tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83243696948884499682024-03-17T11:50:41.357-07:00Books Galore!Because it's never just about books. It's about journeys. And life.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comBlogger116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-39340112584805837772024-01-01T12:34:00.000-08:002024-01-01T12:35:07.195-08:00Books I Read in 2023<p> </p><p style="text-align: center;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6N05cEijsVR1_yDgva6LDqC5Mk324tN2-zmA42-W1-1qYal6uPCc6lwx1Bb-MFxmYW958F4PIVkKXU8-OkVMLWVJxI4RqwOPj7tXVbpPTvGWE_0IptJ6i7Er80-CzoapOvjM4zTS253rSTUT4vLgkGtXISy7L_EHylDKF2s5mnk-0cT4UkCCBLShKP4/s2220/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-01%20at%202.33.38%20PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="544" data-original-width="2220" height="157" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6N05cEijsVR1_yDgva6LDqC5Mk324tN2-zmA42-W1-1qYal6uPCc6lwx1Bb-MFxmYW958F4PIVkKXU8-OkVMLWVJxI4RqwOPj7tXVbpPTvGWE_0IptJ6i7Er80-CzoapOvjM4zTS253rSTUT4vLgkGtXISy7L_EHylDKF2s5mnk-0cT4UkCCBLShKP4/w640-h157/Screen%20Shot%202024-01-01%20at%202.33.38%20PM.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><b>Books I Read in 2023</b></p><div><ol><li>The Postman Always Rings Twice (James M. Cain; audiobook, read by Stanley Tucci)</li><li>The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland (Jim DeFede; audiobook, read by Ray Porter)</li><li>Rez Dogs (Joseph Bruchac)</li><li>In Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul (Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Jamey Gambrell)</li><li>All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries, Book 1 (Martha Wells)</li><li>War and Peas: Funny Comics for Dirty Lovers (Jonathan Kunz and Elizabeth Pich)</li><li>Star Child: A Biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler (Ibi Zoboi)</li><li>American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics (Kevin Hazzard; audiobook, read by Gilbert Glenn Brown)</li><li>Catch the Light: Why I Write (Joy Harjo)</li><li>4:50 from Paddington (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Joan Hickson)</li><li>Aliens: Dead Orbit (James Stokoe)</li><li>And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle (Jon Meacham; audiobook, read by Jon Meacham)</li><li>Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon (Robert Kurson; audiobook, read by Ray Porter)</li><li>South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Imani Perry; audiobook, read by Imani Perry)</li><li>The 13 Clocks (James Thurber)</li><li>Above Ground: Poems (Clint Smith)</li><li>River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (Candice Millard; audiobook, read by Paul Michael)</li><li>The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening (Ari Shapiro; audiobook, read by Ari Shapiro)</li><li>My Dog May Be a Genius (Jack Prelutsky; audiobook, read and sung by Jack Prelutsky)</li><li>The Inheritance Games (Jennifer Lynn Barnes)</li><li>Alive at the End of the World: Poems (Saeed Jones)</li><li>These Precious Days: Essays (Ann Patchett; audiobook, read by Ann Patchett)</li><li>Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Gabriel Garcia Marquez; translated by Edith Grossman)</li><li>Liberation Day: Stories (George Saunders; audiobook read by George Saunders, Tina Fey, Michael McKean, Edi Patterson, Jenny Slate, Jack McBrayer, Melora Hardin, and Stephen Root)</li><li>Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World (Tracy Kidder)</li><li>This is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone)</li><li>Amoralman: A True Story and Other Lies (Derek Delgaudio)</li><li>*Assassination Vacation (Sarah Vowell)</li><li>55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers' Strike (edited by Elizabeth Catt, Emily Hilliard, and Jessica Salfia)</li><li>The Evidence of Things Not Seen (James Baldwin)</li><li>I Do Everything I'm Told: Poems (Megan Fernandes)</li><li>Death in a Prairie House: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Murders (William R. Drennan; audiobook, read by Jim Fleming)</li><li>Stupid Hope: Poems (Jason Shinder)</li><li>Musical Tables: Poems (Billy Collins)</li><li>Hallowe'en Party (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>The Mystery of the Blue Train (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>The Skull (Jon Klassen)</li><li>ABC Murders (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>Hickory Dickory Dock (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3 (Robert Caro)</li><li>Murder in Three Acts (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>Yellowface (R.F. Kuang; audiobook, read by Helen Laser)</li><li>The Book of Delights: Essays (Ross Gay; audiobook, read by Ross Gay)</li><li>Sleeping Murder (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Stephanie Cole)</li><li>The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Robert Caro)</li><li>Minor Threats, Volume 1: A Quick End to a Long Beginning (Patton Oswalt, Jordan Blum, Scott Hepburn, Ian Herring, and Nate Piekos)</li><li>A Fortune for Your Disaster: Poems (Hanif Abdurraqib; audiobook, read by Hanif Abdurraqib)</li><li>The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove (Christopher Moore)</li><li>Death in the Clouds (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>The Body in the Library (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Stephanie Cole)</li><li>Thirteen at Dinner (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Hugh Fraser)</li><li>White Cat, Black Dog: Stories (Kelly Link)</li><li>At Bertram's Hotel (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Stephanie Cole)</li><li>One Above & One Below: New Poems (Erin Belieu)</li><li>The Tragedy of Brady Sims (Ernest J. Gaines)</li><li>Robot Dreams (Sara Varon)</li><li>Sing To It: Stories (Amy Hempel)</li><li>Your Pal Fred (Michael Rex)</li><li>A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens; audiobook, abridged, read by Patrick Stewart)</li><li>Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Nell Irvin Painter; audiobook, read by Nell Irvin Painter)</li></ol></div>Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-22724153976480333552022-12-31T10:51:00.001-08:002024-01-28T15:46:13.878-08:00Books I Read in 2022<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAUfMSNVnxAYdfjS3NN117qra_3SFeZW1DWCsrb-FU55kE90_Ajfh51xnOA0GT--cse92vo0zSnVpSi2T20URBxJ2Y1kVRugkFslHPmjvoRjKLmWUrpI1hwl4yibXVhwU06CplVtxl22yZaQVwvJFMlhuGD1kqsInHSgDKvQFMCblkgGrvYRj1tWdH/s1902/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-25%20at%205.10.57%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="342" data-original-width="1902" height="103" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAUfMSNVnxAYdfjS3NN117qra_3SFeZW1DWCsrb-FU55kE90_Ajfh51xnOA0GT--cse92vo0zSnVpSi2T20URBxJ2Y1kVRugkFslHPmjvoRjKLmWUrpI1hwl4yibXVhwU06CplVtxl22yZaQVwvJFMlhuGD1kqsInHSgDKvQFMCblkgGrvYRj1tWdH/w567-h103/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-25%20at%205.10.57%20PM.png" width="567" /></a></div><p style="text-align: center;"><b>On Books I'll Never Read</b></p><p>There's a chapter in <i>What If?2: </i><i>Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions</i>, in which author Randall Munroe, a former roboticist for NASA, addresses the following question, submitted to his blog by a reader:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?</span></b></p></blockquote></blockquote><p>Through a variety of calculations, many of which are based on our understanding of human productivity, Munroe concludes that a person's ability to read all available English texts ended "sometime in the late 1500s." This corresponds to the Elizabethan era, in which Shakespeare and Marlowe were writing some of the most foundational works in English literature.</p><p>And while this makes sense--Gutenberg's printing press had been in existence for over a century at this point--it is also difficult to accept.</p><p>To a lesser extent, Munroe's conclusion is a reminder that only a small fraction of the literature from Shakespeare's era has survived, including some of the Bard's own work. Our understanding of "literature" in those decades are formed from what survives; we read the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their contemporaries, and we extrapolate outwards.</p><p>But more importantly, it is a reminder that we live in an unprecedented era for readers. Thanks to apps like Libby and Kindle, which allow people to read books anywhere; sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive, which have digitized millions of texts, including rare and out-of-print works; a gargantuan self-publishing industry; fanfic sites; and a proliferation of audiobook services, like Audible and Libro.fm, it has never been easier to find, purchase, and read books. (Having grown up in a small rural town in the 1990s, the change over the last three decades has been staggering: back then, our two greatest resources for books were public libraries--the nearest of which was ten miles from our home--and Waldenbooks, which was located in a now-closed shopping mall 20 miles from our home.)</p><p>This overabundance of reading material is undoubtedly positive: independent bookstores are undergoing a massive resurgence in popularity and support, readers are able to find a wealth of materials in even the most niche of sub-genres, stories have become more diverse and inclusive, and so on. But wealth of any kind leads to problems of its own. In this case, the age-old problem of being unable to read as much as one might want.</p><p>This problem--if it can be called such--rears its head most notably on social media, where dedicated readers post messages of distress: "How," they ask, "will I ever read every book that I want to read?" They bemoan the size of their TBR piles, which never seem to shrink, as if the simple task of reading has led each of us into a Borgesian library of our own making--a world in which the stack of books at our bedsides will never get smaller, no matter how much time we dedicate to reading those books.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ud4VC0FjLXGgrHDU-uvZ3vuIVN9sUPYC0Ac1aLWC8SrMBpQ_G3krMiUGGBMoUb_36n2lHhOMk-1wsBbJcaxqFaacQ8ICx6PjhniGJAYh6fIDgm8Mpftxl4fk8lbxjrUimzuwEvix80ujx4FKx2F2hnm5GSzJK-NKP6UsA09cKqDcfkpearQECk1x/s2368/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-30%20at%208.34.14%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1790" data-original-width="2368" height="437" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0ud4VC0FjLXGgrHDU-uvZ3vuIVN9sUPYC0Ac1aLWC8SrMBpQ_G3krMiUGGBMoUb_36n2lHhOMk-1wsBbJcaxqFaacQ8ICx6PjhniGJAYh6fIDgm8Mpftxl4fk8lbxjrUimzuwEvix80ujx4FKx2F2hnm5GSzJK-NKP6UsA09cKqDcfkpearQECk1x/w577-h437/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-30%20at%208.34.14%20PM.png" width="577" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p>Note the subtle difference between this problem and the question posed to Randall Munroe. The issue today is not that someone might want to read every work published in their mother tongue. Instead, it's that someone may have a carefully curated collection of books that they <i>want</i> to read, perhaps desperately so, but will be unable to before shuffling off this mortal coil.</p><p>Or, to put it more succinctly: We will die before reading every book we want to read, and we cannot accept it.</p><p style="text-align: center;">*<span> *<span> *</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">Earlier this year, in a fit of curiosity, I created a spreadsheet listing every book I own. Most of these are kept in bookshelves scatted throughout my apartment, though a sizable number are in plastic bins in my garage, moved there due to lack of space. (For the sake of simplicity--and to preserve my own sanity--I didn't list the hundreds of books in my classroom library. Yes, I own those books, and yes, I've read many of them, but I purchased them for my students, not myself.)</p><p style="text-align: left;">As of this writing, there are 764 titles in my collection, and they run the gamut of subjects and genres. There are biographies and works of history alongside novels, plays, and poetry collections. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery abound, as do oral histories, works of mythology, graphic novels, anthologies, and photography collections. There are books published by long-standing and much-revered companies alongside those published by independent presses, by museums and historical societies, and by the authors themselves. And there are the oddities, too: William T. Vollmann's seven-volume study of violence, published by McSweeney's, of which I've read only the first slim volume; the collected records of a 19th century fur company; a scientific encyclopedia from the 1950s that spans more than 2,000 illustrated pages, which was a gift from an aunt; a two-volume collection of wildlife photographs by George Shiras, who was active in the early 1900s; and the massive diary of Arthur Inman, a recluse driven to suicide by noise from a nearby construction site.</p><p style="text-align: left;">And while I'm constantly weeding my collection for unwanted books, either donating them to local library sales or turning them in for credit at independent bookstores, the one constant is that I have never read the vast majority of the books I own. In fact, as part of my self-audit, I decided to count the number of books in my personal library that I've actually read. The result? Out of 764 books, I've read 167, or just under 22%.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Which would not be worth mentioning, except that I continue buying books at breakneck speed. Those new books, heaped alongside my desk, will be added to the spreadsheet, placed on a bookshelf (or possibly in a bin), and--if history is any indication--almost certainly ignored for years to come.</p><p style="text-align: center;">* * *</p><p style="text-align: left;">I've accepted that I will never stop buying books, even if it means they gather dust on a bookshelf, suffer the changing temperatures of a detached garage, or go unread. They are here in case I ever get around to them, which is a small--but important--comfort for someone who loves reading.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The books I do read are another matter. In compiling a list of the books I read this year, I noticed another trend in my habits: a majority of the books I read were books I didn't actually <i>want</i> to read.</p><p style="text-align: left;">That is to say, they were not books I was planning to read, or would ever purchase for myself. Books that I buy and keep in my apartment are books I <i>want</i> to read: I come across them in bookstores or library sales, I hear about them online or from other readers, and I buy them because they peak my interest. </p><p style="text-align: left;">But a majority of the books I read this year? They were from libraries, first and foremost, rather than from my own collection. What's more, they were read out of convenience--I needed something short and quick, for example, and grabbed whatever I found on a library shelf--or out of obligation, having read and enjoyed the author's previous works. Sometimes they were read on the recommendation of others. And sometimes I read books based on reputation, either of the author or the prose itself. (In a moment of pure dumb luck, I read Annie Ernaux's masterwork <i>Happening</i> a month before she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.) During the school year, when reading time is scarce and fleeting, I rely on graphic novels--slim volumes with very little text, which can be set down at a moment's notice and just as quickly picked back up. During the summer, when my schedule is more open, I tackle lengthy tomes that require extraordinary time and focus--the next volume in Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, for example.</p><p style="text-align: left;">The numbers don't lie. Of the 102 books I read this year, I count 12 that I was earnestly excited to read. This isn't the typical excitement you feel when starting a new book. Instead, this is the excitement a child feels for presents under the Christmas tree: that nervous, ticklish anticipation of knowing something good is coming your way, that it's something you want and will thoroughly enjoy, if only you're patient for just a little longer. This is the same excitement you feel when you pre-order a book in January, knowing it won't be coming out until March or July or September. It's a feeling that only intensifies as the months pass.</p><p style="text-align: left;">Here are the 12 books I was genuinely excited to read this year:</p><p style="text-align: left;"></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Ain't Burned All the Bright (Jason Reynolds; illustrations by Jason Griffin)</li><li>Punching the Air (Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam)</li><li>Habibi (Craig Thompson)</li><li>Godzilla: The Half-Century War (James Stokoe)</li><li>The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (John Koenig)</li><li>The Sentence (Louise Erdrich)</li><li>Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (Patrick Radden Keefe)</li><li>Woman at Point Zero (Nawal El Saadawi)</li><li>The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2: Means of Ascent (Robert Caro)</li><li>Mapping the Interior (Stephen Graham Jones)</li><li>How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Clint Smith; audiobook, read by Clint Smith)</li><li>The Trees (Percival Everett)</li></ul><div>These are books I had wanted to read--had been meaning to read, had been excited to read--for some time. In a few cases, these are books that had sat on my shelves for a while. In one or two other instances, they were books I purchased as soon as they were published, and devoured in one or two long, delirious evenings.</div><div><br /></div><div>I realize this sounds selfish and close-minded. After all, the joy of reading often comes from discovery--plunging into a book without knowing too much about it. And that's true. Looking over my list of books from this year, I see at least six that were random selections--out of reputation, obligation, or convenience--and were some of my favorites:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Rebecca Hall; illustrated by Hugo Martinez)</li><li>My Life on the Road (Gloria Steinem; audiobook, read by Gloria Steinem)</li><li>Happening (Annie Ernaux; translated by Tanya Leslie)</li><li>Dien Cai Dau (Yusef Komunyakaa)</li><li>Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir; audiobook, read by Ray Porter)</li><li>Inciting Joy: Essay (Ross Gay; audiobook, read by Ross Gay)</li></ul></div><div><br /></div><div>But what I'm focusing on next year is returning to purposeful reading--the idea that I should be reading books that nurture my love of storytelling--rather than reading a book for the sake of reading something, anything.</div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, a focus on quality over quantity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Too often, especially at the end of one year and start of the next, readers set a goal based on numbers. They want to read a set amount of books or pages, rather than wanting to read books they will enjoy, regardless of the number. This is the pattern I've slipped into, and it's resulted in me reading more books every year, but enjoying very few of them.</div><div><br /></div><div>Even now, casting a glance over the unread books on my shelves, I see at least a dozen or so that I am desperate to read: <i>Blood in the Water</i> by Heather Ann Thompson, <i>Love</i> by Toni Morrison, <i>Secondhand Time</i> by Svetlana Alexievich, <i>The Dog of the South</i> by Charles Portis, <i>Becoming Abolitionists</i> by Danica Purcell, <i>Let the Record Show</i> by Sarah Schulman, <i>The Inconvenient Indian</i> by Thomas King, <i>An African in Greenland</i> by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, <i>The Overstory</i> by Richard Powers, <i>The Known World</i> by Edward P. Jones, <i>The Yellow House</i> by Sarah M. Broom, <i>Solitary</i> by Albert Woodfox, and so on. All have sat on my shelves for months, if not years, purchased in a fit of unparalleled excitement and just as quickly forsaken in exchange for books that were short, easy, and convenient.</div><div><br /></div><div>Unlike most of the books I read during the year, these particular books take time. They require something more from me than I have been able to offer so far. And I can set the blame in a dozen different places--my job, the volunteer work I do, the commitments I've made to coworkers, friends, and family--but that is relying on excuses. I have the time and ability. I simply need to shed my fixation on reading a certain number of books by this time next year. </div><div><br /></div><div>I need to focus on the books I want, rather than the books I <i>think</i> I want, or that other people <i>tell</i> me I want.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because, as we all know, time is fleeting and fickle: one minute you're young and have a seemingly endless amount of time, and the next, you're sitting amongst a horde of books, your aching hands and tired eyes suddenly unsure of task in front of you. Unsure if you'll ever be able to devour those books you spent years gathering for this very moment.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><p>Books I Read in 2022:</p><p></p><ol><li>Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Yusef Komunyakaa; concept and dramaturgy by Chad Gracia)</li><li>*Like Water for Chocolate (Laura Esquivel)</li><li>On Animals (Susan Orlean; audiobook, read by Susan Orlean)</li><li>Mooncop (Tom Gauld)</li><li>You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (Tom Gauld)</li><li>Squirm (Carl Hiaasen)</li><li>Baking With Kafka (Tom Gauld)</li><li>Sylvie (Sylvie Kantorovitz)</li><li>Ain't Burned All the Bright (Jason Reynolds; illustrations by Jason Griffin)</li><li>To the Kwai - and Back: War Drawings, 1939 - 1945 (Ronald Searle)</li><li>Lost & Found: A Memoir (Kathryn Schulz)</li><li>I Know What You Did Last Summer (Lois Duncan)</li><li>We Can: Portraits of Power (Tyler Gordon)</li><li>The Mad Potter: George E. Ohr, Eccentric Genius (Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan)</li><li>The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Susan Orlean)</li><li>Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay (David Lester, with Marcus Rediker and Paul Buhle)</li><li>Class Act (Jerry Craft)</li><li>The Jungle: A Graphic Novel (Upton Sinclair; adapted and illustrated by Kristina Gehrmann)</li><li>Stuntboy, in the Meantime (Jason Reynolds; illustrated by Raul the Third)</li><li>The Crossroads at Midnight (Abby Howard)</li><li>I Will Not Die Alone (Debra White; illustrated by Joe Bennett)</li><li>Punching the Air (Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam)</li><li>Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (Rebecca Hall; illustrated by Hugo Martinez)</li><li>In the Shadow of No Towers (Art Spiegelman)</li><li>Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (Maggie Smith)</li><li>Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for Their Rights (Mikki Kendall; illustrated by A. D'Amico)</li><li>Jonna and the Unpossible Monsters, Volume 1 (Chris Samnee and Laura Samnee; colors by Matthew Wilson; lettering by Christopher Crank)</li><li>After the Rain (Nnedi Okorafor and John Jennings; illustrated by David Brame; lettering by Damian Duffy)</li><li>Fantasy Sports, Volume 1 (Sam Bosma)</li><li>Head Lopper, Volume 1: The Island, or a Plague of Beasts (Andrew MacLean; colored by Mike Spicer)</li><li>The Worst Night Ever (Dave Barry)</li><li>Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Roz Chast)</li><li>Fantasy Sports, Volume 2: The Bandit of Barbel Bay (Sam Bosma)</li><li>Head Lopper, Volume 2: Head Lopper and the Crimson Tower (Andrew MacLean; colors by Jordie Bellaire; letters and design by Erin MacLean)</li><li>Habibi (Craig Thompson)</li><li>The Public Burning (Robert Coover)</li><li>Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village (Maureen Johnson and Jay Cooper)</li><li>Head Lopper, Volume 3: Head Lopper and the Knights of Venora (Andrew MacLean; colors by Jordie Bellaire; letters and design by Erin MacLean)</li><li>Head Lopper, Volume 4: Head Lopper and the Quest for Mulgrid's Stair (Andrew MacLean; colors by Jordie Bellaire; letters and design by Erin MacLean)</li><li>Family Tree, Volume 1: Sapling (Jeff Lemire; colors by Phil Hester, Eric Gapstur, and Ryan Cody; lettering by Steve Wands; edited by Will Dennis)</li><li>Something is Killing the Children, Volume 1 (James Tynion IV; illustrated by Werther Dell'edera; colors by Miquel Muerto; lettered by Andworld Design)</li><li>Godzilla: The Half-Century War (James Stokoe)</li><li>Frogcatchers (Jeff Lemire)</li><li>Something is Killing the Children, Volume 2 (James Tynion IV; illustrated by Werther Dell'edera; colors by Miquel Muerto; lettered by Andworld Design)</li><li>Something is Killing the Children, Volume 3 (James Tynion IV; illustrated by Werther Dell'edera; colors by Miquel Muerto; lettered by Andworld Design)</li><li>101 Ways to Bug Your Parents (Lee Wardlaw)</li><li>Sullivan's Sluggers (Mark Andrew Smith; illustrated by James Stokoe; colors by Rodrigo Aviles; letters and designs by Thomas Mauer)</li><li>Delights & Shadows (Ted Kooser)</li><li>The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (John Koenig)</li><li>Wade in the Water: Poems (Tracy K. Smith)</li><li>Sad Horse Music: Poems (Samantha Fain)</li><li>The Sentence (Louise Erdrich)</li><li>American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Tracy K. Smith, editor)</li><li>My Life on the Road (Gloria Steinem; audiobook, read by Gloria Steinem)</li><li>American Primitive: Poems (Mary Oliver)</li><li>The Carrying: Poems (Ada Limon)</li><li>The Beauty: Poems (Jane Hirshfield)</li><li>Mad Man's Drum: A Novel in Woodcuts (Lynd Ward)</li><li>From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (Vikram Seth)</li><li>The Madman's Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts and Other Literary Curiosities From History (Edward Brooke-Hitching)</li><li>The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found (Frank Bruni; audiobook, read by Frank Bruni)</li><li>Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writing of Tom Robbins (Tom Robbins)</li><li>Happening (Annie Ernaux; translated by Tanya Leslie)</li><li>Medium Raw: A Blood Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook (Anthony Bourdain; audiobook, read by Anthony Bourdain)</li><li>Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (Patrick Radden Keefe)</li><li>Dien Cai Dau (Yusef Komunyakaa)</li><li>Too Loud a Solitude (Bohumil Hrabal)</li><li>I'd Like to Play Alone, Please: Essays (Tom Segura; audiobook, read by Tom Segura)</li><li>Woman at Point Zero (Nawal El Saadawi)</li><li>The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family From a Lifetime of Clutter (Margareta Magnusson; audiobook, read by Juliette Stevenson) </li><li>Happy-Go-Lucky (David Sedaris; audiobook, read by David Sedaris)</li><li>There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya; translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers)</li><li>Putting the Rabbit in the Hat: A Memoir (Brian Cox; audiobook, narrated by Brian Cox)</li><li>The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 2: Means of Ascent (Robert Caro)</li><li>Mapping the Interior (Stephen Graham Jones)</li><li>The Ocean at the End of the Lane (Neil Gaiman; audiobook, read by Neil Gaiman)</li><li>My Name is Jason. Mine Too. Our Story. Our Way (Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin)</li><li>Finding Me: A Memoir (Viola Davis; audiobook, read by Viola Davis)</li><li>Manga Yokai Stories: Ghostly Tales from Japan (Lafcadio Hearn; retold by Sean Michael Wilson; illustrated by Inko Ai Takita)</li><li>Generations: A Memoir (Lucille Clifton)</li><li>As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of <i>The Princess Bride</i> (Cary Elwes; audiobook, read by Cary Elwes, Christopher Guest, Carol Kane, Norman Lear, Rob Reiner, Chris Sarandon, Andy Scheinman, Wallace Shawn, and Robin Wright)</li><li>Fat, Crazy, and Tired: Tales from the Trenches of Transformation (Van Lathan Jr.; audiobook, read by Van Lathan Jr.)</li><li>Who Killed My Father (Edouard Louis; translated by Lorin Stein)</li><li>Two Old Women: An Alaskan Legend of Betrayal, Courage, and Survival (Velma Wallis)</li><li>Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir; audiobook, read by Ray Porter)</li><li>Better, Not Bitter: Living on Purpose in the Pursuit of Racial Justice (Yusef Salaam)</li><li>Spies of Mississippi: The True Story of the Spy Network that Tried to Destroy the Civil Rights Movement (Rick Bowers)</li><li>How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Clint Smith; audiobook, read by Clint Smith)</li><li>The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy (James Crews, editor)</li><li>Nimona (N.D. Stevenson)</li><li>Annihilation (Jeff VanderMeer)</li><li>*Train Dreams (Denis Johnson; audiobook, read by Will Patton)</li><li>My Sister, the Serial Killer (Oyinkan Braithwaite)</li><li>Revenge of the Librarians (Tom Gauld)</li><li>Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help (Larissa MacFarquhar; audiobook, read by Larissa MacFarquhar)</li><li>The Philosophy of Modern Song (Bob Dylan; audiobook, read by Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Gooman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright, and Renee Zellweger)</li><li>*The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die (April Henry)</li><li>Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly (Kenneth C. Davis; audiobook, read by Kenneth C. Davis)</li><li>Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Carl Rovelli; translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre)</li><li>What If 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe)</li><li>Inciting Joy: Essay (Ross Gay; audiobook, read by Ross Gay)</li><li>The Trees (Percival Everett)</li></ol><div><br /></div></div><div>*a reread</div>Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-61496923255781994192022-01-01T05:32:00.000-08:002022-01-01T05:32:34.819-08:00Books I Read in 2021<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXu9Zl2hy8yvCnUrU7zzLf9fPoF6hO-1IDFy0SlQYcTCUX9fOmDKiulyVbJv94HQZgHARm4GwRDXkiibL6Q5QOFh7yzV9ytfIquKX0GBeFZrm5Ogm0TvcT-hWF5EveVre5ZZdYTLMyiaYwe7bjwh-boA7PP5pRMsNiQiErkUdttiRvpKZXg-eJpd6q=s2664" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1450" data-original-width="2664" height="347" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgXu9Zl2hy8yvCnUrU7zzLf9fPoF6hO-1IDFy0SlQYcTCUX9fOmDKiulyVbJv94HQZgHARm4GwRDXkiibL6Q5QOFh7yzV9ytfIquKX0GBeFZrm5Ogm0TvcT-hWF5EveVre5ZZdYTLMyiaYwe7bjwh-boA7PP5pRMsNiQiErkUdttiRvpKZXg-eJpd6q=w640-h347" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><ol><li>Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction (Alec Nevala-Lee)</li><li>Home: A Memoir of My Early Years (Julie Andrews; audiobook, read by Julie Andrews)</li><li>One Ring Circus: Dispatches From the World of Boxing (Katherine Dunn)</li><li>Dunce (Mary Ruefle)</li><li>Flamer (Mike Curato)</li><li>The Bad Beginning: A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 1 (Lemony Snicket; illustrated by Brett Helquist)</li><li>Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking (Samin Nosrat; audiobook, read by Samin Nosrat)</li><li>I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf (Grant Snider)</li><li>Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like "Journey" in the Title (Leslie Gray Streeter; audiobook, read by Leslie Gray Streeter)</li><li>Bone, Volume 1: Out From Boneville (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Dear Martin (Nic Stone)</li><li>The Book of Gutsy Women: Favorite Stories of Courage and Resilience (Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton; audiobook, read by Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton)</li><li>The 13-Story Treehouse (Andy Griffiths, illustrated by Terry Denton)</li><li>Clean Getaway (Nic Stone)</li><li>Twins (Varian Johnson; illustrated by Shannon Wright)</li><li>The Breakaways (Cathy G. Johnson)</li><li>Bone, Volume 2: The Great Cow Race (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Bone, Volume 3: Eyes of the Storm (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>When Horses Pulled the Plow: Life of a Wisconsin Farm Boy, 1910 - 1929 (Olaf F. Larson)</li><li>Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (Natasha Trethewey)</li><li>Bone, Volume 4: The Dragonslayer (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Bone, Volume 5: Rock Jaw (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Bone, Volume 6: Old Man's Cave (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Bone, Volume 7: Ghost Circles (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Bone, Volume 8: Treasure Hunters (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>Bone, Volume 9: Crown of Horns (Jeff Smith; Steve Hamaker, colorist)</li><li>I Can't Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I've Put My Faith in Beyonce (Michael Arceneaux; audiobook, read by Michael Arceneaux)</li><li>How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays (Kiese Laymon; revised edition)</li><li>Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope (Kwame Alexander)</li><li>Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Rachel Marie-Crane Williams)</li><li>Electric Arches (Eve L. Ewing)</li><li>Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York (Elon Green)</li><li>Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography (Zora Neale Hurston)</li><li>Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (Billy Collins)</li><li>New Kid (Jerry Craft)</li><li>Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (N. Scott Momaday; audiobook, read by N. Scott Momaday)</li><li>102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn)</li><li>Can't and Won't: Stories (Lydia Davis)</li><li>Tomboyland: Essays (Melissa Faliveno; audiobook, read by Melissa Faliveno)</li><li>How Y'All Doing?: Misadventures and Mischief From a Life Well Lived (Leslie Jordan; audiobook, read by Leslie Jordan)</li><li>Welcome to the Monkey House (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)</li><li>The Ten Year War: Obamacare and the Unfinished Crusade for Universal Coverage (Jonathan Cohn)</li><li>My Life as a Villainess (Laura Lippman)</li><li>The Color Purple (Alice Walker)</li><li>A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance (Hanif Abdurraqib)</li><li>Queer Love in Color (Jamal Jordan)</li><li>On Juneteenth (Annette Gordon-Reed)</li><li>In Pieces (Sally Field; audiobook, read by Sally Field)</li><li>The Complete Far Side, Volume 1: January 1980 - June 1984 (Gary Larson)</li><li>Me & Patsy Kickin' Up Dust: My Friendship with Patsy Cline (Loretta Lynn; audiobook, read by Patsy Lynn Russell)</li><li>Smethurst's Luck: The Story of Dr. Thomas Smethurst, "The Richmond Poisoner" (Peter Maggs; ebook)</li><li>Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (Hanif Abdurraqib)</li><li>Beyond the Gender Binary (Alok Vaid-Menon)</li><li>Murder in Canaryville: The True Story Behind a Cold Case and a Chicago Cover-Up (Jeff Coen)</li><li>American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins (Terrace Hayes)</li><li>The Path to Power (Robert A. Caro)</li><li>I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Nora Ephron; audiobook, read by Nora Ephron)</li><li>In the Freud Archives (Janet Malcolm)</li><li>We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy (Kliph Nesteroff)</li><li>Crazy Brave: A Memoir (Joy Harjo)</li><li>The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science (Sam Kean)</li><li>Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (Cathy Park Hong)</li><li>Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder (John Waters; audiobook, read by John Waters)</li><li>Rememberings (Sinead O'Connor; audiobook, read by Sinead O'Connor)</li><li>Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Julia Whitby and Robin Whitly)</li><li>Cherry (Mary Karr; audiobook, abridged, read by Mary Karr)</li><li>The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Fran Lebowitz; audiobook, read by Fran Lebowitz)</li><li>Brother & Sister: A Memoir (Diane Keaton; audiobook, read by Diane Keaton)</li><li>The Breadwinner: A Graphic Novel (Deborah Ellis and Nora Twoney)</li><li>1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (Charles C. Mann)</li><li>Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (Mary Roach)</li><li>A Strange Loop: A Musical (Michael R. Jackson)</li><li>Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed (Laurie Kilmartin; audiobook, read by Laurie Kilmartin)</li><li>Last Pick (Jason Walz)</li><li>Last Pick: Born to Run (Jason Walz)</li><li>Dragon Hoops (Gene Luen Yang)</li><li>Under-Earth (Chris Gooch)</li><li>Run: Book One (John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell, and L. Fury)</li><li>Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Steve Martin; audiobook, read by Steve Martin)</li><li>Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)</li><li>Dark Days of the Rebellion: Life in Southern Military Prisons (Benjamin F. Booth)</li><li>Exit West (Mohsin Hamid)</li><li>Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (Kristen Radtke)</li><li>Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Alison Bechdel)</li><li>*The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die (April Henry)</li><li>Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)</li><li>Nat Enough (Maria Scrivan)</li><li>The Magic Fish (Trung Le Nguyen)</li><li>Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will (Judith Schalansky)</li><li>Forget Me Nat (Maria Scrivan)</li><li>Sweeth Tooth, Book One (Jeff Lemire; colors by Jose Villarrubia, letters by Pat Brosseau)</li><li>Notes on Grief (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)</li><li>The Complete Far Side, Volume 2: July 1984 - June 1988 (Gary Larson)</li><li>*Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians (Brandon Sanderson)</li><li>The Complete Far Side, Volume 3: July 1988 - December 1994 (Gary Larson)</li><li>The Worst Class Trip Ever (Dave Barry)</li><li>Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (Mary Roach)</li><li>Department of Mind-Blowing Theories (Tom Gauld)</li><li>Dora Bruder (Patrick Modiano)</li><li>Dogs on the Trail: A Year in the Life (Blair Braverman and Quince Mountain)</li><li>Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark (Cassandra Peterson)</li><li>The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)</li><li>Sweeth Tooth, Book Two (Jeff Lemire; colors by Jose Villarrubia, letters by Carlos Mangual)</li><li>Sweeth Tooth, Book Three (Jeff Lemire; colors by Jose Villarrubia, letters by Carlos Mangual; Matt Kindt, artist)</li><li>*Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)</li><li>The 1619 Project: Born on the Water (Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renee Watson; illustrated by Nikkolas Smith)</li><li>Everyone At This Party Has Two Names (Brad Aaron Modlin)</li><li>Bone (Yrsa Daley-Ward)</li><li>Taste: My Life Through Food (Stanley Tucci; audiobook, read by Stanley Tucci)</li><li>Sucker's Portfolio (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)</li><li>An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good: Stories (Helene Tursten; translated by Marlaine Delargy; audiobook, read by Suzanne Toren)</li><li>The Resurrection of Johnny Cash: Hurt, Redemption, and <i>American Recordings</i> (Graeme Thomson)</li><li>God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)</li><li>Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders)</li><li>The Tuesday Club Murders (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Joan Hickson)</li><li>Fiasco: A History of Hollywood's Iconic Flops (James Robert Parish)</li></ol><div><br /></div><div>*Rereads</div>Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-91236281278061978442021-01-01T04:56:00.000-08:002021-01-01T04:56:32.383-08:00Books I Read in 2020<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicG3KEF1r3qE9Tkpw8CWC3g4l55DbjFoWj7xdZJY_Axv3HTHlAye7GSuBXESdkSBjtQC2WS-E-tj2Z4FdQt-xPyxmx6zsaHpqlBpBkhfjyoO1RH63Bi8yKBCNEuWyZOKLB2ydzjKIp80E/s1187/Screen+Shot+2020-12-30+at+1.41.24+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="873" data-original-width="1187" height="294" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicG3KEF1r3qE9Tkpw8CWC3g4l55DbjFoWj7xdZJY_Axv3HTHlAye7GSuBXESdkSBjtQC2WS-E-tj2Z4FdQt-xPyxmx6zsaHpqlBpBkhfjyoO1RH63Bi8yKBCNEuWyZOKLB2ydzjKIp80E/w400-h294/Screen+Shot+2020-12-30+at+1.41.24+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><ol><li>She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (Erica Armstrong Dunbar; audiobook, read by Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Robin Miles)</li>
<li>Dread Locks (Neal Shusterman)</li>
<li>The Women of a State University: An Illustration of the Working of Coeducation in the Middle West (Helen R. Olin)</li>
<li>The Princess Diarist (Carrie Fisher; audiobook, read by Carrie Fisher and Billie Lourd)</li>
<li>The Magician's Elephant (Kate DiCamillo)</li>
<li>Chi's Sweet Home, Volume 1 (Konami Kanata)</li>
<li>The Fiddler in the Subway: The Story of the World-Class Violinist Who Played for Handouts...and Other Virtuoso Performances by America's Foremost Feature Writer (Gene Weingarten)</li>
<li><b>The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)</b></li>
<li>David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall (David Sedaris; audiobook, read by David Sedaris)</li>
<li>Chi's Sweet Home, Volume 2 (Konami Kanata)</li>
<li>David Sedaris: Live For Your Listening Pleasure (David Sedaris; audiobook, read by David Sedaris)</li>
<li>A Prairie Home Companion: Live From the Hollywood Bowl (Garrison Keillor; audiobook, performed by Garrison Keillor, Royal Academy of Radio Actors, etc.)</li>
<li>Chi's Sweet Home, Volume 3 (Konami Kanata)</li>
<li>God Help the Child (Toni Morrison)</li>
<li><b>Oklahoma's Atticus: An Innocent Man and the Lawyer Who Fought for Him (Hunter Howe Cates)</b></li>
<li>Counting Americans: How the U.S. Census Classified the Nation (Paul Schor; translated by Lys Ann Weiss)</li>
<li>*Knucklehead: Tall Tales and Mostly True Stories of Growing Up Scieszka (Jon Scieszka)</li>
<li>The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (Neil Gaiman; audiobook, read by Neil Gaiman)</li>
<li>The BFG (Roald Dahl)</li>
<li>The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros)</li>
<li>The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson; audiobook, narrated by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>*American Born Chinese (Gene Luen Yang)</li>
<li>Tales of the Talented Tenth: Bass Reeves (Joel Christian Gill)</li>
<li>i: six nonlectures (e.e. cummings)</li>
<li><b>The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (Charlie Mackesy)</b></li>
<li>Tales of the Talented Tenth: Bessie Stringfield (Joel Christian Gill)</li>
<li><b>Bad Feminist: Essays (Roxane Gay)</b></li>
<li>Monsters & Other Stories (Gustavo Duarte)</li>
<li>Born to Fly: The First Women's Air Race Across America (Steve Sheinkin; illustrated by Bijou Karman)</li>
<li>A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels, and Renegades (Marie Brenner; audiobook, read by Marie Brenner)</li>
<li>Bossypants (Tina Fey; audiobook, read by Tina Fey)</li>
<li>Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession (Rachel Monroe)</li>
<li>Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms (John Hodgman; audiobook, read by John Hodgman)</li>
<li>The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie; ebook)</li>
<li>The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie; audiobook, read by Phoebe Judge)</li>
<li>A Black Women's History of the United States (Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross)</li>
<li><b>The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (John M. Barry)</b></li><li>*At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson; audiobook, read by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems (Randall Munroe; audiobook, read by Randall Munroe)</li>
<li><b>In the Dream House: A Memoir (Carmen Maria Machado)</b></li>
<li>*A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson; audiobook, abridged, read by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li><b>Sula (Toni Morrison)</b></li>
<li>Bill Bryson's African Diary (Bill Bryson; ebook)</li>
<li>*In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson; audiobook, read by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>*One Summer: America, 1927 (Bill Bryson; audiobook, read by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life (Lulu Miller)</li>
<li><b>This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers (Jeff Sharlet)</b></li>
<li>Comet in Moominland (Tove Jansson)</li>
<li><b>The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Isabel Wilkerson)</b></li>
<li><b>Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Patrick Radden Keefe)</b></li><li>Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (Kate DiCamillo; illustrated by K.G. Campbell)</li><li>Be Prepared (Vera Brosgol)</li><li>Snapdragon (Kat Leyh)</li><li>Jane, the Fox, and Me (Fanny Britt, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault, translated by Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou)</li><li>El Deafo (Cece Bell; David Lasky, colorist)</li><li>Anya's Ghost (Vera Brosgol)</li><li>Roller Girl (Victoria Jamieson)</li><li>Losing the War (Lee Sandlin; ebook version)</li><li>Navigate Your Stars (Jesmyn Ward; illustrated by Gina Triplett)</li><li>Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Isabel Wilkerson)</li><li><b>Becoming Duchess Goldblatt: A Memoir (Anonymous)</b></li><li>Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask (Anton Treuer)</li><li>Essex County, Volume 1: Tales from the Farm (Jeff Lemire)</li><li>Essex County, Volume 2: Ghost Stories (Jeff Lemire)</li><li>The Chancellor and the Citadel (Maria Capelle Frantz)</li><li>Press Enter to Continue (Ana Galvan)</li><li>Failure is an Option: An Attempted Memoir (H. Jon Benjamin; audiobook, read by H. Jon Benjamin)</li><li>The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Marcus Rediker)</li><li>The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Wendy Gamber)</li><li>Beyond the Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic (Adam Shoalts)</li><li>Essex County, Volume 3: The Country Nurse (Jeff Lemire)</li><li>Counting Descent (Clint Smith)</li><li>The Tradition (Jericho Brown)</li><li>Life Before Legend: Stories of the Criminal and the Prodigy (Marie Lu)</li><li>The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860 - 1930 (Wendy Gamber)</li><li><b>How Long 'til Black Future Month (N.K. Jemisin)</b></li><li>Bloodchild and Other Stories (Octavia Butler)</li><li>Solutions and Other Problems (Allie Brosh)</li><li>Intimations (Zadie Smith)</li><li>Before the Ever After (Jacqueline Woodson)</li><li>The Lady is a Spy: Virginia Hall, WWII Hero of the French Resistance (Don Mitchell)</li><li>In the Dark Streets Shineth: A 1941 Christmas Eve Story (David McCullough)</li><li>Conundrum (Jan Morris)</li></ol><div><br /></div><div><div><i>*indicates a reread</i></div></div><div><i>titles in <b>bold</b> were favorites</i></div>
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Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-84623484449681224582020-01-01T12:20:00.000-08:002020-01-01T12:20:22.747-08:00Books I Read in 2019<br />
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<ol>
<li>Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Leslie A. Schwalm)</li>
<li>The Onts: Secrets of the Dripping Fang, Book One (Dan Greenburg)</li>
<li>Booked (Kwame Alexander)</li>
<li>Stardust (Neil Gaiman)</li>
<li>Frank Einstein and the Antimatter Motor (Jon Scieszka; illustrated by Brian Biggs)</li>
<li>Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World (Rachel Ignotofsky)</li>
<li>She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (Carl Zimmer)</li>
<li>The Library Book (Susan Orlean)</li>
<li>The Devil and Dave Chappelle: And Other Essays (William Jelani Cobb)</li>
<li>Buried Lives: The Enslaved People of George Washington's Mount Vernon (Carla Killough McClafferty)</li>
<li>Bronx Masquerade (Nikki Grimes)</li>
<li>Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates)</li>
<li>Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography (Andrew Helfer and Randy DuBurke)</li>
<li>Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems from WritersCorps (edited by Bill Aguado and Richard Newirth)</li>
<li>Good And Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger (Rebecca Traister; audiobook, read by the author)</li>
<li>A Man Without a Country (Kurt Vonnegut)</li>
<li>*Booked (Kwame Alexander)</li>
<li>Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Vine Deloria Jr.)</li>
<li>March: Book One (John Lewis and Andrew Ayedin; art by Nate Powell)</li>
<li>March: Book Two (John Lewis and Andrew Ayedin; art by Nate Powell)</li>
<li>Love That Dog (Sharon Creech)</li>
<li>March: Book Three (John Lewis and Andrew Ayedin; art by Nate Powell)</li>
<li>The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives (Dashka Slater)</li>
<li>Lu (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>Einstein's Refrigerator: And Other Stories From the Flip Side of History (Steve Silverman)</li>
<li>Animus (Antoine Revoy)</li>
<li>Shout (Laurie Halse Anderson)</li>
<li>Dragons in a Bag (Zetta Elliott)</li>
<li>Rhyme Schemer (K.A. Holt)</li>
<li>Fake Blood (Whitney Gardner)</li>
<li>Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic (Eugenie Tsai and Connie Choi)</li>
<li>The Poisoner: The Life and Crimes of Victorian England's Most Notorious Doctor (Stephen Bates)</li>
<li>Writing Radar: Using Your Journal to Snoop Out and Craft Great Stories (Jack Gantos)</li>
<li>Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography (William Zinsser, editor)</li>
<li>Bloody Times: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Manhunt for Jefferson Davis (James Swanson)</li>
<li>Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (Sonya Sones)</li>
<li>Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (Robert Caro)</li>
<li>*Arsenic and Old Lace (Donald Kesselring)</li>
<li>Alice Paul and the Fight for Women's Rights: From the Vote to the Equal Rights Amendment (Deborah Kops)</li>
<li>*Orbiting Jupiter (Gary Schmidt)</li>
<li>The Handmaid's Tale: Graphic Novel Version (Margaret Atwood; illustrated by Renee Nault)</li>
<li>Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (Casey Cep)</li>
<li>Thick: And Other Essays (Tressie McMillan Cottom)</li>
<li>Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland (Jonathan W. Metzl)</li>
<li>Stark Mad Abolitionists: Lawrence, Kansas, and the Battle Over Slavery in the Civil War Era (Robert K. Sutton)</li>
<li>The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (Brenda Wineapple)</li>
<li>Are Prisons Obsolete? (Angela Y. Davis)</li>
<li>Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly (Jim DeRogatis)</li>
<li>Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory (Ben MacIntyre)</li>
<li>The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine (Lindsey Fitzharris)</li>
<li>Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)</li>
<li>Lost and Found: Helping Behaviorally Challenging Students (Ross W. Greene)</li>
<li>Negroland: A Memoir (Margo Jefferson; ebook)</li>
<li>Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; ebook)</li>
<li>Becoming (Michelle Obama; audiobook, narrated by Michelle Obama)</li>
<li>The Season of Styx Malone (Kekla Magoon)</li>
<li>Sisters (Raina Telgemeier)</li>
<li>Smile (Raina Telgemeier)</li>
<li>Ada Blackjack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic (Jennifer Niven)</li>
<li>I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir (Malaka Gharib)</li>
<li>Psychiatric Tales: Eleven Graphic Stories About Mental Illness (Darryl Cunningham)</li>
<li>The Poet X (Elizabeth Acevedo)</li>
<li>The Undefeated (Kwame Alexander; illustrated by Kadir Nelson)</li>
<li>The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>House Arrest (K.A. Holt)</li>
<li>How We Fight For Our Lives: A Memoir (Saeed Jones)</li>
<li>Guts (Raina Telgemeier)</li>
<li>Stay Sexy and Don't Get Murdered: the Definitive How-To Guide (Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark; audiobook, narrated by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark)</li>
<li>Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, A Young Adult Adaptation (Sam Quinones)</li>
<li>For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem (Ntozake Shange)</li>
<li>For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem (Ntozake Shange; audiobook, narrated by Thandie Newton)</li>
<li>My Beloved World (Sonia Sotomayor; audiobook, narrated by Sonia Sotomayor and Rita Moreno)</li>
<li>Elevation (Stephen King; audiobook, narrated by Stephen King)</li>
<li>The Borden Murders: Lizzie Borden and the Trial of the Century (Sarah Miller)</li>
<li>The Rise of the Public Normal School System in Wisconsin (William Harold Herrmann)</li>
<li>Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Trevor Noah)</li>
<li>No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (Greta Thunberg)</li>
<li>One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America (Gene Weingarten)</li>
<li>Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (Ronan Farrow)</li>
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Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-65180437122310982382019-01-02T14:59:00.000-08:002019-01-02T14:59:56.785-08:00Books I Read in 2018<br />
<ol>
<li>Norse Mythology (Neil Gaiman)</li>
<li>The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls)</li>
<li>The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing (Edward Gorey)</li>
<li>Radiance (Alyson Noel)</li>
<li>Long Way Down (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>The History of Monroe County Rural Schools (Julia E. Middleman, editor)</li>
<li>How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish Without a Trace (Frank M. Ahearn and Eileen C. Horan)</li>
<li>William Freeman Vilas: Doctrinaire Democrat (Horace Samuel Merrill)</li>
<li>When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)</li>
<li>Orbiting Jupiter (Gary D. Schmidt)</li>
<li>Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case (Patricia Hruby Powell; artwork by Shadra Strickland)</li>
<li>The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die (April Henry)</li>
<li>Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches (John Hodgman; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by John Hodgman)</li>
<li>The Lovings: An Intimate Portrait (Grey Villet, photographer; Barbara Villet and Stephen Crowley, contributors)</li>
<li>Eats, Shoots & Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Lynne Truss)</li>
<li>Bayou, Volume 1 (Jeremy Love; colors by Peter Morgan)</li>
<li>Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America's Favorite Spectator Sport (Matthew Algeo)</li>
<li>Frederick & Anna Douglass in Rochester, New York: Their Home Was Open to All (Rose O'Keefe)</li>
<li>The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement (Teri Kanefield)</li>
<li>Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Phillip Hoose)</li>
<li>Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (Wil Haygood)</li>
<li>The Abduction (Gordon Korman)</li>
<li>I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (Michelle McNamara)</li>
<li>Role Models (John Waters; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by John Waters)</li>
<li>Bad Boy: A Memoir (Walter Dean Myers)</li>
<li>Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal'd (Mary Losure)</li>
<li>Nancy Wake (Peter Fitzsimons)</li>
<li>The Search (Gordon Korman)</li>
<li>Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus (Dusti Bowling)</li>
<li>The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Timothy Egan)</li>
<li>The Pedestriennes: America's Forgotten Superstars (Harry Hall)</li>
<li>Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (Mountain Wolf Woman; Nancy Oestreich Lurie, editor)</li>
<li>Library: An Unquiet History (Matthew Battles)</li>
<li>The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards)</li>
<li>An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood (Jimmy Carter)</li>
<li>The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them (Roxanne J. Coady and Joy Johannessen, editors)</li>
<li>Trial by Fire (Jeff Probst and Chris Tebbetts)</li>
<li>I'm Just No Good at Rhyming: And Other Nonsense for Mischievous Kids and Immature Grown-Ups (Chris Harris; illustrated by Lane Smith)</li>
<li>Bitter Nemesis: The Intimate History of Strychnine (John Buckingham)</li>
<li>Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" (Zora Neale Hurston; edited by Deborah G. Plant)</li>
<li>The Rescue (Gordon Korman)</li>
<li>The Taming of the Shrew (William Shakespeare; parallel text written by Beth Obermiller)</li>
<li>Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (Erik Larson)</li>
<li>*Long Way Down (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>Calypso (David Sedaris)</li>
<li>Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime (Ron Stallworth)</li>
<li>If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (Tim O'Brien)</li>
<li>After Fifteen Years (Leon Jaworski)</li>
<li>We Should All Be Feminists (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)</li>
<li>Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Maxine Hong Kingston)</li>
<li>The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (James McBride)</li>
<li>Women & Power: A Manifesto (Mary Beard)</li>
<li>Soul on Ice (Eldridge Cleaver)</li>
<li>George's Marvelous Medicine (Roald Dahl; narrated by Derek Jakobi)</li>
<li>The Twits (Roald Dahl; narrated by Richard Ayoade)</li>
<li>You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain (Phoebe Robinson; audiobook, narrated by Phoebe Robinson, with Jessica Williams and John Hodgeman)</li>
<li>Meditations from a Movable Chair (Andre Dubus)</li>
<li>The Light on Synanon: How a Country Weekly Exposed a Corporate Cult--and Won the Pulitzer Prize (Dave Mitchell, Cathy Mitchell, and Richard Ofshe)</li>
<li>I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Austin Channing Brown)</li>
<li>Decision (Richard Harris)</li>
<li>They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays (Hanif Abdurraqib)</li>
<li>Don't Call Us Dead: Poems (Danez Smith)</li>
<li>Soldier from the War Returning: The Greatest Generation's Troubled Homecoming from World War II (Thomas Childers)</li>
<li>The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)</li>
<li>The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II (Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)</li>
<li>Garvey's Choice (Nikki Grimes)</li>
<li>Helium (Rudy Francisco)</li>
<li>Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago (Max Allan Collins and Brad A. Schwartz)</li>
<li>The First Part Last (Angela Johnson)</li>
<li>For Every One (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>World War II Heroes (Allan Zullo)</li>
<li>Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty (G. Neri; illustrated by Randy DuBurke)</li>
<li>Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)</li>
<li>Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (James Baldwin; illustrated by Yoran Cazac)</li>
<li>Lighter Than My Shadow (Katie Green)</li>
<li>Illegal (Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin; illustrated by Giovanni Rigano)</li>
<li>Bad Island (Doug TenNapel)</li>
<li>Ghost Boys (Jewell Parker Rhodes)</li>
<li>Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Outselves (Glory Edim, editor)</li>
<li>Children of Blood and Bone (Tomi Adeyemi)</li>
<li>Patina (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>The Incomplete Book of Running (Peter Sagal)</li>
<li>The Hazel Wood (Melissa Albert)</li>
<li>If They Come For Us (Fatimah Asghar)</li>
<li>Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Kathryn Kolbert)</li>
<li>Free Climb (Jake Maddox)</li>
<li>The Pregnancy Project: A Memoir (Gaby Rodriguez, with Jenna Glatzer)</li>
<li>Harbor Me (Jacqueline Woodson)</li>
<li>Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (J.P. Stassen)</li>
<li>The White Darkness (David Grann)</li>
<li>Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction (Jarrett J. Krosoczka)</li>
<li>Ghosts (Raina Telgemeier)</li>
<li>Sunny (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>*The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die (April Henry)</li>
<li>And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer (Fredrik Backman; Alice Menzies, translator)</li>
<li>The Tales of Beedle the Bard (J.K. Rowling)</li>
<li>Odd and the Frost Giants (Neil Gaiman)</li>
<li>Henry Dodge (Louis Pelzer)</li>
<li>Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou)</li>
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<li>The Movement for Statehood, 1845-1846 (Milo Milton Quaife, editor)</li>
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Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-30230228329330559312017-08-26T11:28:00.001-07:002017-08-26T11:36:31.296-07:00Science ("Caesar's Last Breath" by Sam Kean)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was not a particularly enthusiastic student, at least where science was concerned. Every class I took on the subject, from middle school through college, left me completely uninterested, and I soon mastered the art of daydreaming while maintaining eye contact with my teachers, always with a notebook and pen seemingly at the ready. (In college, a required class on soil science, held at 9 a.m., was almost too much to bear. To keep myself awake, I sat beside the same student every Tuesday and Thursday, a soccer player with an active night life, and nudged him every time his head drooped to one side or the other. This self-appointed task kept me alert enough that I never fell victim to the same fate.)<br />
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Needless to say, upon the completion of my last required science class as an undergrad--and, as I was well aware, the last science class I would ever have to take--I felt a sense of overwhelming joy. I had endured years of droning lectures, filled notebooks with equations and diagrams that I would never fully understand, and devoted hours of study to textbooks that described science as though it were a piece of furniture in need of assembly. Even dissection, something I did only once, revealed itself to be lacking any real interest for me, as we spent most of our time looking over the photocopied carcass of a splayed piglet in preparation for yet another quiz. (In retrospect, I should have claimed moral objections and skipped the entire ordeal, as another one of my classmates did; my grade would have been the same regardless, I'm sure.)<br />
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And yet...buried deep in a box somewhere in my parents' basement are science books. Dozens and dozens of them. Many of them are picture books--on dinosaurs, weather patterns, birds, volcanoes, and so on. As a child, I adored anything related to science, especially if it taught me something about the strange, wild, and fascinating world I had been born into. I watched episodes of <i>Bill Nye the Science Guy</i> with such hunger that even today, twenty years later, I can recite certain moments verbatim. The house in which I grew up was surrounded on all sides by lush forest, and I whiled away hours collecting a leaves, studying anthills, and investigating dens dug by small animals. (That I escaped childhood without once being attacked by a badger is a miracle.) Like many young boys, the effects of fire left me spellbound: aluminum soda cans would weaken if left in a fire long enough, I noticed, but metal soup cans would not, and from these simple experiments I could make endless deductions. And at some point, around the age of ten or eleven, I became obsessed with Alfred Wegener, the man who first proposed continental drift. The thought of a fifth-grade boy becoming enamored with a long-dead German geophysicists while his classmates filled their lunchtime conversations with thoughts on their favorite football players is a little tough to imagine; for me, I couldn't imagine anything else at that age, especially the allure of football when compared to the puzzle-piece continents of our world.<br />
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My interest may have been narrow and eccentric, maybe even parochial, but they were not unusual. My hunch is that many boys and girls experience a similar baptism: a parent or teacher introduces them to an enchanting aspect of the world, and they are hooked. As time passes, however, those interests disappear. Blame is easy to assign--we abandon many of our childhood interests over time, and adolescence makes us self-conscious about ourselves, especially if we enjoy something considered "geeky" or "weird"--but I have no hesitancy in doing so. At some point, science became less about the world around me and more about the world as it was depicted on paper. The science lessons I remember fondly from my pre-teen years--raising butterflies, making alum crystals, dissecting owl pellets, creating an electrical grid from desk to desk--slowly gave way to tedious chapters in decades-old textbooks. Hands-on experiments became fewer and fewer, replaced by thick packets and endless tests.<br />
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Even today, I shudder at what has become standard in science curricula across the country. Once, while tutoring a student after school, he handed me the packet he was required to complete for his science class, which reduced a compelling topic--volcanoes--to a series of multiple-choice questions and short-answer problems, all derived from long, droning paragraphs in his textbook. The boy I was tutoring was eleven years old. In more capable hands, he would be learning about volcanoes by building his own out of paper mache, or by studying pictures of Pompeii, or by tracing every step of an eruption with props and sound effects and destructible scenery. Instead, his study of volcanoes required him to sit at a table and search for bold vocabulary words.<br />
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Which is, of course, a travesty. Our world is endlessly fascinating, and it's only been in the last five years or so--since graduating from college and becoming a teacher myself, albeit of English--that my interest in science has been rekindled, thanks almost exclusively to writers like Bill Bryson, Mary Roach, and Sam Kean.* The first wrote what is perhaps my favorite science book, <i>A Short History of Nearly Everything</i>, which explores the planet Earth from its earliest moments. What makes the book such a treasure is that Bryson, who has no formal training in science, devotes an equal amount of ink to both scientists and their discoveries. He tells their stories as though writing a novel--sometimes comedic, sometimes tragic, often inspiring but just as easily dispiriting--and employs creative analogies and contemporary examples in order to simplify complicated (but important) milestones reached centuries ago.<br />
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The same can be said of Mary Roach, who writes about serious topics--the utility of dead bodies, the science of human sexuality, the preparation needed to undertake a mission to Mars--with biting honesty and a dark sense of humor, both of which help lay readers connect with subjects that might otherwise be seen as too obtuse or irrelevant. And Sam Kean takes broad scientific concepts--elements, genetics, the brain--and weaves together dozens of fascinating stories in order to convey how rich and complicated each subject truly is. In other words, he takes topics that have become stodgy textbook chapters and rewrites them to reveal the human faces behind each. <br />
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Kean's most recent book, <i>Caesar's Last Breath</i>, explains the air around us: what it is comprised of, how long we've known this, and who made these discoveries. Along the way, we are introduced to the first men to successfully fly a hot-air balloon; a crotchety old widower in Washington who defies a volcano and loses; a pig that miraculously survives a nuclear blast; an aristocrat whose house is set on fire by those who see his scientific experiments as proof of his decadence; the world's worst poet, writing an ode to one of the world's worst bridges; a man who hopes to defeat hurricanes with chemicals; and so on. Each of these stories offers us a glimpse into our attempts at understanding, utilizing, and even changing our atmosphere. Most importantly, Kean knows that every respiration is a story in itself--a remixing of the same air breathed by men and women who lived centuries ago, as well as the same air that will be still be breathed centuries from now. In other words, every inhale is a communication with the past, and every exhale is a communication with the future.<br />
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This is one aspect of science that is almost always lost in textbooks: why the past matters to those of us living in the present. It's very easy to ignore the life of Einstein when all we're asked to do is understand his theories. But learning about where our famous scientists came from, as well as how they came to be scientists, is just as important as memorizing their formulas, identifying their discoveries on the Periodic Table, or using modern versions of the instruments they designed and built. We see the situations that propelled them into asking questions, making observations, and filling pages with calculations, until they arrived at a conclusion. This gives our modern world a depth that it so deeply needs, and a nuance that might serve as a warning to others. As Kean points out, not all great scientists were heroic beyond their achievements; some, like Alfred Nobel and Fritz Haber, left legacies of carnage and death that may very well overshadow their scientific accomplishments in the near future. Those who hope to one day work in the sciences must understand that not every breakthrough is universally beneficial; sometimes, the cure for one problem is the cause of another, and anyone who walks into a laboratory without that in mind is taking a great risk.<br />
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Studying the past is also a reminder to young people that those who do great things often come from humble beginnings, that they need to work hard over many years, that they often--and inevitably--struggle. Students often approach science class with a pass/fail mindset--they need to get the experiment right the first time because they will not have a second, and anything that does not achieve the prescribed outcome is meaningless. This is not how science is supposed to work. Science is built upon repetition and failure: every floundering experiment or disproven hypothesis adds to our scientific knowledge because it tells us to try again, change our approach, or move in a different direction. One of the great benefits to doing experiments with children is that it forces them to act, evaluate, and recalculate based on little more than what they've observed, all of which are vital skills. Learning that scientists of the past found success only after years, even decades, of failure gives kids permission to do the same--have an idea, conduct an experiment, and fail. As long as they see that failure as the beginning of a new path rather than the end of their only option, they will benefit much more than if they simply read about these experiments in a stuffy textbook.<br />
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There are writers with much more direct scientific knowledge and expertise than Sam Kean--Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, and Michio Kaku are only a few. And they are fine writers, not to mention excellent spokespeople for the importance of a strong science education. But it's Sam Kean and his compatriots who I enjoy the most, and whose work offers us guidance about how we can reclaim the joys of science for future generations. They remind us that science can be both terrifying and exciting; it can be time-consuming but also fun and invigorating; it can be frustratingly mysterious, almost petulant in its unwillingness to give up the solution as easily as you would like, but within those mysteries is something redemptive. To solve a mystery of this world, even a relatively small one, is to locate a missing puzzle piece, one that reveals even more of our existence once set in place. And the people who solve those mysteries, regardless of their own personal foibles and reputations, are just as worthy of our study as their most important works.<br />
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*A healthy diet of <i>MythBusters</i> reruns has also helped. <br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-26311805887124047722017-04-13T15:49:00.001-07:002017-04-13T15:55:05.625-07:00Hermit ("The Stranger in the Woods" by Michael Finkel)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When he was twenty years old, Christopher Knight parked his car along a rural road in central Maine, left the keys on the dashboard, and walked into the surrounding forest. He had few supplies, no food, and no plan. For the next twenty-seven years, Knight would remain there, living in a makeshift tent in a small clearing with no contact between himself and another person save for a solitary hiker, with whom he exchanged monosyllabic greetings before moving on. He survived by stealing food and other necessities from nearby homes and cabins, many of which were only occupied during the summer months, and keeping his activities limited to nighttime and non-winter excursions.<br />
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It was, he would later profess, his own personal idea of paradise.<br />
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When he finally reappeared in society, escorted there by local police after more than a thousand break-ins, he found himself even more of a loner than before he first set foot in the woods. He had never been a social person; throughout his early years, including those spent in public school, he left little impression on anyone or anything. Raised to be honest, self-sufficient, and intellectually curious, Knight had always longed for the solitude that only nature could provide. And so he followed his desires, relying on frozen meat and junk food left behind by seasonal tourists, as well as the books, soap, shampoo, and propane tanks of local residents, to keep him thriving both physically and mentally. His arrest, which brought an end to both the world's most successful--albeit monotonous--crime spree and a generation of local urban legends, also marked another milestone: at age 47, Knight had dedicated more than half his life to living alone in the woods.<br />
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In the closing pages of <i>The Stranger in the Woods</i>, a nonfiction account of Christopher Knight's life during and after his time in the forest, journalist Michael Finkel attempts to explain just what his subject was hoping to accomplish:<br />
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He wasn't going to leave behind a single recorded thought, not a photo, not an idea. No person would know of his experience. Nothing would ever be written about him. He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice. His end wouldn't create so much as a ripple on North Pond. It would have been an existence, a life, of utter perfection.</blockquote>
A conclusion such as this might seem strange out of context--a man willing to be forgotten, and to think of such a life as perfection--but when read at the end of such a complicated story, this seems like a fitting and appropriate summation.<br />
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What makes Finkel's conclusion problematic is not how strongly it runs counter to the narratives our society embraces--that we must be concerned with our legacy, our footprints, our need to accomplish much and accomplish often--but how Finkel's entire book undermines its own thesis. If, as Finkel believes, Knight wanted to die in his encampment and be absorbed into nature, decomposed by the very same wilderness that offered him refuge, then Finkel has made such an end impossible and rendered the perfect as unachievable. Even if Knight were to return to the forest to die, as he intimates doing at one point, his death would not erase him from the world; instead, Christopher Knight, the so-called "last hermit," would be forever preserved because of Finkel's own book, which is now a bestseller.<br />
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Rarely do we encounter those who willingly remove themselves from society and are better for it; more often than not, those who live in this world, whether they do so in large cities or rural towns, belong to a community, and their absence from this community, whether it be for days or weeks or years, causes irreparable damage. Those who do separate themselves often descend into a strange form of madness; they may not suffer from a recognized or diagnosable illness, but something about them changes, something slightly perceptible at first, then unavoidable, until they become an entirely different person. They become a stranger, as though the isolation has jolted unseen fault lines into dangerous movements, which cannot be traced back or undone. Knight, as depicted by Finkel, seems to waver between becoming one of these people--his inability to make eye contact or engage in social niceties are startling aspects to his personality, ones that don't seem to have been a part of him before his exile into the forest--and preserving that small, pulsing nucleus of his individuality, which thrived as he devoured books, honed his survival instincts, and developed an appreciation for classical music, all in the wilderness of Maine.<br />
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Finkel wants us to believe that more of us should follow Knight's lead--abandon society, even briefly, to rediscover the benefits of silence, of boredom, of self-sufficiency, of nature, of solitude--even as the very subject of his book, the soul of this thesis, refuses to play along. Given every opportunity, Knight refuses to speak the words of Thoreauvian wisdom Finkel so desperately wants and expects, even as he simultaneously acknowledges that such wisdom--if it were to be delivered--would benefit almost no one. When asked what he's learned after so much time in the wild, Knight takes a long pause and recommends we get enough sleep; he then turns and is taken back to his prison cell, his wisdom seemingly spent.<br />
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Finkel's attitude towards Knight is never consistent, despite having had more contact with him than anyone else outside of his immediate family. At first, he initiates a conversation through letters, which rarely focus on Knight's time in the woods. Eventually, he takes a further step and visits Knight in prison, where the hermit's strange mannerisms become clear. Eventually, once Knight is paroled, Finkel begins stalking the man; he schedules flights to Maine from Montana and arrives unannounced at Knight's home, despite the fact that all of Knight's family members have refused to comment on the matter. He drives around Knight's small town speaking to those in his community about him, temporarily sets up camp in Knight's old clearing, attends Knight's sentencing, hounds his brothers, teases Knight about a potential girlfriend, and continues writing letters to him, all of which make the reading experience increasingly uncomfortable. Only when Knight insists that Finkel stop and threatens him with a call to the police does the author finally--and mercifully--relent, and for the first time since his arrest chapters earlier, the "character" of Christopher Knight is given the peace he has so desperately wanted.<br />
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Perhaps Finkel believes all of this is well-intentioned: an attempt to connect with a man who struggles to do so. Perhaps he believes he is doing a service for his readers, who--he imagines--would want to know more about someone who seems so unwilling to share anything even remotely personal. Instead, Finkel becomes the very thing Knight had spent so many years eluding: the ever-present set of eyes that is constantly judging, constantly questioning, constantly demanding. Among other people, Knight was forced to wear a mask of society's making, one that offered up meaningless small talk with ease, exhibited the appropriate facial expressions, watched mindless television, avoided anything intellectually engaging, and scorned those who didn't do the same. Among the trees, Knight could chip away at the mask, piece by piece, until he was finally himself. Even prison offered him enough structure and solitude to keep the full mask at bay.<br />
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But a journalist who arrives unannounced and uninvited, pries into his personal life, asks unwanted questions, and initiates contact with family members is little more than those prying eyes come back with a new mask in hand. And in publishing a book devoted exclusively to Knight, whose only real desire is to be left alone and forgotten, Finkel has committed the most heinous crime of all: he has forced Knight to remain a public figure long after he's passed away. Rather than being the subject of some long-forgotten online articles--the very kind that require refined Internet searches and hours of scrolling--Knight will be preserved as caricature and exhibit, his mask made of paper and ink and bytes, and his name synonymous with freak. Michael Finke could have used this book to explore the ways in which our society has disconnected us from one another and the world around us, and the benefits of getting those connections back; instead, he has reminded us that, no matter how we work to fix ourselves and pursue our redemptions, there will always be those who stand at the forest's edge, mask in hand, waiting for us to emerge.<br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-57808270436481119682016-12-30T15:47:00.001-08:002016-12-30T15:54:35.523-08:00The Kid Becomes Laureate: Bob Dylan in 2016<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLOFwrjft1nRkXq7-uFmznZLW_-V72BRkzIiIr682Dq3noHA3cRbt8r1iMdd5gVDuu6n6w3rprKvVGKNO5w4Bl4BIgZM3HuLE0xzjpHWSZsKLT-dCy8YQ9GMeWT8S8mV5C_DEFvPX7dCA/s1600/BobDylanLyrics_Amazon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLOFwrjft1nRkXq7-uFmznZLW_-V72BRkzIiIr682Dq3noHA3cRbt8r1iMdd5gVDuu6n6w3rprKvVGKNO5w4Bl4BIgZM3HuLE0xzjpHWSZsKLT-dCy8YQ9GMeWT8S8mV5C_DEFvPX7dCA/s200/BobDylanLyrics_Amazon.jpg" width="163" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.<br /><br /> 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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Take, for example, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," a song from his 1964 album <i>The Times They Are a-Changin'</i>, 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. <br /><br />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: "</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">They say that your ore ain't worth digging / </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">That it's much cheaper down / </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">In the South American town / </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Where the miners work for almost nothing."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <i>Empire Burlesque</i>, 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: "</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">They gave him dope to smoke, drinks and pills / </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A jeep to drove, blood to spill</span> / <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">They said 'Congratulations, you got what it takes' / </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">They sent him back into the rat race without any breaks</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">....</span> <span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">He bought the American dream but it put him in debt / </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The only game he could play was Russian roulette."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />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 <i>Empire Burlesque</i>, "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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />Even Cormac McCarthy, by far the most deserving of the conventional choices, would have caused people little pause. Yes, millions have read <i>No Country for Old Men</i> and <i>The Road</i>--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--<i>Suttree</i>, perhaps, or <i>The Orchard Keeper</i>, or even the masterful and biblical <i>Blood Meridian</i>--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.<br /><br />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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">*Perhaps my favorite example of the degree to which so-called experts failed at predicting a Dylan win comes in an <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/137496/will-win-2016-nobel-prize-literature" target="_blank">article</a> by Alex Shephard of the <i>New Republic</i>. 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.</span></div>
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<b>Books I Read in 2016</b></div>
<ol>
<li>A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Sylvia Nasar; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Edward Hermann)</li>
<li>Candy Bomber (Michael O. Tunnell)</li>
<li>So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood (Patrick Modiano; Euan Cameron, translator)</li>
<li>When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (Gene Smith)</li>
<li>The Three-Body Problem (Cixin Liu; Ken Liu, translator)</li>
<li>Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (Shel Silverstein)</li>
<li>So, Anyway... (John Cleese)</li>
<li>Salome (Oscar Wilde)</li>
<li>Okay For Now (Gary D. Schmidt)</li>
<li>The Protectors (Val Karlsson)</li>
<li>Uprising (Margaret Peterson Haddix) </li>
<li>Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: The Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life of John Quincy Adams (Joseph Wheelan)</li>
<li>Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams)</li>
<li>The Curse of Madame "C" (Gary Larson)</li>
<li>Dead End in Norvelt (Jack Gantos)</li>
<li>The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain (Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics (Chris Grabenstein)</li>
<li>Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case (Chris Crowe)</li>
<li>The Wave (Todd Strasser)</li>
<li>*One Summer: America, 1927 (Bill Bryson; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)</li>
<li>Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library (Scott Sherman)</li>
<li>The Bookshop (Penelope Fitzgerald)</li>
<li>The Shrunken Head (Lauren Oliver, ebook)</li>
<li>The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (Margalit Fox)</li>
<li>*At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (Kate DiCamillo)</li>
<li>If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino; William Weaver, translator)</li>
<li>Guantanamo Boy (Anna Perera)</li>
<li>The Far Side Observer (Gary Larson)</li>
<li>Begging for Change (Sharon Flake)</li>
<li>Something Under the Bed is Drooling (Bill Watterson)</li>
<li>Here Lies the Librarian (Richard Peck)</li>
<li>Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (Tony Horwitz)</li>
<li>The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)</li>
<li>A Year in the Life of a Complete and Total Genius (Stacey Matson)</li>
<li>One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment (Mei Fong)</li>
<li>One Man's Folly: The Exceptional Houses of Furlow Gatewood (Julia Reed; Paul Costello, photographer; Rodney Collins, photographer)</li>
<li>Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians (Brandon Sanderson)</li>
<li>The Logogryph: A Bibliography of Imaginary Books (Thomas Wharton)</li>
<li>The Sculptor (Scott McCloud)</li>
<li>The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson (Jeffrey Toobin)</li>
<li>Lake Wobegon Family Reunion (Garrison Keillor; audio, unabridged, narrated by Garrison Keillor, recorded live)</li>
<li>A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (Tony Horwitz)</li>
<li>Champlain's Dream: the European Founding of North America (David Hackett Fischer)</li>
<li>Bad Unicorn (Platte F. Clark)</li>
<li>News From Lake Wobegon (Garrison Keillor; audio, unabridged, narrated by Garrison Keillor, recorded live)</li>
<li>Veronica's Room: A Melodrama (Ira Levin)</li>
<li>My Reading Life (Pat Conroy; audio, unabridged, narrated by Pat Conroy)</li>
<li>Gifts (Ursula K. Le Guin)</li>
<li>Last Chapter and Worse (Gary Larson)</li>
<li>Phantoms on the Bookshelves (Jacques Bonnet; translated by Sian Reynolds)</li>
<li>A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveller (Jason Roberts)</li>
<li>The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Volume 1: Acadia, 1610-1613 (Rueben Gold Thwaites, editor)</li>
<li>Borderlands: Unconquered (John Shirley)</li>
<li>Coraline (Neil Gaiman)</li>
<li>Unfamiliar Fishes (Sarah Vowell)</li>
<li>Wolf by Wolf (Ryan Graudin)</li>
<li>84, Charing Cross Road (Helene Hanff)</li>
<li>Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker (Renata Adler)</li>
<li>Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Tony Horwitz, ebook)</li>
<li>The House of Paper (Carlos Maria Dominguez; Peter Sis, illustrator; Nick Caistor, trans.)</li>
<li>Echo (Pam Munoz Ryan)</li>
<li>Three at Wolfe's Door (Rex Stout)</li>
<li>The Works of Samuel de Champlain, Volume 2 (Samuel de Champlain; H.P. Biggar, editor; John Squair, translator; digital copy)</li>
<li>Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster (Jon Krakauer; audio, unabridged, narrated by Jon Krakauer)</li>
<li>Agnes Quill: An Anthology of Mystery (Dave Roman; Jason Ho, Jen Wang, Taina Telgemeier, and Jeff Zornow, illustrators)</li>
<li>Breakthrough! How Three People Saved "Blue Babies" and Changed Medicine Forever (Jim Murphy)</li>
<li>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Eric Idle)</li>
<li>In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Hoot (Carl Hiassen)</li>
<li>Toxic Planet (David Ratte)</li>
<li>Don't You Turn Back: Poems by Langston Hughes (Langston Hughes; Lee Bennett Hopkins, editor; Ann Grifalconi, illustrator)</li>
<li>Yukon Ho! (Bill Watterson)</li>
<li>Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud (Shaun Considine)</li>
<li>Everything, Everything (Nicola Yoon)</li>
<li>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)</li>
<li>*In a Sunburned Country (Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>The Hudson's Bay Company (George Woodcock)</li>
<li>*A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy (Kliph Nesteroff)</li>
<li>Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (James McBride; ebook)</li>
<li>The Rape of Nanking (Iris Change)</li>
<li>*A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bill Bryson; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Joe Gould's Teeth (Jill Lepore)</li>
<li>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)</li>
<li>*Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film (Patton Oswalt; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Patton Oswalt)</li>
<li>The Nazi Hunters (Andrew Nagorski)</li>
<li>*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) </li>
<li>Luke Skywalker Can't Read: And Other Geeky Truths (Ryan Britt)</li>
<li>Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman (Lindy West)</li>
<li>Missionary Labors of Fathers Marquette, Menard and Allouez, in the Lake Superior Region (Chrysostom Verwyst; PDF)</li>
<li>But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past (Chuck Klosterman)</li>
<li>Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870: Volume 1, 1670-1763 (E.E. Rich)</li>
<li>*Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (Reza Aslan; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Reza Aslan)</li>
<li>Citizen: An American Lyric (Claudia Rankine, ebook)</li>
<li>A Very Remarkable Sickness: Epidemics in the Petit Nord, 1670-1846 (Paul Hackett)</li>
<li>This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (Ann Patchett; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Ann Patchett)</li>
<li>On Trails: An Exploration (Robert Moor)</li>
<li>There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say (Paula Poundstone; audiobook, abridged, narrated by Paula Poundstone)</li>
<li>The Voyageur's Highway: Minnesota's Border Lake Land (Grace Lee Nute)</li>
<li>History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan (Andrew J. Blackbird, digital)</li>
<li>JR (William Gaddis)</li>
<li>American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (Jeffrey Toobin)</li>
<li>1776 (David McCullough)</li>
<li>Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (David Rakoff, ebook)</li>
<li>Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish (David Rakoff; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by David Rakoff)</li>
<li>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)</li>
<li>The Ice Master: The Doomed 1913 Voyage of the Karluk (Jennifer Niven)</li>
<li>All the President's Men (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein)</li>
<li>A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (Simon Winchester)</li>
<li>The Library at Mount Char (Scott Hawkins)</li>
<li>First Man: Reimagining Matthew Henson (Simon Schwartz)</li>
<li>Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger, and Heartbreak from The Atavist Magazine (Evan Ratliff, editor)</li>
<li>The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party (Daniel James Brown, ebook)</li>
<li>The Silence of the Lambs (Thomas Harris)</li>
<li>The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel (F. Scott Fitzgerald; Edmund Wilson, editor)</li>
<li>Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Geoff Dyer)</li>
<li>Challenger Deep (Neal Shusterman; Brendan Shusterman, illustrator)</li>
<li>The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe)</li>
<li>The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club (Phillip Hoose)</li>
<li>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)</li>
<li>Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (Jon Meacham)</li>
<li>The Finest Hours: The True Story of a Heroic Sea Rescue, Young Reader's Edition (Michael J. Tougias and Casey Sherman)</li>
<li>Tracker (Gary Paulsen)</li>
<li>Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science (Atul Gawande)</li>
<li>The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (David Grann)</li>
<li>You Are Here: Around the World In 92 Minutes: Photographs from the International Space Station (Chris Hadfield)</li>
<li>Rise of the Wolf (Curtis Jobling)</li>
<li>Three Black Swans (Caroline B. Cooney)</li>
<li>In the Shadows of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives (Kenneth C. Davis)</li>
<li>I Heart You, You Haunt Me (Lisa Schroeder)</li>
<li>The Zodiac Legacy: Convergence (Stan Lee and Stuart Moore; Andie Tong, illustrator)</li>
<li>Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World (Evan Thomas)</li>
<li>Let the People Decide (William M. Kraus)</li>
<li>Unbought and Unbossed (Shirley Chisholm)</li>
<li>Caesars of the Wilderness: Medard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers and Pierre Esprit Radisson, 1618-1710 (Grace Lee Nute)</li>
<li>Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders (Joshua Foer, Ella Morton, and Dylan Thuras)</li>
<li>Assassin's Creed: Last Descendants (Matthew J. Kirby)</li>
<li>Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War (Steve Sheinkin)</li>
<li>"He Chews to Run": Will Rogers' Life Magazine Articles, 1928 (Will Rogers; Steven K. Graget, editor)</li>
<li>The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country (Laton McCartney)</li>
<li>Robert M. LaFollette and the Insurgent Spirit (David P. Thelen)</li>
<li>Irena's Children: A True Story of Courage, Young Readers Edition (Tilar J. Mazzeo; adapted by Mary Cronk Farrell)</li>
<li>Grendel (John Gardner)</li>
<li>*A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens)</li>
<li>The War Within These Walls (Aline Sax)</li>
<li>The Thief of Always (Clive Barker)</li>
<li>How to Build a Museum: Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (Tonya Bolden)</li>
<li>Ghost (Jason Reynolds)</li>
<li>The Peace of Montreal of 1701: French-Native Diplomacy in the Seventeenth Century (Gilles Havard; Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott, translators)</li>
<li>The Lyrics: 1961-2012 (Bob Dylan)</li>
</ol>
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*Denotes a reread.</div>
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Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-79115440457068232142016-11-12T15:27:00.001-08:002016-11-13T05:08:24.678-08:00A State Of a Different Color: Thoughts on the 2016 Presidential Election<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikE_EgW-xIX_CkEXQ-wdrk8_O4o1XNh8NMRH30E3n8vxyyen_UUqGEj7rkYY709ZYOuarjVlSUCeESZeP8la2DJsZzJKr07oZ7hyphenhyphen-ywvGJqYviOl-HHV19qku0EeVO3HvQv9rhxPHSHjE/s1600/RobertLaFollette_Amazon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikE_EgW-xIX_CkEXQ-wdrk8_O4o1XNh8NMRH30E3n8vxyyen_UUqGEj7rkYY709ZYOuarjVlSUCeESZeP8la2DJsZzJKr07oZ7hyphenhyphen-ywvGJqYviOl-HHV19qku0EeVO3HvQv9rhxPHSHjE/s200/RobertLaFollette_Amazon.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br />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 href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/04/AR2008010403860.html">a law</a> 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.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/business/economy/10jobs.html">half a million jobs</a> 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 <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/36231884/ns/business-eye_on_the_economy/t/study-million-households-lost-recession/#.WCc9--ErJbU">foreclosures</a> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/29/news/economy/bailout/">vote</a>, 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 "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/us/politics/29obama.html">the stimulus</a>," an almost $800 billion infusion of money into the economy in order to incite job growth and shore up faltering public institutions. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />In their eyes, this was comparable to the local fire station handing over control of the firetrucks to a group of arsonists.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/heres-congress-works/story?id=24810354">less than 150</a> 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.<br /><br />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:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">...[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.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />This, to be perfectly honest, is bullshit.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">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.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/sep/05/barack-obama-us-minimum-wage-republicans-tom-perez">refused to budge</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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 <i>in spite</i> of his bigotry rather than <i>because</i> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /></span></div>
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Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-77056003285290834542016-10-20T17:16:00.001-07:002016-10-20T17:41:53.159-07:00Legacy ("Destiny and Power" by Jon Meacham)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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 <i>Team of Rivals</i> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>Destiny and Power</i>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>not</i> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-86077966721002795802016-06-09T06:45:00.001-07:002016-06-09T06:50:12.153-07:00Obscurity ("Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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.<br />
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This untenable balance is the undoing of <i>Joe Gould's Teeth</i>, Jill Lepore's short but fact-jammed account of her attempts to track down <i>The Oral History of Our Time</i>, 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<i> New Yorker</i>, 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.<br />
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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:<br />
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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 <i>New Yorkers</i>, and seagull feathers. I called my paper-mache <i>White Man (Variation)</i>. [30]</blockquote>
There are also moments in which Lepore discovers excerpts from the actual <i>Oral History</i>, 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.)<br />
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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.<br />
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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 <i>New Yorker</i>--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.<br />
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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.<br />
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*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.<br />
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**A quick Google search for Augusta Savage brings up a few of these photographs, and they are wonderful.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-78175639791614867742016-03-22T03:04:00.001-07:002016-06-30T18:22:56.340-07:00Reading ("My Reading Life" by Pat Conroy)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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, <i>My Reading Life</i>, 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.<br />
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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 <i>The Wright Brothers</i> 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.*<br />
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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--<i>Gone With the Wind</i>, <i>War and Peace</i>, <i>Deliverance</i>, <i>Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Rings</i>--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.<br />
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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 <i>My Reading Life</i> 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.<br />
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*There are a handful of actors who can have the same affect. Perhaps the most noteworthy is Sissy Spacek, whose reading of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i> 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.<br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-27447118162448646132016-02-03T03:46:00.001-08:002016-02-03T03:46:18.045-08:00Libraries ("Patience and Fortitude" by Scott Sherman)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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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 "<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2013/01/16/why-public-libraries-matter-and-how-they-can-do-more/#55b813437704" target="_blank">welcomed</a> 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.<br />
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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 <a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/09/15/who-uses-libraries-and-what-they-do-at-their-libraries/" target="_blank">Pew Research Center</a> 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. <br />
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And how much does this cost each American taxpayer? According to the research, forty-two dollars. In <a href="http://business.time.com/2012/01/23/how-much-you-spend-each-year-on-coffee-gas-christmas-pets-beer-and-more/" target="_blank">contrast</a>, 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.<br />
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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 <i>Patience and Fortitude</i>, 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.)<br />
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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.)<br />
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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.)<br />
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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.<br />
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*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.<br />
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**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.<br />
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***I say "were" rather than "are" because the books were eventually moved to a warehouse in New Jersey, where they remain to this day.<br />
<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-79114256665005441402016-01-24T11:20:00.001-08:002016-01-24T11:20:04.836-08:00Nostalgia ("The Road to Little Dribbling" by Bill Bryson)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the seventh chapter of <i>The Road to Little Dribbling</i>, author Bill Bryson introduces us to one of his friends, a retired travel editor named John Flinn, by writing that he "loves baseball and shares with me an abiding admiration for the fashion model Cheryl Tiegs as she was forty years ago and, in our memories, will always be." This lone statement--meant, I suppose, as a cheeky commentary on the author's age and overall temperament--is in fact the perfect distillation of everything that is wrong with Bryson's most recent book in one sentence, as he uses much of the travelogue's 375-page run to point out everything about British society, culture, and topography that has changed since the publication of his last memoir about Great Britain, <i>Notes from a Small Island, </i>twenty years ago.<br />
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Granted, nostalgia can be a worthwhile topic to explore, as long as the author is cognizant of the silliness behind his or her own feelings, which Bryson frequently claims to be. (And were Bryson writing this in the same style as his other books, there would be little reason to worry. After all, Bryson is one of the few writers who can offer biting criticisms that also come off as exceedingly reasonable and erudite.) But there are more than a few moments--when he finds himself engrossed in a tabloid, for example, or speaking with service workers, or criticizing the British government--when Bryson's frustrations with the changed world around him compel him to let loose with obscenities, invectives, and fantasies of violence, all of which are delivered to the reader without a hint of irony or self-awareness. (This is in contrast to some of Bryson's other books, such as <i>A Walk in the Woods</i>, in which the author depicted himself as cross between intrepid explorer and bumbling old fool, albeit one with an impressively bookish understanding of the world, and delivered his criticisms of people and places with a warm, dry wit.) As we flip from one page to the next--and as Bryson journeys from one location to the next--he punctuates his story with the cynicism and humorlessness of a man who believes he can better connect with an audience through negativity, all the while dismissing such behavior as an inevitability of age. (At 63 he's now considered a senior citizen, a fact he continually presents as though it explains away everything.)<br />
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What's especially troublesome is that, in writing about his dejection in the face of a country with which he is suddenly unfamiliar, Bryson's nostalgia is competing against others who, at the same time, are seeing Great Britain in the way Bryson once did. They are young, perhaps the same age as Bryson when he first set out twenty years ago, and they are stopping and seeing the unique, unheralded places that rest beyond the major highways for the very first time. They don't see their country as something to be compared against a mental scrapbook; they see it as Bryson himself once did and still wants to...which, in a way, makes this book not only immediately outdated but also in many ways unnecessary.<br />
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That's not to say there aren't moments in which we see the old Bryson return to us. In fact, his grating negativity is mostly consigned to the book's first hundred pages; once they have passed, and Bryson is fully engaged in his journey, he becomes more and more tolerable, until the book begins to read like it should. Bryson offers us historical backstories or short, biographical anecdotes about important people, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Keiller, Herbert Ponting, Roger Bannister, Lawrence Bragg, and Basil Brown, among others. (His account of Michael Ventris, which occupies a single paragraph, is simple, straightforward, and entirely heartbreaking.) Without pause, these moments transport us back to the books that made us adore Bryson in the first place--in my case, <i>A Short History of Nearly Everything</i>, followed by <i>A Walk in the Woods </i>and, eventually, <i>At Home</i> and <i>One Summer</i>. But those moments are rare, often interrupted by descriptions of the land--which are not half bad at times--or more of Bryson's complaints.<br />
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In pining for Bryson to tell us more of these stories rather than more of his desire for the way things used to be, the reader becomes Bryson himself: upset that so much has changed so suddenly, that what lies before us is not what we're familiar with or what we expect. (Those moments when Bryson becomes the befuddling yet knowledgeable traveller with whom we are accustomed serve only to remind us of exactly what we're missing out on when those moments end.) Unintentionally, Bryson's sour attitude offers us the best insight into exactly how he feels as he crosses his new home country, except that our nostalgia is for a man rather than an island.<br />
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A few pages after introducing us to John Flinn and sharing their affection for a more youthful Cheryl Tiegs, Bryson finds himself sitting in his hotel room watching television...or at least attempting to. As it happens, British television has little to offer our author, and he settles on a nonfiction program--a travelogue, as it happens, in which a former government official "with a taste for annoyingly colorful suits" rides trains across the country:<br />
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Occasionally he would get off the train and spend approximately forty seconds with a local historian who would explain to him why something that used to be there is no longer there. <br /> "So this used to be the site of the biggest prosthetics mill in Lancashire?" Michael would say.<br /> "That's right. Fourteen thousand girls worked here in its heyday."<br /> "Gosh. And now it's this giant supermarket?"<br /> "That's right."<br /> "Gosh. That's progress for you. Well, I'm off to Oldham to see where they used to make sheep dip. Ta-ta."<br /> And this really was the best thing on.</blockquote>
In moments such as these, one wonders if Bryson isn't making us the target of an elaborate satire, almost like performance art in book form. Surely, we wonder, no one could lack such self-awareness--to bemoan the vacuity of television while simultaneously finding that same vacuity important enough to note in a book...and not just any book, but one in which an older man travels across the county to discover that something that once used to be there is no longer there. Except, in the end, we discover that we are the same. We undertake a journey, only to discover, much to our genuine disappointment, that the man who had once been there may no longer be there anymore.<br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-87913956356094169722015-12-30T14:59:00.003-08:002015-12-30T14:59:59.024-08:00Why David McCullough Matters: An Essay<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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If history is any indication, David McCullough's most recent book, <i>The Wright Brothers</i>, might also be his last. Having published his first book almost a half-century ago, McCullough has averaged one every four to five years, a process that he undertakes in a small cottage behind his home on Martha's Vineyard. Each book is laboriously researched, often in the halls of the Library of Congress, and McCullough crafts each page not with a computer or army of assistants but a simple typewriter, a process that he refuses to change. And in the half-century that he has plugged away at that typewriter, he has collected a myriad of prizes and accolades, and he is one of the few writers of history whose books are instant bestsellers, despite the fact that his style--verbose, almost prose-poetic passages that dwell on the most technical of subjects, sometimes for chapters at a time--resists the trends of the day that demand writers create works of history that read more like novels, regardless of the liberties that must be taken to accomplish this. Instead, McCullough's writing drips with meticulousness, with the ink of a man who has allowed primary documents to seep into his skin and down into the dark ribbons of his machine, and his words are never suspect. We know that, when we read McCullough, we are reading history pure and true, and everything on the page--every scrap of dialogue, every insinuation and deduction--is based in fact and fact alone.<br />
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Now 82 years old, McCullough still possesses the same skills and insights that have made him America's greatest living writer of history--possibly the greatest in our lifetimes--a fact clearly demonstrated by <i>The Wright Brothers</i>, which is 300-plus pages and enthralling throughout. But with the knowledge that, some day soon, we may lose McCullough to the very history that he so clearly loves, we must understand just why it is that this one writer, beside so many others, is so universally revered and so sadly irreplaceable. Why is it that, when McCullough passes from our midst, we will be left with a yawning emptiness in our society and culture that cannot be filled? And, once we understand that, how can we guarantee that such an emptiness does not remain for long?<br />
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To understand the importance of David McCullough, you must first understand the research. Turn to the back of any of McCullough's books, and you will find yourself with a testament as to why its author is deserving of reverence: a detailed list of sources, almost all of which are firsthand documents culled from the vast collections of libraries and historical societies. For <i>The Wright Brothers</i>, McCullough read hundreds of lengthy and often technical letters between the brothers, members of their immediate family, friends, confidants, experts, colleagues, doubters, detractors, and even strangers. He quotes long-forgotten newsletters, newspaper articles more than a century old, and meditative books long out of print. At no point does his prose depend on the weak credibility of secondhand accounts, contemporary postulations, or exultant propaganda. What's more, if the information he wishes to convey doesn't appear in any of these sources--that is to say, if a fact long thought to be true is instead discovered to be little more than a modern fabrication, an apocryphal story, an anecdote with no basis in history--he debunks it before our eyes, and with unwavering assuredness, before swiftly moving on. McCullough has neither the time nor the patience for manufactured truth, regardless of its purpose or effects, and he desires the same attitude from us. In McCullough's world, and rightfully so, there is no room for false idols on the altar of history.<br />
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All of which makes him an anomaly in today's publishing world. Almost all of the "historical nonfiction" books published in any given year approach their topics as though subjects of bestselling paperbacks or Hollywood screenplays: emphasis is placed on the thrilling and more lurid aspects of the story, and much of what matters--the quiet, contemplative moments of maturation and revelation that are often conducted away from public view--are discarded as unimportant, difficult to research, or downright dull. Historical figures become characters who are developed in much the same fashion as fictional creations, with one-chapter backstories, exaggerated inner turmoil, and scandalous personal lives that are bestowed with the same level of importance as their actual accomplishments. What's more, authors often grant themselves authority over their subjects' inner identities by fabricating otherwise unrecorded thoughts or focusing on what their subject must have surely been feeling at a specific time and place, despite the fact there are no historical records of any kind to support these supposed facts...all of which is evidenced when, flipping to the back of these books, we find not a thorough bibliography but instead a list of secondary sources that runs for a dozen pages, at most. (Sometimes, a rare book will appear that either does not include a list of sources at all, or includes a list but without any connection to the actual information, which makes tracing the information to its original source difficult, if not impossible.) Unfortunately, these books saturate the market, and they sell well; meanwhile, authors whose books are built from the ground up, one piece of archival material at a time, are often relegated to the shelves of university libraries, their hard work seen as nothing more than a tired, heavily footnoted chore.<br />
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And yes, there are others who achieve success without devaluing primary sources or embracing the belief that historical nonfiction should be written in the fashion of novels--Robert Caro and Doris Kearns Goodwin are two of the most prominent--but like McCullough, they are not young. Goodwin is in her eighth decade, and has admitted that at best she has one more large work of history to write. Caro, on the other hand, turned 80 this year and has devoted much of the last thirty years to a five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson--a monumental achievement that will surely be his legacy when completed, but one that has distracted him from all other potential subjects. Beside them stand ideologues, propagandists, and fabricators, all of whom shall go nameless here, but who work--intentionally or unintentionally, it doesn't matter--to reduce archives of real, invaluable stories to worthless potboilers.<br />
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The questions then remains is, what must we demand of our historians and writers of history in order for McCullough's legacy to avoid the shadows? But this is not the question we must ask--there will always be those who take the highway towards fame and prosperity rather than the rough path towards truth and duty. The true question is what we must do as readers to assure that those writers who choose to dedicate years, if not decades, of their lives to a singular subject are rewarded with praise, attention and, most of all, patience. We must become as familiar with the ends of a book as we are with its beginnings, and we must set aside those that refuse to tell us--in specific detail--where every single quote, fact, and assertion originated. Publishers must demand this, as well, as the growth of the internet has allowed millions of people to become their own personal fact-checkers, and a company that does not guarantee authenticity has instead opened the door for public scrutiny and backlash.<br />
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If we are blessed to have David McCullough around for many more years--as I hope we are--then we must treasure him, not just because of his skills as a writer, but because he is one of the few who is actively keeping the process alive. In a world where gossip, scandal, and lies are often what grab our attention, McCullough's book guarantee that there is at least one figure standing ready to preserve truth.<br />
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Below is a list of the books--including many by David McCullough--that I read in 2015.<br />
<ol>
<li>At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Ghost World (Daniel Clowes)</li>
<li>Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time (Beth Moon)</li>
<li>After Dark (Haruki Murakami)</li>
<li>Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (Robert K. Massie; e-book)</li>
<li>The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society (Julian E. Zelizer)</li>
<li>Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories (Jerome Stern, editor)</li>
<li>Brian's Winter (Gary Paulsen)</li>
<li>The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales of Science, Surgery, and Mystery (Rob Dunn)</li>
<li>Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Atul Gawande)</li>
<li>Child of God (Cormac McCarthy)</li>
<li>Mind Over Matter: The Epic Crossing of the Antarctic Continent (Ranulph Fiennes)</li>
<li>Poisoned Apples: Poems For You, My Pretty (Christine Heppermann)</li>
<li>Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist (Thomas Levenson)</li>
<li>Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film (Patton Oswalt)</li>
<li>Prophet's Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (Sam Brower)</li>
<li>Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Bryan Stevenson)</li>
<li>The Duck Gods Must Be Crazy: More Stories of Waterfowling Obsession (Doug Larsen)</li>
<li>The Natty Professor: A Master Class on Mentoring, Motivating, and Making it Work (Tim Gunn)</li>
<li>I Hate My Selfie: A Collection of Essays (Shayne Dawson)</li>
<li>Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (Erik Larson)</li>
<li>*The Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson; ebook)</li>
<li>Mother Nature is Trying to Kill You: A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World (Dan Riskin)</li>
<li>*The Road (Cormac McCarthy)</li>
<li>The Wright Brothers (David McCullough)</li>
<li>Inventions That Didn't Change the World (Julie Halls)</li>
<li>No Better Friend: One Man, One Dog, and Their Extraordinary Story of Courage and Survival in WWII (Robert Weintraub)</li>
<li>When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner)</li>
<li>*Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck)</li>
<li>Headstrong: 52 Women Who Changed Science and the World (Rachel Swaby)</li>
<li>Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich (Joachim Fest)</li>
<li>A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Ben Macintyre; ebook)</li>
<li>Washington's Circle: The Creation of the President (David S. Heidler; ebook)</li>
<li>*At Home: A Short History of Private Life (Bill Bryson; ebook)</li>
<li>The Festival of Insignificance (Milan Kundera)</li>
<li>The Boxes (William Sleator; ebook)</li>
<li>The Shadows (Jacqueline West; ebook)</li>
<li>Rooftoppers (Katherine Rundell)</li>
<li>Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (David McCullough)</li>
<li>Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Jesse Andrews)</li>
<li><a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2015/07/hope-go-set-watchman-by-harper-lee.html" target="_blank">Go Set a Watchman (Harper Lee)</a></li>
<li>*A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor (Edward S. Cooper)</li>
<li>The Wordy Shipmates (Sarah Vowell)</li>
<li>*There Are No Shortcuts (Rafe Esquith)</li>
<li>Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library (Chris Grabenstein; ebook)</li>
<li>The Phantom Tollbooth (Norton Juster; ebook)</li>
<li>Assassination Vacation (Sarah Vowell)</li>
<li>What Pet Should I Get? (Dr. Seuss)</li>
<li>The Island of Dr. Libris (Chris Grabenstein; ebook)</li>
<li>The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers Who Inspired Chicago (Douglas Perry)</li>
<li>The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth (Paul Hoffman)</li>
<li>*The Thing Beneath the Bed (Patrick Rothfuss; Nate Taylor, illustrator)</li>
<li>Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science (Alice Dreger)</li>
<li>Bird Box (Josh Malerman)</li>
<li>The Conquerors (David McKee)</li>
<li>The Incredible Book Eating Boy (Oliver Jeffers)</li>
<li>Lost and Found (Oliver Jeffers)</li>
<li>My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (Mary Roach)</li>
<li>My Father's Arms Are a Boat (Stein Erik Lunde; Oyvind Toyseter, illustrator; Kari Dickson, translator)</li>
<li>The Hueys in the New Sweater (Oliver Jeffers)</li>
<li>Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (Christine Baldacchino; Isabelle Malenfant, illustrator)</li>
<li>Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Cheryl Strayed)</li>
<li>The Wright Brothers (David McCullough; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by McCullough)</li>
<li>Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan: the True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate (Rick Bowers)</li>
<li>A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books (Nicholas Basbanes)</li>
<li>The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights (Steve Sheinkin)</li>
<li>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams; audiobook, unabridged, narrated by Stephen Fry)</li>
<li>The Great Whale of Kansas (Richard W. Jennings)</li>
<li>Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (Eric Foner)</li>
<li>Stories 1, 2, 3, 4 (Eugene Ionesco; illustrated by Etienne Delessert)</li>
<li>And Then There Were None (Agatha Christie)</li>
<li>What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami)</li>
<li>A Monster Calls (Patrick Ness)</li>
<li>The Boy on the Porch (Sharon Creech)</li>
<li>How to Steal a Car (Pete Hautman)</li>
<li>The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters (James McPherson)</li>
<li>Wind/Pinball: Two Novels (Haruki Murakami)</li>
<li>Humans of New York: Stories (Brandon Stanton)</li>
<li>Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad (M.T. Anderson)</li>
<li>Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (Sarah Vowell)</li>
<li>The Rest of Us Just Live Here (Patrick Ness)</li>
<li>Steam & Cinders: The Advent of Railroads in Wisconsin (Axel Lorenzsonn)</li>
<li>Crenshaw (Katherine Applegate)</li>
<li>La Pointe: Village Outpost on Madeline Island (Hamilton Nelson Ross)</li>
<li>Brave Companions: Portraits in History (David McCullough)</li>
<li>Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952 (T.H. Watkins)</li>
<li>Carry On (Rainbow Rowell)</li>
<li>The Thing About Jellyfish (Ali Benjamin)</li>
<li>History of Brule's Discoveries and Explorations (Consul Willshire Butterfield)</li>
<li>Mockingbird (Kathryn Erskine)</li>
<li>Marked (P.C. Cast and Kristen Cast)</li>
<li>History of the Ojibways, and their Connection with Fur Traders: Based Upon Official and Other Records (Rev. Edward D. Neill)</li>
<li>Truman (David McCullough; audiobook, abridged, narrated by David McCullough)</li>
<li>The Chippewas of Lake Superior (Edmund Jefferson Danzinger, Jr.)</li>
<li>The Shark Attacks of 1916 (Lauren Tarshis)</li>
<li>Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (Isaac Bashevis Singer; translated by multiple authors)</li>
</ol>
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-9694831944828142312015-07-18T03:56:00.001-07:002016-02-19T14:10:31.933-08:00Hope ("Go Set a Watchman" by Harper Lee)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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By now, the backstory is established. Supposedly written before <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, Harper Lee's <i>Go Set a Watchman</i> was discovered in a safety deposit box by the author's lawyer and, with Lee's approval, published. Almost sixty years after its pages were first pulled from the grip of a typewriter, the novel's very existence defies easy classification: it's a prequel in some respects, as it was written first, though it takes place 20 years after the events in <i>Mockingbird</i>, thereby making it a quasi-sequel. It also shares enough with its successor that we might reasonably call it a first draft. After all, the stories of the Cunningham family's garbled name, the settlement of Maycomb County, Miss Maudie's penchant for baking small cakes for the children, all reappear in these new pages like vibrant, porch-side hits of nostalgia, and without warning the scenes--whether drawn from old ink, borne from our imagination, or lifted from the transcendent film adaptation--play before our eyes unwillingly but not unwelcomely. To read this book seems, at first, like recalling friends you'd always kept in the back of your mind but never made a point of remembering fully.<br />
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But the world of <i>Go Set a Watchman</i> is a few degrees different than the one of <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>. For starters, Scout is now Jean Louise--a woman in her twenties who has returned to Maycomb for two weeks; she graduated from a Georgia women's college at her father's insistence and now lives in New York City, though she toys with the idea of coming home for good. Dill fought in the war in Europe and stayed--always the wanderer, according to Jean Louise. Jem is dead, having collapsed from the same heart condition that claimed his mother so many years ago, and his sister now remembers him with the same mixture of fondness, admiration, and irritation that punctuated their relationship when they were children and recreating elaborate adventures on the front lawn. Calpurnia fled the Finch family and grew old, and when Scout visits her, their relationship has hardened. Beyond them, most of the characters from <i>Mockingbird</i> go unmentioned, with few exceptions: Uncle Jack, Aunt Alexandra, Mr. Underwood, and Atticus. And it is the last of these characters--Atticus Finch, the undeniable hero of Lee's original--who has caused readers the most consternation over <i>Go Set a Watchman</i>. He is 72 years old now, retired from the state legislature, and racked with a host of medical problems--near blindness, rheumatoid arthritis, and the fragility that comes with age.<br />
<br />
He also espouses many of the racist attitudes of the day, which Jean Louise discovers when she finds a pamphlet tucked among his bookshelves--a publication she promptly drops into the trash, to her aunt's abject horror. She then follows Atticus and her fiancee, Henry Clinton, to a meeting of the Maycomb Citizens' Council, where Maycomb's finest men listen to speeches about the grave "nigger" threat that is threatening their country. The realization that her father--"the one human being she had ever fully and wholeheartedly trusted"--is as weak-willed and small-minded as the "white trash" that populates Maycomb makes Jean Louise physically ill. For much of the book, she struggles to understand how the man who raised her, a man who never once acted superior than anyone else and taught her to do the same, could have also held such repugnant beliefs, and the chapters leading to the novel's close trace her journey across Maycomb--an Odysseus in search of a home that is right beneath her feet but also now thousands of miles away. When she finally confronts her father in his office, she denounces him for raising her with a false ideal of him, pushes back on his belief that black people are "backward" and lack refinement and education, and calls him a killer of souls akin to Hitler.<br />
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Reconciling ourselves with this new version of Atticus Finch is difficult, and for many reasons. For more than five decades, Atticus has stood as the pinnacle of what it means to be a strong, intelligent, morally upright individual--the prime example of a "good human being." He is a good father to his two children, a respected member of his community, and one of the few people in Maycomb to treat everyone equally, both in person and under the law. Even when facing down the most corrosive elements of the world around him, a lynch mob, it's his integrity and generosity that save not only his life but also Tom Robinson's, when the men standing before him are reminded of the good he does, regardless of their status. In other words, Atticus Finch has existed in our culture across multiple generations as the kind of person we should all aspire to be.<br />
<br />
What's more, this depiction of Atticus--of the entire country, both within Maycomb County and beyond its borders--was written during the Eisenhower Administration but published in the age of Barack Obama without any revisions...a context that makes appreciating Lee's novel with any objectivity difficult, if not impossible. Jean Louise's confrontation with Atticus, for example, is downright pathetic by modern standards, including her comparisons to Hitler. But one wonders what the reaction would have been had it been read by audiences in the 1960s, when the passion behind Scout's words would have been seen as much more relevant and revelatory. (In <i>Mockingbird</i>, Scout highlights the hypocrisy between those who denounce Hitler's policies against Jews while also using them against African-Americans, though she does so with the limited understanding of a child; in <i>Watchman</i>, the comparisons are unburdened by adolescent nuance, as they're shouted across Atticus' small office with all of the straightforwardness and intensity of someone angry at the world.) We chastise Scout for backing down so easily, for immediately regretting everything she says and does, all the while forgetting that she's doing so sixty years in the past.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, the time that has passed since Lee wrote <i>Watchman</i> has dulled its potential importance. Nowhere near as well-written as <i>To Kill a Mockingbird</i>, <i>Watchman </i>tries to understand the changing country through the mind of a twenty-something woman pulled between opposite environments--from rural Maycomb County to bustling New York City and back again. Lee does not succeed, though she doesn't exactly fail, either. Scout's arguments with those around her are not as satisfying as they should be, considering they are being waged by someone we've all come to associate as strong-willed and open-minded. The Scout who would have gladly pummeled a foe with her fists, despite her father's commands to the contrary, stands by weakly as one neighbor and family member after another presents their views to her without objection. She becomes a creature of tough, steadfast thought but pitiful inaction, and even her knock-down diatribes are batted down by Atticus and Uncle Jack as though made of smoke. And when, in the novel's penultimate chapter, Uncle Jack reappears to try and make Scout understand, Scout seems to give in almost immediately, as though the disgust she feels is no match for the desperate hunger she has for her father's affection.<br />
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However, the novel at least grants us access to Jean Louise's thoughts as they appear stream-of-consciously rather than in retrospect so many years later, which shows us a different side to our treasured tomboy. She is furious, amorous, confused, impulsive, self-conscious, brash, nostalgic, often at the same time or within the same few paragraphs. As she nears her final confrontation, her thoughts become increasingly disheveled, and when she storms out of her father's office, she is an emotional train-wreck--a surprising amount of depth that Lee's first book couldn't offer us, and much of Scout's inner turmoil holds up quite well, especially as we in this country continue to wrestle with many of the same social and political demons. The anger Scout feels seems refreshingly current, even as the rest of the book struggles to find consistency. <br />
<br />
But again, I'm trying to understand a book through 21st-century eyes--a book that is older than my parents and was never meant to have its first publication this many years after being written.<br />
<br />
In preparation for its release, the author herself--now approaching 90, living in a nursing home, and severely impaired--made no changes or revisions to the manuscript, meaning what we have is what Harper Lee wrote, unencumbered and unedited. Six decades have passed since the world first read about Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson--six decades that have also witnessed the supposed end of Jim Crow, the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the unanimous <i>Loving v. Virginia</i> decision, the commercialization of black culture, the elevation of black men and women to positions of influence and power, and the election of America's first black president. Unfortunately, those six decades have also seen a rise in the numbers of black men who face incarceration, a more subtle form of segregation in schools and neighborhoods, political isolation through gerrymandering, the appropriation of black culture, a rise in the deaths of unarmed black citizens by police, and the Supreme Court's gutting of the very same Civil Rights Act. Those who look at the progress made during those six decades will surely look at <i>Watchman</i> as a kind of artifact or gauge--a tool to measure just how much has changed, or how much remains to be changed. Others will hold the novel up as proof of something they already believe--that Lee is a racist, that Atticus was never out for anyone other than himself, that there is little hope where race and equality are concerned. After all, if someone like Atticus Finch--a man based on Harper Lee's own father--could be corrupted by fear and the propaganda of bigots, then so could anyone. And perhaps these people are right. But perhaps there is another way of looking at <i>Go Set a Watchman</i>.<br />
<br />
In reading the novel, we become Jean Louise. In denouncing her father for his racist beliefs, she is forced to become her own person, as Uncle Jack says. She must detach herself from the golden idol that is Atticus Finch and embrace a new identity, rather than remaining "Atticus Finch's daughter" for the rest of her life. Which means we must leave Atticus behind, as well. For sixty years, Atticus has stood as our standard-bearer, the ideal citizen. But that began sixty years ago--the country has indeed changed since then, and it has changed for the better. Yes, we continue to struggle as a nation with issues of racism and equality, but the issues and the severity of those issues have changed, just as the people at the heart of those issues have changed--just as Atticus has changed. And just as we become Scout, Harper Lee becomes our Atticus, speaking to us from a life of wisdom and telling us that we have to let go, too, that the idol we've treasured for so many decades is tired and from an era that has passed us by. When Uncle Jack speaks to Scout, he pleads for her to understand that her father can only be her hero for so long before she surpasses him, which she's already done. She becomes better than Atticus, only because Atticus has grown old and tired, and because he raised her well. He brought her up to stand out, speak her mind, and still be accepted by those who would otherwise look down on her...in much the same way Atticus pushed back against the prejudices of the day while still being accepted by Maycomb. (Uncle Jack's closing plea to his niece, that she should stay in Maycomb because the town needs people like her, is perhaps the novel's single best moment.)<br />
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In Jean Louise's own words, Atticus never viewed another person as lesser than himself, regardless of their skin color. He never devalued someone, spoke negatively of them, treated them as inferior, or told his children to do the same. But when he tells Jean Louise that integration is wrong because African-Americans are uneducated, and that this will cause social chaos, he's not accepting the reality that racist policies made it this way--that black people are forced to live in a system that deprives them of the chance for a strong education, then uses the effects of that deprivation as "proof" of inferiority. Instead, he places the blame on their shoulders, believing it's part of their genetic makeup or their culture. In doing so, he alleviates white people of their responsibility, even as he stands as one of the few white people in the entire town who did right. He believes in demagoguery and fear-mongering rather than logic or common sense, hides behind arguments about state's rights and American individuality, and promotes himself as someone who believes in each legislature making their own decisions on the matter rather than changing at the whim of the Supreme Court or the NAACP. These are arguments that seem hauntingly familiar six decades later, as defenders of the Confederate flag and opponents of same-sex marriage use the very same language to defend their own tired, outdated points of view.<br />
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None of what Harper Lee offers us about Atticus Finch appeared in <i>Mockingbird</i>, despite <i>Watchman</i> having been written first and <i>Mockingbird</i> focusing exclusively on Atticus' heroic qualities, a reality that is downright astonishing. In fact, there came a point near the end of the novel where I began to wonder if Lee and her representatives had been lying to us about the timeline. Perhaps, I thought, Lee had written <i>Watchman</i> at a later date, maybe in the last two or three decades, as a response to the ways in which Atticus Finch had been so thoroughly lionized and embraced by our culture. Perhaps she was unsettled by our reliance on him as our national compass, our collective conscience, our idol, in much the same way Scout looks to Atticus as her own compass and idol. Maybe Lee felt it was time for us to see Atticus as a man with the same kinds of imperfections we all share--an idol whose metal was scuffed and scarred and dull.<br />
<br />
Atticus Finch served a purpose beyond the page, and he did so more than any of us might realize, even now. He was a North Star when the road ahead was bumpy and unclear, or when we found ourselves having to cut our own way through the wilderness. He taught us that clear morals and strong ideas are just as powerful as a bullet in a gun: he stood in the center of town and faced down a rabid dog, just as stood in the center of a courtroom and faced down an entire town gone mad with bigotry. He taught his daughter empathy in the best way he knew how, and in doing so he taught us the same lesson. He understood the power of the written word, even when those in the schools thought otherwise, and he knew that being a good parent often meant letting your children figure something out for themselves. He believed in hard work but also valued play; he believed in time together as a family while also the freedom and independence of childhood. He helped his neighbors, even when they spit in his face or threatened to hang him from a tree. For sixty years, he has been--was--the embodiment of good parenting, of responsible citizenship, of wholesomeness.<br />
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In all honesty, I wish the manuscript for <i>Go Set a Watchman</i> had stayed lost, so we could keep Atticus Finch just a little longer. And, in a way, we still can--we can keep reading <i>Mockingbird</i>, talking about it with our children and students, and treasuring what we'd always treasured about the book and its characters. But the time has come for us to find another Atticus Finch, someone who stands for the same values but does so in a way that allows our own children the opportunity to grow with him over time instead of simply inheriting him. Our country faces new and pressing issues, ones that would have been foreign to someone living in Depression-era Alabama, and each deserves its own literary hero. The goodbyes won't be easy, and they won't be final for a long time, which is good. Perhaps more people will come to the same conclusion, will set <i>Watchman</i> on their shelves and look at it from time to time, not as a sequel or first draft, but as a book all its own, connected to <i>Mockingbird</i> through little more than a few shared names. We'd like to do that, because we could remain young, dirt-stained children running through the grass, taking small gifts from the knotholes in trees, and waiting for our Atticus to appear around the corner so we can walk alongside him and welcome him home. Unfortunately for us, there comes a point when every child has to grow up.<br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-55743297136068325402014-12-31T03:58:00.003-08:002014-12-31T03:59:27.334-08:00The Past ("Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" by Haruki Murakami; Philip Gabriel, trans.)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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2014 marked ten years since I graduated from high school--a small, some would say meaningless milestone that is typically accompanied by a reunion of some sort. In my case, the invitation arrived a few weeks into August, after some dedicated outreach on the part of a former classmate. She organized a modest get-together in a community park less than a mile from our old high school, nothing too demanding, and attending would have been easy--after all, I only live 90 minutes away and have weekends free. Nevertheless, I didn't go, and I don't plan on attending any reunions in the future, either. This decision had nothing to do with the quality of my high school, which I enjoyed overall, nor an attitude about my former classmates; instead, my decision has everything to do with the person I used to be and how that version of myself doesn't exist anymore.<br />
<br />
Yes, we all change after high school, but most people change linearly: they become the person they were already becoming, moving every further down a straight line while leaving behind those aspects of themselves that they outgrow. There are those rare few, however, who change in substance rather than style or amplitude. (To be more metaphorical about it, most of us change the hues of their self-portrait, deepening some colors and lightening others, while a few simply paint over the entire canvass with something completely new. I would fall into this latter category.) The high-school version of myself was a different creature altogether, a character constructed Frankenstein-like to mask--or personify, I've never been sure which--the toxic punch of sadness, self-loathing, anger, confusion, and desperate clawing jealousy that fueled my teenage years. Not that I was miserable by any stretch of the imagination, or that the tempestuous emotions raging inside of me were any worse than those experienced by my classmates, but the relationships I built were always shallow and one-sided, and to this day I'm only in regular contact with two or three people from that time in my life. This was not an instance of people "drifting apart," as the cliche goes; this was an example of people leaving the theatre after a four-year performance unaware that one of the actors had joined them in the streets, having been too consumed by himself to care about anyone sitting in the audience beyond their occasional applause.<br />
<br />
While every teenager is different, I was different in more than just the usual ways--permanently, undeniably different--and it would take me another few years to fully understand and accept those differences...and only then, in my early 20s, could I actually begin to work on myself in the same way most of my classmates had years before. They'd had guides to help them, people who had been through many of the same experiences and could lend their wisdom or point my classmates in the right directions. And while I was blessed with fantastic parents and excellent teachers, none of them could offer me a guiding hand because none of them had faced down the long stretch of asphalt that had been steamrolled out in front of me. And I was too afraid--too ashamed, too mistrusting--to ask for a pair of shoes before setting my feet on the boiling tar and beginning my walk. Looking back, and knowing what I know now, it's easy to blame myself for being fearful of something that was terrifying only because I decided that it was, because I didn't think I was strong enough or mature enough to handle it. In the moment, however, life's obstacles can seem insurmountable.<br />
<br />
And so, to hide the fact that I was different--an appalling possibility in such a small, conservative, rural town--I both embraced and denied my otherness in the same breath, transforming me into a walking Jekyll forever caught in mid-transformation. It was a strange identity to embrace, one I still don't fully understand, but the distance I gained after graduation--from my small town, my peers, the public image I'd manufactured for myself--allowed me to step away and become a better, more self-aware person. It also allowed me to see just how vacuous and unappealing my former self had been; even though I can claim to have been liked, it was for the wrong reasons. My friendships only existed for my own benefit, and when they couldn't offer me anything else, the friendships faded into nonexistence. Other friendships were nurtured on negativity and gossip, which was less about friendship and more about making ourselves feel better by criticizing others. And the sarcastic sense of humor I developed early on was deployed to defuse any serious situation or push away those who might disrupt the character I'd made for myself. To meet up again with anyone who knew me back then would have forced me to resurrect that character in memory, if only briefly, which would mean having to reconcile the two all over again--an activity I have no interest in repeating, even to explain away my past or the person I now am. I'm more comfortable letting that past identity continue fading into history, kept alive by little more than yearbook notes to my classmates that, ten years later, mean very little out of context.<br />
<br />
At the same time I was sending contact information to the president of my graduating class, all for an invitation I had no intention of opening, Haruki Murakami's awkwardly-named <i>Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage</i> found its way into my hands. I read the entire book in two days, devouring a story that seemed destined for intrigue and suspense--an unexplained death from the past, former friends who suddenly abandoned the protagonist and, years later, are just as shadowy and evasive as before--but ended somewhere nuanced and profound, far from the choking cityscapes of Murakami's native Japan and his penchant for unique and bizarre situations. The novel's closing chapter, where our protagonist finally gets a sense of closure over his past, is tender and moving, filled with supporting characters who defy every cliche you expect Murakami to throw our way. Compared to the novel's opening pages, which are clunky and seem to embody the author's need for professional direction--an awkwardness that seems to embody what it's like to be actually be a teenager--the closing moments leave you with a sense of understanding, something you very rarely have when you look back on your past in search of clarity.<br />
<br />
All of the cliches associated with reunions--with meeting people you knew in your younger and more vulnerable years, as Nick says in the opening lines of <i>The Great Gatsby</i>--assert that we'll revert at once to our past selves. The sarcastic outcast will still be the sarcastic outcast, the star athlete and his girlfriend will have gotten married, the bookworm will be making six figures in an impressive start-up company, and past relationships will be awkwardly rekindled over tasteless drinks and food. That is the nature of cliches, after all. But the reality is different. We come back as changed people, though the degree of our personal transformations are varied, and often we come back because there's something left unanswered, like in Murakami's novel. But rarely does the past hold a key to helping us understand ourselves. We have to find the answers to those questions ourselves, even if it means walking away--and maybe even staying away--from the places where we came from.<br />
<br />
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<b>Books Read in 2014</b></div>
<ol>
<li>Marie Antoinette's Head: The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen, and the Revolution (Will Bashor) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/01/revolution-marie-antoinettes-head-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>We Learn Nothing (Tim Kreider)</li>
<li>The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (Sloane Crosley and Jason Wilson, ed.; eBook)</li>
<li>Dog Songs (Mary Oliver) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/01/dogs-dog-songs-by-mary-oliver.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Rising from the Plains (John McPhee)</li>
<li>Clockwork Angel (Cassandra Clare)</li>
<li>The Optimist's Daughter (Eudora Welty)</li>
<li>A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk (Valerie Steele, et al, ed.) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/01/fashion-queer-history-of-fashion-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Old Gringo (Carlos Fuentes; Margaret Sayers Peden, trans.)</li>
<li>American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham)</li>
<li>Ramayana: Divine Loophole (Sanjay Patel)</li>
<li>Andrew's Brain (E.L. Doctorow) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/01/subtlety-andrews-brain-by-el-doctorow.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Train Dreams (Denis Johnson)</li>
<li>The Impossible Knife of Memory (Laurie Halse Anderson)</li>
<li>The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI (Betty Medsger) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/02/treason-burglary-by-betty-medsger.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Incarnadine (Mary Szybist)</li>
<li>Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Road Peace Conference of 1865 (James B. Conroy) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/02/reconciliation-our-one-common-country.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Starting Over (Elizabeth Spencer) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/02/visitors-starting-over-by-elizabeth_16.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry that Built America's First Subway (Doug Most)</li>
<li>The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation (Harold Schechter)</li>
<li>The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald; Michael Hulse, trans.)</li>
<li>Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (Laura Hillenbrand)</li>
<li>Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Lawrence Wright)</li>
<li>What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Nathan Englander)</li>
<li>Tomorrow-Land: The 1964-65 World's Fair and the Transformation of America (Joseph Tirella) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/progress-tomorrow-land-by-joseph-tirella.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Monster (Walter Dean Myers)</li>
<li>The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse (Philip Schultz) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/hell-wherewithal-by-philip-schultz.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Notes from the Internet Apocalypse (Wayne Gladstone) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/delusion-notes-from-internet-apocalypse.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Ian Haney Lopez) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/prejudice-dog-whistle-politics-by-ian.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Wives of Los Alamos (Tarashae Nesbit) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/we-wives-of-los-alamos-by-tarashea.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (Blake Bailey) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/honesty-splendid-things-we-planned-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Bark: Stories (Lorrie Moore) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/03/perfection-bark-stories-by-lorrie-moore.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>*To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)</li>
<li>Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (Ben Montgomery) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/04/journeys-grandma-gatewoods-walk-by-ben.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Encyclopedia of Early Earth (Isabel Greenberg)</li>
<li>Blood Royal: A True Tale of Crime and Detection in Medieval Paris (Eric Jager)</li>
<li>The Consolations of the Forest: Alone in a Cabin of the Siberian Taiga (Sylvain Tesson; Linda Coverdale, trans.)</li>
<li>*Eating the Dinosaur (Chuck Klosterman)</li>
<li>11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative (Paul Kengor) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/04/myths-11-principles-of-reagan.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Todd S. Purdum) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/04/tradition-idea-whose-time-has-come-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>High Crime Area (Joyce Carol Oates) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/04/stuck-high-crime-area-by-joyce-carol.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>A Window on Eternity: A Biologist's Walk Through Gorongosa National Park (E.O. Wilson and Piotr Naskrecki)</li>
<li>50 Children: One Ordinary American Couple's Extraordinary Rescue Mission into the Heart of Nazi Germany (Steven Pressman)</li>
<li>You Are Not Special:...And Other Encouragements (David McCullough, Jr.)</li>
<li>Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution (John Paul Stevens) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/05/amend-six-amendments-by-john-paul.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (Harvey Kaye) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/05/ideals-fight-for-four-freedoms-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out (Susan Kuklin) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/05/visible-beyond-magenta-by-susan-kuklin.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>What It Takes: The Way to the White House (Richard Ben Cramer)</li>
<li>The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Sam Kean) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/05/discovery-tale-of-dueling-neurosurgeons.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies (Lawrence Goldstone) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/05/greed-birdmen-by-lawrence-goldstone.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim (Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet)</li>
<li>The Oldest Living Things in the World (Rachel Sussman) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/06/time-oldest-living-things-in-world-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Last Kind Words Saloon (Larry McMurtry) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/05/westerns-last-kind-words-saloon-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic (Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury)</li>
<li>I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away (Bill Bryson)</li>
<li>63, Dream Palace (James Purdy)</li>
<li>Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness (George Saunders)</li>
<li>Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence (Geoff Dyer)</li>
<li>The Autumn of the Patriarch (Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Gregory Rabassa, trans.)</li>
<li>The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps (Michael Blanding)</li>
<li>This is How You Lose Her (Junot Diaz)</li>
<li>Crabwalk (Gunter Grass; Krishna Winston, trans.)</li>
<li>Tenth of December (George Saunders)</li>
<li>*Things You Should Know (A.M. Homes)</li>
<li>Taking on the Trust: How Ida Tarbell Brought Down John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil (Steve Weinberg) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/06/monopoly-taking-on-trust-by-steve.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)</li>
<li>Geek Love (Katherine Dunn)</li>
<li>Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (John Waters) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/06/filth-carsick-by-john-waters.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut)</li>
<li>The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (Kevin Birmingham) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/07/endurance-most-dangerous-book-by-kevin.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (Peter Finn) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/07/endurance-most-dangerous-book-by-kevin.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (Stuart Dybek)</li>
<li>Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness: Four Short Novels (Kenzaburo Oe)</li>
<li>The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America's Coldest Cases (Deborah Halber)</li>
<li>Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (Robert L. O'Connell) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/07/legacy-fierce-patriot-by-robert-l.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>*The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family (Dan Savage)</li>
<li>The Journal of Christopher Columbus (During His First Voyage, 1492-93): And Documents Relating to the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real (Clements Robert Markham, ed.)</li>
<li>Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (Alastair Bonnett)</li>
<li>Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (Deborah Blum)</li>
<li>The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China (David Eimer) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/07/china-emperor-far-away-by-david-eimer.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Northmen: Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 (Julius Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne, editors)</li>
<li>Last Stories and Other Stories (William T. Vollmann) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/08/haunted-last-stories-and-other-stories.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl: How Two Brave Scientists Battled Typhus and Sabotaged the Nazis (Arthur Allen) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/08/history-fantastic-laboratory-of-dr.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Twelfth Night (William Shakespeare)</li>
<li>Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead (David Casarett) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/08/alive-shocked-by-david-casarett-md.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (James Oakes) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/08/truth-scorpions-sting-by-james-oakes.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, Updated Edition (Ron Rosenbaum)</li>
<li>Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty (Austin Sarat) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/08/punishment-gruesome-spectacles-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Americans (Robert Frank)</li>
<li>*Teach Like Your Hair's On Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56 (Rafe Esquith)</li>
<li>*There Are No Shortcuts (Rafe Esquith)</li>
<li>The Outlaw Album: Stories (Daniel Woodrell)</li>
<li>Eleven Years (Jen Davis) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/09/self-eleven-years-by-jen-davis.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Explorers: A Story of Fearless Outcasts, Blundering Geniuses, and Impossible Success (Martin Dugard) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/09/perspective-explorers-by-martin-dugard.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>We Were Liars (E. Lockart)</li>
<li>Fun Home: A Family Tragocomic (Alison Bechdel)</li>
<li>What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions (Randall Munroe) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/09/hypothetical-what-if-by-randall-munroe.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murukami; Philip Gabriel, trans.)</li>
<li>When Paris Went Dark: The City of Lights Under German Occupation, 1940-1944 (Ronald C. Rosbottom)</li>
<li>Dr. Mutter's Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine (Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/09/legacy-dr-mutters-marvels-by-cristin.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Young Man and the Sea (Rodman Philbrick)</li>
<li>Through the Woods (Emily Carroll)</li>
<li>Thoreau at Walden (Henry David Thoreau; John Porcellino, editor and illustrator)</li>
<li>The Bone Clocks (David Mitchell) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/10/cycle-bone-clocks-by-david-mitchell.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>How We Got to Now: The History and Power of Great Ideas (Steve Johnson)</li>
<li>Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (Caitlin Doughty)</li>
<li>Leaving the Bench: Supreme Court Justices at the End (David N. Atkinson)</li>
<li>Belzhar (Meg Wolitzer)</li>
<li>Artemis Fowl (Eoin Colfer)</li>
<li>Beautiful Darkness (Fabien Vehlmann; Kerascoett, illus.) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/10/darkness-beautiful-darkness-by-fabien.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Snowpiercer, Volume 1: The Escape (Jacques Lob; Jean-Marc Rochette, illus.; Virginie Selavy, trans.)</li>
<li>A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 (Rachel Cohen)</li>
<li>Chasing the Falconers (Gordon Korman)</li>
<li>The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power (Jules Witcover) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/10/second-american-vice-presidency-by.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust (Claude Lanzmann)</li>
<li>The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Elizabeth Kolbert)</li>
<li>The Best American Infographics 2014 (Gareth Cook, ed.)</li>
<li>America 1844: Religious Fervor, Westward Expansion, and the Presidential Election That Transformed the Nation (John Bricknell)</li>
<li>The Resistance: the French Fight Against the Nazis (Matthew Cobb)</li>
<li>Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics (Michael Wolraich) <a href="https://www.blogger.com/Unreasonable%20Men:%20Theodore%20Roosevelt%20and%20the%20Republican%20Rebels%20Who%20Created%20Progressive%20Politics" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>Dance of the Reptiles: Rampaging Tourists, Marauding Pythons, Larcenous Legislators, Crazed Celebrities, and Tar-Balled Beaches: Selected Columns (Carl Hiaasen; ebook)</li>
<li>Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and Their Aftermaths (Paul Ham) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/12/after-hiroshima-nagasaki-by-paul-ham.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace (A.J. Langguth) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/12/shame-after-lincoln-by-aj-langguth.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The City of Ember: the Graphic Novel (Jeanne DuPrau; Dallas Middaugh and Niklas Asker, illus.)</li>
<li>True Grit (Charles Portis)</li>
<li>Among the Hidden (Margaret Peterson Haddix)</li>
<li>Resistance: France 1940-1945 (Blake Ehrlich)</li>
<li>Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America (Linda Tirado) <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/12/empathy-hand-to-mouth-by-linda-tirado.html" target="_blank">[review]</a></li>
<li>The Strange Library (Haruki Murakami)</li>
<li>Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944 (Matthew Cobb)</li>
<li>Dogfight at the Pentagon: Sergeant Dogs, Grumpy Cats, Wallflower Wingmen, and Other Lunacy from the Wall Street Journal's A-Hed Column (The Wall Street Journal)</li>
<li>Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl (Steven Bach)</li>
</ol>
<br />
*A re-reading.<br />
<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-43648913678537895982014-12-28T11:53:00.001-08:002014-12-28T11:59:44.283-08:00Empathy ("Hand to Mouth" by Linda Tirado)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Over the last two years, there has been a steady but not entirely unprecedented rise in public attacks on Americans who are poor, unemployed, and underprivileged. This is in part due to the 2012 presidential election, in which supporters of Mitt Romney were forced to defend his opinions on the "47% of Americans" who receive government assistance--those on Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and so on, all of whom Romney's supporters derided as "takers"--but was in retrospect little more than another example of conservative politicians deriding those who they saw as lazy, selfish, and transitively inferior. In fact, ever since Lyndon Johnson proposed and signed legislation intended to foster a Great Society, there has been an undercurrent of resentment where the poor and impoverished are concerned, especially when it comes to government programs. This resentment is often underscored by offensive stereotypes, scapegoating, and a belief that those who aren't on these programs are ethically and morally superior to those who are.* Unfortunately, those who advance these beliefs have the power and influence to diminish such important programs, and they advocate for such changes with abandon.<br />
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In writing <i>Hand to Mouth</i>, which builds off a Gawker post published last year, Linda Tirado is attempting to give voice to those who are so frequently maligned, including herself and her family. Much of her book is an explanation of just what those who are poor or live in poverty have to endure on a daily basis as they struggle to work part-time and at-will jobs, both of which are loosely overseen by the federal government, while also dealing with addiction, sending children to school, negligent landlords and abusive bosses, and paying bills on time. In doing she, she explains how the system is structured to work against those who work so hard to make so little: the inefficiency of raising the minimum wage, the difficulties of moving from one job to another, the winless choices inherent in insurance policies, and so on. In outlining this for unfamiliar readers, she also demonstrates why neither political party is in any way equipped to correct these issues--meaning, unfortunately, that they will continue into the distant future.<br />
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She also uses her own life as a way to explain some of the stereotypes associated with those who are poor or impoverished. For instance, after a horrible car accident, Tirado was left with missing and damaged teeth, which made her instantly less employable. In order to fix her dental problems, she would've needed strong insurance--which she did not have--and the ability to pay for an upgrade in dentures years later, which she also did not have. Over time, as her original pair of dentures broke apart, eating became painful, which affected not only her health but also her ability to communicate with friends, family, and even customers. At the same time, in order to stay awake and on her feet through two or three part-time shifts, she took to smoking--a cheap way to get an instant hit of dopamine--which did little to help her overall health and probably scarred her already stained teeth even more. But, as she points out, when a paycheck is on the line, suddenly the Surgeon General's warning on the side of a cigarette pack becomes less of a deterrent.<br />
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The reason a book like Tirado's is so important is because, throughout much of the country--at least among the 250 million or so Americans who are not poor or living in poverty--there is a lack of understanding about just what being impoverished means. We talk of the United States as the Land of Opportunity, and yet we've created a system in which that opportunity is becoming less and less available to more and more people. And while some national figures attempt to build grassroots progressive movements to address the growing disparity between rich and poor--movements that, they hope, will also carry them into higher office--there is very little that can be truly done at this place in time, and it's for one simple reason: a lack of empathy.<br />
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When we speak about the plight of those who are struggling, unemployed, or living below the poverty line, we talk in such a way as to convey our sympathy for their struggles--how we understand what they're going through and how unfortunate it is that there isn't more we can do. This is an easy way for those who aren't poor to avoid the discomforts that come with realizing they are part of the problem. This is the unspoken issue with "being sympathetic"--it is a way for those who aren't suffering to make themselves feel better without actually helping those who are suffering. Instead of proffering meaningless sympathies and advocating for self-serving political movements, we need to become a more empathetic society--a society that strives to legitimize the feelings and experiences of others over our own by recognizing their struggles and actually working towards a goal of some kind. Even Tirado admits that it wouldn't take much on our part to correct some of these injustices, but we can't do that until we admit that those who are poor, living in poverty, unemployed, or underprivileged live in a completely different society than we do, not because they've chosen to or are too lazy to find their way out, but because we've allowed our system to become an inhumane machine that chews up those who work so hard to keep it functioning.<br />
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*This attitude is typified by recent legislation meant to force those on welfare to undergo random drug screenings, even though men and women on welfare are statistically less likely to take illegal drugs than those who are not on welfare.<br />
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<br />Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-56730315699214648622014-12-28T09:42:00.000-08:002014-12-28T11:59:53.697-08:00After ("Hiroshima Nagasaki" by Paul Ham)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Determining the thesis of Paul Ham's <i>Hiroshima Nagasaki</i> can be accomplished with ease by simply looking at the table of contents--specifically, chapter six, which is entitled "Japan Defeated." This would seem to imply an end to Ham's investigation of the titular events; after all, the surrender of Japan is what history tells us was the ultimate goal--and accomplishment--of the atomic bombings of Japan. And yet, beginning as it does on page 166, chapter six does not even mark the halfway point: when the chapter ends, there are still 300 pages remaining, almost all of them devastating in their critique of not only the American government but the Japanese one, as well. The story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ham believes, is not at all what we think it is.<br />
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For the longest time, we have told ourselves--in anecdotes, on television programs, in textbooks--that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified, that Hirohito's empire was so thoroughly invested in complete victory that it was willing to fight until the last man, woman, and child had shed their blood. Defeat, we have been repeatedly told, was not part of the Japanese vocabulary, and to force their hands, we had to demonstrate the utter destructive abilities of our own military--a clear and unequivocal sign that Japan would not survive if it continued to resist surrender. Part of the reason this story has survived as long as it has is because of our national hubris--a belief that, because of our victory and the speed with which we developed such destructive weapons, we were the deciding factor--and part of the reason is because we, as victors, were in the position to write the history ourselves. (As the saying goes, history isn't written by the losers.) But the overriding reason is that, for decades after the actual bombings, most of the pertinent information related to the decision and its aftermath was classified or unpublished by the U.S. government, including communications between members of the Japanese government that was intercepted and decoded by the MAGIC program.<br />
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Even today, those intercepted communications--which should be readily available on websites and in government publications--can only be accessed in bits and pieces across the internet, if at all. (The diplomatic cables between members of the Japanese government, which Ham uses to great effect throughout much of his book, are available in full only on 15 reels of microfilm that exist in a handful of college libraries across the country.) The reasons for this odd hesitancy to publicize more about our own history has never been explained, though theories might abound. What matters, however, is that the lack of awareness over what these documents reveal distorts our own understanding of history--our knowledge of what was done in our names and with our tacit permission, if not our unchallenged approval--and keeps us from making sure the tragedies of the past don't become tragedies of the future.<br />
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For example, the belief that Japan's government was unified behind its last-man-standing mentality is easily disproven by the MAGIC intercepts, in which many of the top men in Hirohito's government pushed vociferously for their country's surrender to the Allies, only to be refuted by more ardent and nationalistic colleagues. Perhaps the most vocal of these figures is Naotake Sato, a diplomat whose awareness of the situation transformed him into one of the few honest men in all of Japan's government, and he spoke his mind with careless abandon--a decision that could easily have cost him both his position and his life. The bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki play a minimal role in the back-and-forth between those voices advocating for continued hostilities against the Allied forces and those demanding a quick but honorable surrender; in fact, when notified of the bombing of Nagasaki during an hours-long meeting meant to plan out the terms of their surrender, the top Japanese officials are recorded as demonstrating little reaction or concern, a fact that our own country has steadfastly refused to acknowledge.*<br />
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The main reason the Japanese government was unmoved by the dropping of not one but two atomic bombs on their own people is that their empire was already suffering immensely at the hands of the Allies. Their country was prevented from importing any food or necessary supplies by an Allied navy blockade, and their closest neighbors--China, the Soviet Union--were also against them, removing any chance for humanitarian aid. Towards the end of the war, they hoped the latter of these nations, under the leadership of Josef Stalin, would at least serve as the arbitrator in negotiations with the Allied Powers; when the Soviet Union instead declared war on them, it marked the disappearance of the last possible hope of the Japanese government and its people. Millions were starving and homeless due to Allied air-raids and fire-bombings, and hundreds of thousands were dead; had the Allies simply kept the blockade intact and continued pushing towards the Japanese mainland, it's safe to assume--and General Eisenhower himself agreed after the war--that Japan would have been forced to declare surrender before the year's end anyway.<br />
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Likewise, the American government's decision to drop both bombs is called into question by Ham's research. Much like Japan, the American government experienced its own tumultuous split over how. when, and where to use the atomic bombs. Truman seemed determined to utilize the weapon as soon as possible, refusing to proffer a warning to the Japanese government about what would happen to their cities. (There were some in the government who said a warning would persuade the Japanese to surrender before the bomb was even used, an idea that is difficult to prove.) And, much like Japan, there were those who attempted to secure a peaceful resolution, or at least a resolution that did not involve the use of cataclysmic weapons. Included among these voices was Joseph Grew, the former ambassador to Japan who understood, after a decade of firsthand experience, that demanding Japan give up its emperor as part of an "unconditional surrender" would force the country to continue hostilities, even when all hope seemed lost. Grew, who had been interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, was soundly ignored.<br />
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In the end, Ham argues that it wasn't the atomic bombs that forced Japan to finally surrender, nor was it the naval blockade--which, he argues, had a much greater effect on the Japanese government's decision than the actual bombs--but the Soviet Union's refusal to act as an intermediate and its subsequent declaration of war against Japan. Only then, according to the correspondences of those in power, did the government of Japan finally give in to what the rest of the world had seen as inevitable for some time. What followed was an ocean surrender and, as Ham writes, an occupation by the Allies that was shameful, with the American government steadfastly denying the true legacy of the atomic bombs: radiation poisoning, illness, and death, all spread across generations. Journalists who gained access to Hiroshima and Nagasaki wrote about and photographed the aftermath; much of this evidence was soon confiscated or censored by the American military. Not until John Hersey's <i>Hiroshima</i>, published in 1946, did the American public come to understand the true extent of the devastation.<br />
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And yet history continued to tell us that, had it not been for these two bombs, the war would have become even bloodier, lasted even longer, cost even more American lives. The atomic bombs, we are told, actually helped save lives and end the war. This postulation isn't entirely false--an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have certainly resulted in the deaths of Allied soldiers, as the mainland forces were surprisingly strong--but to offer those options as the only two we could have taken demonstrates a remarkable unwillingness to reexamine ourselves and our own war-time decisions, especially today. Yes, we didn't know then what we know now, so past generations should not be denounced with retrospective guilt--they were simply embracing what they were told by the very same government that had led them through the largest war in world history, and against some of the most vile dictators we would ever experience, including an empire that attacked us on our own soil. But to look back with so many previously classified and unpublished documents now available--albeit limitedly--for our consumption, and retain the same theory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is ignorant, if not downright dangerous. It allows us to see cataclysmic weapons as a viable--and paradoxically lifesaving--solution, one that values the civilian lives of one nation over the civilian lives of another, without understanding all of the implications and nuances inherent in such a momentous decision.<br />
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Yes, the people of Japan held onto their emperor, even as their emperor ignored them, and they had been brainwashed--or threatened--into believing their crusade against the Allied Powers was a noble one. But to use this as an excuse to dismiss hundreds of thousands of lives as justifiably expendable, simply because they were civilians under the other side's government, sets a dangerous precedent where foreign policy and war is concerned. By waving aside these numbers and statistics, and by ignoring the photographs of sick and deformed Japanese civilians--men, women, and children who were guilty of nothing more than being born in a country that warred against our own--we are casting ourselves as something less than the scions of liberty and freedom we so vocally aspire to be.<br />
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People will debate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades to come, and there will never be a consensus over the efficacy--or even necessity--of Fat Man and Little Boy. Even Ham, for all the positive aspects of his book, leaves much to be desired in terms of writing a comprehensive and accurate history. But there can never be one, at least not yet: we exist beyond a time and place where one could be written, and our minds are too frequently clouded by ideology, propaganda, and patriotism to see what needs to be seen. Instead, we need to take the bombing of Japan for what it can still teach us, and that requires having all the information available to us, without restrictions or concessions. Unfortunately, as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grow ever more distant, and those who continue to push a simplistic, winner-take-all history fade into that very same timeline, we will see its legacy spread tendrils and grow. The truly sad part is that, without more books like this one, regardless of its successes or failures, we won't even realize that it is happening until the cycle repeats itself and we're back where we started, having learned nothing.<br />
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*There are those who point to Hirohito's 1945 radio broadcast, in which he stated that "the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives," as proof of the opposite. But what a government tells itself and what a government tells its people are often completely different.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-42088348981472727282014-12-13T18:45:00.001-08:002014-12-13T18:50:52.825-08:00Shame ("After Lincoln" by A.J. Langguth)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Of the 20 chapters in A.J. Langguth's <i>After Lincoln</i>, a history of the United States' failed attempts at reunification and peace following the Civil War, nineteen of them are concerned with the events of just over two decades: 1865-1887. These eventful twenty-two years saw the assassination of Abraham Lincoln--the moment that serves as this book's opening scene and, by intimation, the catalyst for what comes later--the elevation of Andrew Johnson to the presidency, the elections of Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, as well as the first black politicians in the nation's history, insurrection in every Southern state, the disenfranchisement of black voters, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, revolts, mobs, and the widespread murder of former slaves, their supporters and defenders, and their descendants. In the process, Langguth also offers us a wealth of backstories and foreshadowings that break through the timeline's constraints, but overall this is the story of a generation in which the opportunity to correct centuries of oppression and genocide was squandered in a single generation, thereby enshrining such horrors for centuries to come.<br />
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Only by the twentieth chapter--the final chapter--does Langguth take everything he's presented and connect it to our modern world...or at least as close to our modern world as he feels necessary. In this case, that means ending his history of Reconstruction with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a monumental piece of legislation that Langguth seems to imply marks the end of the tortured history of America's shameful, post-war racial history. Which is the problem with <i>After Lincoln</i>, the fourth and final volume in the author's series. Langguth, who himself covered the Civil Rights Movement as a reporter, seems to bestow the Civil Rights Bill with the qualities that Lyndon Johnson himself emphasized in advocating for its passage: "Let us close the spring of racial poison," Johnson said and Langguth quotes, continuing, "Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole." These words were and continue to remain noble words, unquestionably, and Johnson pushed these ideals and their enforcement more than any other president since Lincoln, even though his own history on issues related to civil rights were often questionable.*<br />
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And yet, exactly fifty years later, we know with certainty that our nation did not come together and become one again. In many respects, we remain a country divided--millions of people standing on separate shores looking for unity in the opposing reflections but finding strangers. It's easy to point to events from this year and claim that we have not come as far as we should have or thought we had--since 1865, 1887, 1964--a claim that is hard to quantify, no matter who you are. It's also easy to see the events from this year and say, with misplaced confidence, that at least it's not as bad as it once was: no more lynchings, no more laws against interracial marriage, no violent protests over the integration of schools. However, by making these statements, we are looking to excuse ourselves from responsibility. According to the former, we are only aware of our lack of progress when tragic events force us to reexamine how we treat one another and approach issues of race; unarmed black men and children are shot and killed, protests erupt, and only then are we able to assess the level of progress we've made. On any other day, when the news is not dominated by similar stories, we can dismiss our responsibility as people and citizens to consider such possibilities. The latter implies that any sort of progress, regardless of its breadth or depth, excuses whatever problems remain to be solved. But lesser violence is still violence, and lesser hatred is still hatred. We see what crimes are no longer committed rather than which crimes remain, and we refuse to believe that what we've consigned to the dust-bins of history have any relation to what occurs in the broad sunlight of our own backyards, even when it's clear that one is our inheritance from the other.<br />
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In reading a book like <i>After Lincoln</i>, it's easy to choose a particular person or group of people and lay the blame for our current problems at their footsteps. Andrew Johnson is perhaps the best example of this inclination. He was an undeniable racist and an unabashed drunkard who based much of his decisions on satisfying his own sense of inferiority and need for acceptance and validation, and his decisions undoubtedly allowed for much of the atrocities that followed. But in focusing on Johnson--or Ulysses Grant, or John Wilkes Booth, or Gideon Welles--we absolve the millions of people who came before us, experienced racism and racial violence--as perpetrators, apologists, bystanders, armchair advocates, what have you--and did nothing to fight back. In fact, Langguth's book is full of those who can be seen as accomplices to the crimes and missteps of Reconstruction, but there are comparatively few men and women--Amos Akerman and Benjamin Bristow at the federal level, thousands of unnamed women who taught in black schools at the local level--who we can look to as genuine heroes. Unfortunately, in the history of the United States after the Civil War, it's the perpetrators who dominate its pages, as their fingerprints are all over the problems we face today, alongside the fingerprints of previous generations whose poisoned ideologies remain with us, haunting us in different forms but with the same goal. And regardless of the form, the severity, the excuse, hatred is hatred, and its history is far from over. Its final volume has yet to be written.<br />
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*A.J. Langguth passed away on September 1 of this year, just over two weeks before <i>After Lincoln</i> was published, and in his "Acknowledgements" he mentions being in hospital and then restricted to home. It's possible--and I'd like to believe this--that this final book of Langguth's was rushed, and that, had there been more time, he would have written a stronger closing chapter.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-2785160196389001462014-11-23T13:59:00.002-08:002014-11-23T13:59:06.745-08:00Goals ("Unreasonable Men" by Michael Wolraich)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In the introduction to <i>Unreasonable Men</i>, his history of the Progressive Movement in the early 20th century, author Michael Wolraich sets an uncomfortable tone. Writing of the Republican politicians who advocated progressive policies--an eight-hour work day, trust-busting, conservation, the abolishment of child labor--Wolraich draws a direct link between the era of Teddy Roosevelt and our own times, writing that "those who identified with Roosevelt or La Follette called themselves progressives," their opponents "called themselves conservatives," and that, in reciting this era in American history "when America broke into two ideological factions, we can see more clearly what we're fighting about and better appreciate the stakes."<br />
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This is, for obvious reasons, a dangerous series of statements to make. Men like Roosevelt and La Follette did indeed call themselves progressives--the latter much earlier than the former--but rarely if ever does Wolraich actually quote any Republicans referring to themselves--or being referred to by others--as conservative. (Woolraich does that himself, and mostly when talking about William Howard Taft.) Similarly, the implication that our nation was politically and ideological homogenous until the early 1900s, when it "broke into two" for what Wolraich implies was the first time, is so ridiculous that it must be taken as little more than a poorly-stated thought that slipped by the editors; otherwise, it would be a terrifying insight into how little the author knows about American history.<br />
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These two small missteps, sheltered as they are in the book's introduction, are a pretty concise diagnosis of the problems with Wolraich's book, despite all of its positive aspects. After all, Wolraich is not a bad writer; in fact, his prose is engaging, and he quotes from both primary and secondary documents without losing the narrative flow, which can be difficult when relying on Congressional speeches and presidential correspondences. But his book lacks context and, more importantly, focus. In terms of the first, the political landscape Wolraich presents ignores almost ninety percent of the elected officials of this era, focusing on a handful of the most powerful--and often the most corrupt--senators and representatives. In doing so, he inadvertently makes this a story not about a grassroots movement against the existing social structure but about a half-dozen old congressman who stood in the way of social change because of their own vested interests. (The most important voting members of Congress came from the still-expanding Western states, where people saw firsthand the stranglehold of the locomotive industry, but Wolraich speaks of them as one collective group rather than as individuals.)<br />
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In terms of the second issue, Wolraich's claim that his book is advocating for insights drawn from the past would make more sense if the history he presents supported that claim. But the most successful years of the Progressive movement, according to Woolraich's own research, occurred not under the presidencies of Roosevelt or Taft, or even early in the senatorship of Robert La Follette, but the first term of Woodrow Wilson, which occupies the last 6 pages of the book, and only then as an abridged history. There, Woolraich's details all of the major accomplishments that were not passed into law over the preceding 250 pages--an odd decision that seems to debunk the very legacy of both Roosevelt and La Follette, foisting it instead upon a Democrat who had zero influence on progressive policy until his ascension to the White House.<br />
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The underlying reason for this choice seems to be that, rather than exploring their ratification, Wolraich wants to understand the process it took to get those specific policies and bills passed...which is a perfectly acceptable approach to history. Unfortunately, if we take the past as a guide for the future, the Progressive Era--as is the case with all past eras--does not translate well. The primary reason is that, unlike one hundred years ago, there are no Teddy Roosevelts or Robert La Follettes around to lead a movement for change; the closest figures we have who meet these requirements, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are both fantastic candidates, but even they could not rally the country to change in the way Roosevelt and La Follette did. Yes, there are similarities between early 20th-century America and early 21st-century America--the popular election of our congresspeople is controlled by the politicians themselves, money has an unprecedented influence over our elected officials, banks possess unchecked powers while labor is being stripped of its own powers, economic disparity is growing--but the average American does not understand its root cause. They've been told that any difficulties in their lives are the responsibility of the other side, and journalism--once dominated by muckrackers like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell--has become a shallow circus deficient of substance and impartiality. The Fourth Estate, forever entrusted with the responsibility of keeping us informed, has abandoned those responsibilities, and there is no one around who seems able to rise above such a glowing deficiency in our democracy.<br />
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By deciding that we can learn--and must learn--from an era that passed into history a century ago, Wolraich is making it seem as though the genuine problems we face have an easy solution, one we can discover simply by consulting textbooks and turning their lessons into a checklist. This is not how progress in the United States works. The reason we are facing the same problems again as a nation is twofold--because we have forgotten the past, and because we are different people now. Those who want to consolidate money and power for themselves have learned from the mistakes and oversights of their predecessors and are now better prepared for any impending challenges to the status quo. The rest of us are not. We could be, if only there were those who could lead us there with their words and their writing. Michael Wolraich, in offering us an engaging but flawed and unfocused book, is not one of those people.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-79914783874171040792014-10-29T19:17:00.000-07:002014-10-29T19:17:54.511-07:00Second ("The American Vice Presidency" by Jules Witcover)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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To be elected vice-president of the United States is to acquire a thankless and almost foreordained task. Of the 47 men who've held the office, only four have gone on to be elected president in their own right after their predecessors' term ended--and the results were decidedly mixed.* Nine more succeeded a president who died of natural causes, was assassinated, or--in the case of Richard Nixon--was forced to resign.** And, perhaps most tragically, when seven of these men died in office themselves, not a single one was replaced until the president himself faced reelection and was able--or perhaps forced--to fill the post, a testament to the office's historically low opinion among not only the majority of Americans, who didn't seem to notice the vacant posts, but also the nation's own federal government, which didn't seem to care. (The situation is even more tragic when you add to this total the number of vice presidents who passed away within a few years of leaving office, many of them having served their final months or years in declining health to no one's apparent alarm.)<br />
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In fact, of these 47 men, only one was able to achieve a level of true dignity, grace, and equality in his role as vice president. He did so on level footing with his president, based on an agreement reached amiably between the two men before their party's convention, while also avoiding any deep and lasting rifts between himself and the Oval Office. He presided over the Senate with skill, making sure his firsthand knowledge of the institution's ways didn't imbue him with either arrogance or deference, and he took on legislative and diplomatic responsibilities beyond the Senate without ever neglecting his Constitutional duties there. And yet, after spending four years as the nation's second-most-powerful public figure--only "a heartbeat away from the presidency," as they say--there are few if any Americans who would be able to identify Walter Mondale from this description. Such is the fate of those who choose to seek--or are foolish enough to accept--the office.<br />
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Today, the vice president is seen as less of a stand-by commander in chief--a person ready and able to take control in case of a presidential vacancy or national emergency--and more of a path to scoring political points and possibly influencing the outcome of an election. Barack Obama's selection of Joe Biden did much to reassure voters who were concerned over the freshman senator's inexperience with the culture of Washington, D.C. and the United States' near incomprehensible foreign policy, both of which Biden--a Senate veteran and chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations--offered in spades. Obama's opponent in the 2012 election, Mitt Romney, chose as his running mate Paul Ryan, a nationally recognized congressman whose staunch conservative ideals overshadowed Romney's damaging record as a moderate. Four years earlier, John McCain chose Sarah Palin, the relatively unknown first-term governor of Alaska, as a way to counteract Obama's historical significance while also invigorating his campaign with some much-needed personality; unfortunately, the decision backfired, transforming the election into a referendum on Palin's preparedness and intelligence rather than a contest between candidates and their ideas.<br />
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Then again, Obama and his opponents were in good company: very rarely has a president's running mate been chosen simply to guarantee a fluid transition should the nation's highest office be suddenly and unexpectedly vacated, as the Constitution prescribes. Instead, many of the nation's vice presidents were chosen to offset--or complement--the leading name on the ticket rather than to ensure the continuation of the federal government in times of crisis or tragedy. As might be expected, this often put our country at great risk. John Breckinridge, the vice president under James Buchanan, would later join the Confederacy during the Civil War, causing the Senate--which he had joined after leaving office--to declare him a traitor and unanimously expel him from its body. Had Breckinridge found himself president at any point, the fate of the entire country, not to mention the Civil War and the end of slavery, might have changed dramatically. There is also the more recent example of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's vice president, who was forced to resign from office a full ten months before Nixon himself on charges of corruption, for which he plead "no contest." Had Agnew been able to hold onto his office for another year, he would have become the most powerful man in the world; instead, he is today considered one of--if not the--worst vice president in American history.<br />
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Unfortunately, in the long history of the American vice presidency--which, in the hands of Jules Witcover, comes in at just over 500 pages an in an abridged and heavily summarized form--not a single one of those 47 men could claim to have had a lasting influence on the nation while in office. Even the most bombastic, progressive, or controversial of these men--Walter Mondale, John Nance Garner, Dick Cheney--today recede into history only as footnotes rather than interesting chapters all their own. Most Americans, if not all but the most astute students of history, have little knowledge of any of the vice presidents who served outside of their own lifetimes. As our nation continues to grow older, that fact becomes increasingly true.<br />
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The subtitle of Witcover's book is "From Irrelevance to Power," and the most striking example of this shift is Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's vice president, who seemed at times to be the more influential of the two men. And while Cheney's legacy will be debated for decades, at least until there is enough distance from the emotions of the moment, just as all presidents and vice presidents are judged, he seems to have been the driving force behind Witcover's lengthy and largely impartial--if not entirely exhaustive--study of the office and the men who have held it. As the next presidential election approaches, one in which we will see two new nominees choosing two more candidates for the vice presidency, we must remind ourselves that the vice presidency has a greater role to play in our lives and government than any of us recognize. After all, it's been forty years since a vice president was forced to succeed a president; the youngest voters at that time of Gerald Ford's swearing in would now be fast approaching retirement age. As history demonstrates, fate has little interest in what we choose to remember from the past and what we choose to forget, and our actions--not to mention the actions of the next president, his party, and his supporters--can determine the entire future of the country in unexpected and irreversible ways.<br />
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*John Adams succeeded George Washington and was a failure, whereas Thomas Jefferson succeeded Adams and was a success. Martin Van Buren followed his president, Andrew Jackson, into the White House but only served one term, just as George H.W. Bush followed Ronal Reagan in 1988 and was voted out four years later, and for almost the same exact reason--a tumultuous economy.<br />
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**These nine men were John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Gerald Ford. Surprisingly, the forty years since Ford ascended to the presidency marks the second-longest span of time in which there has been no presidential vacancies, second only to the fifty-two years between George Washington's inauguration and William Henry Harrison's tragic--but entirely avoidable--death one month into his first term.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-28739682396703925452014-10-24T17:08:00.000-07:002014-10-24T17:08:37.988-07:00On Percy Jackson: A Response to Rebecca Mead<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Earlier this year, <a href="http://therewillbebooksgalore.blogspot.com/2014/06/ya-response-to-ruth-graham.html" target="_blank">Ruth Graham</a> of <i>Slate Magazine</i> denounced young adult literature--and John Green's <i>The Fault in Our Stars</i> in particular--for offering what she saw as substandard material, a criticism that was couched in a greater denunciation of the adults who actively read YA books over other, more "literary" offerings by writers like John Updike and Willa Cather. Now, a few months later, another prominent magazine--this time the <i>New Yorker</i>, perhaps the nation's most renowned venue for literature and criticism--has published an <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/percy-jackson-problem" target="_blank">article</a> on YA literature, only this time the object of criticism is Rick Riordan, and the writer bases much of her opinion on firsthand observations of her son, a Riordan fanatic. Thankfully, Mead's article does not embrace the same arrogant tone that so feverishly dripped from Graham's, and much of what Mead has to say seems derived from a deep and honest belief in the importance of literature for young children and teenagers. In fact, her article devotes its opening paragraphs to a summary of two opposing camps--those who believe children benefit from reading anything, and those who believe that learning can only come from through the reading of more "literary" fare--but as she continues, Mead quickly embraces Graham's close-minded attitude towards the former, and her reasoning devolve into arrogance.<br />
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As someone who spends much of his day surrounded by both teenagers and books, not to mention teenagers reading--or refusing to read--said books, I feel compelled to offer my own insight into this argument over the works of Rick Riordan and, to a lesser extent, young adult literature in general. As a high school English teacher, I've had more than a few opportunities to become acquainted with not only the works of Mr. Riordan but the original myths upon which his novels are based; last year, I even forced myself to read one of Riordan's myth-based books, though not the Percy Jackson volumes Mead focuses on. Instead, it was <i>The Red Pyramid</i>, 540-page work based on Egyptian mythology rather than Greek or Roman, but nonetheless consistent with the focus of Mead's complaints.<br />
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I'll be honest, I didn't finish the book. I got halfway through it--I can't even remember what most of it was about--and had to set it aside for good. Riordan may sell a lot of books, and he may have a rabid fanbase, but his ability to craft a fluid and engaging narrative wasn't strong enough for me. The chances of me picking up anything else written by Riordan are pretty slim, though I suppose I could be convinced. But what separates me from Mead in this area is that, unlike her, I recognize that my interests cannot--and should not--have any bearing over what other people read, especially when it's something they <i>want</i> to read. If my students, many of whom like Riordan's books, read him with the same level of passion and focus that I have when reading, say, the newest Cormac McCarthy or Stephen King, then any opinion I have about his skills should be left unexpressed on my part. If a student ever asked for my reaction to his books, I'd be honest and tell them exactly what I've just written here--that I tried once, a while back, didn't enjoy it, stopped halfway through, and moved on--but I would never go so far as to try and dissuade them from reading him. I'd encourage their reading, even tell them I hoped they would enjoy the book, and end by saying I looked forward to hearing about it at an SSR conference later that quarter. Which--and I'm not lying here--would be the complete and honest truth.<br />
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Where Mead and I also differ--and this is perhaps Mead's biggest problem--is on the book she recommends in place of the Percy Jackson series, which is <i>D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths. </i>Written by a husband-and-wife team and published more than 50 years ago, the D'Aulaires' collection takes its readers through the most famous and important myths, many of which are retold--in much different fashion--in Riordan's own series, only the D'Aulaires did so without the addition of an overarching story concerning teenagers at summer camp. In extolling the virtues of this book, Mead acknowledges its age, though she holds that aspect of it up as a positive--the language is more poetic, she says, and contrasts it to lingo- and pop-culture-heavy quotes from Riordan's work, a rhetorical tactic I will address momentarily--and admits that most children, when given a choice, would opt for Riordan's versions, which she attributes to its "irresistibly cool" language.<br />
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Which is a revelation that, for someone who is supposedly familiar with literature and literary criticism, demonstrates a near disqualifying level of unfamiliarity with how literature actually works. The "irresistibly cool" language Mead so easily dismisses--you can almost feel her eyes rolling as you read the words--is not some strange second language introduced by an alien race to corrupt the spotless legacy of Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner. It's how people talk today. Very rarely does anyone in this day and age--children, teenagers, middle-aged parents, senior citizens--speak like a Greek hero, or even in the dull, manufactured tone of the D'Aulaires' collection, which reads as though it's been polished and revised by an entire college English Department.<br />
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Earlier in that same paragraph, Mead denounces Riordan's incorporation of "obsolescence"--Craigslist, iPhones, Powerball, all of which she feels date his novels--even though, in a preceding sentence, she quotes the opening lines to the D'Aulaires' book, which mentions shepherds and herdsmen, two professions that are so rare these days, or at least appear in radically different forms, that they themselves could be seen as dating their source material in much the same way. (Furthermore, the original Greek myths as retold by the D'Aulaires mention smiths, chariot-drivers, and a slew of other mortal professions that would be foreign to modern students.)<br />
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Besides teaching students who read--and discuss, and recommend--Riordan's books, I've also had the chance over the last few years to teach myths taken directly from the D'Aulaire's collection, which I've used to both prepare my students for <i>The Odyssey</i> (English 9) and help them understand how various myths from across the world share common themes, ideas, and characters (World Literature & Composition). This experience provides me with what I would consider the ultimate proof against Mead's argument that students would find the literary and refined work of the D'Aulaires more beneficial than the work of Riordan and his ilk: the <i>D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths</i> is boring.* Every student of mine who has been handed a chapter from any of their mythology books and told to read it has found it unworthy, not because it might be inferior to anything else I could have offered them, but because it was written in a different time for a different population. It is like handing students a typewriter and telling them it's just as equal to the Chromebook or iPad they have in their lockers. It doesn't mean the typewriter is a horrible object, or that we should disdain or ignores its importance; its simply the relic of older times, significant in its day, but not something that has any true and immediate relevance in the lives of young people.<br />
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Which is the truth of literature: it changes. Mead criticizes Riordan for taking these prized myths, which have lasted for millennia, and besmirching them with modern-day references, a cliched storyline involving teenage protagonists, substandard paraphrasing, and lackluster prose. But Riordan is simply following the lead of those very same men and women who, thousands of years ago, began telling their own stories...which they, in turn, had adapted from stories they themselves had been told. When you study world literature, you understand that these stories, regardless of where they come from, all share such an incredible number of similarities that believing they arose spontaneously and without outside influence--without the fingerprints of a premodern globalization--is a mark of arrogance and stupidity. Riordan may be far from a lasting writer--he is this generation's S.E. Hinton, its Carolyn Keene, destined for dollar-bins and garage sales, as is ninety-nine percent of all books published today, or ever--but he's basing his work on the very same mythology that both borrowed from and lent to other storytelling traditions. By reading Riordan, young readers aren't just entertaining themselves, escaping into a fantastic alternate reality, or engaging with relatable characters--they're participating in a tradition as old as the stories themselves.<br />
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That my seem like a lofty and hyperbolic statement, especially in response to a poorly developed article by someone who seems to have forgotten what it means to be young and interested in books. In fact, if I were to guess, I'd say there are articles out there somewhere, perhaps buried in the reels of old newspaper microfilm, in which some respectable critic from mid-century bemoans how the D'Aulaires took such prized myths, made them accessible by children, and presented them with dozens of illustrations. After all, that was the era of Edith Hamilton's dense, virtually inaccessible <i>Mythology</i> book, and to present any form of classical literature in such an edited fashion would have surely stoked the ire of the Old Guard. If that person had existed, it seems as though Mead and her parents had little issue ignoring them, just as millions of readers today will have no problem ignoring the ridiculous concerns of people like Mead, who would be better served reading more of these books rather than wringing their hands over children who seek them out. Or not. After all, Mead can read whatever the hell she wants--it's her right as a reader, after all, just as it's the right of her own child and children everywhere.<br />
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*Just to be clear, I'm not saying I don't think people should avoid the D'Aulaires' book, or that it shouldn't be taught. I'm only saying that, in attempting to denounce one book while elevating another, Mead has replaced the subjectivity and democracy of readership with her own biased ideas about which is better, and what books we should be reading over others.Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8324369694888449968.post-16482598175408404692014-10-14T19:10:00.003-07:002014-10-14T19:11:09.097-07:00Darkness ("Beautiful Darkness" by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët; translated by Helge Dascher)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The setting of <i>Beautiful Darkness</i>, the graphic fairy tale by Fabien Vehlmann and illustrator Kerascoët, is not a charming castle or faraway wonderland populated by anthropomorphic daydreams, but the corpse of a young girl. Struck down inexplicably in the book's opening panels, she is presented to us as a Tennelian cadaver laid out on the forest floor. The book's characters--small, toylike creatures in the girl's body--soon crawl from her mouth and nose and circle around her, blissfully unaware of what this means for them, or who she even is. (In fact, the cause of her death is never disclosed and, in a perverse way, it doesn't seem to matter.) Instead, they line up for bits of cookie, then disperse into the wild and unmapped brush around them, almost all of them lost in their own enchanted delusions.<br />
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Soon, they begin to die one by one, and in horrifying ways. One creature, desperate for food, climbs into the nest of a bird and sits among the hatchlings; when the mother-bird returns and prepares to regurgitate the morning's catch, her beak pierces the creature's tender organs, causing it to vomit blood before dying in the high branches. Another, even more famished, feasts on maggots from the corpse before crawling deep into her soft skull, where it finds shelter but is also haunted by the girl's own memories; eventually, the story drifts away from this creature, and we can only assume it dies within the bone-walls she has come to call her home. There is cannibalism, the torture of small animals, a live entombment, and a half-dozen other instances of nature's vicious indifference towards the small figures, who have gone from the warm protections of a child's anatomy to a cold, Darwinian world of predators and prey.</div>
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Throughout much of the story, this reality exists in spite of the blind optimism of its protagonist, a blond-haired girl named Aurora, who is borne of pure fairy-tale obligation: the wholesome daughter and watchful granddaughter, the princess-in-waiting, the sugar-toothed dreamer in a world of cynics and wickedness, the defining version of just what we've come to expect from Disneyfied bedtime stories. She is pre-ball Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty before the curse, Snow White before the apple has been bitten. She is Alice searching for her way into Wonderland, forever testing the balance between too large and too small, all without ever becoming frustrated when the equilibrium escapes her. Throughout much of the book Aurora works to keep order, once even arranging a party between her fellow creatures and some of the forest's wild animals--an attempt, she says, to encourage friendships between both parties, which ends in predictable failure. Soon, the others begin to take advantage of her, dismissing her attempts to adapt and using her goodwill to feed and shelter themselves.</div>
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This is, the author and illustrator tell us, the nature of humanity: we are selfish, cold-hearted animals fit to live among the rabid tail-and-claw underclass, and the fairy tales we tell ourselves and our children--the very same stories represented in Aurora's blond hair and sunny demeanor--are not only worthless but delusions in themselves. To create a story as graphic and cold as this one, and to populate it with small creatures the size and appearance of both toys and people, is to juxtapose the fantasies we have of ourselves--as veritable royalty, or of overlooked beauty awaiting the midnight carriage and glass slippers--with the truth behind our masks. The message of <i>Beautiful Darkness</i>--a contrast in itself, it could be argued--is that the behavior Aurora faces, even when she's exhausting herself to help others, is the same behavior we exhibit to one another, not just in times of hardship, but in all aspects of daily life. </div>
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In the end, Aurora--our bastion of morality and humanitarianism, this personification of our own fantastical ideas of ourselves, left standing alone among supposed degenerates--gives in to the darker angels of her nature and lashes out, first at a furry companion and then at those who wronged her time and again. She does so not around the girl's corpse, which has now rotted away into a heap of bones, but the warmth of a cottage--the home of a nameless woodsman whose shelves are littered with broken keepsakes, including a clock and child's doll. In a way, the authors might argue that in taking revenge, Aurora fulfills her destiny by becoming the harshest creature of all--by ripping away the mask of fantasy and embracing the ugliness beneath. And when she does, we smile...and we tell ourselves we're glad the villains got what was coming to them, even as those spinning this story know that we smile because the virtuous Aurora has joined our ranks. She has awoken from her slumber and joined the shadows of a much different and deeper sleep.<br />
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Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of this entire story, however, is that Aurora has not wandered far in order to find the woodman's cottage. Which means that, just a few dozen feet from his door, are the bones of that very young girl. Which begs the questions, did this man know her in life? Was he her father, or perhaps an older brother, or uncle? Why is it that this one man, so thoroughly involved in the wilderness beyond his front door, never once stumbled upon her body, or at least noticed the smell of rot in the forest air? And why would a man, so obviously alone, have a broken doll on his shelves when there is no evidence that he has children of his own? The question arises that, perhaps, this man is callous, or even ignorant. Or perhaps he knows she is there, that he is the one who felled her body as he might fell one of the surrounding trees. Or perhaps, in this world--this dark and honest anti-fantasy--we must live with the unknown, the mysterious, the unpursued. Perhaps it is time we accept that, sometimes, unhappily ever after is the best we can do.</div>
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Adamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07361786480474830354noreply@blogger.com