Different ("Oddly Normal" by John Schwartz)

Before John Schwartz begins telling us his story--the story of his family, and especially the story of his son Joseph--he tells us something else: this is not a how-to book about raising a gay child. He's never liked how-to or self-help books, finding them impenetrable and pointless, and he cautions his readers against taking his experience--his successes and failures--and substituting it as their own, looking to turn his detailed and specific chapters into some sort of traceable set of goals and milestones. This is his family's experience alone, something to learn from rather than be guided by. And while he hopes that his book will teach his readers without explicitly instructing them, Schwartz's main goal is to tell a story, purely and simply, which is something he does with ease and skill.

 

Oddly Normal is the story of Joseph Schwartz, a precocious young boy whose parents understand from a very early age that he is gay. His personality and interests--he enjoys Barbies, glitzy decorations, playing with girls' hair, and other stereotypically feminine things--lead his parents to this conclusion, and they're immediately accepting but also cautious: they don't care one way or the other if their son is gay, though they also want to avoid labeling him at an age when society's gender norms mean nothing and he may simply be curious. (Schwartz points out that, after their first two children were born, they lumped dolls and trucks into a gender-less mass in the playroom, and their daughter naturally went for the Barbies while their son went for trucks.) However, as Joseph grows older, the possible becomes the obvious, the obvious becomes unavoidable, and soon his atypical interests and behavior make him not only an outcast at school but the target of some of his teachers' frustrations and wrath. Soon, John and his wife find themselves defending Joseph against careless teachers, lazy therapists, and a school bureaucracy that is more interested in blaming children than understanding them.

 

For me, this was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book, not just because it was the conflict that dominated the first half--the second half being focused on Joseph's internalized conflict with himself and his emotions--but also because I'm a teacher who, even in the few years I've been teaching, has seen this play out firsthand. All teenagers go through this at some point--the feeling that they're alone and different, even among hundreds of other teenagers who are experiencing similar things in their own lives--but for gay teenagers, the feeling of loneliness and the idea that no one else possibly understands what they're going through, least of all the adults around them, is compounded. John Schwartz admits upfront that he and his wife tried their best to be good parents, and this book paints a picture of a mother and father who did indeed try their best, missed a few signs along the way, struggled, but ultimately raised a young man who is smart, confident, and well-rounded. But he also admits that, had Joseph been raised and taught in environments in which his uniqueness had been appreciated as a "gift"--as a part of him, not unlike hair color or height or gender--rather than a challenge to be corrected, he would have fared much better. Which is an issue still to this day: schools that feel accommodating students' differences, whether it be who they are or how they act, means doing nothing and hoping the "problem" goes away. It's this struggle that Joseph and his parents fight and, near the books' end, ultimately win.

 

This is not to say, however, that Schwartz's book doesn't have a few problems--namely, his need, perhaps based on his career as a journalist, to bring in research and statistics related to LGBT teens and current gay rights issues. There's nothing wrong with this, per se, and in fact it actually balances out well in their respective chapters: talking about a specific event in Joseph's childhood, then expanding out to see how it relates nation-wide, including the relationship between effeminacy and sexual orientation in boys, learning disabilities, and suicide. But the research is presented as just that--research--instead of being paraphrased down to fit with the rest of his book. At times, Schwartz's discussions of research feel like a lecture delivered in the middle of an otherwise engaging story, and it weakens the compassion and empathy we've felt towards Joseph and his struggle, almost as though Schwartz were trying to analyze his son's life to see how well it fit into the LGBT narrative...which, as Schwartz mentions more than once, isn't even a reliable narrative, as it raises up the stories of struggle ("it gets better") over the stories of hope ("it's better now") and presents the LGBT experience in teens as one of desperation, harrassment, and futility.

 

There's a moment in his forward when Schwartz says that, while he and fellow memoirist Joan Didion have very little in common, he would find more solace about death in her book The Year of Magical Thinking than in any self-help or how-to book, no matter how well-recommended they were. This goes back to his idea that, given the choice between dry advice and fluid story, he finds more to learn and relate to in story. It's a concept that I agree with wholeheartedly, and I only wish Schwartz had followed this more closely in the writing of his book. It's not that the research is bad--as I stated before, it actually adds to the story--but the story is much better, far and away.

Us and Them ("Lost At Sea" by Jon Ronson)

 

Ten years ago this December, a book called Them found its way into American bookstores. Written by a then unknown (to Americans) British journalist named Jon Ronson, Them introduced readers to what the author himself called "extremists"--a collection of men and women who saw the world around them in strange, different, hateful, and downright conspiratorial ways. There were those who believed the world was run by secret lizard-people who have served in the highest of public offices; a man who tries to reform a racist hate-group by making them, in the age of public relations, more appealing; a seemingly unstable Hollywood director who lobbies for creative control by bringing religious leaders to a production meeting; and so on. What made this collection of stories so unique was that, unlike other investigative journalists, Ronson never sought out his subjects to belittle or confront them, though more often than not he's forced into thost situations, sometimes through basic questions; instead, Ronson sought out and followed them in order to better understand them. Because, unlike most of society, Ronson doesn't consider these people to be the outliers that the title of the book suggests: he knows that, rather than being simply "them"--the fringe humans who we feel comfortable rolling our eyes, whose beliefs and behavior we excuse with derision and detachment--they're simply extreme versions of "us," and by trying to understand them, we can better understand ourselves.

 

Them was following in no short time by The Men Who Stare at Goats--the first of Ronson's books I ever read, and in my opinion still his best--two books on "everyday craziness" that are culled from his print articles, and The Psychopath Test, a look at the prevalence of psychopaths and sociopaths in everyday society, how we identify them, how we have failed to address their presence, and what that means for the non-psychopathic populace. (Spoiler: prisons don't help.) Lost At Sea, published late this year, is the most recent addition to Ronson's works...and where his past books were long-chaptered investigations of "thems," Lost At Sea is a collection of short-chaptered mysteries ranging from unusual murders and TV psychics to new-age hypnotists, faith-healers, cruise workers, and one assisted-suicide advocate who may find a little too much pleasure in the easing of others' pain. Them "thems" are still here, but now the boundaries between what constitutes "them" and "us" are increasingly blurred, and the effect is frequently--and perhaps purposely--unsettling.

 

In short, Lost At Sea still retains all the traits that make Ronson's writing so enjoyable. He approaches each subject with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and empathy--a need to understand tempered by a journalist's reason and a layman's sarcastic common sense--and often finds himself identifying with their struggles, as is the case with a group of Jesus Christians who look to better the world by abandoning material possessions and donating their kidneys to strangers; Ronson never once dismissed their charitable nature--giving an organ to a stranger is, after all, the height of Christian charity--but also finds himself put off by the leader's instability. (You almost wonder, in reading how Ronson is treated by the man, if the leader of the Jesus Christians thinks of himself as a Christ figure destined to be forever martyred.) At the end of the day, Ronson doesn't elevate any of his subjects to the status of outsiders who should be more mainstream, or to that of someone who is persecuted for no clear reason; every person he encounters has essentially, and often self-righteously, made themselves out to be unassuming victims, even as they continue to dig themselves deeper and deeper. (The clearest example of this is psychic Sylvia Browne, who comes off as so brash to cruise-ship attendees that she pushes away even the most willing followers. Ronson seems to see her as a hack cold-reader who is, above all else, just damn exhausted.)

 

The only disappointing aspect of Ronson's new book is its lack of depth. Yes, the book as a whole covers such a breadth of people and experiences that Ronson seems to be constantly crossing the oceans, meeting up in obscure locations, and going off on week-long excursions with the strange and gullible. (More than once I wondered if Ronson, who talks openly about his own home life, ever has time to be with his family...or if he's constantly off on some sort of investigation.) But the chapters are shorter than usual, and they're over before they should rightfully be. Each of his chapters could very well be their own short book of sorts, and some really should. But in trying to cover so much--to investigate the "them" and, in the process, teach the "us"--he doesn't give us enough to really understand anything. I've always loved Jon Ronson's books for their adventurous tangents--he's investigating one thing, then a tip or recommendation sends him off somewhere completely different, but always to the benefit of his research--but by tossing out those tangents in favor of short-form pieces, which read like half-finished articles at times, he makes himself as a writer seem posivitely...dare I say it?...normal.

History ("HHhH" by Laurent Binet)

When you read a lot of nonfiction, especially historical nonfiction, you begin to notice certain patterns in the writing. Often, these books will open not with the most obvious or approrpriate moment--the subject's birth, say, or the triggering of a titular event--but rather a seemingly insignificant one that, in the writer's own warped logic, somehow embodies all that follows. Or, more perversely, the writer may choose to begin at the end--the subject's death, usually marked by a long and somber funeral procession on a gray and dreary day*; the signing of a treaty or unveiling of a memorial; the daily lives and pristine, ghost-like nightmares of the survivors decades after the fact. At some point, this need to be both factual and literary, the need to convey dry information balanced with the desire to tell an engaging story, becomes tiresome, especially when the author's skills in either research or creative writing are lacking...or, perhaps worse, overpowering.

The subject of Laurent Binet's HHhH promises to be a thrilling read from the outset: the planned assassination of Richard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official, by a handful of European military officers and everymen...a plan that, as is often the case, falls apart almost from the get-go. But it's immediately clear that Binet's focus on delivering this obscure, enthralling story is matched only by his obsession with how to do it properly....and that is where HHhH gets its magic. Yes, the story of the Heydrich assassination is spread out in fantastic detail, but it's Binet's deconstruction of this process--and simultaneous critique of himself as writer--that makes this pseudo-novel such a rewarding and worthwhile read. Binet worries that he's slipping into cliche, that pieces of his own life are slowly going to influence how he fills in the story's gaps; in one chapter, Binet frets that the cold he is suffering through will somehow find its way into a character's own system and make him ill, as well. On the surface, it's an interesting and unusual way to tell a story; beneath the surface, however, Binet's style speaks to the unwritten agreement between writers of nonfiction and their readers that everything put down on the page will be truthful, researched, and clear. It's an agreement that, more and more frequently, is being violated by the men and women we trust with telling our history.

By breaking down his process and being honest with his thoughts as a writer, Binet is highlighting the human failings that could--and often do--sneak their way into the books we read. We trust that writers like David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Edmund Morris are reliable sources of history because all the tell-tale signs are present in their works: their stories are clean of judgement and opinion, their writing is lucid and professional, and their bibliographies are repositories of hundreds if not thousands of first- and second-hand sources that, to our eyes, seem legitimate. But how many of us become detectives as we read those books, stopping every few sentences to double-check that their sources are real, that the information is factual, that interpretation and opinion have not replaced statement and fact? Few, if any. And writers of nonfiction seem to know this, for at least once a year some established writer will have to issue public apologies and sometimes even resign from prestigious positions--at universities, at journals, at websites--because they've broken the agreement and called into question the faith we put in keepers of our history.** It's an event that, besides providing fodder for pundits, challenges those writers who revere the relationship between writer and reader to keep that very relationship strong and defend themselves against whispers that perhaps they too have broken the agreement.

There was a moment after finishing HHhH that I wondered if perhaps Binet was doing a disservice to history; after all, there are few if any good books out there about the Heydrich assassination, so wouldn't Binet have done us all a great favor by writing a straightforward account of those events? Binet obviously did his research well, knows how to construct a fluid narrative filled with suspense and intrigue, and understands the nuances of writing historical nonfiction when history itself ends up being incomplete or unwritten. Why not just write a nice, 200-page retelling of what happened instead of a treatise on modern nonfiction itself? It's a legitimate question, and one that bothered me for some time...but the longer Binet's book sits with you, the more you understand that the only way we can trust our history is by trusting those who write it. And by opening the curtains on his writing process--not to mention opening himself to the same kind of scrutiny that will be bestowed on his subjects--Binet is hoping to gain out trust so that we will revel in history without the fear of being lied to by the person telling it.


*Heavy rain is optional in instances such as these; chances are, your readers will not be motivated enough to scour old newspaper reports of that day's actual weather, so maudlin little touches such as these usually lend themselves well symbolically.

**One book mentioned by Binet is Comer Clarke's England Under Hitler, an obscure, out-of-print pseudo-historical book that looks to understand Hitler's plans for England through interviews with some of the men tasked with writing up those plans. It's a fascinating topic, but in Clarke's hands it becomes an excuse to make heavy-handed literature out of history by imagining conversations between historical figures. It's a ridiculous book, and it's rareness is a benefit to readers and history buffs alike.

Truth ("Cronkite" by Douglas Brinkley)

I was born five years after Walter Cronkite stepped down from the CBS Evening News, so I never really knew him the way millions of others did. And yet, strangely, I don't remember a time when I didn't know of him. It's a testament to his influence that, even in retirement, he was one of those unyielding cultural presences that hung over the world around us--an omnipotent and reliable measuring tool against which we judged not only our journalists and newscasters but our fellow citizens, as well.

In cases like these, the person we idolize will always have flaws that appear later on and threaten to temper our respect, not to mention dirtying their legacies. From the way people have talked about Douglas Brinkley's massive, 830-page biography of Walter Cronkite--667 of biography, the rest of sources and indexes--you'd think the so called "most trusted man in America" was doomed for the same fate. And while there is a lot in Brinkley's biography that makes us second-guess how we think about Cronkite, the bigger problem with Brinkley's book has nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with Brinkley himself. For 667 pages, Brinkley manages to prove just how rare and important someone like Walter Cronkite was by ignoring Cronkite's entire modus operandi of good journalism.

As Brinkley reminds us throughout his biography, Cronkite believed in triple-checking sources to make sure he wasn't being impulsive and, in the process, undermining his credibility by spreading inaccurate information or idle conjecture. Cronkite believed in providing truthful, researched news rather than the entertainment of news--that is, news that gets attention for being first and being loud rather than being right. But as one online reader after another has pointed out, Brinkley's own book seeps with violations of this attitude. For example, there are misspellings ("Silverseas"), incorrect facts (Daniel Schorr's official role during Watergate, the death of Bob Post during WWII), the occasional snarky interjection, and insignificant gossip, most of which centers on the tension between Cronkite and Dan Rather in the 80s and 90s.

On top of this, almost the entire book is written in stilted, uninteresting prose that never quite pulls the reader in. (The only exceptions, in my opinion, are the chapters on Cronkite's role as a journalist in WWII, which are written in a lucid, engaging, and often suspenseful style.) You get the impression that, with Cronkite having passed away just under three years ago, Brinkley and his publisher rushed to get this book to the press in order to capitalize on the subject's name recognition while the generation of his lifelong viewers was still around to buy the book. (After all, the idea of someone my age--26--or younger purposely picking up this book seems a little farfetched. Most twentysomethings today probably have no idea who Cronkite was.) I'd like to think this wasn't true, that Brinkley didn't rush this biography, that he had more than enough time to finish it the way he wanted, but something tells me it isn't.

Still, Brinkley should be commended for taking on such a difficult and well-lived subject. That Cronkite's life and career should require so many pages doesn't seem surprising, given the man's extensive influence on American life. But Brinkley, in giving Cronkite his due number of pages, should have also given the man his time and patience in order to get everything right. Cronkite deserves a lot of what Brinkley has to offer--praise, scorn, doubt, cynicism--but he doesn't deserve to be boring.

Congress ("Do Not Ask What Good We Do" by Robert Draper)

There are few things more disliked in our country than Congress--not the institution so much as the people who are elected to fill it. At last count, Congress' approval rating was a dismal 9%--the lowest ever. And judging by the last 18 months, it's not likely to rise any time soon.

What's strange is that, while Americans disapprove of Congress with near unanimity, they still approve of their own individual representative. It's a complex, almost paradoxical mindset that detaches individuals from the institution and treats them as Kafkaesque everymen trapped in some sort of inescapable beaurocracy. Everyone in Congress is a do-nothing crook, we tell ourselves, except our guy. He's on our side. Hence, all those members of Congress we claim to dislike are, not surprisingly, returned back to office every two years, often by hefty margins.

Robert Draper's Do Not Ask What Good We Do has an obvious bend to it, as is evident in the title. But what sets his book apart from other examination-cum-diatribes against Congress is that, rather than list the institution's failings to prove a point about its intractibility, Draper selects about two dozen members and tells their individual stories. Some of them are new, Tea Party-backed freshmen, while others have been in Washington for years or even decades...and one who, as of a few years ago, is officially the longest-serving representative in American history. They are a mix of men and women, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives and moderates bridging those two gaps. 

Perhaps the two most surprising cases highlighted in Draper's book are both Republicans, though they couldn't be more different. The first, Missouri representative Jo Ann Emerson, is someone most Americans have never heard of. Unlike other members of Congress, Emerson does not appear regularly on cable news programs or seek out cameras to make a name for herself; she is a moderate in the classic sense of the word, and she's one of the few politicians who seems to favor the rational over the immediately popular. By Draper's account, she works hard for her constituents, who happen to live in one of the nation's poorest districts, even if it means bucking her own party and voting with Democrats. And on top of all this, she came to office unwillingly: after her husband, Representative Bill Emerson, died suddenly in 1996, she ran for his open seat and has kept it ever since.

Allen West, on the other hand, came to Congress by running against the same Democrat who defeated him--narrowly--in 2008, in a Congressional district that isn't even where he lives. A proud member of the Tea Party, West is one of the few House members known to a wide swathe of Americans thanks to his visibility as an outspoken conservative and one of only two African American Republicans in the House...a fact that has given him no shortage of troubles from both parties. West is frequently interviewed on television, has engaged in a few public scuffles with other members of the House, and was even touted by some earlier this year as a possible VP nominee, a suggestion West himself scoffed at. Unlike Emerson's Missouri district, West's Florida district--which was created less than twenty years ago*--has a median income of over $50,000 a year and lies along the Florida coast, making it a hub of tourism.

Two entirely different kinds of congresspeople. And yet, the way in which Draper presents these two representatives makes them both so downright fascinating that they shed their political selves and become individuals--which, I suppose, is the point. Any vitriol I felt towards Allen West, simply after seeing snippets of his "bayonett" speech or gossipy retellings of his fued with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, became secondary, and I felt a sudden appreciation for this man who, on more than one occassion, has become frustrated by his party trying to score political points rather than act on a piece of legislation. Similarly, my attitudes about the lack of strong moderates in Congress was challenged by Draper's words on Emerson, and I suddenly found myself wondering how many other level-headed members filled Congress' halls.

There are others, too, who transcend the "R" or "D" after their names and become fascinating individuals. There's Sam Johnson, the 81-year-old veteran from Texas who brought silence to the floor of the House in memory of fallen soldiers. Or Sheila Jackson Lee, who had promise as a reformer but has become her own worst enemy, the inspiration behind jars of change meant to calculate her insufferability. Or Walt Jones, the once in-line Republican who's become disillusioned with his party and now spends most of him time with Ron Paul. Each of the members featured in Draper's book come off as more vulnerable than one might expect, especially in an age when a politician's entire legislative years can be boiled down to five-second soundbites and 30-second attack ads. It's this human side that we need to see more of, especially beyond our own reprentatives, so maybe when pollsters report that, despite Congress' dismal approval ratings, most of its members will be soundly re-elected, we shouldn't be surprised after all.

*In contrast, Emerson's district has been around since 1863.