singers that were clearly influenced by Patti Smith (according to me):
PJ Harvey – Good Fortune
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Pretenders – The Adultress
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Cat Power – Speak for Me
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Video of 10,000 Maniacs covering Because the Night, a Smith/Sringsteen collaboration
And lastly, I include Sympathy for the Devil since it was mentioned specifically in the text. Smith remembers that Mapplethorpe was completely taken with the song on first listen and seemed to relate to it as he was beginning to explore what he considered the darker side of himself.
Rolling Stones – Sympathy for the Devil (Neptunes Remix)
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And if you need more, you can tune into the Just Kids station that I set up on Pandora to complete my Patti Smith immersion experience.
My brand new son, Finn, was born on January 15th, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. This is interesting to me, because my daughter was born the day before MLK’s death day. She discovered this fact while watching a short kids’ oriented MLK documentary in pre-school. She reported back to us, “We learned about Martinluffaking today. He wanted everybody to be nice to each other so a mean man killed him.” She has been grilling us about Martinluffaking regularly in the years since. More or less non-stop. (“Mommy, tell me another non-fiction story about Martinluffaking.”) Having exhausted our own version of events, we turned to children’s books on the subject.
Martin’s Big Words byDoreen Rappaport with illustrations by Bryan Collier came highly recommended. It’s a beautiful book and a great starting point for providing information to curious youngsters. As you can see from the cover, it has also won many awards. The book gives a nice overview of MLK’s life, and while it doesn’t shy away from the facts, it doesn’t go into a lot of detail either. It left my 5 year old asking more questions, so I turned to the “additional reading” list at the end of Martin’s Big Words for guidance on where to turn next.
If You Lived at the Time of Martin Luther King by Ellen Levine with illustrations by Beth Peck is where things get real. This book, while geared towards children, does not pull any punches. It is guaranteed to raise questions that may be difficult to answer if you’re not ready- so be prepared. (“Why did people get killed over silly rules?”- i.e., segregation laws.) You will find yourself having to explain details on slavery, segregation, the Klan, lynching, and other delightful bedtime topics. If You Lived is probably geared towards slightly older children, but it is answering my daughter’s many, many questions while raising many, many more.
The heartening thing about this experience is that Civil Rights seem to be self-evident to five year olds. Most of our conversations are centered on how things are no longer as they were in MLK’s time and why that’s a good thing. My daughter is in a very diverse kindergarten class, and I can see that it doesn’t make any sense to her that grown-ups would have once told her that she couldn’t be friends or even go to school with some of her classmates. Maybe that’s why this all so fascinating to her. I’m sure there are more excellent books on the topic, but that’s as far as we’ve made it in our readings. Let me know if you have recommendations for our sure to be growing Civil Rights bookshelf.
Initially I was hesitant to check out The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties by Helen Weaver. I was sure that it would amount to a hagiography. Weaver had dated Kerouac for a short time in the fifties, and a lightly disguised version of the author appears as a character in one of Kerouac’s novels. However, the novel is published by City Lights in San Francisco, which is owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This fact seems to amount to an official “Beats Seal of Approval”, so I decided to check it out.
Weaver tells an interesting story of the escape of a young woman from the Leave it to Beaver 50′s of Scarsdale, NY to the happening scene of Greenwich Village. One day, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and friends end up on her doorstep looking for a place to crash. Kerouac and Weaver begin a brief and tumultuous relationship. Ultimately, she must turn out the alcoholic and seemingly rudderless Kerouac. With the value added of hindsight, Weaver comes up with this eulogy of the relationship:
I rejected him for the same reason America rejected him. He woke us up in the middle of the night in the long dream of the fifties. He interfered with our sleep.
Naturally she means this literally for herself and figuratively for America. Weaver’s memoir also discusses her dalliances in religion and psychotherapy. She draws on these experiences to explain how the French-Canadian Kerouac’s Catholic upbringing informed his Buddhism, and how both philosophies made him who he was.
Weaver’s story also sheds light on the publishing business, in which she was employed, as it existed in the 1950′s. It sounds like little has changed since then:
It was here that I first learned that from a publisher’s point of view the author is a necessary evil: a sort of un-housebroken, hypersensitive enfant terrible who needs to be nursed along, ignores deadlines, and makes impossible demands, and that it would be a whole lot easier and more efficient to publish books without having to deal with them–except for the inconvenient fact that you need then in order to have books to publish. When an author was actually physically present in the house there was a sense of excitement in the air…as if a wild animal were loose in the halls.
The subtitle of the book, A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties, seems to lose its focus later in the book as Weaver begins to talk about the sixties and that time that she hooked up with Lenny Bruce. (She had a thing for doomed young men, apparently.) Ultimately she comes back to Jack and the changing perceptions of the Beats and their place in the world of Letters.
Weaver now lives in Woodstock and has embraced some new age ideas. She has written books about communicating with animals and astrology. She has also helpfully included complete astrology charts for the main players discussed in her memoir. I admit, she lost me completely there. In the end, Weaver’s memoir, though uneven and occasionally a little too new age-y for my tastes, is a fascinating look at the private side of Jack Kerouac and other luminaries, the Beat’s scene in 1950′s New York, and the legacy of the Beat Generation.
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!
When I first started to read the early glowing reviews of David Owen’s Green Metropolis: Why Living Smarter, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, I’ll admit that I was skeptical. I bought it anyway, and I promptly had my mind blown. In a nutshell Owen’s thesis is this: big cities are inherently greener than the rural/suburban landscapes that many green authorities would have you believe are the platonic ideal of green living. That’s right, New York City is greener than Vermont. I read this book while on a trip to New York, which was too bad for my hosts. I provided them with near constant updates about why their city was one of the greenest on Earth. It got a little obnoxious. (Sorry, yall!)
Owen sets it up like this:
…We decided to make out first home in a Utopian community in New York state. For seven years we lived quite contentedly in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn’t have a lawn, a clothes dryer, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bill worked out to about a dollar a day. The Utopian community was Manhattan.
The reasons that New York is greener are varied. New Yorkers use less gasoline than the rest of us – way less (9 gallons per person per year). It’s possible to live in New York City and never get a driver’s license. Walking is a viable daily means of transportation. Public transportation is excellent. New Yorker’s activities take up remarkably less space and are accordingly more efficient. (The author gives the example of his workplace, the Conde Naste building. If built like a suburban office park, it would take up over 150 acres. And everyone would have to drive to get there.) Living spaces that share walls cut down on energy costs. New Yorkers live longer than the rest of us and are able to remain independent longer, too (all that walking is good for you). And so on.
In the second chapter, Owen lays out how the case of our oil dependency in this country and how well and truly screwed we all are as a result. It is impossible, Owen argues, to continue living anything close to the way that we have been. That’s a sobering assessment. We are going to have to change how we live dramatically whether we want to or not. The model that Owen puts forth as a solution is that of our largest cities. We need to live closer to one another in densely developed areas. We need to live in smaller spaces. Our cities need to be walkable and have excellent public transportation. Most difficult of all, we need to stop driving.
Along the way, Owen examines some of the “green” activities that may make us feel better, but are largely window dressing (or just plain wrong-headed) in the context of our oil addiction:
Anything that eases traffic in urban areas (makes driving more appealing) is bad
LEED “green” architecture is not so great (standards are difficult to document; does a poor job of putting buildings in context – i.e., a green office building that requires all of its workers to drive to/from work and out and back at lunch is not so green)
Large Victorian-style parks (think Olmsted parks like Central Park, Prospect Park, Piedmont Park in Atlanta) that break up urban walking routes are utilized less than smaller neighborhood parks
Locovorism is not a sustainable way for all of us to get all of our food
Vertical farming in cities is lunacy
Recycling may make you feel warm and fuzzy but is probably almost completely undone by your driving
Anything involving two people living in a 5000 square foot house (no matter what kind of earth friendly flooring they choose) is bad
If you live in a suburban or rural area, this make is going to make you feel, depending on your attitude about such things, somewhere between a little bit and a lotta bit crummy. Don’t worry though, the author is right there with you. Owen lives in rural Connecticut and is trying to work through the same issues as the rest of us.
In short, Green Metropolis is well deserving of all of the early review praise that I read. I’ll add my own: Green Metropolis is a lucid, well-argued book that will force you to change the way you view our world. It is a must read if our environmental future is something that concerns you. Read it already.
This review is already much longer than most that we run here on BGB, and I feel like I could write about this thought-provoking book all day long. Still, I’m not really doing the book justice because I am scrambling to get this post out so that I can let you know this: David Owen will be participating in a lecture/reading/interview with WABE’s Valerie Jackson at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library tomorrow night (11/12) at 7PM. Free.
Books, Non-Fiction | Tim | 
October 25, 2010 8:10 am | 
Comments (2) 
, 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.
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