Friday, December 30, 2016

The Kid Becomes Laureate: Bob Dylan in 2016



On an otherwise quiet October morning in 2016, the Swedish Academy announced that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, catching much of the world by surprise. Though Dylan appeared frequently on shortlists for the award, his chances were never anything more than slim--the dream of the contrarian--and the annual disappointment over his lack of recognition always seemed to be delivered with a wistful grin by his supporters. Those who professed a deeper knowledge of the Academy's unspoken criteria pointed to other American writers--Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates--as more likely and more deserving recipients; after all, those authors were integral to understanding the modern American experience, were taught in college classes, received major awards, and wrote "serious" literature, while Dylan was little more than a folk singer--an important one, to be sure--who had aged into a strange, incoherent caricature of himself. That such a revered prize should be bestowed upon a man whose only published works were an incomprehensible and out-of-print novel, a single volume of memoir, collections of his artwork, and children's books based on his life and music, seemed downright preposterous.

On that October morning, however, the preposterous became reality.* For the first time in the 115-year history of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the award was given to someone known primarily as a songwriter rather than as a novelist, poet, dramatist, or writer of short stories. (Last year's recipient, Svetlana Alexievich of Belarus, is known for her lengthy works of oral history, another first for the Swedish Academy) What's more, Dylan became the first American in more than two decades to receive the Nobel--a gap of time that many attribute to the Swedish Academy's thinly disguised disinterest in American literature. In 2008, Horace Engdahl, then the Academy's secretary, dismissed contemporary American literature and suggested that no living author from the United States was worthy of recognition. Speaking to the Associated Press, Engdahl stated, "There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world...not the United States. The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature....That ignorance is restraining."

The response from American critics, academics, publishers, and writers to Engdahl's assertion was instantaneous. They offered to send Engdahl a list of authors whose works, they said, disproved his belief in an ignorant and self-centered trend in literature from the States. They cited the number of American books published every year, the number of translations available to American readers, and writers who already possessed wide international audiences, all to no avail. In the years that followed, it seemed as though an entire generation of American writers would never see another one of their own honored.

Those who extolled the virtues of American literature, especially in the wake of Engdahl's public comments, advocated for a small but important selection of writers as worthy laureates--DeLillo, Roth, Oates among them--and justified such a list by noting how the work of each embodied not only the virtues of American literature--a focus on internal struggles suddenly borne outward, the pitfalls of dreams against a disinterested reality, the shades of emptiness and regret lurking behind every painted front door--but also honest, excellent, and stylistic writing. However, if you reexamine these same writers when placed beside those who won the Nobel over the previous two decades--that is to say, since Toni Morrison received the prize in 1993--you begin to see the differences. For all the variances in style and subject, the previous 23 laureates fit a certain mold. Their work focuses on the lives of the downtrodden, the dispossessed, the forgotten. They emphasize the experiences of those who are not part of the mainstream, who are not privileged, who walk through the world as innocents rather than troubled patriarchs. They confront issues of the present--genocide, censorship, inequality, totalitarianism--directly while forcing readers to suffer under the weight of the past, often whitewashed and frequently forgotten, as though the book were stitched together from the memories of the dead. The reason why Toni Morrison won a Nobel had little to do with the beauty of her prose or the complexity of her characters, though both were--and remain--stunning. Instead, she wrote books that refused to suffer from a willed amnesia, that refused to compromise content for the sake of commerce, that placed a mirror up not only to her readers but the country in which they lived and asked everyone to take a long, deep look at the reflection. Morrison understood--and understands--that placing the past behind us gives us permission to ignore it, even as it stands waiting for us on the coming horizon.

To be more blunt, most authors will make us confront the past, but do so incrementally and always delicately, as though the truth may be too much, or their readers possess fragile minds. A great author, on the other hand, pushes us towards the mass graves, the rusted slave-shackles, the improvised monuments to those who were disappeared by their governments. Most American writers focus their stories on small moments between people--the slow dissolution of a family, the questioning of faith, the infirmities of age against the ignorances of the young--without taking those lessons and connecting each to the greater world. This is what the Swedish Academy wants: a writer whose words resonate beyond their own mind and skin. Morrison's body of work works under the belief--one of many--that we as a nation cannot claim the mantle of freedom while standing atop a mound of chains...that we as a nation are forever engaged in a struggle for our own soul, even as we convince ourselves of our own moral superiority.

This is the reason why Bob Dylan--the eccentric, incoherent American troubadour--is a much more appropriate laureate than any of the aforementioned authors. Throughout his career, Dylan's lyrics have told stories of men and women who labor under inequities that consume them; of communities devastated by the greed and avarice of those in positions of power; of systems and institutions built to preserve liberty for the few and wealthy, rather than the many and the needy; of struggles by the downtrodden to gain the rights they need and deserve; of peace in the face of war and acceptance in the face of prejudice. Reading his lyrics today, often four or five decades after they were first written, is to see stories and images that transcend the era in which they were first put to paper. The struggles that inspired Dylan to write his songs remain to this day, and while they may differ in form, they remain the same in their devastating effects.


Take, for example, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a song from his 1964 album The Times They Are a-Changin', in which Dylan recounts the story of a black woman--a mother of ten--who is killed by William Zanzinger, a white man half her age, whose wealthy parents, family connections, and status in a segregated society guarantee he will see no punishment. And, as the song reveals, he receives a six-month sentence--far from the kind of resolution promised by a court of law, though one befitting a world in which Hattie Carroll was considered unworthy of justice simply because of the color of her skin. Though we may tell ourselves that we've banished such occurrences from our world, finding evidence to the contrary is not difficult: we see judges handing down harsher verdicts and punishments in cases involving people of color, while white defendants charged with heinous crimes against those same communities are found not guilty or given lenient sentences; we see prosecutors removing men and women from juries based on their ethnicities; and we see courts allowing politicians to disenfranchise non-white voters, making it increasingly difficult for them to gain the political influence they need to advocate for their rights. Dylan's song may be old, but the injustices of which he sings are ever-present in our lives.

Or take "North Country Blues," in which he sings of a poor rural community from the point of view of a young woman who lives there. Though the mines in her small town are successful--"the red iron pits ran plenty"--the narrator loses both her father and brother in a mining accident, and she decides to leave school to marry a miner. Eventually, the mine is closed completely, and when a representative from the company comes to town to explain why, the narrator records his words:  "
They say that your ore ain't worth digging / That it's much cheaper down / In the South American town / Where the miners work for almost nothing."

In the years to come, the town empties of people, including the narrator's husband, who disappears while she sleeps; and suddenly the narrator is alone with three children to raise in a town where there is little hope. Soon, the homes bear "cardboard filled windows," the shops close up one after another, and the narrator commiserates over the knowledge that her children will one day leave, saying, "Well, there ain't nothing here now to hold them."

Though this song is more than a half-century old, the scenes it depicts--of small towns dying away, of families struggling with poverty and job loss, of once prosperous industries leaving for distant countries and cheaper labor--are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. Millions of Americans continue to struggle with such issues, especially in regions where mining once kept entire communities alive. Urban and suburban areas continue to grow while towns and villages see their populations become smaller and grayer as young people graduate and move away. Financial strains take their toll on families, often dragging households into poverty. And when those tasked with fixing such problems come to town, they make sure to walk in parades, promise to bring jobs back in exchange for a couple of votes, then disappear for two years, four years, six years...returning only to reassure those same people that, yes, those jobs will come back, you just need to wait a little longer, and make sure you vote for the right candidate in November.

Even Dylan's later work, written long after the tumultuous 1960s had faded from memory, couldn't avoid touching on the problems faced by the average American. The song "Clean Cut Kid," released on his 1985 album Empire Burlesque, tells the story of a boy whose life is affected by the world around him until he throws himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in despair. He is raised with a deep sense of community and selflessness; he joins a sports team, sings in a choir, and even becomes a Boy Scout. Along the way, however, he's taught lies--"They said what's up is down, they said what isn't is / They put ideas in his head he thought were his"--in a manner that resembles indoctrination. Soon, he is drafted by the army and sent to Vietnam--"They sent him to a napalm health spa to shape up"--where alcohol, drugs, and guns become a common part of his life. When the war ends, he returns home a changed person, and without the skills he needs to leave the war behind:  "
They gave him dope to smoke, drinks and pills / A jeep to drove, blood to spill / They said 'Congratulations, you got what it takes' / They sent him back into the rat race without any breaks .... He bought the American dream but it put him in debt / The only game he could play was Russian roulette."

The song's refrain--"He was a clean-cut kid / But they made a killer out of him / That's what they did"--is an overt condemnation of a country that would send an entire generation off to war, oversee their return with indifference and disdain, and turn a cold shoulder to the problems they faced in the years to come. Long before PTSD was understood to the degree that it is today, American families saw the effects of a long, protracted war without rules, one that was fought by kids barely of out high school, and one that most people back home never wanted to talk about, even though it lingered behind them like a cannibalistic shadow. Among the many songs of love and heartbreak on Empire Burlesque, "Clean Cut Kid" was a clear yet overlooked reminder that Dylan had not tempered his desire for social justice, even in the age of Reagan's "Morning in America." Now, as our country faces yet another wave of soldiers who have returned from war without the skills or treatment they need to fight PTSD--and a country that seems unable or unwilling to help them, even in the face of high suicide rates among soldiers--Dylan's song is just as powerful as it was thirty years ago.

Dylan, who has devoted much of his career to moving between styles and genres with little concern for the opinions of critics and fans, has often puzzled those who look at the entirety of his output and cannot find a consistent message...or who see a once great folk singer mellowing with age, his passion and outrage diluted by commercial success and a world that has moved on from the protests of the Vietnam era. But this reading of Dylan's work ignores the fact that all good artists--writers, painters, musicians--change. If Dylan wrote and sang the same way he did fifty years ago, he'd be considered a relic of sorts, a sad novelty stuck in the past. Instead, he has used the last half-century as an opportunity to follow his own interests, even if that means facing the wrath of his devoted listeners.

In confounding others, Dylan reaffirmed his status as someone who had little interest in the wants of those in power or the patterns of a successful commercial artist. He does not need to prove himself to anyone, and his decision to skip the Nobel ceremony--because of scheduling conflicts, he said--was the clearest reminder yet that Dylan does not want or need the approval of anyone other than himself. This is precisely why he won the Nobel Prize in the first place. In bestowing him with such an honor, the Swedish Academy is saying, in essence, that those looking to advocate for American literature should look beyond the "conventional" authors who are so consistently touted as worthy of a Nobel Prize. Becoming a laureate is not the mainstreaming of a folk hero; instead, it is the world acknowledging what Americans academics have so long forgotten: American literature is at its best when it's challenging the laws and habits of its forefathers, uncovering the deeper truths about American history with clear eyes, and pushing the nation's conscience toward salvation.

But perhaps this is wrong. The larger lesson may have nothing to do with the Swedish Academy's rationale. Instead, the reaction to Dylan's win may be a chance to reassess how Americans see their relationship with literature. If any of the conventional authors had won, the announcement would have been met with words of celebration--an American, finally!--and a small uptick in sales for that authors' work, but little else. Some would have raised their voices to complain about the selection's predictability, its safeness, even its outdatedness; others would have posted long explanations for the lay-reader as to why the award was deserved after all; but the large majority of Americans who read books would have simply shrugged and forgotten.

Even Cormac McCarthy, by far the most deserving of the conventional choices, would have caused people little pause. Yes, millions have read No Country for Old Men and The Road--the latter being another of Oprah's choices, and a Pulitzer Prize-winner to boot--and millions more had seen the film adaptations of both. But go deeper into the past, beyond the instant bestsellers, and read his earlier novels--Suttree, perhaps, or The Orchard Keeper, or even the masterful and biblical Blood Meridian--and they would have discovered an author whose oeuvre is much more challenging and unorthodox than expected, and they would have set him aside as they would all the others.

Dylan is the antithesis of all this. Americans know him, can recite his words from memory, can sing his songs at the simple announcement of a title. They have lived with him for decades. His music defined not only eras in people's lives but also their struggles. It's Dylan who we need to look to, not as a sort of late-in-life savior in need of a second or third act, but as someone who understands what it means to struggle, to fight for one's own survival. Dylan knows who the enemies are, even as they hide behind desks or flee from the fight, and he understands that the crumbling neighborhoods around us are not a reflection of who we are, but of those who claim to represent our interests while caring only for themselves. Dylan sings of a changing world and how beautiful it can be. But he also wants us to know that change only happens when the downtrodden and oppressed come together; and when they do, those who stand in the way of progress--those who refuse to yield to the rivers of progress--will find themselves sinking like stones.



*Perhaps my favorite example of the degree to which so-called experts failed at predicting a Dylan win comes in an article by Alex Shephard of the New Republic. Posted just days before the Swedish Academy's announcement, Shephard goes out of his way to remind his readers that "Bob Dylan 100 percent is not going to win. Stop saying Bob Dylan should win the Nobel Prize." One week later, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize.



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Books I Read in 2016
  1. A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Sylvia Nasar; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Edward Hermann)
  2. Candy Bomber (Michael O. Tunnell)
  3. So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood (Patrick Modiano; Euan Cameron, translator)
  4. When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (Gene Smith)
  5. The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu; Ken Liu, translator)
  6. Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (Shel Silverstein)
  7. So, Anyway... (John Cleese)
  8. Salome (Oscar Wilde)
  9. Okay For Now (Gary D. Schmidt)
  10. The Protectors (Val Karlsson)
  11. Uprising (Margaret Peterson Haddix) 
  12. Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: The Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life of John Quincy Adams (Joseph Wheelan)
  13. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams)
  14. The Curse of Madame "C" (Gary Larson)
  15. Dead End in Norvelt (Jack Gantos)
  16. The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain (Bill Bryson)
  17. Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics (Chris Grabenstein)
  18. Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case (Chris Crowe)
  19. The Wave (Todd Strasser)
  20. *One Summer: America, 1927 (Bill Bryson; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)
  21. The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
  22. Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library (Scott Sherman)
  23. The Bookshop (Penelope Fitzgerald)
  24. The Shrunken Head (Lauren Oliver, ebook)
  25. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (Margalit Fox)
  26. *At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)
  27. Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (Kate DiCamillo)
  28. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino; William Weaver, translator)
  29. Guantanamo Boy (Anna Perera)
  30. The Far Side Observer (Gary Larson)
  31. Begging for Change (Sharon Flake)
  32. Something Under the Bed is Drooling (Bill Watterson)
  33. Here Lies the Librarian (Richard Peck)
  34. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (Tony Horwitz)
  35. The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
  36. A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius (Stacey Matson)
  37. One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment (Mei Fong)
  38. One Man's Folly: The Exceptional Houses of Furlow Gatewood (Julia Reed; Paul Costello, photographer; Rodney Collins, photographer)
  39. Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians (Brandon Sanderson)
  40. The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books (Thomas Wharton)
  41. The Sculptor (Scott McCloud)
  42. The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson (Jeffrey Toobin)
  43. Lake Wobegon Family Reunion (Garrison Keillor; audio, unabridged, narrated by Garrison Keillor, recorded live)
  44. A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (Tony Horwitz)
  45. Champlain's Dream: the European Founding of North America (David Hackett Fischer)
  46. Bad Unicorn (Platte F. Clark)
  47. News From Lake Wobegon (Garrison Keillor; audio, unabridged, narrated by Garrison Keillor, recorded live)
  48. Veronica's Room: A Melodrama (Ira Levin)
  49. My Reading Life (Pat Conroy; audio, unabridged, narrated by Pat Conroy)
  50. Gifts (Ursula K. Le Guin)
  51. Last Chapter and Worse (Gary Larson)
  52. Phantoms on the Bookshelves (Jacques Bonnet; translated by Sian Reynolds)
  53. A Sense of the World:  How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveller (Jason Roberts)
  54. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Volume 1: Acadia, 1610-1613 (Rueben Gold Thwaites, editor)
  55. Borderlands: Unconquered (John Shirley)
  56. Coraline (Neil Gaiman)
  57. Unfamiliar Fishes (Sarah Vowell)
  58. Wolf by Wolf (Ryan Graudin)
  59. 84, Charing Cross Road (Helene Hanff)
  60. Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker (Renata Adler)
  61. Confederates in the Attic:  Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Tony Horwitz, ebook)
  62. The House of Paper (Carlos Maria Dominguez; Peter Sis, illustrator; Nick Caistor, trans.)
  63. Echo (Pam Munoz Ryan)
  64. Three at Wolfe's Door (Rex Stout)
  65. The Works of Samuel de Champlain, Volume 2 (Samuel de Champlain; H.P. Biggar, editor; John Squair, translator; digital copy)
  66. Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (Jon Krakauer; audio, unabridged, narrated by Jon Krakauer)
  67. Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery (Dave Roman; Jason Ho, Jen Wang, Taina Telgemeier, and Jeff Zornow, illustrators)
  68. Breakthrough! How Three People Saved "Blue Babies" and Changed Medicine Forever (Jim Murphy)
  69. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Eric Idle)
  70. In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)
  71. Hoot (Carl Hiassen)
  72. Toxic Planet (David Ratte)
  73. Don't You Turn Back: Poems by Langston Hughes (Langston Hughes; Lee Bennett Hopkins, editor; Ann Grifalconi, illustrator)
  74. Yukon Ho! (Bill Watterson)
  75. Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud (Shaun Considine)
  76. Everything, Everything (Nicola Yoon)
  77. The Works of Samuel de Champlain, Volume 3 (Samuel de Champlain; H.P. Biggar, editor; H.H. Langton, translator/editor; W.F. Ganong, translator/editor; digital copy)
  78. *In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson)
  79. The Hudson's Bay Company (George Woodcock)
  80. *A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)
  81. The Comedians:  Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy (Kliph Nesteroff)
  82. Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (James McBride; ebook)
  83. The Rape of Nanking (Iris Change)
  84. *A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)
  85. Joe Gould's Teeth (Jill Lepore)
  86. The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas:  the Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle Des Indes Occidentales (Louis Nicholas; Francois-Marc Gagnon, editor and introduction; Nancy Senior, translator; Real Ouellet, modernization)
  87. *Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film (Patton Oswalt; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Patton Oswalt)
  88. The Nazi Hunters (Andrew Nagorski)
  89. *Mornings on Horseback: the Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (David McCullough; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Edward Herrmann) 
  90. Luke Skywalker Can't Read: And Other Geeky Truths (Ryan Britt)
  91. Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman (Lindy West)
  92. Missionary Labors of Fathers Marquette, Menard and Allouez, in the Lake Superior Region (Chrysostom Verwyst; PDF)
  93. But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past (Chuck Klosterman)
  94. Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870: Volume 1, 1670-1763 (E.E. Rich)
  95. *Zealot:  The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Reza Aslan; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Reza Aslan)
  96. Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine, ebook)
  97. A Very Remarkable Sickness: Epidemics in the Petit Nord, 1670-1846 (Paul Hackett)
  98. This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (Ann Patchett; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Ann Patchett)
  99. On Trails: An Exploration (Robert Moor)
  100. There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say (Paula Poundstone; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Paula Poundstone)
  101. The Voyageur's Highway: Minnesota's Border Lake Land (Grace Lee Nute)
  102. History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (Andrew J. Blackbird, digital)
  103. JR (William Gaddis)
  104. American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Jeffrey Toobin)
  105. 1776 (David McCullough)
  106. Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (David Rakoff, ebook)
  107. Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (David Rakoff; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by David Rakoff)
  108. The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Regions of the Great Lakes, Volume 1 (Nicolas Perrot, Bacqueville de la Potherie, Morrell Marston, and Thomas Forsyth; Emma Helen Blair, translator/editor/annotator; digital copy)
  109. The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk (Jennifer Niven)
  110. All the President's Men (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein)
  111. A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (Simon Winchester)
  112. The Library at Mount Char (Scott Hawkins)
  113. First Man: Reimagining Matthew Henson (Simon Schwartz)
  114. Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger, and Heartbreak from The Atavist Magazine (Evan Ratliff, editor)
  115. The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party (Daniel James Brown, ebook)
  116. The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris)
  117. The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel (F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edmund Wilson, editor)
  118. Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Geoff Dyer)
  119. Challenger Deep (Neal Shusterman; Brendan Shusterman, illustrator)
  120. The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)
  121. The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club (Phillip Hoose)
  122. The Boys in the Boat: The True Story of an American Team's Epic Journey to Win Gold at the 1936 Olympics, Young Reader's Edition (Daniel James Brown; Gregory Mone, adaptor)
  123. Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Jon Meacham)
  124. The Finest Hours: The True Story of a Heroic Sea Rescue, Young Reader's Edition (Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman)
  125. Tracker (Gary Paulsen)
  126. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Atul Gawande)
  127. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (David Grann)
  128. You Are Here: Around the World In 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station (Chris Hadfield)
  129. Rise of the Wolf (Curtis Jobling)
  130. Three Black Swans (Caroline B. Cooney)
  131. In the Shadows of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives (Kenneth C. Davis)
  132. I Heart You, You Haunt Me (Lisa Schroeder)
  133. The Zodiac Legacy: Convergence (Stan Lee and Stuart Moore; Andie Tong, illustrator)
  134. Ike's Bluff:  President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World (Evan Thomas)
  135. Let the People Decide (William M. Kraus)
  136. Unbought and Unbossed (Shirley Chisholm)
  137. Caesars of the Wilderness: Medard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers and Pierre Esprit Radisson, 1618-1710 (Grace Lee Nute)
  138. Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders (Joshua Foer, Ella Morton, and Dylan Thuras)
  139. Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants (Matthew J. Kirby)
  140. Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War (Steve Sheinkin)
  141. "He Chews to Run": Will Rogers' Life Magazine Articles, 1928 (Will Rogers; Steven K. Graget, editor)
  142. The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country (Laton McCartney)
  143. Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (David P. Thelen)
  144. Irena's Children: A True Story of Courage, Young Readers Edition (Tilar J. Mazzeo; adapted by Mary Cronk Farrell)
  145. Grendel (John Gardner)
  146. *A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)
  147. The War Within These Walls (Aline Sax)
  148. The Thief of Always (Clive Barker)
  149. How to Build a Museum: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (Tonya Bolden)
  150. Ghost (Jason Reynolds)
  151. The Peace of Montreal of 1701:  French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Gilles Havard; Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, translators)
  152. The Lyrics: 1961-2012 (Bob Dylan)

*Denotes a reread.



Saturday, November 12, 2016

A State Of a Different Color: Thoughts on the 2016 Presidential Election





On Election Day, the state in which I've lived for my entire life gave its ten electoral votes to the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump. In doing so, it broke a nearly three-decade trend of voting for the other party: ever since the election of 1988, when George H.W. Bush faced off against Michael Dukakis, Wisconsin has cast its lot in with the Democratic candidate.

What makes this fact worthy of note is that the voters of Wisconsin have long embraced their state's progressive history with pride. After all, this was the home of Robert LaFollette, the anti-war Progressive who championed civil rights, economic parity, and an end to party control, all in an era when such positions were not always celebrated; and Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, who served the state as both governor and senator. For decades, Wisconsin was the epitome of a blue-collar state, where agriculture and industry mixed well together, its universities ranked among the best in the country, and its citizens chose their politicians based less on party identification and more on a shared set of ideals. After all, this is the same state that elected a Tea Party Republican, Ron Johnson, to the Senate in 2010, then elected an openly gay liberal, Tammy Baldwin, to the same body two years later.

Wisconsin has a history of blurring the lines between Democrat and Republican, between liberal and conservative, and embracing the idea that a good politician should be approachable, reasonable, and a defender of democratic principles, rather than a partisan who only scores points for his or her side. William Proxmire, a Democratic senator for more than three decades, devoted much of his career to fighting government waste, to the point of making enemies among many liberal institutions. Similarly, Lee Dreyfus, a Republican governor in the early 1980s, signed a law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation--the first state in the nation to do so--and explained his decision by stating, "It is a fundamental tenet of the Republican Party that government ought not intrude in the private lives of individuals where no state purpose is served, and there is nothing more private or intimate than who you live with and who you love." Wisconsin elected a socialist to Congress in 1910, watched as he was removed from office for speaking out against World War I in 1919, and returned him to the same Congressional seat in a special election five weeks later. And when Joseph McCarthy, the state's junior senator, forced his witch-hunt on the American population, more than 300,000 Wisconsinites signed recall petitions against him. (The "Joe Must Go" movement did not succeed in its goals, but McCarthy's career was over nonetheless; he was censured by his colleagues in the Senate and died in 1957, before his term ended. Proxmire was elected to replace him and served until 1989.)

But these political juxtapositions do not explain why a reliably blue state, even one with a Republican governor and Republican-controlled legislature, went for the Republican candidate this year. Some have pointed to the final results--Clinton lost to Trump by around 27,000 votes, a minuscule number in a state that cast more than three million ballots--and placed the blame on third-party candidates, who received more than 150,000 votes, enough to have put Clinton over the threshold of victory if even a fraction of those votes had gone to her. Others note that Bernie Sanders, whose policies were much more liberal than Clinton's, won the state's primary 56.6% to 43.1%, a suggestion that perhaps Clinton's message did not resonate with enough of Wisconsin's historically progressive electorate. Others still noted how Clinton had not campaigned in Wisconsin since April of this year, perhaps believing her lead in Wisconsin to be more secure than it was. And while these are legitimate theories, they do not take into account other possibilities that I find much more believable, based on all of the years I've spent living in rural areas of Wisconsin.

To understand the election of 2016 as it relates to Wisconsin (and other blue-collar, Midwestern states), we must return to 2009, to the days and weeks after President Obama took office for the first time. Across the country, millions of Americans were suffering under the most devastating economic downturn in 75 years. More than half a million jobs had disappeared in December alone, a month before Obama took the oath of office, and unemployment in 2008 had exceeded 11 million people, almost twice the number of Americans who were considered unemployed before the recession began. (Eventually, the unemployment rate would reach 10%.) The number of foreclosures throughout the country was also continuing to rise and would eventually surpass 1.2 million by 2010, forcing many families into a state of uncertainty, if not outright homelessness. Food insecurity skyrocketed; state and municipal budgets were slashed, affecting everything from pensions and infrastructure to education and basic public services; and economic growth came to a standstill. To say that the country was suffering would have been viewed as the ultimate understatement.

This was the dominant problem facing Obama and the new Congress. It was far from an insurmountable problem, but solutions would not be quick or easy. Difficult votes would need to be taken, especially considering the amount of money required to assuage the damage that had been done. Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, had managed to pass legislation in the closing months of his second term, which was designed to lessen much of the recession's economic damage. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, or "bailout," was introduced in the final days of September and promised to infuse more than $700 billion into the economy while helping rescue faltering banks and financial institution. When it was brought up for a vote, however, the bill failed due to concerns over the legislation's benefits to "big banks," its disregard for individual Americans who were suffering, and the possibility that it might hurt taxpayers even more. Eventually the act did pass, but most agreed that the next president--whether it be Obama or McCain--would need to do more. This gave rise to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, known informally as "the stimulus," an almost $800 billion infusion of money into the economy in order to incite job growth and shore up faltering public institutions.

To most economists, these two legislative acts were necessary: you could not shore up the American economy without first stabilizing its major institutions, especially in a country in which so much of the economy was based around banking. But to the millions of Americans who were suffering, this seemed like a betrayal. Instead of moving to secure the financial lives of its citizens, the American government appeared to be handing over an unconscionable amount of money to the very same people whose greed and carelessness had undermined the economy and brought about the recession in the first place.

In their eyes, this was comparable to the local fire station handing over control of the firetrucks to a group of arsonists.


This was the perception, and it so angered the American population that it gave rise to the Tea Party, a supposedly grassroots movement among conservative voters who were angered over the government's assistance to Wall Street. (The Tea Party was actually funded and encouraged by vested interests in the Republican Party and conservative circles, including those in the conservative news media.) In the end, however, the bailout and stimulus both prevailed, and in the years since the latter proved to be one of the great successes of Obama's first term--the economy rebounded, the stock markets stabilized, and unemployment fell below 5% by the end of Obama's second term. Supporters of the stimulus, as well as members of the president's party, hailed the bill as a major success, and more often than not their adulation took the form of the same laudable claim: he had prevented a second Great Depression.

The problem is that, at least in American politics, you rarely get credit for preventing something from happening, no matter how successful you may have been at it. Those who had looked to the government for support were not helped by the bailout or the stimulus, at least not in a way that they could sense in their everyday lives. But still they waited, perhaps expecting Obama and Congress to turn their attention to the recession's many victims once the banks had recovered. Unfortunately, their elected officials moved on to other pressing issues without addressing many of the economic problems that remained; they did not raise the minimum wage, institute a living wage, strengthen Social Security, prevent jobs from moving overseas, or enact a myriad of legislation that could have lessened the growing wage gaps and class disparities. To those Americans who worked long hours, perhaps even multiple jobs, while taking home paychecks that barely sufficed, no explanation could have been good enough: a politician talking about policy will never mitigate what blue-collar workers see and feel on a daily basis.

These same voters became buried under credit card debt, often because the companies charged exorbitant interest rates; could barely afford life-changing medical visits, even as millions of previously uninsured men and women gained access to the marketplace; had difficulty paying their mortgages, despite the sudden profitability of their banks; watched their children suffer under crushing student debt, to the point that many moved back home; and saw their jobs disappear while Wall Street executives saw record-breaking profit margins, gave themselves large pay raises, and claimed incredible retirement packages.

And while they waited for help, they watched as the very same politicians who had been elected to help instead them took millions from lobbyists, cut the number of days they would be in session to less than 150 and, in some cases, took up permanent residence in Washington, D.C. rather than back in their state or district. Even more, House districts were redrawn to make them politically safer, to the point that most congressional districts were no longer competitive; as long as an incumbent won his or her primary, which is easy to do with large donations and support from super-PACs, the general election was no longer a viable threat, and the need to moderate views and compromise on legislation became not only unnecessary but a potential liability. As a result, these elected officials, who were supposed to be acting as public servants, were instead treating their seats in Congress as well-paying, highly influential, top-tier jobs...and they were willing to say and do what they needed in order to keep them.

This enmity towards Washington D.C. became the first ingredient in the vile concoction that would elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. But anger alone cannot drive a presidential campaign, especially when the outgoing commander-in-chief has a high approval rating, unemployment is under 5%, and the party's chosen candidate has an unprecedented amount of baggage. And anger at Washington D.C. is not the same as anger at those of other religions, nationalities, ethnicities, or sexual preferences. Even Hillary Clinton understood this. In her now infamous "deplorables" speech, in which she characterized half of Trump's supporters as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic--you name it," Clinton said he had lifted the fringes of his party into the mainstream and made their beliefs a cornerstone of his campaign. However, she added, there was another basket, one that needed to be separated from the first:

...[I]n that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures. And they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
The point, Hillary said, albeit inelegantly, was to try and appeal to that second basket of people--to show them that Trump would not be their savior in Washington, that he would not fix the status quo, that he would not rescue them from their despair. The point was to give them a better option, one that did not force them to endorse Trump's bigotry and hate out of desperation and fear. It was an argument that made sense and should have guided the final months of Hillary's campaign, but instead it became a source of controversy for her, to the point that she had to apologize publicly. In that realm, Trump won, and in doing so, he could paint Clinton once again as the embodiment of the D.C. establishment he hoped to remove.

Now, at this point, some clarification is needed. For much of this year's election cycle, Republican pundits and party spokespeople claimed that Trump's surprising amount of support was due to this inaction on economic issues--that people suffering from "economic anxiety" were frustrated enough with Washington D.C. that they could no longer tolerate career politicians like Jeb Bush, John Kasich, or Hillary Clinton. These were candidates, it was said, who had become so ingrained in the system that they could not be trusted to look out for the interests of anyone but themselves and their friends on Wall Street. Only someone like Donald Trump--a man so rich he could not be bought, so outspoken he could not be silenced, so confident in his ideals that he could not be swayed--could possibly restore the federal government to working condition.

This, to be perfectly honest, is bullshit.

Characterizing the economy as the sole reason for Trump's victory is beyond misguided. Yes, there is actual economic anxiety throughout the country, but that does not excuse those Trump supporters who cast a vote for him with full knowledge of his bigoted positions. During the campaign, Trump called for the exclusion of an entire religion from a country whose very Constitution ensures religious liberty; who characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals; who derided the status of all POWs, including one who was the Republican Party's nominee in 2008, as less than heroic; who refused to denounce the support he received from hate groups, including neo-Nazis and the KKK; who refuses to release his tax returns, thereby hiding any conflicts of interest he might have; whose campaign was in regular contact with members of the Russian government; who announced that he would jail his political opponent, despite the fact that she had been cleared by various Republican officials and committees; who supported the bombing of innocent women and children in war zones, the textbook definition of a war crime; who endorsed the use of torture; who defended the sexual assault of women; and so on. Each one caused endless controversy for Trump, and yet he remained relatively unscathed. In fact, it could even be argued that this brazen, unapologetic attitude actually enhanced his reputation as the only candidate who could not be bossed or shamed--as someone who was genuine rather than shaped by focus groups, even if that genuineness was disgusting and disqualifying.

After all, a person's bigoted views don't matter so much when you're one missed paycheck away from total poverty. If Trump claims he can fix the system that has kept you in financial shackles for more than a decade, a system that also threatens to keep your children and grandchildren in those same shackles, then what he says doesn't matter so much as what he can do.

There is another reason for Trump's victory, one that extends beyond economics and is supported by much of the exit polling, not to mention the hundreds of localized events that happened during the campaign, and have continued well into the wake of Trump's victory: that the American population, and specifically the white voting block, holds many of the same bigoted views as Trump. There has always been an undercurrent of prejudice in the Republican platform. After all, this is the same party that has pushed voter ID laws designed to disenfranchise those in low income, African American, and Hispanic neighborhoods, as well as areas in which college students live in large numbers; has worked to undermine the health care options of women; has prevented meaningful immigration reform, which would help millions of people "come out of the shadows"; has demonized Muslims as part of a nation-wide conspiracy of terrorism; has characterized those on welfare programs like Medicare and Medicaid as lazy; and has refused to extend civil rights to the LGBT community, among other issues. Many of these views were codified into actual legislation over the previous decades, and others were promoted endlessly by talk radio and 24-hour cable news, which advanced ugly stereotypes about specific minority groups while also encouraging viewers to see their country as one that was changing for the worse due to those same groups. When Donald Trump spoke of "making America great again," he was continuing this narrative, which imagined a return to a time when gay people could be persecuted without repercussion, women worked in the home without demanding equal treatment, and people of color "knew their place."


In the years that followed the stimulus, Obama and his administration championing the rights of minority groups--celebrating same-sex marriage, pushing for acceptance of transgender individuals, advocating for immigration reform, accepting Syrian refugees, and so on. This was in keeping with Obama's belief that a country can only be strong when every one of its citizens is strong, that a country can only be free when every person living within its borders is free, that a country leads in the world when it does so by example and not by chastisement or hypocrisy. For millions of Americans--older, white, working class Americans--these actions reeked of betrayal. "Obama is helping everyone," they told themselves, "everyone but me and the people like me." Instead of increasing the minimum wage, they saw him pushing states to make bathrooms accessible to transgender individuals; instead of reigning in the power of Wall Street, they saw him commenting on the shooting of black men and women by police; instead of working to refinance their mortgages or reinstate Glass-Steagall, they saw him bathing the White House in colors of the rainbow to celebrate same-sex marriage. In their eyes, Obama was purposely ignoring them to the benefit of other minority groups, and they construed this as a threat to their own livelihoods. As Heather C. McGhee, a policy analyst, said of this perception, "When you're so used to privilege, equality feels like oppression." 

In other words, Obama's efforts to raise others up to the level of fairness and equality so long enjoyed by white voters was seen by those same voters as evidence of Obama's disregard for their needs and disinterest in their rights. 

But what they saw paled in comparison to what they did not see, what they chose to not see, or what was kept from them. That many of Obama's attempts at rectifying these economic problems were obstructed by the Republican majorities in Congress was a fact often ignored by these voters. They had been told long before inauguration day--by pundits, by talk radio, by Fox News, by Republicans themselves--that Obama was not looking out for their interests, that he would ignore the plight of the working class (who happened to be resoundingly white), that he was just another big-government liberal who was plotting to undermine the American economy, take away their guns, and persecute them for their religious beliefs. None of which was remotely true, but it didn't matter: by January 2008, the narrative had already been written, and the Republicans in Congress made sure that Obama didn't achieve anything that deviated from such a narrative.

Obama worked to open up the health care markets to millions of Americans who were uninsured or were paying too much through their workplace, a program that would have benefited many of the same individuals who were suffering economically; instead, the Republican Party and Fox News characterized the program as socialist, used scare tactics (such as "death panels") to distract people from its potential benefits, and fought for its defeat. Obama worked to close the wage gap between men and women by signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which would have protected women--many of them future Trump supporters--from being given inadequate wages by unscrupulous employers; Republicans in the House and Senate voted against it, forcing Democrats to reintroduce it in the following session. Obama advocated for raising the minimum wage in his 2015 State of the Union Address, but Republicans in Congress refused to budge, and many began giving voice to the lie that a raise in the minimum wage would devastate small businesses and ruin the economy; in response, all the president could do was sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors, leaving most Americans to continue working long hours for insufficient wages.

At every step, when Obama attempted to help those who were suffering economically, he was kept from doing so...not because the Republicans had basic ideological differences with his ideas, or because they viewed the language of the bills as inadequate, but because giving Obama a single legislative victory would have hurt their narrative. Had Obama been successful in raising the minimum wage, the Democratic Party would have been able to claim, with unassailable proof, that they were the ones looking out for the interests of the working class, not the GOP. It was obstruction of the vilest form, as it forced millions to suffer day after day for the sake of political points, and it was an unmitigated success for the Republican Party. When the 2016 campaign began, Republican candidates could claim that Obama had done nothing for the sake of "everyday Americans," all while hiding behind their own misconduct.

All of which hurt Hillary Clinton's chances. She was already facing a historically difficult campaign, as it's rare for candidates from the outgoing president's party to win a presidential election--the last to do so was George Bush in 1988, and before him, Herbert Hoover in 1929--but Obama's approval ratings were unusually high, the demographics of the country favored the Democratic candidate, and Clinton's campaign was much more organized from the outset. That Bernie Sanders, the 74-year-old democratic socialist senator from Vermont, was able to wage such a successful campaign against Clinton in the primary was a surprise to many, and should have been a clue to Clinton's own campaign about the lack of enthusiasm towards her otherwise historic run. But the threat Sanders posed was never a strong one in terms of winning the nomination, and the Democratic Party platform eventually moved further to the left because of him--apparently the closest Clinton came to embracing a truly progressive campaign.

There have been many who, in the hours and days following Election Day, looked back on the Democratic primary and wondered what might have been. They unearthed polls that showed Sanders defeating Trump heavily and used them to bolster claims that Clinton herself should carry the burden of responsibility: she was a weak candidate, they say, and she wasn't progressive enough, was too corrupt. That these Sanders supporters make this claim after this election, in which the vast majority of polls and pundits were not only wrong but demonstrably so, reveals how little we know about what might have been, and we should leave it that way. Blaming Clinton is not only counter-productive, it's based on a fallacy. When all votes have been counted, Clinton will be shown to have won the popular vote by a staggering amount, and she will most likely have received more votes than any other candidate for president in American history save Obama himself. The blame here does not belong to one person, it belongs to many.

In the days following Trump's victory--which he achieved, it should be said again, without the popular vote--many on the left declared it a result of the bigotry of his voters, nothing more. They dismissed the idea that his support came a disaffection with economic condition, or with the disappearance of the middle class and a rise in those who are holding down more than one job, or with an unprecedented distrust of the government itself, at least where their own well-being is concerned. And while those who supported Trump in spite of his bigotry rather than because of it should never be allowed to forget how their vote was an endorsement of such bigotry, simply characterizing all Trump voters with the same label does a disservice to those of us who wish to be informed and be able to inform others.

By attributing Trump's electoral success solely to bigotry, Democrats are giving themselves a pass. "It wasn't us," they can say, "it was the racists and the sexists who are at fault." Or they point to the top of their ticket and say, "It was Hillary's fault. We should have nominated Bernie." This may allow Democrats to feel better about their own situation, not to mention their own party, but it does not address the real problems they have with messaging, candidates, and leadership. The Democratic Party cannot continue ignoring the needs of the vanishing middle class and the expanding lower class. They cannot continue supporting candidates who are flawed, institutional, or lacking in a progressive zeal. They cannot continue ignoring the farms and factories in favor of country clubs, closed-door dinners, and fundraisers where a plate of food costs more than the average American makes in two or three weeks. They cannot continue being led by career politicians who are more interesting in preserving their jobs than steering the party in the right direction. They cannot keep letting the biases of cable news and the pundit class control their own messaging. They cannot stand by while others mischaracterize and demean their ideals, simply because they want to "rise above the fray" or preserve their own sense of political decency.

And, most importantly, they cannot keep giving in to the belief that voters appreciate compromise over advocacy, logic over passion, moderation over progressivism. The voters of the country, and especially those on the left, want candidates who deliver power policy ideas, even if those same ideas might seem extreme to the opposition; as the candidacies of Trump and Sanders proved, powerful ideas can take a candidate further than those in the establishment might imagine. And while it's true that Clinton received more votes than both--more than Sanders in the primaries, more than Trump in the general--she was far from the inspiring candidate Democrats (and our democracy) needed. She did not reach the same number of voters as Obama did, she did not "perform" as well as he did in battleground states, and in turn those voters did not feel inspired enough to cast their votes for her. As Obama proved in 2008, the American people are still willing to be inspired.

No, not willing. Desperate. We as a nation are desperate to be inspired, and we are desperate for those inspiring words to have some fight behind them. But sometimes the wrong person comes along with the wrong message for the wrong fight. In 2018--and 2020, and 2022, and every election in the foreseeable future--Democrats need the right message in the hands of the right messengers. The future looks bright for them, and their list of potential candidates--Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Perez, the Castro Brothers, Kamala Harris--are all exceptional. The Democratic Party may even have the edge when it comes to future voters--young people, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans all vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic ticket, and their share of the electorate will continue to grow over time--but every day without a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress is a day in which the achievements of not only Obama but every Democratic administration of the last century are under threat. The Democrats can rise again, but first they need to change, to embrace their rebellious side, to stick up for what they believe in, and to show the American voters that they're worthy of the White House.






Thursday, October 20, 2016

Legacy ("Destiny and Power" by Jon Meacham)



There is an oft-spoken understanding that the legacy of an American president cannot be adequately assessed until they have been dead for some time. David McCullough's epic Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry Truman was published in 1992, two decades after the man himself passed away, and even that otherwise lengthy span of time that was relatively quick, considering how long it took for us to be given comprehensive biographies of his predecessors. Abraham Lincoln, for example, lay buried beneath 140 years of fable and partisan vitriol before Doris Kearns Goodwin's massive Team of Rivals unearthed him; until then, he was little more than a skinny Kentucky-born lawyer and political novice whose decisiveness and cool diplomacy singlehandedly reunited a broken country, neither of which was entirely true. Similarly, the first volume of Edmund Morris' trilogy on Teddy Roosevelt was published 60 years after the subject's death, despite the fact that Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in the era of muckraking journalism, which offered him an endless platform to express and refine his ideas. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower--all were men whose presidencies changed both the direction of the country and the role of its government, and who were not given definitive biographies until decades, if not centuries, after their passing.

Rarely--perhaps never--has an American president's life and career been assessed objectively while they are alive. Those who undertake such a foolhardy mission often find themselves stymied by sectarian sentiments, the biases of interview subjects, the inaccessibility of necessary documents, and the residue of frivolous tabloid scandals. What's more, any historian who attempts to place a living head of state into the historical record faces an insurmountable inability to know whether that president's accomplishments will last the test of time, or if they're simply popular and successful in the moment. For example, anyone who writes about the presidency of Barack Obama in the coming decades will find it difficult to ascertain with certainty the effects of his more substantial accomplishments, such as Obamacare, ending the war in Iraq, and his appointments to the Supreme Court. Only the passage of time and a clear-eyed examination of the facts can answer these questions, and even then a historian has to be vigilant against ideologues.

That Jon Meacham, a respected Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, should undertake such a mission--and to focus that mission on a one-term president overshadowed in popular culture by both the man who succeeded him and the man he succeeded--seems almost foolhardy from a distance. Nevertheless, his biography of George H.W. Bush, entitled Destiny and Power, is a noble attempt to convey the story of a man whose life was a rich array of experiences. He was a senator's son who served in World War II, a successful Texas oilman, congressman, head of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, head of the CIA, vice-president under Ronald Reagan, and eventually the president. He lived long enough to see himself become a great-grandfather, to watch two of his sons become governors--and one ascend to the presidency himself--and see his legacy reevaluated to his benefit. He became friends with the man who defeated him in 1992, and together they raised millions of dollars to benefit the victims of natural disasters. Most men, even those who become president, never achieve the kinds of successes experienced by George H.W. Bush, and those who do almost never approach such successes with Bush's level of humility and indebtedness.

When Meacham began his research into George H.W. Bush, he could not have known how timely such a project would prove to be, nor could he have guessed at the fortuitousness of the book's eventual year of publication:  2016, a presidential election year, in which the most qualified candidate in American history faces off against the most unqualified. There are those who see the publication of this biography as a rebuke to contemporary politics and politicians, including--and especially--the candidacy of Donald Trump, currently the nominee of Bush's cherished Republican Party. But the writing of this book was not undertaken in the last sixteen months alone, and as Meacham himself admits in the closing pages, he spent almost a decade interviewing the man himself--meaning that this project began not during the current presidential campaign but the presidencies of George W. Bush and, more importantly, Barack Obama, with whom Bush Sr. shares many similarities. Both speak with intelligence rather than hollow passion, rely on logic over emotions, and see the nation as a place in which everyone should be able to live successfully and in harmony, regardless of ideology or background. What's more, both presidents emphasizes compromise over an everything-or-nothing mindset, to the point that their legislative agendas suffered. When Obama awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bush in 2011, he spoke admiringly of his predecessor, and in doing so joined millions of other Americans who had reevaluated Bush and liked a lot of what they saw.

Nevertheless, Meacham's book does provide an interesting insight into modern-day politics, from the 1988 campaign--which is infamous for race-based attack ads, over which Bush had no control--to the rise of cable news, including the network that would one day be overseen by a Bush campaign advisor, Roger Ailes. In one chapter, Meacham quotes a memo written to Bush's campaign officials by Ailes, in which the latter discusses a general theme for the election, including a belief that voters "must also know that George Bush will not raise their taxes. He has the experience to keep negotiations going with the Soviets. And he is very tough on law and order. If we penetrate with those three messages, it is my belief that we will win the election. A major amount of our time, effort, speeches, commercials and interviews should be spent repeating and repeating and repeating those messages. We must force this election into a very narrow framework to win." (335) To read these words almost three decades after the fact, and during an election in which Ailes is advising a Republican nominee whose messaging includes lowering taxes and returning "law and order" to the nation (while also dismissing a controversial relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin), makes one feel as though this book were intentional, despite the knowledge that it is not, and raises a fear that perhaps our politics have not advanced as far as we might have hoped.

Regardless of how it reflects on the current political climate, no lifetime can be summarized in a single volume, especially that of an American president. This simple fact becomes glaringly obvious as Meacham's biography reaches its halfway point: Reagan's presidency occupies only 50 pages or so (out of 600), giving the impression that both terms were largely inconsequential for Bush, which is far from accurate. In truth, those eight years could fill a volume of their own, as could almost every era in Bush's life, from his service in the Pacific Theatre and education at Yale to his role as ambassador and envoy, and even his post-presidency. The brevity of Meacham's book, even at 600 pages (with another 200 for notes and sources), means it can never become what it aspires to be: the first truly comprehensive biography of America's 41st president. Instead, Meacham has created a roadmap--a fascinating and even-handed but surprisingly brief and quick outline--that will serve future biographers well. Those who will one day write such comprehensive biographies will be indebted to Meacham, as will Bush himself and every student of history. After all, any man who accomplished as much as George H.W. Bush is worth knowing, and he is worth knowing well.




Thursday, June 9, 2016

Obscurity ("Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore)



Over the last few decades, the predilection for nonfiction writers to insert themselves into the story has grown increasingly worse, to the point where such habits now threaten to unmoor the entire genre. Journalists who once sought interesting and important subjects now think of themselves--or at least their experiences--as an equally interesting or important part of the equation. In addition to direct quotes and personal insights from their interviewees, we are given descriptions of the process with which these journalists secured the interview, the travels they took in order to reach their subjects, the emotional responses they felt as they sat across from said subjects, realizations they underwent in the proceeding hours, recollections, moments of nostalgia, and unrelated tangents, until each sentence becomes a heady, ego-nursing burden for the reader. Similarly, many writers of history offer their readers volumes engorged with their own firsthand experiences:  digging through dusty archives, walking through long-ignored museums and galleries, pondering the thoughts and feelings of someone many centuries dead, and ruminating over crumbled historical buildings. And while there are those in this field who excelled at balancing story and experience so that a greater truth emerges--Hunter S. Thompson* is perhaps the best example--that balance is almost impossible to strike successfully, and more often than not the author takes center stage over the actual subject, now rendered as foil or, even worse, understudy.

This untenable balance is the undoing of Joe Gould's Teeth, Jill Lepore's short but fact-jammed account of her attempts to track down The Oral History of Our Time, a fabled work of literature written by the very subject of her book. A bohemian in New York City between world wars, Joseph Gould was famous for being eccentric:  near destitute for much of his life, he nevertheless claimed to be writing an "oral history" of the present day that would be longer than anything else in human history. He wrote this epic in hundreds of cheap composition notebooks over the course of decades, though almost none of them were preserved; sometimes he would lose a few, the entire collection would be thrown out, he would give one or two volumes to friends, or he would simply restart. Today we know that he most likely suffered from hypergraphia; at the time, however, he was considered a unique and temperamental marvel of the age, a benefactor of men like Ezra Pound. When Joseph Mitchell profiled Gould in the New Yorker, he became a sensation unto himself, as did his work-in-progress. But when Gould died, his notebooks vanished, transforming both man and manuscript into myths that would be constantly changing and forever unsolvable.

As she notes in her afterward, Jill Lepore spent a semester gathering artifacts related to Joe Gould, poring over them with her students, and following leads that promised to settle the matter of his notebooks once and for all:  did his masterpiece exist, or didn't it? In the process, however, Lepore reveals a strange lack of interest in presenting the man's actual work to her readers. She finds Gould's diary, a collection of ten notebooks that run "more than eight hundred pages," and photographs every single page so that she can consult, transcribe, and keep them. In lieu of the actual oral history, this seems like it would make a fitting substitute as the heart of her research. But Lepore only offers us short, rare excerpts from these diaries, nothing more than a few loose sentences, and a quick consultation of the book's sixty-five pages of notes reveals that Gould's diary is utilized in less than two dozen instances. The reader is forced to assume that the diary is filled little more than disconnected thoughts or unintelligible scribblings--nothing that would add to her research. And yet, according to Lepore herself, "As diaries, as a record of a life, they're often dull, but they're also cluttered with detail and full of speech." However, she does not offer us more than a few scraps from these 800-plus pages to prove her point or illustrate Gould's mind at work; instead, at the close of this portion of the chapter, she fantasizes about what she'd actually like to do to his diary, as well as a few other artifacts:
I picture it like this:  I'd dip those letters and pages torn from the diaries in a bath of glue and water--the black ink would begin to bleed--and I'd paste them over an armature I'd built out of Gold's empty cigarette boxes, rolled up old New Yorkers, and seagull feathers. I called my paper-mache White Man (Variation). [30]
There are also moments in which Lepore discovers excerpts from the actual Oral History, or at least from certain versions of it. She finds them in old literary journals or in the possession of Gould's friends and confidants. And while they are small, meager pieces of a vast, almost incalculable puzzle, they nevertheless constitute more than almost anyone else has read from Gould. Considering their rarity, one would assume that Lepore would print as much of them as she could. In doing so, Lepore would add to our collective understanding of Gould more than anyone else, including Gould himself. Instead, she repeatedly passes over those opportunities. Where other researchers or historians would have included one long passage after another, Lepore offers a few sentences at most, all the while quoting friends of Gould who extolled the virtues of what they themselves had read. To offer a weak metaphor, Lepore has given us a menu that promises much, as well as quotes from other satisfied customers, but refuses to bring anything other than a basket of crusty bread to our table.

This is the pattern that Lepore follows throughout much of the book. She provides us with quick, staccato-like facts about Gould and his notebooks but nothing more. What made Gould both famous and notorious is his obscurity and his eccentricity, both of which would seem to meet beautifully in the words he wrote. But Lepore is more interested in keeping those aspects unresolved, and in refusing to explore Gould beyond her own experiences and discoveries--in essence, refusing to let us know Gould in the same way she has--Lepore is trying to keep him all to herself. This goes against the very nature of a writer and a historian, and brings into question the entire reason Lepore wrote this book in the first place.

In perhaps the most enraging moment of the book--which, at a mere 151 pages, not including the sources, taunts us with its brevity--Lepore describes the process she undertook at the end of her research as she was boxing up all of her papers, which concludes with this moment:  "I spoke on the telephone to an old man in a faraway land. He told me he had some of Gould's notebooks. I believed him. I did not call him again." Taken literally, Lepore is admitting that she had an opportunity to secure--or at least examine--actual notebooks from her subject and chose to pass that opportunity by. This one act alone demonstrates Lepore's apparent disinterest in her stated goal, which was to verify if Gould's long epic was in fact real; instead, it seems to suggest that, after only a few months, she had grown tired of Gould, despite the fact that this book makes her responsible for him. (The last book about Gould was published in 1965; its author, Joseph Mitchell, passed away 20 years ago.)

If Lepore is writing figuratively--the unnamed man from a "faraway land" reads almost like a fairy tale--and personifying her own subconscious, her Gould-like obsession, into human form, then she's unnecessarily teasing the reader while also revealing an aspect of her methodology that undermines any credibility she may have:  she is quitting. By their very nature, historians spend years tracking down every last artifact they possibly can, all the while understanding that even the smallest story can never fully be told; in Lepore's case, she has given herself a meek timeline--four months, possibly five--and simply stopped, despite her mind telling her to continue on. The result is the book before us:  short, small, and wholly unsatisfying.

The irony is that, in researching Joe Gould, Lepore uncovers another figure from the era who is not only similar to Gould but, as it turns out, much more interesting. For much of his life, Gould was obsessed with a "Negro sculptress" named Augusta Savage--a woman who, as Lepore discovers, was a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Lepore also discovers that Savage's descent into obscurity was largely of her own making:  of the dozens of sculptures she made in her lifetime, few remain, with many having been destroyed by the artist herself. There is very little we know about Savage--even less than we know about Gould, who was twice profiled in the New Yorker--and yet the infrequent portions dedicated to Savage are stunning, thrilling, and beautiful. Savage is the true long-lost subject, the creator disinterred from history and cleared of dust, and Lepore's attempts at drawing a subtle parallel between her and Gould--they are artists, they are persecuted, they obsess, and they generate their own obscurity--are the most successful portions of the book. This is partly because both figures are fascinating when placed together, despite Savage's complete loathing of Gould; partly because Savage is genuinely interesting on her own; but largely because Lepore removes herself from the actual story and allows her subjects to contrast themselves.

Even then, however, Lepore cannot help but edit as she sees fit. We are told that Savage gave up a teaching job to create a sculpture for the World's Fair, only to see the sculpture bulldozed and the teaching job given to someone else; a quick look through Lepore's notes tells a much more fascinating story--of betrayal and fear, of the Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s, of oppression--one that Lepore consigns to its own obscurity in the footnotes. And of Savage's artwork, we are told repeatedly that few of them survive...but some do, and others were photographed before their disappearance or destruction. Lepore knows this, has probably even seen these photographs, but offers us none of them to satiate our curiosity or shape our perceptions of Savage's art.** Once again, even when the spotlight is on someone else--a figure lost to time--Jill Lepore manages to make this book all about Jill Lepore.



*There is a discussion to be had, I'm sure, over the subject of New Journalism and its belief in seeking out "truth" over "facts," which requires not only the author's participation but inclusion in the story. I have little interest in this discussion.

**A quick Google search for Augusta Savage brings up a few of these photographs, and they are wonderful.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Reading ("My Reading Life" by Pat Conroy)


I had never read a single word written by Pat Conroy when, on March 18 of this year, I checked out the audiobook of his memoir, My Reading Life, from a local library. That Conroy had passed away only two weeks earlier was entirely coincidental; my library's selection of audiobooks leans heavily toward forgettable thrillers, and Conroy's was one of the few works of nonfiction available. What's more, it fit the one requirement I have concerning audiobooks:  it must be read by the author. While most readers are adamant that writers do not make good narrators, preferring instead to hear a professional like Jim Dale or Simon Vance, I've never adapted to this way of thinking. For whatever reason, I cannot tolerate a voice that is tempered by perfection or sounds overly rehearsed--one that, for lack of a better analogy, evokes a pompous actor taking his lines far too seriously. I can listen to a minute, maybe two, before I need to turn off the book and regain my composure.

With authors, you are greeted almost instantly by flaws--mispronunciations, slurred dialects, inconsistent pitch, a complete unfamiliarity with proper pacing--but also the life behind each word. An author understands their book in ways a professional narrator never can, even with notes and some gentle tutoring, and most read their books as though piecing together a past self one syllable at a time. David McCullough is better than almost anyone else at this:  his voice is that of a learned sage come to read you a bedtime story wrought from the bones of history. Even when his voice is wracked with the strains of age or illness--his reading of The Wright Brothers is beautiful in its unexpected and unavoidable frailty--he holds you enraptured. The same applies to other writers--Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Bill Bryson, Douglas Adams, Seamus Heaney, Jon Ronson--who infuse their own work with an electricity begotten from something more than just paper and ink.*

This is the charm of Pat Conroy. A Georgia-born Army brat, Conroy's voice is a heavy drawl that welcomes you with open arms while also inviting stereotypical images of the simple Southerner. The former is Conroy's gift; the latter is the readers' shame. With little hesitation, Conroy recounts--in vivid, immaculate prose--the books that have shaped him as a writer and as a man. The novels he holds up as integral to his development--Gone With the Wind, War and Peace, Deliverance, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Rings--are like characters all their own, albeit carved from granite and propelled into his life like a celestial body breaking through the atmosphere. And standing behind each book is a man or woman to whom Conroy offers even greater praise:  his mother, a high school English teacher, an uncompromising bookseller, the owner of an Atlanta bookstore, James Dickey himself.

Which is perhaps the greater truth as Pat Conroy sees it. A book can change your life, but never on its own; it must be sewn into the very fabric of your being like a seed driven into the soil in order to fulfill its promise. There is not a single book mentioned in Conroy's memoir that did not have its genesis in another person, and for eight hours--350 pages--Conroy traces the roots of each until we have a full picture of the man now reading to us in his slow, steady drawl. To listen to My Reading Life as an audiobook is to take an extended road trip with someone whose entire life has prepared him for one book recommendation after another. Conroy is a wonderful companion, even as you fight away the awareness that the emptiness beside you is twofold:  behind the narration, there is no longer a flesh-and-body man steadying himself against the spinning world. Instead, we have a voice that pushes us forward in much the same way he was pushed forward by his family, friends, and teachers...a voice telling us to take up a book in our hands and demand from it the secrets to living a good life.



*There are a handful of actors who can have the same affect. Perhaps the most noteworthy is Sissy Spacek, whose reading of To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most honest narrations I've ever heard. Gentle and unassuming, forceful and indignant, she becomes a grown-up Scout Finch regaling us with stories of Maycomb from the comfort of a porch-swing.


Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Libraries ("Patience and Fortitude" by Scott Sherman)


There are few aspects of American life that are truly and inarguably democratic. The ability to cast a ballot and directly elect representatives--an act held up as the embodiment of democratic ideals, often by those very same representatives--is available only to a select portion of the population based on age, citizenship, criminal record and, in states that have adopted voter ID laws, the ability to pay for and receive a wholly unnecessary form of identification. Similarly, the ability of anyone--again, of a certain age, citizenship, and criminal record--to run for and hold public office has been undermined in recent years by the advent of Citizens United, the unencumbered growth of super-PACs, and the gerrymandering of districts into those that are "safe" for incumbent politicians and their respective political parties.* What's more, the various freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights, a document that by its very nature and origins should make our nation unique in its democratic strength, are often undermined by the ideological impulses of those tasked with interpreting them--namely, the nine members of the Supreme Court, as well as the thousands of judges occupying state and federal benches. In every respect, we are a country that cherishes its freedoms, often vocally and in contrast to other nations, while simultaneously refusing to understand just how limited those freedoms are.

In fact, the two most truly democratic institutions in the United States are, with few exceptions, free and accessible to everyone. And yet they are so omnipresent in our lives that most Americans take them for granted, often while using them. The first is our parks system. From small municipal lots that encompass little more than a city block to national antiquities that stretch for hundreds of thousands of protected acres, American parks are open to anyone at any time of year, regardless of age, ethnicity, religious practices, wealth, citizenship, or criminal record. When you hike in the shadow of the Half Dome in Yosemite, peer over the edge of the Grand Canyon, watch the sun rise over the Great Smoky Mountains, or marvel at the frozen cliffs and caves of the Apostle Islands in winter, you may being doing so beside an immigrant from Central America, a Mormon preacher, a five-year-old child, a great-grandmother, a father on food stamps, or the CEO of a large company. American parks are a great equalizer in American life, requiring nothing of its visitors except a desire to see nature as it should be.

The other is the public library, an idea older than the nation itself, and one that was nurtured by many of the Founding Fathers, who believed it integral to the strength of a free and prosperous nation.** Today, there are more than 17,000 public libraries available throughout the country, and they grant each and every visitor access to the very same resources, regardless of background or identity. They are fixtures in their communities, often providing resources to those who would otherwise go without.

Over the past decade, however, the question has been raised as to what role the public library should play in the era of ebooks, digital subscriptions, and online databases...or whether it can even adapt at all. (The reference librarian, for example, now competes against search engines and apps, the card catalog and shelves of reference materials no match for the power of a few bytes of data delivered at the press of a button.) If people can access these resources at home (the argument goes), what is the purpose of preserving such large and expensive buildings? Why devote so much of our tax dollars to keeping alive an institution that, as storied as it may be, seems incapable of keeping up with changes in our culture and society...an institution that is being rapidly supplanted by phones and computers?

The problem with these questions is twofold. First, the assumption that a rise in digital content correlates to a drop in library patronage is not supported by the facts. In 2009, for example, American public libraries "welcomed more than 1.59 billion visitors...and lent books 2.4 billion times--more than 8 times for each citizen." And while public libraries have seen a decrease in the number of patrons who walk through their doors over the last few decades, those who decry their downfall are doing so prematurely:  as the numbers attest, American public libraries are never empty of people.

Secondly, these arguments assume that digitized content is just as readily accessible to Americans as the public library, when in fact that is also not the case. A large swathe of the population doesn't have easy access to the internet in their own homes, including the elderly, the unemployed, and those living in impoverished neighborhoods. To them, public libraries address needs that cannot be met. As the Pew Research Center noted last year, library patrons do more than just browse books or surf the internet; they also research information about health care, search for jobs, study for work or school, attend trainings, go to class, and give their children access to books and reading groups--a major benefit to childhood literacy, especially in areas where daycare and summer school programs are unavailable or unaffordable.

And how much does this cost each American taxpayer? According to the research, forty-two dollars. In contrast, a 2012 report found that the average American household spent more than $800 on soft drinks. There are other numbers that could be cited, of course, but none of them in any way diminishes the reality that this institution is entirely affordable.

What is to be done, then, about the public library? It provides necessary services to communities across the country, but it's status as a public institution means it is constantly in need of money. In Patience and Fortitude, Scott Sherman examines one of the largest library systems in the nation, the New York City Public Library (NYPL), and its long, controversial struggle with declining patronage, as well as its financial setbacks, the changing needs of its surrounding neighborhoods, and the unique role it has played as a repository for one-of-a-kind historical documents and research materials. The system, which is overseen by both a director and board of trustees, was scheduled to undergo major changes to a handful of its locations, including the magisterial 42nd Street building, where more than three millions books were housed.*** The redesign called for stacks to be gutted, books to be warehoused across state lines, buildings to be razed and rebuilt--in one case, as the first floor of a luxury apartment building--and the system's focus to shift from library services to technology, despite the fact that millions of patrons still used the libraries for basic research. The plan also required hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, some of which would be spent on a design by architect Norman Foster--money that, as Sherman notes, could have been better spent paying for upgrades to existing locations. (In one of the book's most startling scenes, the NYPL system's director is shown an upstairs room in one of these locations. Originally intended for the library's live-in custodian, the large room has remained in the same cobwebbed state for decades--space that could easily be refurbished for use by the staff and patrons, and at very little cost. The director, already aware of this extra space, is unmoved by the idea, and the rooms remain unused.)

Sherman portrays the director and trustees as not only oblivious to the services provided by the city's public libraries--their outreach to immigrants, for example, or their legacy of preserving historical documents for writers and researchers, many of whom would later become famous and use their status to advocate against the proposed changes--but also blinded by greed. They view the system as a potential business--that is, as a way to raise money rather than as a service to the public. Often, when discussing the planned changes, they speak in terms of land value, the growing real estate market, and non-performing assets...terms that would otherwise be incongruous in a discussion about sustaining public libraries. When pressed about their true intentions, the trustees shield themselves behind privacy laws that govern their meetings--a deep irony considering the fact that libraries embody transparency, openness, and the unrestrained sharing of knowledge. (In fact, almost all of those involved in the planned changes declined to speak with Sherman, or even acknowledge his interview requests.)

This one fight, seemingly consigned to a single system, represents the struggle libraries have faced for years:  meeting the needs of their community while straining under the directives of those who rarely if ever set foot inside. Most American libraries are overseen by boards who have the institution's best interests at heart; unfortunately, most library funding comes not from boards or patrons but politicians, who decide how much revenue will be designated for public libraries in any given year. As Sherman argues, those who set out to purposely defund libraries do so in the hopes of making information less available to the public, and a less-informed public is one that is less politically engaged and easier to manipulate. (The prevalence of the internet assuages some of this; unfortunately, as noted above, those who suffer the worst from ideological budget cuts--the poor and elderly, students, and those living in ignored neighborhoods--are also the least likely to have easy access to the internet.)

We live in an era in which the phrase "government spending" is used with disdain, often by the very same men and women who belong to the government or wish to hold its highest office. They decry the use of taxpayer money on "entitlement programs" they deem ineffective, undemocratic, and wasteful. What they refuse to acknowledge or understand, however, is that the purpose behind taxes is to provide everyone with the same rights, services, and opportunities, regardless of who they are or where they live. This includes the right to be safe and secure in your own home, the opportunity to attend school and travel safely on well-maintained roads, protections against unexpected illnesses, economic downturns, disability, hunger, and so on. It also includes the ability to walk into a building and learn anything you want by simply picking up a book, paging through a magazine, or logging onto a computer. Certain aspects of our society require us to give up some of our money without expecting any in return; instead, we're given something else, something far more valuable than the coins in our pocket, and that is certainly worth keeping around for as long as we can.





*Granted, the history of elections in the United States is one fraught with continual problems, including rampant disenfranchisement, back-room dealmaking, the impenetrable control of party bosses, the electoral college, and so on. That being said, until the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, the presidential elections of the previous four decades can reasonably be seen as the closest we've come to purely democratic elections...though they were still far from ideal.

**Perhaps the greatest example of this is Thomas Jefferson's 1815 sale of his entire private library, undoubtedly the greatest in any colony, to the young nation. Once purchased, the thousands of volumes in his collection became a precursor to the Library of Congress, which today holds almost 24 million books.

***I say "were" rather than "are" because the books were eventually moved to a warehouse in New Jersey, where they remain to this day.