What's up for 2012?

Books I haven't managed to write about yet include Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle, a book I was pleased to have read in the past few months, and found to be everything. I hope to follow this up with his last collection (I think), Apricot Jam and Other Stories. In November, I read The Art of Fielding, a first novel by Chad Harbach. Zen and baseball ... how can you go wrong? Set on the campus of Westish College, which is situated in the crook of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin, Harbach's novel is about mindlessness and mindfulness, the varieties and complexities of male relationships, the complexities of relationships, and a great and enjoyable read.

I'm looking forward to revisiting a favorite novel and reading new novels by favorite authors. I recently learned that Dean Bakopoulos is teaching at Grinnell College. I read his 2005 novel, Please Don't Come Back to the Moon when it first came out and it has stayed with me all of these years. I just received it and his newest novel My American Unhappiness as Christimas presents. They are both at the top of my list. I am also looking forward to Ha Jin's new novel, Nanjing Requieum, and David Guterson's new novel Ed King. Ann Patchett has  a newish novel, State of Wonder, as does Umberto Eco. Jonathan Lethem and Stanley Fish both have collections of essays to be explored, and I'm thinking of dipping into Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy, Peter Ackroyd's London Under, Alina Bronsky, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, and R. Zamora Linmark's Leche.

Sounds like a happy New Year. Let the Favorite Books and Book Review know what you're going to be reading in 2012.

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad. New York: Anchor Books, 2011.

R. Stuhr

As a Pulitzer Prize winner (and a "national best seller"), this is an already much written about book. In October, I heard Jennifer Egan read a chapter from this novel at the Free Library of Philadelphia. One of the qualities she talked about was the way each chapter shifts focus to talk about a character who appeared in a minor role in another chapter. At the time I was reading In the First Circle, which uses the same technique. So, I thought, well, interesting, but not new, Solzhenitsyn was way ahead of her. But, it was a good reading, and I bought a copy of Egan's book on my way out. I was not at all disappointed. The narrative, in the form of distinct chapters all connected by a consistent cast of characters, moves backwards and forwards in time. We see the characters from a variety of perspectives and at different points in their lives, but the spaces are not all filled in. Aging forever-young producers age and wither, as younger aspiring characters find their way into middle age.  Some remain true to their ideals, others sell out, still others seek a settled life after years of wandering. The excesses of the seventies and eighties fade and evolve into the excesses of the 21st century. Along with fashions and fetishes, technology remains in a state of revolution reaching all ages, bringing people closer together while at the same time creating buffers to provide distance. In the culminating chapter, Egan takes her readers into a Shteyngartesque not-so-distant future, in which the youngest downloader on record is three months old, connect and transmit are no longer meaningful concepts, and words such as friend, real, change, and story are "shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks." Everyone is looking for something, and maybe it is something that they can see, hear, and touch.

If you haven't yet read this novel, find a copy at your local library or book store.

Swamplandia!

Russell, Karen. Swamplandia! NY: Vintage, 2011.

R. Stuhr

I had the good fortune to hear Karen Russell speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia on a cold, rainy Tuesday night in November. She was funny and self-deprecating and, although I've been saving as many pennies as I can as of late, I couldn't resist buying not only Swamplandia!, but her first collection of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (have not read this one yet). She chose to read an interesting segment of Swamplandia!--one that was central to the novel but was in many ways a diversion. Reading it out of context gave the uninformed little clue as to what the novel was about, and it startled me when I got to that section in my own reading of the novel. But having said that, the novel is much more serious in theme and tone than I would have expected from Ms. Russell's own demonstrated sense of humor. But this is just an observation and in no way a criticism. I was not disappointed by the book even though my taste tends to veer away from the  gothic sagas of eccentric families raising their children without any of the usual mores and codes. I think of, for instance, Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux. And yet, Russell does not forgive or absolve the parents for their neglect and ultimate abandonment of the children. What becomes of them, what they suffer, is serious and life changing. At the same time, we can recognize the desperation and helplessness and good if mistaken intentions of the parents. In fact, we never really learn the whole story or discover the paths that brought the parents together. How did the mother feel about her life? What did she give up and did she have regrets? What were her choices?

Swamplandia! has a dual narration. Segments are narrated in the first person by Ava, the youngest child, and other segments are in the third person. It was always a little jolting to shift from "he" to "I." Early in the novel, the family's tenuous existence catapults toward disaster after the untimely death of the mother. Kiwi, the oldest son, eventually leaves their island and Alligator park (the island and park are both Swamplandia) in the Florida Everglades to try to earn money to save the family from bankruptcy. The middle child, Ossie, a teenage daughter begins communicating with the dead, and Ava, barely in her teens, tries to fill the gap left by her mother. When the father leaves for a few weeks to take care of business (work a second job on the mainland), Ossie drifts off to seek a lover among the dead and Avis to find her sister with the swamp's "bird man." This is the most gripping and poignant part of the novel. The reader is no better informed as to the qualities of the bird man, whether or not he can be trusted and relied upon, than Ava is as she counts on him to help her find her sister and needs him in her state of complete abandonment by all members of her family. As they go deeper into the swamp in search of Ossie the landscape and Ava's situation become more terrifying.

In the meantime Kiwi has gone to the rival amusement park, The World of Darkness, and struggles in the world of minimum wage to earn something to send back to his family.

To say more would be to give too much away. Suffice it to say that Russell is an outstanding story teller, who keeps you turning pages, but gives your mind something to work with and ponder as you read. Her characters have depth and the lines and details of the plot are revealed through their interpretation of events.

Swamplandia! is available as a printed book to be checked out and also as an electronic book to be downloaded from the Free Library of Philadelphia.

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Dennis Lehane's Novel The Given Day

Lehane, Dennis. The Given Day. NY: HarperCollins, 2008

By Walt Giersbach

Tribulation in a Boston Dimly Remembered

The police/mystery novel has always been suspect as literature, even when Umberto Eco and Jasper Fforde transcend genre into a more literary level.  Dennis Lehane skirted this genre tag skillfully in Mystic River; Shutter Island; Darkness, Take My Hand; and Gone, Baby, Gone, creating well-rounded characters who functioned in realistic, inventive story lines.  But, often, his writing remained “mysteries.”  His work in The Given Day, however, exceeds all his former portraits of troubled people trying to function in his troubled Boston area.

Lehane takes the reader back to a relatively unexplored time just after The Great War and influenza epidemic, but before the ‘20s roared in.  In his treatment of the time and place, he was compared in The New York Times to John Dos Passos and The U.S.A. Trilogy.  Boston’s police department was being paid 1908 poverty-level wages, could be ordered to put in 70-hour weeks, and worked in vermin-infested quarters.  Worse, it was a time when strikers found themselves at the mercy of police nightsticks and attacks by goons, African-Americans didn’t walk through white neighborhoods, anarchists were blowing up buildings, and Nativist cultural attitudes poisoned the civic weal.  The Irish — in Boston, at least — ran the civil service at the expense of the Italians and “Bolsheviks” and for the benefit of the Anglo Brahmins.

Lehane’s rich narrative — in 700 pages — leads inexorably to the police strike of 1919, large-scale rioting in the city, families dissolved by “traitorous” behavior, and wanton murders.  Police officer Aidan “Danny” Coughlin; the African-American, Luther Leonard, who left wife and child after murdering a cocaine dealer; and the immigrant Irish maid, Nora, form the triumvirate of characters working to survive in this turbulent environment.  .

Lehane slowly lets the historical period unfold through the eyes of Babe Ruth, shortly to leave the Red Sox, and shoehorns the Great Bambino in and out of the novel.  Babe’s character is wonderful history, which Lehane has researched beautifully, but unfortunately it has little to do with the story’s development.

By creating this universe called “Boston 1918-19,” Lahane time-travels us into an alternative history that is both distant and familiar.  The streets, department stores and place names are all identifiable today.  While this is entertaining — and emotionally involving — it remains questionable whether Lahane is over-dramatizing the venality, mayhem, cultural biases, and civil breakdown of his city and forebears.  Enjoy The Given Day as drama and enlightenment on issues that plague us today, not history, in spite of the author’s bibliographic sources.
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Reading Lehane’s work (of seven novels and a collection) made me reflect that there are books that launch a neophyte writer’s career, those that put air under the author’s wings, and finally the literary triumph that puts the writer at the top of his game.  The Given Day will give any reader pause to examine the cultural baggage we carry as Americans and that which has been smuggled into our luggage by strangers.  The Given Day is a dense literary work firmly nestled in a fascinating time when the country began to turn another corner.


From the Book Review: Dennis Lehane's most recent novel is Moonlight Mile. You can find Given Day and other Dennis Lehane novels at University of Pennsylvania Libraries and at your favorite branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia


http://www.dennislehanebooks.com/

Read other reviews by Walter Giersbach at the Favorite Books and Book Review and find out about his fiction at  Allotropic Lucubrations

Will Rogers: A Political Life

Will Rogers: A Political Life by Richard D. White, Jr. Texas Tech University Press, 2011.

Review by J. Hewitt

Will Rogers was an improbable example of the classic American Dream come true.  This book looks at this very public figure as a political animal.  Rogers’ charm and wit propelled him into vaudeville and onto the Broadway stage in the 1920s.  After the rope tricks got stale, he began spicing up his stage act with comic comments about current events. The public and the politicians responded favorably to his gentle, and often shrewd, observations gleaned, in the beginning, from his daily reading of multiple newspapers with breakfast.

As Rogers’ inoffensive barbs brought more fame, he became favored by influential political bosses.  They wanted to be associated with a figure who the public viewed as reflecting the common sense ideas of middle America.

Will Rogers became one of the most popular entertainers in the 1920s and 1930s.  He starred in silent and talking films.  He had a weekly radio program so popular that President Franklin D. Roosevelt scheduled several of his ‘fireside chats’ to follow Will Rogers’ program.

Not an ideologue, Rogers was a life-long Democrat and shared much of Theodore Roosevelt’s worldview. He believed that the United States should stay out of other countries’ troubles while protecting the United States from conflict with a strong military. He did not believe in disarmament conferences, Prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, or women’s suffrage.  He did believe in using fame to help others, charitable causes like the Mississippi floods in 1927 and the Depression, expanding commercial aviation, baseball, travel, and the New Deal.

Richard D. White’s book seeks to discover how this poorly-educated young man from the Cherokee Nation, now part of Oklahoma, became a confidant of presidents, kings, and princes while preserving his public reputation as just a regular joe.  Using newspaper archives and media accounts of Will Rogers public activities, White gives an account which at times is giddy with admiration and at other times speculative about Rogers’ activities on behalf of U.S. Presidents, but never dull.  Writing in colorful style peppered with Rogers’ one-liners, he makes a persuasive argument that Will Rogers is a unique, even an iconic, character in the American experience.

Available at  at 15 branches of the Free Library of Philadelphia

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With Liberty and Justice for Some

Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2011.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Salon.com’s blogger extraordinaire Glenn Greenwald tells the story of how we as a country have allowed a culture of elite immunity to flourish.  With Liberty and Justice for Some, he makes a rather old-fashioned argument. American political liberty rests on the assumption that the law reigns supreme. And, if the fundamental requirement of the rule of law is equality then the last forty years of American political history has made a mockery of this idea. The promise of America’s founding has been forsaken by the emergence of a two-tiered justice system.

Greenwald pinpoints the descent into the corrupt culture of elite immunity beginning with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. It was the Nixon pardon which became the template for justifying elite immunity. President Ford, who if you believe Seymour Hersh (and Greenwald does), was selected as Agnew’s replacement because of his willingness to protect Nixon.  It was Ford who made the impassioned plea of empathy for Nixon i.e. because he had been through so much already and because the country needed to “look forward.”  In essence this call for empathy was a disguised appeal for aristocratic privilege that was granted and used as a perniciously burgeoning precedent.

The shenanigans associated with Nixon era criminality were followed closely by successively more brazen acts.  The law-breaking that went along with the Iran-Contra scandal (its subsequent cover-up and pardons) followed by the refusal of the Clinton administration to do anything about it gave way to a crescendo of felonies and war crimes committed by members of the Bush #43 administration.

In addition to crimes disguised as policy decisions receiving immunity, membership privileges were extended to the “corporate partners” as well.  The political criminals of George W. Bush’s administration merely had to utter the word “terrorism” and the Democratic Congress swiftly and obediently complied in allowing immunity to be extended to telecom corporations which had violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) with uninhibited impunity. The telecom immunity battle was the point at which politicians and corporations perfected immunizing private sector elites.  

In keeping with tradition and violating the law himself to do so, President Obama overlooked the crimes of the Bush administration because he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” (p. 54) One need not wonder what would happen to a defendant in criminal court (naturally not from the political or corporate elite) who tells the presiding judge that while dozens of people saw him shoot another down in cold blood he is “looking forward” now.  The defendant would almost certainly be joining the 1% of the adult population in the United States that are currently in jail or prison.

Then there was the late financial criminality of Wall Street run amok.  Unlike the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 1980s which resulted in the Federal government bailing out the cousin of the banking industry to the tune of $150 billion, the 2008 meltdown which occasioned a bailout at least seventy times larger, no one has been sent to jail or even charged with a crime. Greenwald quotes Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi: “The only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess – Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general – are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.” (p.117) Much like his former Senate colleague Charles Schumer of  New York  (a.k.a. “Senator Wall Street”) Obama was not about to turn the party over to “crazy, anti-business liberals.”

Whereas the Bush administration only threatened to prosecute whistle blowers the Obama administration, attempting to become the undisputed champion of elite immunity and privilege, has aggressively carried out these threats.  The Obama war on Wikileaks and PFC Bradley Manning is an illustration of this practice. “If you create a worldwide torture regime, illegally spy on Americans without warrants, abduct people with no legal authority, or invade and destroy another country based on false claims, then you are fully protected.  But if you expose any of these lawless actions by publishing the truth about what was done, then you are a criminal who deserves the harshest possible prosecution.” (p.262) 

Greenwald makes what can be construed as a basically conservative argument.  While he admits that there has never been anything like equality before the law (we achieved universal suffrage in this country about the same time we all bought color TV sets) he nevertheless decries the abandonment of the de jure ideal of the rule of law.  Greenwald does a solid job of recounting the “what” of history but he does not attempt to reckon with the “why” in this book. Sometimes art is short and life is long but the question of why is it that the American political class bothers less and less with a pretense of legality is of interest.

Doing my best to avoid a Marxist-smarty-pants-post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc conclusion is difficult. I think Slavoj Zizek’s contention that we are in a post-ideological epoch certainly has some validity.  Accordingly, it is not “hurray the beast ideology is at long last dead” as much as it is “we are so totally in control at this point that we don’t have to pay lip service to any nonsense about equality anymore.” A decadent political culture which allows a proud war criminal such as Dick Cheney to go on television, openly admit to his role in the crime of waterboarding while mocking the authorities who failed to lock him up, is evidence of a political system that not only tolerates but encourages open displays of obscene arrogance.

Soon to be available at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Check your library or local book store.

The book review heard David Harvey, professor of geography and anthropology at CUNY,  speak last night as part of the Penn Humanities Forum series of lectures. His lecture followed the same themes outlined by Hatch above, emphasizing the growing and solidifying disparity in wealth in this country and around the world. His most recent book is available at Penn Libraries. Harvey, David. The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford [England: Oxford University Press, 2010. HB95 .H37 2010

Favorite Books and Book Review welcomes your reviews and comments about books you care about.

The Altruism of Imperialism

Jean Bricmont. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006.

Richard Seymour. The Liberal Defence of Murder. London/New York: Verso, 2008.

Samantha Power, "A Problem From Hell:” America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Perennial Harper Collins, 2002.

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Robespierre once argued that “nobody likes armed missionaries.”  That was in the context of an argument with Brissot de Warville (and those of his ilk generally known as Girondins) who, anticipating elements of the Bush administration, advocated a preemptive attack on the royalists who had run away from the Revolution and their foreign enablers.  Further, according to Brissot, this act of liberation could only be greeted with enthusiasm by the burghers of Koblenz.  To indelicately state the obvious the people of Koblenz were much like the people of Baghdad in not greeting their “liberators” with open arms; while Brissot arguably got what he deserved George W. Bush has really good seats to Texas Rangers baseball games and a presidential library. To heighten the indignity,  history has robbed Brissot of the credit of formulating the Bush Doctrine.

Samantha Power who currently runs the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights as Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council argues that it is the moral responsibility of the United States government to intervene militarily to prevent genocide.  Who could be against the prevention of a genocidal slaughter?  The problem is that this “responsibility to protect” argument transcends simply intervening to halt genocide and allows the ideological cover for a less exalted form of imperialism on the part of the world’s leading interventionist.

Power was reportedly one of the leading advocates of a humanitarian intervention in Libya inside the Obama administration.  At the time of this writing Muammar Gaddafi has been freshly killed and the era of despotism has been vanquished.  The problem is that what started as a humanitarian military intervention to save the civilians of Benghazi has “worked” to achieve regime change. This template for humanitarian imperialism is now far more likely to happen again. Just as Brissot and Bush couched their plans for conquest in humanitarian language so the Obama administration has made imperialism an altruistic activity.

In “A Problem From Hell” Power chronicles the efforts of Raphael Lemkin, who originated the term genocide, to bring the issue to the attention of the world.  The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December of 1948.  Springing into action the United States Senate became the ninety-eighth nation to ratify thirty-eight short years later.

One of the most endearing parts of Power’s book is the story of Senator William Proxmire’s relentless struggle to have the Genocide Convention adopted by the Senate.  Proxmire, a democrat from Wisconsin, used his one minute speech in the Senate 3,211 times to argue for the ratification of the Convention.  Finally, in 1986 that ratification occurred.

Richard Seymour, also known for his blog Lenin’s Tomb, in The Liberal Defence of Murder directly criticizes Power for paying no attention to the worst crimes of Western states e.g. Guatemala and East Timor. She also somehow forgot to include the atrocities in Indochina committed by the U.S. which were quasi-genocidal.  Seymour asserts that “The assumption that the US military will have the answer to genocidal violence wherever it is occupying cannot work without this historical forgetting.” (p. 219)

Seymour argues the process by which the U.S. government launches imperialistic wars of conquest, while at the same time comparing itself favorably to Oxfam, began with the first Gulf War in 1991. The idea that Empires can be trusted to perform good deeds out of a sense of altruism is absurd.  The Gulf War was the real beginning of the exaltation of humanitarian intervention. It is from this point that a straight line can be drawn to the logic of humanitarian intervention in Yugoslavia, which in turn laid the groundwork for the debacle in Iraq. 

Supporting American or European power against aspects of global power deemed even more barbaric was irresistible for some.  The “nouveaux philosophes” i.e. Bernard Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner (“Mr. Humanitarian Intervention”), and Alain Finkielkraut were galvanized by a logic of “lesser evilism.” Formerly left-wing intellectuals accommodating themselves to capitalism has led to what Seymour has labeled an “energetic depoliticization of the issues.”  Politics as thus been reduced to a disingenuous discourse of human rights.

Jean Bricmont in Humanitarian Imperialism Using Human Rights to Sell War argues that the well-meaning advocates of humanitarian intervention provide “moralistic cover for the cynicism of a Donald Rumsfeld.”  Since the West is all about “widespread indifference to criminal policies pursued with a perfectly clear conscience” (p. 57) the doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” is perfectly suited to these nefarious ends.  This is the epoch when the U.S. Navy can advertise itself as “a global force for good.”  Moralizing rhetoric combined with cynical practice has flourished remarkably in places like Afghanistan.

Bricmont maintains that ideology is the most effective form of social control in a democratic society; a free press is a brilliant propaganda tool in the service of imperialism.   So the defense of human rights serves as the righteous basis of Western imperialism in its offensive against the former socialist bloc and Third World countries escaping from the cold embrace of colonialism. He goes as far as to suggest that humanitarian interventionism has become today’s new opium.

There is a stunning hypocrisy in what liberal imperialists will defend.  Most U.S. Democrats, European Social Democrats, and Greens defend democracy domestically but call for the dictatorship role for a small group of countries on the international level (Obama being the modern version of Gladstone in this respect).  An international Herrenvolk democracy has been created; American liberal ideology has conquered the world. Because Bricmont believes that there is nothing more hopelessly utopian than the notion that there can be stability in a world under American hegemony, he proposes an organization for our time. The watchdog organization that he proposes would be called “Imperialism Watch.”  Its mission would be to denounce wars and war propaganda as well as the economic pressures and other maneuvers that make injustice thrive and prosper. 

All of this might lead us to ask a couple of relevant questions.  Was Rachel Corrie a true example of humanitarian intervention as Richard Seymour suggests? Or, when President Romney launches his first humanitarian assault to whom should he rightfully give credit?

Reading anything that you would like to share? Send us your original review to favoritebookreview @ gmail. com

Not a False Note Is Played: Peggy Ehrhart's Sweet Man Is Gone

Ehrhart, Peggy. Sweet Man Is Gone. Gale Cengage, 2008

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

Peggy Ehrhart immerses the reader in a world of musicians, what they go thorough to get their gigs, and the tribulations of trying to get your band to the point where it pays the bills.  Never fear if you’re not an avid music fan.  Her allusions and descriptions are transparent and easy to grasp.   Ehrhart, herself a guitarist, nails this world down cold, then adds the literary challenge of an amateur sleuth wanting to solve the murder — make that two — of friends.
   
The atmosphere and ambience of Sweet Man Gone are right on, from the dingy bars of the Lower East Side to the cheap pads of the Upper West Side to the rundown flats in Hackensack.  Nostalgia flowed over me as I recalled streets I walked and places I hung out long ago.  Her plot flows seamlessly — and often dreamlike — as she drives her clunker in and out of the city, from practice studios to blues bars to crash pads.  Interestingly, there’s not a false note of irony, cynicism, or authorial disbelief in her writing.  Hers is a beautiful portrayal of a lonely woman just trying to make it while loving the blues too much.

The plot unfolds smoothly, building bit by bit as a novel of character evolves into a fast-paced crescendo of discovery.  And, like a classic whodunit, the killer isn’t revealed until the last pages.
   
Sweet Man Gone is a very refreshing antidote for those suffering an overdose on Dennis LeHane, Dashiell Hammett, James Patterson and other hardboiled crime writers.

ISBN-10: 1594146683

Available at three locations at the Free Library of Philadelphia or from your local library or bookseller. Interested in other books by Peggy Ehrhart? Check out her Web page.

Follow Walter Giersbach's own short fiction and ideas at
http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/

Reading anything that you would like to share? Send us your original review to favoritebookreview @ gmail. com

Enter the Man with No Name: Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest

Reviewed by Walter Giersbach

“Red Harvest,” Dashiell Hammett’s first published novel (in 1929), reveals a world of venality, mayhem and revenge that set the tone for detective novels half a century into the future.

A Continental Detective Agency Op is summoned from California to “Poisonville,” Mont. by aged newspaper owner and banker Elihu Willsson. Elihu’s criminal enterprise of imported thugs threatens to turn on him. The aged banker gives the Op enough of information to let our nameless narrator work his way through a host of evil-doers: Bill Quint, an affable old IWW member; corrupt police chief Noonan; greedy Dinah Brand, who has scandalous information on everyone; jealous bank clerk Robert Albury; hoodlum Max “Whisper” Thaler; and other evil-doers who run the town and its rackets. The first question is “Who killed Elihu’s son?”

The Op sets about pitting the factions against each other, saying, “Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right.” This “stir-it-up novel” is filled with offhanded shootings, explosions, and murder by ice pick. The carnage is colorfully expressed in passages where the Op says, “We bumped over dead Hank O'Meara's legs and headed for home” and “Be still while I get up or I'll make an opening in your head for brains to leak in.”

Don’t expect plausibility, but do look for the snappy dialogue, strong characters (especially in the Op), and writing style that moves fast. Time magazine included “Red Harvest” in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1922 to 2005. Literary critic Andre Gide also called the novel “the last word in atrocity, cynicism and horror.”

Hammett’s “Red Harvest” has given us a sub-genre of the crime/adventure/detective novel that might be termed “the man with no name.” “Red Harvest” can lay claim to being the successor to the classic Western — not the Sherlock Holmes “whodunit.” The novel’s amazing power and plotting led movie director Akira Kurosawa to create “Yojimbo,” focusing on a freelance samurai who confronts town’s warring factions. Look for thematic vestiges of Hammett’s novel also in Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Westerns” with Clint Eastwood and in John Sturges’s “The Magnificent Seven.” “Red Harvest” is the novel that started an epic genre.

See your library or favorite book seller for Red Harvest and other books by Dashiell Hammett

Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia

Nathans, Ben. Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Although I cannot do justice to University of Pennsylvania professor Benjamin Nathans's book Beyond the Pale, I will nonetheless attempt to briefly describe it. Essentially, Nathans describes the Jewish community that left the restricted area of the Russian Pale and went to St. Petersburg. Part of this story is the changing circumstances of Jews in Russia. The Jewish population expanded considerably at the time of Catherine the Great after she annexed Poland and other Baltic countries, which were home to much of Europe's Jewish population. This annexation led to official concern for the integration of Jews into Russian life. Nathans makes the point that this concern was not unique to the Jewish minority population in Russia--integration was always an imperial goal, but it was more overt and much more pronounced. Education and conscription seemed to be avenues to integration. Russia's draconian conscription policy of 25 years of service took many young Jews away from their families. At the end of the 25 year period, if you were still alive, you could move out of the Pale and into St. Petersburg. Special privileges to leave the restricted Jewish area (as large as the country of France) were also given to certain artisans, professionals, and to students. But Imperial Russia was never satisfied with the results of their policies over a hundred years of trying: quotas were tightened, loosened, and tightened again. Officials could not decide, for instance, if the Jews were a bad influence on Russians--turning them away from Christianity and toward Nihilism, or if Russians were a bad influence on the Jews--turning them into revolutionaries. In addition, popular and official beliefs were that the Jewish migrants to St. Petersburg were viewed as too successful; they were taking all the places in the professions; they had more babies than Russians; and they were invading the schools. Nathans looks at census documents, the shift of primary languages among the Jewish population and other details of acculturation; he explores the verifiable and mythological stories of the various ways some of the population attempted to circumvent the quotas and restrictions; compares Russia's policy toward its Jewish population with the policies of Europe. In many ways, Russia lagged far behind Europe both in its policies and its modernization. But it also has the sad legacy of anticipating the virulent anti-semitism that spread through Europe as the century turned. As with any excellent book, Nathans, by describing a particular opens the readers eyes to other similar instances perhaps closer to home, teaching a broader lesson in history. Nathan shows how Russia, though seeking to acculturate its Jewish population, could not resist continuing to single them out through laws of quotas and restrictions, thereby, creating a clearly defined "other," ripe for scape-goating and vilification. 

Find this book at a library near you.

New Online Short Fiction by Walter Giersbach, No. 2

and if one newly published short story isn't enough good news--two certainly is great news:

I'm happy to see that a new short short story--"Big Biz @ the Mall"-- is up at The Corner Club Press.  The editor said two days after I submitted it, "You knew we were going to accept this." Well, no I didn't.

   I bounced a draft copy off an 18-year-old to get her thoughts. "Any typos or misspellings?" I asked. "No," she replied, "well, maybe one word's misspelled."  (You know who you are, young lady, but I won't embarrass you or anything.) 

   How about you?  You can find it in Issue IV, pp. 50-51 at http://www.thecornerclubpress.com/uploads/6/0/5/3/6053731/the_corner_club_press_issue_4.pdf, and read it between subway stops, while waiting for the barkeep to bring your beer, or during your first bathroom break at work.

--Walt

Note from the blogger: You not only get the fast paced short story by author Giersbach, you get the entire 116 page anthology from Corner Club Press. Not to be missed! Many thanks Walter. Open Access and Digital Humanities all wrapped up into one.

Recommended Short Fiction from Walter Giersbach, No. 1

Grinnell alumnus and east coast resident Walter Giersbach, one of the Favorite Book Reviews favorite book reviewers, writes:

And now a I'm happy that after much waiting my "Fish Stories and the Mermaid" has been  posted at Bewildering Stories (at http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue439/fish_stories.html).

As animals and humans crowd each other out of their habitats, we know they adapt, but in what curious ways?  Now if I can only learn to hold my breath under water.

Enjoy!

--Walt

http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/

The Cyclist

Berberian, Viken. The Cyclist: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

I know almost nothing about Berberian as a writer. According to Amazon.com he writes for newspapers, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Financial Times, and others. He has a second novel out, Das Kapital: A Novel of Love and Money Markets, 2007.  When I say that Berberian is a poet, I do not know whether or not he writes poetry, but his use of language in The Cyclist shows a love and mastery of language that one associates with the careful precise use of poets. Berberian's protagonist is a young man who, the reader learns only towards the end of the novel, was recruited into a terrorist organization (the Academy) following a major bomb explosion of his natal village market square. His target is to be the Summerland Hotel on the beaches of Lebanon. It is clear that this act of revenge is to be carried out regardless of the loss of innocent lives, beleaguered citizens of a battle scarred country.

In preparation for this attack, the protagonist trains to take part in a bicycle race, eventually to veer off from the pack, and to take the bomb to the hotel where he will activate it to kill the maximum number of people. Having sustained great injuries as a result of his training, the novel opens with the cyclist in a hospital bed, unable to blink, unable to eat, unable to move, unable to speak because of a cycling accident. Through careful attention from medical experts and familial and Academy members, one of whom he is a childhood friend Ghaemi who he is very much in love with, the cyclist makes complete recovery.

The novel is written in a sort of stream of consciousness. The reader is unclear what is going on, because the narrator is also only partially informed and aware of what is happening. We have no idea whether Ghaemi loves him or is acting as a loyal member of the Academy. We do not know the sincerity of the leader Sadji who travels, buys clothes at the most expensive boutiques, and, in the name of deception and fact finding, spends time recreating with the higher levels of society. We do know that neither Ghaemi nor Sadji intend to risk their lives to carry out their prime initiative. Neither do we know whether they have had something to do with the accident that put the cyclist in the hospital, whether anything they say can believed beyond its power to manipulate the protagonist.

The cyclist is a lover of food and this figures as prominently in his thoughts as love and desire for Ghaemi. Once out of the hospital, the cyclist follows the path set out for him by the Academy. The reader begins to see the events that have brought him to the point of carrying out mass murder, but the logic of an action that harms the same people who are being avenged  is never apparent. There is no logic, only passion, and seductive power. As the cyclist inadvertently meets, face to face, people who will be victims of his action, the juice man who saved his life after the first accident, a cellist who escapes one terrorist act only to unwittingly be confronted by his, the cyclist's own grasp of the logic of his action begins to crumble.

Berberian, through his narrator, illustrates the richness of a culture eviscerated by wars and American hegemony through the succulent elements of its cuisine and culinary practices. As the protagonist prepares himself for his bloody task, he calms himself through the repetition of instructions and concepts, the importance of bicycle helmets, the baby that is his bomb and the baby that could be his and Ghaemi's true child, the listing of dishes and their ingredients.

As the novel reaches its conclusion, the cyclist attempts to explain how he has come so far beyond his passion for the tastes of his native cuisine to the task of an out of scale revenge. He tells his readers or listeners or imagined audience, "I suppose one can be philosophical and ask as I do every day why some of us return home safely after a morning of shopping at the fish market, sifting through rows of mollusk and marlin, while others become the target of a mugging, a beating, even a bombing. For years I have wrestled to find the answer. But what is the point of procrastination? The road to terrorism does not begin with boredom." (170).

It is clear as the narration progresses, that the protagonist does not want to die, and his determination to carry out the plan becomes rattled when, the night before he is to carry out the bombing, he is told by Sadji that the plan has changed and they want him to explode the bomb in effect, as a suicide, "deliver the baby straight from your bosom" (162).

The rest I leave for you to discover.

I didn't realize until after I had read the novel that it was written in 2002. Since I just bought it in a small bookstore (Bindlestiff between 44th and 45th on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia), I just assumed it was new. I was already amazed with the intricate beauty of Berberian's writing on such a subject...giving the reader so much to think about and weigh, but my amazement is magnified thinking of the task of writing this so soon after the 9/11 event--provoking both sympathy and judgment in the reader.

Find this novel at a library near you.

The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe

Marquand, David. The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Marquand's examination of the European Union focuses on aspects of nationalism, ethnicity, regionalism, federalism, borders, and unity. As Marquand describes it, the European Union was and is a grand plan to mitigate the hegemony of Napoleons, Hitlers, and Stalins; to prevent the imperial designs and desires of individuals and nations. Marquand contends that the idea that pureness of blood or specific ethnicities should determine national boundaries is a relatively recent event in history, predating Hitler to be sure, but brought to its most complete manifestation by his Nazi regime. The European Union sought to do away with this way of thinking once and for all through diminishing the importance of borders through the unification of economies, monetary units, laws, and policies. Marquand shows that as national borders have faded in some respects, internal ethnic lines have become more indelibly drawn. In fact, as the European Union embraces countries farther afield geographically, economically, and perhaps ideologically from the initial core countries, unity may be an ever more difficult goal to reach. (Positive manifestations of this can be seen in the United Kingdom, where Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have achieved governing bodies independent of England, while staying within the UK).

Marquand discusses the difficulties with gaining popular acceptance of the EU constitution, the quandries related to the admittance of former Soviet Satellites, and only briefly at Turkey's efforts to join (A brand new book is out on Turkey and the European Union-look for a brief look at this book in a future blog entry).

A supporter of the union, Marquand asserts that it has accomplished more than anyone could possibly have expected as it came into formation. He considers the concept of East and West, dating from the time of the ancient Greeks, and points out the folly of Western rhetoric failing to recognize the foundational contributions of cultures beyond the imagined geographical West. As many of these non-Western nations rise to prominence in world affairs, Marquand writes that, [W]e shall have to recognize that the familiar "Western" narrative of global history . . .is a parochial distortion of a far more complex truth....[W]e shall have to accept that the "West" will never again call the shots in global politics: that there is no longer a "West" to call them" (177). Yet he sees hope in a functional European federation--and that creating such an entity is Europe's greatest challenge.

Find this book in a library near you.

Interdisciplinary Conversations

Strober, Myra. Interdisciplinary Conversations: Challenging Habits of Mind. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

An excellent discussion of how scholars work and communicate in the different disciplines and the difficulty of communicating across disciplines because of learned habits of mind. Strober, after conducting a case study of a selection of funded interdisciplinary study groups at three different universities, makes recommendations on how such groups can be conducted so as to have productive outcomes. She specifically recommends that participants lay aside the learned habit of approaching new concepts from the perspective of doubting and work from a perspective of first believing and then questioning. She writes that "synthesizing ideas from disparate disciplines is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. But it is in that discomfort that the seeds of creativity lie, and if the group can continue to play the believing game--not insisting on certainty, closure, or judgments--participantsmay ultimately move to new truths and imaginative solutions" (165). It is about listening with an open mind, trying on ideas, doing away with certainty about any single approach, method, or idea as the only possible scholarly path.

Miroslav Penkov's East of the West: A Country in Stories

Penkov, Miroslav. East of the West: A Country in Stories. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

I read this collection of short stories on the recommendation of my daughter Helen, and her boyfriend Max. I am not disappointed but completely gratified. I found myself looking forward more than usual to the intervals during the day I get to devote to reading and am sorry to put the book down. The stories are about Bulgaria, Bulgarians, and Bulgarian expatriots in the United States, separated from their families, their language, and the tenacious remnants of culture that have survived invaders from the Ottoman Empire to the Soviet Empire. These stories portray an extreme and, I guess, blood soaked country, with an impoverished population, resisting imperial pressures at the same time that they look reluctantly to the West for something better. "Makedonija," tells the story of an old man's love for his ailing wife, "East of the West," is a tragic story of families divided by politically motivated boundaries and  a younger generation whose passions are stronger than their fear of death.  "Buying Lenin," is about a young man who, in opposition to his party faithful grandfather, tenaciously learns English with the intention of studying in the United States. Once there, despite his language skills, the young man finds that he is not connecting with fellow students or faculty, and as he isolates himself, he seeks to reconnect with his grandfather.  "The Night Horizon," is a striking story that seems to be in the present and the past at the same time. A father raises his infant daughter as a boy so that she can learn his craft of making bagpipes. At the same time, her mother becomes very ill and connected to tubes and bags of fluids. Set apart from the other children because of the way her father has raised her, her father also keeps her from her mother--no hugs or kisses, no comfort for either of them. Their isolation intensifies as Kemal and her father set out to make 100 bagpipes in hopes of curing her mother. The final story in the collection, "Devshirmeh," is both heartbreaking and hopeful as Mihail, after seven years in the United States, separated from his mother and sister, is without work, money, or his wife. However, he still has his daughter with whom he spends weekends. Mihail, who insists that his daughter speaks Bulgarian reads her Bulgarian stories, and spins his memories into an epic tale about his great grandmother, the most beautiful woman in the world, and the Turkish Sultan who spends his life languashing for her. As he tells his daughter, the story begins in blood and so it must end in blood. As Mihail, his daughter, and their friend John Martin are caught in and survive their own epic storm, he brings his tale to a close.

Penkov's stories are compelling, moving, beautifully written with hardly a word out of place. He tells each story from a new perspective, each time revealing the hearts of his characters to the reader.

Reading about Russia

Lukacs, John. June 1941: Hitler and Stalin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006

  Lukacs' irreverent style keeps this brief history of the months and days leading to Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union entertaining and a quick read. There are few people to admire in this turning point in Hitler's attempt to subdue all of Europe. Was Stalin's motivation to make and keep peace with Hitler motivated by his desire to stay out of a war for which Russia was ill prepared? Whether or not this was the case, Stalin's desire was so strong that he did not recognize Hitler's intent or chose to ignore all signs of the German preparations to invade. Lukacs points out that the many Communists suffering in Hitler's own prison camps would have lost all hope in support from Russia as this agreement was signed. As Stalin acted in good faith (seems incongruous to type Stalin and good faith so close to each other), sending to Germany promised trainloads of supplies along the railroads built by Soviet prisoners who were living in state imposed conditions of slave labor and starvation, Hitler made his plans to attack Russia. Because Stalin refused to acknowledge the many messages from not only his own ambassadors and diplomats, but from diplomats from Japan, England, and elsewhere, Hitler and his forces did not have to worry about operating in secrecy to secure a surprise attack. Germany was able to gather enough information to destroy the Soviet air force on the first day of their invasion. Lukacs delves into the psychology of Stalin and Hitler, comparing the two men and their rise to power and their shared need to do away with any any hint of opposition.

Frazier, Ian. Travels in Siberia. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

 Frazier describes his growing desire to travel across the remarkable expanse that is Siberia. As a prelude to his own journey, he becomes familiar with all of the literature provided by earlier travelers, most significantly, George Kennan, a relative of the more famous George Frost Kennan, who not only crossed Siberia but became acquainted with the Russian Siberian prison system that predated the system that was greatly expanded under the Soviets.

He begins his travels in stages, first heading to Alaska, where he waits for the opportunity to fly across the Bering Sea to Chukotka, on  Russia's eastern edge, from Nome, Alaska, a town I that you can only fly into. There are no roads leading into (or out of) Nome. (I spent a lot of time with Google maps finding the Diomedes Islands, Nome, Chukotka and able to get close enough to see the remote station on Big Diomedes...).

When he finally begins his journey, which he will undergo by car, Frazier engages two men who have their own ideas about how to get across the great land mass. Their ideas continually clash with Frazier's and Frazier responds petulantly, with exasperation, and with some self-awareness of his own inability to manage with his own personal resources. As seems to happen, the fact that Frazier can not communicate with them on an intellectual level to which he is accustomed, leads him to assume to interpret their conversation and actions as commical. Yet, they are the ones with the skill, cultural knowledge, and where-with-all to make his trip a success.

Frazier is intent on exploring references in the literature and histories he has read. Much of it represents a darker history than either of his fellow travelers are comfortable uncovering. When Frazier refuses to accept his partner's demand that he not photograph a sensitive sight, they nearly part ways.

This books is fascinating from cover to cover in all of its aspects: geography, history, the many people Frazier meets over the long period of his interest and fascination with Russia, the travails and rewards of his travels, and his evolving relationship with his continental cohort.

If you read this book .... you may find yourself plotting how you might indulge in even a small portion of this travel--perhaps, though, by train.


Petkevich, Tamara. Memoir of a Gulag Actress. Translated by Yasha Klots and Ross Ufberg. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010 (first appeared in Russia in 1993).


And here is the other side, not passing through, but inprisoned in various camps throughout the north for seven years. Petkevich was born into loyal revolutionary family, both mother and father. Her father was arrested in the 30s and sent away to camp. Petkevich became acquainted with young man while standing in lines to find out about her father's whereabouts. She eventually follows him to Frunze in Kazakhstan to marry him. Things begin their tragic course as first she hears of the Germana invasion, then the deaths of her mother and sister, her remaining sister sent to an orphanage. First her husband is arrested and then she herself is arrested under article 58, political crimes. It is 1943, Petkevich is 23. She is released at age 30 in 1950, having given birth to and lost her son to his free father. Traumatized but with strong ties to her fellow prisoners, the disaster begins again as one by one her friends are rearrested and once more sent away to exile and camps. Petkevich is heavily recruited to be an informer, but she decides that it is better to risk death than to cause others pain. Suddenly the pressure stops, and although there is no mention of a change in the government or in policy, the terror subsides (but does not disappear altogether).

Petkevich's memoir is a glimpse into prison society, the inhumane treatment, the exploitation of the imprisoned artists and intellectuals, the starvation of the body and the mind, and the amazing ability to survive and to retain spirit and integrity when there seems to be no hope, no joy, no future.

All of these books are available at a library near you!

Malcolm X

Manning Marable. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011).
Burling 1st floor  BP223.Z8 L57636 2011
Reviewed by T. Hatch

Manning Marable argued that Malcolm X was the most important black leader of the twentieth century.  On its face this is a bold assertion; Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention stands as a forceful testament to the veracity of Marable’s audacious claim. This long awaited book (twenty years in the making) makes Malcolm a human being with a wealth of foibles and strengths.  It is certain to inspire further discussion and will just as certainly anger more than a few readers.

The description of this book as simply a biography does not do it justice.  The background to the founding ideology of the Nation of Islam and the astute political commentary throughout the work belie the notion that this is merely biography.  Thus, there are numerous ways to conceptualize this magnificent book.   I have chosen to divide it into three major parts i.e. corrections to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the break with the Nation of Islam, and finally the assassination and legacy of Malcolm X.

Between 1965 and 1977 The Autobiography of Malcolm X sold over six million copies worldwide (I first read the book circa 1972 in a paperback edition).  Besides being read by millions it served as the basis of Spike Lee’s 2000 film. It was co-authored by Alex Haley (later of Roots fame) for whom Marable has a constrained contempt that smolders periodically throughout his writing.

It was because of Haley that the "Autobiography does not read like a manifesto for black insurrection, but more in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.” (p. 505) More importantly it was the decision to eliminate the Autobiography’s “missing chapters," that in Marable’s estimation was undertaken by Haley alone.  These chapters which are now privately owned, and remain in a safe in Detroit, were available to Marable for a total of fifteen minutes in a meeting with the documents’ current owner in a restaurant. The three chapters that were to appear in the Autobiography were essentially Malcolm’s political blueprint.  They were entitled “The Negro,” “The End of Christianity,” and “Twenty Million Black Muslims.” One may speculate as to the reasons why Haley, a retired career U.S. Coast Guard officer, may have suppressed these chapters.  To drastically understate the case, it is clear that he did not share Malcolm’s revolutionary vision.

Another failing of the Autobiography is the misleading and selective testimony provided by Malcolm himself. This of course is the common flaw of memoires in general and the salient reason that Mark Twain insisted that his autobiography be published a century after his death.  Malcolm’s motivation for agreeing to Haley’s proposal in the first instance was to exalt the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.  By exaggerating his criminal exploits he was only enhancing the redemptive powers of his then spiritual leader.  The reason that certain events were left unmentioned, e.g., Malcolm’s robbery of a black man in 1945, a financially inspired homosexual relationship, or that his wife was sexually unfulfilled, was undoubtedly embarrassment.

The rupture and separation from the Nation of Islam was a protracted process.  Malcolm X was a phenomenal organizer and recruiter but jealousies, especially among Elijah Muhammad’s children who feared that he would usurp the messenger’s role, were a factor in his alienation from the Chicago secretariat of the NOI.  Another fundamental problem was that to remain true to Elijah Muhammad meant remaining out of the political arena because of the messenger’s teaching that Muslims should abstain from politics. The proverbial last straw was the then growing body of evidence that Elijah Muhammad had fathered numerous children out of wedlock with NOI secretaries including the woman with whom Malcolm had once had a relationship. The break with the NOI occurred on March 8, 1964; Malcolm was killed on February 21, 1965. In that period of less than a year that he was to live he became an orthodox Sunni Muslim, intensely engaged in political activity, and a man stalked for assassination.

After the split with the NOI Malcolm founded two different organizations.  Moslem Mosque Inc. was comprised largely of former Nation members who had followed Malcolm out of the NOI for reasons of personal loyalty and the Organization of Afro-American Unity was a secular political organization, which reflected Malcolm’s growing emphasis on Pan-Africanism and Third World revolutionary struggle.  It was during this time (he spent five months of the last year of his life traveling to Africa and the Middle East) that he promoted bringing an indictment of the United States for racist crimes to the forum of the United Nations. 

Marable spends a great deal of time documenting the machinations of the assassination plots against Malcolm X.  He asserts that “The existing evidence raises the question of whether the murder of Malcolm X was not the initiative of the Nation of Islam alone” (p.515). The FBI began its surveillance of Malcolm in 1954 and the NYPD followed suit in 1957.  At a bare minimum it is clear that law enforcement knew of the imminent and specific nature of the assassination threat to Malcolm X.  Marable suggests that they may have actually played a more active role but because both the FBI and NYPD  have thousands of pages of documents relating to the assassination, that are still classified, it may be many more years before the entire truth of those events is known.

Then there is the most contentious part of any discussion of Malcolm X, his legacy. Marable argues persuasively that revisionist attempts to make Malcolm into a liberal desegregationist reformer are simply wrong.  Marable did not live to see Tu-Nehisi Coates’ piece in the May 2011 Atlantic (replete with a photo image of the President as Malcolm) “The Legacy of Malcolm X: Why His Vision Lives On in Barack Obama.”  If he had he might have pointed out that black liberation “by whatever means necessary,” the endorsement of revolutionary violence, and Malcolm’s position that blacks that voted dutifully for Democrats were “not only chumps but a traitor[s] to [their] race” are generally not positions associated with the current President.  Malcolm’s life was in the tradition of Stagger Lee, Robert Johnson, and Tupac Shakur.  He was a dissident fighting the existing social hierarchy.  There was not a before and after Malcolm or “two Malcolm X’s” as Marable put it.  Malcolm was no more a liberal than Frantz Fanon or Che Guevara.  His legacy is that of a revolutionary.

Consumers and Trash: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash

I posted an article recently about the use of the word "consumer" rather than "citizen," and Katie Dunn, formerly a librarian at Grinnell College (and greatly missed!) and currently a librarian at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY, agreed that the use of the word consumer was as she put it "weird" and "disturbing." She responded with her thoughts on a book she is currently reading. Thank you Katie!

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser. NY: Metropolitan Books, 1999
Burling 2nd floor  HD4482 .S77 1999
Reviewed by Katie Dunn

". . .  I am in the middle of this really cool book, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. It has a lot about how marketing was used to get people used to the idea of replacing things before they were actually worn out, and to give up the idea of saving/reusing/repurposing things. It shows how changes in how people think of or handle waste changed over time as a result of other things that were going on at the time. It's not a lefty polemic type book (though I tend to enjoy those, too), just a nifty history with a lot of interesting details from primary sources. Recommended!"

If you are interested in this book, you might be interested in the classic: Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher. NY: Harper & Row, 1975. Burling 2nd floor HB171 .S384 1975 or Economic Growth and Environmental Quality: How to Have Both by Barry Commoner. NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995. Science Library GE42 .E18 1995.

National Poetry Month: Featuring Grinnell Poet Mark Baechtel

Lament

By Mark Baechtel

If I watch long enough, the pencil will give up its soul.
in this it is like any thing: it has its ways, and observation
cuts down into them, a killing knife.
What can I look at without dismembering it?
The day limps home after I’m done with it, weeping,
wanting kisses and protection; the night has a long list of grievances
it wants to lodge with someone. I am guilty; greed is a sin, 
and I walk into the room like the Golem—paper in my mouth, famished eyes
peeled permanently open—whispering “Indulge me,
Indulge me, indulge me…”

Books by Mark Baechtel
Shaping the Story: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Short Fiction
Burling 3rd floor PN3373 .B135 2004

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Mark Baechtel has been Director of Grinnell's Forensic Activities since 2006. Writing has been the focus of his professional career. He writes and publishes poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, and has worked in various capacities in journalism since his graduation  from The American University in Washington, DC. Baechtel is also a graduate of the  Iowa Writers’ Workshop  and he has taught writing at Grinnell in the English Department  and the Writing Lab. He had a two-year stint  in Alaska working as Arts Editor for the Anchorage Daily News. In addition to publishing his journalism in newspapers and magazines nationwide, Baechtel's poetry and fiction has appeared in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary, The Grinnell Review, Lip Service, Poet Lore, Sou'wester and three anthologies—Open Door: A Poet Lore Anthology, Baltimore: Poems About A City and Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees, which is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press. His book on short story writing, Shaping the Story, came out in 2003 from Longman Publishers. Baechtel recently finished a novella which was a finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom competition, and is at work now on a novel entitled Renovation.

The Big Short, A Unique Look at the Most Recent Financial Crisis

Michael Lewis. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. NY: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Submitted by Grinnell College Circulation Supervisor Nathan Clubb ’10

The massive scale of the latest financial crisis and my deep interest of both economics and finance sparked a desire to learn more about how the world’s financial markets fell so far, so quickly.  The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, examines some of the key contributors to the recent financial crisis.  Lewis dives into the lives of several individuals who saw the impending mortgage and housing crisis and were able to bet against it.  He explains how several financial giants created complex mortgage bonds, turning low grade mortgage bonds into AAA rate bonds.  He looks into the greed of those who put the entire financial system at risk in order to push their profits ever higher.  He examines several important questions.  Who actually understood the risks associated with creating “artificial securities,” which  depended on housing prices always increasing to succeed?  Why did so many in the financial industry scoff at those who saw the risks associated with these mortgage bonds and credit default swaps without looking into their own holdings?  This is a story about a major underlying cause of the recent financial crisis, the small investors who saw it coming, and their persistence and eventual perseverance despite the rejection of their findings by most of the financial industry prior to the crisis.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.
Burling 2nd Floor  HC 106.83  .L5  2010

Grinnell College Libraries possesses other works by Michael Lewis including:

Moneyball:  The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. New York : W. W. Norton, c2003
Burling 2nd Floor  GV 880 .L49 2003

Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2009
Burling  2nd Floor  HB 3722 .P36 2009

Trail Fever: Spin Doctors, Rented Strangers, Thumb Wrestlers, Toe Suckers, Grizzly Bears, and Other Creatures on the Road to the White House.  New York : Knopf, 1997
Burling 2nd Floor  E 888 .L49 1997.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick

The Adjustment Bureau
Walt Giersbach ‘61

The release Mar. 4 of The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, will send some movie-goers back to their sources to review author Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre.  They should.  This seminal author’s 46 books and 121 short stories have been adapted to 10 films.  (Confession: I have 13 Dick books on my shelves and one e-book collection of stories.) 

It wasn’t always this way, in the 1950s and ‘60s when Dick was writing for pulp science fiction magazines.  Jonathan Lethem notes in the foreword to The Stories of Philip K. Dick that Dick worked to gain recognition and usually failed.  He also takes note of Dick’s “remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation.”  
Laura Miller, an editor at Salon.com, wrote, “Dick has his share of champions, ranging from rock musicians to French postmodernists.  Since his best work was published as pulp science fiction, they've had their hands full just trying to win him a little credibility.  Meanwhile, almost unremarked, Dick's sensibility has seeped wide and deep into contemporary life.” 

Some writers rise like Roman candles before fading, their books relegated to flea markets.  Fortunately, Dick has heirs and a literary executor maintaining his reputation, and I presume merchandising his work beyond his death in 1982.  In lieu of a seeing his works reissued, there are always new and used bookstores, and his official site, http://www.philipkdick.com/, to keep his work alive.

The plot of The Adjustment Bureau isn’t material here.  (A man confronts the fact that he doesn’t have free will in the face of the Bureau that guides his decision-making process.)  In any case, it was extensively rewritten by Screenwriter-Director George Nolfi.  Key to the storyline of both book and film, however, is Dick’s existential question of what is human and real.

The other films were adaptations as well, often surpassing the original story.  You’ll remember Blade Runner (based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), Screamers (based on "Second Variety"), Total Recall (based on "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"), Confessions d'un Barjo (French, based on "Confessions of a Crap Artist"), Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly.  King of the Elves is set for movie release in 2012.  Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick includes “The Adjustment Bureau” and 21 other short stories including “Paycheck” and “The Minority Report.”

Dick wrote of made-up worlds – of a farmer on Mars, a police agency that arrests criminals before they commit a crime, and an alternative history in which the Axis powers win World War II.  Often, he posed those questions of what is human and what is real.  This might also have been Dick’s own cri de coeur for never being recognized as a “real” literary writer.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, 2000, Pantheon Book, ISBN-13: 978-0-307-49777-2
[on order for Burling Library]

Featuring Asian American Authors: Theresa Cha

Submitted by Kelly Musselman '11

Theresa Cha was born in 1951 in Korea.  She moved around a lot in Korea as a child because of the war and then her family immigrated to America.  She received her B.A., M.A., and M.F.A. from University of California, Berkeley.  She also moved to Paris for her Post-Graduate study.  She began studying films and collected a number of essays on the subject entitled Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (1981).

Cha published her only book, Dictee, in the same year she was murdered.  The book is a semi-autobiographical work composed in many genres.

"The story contained in [Dictee] is of several women. First there is a Korean revolutionary, Yu guan Soon; then Joan of Arc and St. Theresa of Lisieuz make an appearance, as well as Cha's mother and Cha, herself; also included are the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone; and Hyung Soon Huo, a Korean born first-generation immigrant.[...]

Dictee is divided into nine parts, each part dedicated to one of the nine Greek muses, and it focuses on developing metaphors for loss and dislocation. The book has also been described as a collage, as it contains not only various styles of writing, such as poetry, handwritten drafts, historical documents, biographical excerpts, letters, and translation exercises, it also incorporates maps, charts, and photographs."  -- From Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. From Literature Resource Center.

For more information about Theresa Cha, please see the articles in Literature Resource Center. Or check out Dictee from Burling Library:

Dictee
Burling 3rd Floor  PS3553.H13 D5 1995

Featuring Asian American Authors: Monique Truong

Submitted by Kelly Musselman '11

Monique Truong was born in Vietnam in 1968 and immigrated to the United States in 1975.  She graduated from Yale University in 1990 and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.  She won the Bard Fiction Prize in 2003 and the Young Lions Fiction Award in 2004, both for her first book, The Book of Salt.  Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, was semi-autobiographical in nature and focused on an outsider in the town where Monique lived for four years as a child in the U.S.  Linda, the main character, has synesthesia and the story details her life and her interactions with the other residents of Boiling Springs.

"Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt is set in the household of writers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in 1920s Paris. Revolving around a Vietnamese cook the lesbian couple have hired, a man named Binh, the novel mixes reality with fiction. While Binh is a fictional character, Stein and Toklas did indeed have a Vietnamese cook in Paris, a cook mentioned only in passing in several of their writings.

Truong was born in Vietnam and was taken out of the country as a child just before the communist takeover in 1975. Her own experience as a refugee who journeyed far from her homeland, led her to wonder about the circumstances that prompted Stein and Toklas to leave America to live in France, and why their cook left Vietnam behind to move to Europe. Through the character of Binh, who narrates The Book of Salt, she explores these questions. "The book," according to Christopher Benfey in the New York Times Book Review, "is about exile: both Binh's aching distance from his native Saigon and his two Mesdames' cheerful distance from America."

In Troung's novel Binh leaves Vietnam because his father disapproved of his homosexuality and forced him out of the house. After spending several years at sea, he arrives in France, where he works for several families before joining Stein and Toklas. Binh also enjoys the pleasures of Paris's indulgent sexual underground, even having a tryst with a young Ho Chi Minh. While describing both Binh's life in Vietnam and his new life in the Stein household, The Book of Salt also includes much information about Binh's Vietnamese cooking.

"The novel is in fact largely a meditation on the senses and sensuality," a critic for Kirkus Reviews wrote. By "interweaving the narrative with suggestions of ingredients, recipes, and exotic dishes, Truong provides a savory debut novel of unexpected depth and emotion," Margaret Flanagan stated in Booklist. Shirley N. Quan in Library Journal concluded of The Book of Salt that "Truong is able to create Asian characters and blend them with historical elements to create a work that will appeal to a broad audience." -- From Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. From Literature Resource Center.

For more information about Monique Truong, please see the articles in Literature Resource Center, visit her Web site, or check out one of her books from Burling Library (or your local library!):

The Book of Salt
 Burling 3rd Floor  PS3620.R86 B66 2003
Bitter in the Mouth 
Burling 3rd Floor PS3620.R86 B57 2010


What are you reading? Let us know by emailing bookreview@grinnell.edu

La Belle Vie: Embedded, Tenured, and Intellectually Lazy – or - Why My Contempt for Corporate Media Continues to Sprout Like a Weed

Review of Essay of the Following Titles:


Myra MacPherson. “All Governments Lie”: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone. New York: Scribner, 2006 [On order for Burling Library]

Ahmed Mansour. Inside Fallujah: The Unembedded Story. Northampton Massachusetts: Olive Branch Books, 2009. [On order for Burling Library]

Nir Rosen. Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World. New York: Nation Books, 2010. [On order for Burling Library]


Chris Hedges.  Death of the Liberal Class. New York: Nation Books, 2010. [On order for Burling Library].

213.251.145.96 (WikiLeaks)

Reviewed by T. Hatch

Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “muckraker” as a pejorative way of referring to troublesome reporters.  I.F. Stone was firmly from this tradition and was proud to be nudnik number one pestering those exercising power inside the establishment. Myra MacPherson's "All Governments Lie”: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone, chronicles his career which spanned from the 1920s until 1989.  Unlike the majority of journalists, both then and now, Stone was uncorrupted by an unchaste desire for access (as well as celebrity and fortune) that continues to plague the fourth estate. 

Stone was a mainstream member of the press until he was blacklisted in 1950.  He responded to forced unemployment by becoming an entrepreneur and publishing  I.F. Stone's Weekly for the next twenty-three years. In a sense, Stone was the godfather of alternative U.S. media. It is tempting then to play a game of what would Izzy do (WWID) when viewing the behavior of mainstream media types in our own time.  It seems unlikely, for example, that Stone would have said “I just want you to know I think Navy SEALS rock” like Katie Couric did, nor would he have been paid $15 million dollars a year to say it.  And, certainly no one would have ever referred to him as “America's sweetheart.”

I.F. Stone spent the better part of his career as a determined critic of mainstream media support of the Cold War and later as one who condemned the Vietnam War as an example of the tragic consequences of the arrogance of power in both the government and the media.  Stone was always about journalism from below. He once opined that “Establishment reporters undoubtedly know a lot of things I don't. But a lot of what they know isn't true.” Yet even he would be shocked by the servile nature of corporate media today.

Al Franken in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (2003) answers the charge that the media in this country has a liberal bias by arguing that sure the media suffers from being biased but most notably from the biases of making a lot of money and being lazy. While celebrity embedded journalists where holed up in Baghdad's green zone spending their evenings over cocktails there were actually journalists in the field not acting as government propagandists doing the real work of journalism. 

Ahmed Mansour of al-Jazeera has written of his experiences covering the U.S. assaults (there were actually two separate battles) on Fallujah.  In Inside Fallujah: The Unembedded Story, he recounts how the televised murder of four Blackwater mercenaries on April 2,  2004 outraged the Bush administration to the point that they ordered that revenge be exacted against the city of Fallujah in the Anbar province of Iraq. While the killing of the Blackwater operatives was not an isolated incident the problem was that it was broadcast globally.  The U.S.'s global image had been tarnished and only an act of retribution could restore American honor. “This revenge would be exacted not only on the insurgents who committed the murder, but also on the 300,000 civilian residents of Fallujah.”

Mansour and his al-Jazeera satellite news team remained in Fallujah during the entire battle known as Operation Vigilant Resolve.  The U.S. Marines surrounded the city and set up speakers that could be heard inside the city calling for handing over the “evil doers.”  Mansour and his crew reported live on the campaign that the Marines conducted against the cultural and religious identity of Fallujah by directly targeting mosques.  They recounted how after occupying Fallujah's public hospital and banning its staff and doctors from the premises, the U.S. forces then bombed the emergency hospital that had been established.  They also related stories of Fallujans being shot by snipers as they attempted to bury their dead.  If all of this was not annoying enough to Donald Rumsfeld and L. Paul Bremer, the final straw was al-Jazeera exposing in filmed coverage the lie American officials told when they proclaimed to the world that they had declared a unilateral cease-fire effective at noon April 9, 2004. 

Mansour was accused of propagating lies, cooperating with the insurgents, and actively supporting Saddam Hussein.  As we learned later, George W. Bush went as far as to propose bombing al-Jazeera's headquarter in Doha Qatar to Tony Blair.  When this story broke on November 22, 2004 in the U.K.'s Daily Mirror the headline read “EXCLUSIVE: BUSH PLOT TO BOMB HIS ARAB ALLIES.”  In August of 2004, the compliant Ayad Allawi issued orders to close al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau.  Meanwhile al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj was being tortured at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility refusing to bend to U.S. pressure to implicate al-Jazeera as being connected to al-Qaeda. 
The U.S. vendetta against al-Jazeera went as far as to demand that one of the conditions of Sami al-Haj's release from Guantanamo was that the news agency could not be present at the airport when he arrived May 2, 2008 after six plus years in captivity with no charges ever filed replete with “enhanced interrogations.”

On November 7, 2004, days after George W. Bush's re-election, the second attack on Fallujah a.k.a. Operation Phantom fury was launched. With no al-Jazeera to contend with, the Marines attacked a city of 300,000 inhabitants to root out fewer than 2,000 belligerents if fresh recruits and locals with shotguns are included in the total.  The big lie to this operation was that the infamous al-Zarqawi and his al-Qaeda in Iraq forces were present in the city.  Although al-Jazeera was not there, the truth still leaked out (see Italy's RAI network's documentary Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre).

Nir Rosen In Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World has provided us with the gold standard of independent unembedded reportage.  This book is really about the Bush legacy in the Middle East. The war in Iraq has indeed changed everything in the Muslim World.   Instead of the neoconservative fantasy of democracy spreading throughout the Middle East it was radical Islam that had washed over the region. Aftermath is also the story of the Iraqi diaspora which as a refugee crisis surpasses even 1948. Iraqis fled to anyplace they could: Kurdistan, other neighborhoods in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and even Denmark among other places.

Rosen is remarkable for an American journalist in that he mingles among the people he covers and is actually curious enough to learn their language and something about their culture [essentially] operating without a safety net in an Arab country where people get shot on a regular basis. He is rightfully critical of the Iraq and terrorism “experts” who are largely pundits who have catered to the American administration and the occupation while never bothering to learn how to speak or read Arabic.  Many of the “experts” have never set foot in Iraq and if they have they derive lessons such as Thomas L. Friedman's comment that the American occupation of Iraq was actually “a million acts of kindness.”

This may be one of the most comprehensive and important books on the U.S. in the Middle East to date. The reader gets a view of how Nouri Maliki has now firmly established Iraqi independence albeit in an authoritarian way and at a tremendous cost.  Maybe the most valuable thing this book does is to expose the mainstream media myth that the General David Petraeus led surge was a victory.  Rosen, in graphic detail, describes the deeply flawed naked emperor of counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN). What is truly dangerous about the lessons derived by the corporate media is that COIN was not the decisive factor in Iraq they erroneously believed it to be.  Further, the mistake is compounded when the doctrine is mindlessly applied to an entirely different situation in Afghanistan.  If one is interested, Rosen did an hour and fifteen-minute program on C Span Book TV recently, which discusses this particular issue.

Chris Hedges has given us an explanation of why the media has failed so ignominiously in Death of the Liberal Class.  The media, like the other liberal institutions of the church, university, arts, labor unions, and Democratic Party, have sold their souls to cling to what little privilege is still left to them.  Because liberalism refuses to acknowledge the corporate domination of politics, a weakened liberal class seeks comfort in denouncing Islamic radicalism, just as they did communism, rather than fight the structural abuses of the corporate state.  In Hedges' view if one is not actively resisting the corporate domination of the economy and the culture of permanent war then one is part of the problem and not the solution.

Hedges argues that the beginning of the end for moribund liberalism came during the First World War. It was then that modernity in war first reared its ugly head.  Industrial production and vast wartime bureaucracies were in play and mass propaganda was utilized.  More importantly the template for the next century was set as intellectuals, seduced by war, eagerly embraced the original sin of crushing radicals so as not to be labeled unpatriotic.  After a century of corporate Uncle Tomism the liberal class defends the power elite because “it is a full member of the club.”  Hedges, following C. Wright Mills, concludes that this is so because the commercial media faithfully plays their part as essential tools for conformity in society.

The most encouraging development in the alternative media, doing their part to subvert conformity, has been the massive release of government documents through WikiLeaks. Julian Assange has angered the government and mainstream media in the U.S. in the same way al-Jazeera has infuriated the Mubarak regime in Egypt.  In both instances the veracity of what is being reported is not questioned but the messenger is attacked and smeared.  Maybe it should not come as a surprise but the most aggrieved party in the recent wave of WikiLeaks releases seems to be the corporate media itself.  Rather than rightfully hanging their heads in shame at being massively outperformed by a small group of journalistic anarchists operating on meager funding, the response instead is one of indignation.  The recent 60 minutes interview of Julian Assange is an example of this phenomenon.  Steve Kroft seemed personally offended by Assange's temerity in exposing the falsehoods of the powerful with whom Kroft – allegedly an investigative journalist himself – rubs shoulders in a world of celebrity access.

The recent WikiLeaks release of over 250,000 documents makes for fascinating reading.  Despite the authorities initially attempting to prevent the reading of this material by forcing WikiLeaks to change servers a couple of times, the address 213.251.145.96 is on my bookmarks. Reading these is like swimming against a swift current because there is never an end to it.  But two themes come up over and over again.  In the first instance the contempt that those in power have for those whom they supposedly serve is immense.  Secondly, considering the nature of their sleazy business it is understandable that they wish to operate under the veil of secrecy.

When Daniel Ellsberg spoke at Grinnell College in 2005 he proposed then that events like the invasion of Iraq might be stopped by providing a place on the Internet where somebody – such as Colin Powell for instance – could leak documents.  It seemed far-fetched to me at the time, and now as well, that the Secretary of State leaking documents to an Internet site would derail an imperial war. Ellsberg took the position that while seemingly futile it is was still worth a try. Better to have blown the whistle and lost than to never have blown the whistle at all was his position.  In retrospect the Internet might be the proper medium, but the leaks are going to have to come from below, e.g., the case of PFC Bradley Manning. 

I. F. Stone worked as a journalist in the days before the Internet.  But the fundamental guiding principles are the same now as they were then.  Real journalism and real change in society occur when those from below refuse to be corrupted and play along any further.     














 

Readings from Poland and Istanbul: Zbigniew Herbert and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, Oberlin alumna and occasional contributor to this blog currently headquartered in Istanbul, writes this about Zbigniew Herbert's Collected Poems, 1956-1998:

"I was handed this book of poetry a couple days ago and I love it more than I can really remember loving any book of poetry."

The Collected Poems, 1956-1998. Translated and edited by Alissa Valles with additional translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott.

Burling 3rd Floor PG 7167 .E64 A2 2007

Helen is currently reading A Mind at Peace by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. translated from the Turkish by Erdağ Gökna. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2008.

Burling 3rd Floor PL248.T234 H8913 2008
She summarizes the text:

"A Mind at Peace is divided into three sections, the first of which is called “İsan,” after Mumtaz’s cousin who took Mumtaz in after the death of his parents. İsan is ill, bed-ridden, and very possibly near death. Under these circumstances Mumtaz first begins his ruminating. He wanders from place to place, from Mosque to Mosque, around the Golden Horn and along the Bosphorus."

To read Helen's full review follow this link.