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Book Rate: July 11, 2006
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes...
Maybe.
Posted: July 11, 2006
Note: The following entries come from Robert
Birnbaum and Matt
Borondy
Books covered this week include:
A Farewell to Arms
(Unabridged) by Ernest Hemingway, read by John Slattery
Great Ideas, Series Two
from Penguin Books
Revolutionary Characters: What Made
the Founders Different by Gordon Wood
Moonlight Hotel
by Scott Anderson
Apathy and Other Small Victories
by Paul Neilan
Talk Talk by T.C.
Boyle
Black Like You by
John Strausbaugh
Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over
for Bush by Eric Boelhert
A
Farewell to Arms (Unabridged)
by Ernest Hemingway, read by John Slattery (Simon &
Schuster Audio, 9 hours)
No doubt you have heard of Ernest Hemingway. (OK, OK—allow
me my small barbs aimed the Paris Hilton/Tom Cruise-crazed culture.)
There is a new series of Hemingway audio texts, including this,
his classic of classics, A Farewell to Arms. And to reiterate
my feelings on audio books, they are not to be seen as substitutes—simply
an additional iteration like the movie.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Great
Ideas, Series Two
from Penguin Books (12 books)
If this is not a great idea I don’t know what a great idea
is... Nicely designed (“a unique type-driven design that highlights
the bookmaker’s art”), nicely printed series monographs
by (arguably) some of the world’s great thinkers. This, the
second in a series, includes Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,
Christine de Pizan’s The City of Ladies, Marx and
Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, Veblen’s
Conspicuous Consumption, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann
and the Holocaust, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,
Castiglione’s How to Achieve True Greatness, Francis
Bacon’s Of Empire, Rousseau’s The Social
Contract, Plato’s The Symposium, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and Thoreau’s
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Revolutionary
Characters: What Made the Founders Different
by Gordon Wood (Penguin Press, 304 pages)
His 1992 Pulitzer prize-winning Radicalism of the American
Revolution, and most recently The Americanization of Benjamin
Franklin, suggest that Gordon Wood, who teaches at Brown University,
can be counted on to spare readers and students the hagiographic
myth-fostering present in the recent wave of Founding Father biographies—David
McCullough’s John Adams, Ron Chernow’s Alexander
Hamilton, Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers,
and Walter Isaacson’s Benjamin Franklin. From George
Washington to Aaron Burr, Wood devotes each of his eight chapters
to a different revolutionary leader. Edward Renehan (Dark Genius
of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the
Robber Barons) writes:
“Wood has never failed to produce vibrant and interesting
commentary on the Founders. He remains true to form here, selecting
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton,
James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr for particular
attention. To each of these gentlemen, Wood applies a key rubric:
studying their individual moral characters and their view of moral
character as a concept… Whether the 'Age of Paine,' the
'Age of Reason' or both, the fact remains that the diverse Founders
(with all their varied agendas and foibles) populated and defined
the era for good or ill. Wood paints these fascinating characters
in all their contrasting and conflicting colors, and does so quite
brilliantly.”
-Robert Birnbaum
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Moonlight
Hotel
by Scott Anderson (Doubleday, 384 pages)
Unlike his inestimable brother Jon
Lee, war correspondent Scott Anderson works both sides of the
literary divide, writing nonfiction, as in The Man Who Tried
to Save the World and The Four O’Clock Murders
and War Zone (with Jon Lee), and his first novel, Triage.
In his day job he contributes to Vanity Fair, Esquire, Harper’s,
Outside, and others, being a regular visitor to such hellholes
as Beirut, Northern Ireland, Chechnya, Israel, Sudan, Sarajevo,
and El Salvador, among others.
Here’s a synopsis of Moonlight Hotel:
David Richards is a mid-level diplomat assigned to the sleepy
Middle Eastern kingdom of Kutar. Richards spends his days monitoring
small development projects and his nights attending embassy cocktail
parties and bedding various visiting American women and diplomats’
wives.
The time is the early 1980s, when the American Empire has begun
to tentatively flex its muscles once again. Kutar is a diplomatic
backwater, a former British colony, barely a blip on the State
Department’s radar back in Washington. For centuries desultory
tribal conflict has flared sporadically in the arid hills hundreds
of miles from the coastal capital of Laradan, and as the book
opens rumors of a new skirmish there reach the city’s inhabitants.
As always, the residents of Laradan ignore the stories, but this
time something is different: The Americans decide to do something
about it.
As any casual student of geopolitics might guess, this is bad
news for the people of Kutar. Urged on by a Kurtzian American
military advisor named Colonel Munn, the little-used Kutaran army
marches into the hills. In quick order they are decimated, and
with stunning rapidity the heights above Laradan are occupied
by a rebel force possessed of the government’s abandoned
artillery. Soon the Americans, and all other foreigners, are ordered
from the country and leave the people of Laradan to their fate.
For his own deeply personal reasons, David chooses to stay on
in the besieged city, and moves into the Moonlight Hotel, a crumbling
colonial dinosaur. There he is joined by an eclectic assortment
of other foreigners, including a senior British diplomat, an acid-tongued
Romanian countess, and Amira, an aristocratic young woman who
previously spurned David’s romantic advances. Together,
this small community tries to maneuver over the radically-changed
landscape of the beleaguered city, while holding out hope that
the outside world might yet come to its rescue. Then the shooting
begins in earnest.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Apathy
and Other Small Victories
by Paul Neilan (St. Martin's Press, 231 pages)
Goddam this book is hilarious. Seriously. My neighbors keep wondering
what the hell I'm laughing at. This book is what I'm laughing at,
neighbors. It's about this guy who sleeps in handicapped stalls
and is accused of murdering his clueless dentist's hearing-impaired
assistant. The author is from Portland. His name is Paul Neilan.
I don't know much about him beyond that, except that his book is
freaking hilarious. Is that enough for you, people who read book
reviews? I thought so. Now go buy it from Amazon so I can get like
forty cents.
-Matt Borondy
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Talk
Talk
by T.C. Boyle (Viking, 340 pages)
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Old pal Tom
Boyle says about his 11th novel, Talk Talk, "It
has a contemporary setting and deals with identity theft. As I began
to explore the issue of identity theft as it is used for criminal
purposes, I found myself meditating on identity in general--that
is, how we distinguish ourselves from each other, how we know who
we are in our own minds. Of course, if you're able to read this
you will understand that we know who we are because we have been
acculturated and because we have have learned to use language. This
further meditation on language led me to the creation of my heroine,
Dana Halter, and the subject of the book that she herself is writing
on the Wild Child of Aveyron, who was found at the age of eleven
or twelve living ferally in Napoleonic France, and who, despite
the efforts of a truly extraordinary teacher, was unable to acquire
language. That novella--of 66 pages--was originally attached to
the text of Talk Talk as an appendix, but I have deleted
it from the novel and published it separately in McSweeney's
19.”
Here's an
excerpt:
She was running late, always running late, a failing of hers,
she knew it, but then she couldn't find her purse and once she
did manage to locate it (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on
the coat tree in the front hall), she couldn't find her keys.
They should have been in her purse, but they weren't, and so she'd
made a circuit of the apartment — two circuits, three —
before she thought to look through the pockets of the jeans she'd
worn the day before, but where were they? No time for toast. Forget
the toast, forget food. She was out of orange juice. Out of butter
and cream cheese. The newspaper on the front mat was just another
obstacle. Piss-warm — was that an acceptable term? Yes —
piss-warm coffee in a stained mug, a quick check of lipstick and
hair in the rearview mirror, and then she was putting the car
in gear and backing out onto the street.
She may have been peripherally aware of a van flitting by
in the opposite direction, the piebald dog sniffing at a stain
on the edge of the pavement, someone's lawn sprinkler holding
the light in a shimmer of translucent beads, but the persistent
beat of adrenaline — or nerves, or whatever it was —
wouldn't allow her to focus. Plus, the sun was in her eyes, and
where were her sunglasses? She thought she remembered seeing them
on the bureau, in a snarl of jewelry — or was it the kitchen
table, next to the bananas, and she'd considered taking a banana
with her, fast food, potassium, roughage, but then she figured
she wouldn't because with Dr. Stroud it was better to have nothing
at all in your stomach. Air. Air alone would sustain her.
To rush, to hurry, to fret: Old English and Latinate roots,
the same sad connotative stab of meaning. She wasn't thinking
clearly. She was stressed, stressed out, running late. And when
she got to the four-way stop at the end of the block she felt
momentarily blessed because there was no one there to stop for,
yet even as she made a feint of slowing and shifted from neutral
to second with a quick deft plunge of clutch and accelerator,
she spotted the patrol car parked just up the street in the bruised
shadow of an SUV.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Black
Like You: Blackface Whiteface Insult & Imitation in American
Popular Culture
by John Strausbaugh (Tarcher Penguin, 370 pages)
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Black Like You is an exploration of race relations in
American popular culture. Which digresses to the now-taboo entertainment,
blackface, that understandably is now viewed as purely racist mockery
and has been disappeared from most accounts of American cultural
history. Strausbaugh argues its impact has been deep and longlasting.
Which can be seen in a manifold areas of pop culture: in rock and
roll and hip-hop; in vaudeville, Broadway, and drag performances;
in Mark Twain and "gangsta lit"; in the earliest filmstrips
and Hollywood's 2004 White Chicks; on radio and television; in advertising
and product marketing; and American vernacular. With great acumen,
Erin
Aubry Kaplan asserts, "Well aware of the toxic nature of
the subject, Strausbaugh presents Black Like You as a breezy
conflation of American history, social theory, essay, anecdote,
criticism and pop-culture analysis; he stomps his way through terrain
most contemporary white authors fear to tread. The good news is
that his belief that a legacy of blackface still holds sway over
much of the American popular imagination is encouraging in this
age of let's-move-on racial denial. His core argument is that instead
of dismissing blackface as an embarrassing, isolated chapter in
our history (something we tend to do with slavery, despite the fact
that it went on for 250 years), we should give the phenomenon its
due. We should more closely examine the discomfiting, almost pornographic
intersection of black and white that was minstrelsy's essence. This
is a worthy challenge..."
-Robert Birnbaum
____________
Lapdogs:
How the Press Rolled Over for Bush
by Eric Boelhert (Free Press, 333 pages)
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Simon and Schuster (a lapdog of Viacom) asserts about Lapdogs—"is
the first book to demonstrate that, for the entire George W. Bush
presidency, the news media have utterly failed in their duty as
watchdog for the public. In blistering prose, Eric Boehlert reveals
how, time after time, the press chose a soft approach to covering
the government, and as a result reported and analyzed crucial events
incompletely and even inaccurately. From WMDs to Valerie Plame to
the NSA's domestic spying, mainstream fixtures such as The New
York Times, CBS, CNN, and Time magazine too often
ignored the administration's missteps and misleading words, and
did not call out the public officials who betrayed the country's
trust. Throughout both presidential campaigns and the entire Iraq
war to date, the media acted as a virtual mouthpiece for the White
House, giving watered-down coverage of major policy decisions, wartime
abuses of power, and egregious mistakes -- and sometimes these events
never made it into the news at all. Finally, in Lapdogs,
the press is being held accountable by one of its own."
Here's some of the blistering
prose:
It must have been an awkward encounter when Bob Woodward
sat down for two hours at his Washington, D.C., attorney's M Street
office on November 14, 2005, to answer questions, under oath,
posed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Woodward, of Watergate
and Washington Post fame, was the most famous reporter
of his generation, and Fitzpatrick, by the fall of 2005, was the
most talked-about investigator in America. Appointed to uncover
who inside the Bush administration had leaked the identity of
Valerie Plame, a CIA operative married to a prominent war critic,
Fitzgerald's media-centric investigation had already put one New
York Times reporter, Judith Miller, behind bars. His probe
had also issued subpoenas to half a dozen influential Beltway
reporters as well as most members of Bush's inner circle. Fitzgerald's
pursuit had become the most fevered Beltway whodunit of the Bush
presidency.
The sit-down between Woodward and Fitzgerald must have been
awkward for a variety of reasons. Awkward because Woodward had
made a handsome living starring in the role as the capitol's velvet-gloved
inquisitor of people in power. For decades the soft-spoken Woodward
had asked the questions. Now he was told to answer them. Awkward
because Woodward, through his various television appearances during
the previous months, had made it quite clear that he thought little
of Fitzgerald's investigation, that it was "disgraceful,"
that Fitzgerald was a "junkyard prosecutor," and that
the Plame leak had caused the CIA no harm. And awkward also because
just weeks after Fitzgerald issued indictments in the case, targeting
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby for obstructing justice and lying to Fitzgerald's grand
jury, a source of Woodward's came forward and told Fitzgerald
that he'd actually told the star reporter about Plame's identity
long before Libby started chatting up reporters in 2003. In other
words, Woodward had been sitting on the scoop for more than two
years. Woodward insisted the information he had received about
Plame was insignificant; not newsworthy. But if his scoop had
been revealed months earlier -- let alone years earlier -- it
would have created enormous political and legal problems for the
Bush White House. That Woodward, who in 1972 famously kept digging
into a story of White House corruption while much of the mainstream
media waved off Watergate as a second-rate burglary, was now serving
as the media elite's unofficial ambassador -- trying to wave off
the Fitzgerald investigation and trying to keep crucial information
under wraps -- only hinted at the larger ironies in play.
It was ironic that a federal prosecutor was quizzing a journalist,
trying to pry out of him sensitive information that was damaging
to the Bush White House and information the investigate reporter
had refused to share with the public, let alone his editors. The
strange truth was that, at least in regards to the Plame investigation,
the special prosecutor had supplanted the timid D.C. press corps
and become the fact finder of record. It was Fitzgerald and his
team of G-men -- not journalists -- who were running down leads,
asking tough questions and, in the end, helping inform the American
people about possible criminal activity inside the White House.
For two years, the press had shown little interest in that touchy
task and if it hadn't been for Fitzgerald's work, the Plame story
would have quietly faded away like so many other disturbing suggestions
of Bush administration misdeeds. (Lots of frustrated news consumers
must have been wondering where was the special prosecutor for
Enron, Halliburton, and prewar intelligence?) As conservative
blogger Glenn Reynolds noted in the wake of Woodward's embarrassing
revelation about his nonaction, "This is Watergate in reverse.
The press is engaged in the cover-up here. If everybody in the
press simply published everything they knew about this, we would
have gotten to the bottom of this in a week instead of dragging
it out for two or three years."
Woodward's decision to sit on the Plame scoop seemed to confirm
that Beltway access had trumped news reporting. (At the time,
Woodward was hard at work on his third Bush book, which required
continued entrée to administration sources.) But the puzzling
inaction, which could have extended indefinitely had Woodward's
source not contacted Fitzgerald himself, highlighted a much more
pervasive problem: how the mainstream news media completely lost
their bearings during the Bush years and abdicated their Fourth
Estate responsibility to report without fear or favor and to ask
uncomfortable questions to people in power. And how, most dramatically,
the press came to fear the facts and the consequences of reporting
them. Morphing into a status quo-loving group, the mainstream
media became trapped in a dysfunctional hate/love relationship;
the Republican White House hated the press, but the press loved
the White House. Or at least feared it. Yes, there were exceptions,
and some within the mainstream media during the Bush years produced
shining examples of industrious reporting and refused to adopt
the telltale timidity. Many of those examples are cited in this
book. But taken as a whole, the mainstream media's political reporting
during Bush's first five years in office was infected with unfortunate
nervousness. The mainstream media filter favored Bush.
-Robert Birnbaum
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Want more? See last week's reviews.
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