Becoming by Michelle Obama

Hardcover, 426 pgs, Pub Nov 13th 2018 by Crown, ISBN13: 978152476313, Lit Awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Memoir & Autobiography (2018)

Who would have guessed there would be two such popular and talented writers in one family as there are in the Obamas? I guess we will have to wait to see if their kids, Malia and Sasha, have inherited the gene. Michelle’s book is ravishingly interesting and so smoothly written I was happy sitting there and reading it at the neglect of less pleasurable duties.

The fairy-tale aspect of growing up “with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighborhood” and ascending to the most admired and coveted house in the land is not emphasized until the last pages. Michelle looks back at Barack’s eight years in office, and how he was followed by a con man with a filthy mouth. The contrast between the two men is not subtle, and neither is Michelle’s distress.

Before the disappointing turnover at the end of Barack’s time in office, the story is filled with hope—hope that Americans will see change for the better in their opportunities, schooling, wages, and leadership. Michelle’s emphasis mostly stays squarely on her own hopes rather than those of her husband, and focuses on her plans to institute mentoring for teens of color, and the building of a system for providing good food for kids in schools.

Michelle made no bones about the fact that she was more a homebody than her cerebral husband who, in one anecdote, laid in bed late one night gazing at the ceiling. When asked what he was thinking about, he sheepishly answered, “income inequality.”

Michelle had come from a family that was large and loud and lived close by one another in Chicago. After claiming an undergraduate degree at Princeton, Michelle moved on to Harvard Law, taking advantage of the momentum. the opportunity, and the expectation that she would achieve what her parents did not. She may not have been timid, but she wasn’t exactly expansive in her view of herself or her life. She acknowledges Barack introduced her to a larger world with different but equally important personal and societal goals and expectations that are shared by millions.

I have seen in comments about this book that Michelle dodged important questions about Barack’s time in office that involved decisions the two of them would have made together, e.g., Reverend Wright, etc. and while her opinion may have added something to the narrative, I tend to agree with “write your own darn story” pushback. Michelle’s considered take on what it meant to her and her family when some people seemed to lay in wait to broadcast misinterpretations of her campaign stump speeches makes it clear we are lucky to get anything more. It is easy for us to forget Michelle was an actual surrogate for Barack. She had a heavy speechmaking schedule and drew such crowds that she finally scored a plane and a team of her own.

Probably the thing I am most impressed with—and what Michelle herself is most proud of—is her raising two consequential young girls in the fishbowl that is the White House. The girls survived, even thrived, in that place, and hopefully will have absorbed some of the grace and resilience of their parents. What we don’t know is what Michelle’s next act will be, for she is still a relatively young and IVy- trained lawyer. We know she doesn’t like politics, never has, but would still like to make a contribution.

Just having withstood the pressures of the White House without cracking and having taken the time to write a book that encourages others to see themselves as aspirants to national office is something to be thankful for. I am also grateful she provided the home life and support Barack needed in such a difficult job with such a difficult Congress. It wasn’t easy for either of them and in many ways it did not turn out as they had envisioned.

The Obamas could have had a more placid life without trying to handle affairs of state, so their attempt to share their strong family values was a kind of blessing. The book is a wonderfully smooth read (or audio!), and is hard-to-put-down. The audio is read by Michelle herself and therefore places the emphases where she wanted. Published by Crown and Random House Audio in North America, this book sold more copies in the U.S. than any other book in 2018 and will be published in 24 languages.

A section of color photographs is reason enough to choose the book over the audio, but the audio is interesting because Michelle herself reads it. She has chosen to discuss things we are intrinsically interested in, like choosing a college, a major, a job, and a husband, and while many of us have had similar decisions to make we would not have had Michelle’s set of choices. The book is absolutely worthwhile.



Tweet

Evicted: Poverty & Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Hardcover, 418 pgs, Pub Mar 1st 2016 by Crown, ISBN13: 9780553447439, Lit Awards: Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2017), PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction (2017), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Current Interest (2016), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2016), Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction (2017), Kirkus Prize Nominee for Nonfiction (2016), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Nonfiction (2016)

This book won a number of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, for uncovering a housing problem in America that appears to disproportionately affect low-income renters and keep them in a cycle of perpetual uncertainty: eviction. A beautifully written and involving set of individual family case studies, this sociological work casts light on a problem that has developed over time and has not been well understood to date.

Desmond is able to involve his readers in the lives of the people he describes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin because he includes many details of their circumstances which we may recognize. The decision-making and determination of these folks to get out of the cycle of eviction they face is not flawed. They work with imperfect tools and face a constantly renewing mountain to climb starting from a new lower low with each instance of rent non-payment and subsequent eviction.

Addiction doesn’t appear to be the most common cause of eviction, at least among the people whose stories Desmond shares with us, though it does figure in the lives of many families he describes. Lending money to addicts is a constant drain on everyone’s scarce resources. Neither does wild over-spending appear to be a common cause of poverty. Desmond will argue that wild overspending on inappropriate items is a result of poverty, not a cause.

Hard as it is for us to admit, exploitation by landlords appears to contribute hugely to reasons low-income tenants cannot be free from the cycle of eviction. The slumlords to whom Desmond introduces us extract outsized profits from very low-end housing without necessary inputs like plumbing, painting, repairs. This leads to families not valuing their abode, children being placed in unsafe conditions, and adds to the burdens of rent-payers.

Recognizing that renting out housing at the low end of the market is not a charity, we must still condemn excessive profit at the client’s expense. What are excessive profits? If these notions are not universally recognized, they need to be challenged in court. Desmond points out that most tenants facing eviction do not show up in court to challenge charges against them or to raise property maintenance issues. These huge, messy problems involve individuals with extenuating circumstances. Sometimes the problems appear circular, and insoluble.

Desmond will argue that housing should be considered a basic human right, like clean drinking water, protection for elders, and universal education. This proposal may cause catalepsy among libertarians. Conservatives for small government might agree, however, that we don’t want to live in a country where people are living and/or dying on the streets, unable to free themselves from a cycle of dependence. I think we all can agree with that. The question remains: what is the best way to evict people from poverty?

Desmond suggests a universal voucher for all low-income families in his epilogue, but I won’t repeat his argument here. You need all the pieces to make sense of what he is proposing. It helps to see the scope of the problem by reading the book—no hardship because it is so well written—but you can also just go to the Epilogue. I do want to point to a couple of interesting observations he makes earlier regarding fixes made so far to address poverty and homelessness but which developed unexpected consequences.

People using vouchers are allowed to use those vouchers in any community in states that accept vouchers, which means low-income renters could try to escape the inner city which can be dangerous and unkempt. However, prospective tenants often encounter a reluctance on the part of landlords to rent to families with children, pets, or smoking habits. Renters themselves don’t like the greater adherence to immutable rules that are common in more upscale locations, and the lack of leniency in the case of under-payments.

Currently landlords in low-income housing areas do not want to accept housing vouchers and rent assistance in most of their properties because “they didn’t want to deal with the program's picky inspectors.” There are legal limits to the degradation on a property which accepts government-issued vouchers. This is true everywhere, but those on housing assistance get checked on. This “government interference” some conservatives (and slumlords) decry. So much for the market policing itself.

The option of “working off the rent” is only taken advantage of by male tenants, Desmond found. This option should have appeared more possible for women as well, it seems, but it parallels the phenomenon of exchanging sex for rent which appears to be an exclusively a female option. Desmond did not encounter this among his interviewees.

Among interviewees who were evicted, few felt pity for others in similar circumstances: they often felt “it was their own fault” for unsound choices they’d made and were disinclined to help. This included Christians and church-going neighbors, though examples of times they’d helped in the past were evident. Evicted tenants were reluctant to ask family, or were refused if asked.

This is one problem among many in this country. The world is changing utterly, and fast. We need to fundamentally rethink how we want business and government to run going forward. Looking back nostalgically is the wrong solution, I am convinced.

Perhaps something like an offer for free college but also a requirement for national service could be brainstormed. If we sent youth out to be witnesses in these problem areas, have them suggest & develop solutions, and follow through, e.g., gaining new skills building better housing, repairing old housing stock, using their legal skills attending law court for strapped tenants, I think both sides might get something from the experience. Sociologists, finance, nursing, social welfare, law, teachers...everybody has something to offer.

One of the most heartbreaking results of this cycle of evictions is its effect on the children. Trying to round up the children for schooling each day when they have been displaced so many times--in one case Desmond found the child moved schools five times. Some of the children watch a parent hauled off for doing something illegal under pressure to round up enough cash to keep themselves housed. Violence explodes suddenly and cannot be controlled. The children need more attention, and protection, but the adults do, too. Few among us have that kind of resilience.

The problems that befall individuals and families are inconceivable to those among us without similar constraints. Religious groups could ramp up their services and showcase their empathy and yet not feel as though they were laboring alone in the wilderness. We can see how that has impacted their outreach in the past.

Does it make any difference if low-income people live among wealthier neighbors? I believe it could allow them to see how others live, what other choices and opportunities are out there, and allow them to get help from neighbors in the normal way we all do. Dilution of the problem—is it coercive if we eliminate “low-income” housing altogether? Anyway, just thinking…



You can buy this book here: Tweet

On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Paperback, 128 pgs Pub March 28th 2017 by Tim Duggan Books Orig TitleOn Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century ISBN13: 9780804190114

Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University, has written a pamphlet reminiscent of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense written in 1776, at America’s beginning. Snyder’s pamphlet contains twenty admonitions for us to consider as we pay attention to the political environment we see right now in the United States. The first sentence of Snyder’s Prologue brings us right back to our founding fathers, the Constitution, and the democratic republic they envisioned.

It’s a small book, the quarter-page size running slightly more than one hundred pages. A word about the publisher, Tim Duggan Books of Crown Publishing: Duggan's list is fascinating and diverse, and heavily international. This is the kind of work I crave, and gravitate towards. In any case, the relative brevity of this particular book may leave a few notions unclear that Snyder fully intended to illuminate for us. We need to be careful in reading, combing it over until our questions are clarified, calling them out and talking with others about them if not.

There is no reason for me to deny I agree with Snyder’s take on the present administration and the henchmen that carry out the damaging policies dreamed up by our thoughtless, fearful leader. For that reason I was all set to clap through a review, stamping it with my approval. Imagine my surprise, then, to find myself slowing down and viewing what Snyder has decided to spotlight with a critical eye.

The very first point Snyder makes caused me to back up, circle around, scratch my head until it finally dawned on me that we probably agree. What Snyder says is 1. Do Not Obey in Advance which in my parlance would be, “Do not anticipate your leader’s orders.” The example he gives is

“In 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the SS took the initiative to devise the methods of mass killing without orders to do so. They guessed what their superiors wanted and demonstrated what was possible. It was far more than Hitler had thought.”

Snyder goes on to say that “anticipatory obedience means adapting instinctively, without reflection.” Yes, I agree that the eagerness to be agreeable can make fools of us. Even if we are in the uniformed services, Snyder argues, we have the responsibility to 7. Be Reflective if You Must Be Armed. “Be ready to say no” and stand up for our values.

19. Be a Patriot. The word patriot has been so bandied about we are no longer sure what it means any more. Snyder tries to help us think critically about this concept. In addition, he exhorts us to remain skeptical and 11. Investigate and still 10. Believe in Truth. The world is changing rapidly and dangers are all around us. We must 17. Listen for Dangerous Words and do not allow words to be hijacked and used against us. We can reclaim our vocabulary and the language of reason, but it requires speech, action, dissent.

To give us feel a measure of stability and solidarity in a political world in which we no longer have faith, Snyder suggests we 2. Defend Institutions: we created institutions to protect citizens from changes in attitudes and government. We must defend them now, when they come under attack, so that they continue to be able to protect us when needed.

And when Snyder exhorts us to 3. Beware the One-Party State, he means

“We believe we have checks and balances [in government], but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.”

We must be strong, 18. Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives, and 20. Be As Courageous As You Can. "If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny." When I read these words I thought of the bravery of the man during the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 who was wearing a white shirt and holding grocery bags in each hand as he stood in front of rolling tanks. It wasn’t just that man who showed extraordinary bravery, but the soldier in the tank whose orders were to reach the square. He stopped, disobeying orders, and for all he knew, would bear the wrath of his superiors. That’s when we know the values hold.

This book is also available on audio, produced by Random House Audio and read by the author. A sample is given below. #Resist





You can buy this book here: Tweet

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

Hardcover, 259 pgs, Pub Sept 6th 2016 by Crown, ISBN13: 9780553418811, Lit Awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science & Technology (2016)

O’Neil deserves some credit right off the bat for not waiting until her retirement from the hedge fund where she worked to tell us the secrets of how corporations use big data (our data). Underlying the collection and use of big data is an attempt to utilize efficiencies in the market place for goods, money, and talent. Big data ostensibly can also “set us free” from time constraints and uneven knowledge dispersal. Conversely the opposite is often true. We are at the mercy of how our own data is shredded and packaged, and errors in the model can mean mutually assured destruction—for the school, corporation, family.

The book starts with examples any readers who actually picked up this book to read might recognize: the chances of getting into a major university. O’Neil doesn’t go into the actual algorithms but just explains the variables chosen to populate the algorithms. Just when I was wondering who this book is targeted at, since after all, we kind of know how to get into university already, she comes up with examples of big data messing with aspirations that are still (hopefully not) in our futures.

She addresses the real pain-in-the-ass nature of minimum wage jobs where the inadequate part-time hours are constantly changing to maximize profits for owners and to screw with employees ability to plan their life, their children’s lives, and the children’s caretaker’s lives. O’Neil addressed the situation in 2009 when Amex decided to reduce the risk of credit card nonpayment by reducing the credit ceilings on users who shopped at certain stores, like Walmart. She shows us the way micro-targeting ends up using data to perpetuate inequities in opportunity and “social capital.”

The hardest part of reading this book (there is no actual math), was keeping my mind on what O’Neil was saying. Every time she'd mention another example of the ways big data was screwing us over, my mind would wander to experiences of my own, or ones I’d heard from friends, family, or others. This is real stuff, and just when I thought that it would be an excellent book for those with skills and interest in social justice to take to an interview with Google, Amazon, or a big bank, in she comes with another example of how the “fixes” are almost worse than the disease (Facebook’s method of who your friends are determining your credit risk).

But O’Neil reminds us big data, mathematics, algorithms, etc. aren’t going to go away.

"Data is not going away. Nor are computers—much less mathematics. Predictive models are, increasingly, the tools we will be relying on to run our institutions, deploy our resources, and manage our lives. But as I’ve tried to show throughout this book, these models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about which data to pay attention to—and which to leave out. Those choices are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral."

Exactly. We still have to use our brains, not just our computers. It is critical that we inject morality into the process or it will always be fundamentally unfair in some way or another, especially if the intent is to increase profits for one entity at the expense of another. One simply can’t include enough variables or specifics. Some universities have begun to audit the algorithms—like Princeton’s Transparency and Accountability Project—by masquerading as people of differing backgrounds and seeing what kind of treatment these individuals receive from online marketers.

O’Neil suggests that sometimes data might be used to good effect by targeting frustrated online commenters with solutions to their issues: i.e., affordable housing info, or by searching out possible areas of workplace or child abuse and targeting that area with resources. She wades into national election data and notes that only swing states get candidates attention, suggesting, by the way, that the electoral college has outlived its usefulness to the citizenry. Algorithms are not going to administer justice or democracy unless we find a way to use them as a tool to root out inequities and try to find ways to deliver needed services where they are deficient.

When I look at the totality of what O’Neil has discussed, I am inclined to think this book is best targeted to thoughtful high schoolers and college-aged students who are thinking about planning their careers, who have a penchant for mathematical and computer modeling, and who think their dream job might be with an online giant. I’d be happy to be disabused of this notion if someone wants to challenge my thought that much of this information is known to many of us who have been out of school for awhile and who have been paying attention to our online experiences and junk mail solicitations. But it is always interesting to read someone as coherent and on the side of social justice as Ms. O’Neil.

It might be noted that Jaron Lanier in Who Owns the Future? (2013) also talks about the use of big data to steer our thinking and makes a preliminary suggestion that individuals should be paid for their data—for data that is collected about them, for profit. It is an interesting discussion as well. Love these intersections of technology and humanity.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists by Peter Bergen

Hardcover, 416 pages published April 12th 2016 by Crown (first published February 10th 2015)

When America began experiencing religious-motivated extremism in the 1990's, officials theorized that the people perpetrating acts of terror were psychiatric cases, loners, angry and destitute, or out of step with society. Bergen asks several questions in this book: who are the terrorists, what is their path to radicalization, and is there a way to short circuit their deadly plans? Looking over hundreds of cases of homegrown jihadism, Bergen chooses several that illustrate some “classic” characteristics and discusses how those cases ended up. He tells us that we may never know why an individual chooses to become a suicide bomber among innocents, but if we recognize the patterns, we might be able to intervene at some critical stage to turn the motivation.

Shortly after 9/11, the work of a long-time CIA psychiatrist contravened most of the then-current suppositions about terrorists, revealing that the majority of “men who joined were middle-class, relatively well-educated, mentally stable and often married with children.” But another man, a radical jihadist himself, thought the top-down bureaucracy of Al Qaeda too inflexible to last and recommended spontaneous operations, or leaderless jihad. No direct affiliation with a terrorist organization has become a prevalent form of successful terrorism in this country in the decades since 9/11, though individuals might receive encouragement, perhaps training, and some resources from overseas, or from websites created overseas. The type of person involved often has some education and appears adjusted until there is a “cognitive opening” (a shock, disappointment, or tragedy) that makes individuals question their place in the world. Gradually they may begin to limit their circle of friends to those who agree with their worldview, may change their appearance, and try to convert others. Only a third of those examined were employed at the time of their change because the radicalism takes over one’s life. Bergen suggests mosques could have an important role in recognizing and defusing Islamic-type radicalism.

There were seventy-two plots against America by homegrown jihadists since 9/11, and Bergen details some of them here. He also points out that the NYPD and the FBI were aggressive in pinpointing nascent aggression and set up stings to get individuals out of circulation.

“Al-Qaeda’s core group in Pakistan has mounted six terrorist plots (of varying sophistication); al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen has mounted two; the Pakistan Taliban and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate have each mounted one. Three other plots were engineered by the NYPD. The FBI has been responsible for thirty.”

Bergen discusses the U.S. administration’s preferred way to deal with terror cells: drone strikes.

“Under the Bush administration, there was an American drone attack in Pakistan every forty-three days. During the first two years of the Obama presidency, there was one every four days. And in 2011 and 2012, just as strikes in Pakistan began to slow, Obama vastly accelerated the campaign in Yemen. Just one drone strike occurred in Yemen under Bush; under Obama the numbers climbed to 120 drone and cruise missile strikes.”

Bergen discusses the circumstances and lead-up to the death of the American cleric al-Awlaki and, separately, his son in Yemen. When some American officials expressed concern over the targeting of an American overseas, after looking at the vast body of evidence, they concurred with the decision. Awlaki’s son was “collateral damage,” killed because someone with whom he was travelling was targeted. I have watched Jeremy Scahill’s film, Dirty Wars, which addresses this incident, among others. I do not find myself troubled by the questionable legality of targeting of al-Awlaki, Sr. Collateral damage will always be a stain on us, however, and even if it does not trouble us, it troubles others, and will be something we will be defending forever, as this is the radicalizing element.

Bergen addresses the means of collecting information about possible terrorists and concludes that among homegrown terrorists,

“sixteen [plots] involved a terrorist act that was not prevented by any type of government action, such as the failed attempt by Faisal Shahzad to blow up a car bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010. Of the remaining fifty-six plots, the public record shows that forty were uncovered by traditional law enforcement methods, such as the use of informants, community tips about suspicious activity, and standard policing practices….With regard to the 330 individuals involved in jihadist crime in the United States since 9/11, surveillance of American phone data had no discernible role in preventing acts of terrorism and only a marginal role in preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fund-raising for a jihadist group.”

While Bergen’s numbers do not precisely add up, we can take his analysis to mean that the NSA program is not as effective as previously touted, but it may have been something we needed to try to see if it netted information we were missing. It didn’t. We can therefore rest easy that the law has been changed not to allow it with little fear about our ability to stave off threats.

One final thing Bergen raises at the end of the book is the increasing role of women in jihad. The one thing that was different about the San Bernadino attacks is that a woman was involved. He notes that women travelling to the Middle East to join ISIS also have a prominent place in the media surrounding the camps there, tweeting to possible recruits about how cool it is to be part of a movement.

What makes this book special is its exquisite fluency, clarity, and roundedness: it addresses most of the questions ordinary citizens might have about the nature of the threat in America and is so interesting it is difficult to put it down. We get details about events we only marginally understood at the time it was happening. We get the background theory behind administration policies and the radicalization of citizens that make those policies necessary. It is a fascinating look at the work done by law enforcement to try to understand where the limits to privacy begin and end. It’s a terrific, informative read.

I’d heard of Peter Bergen before but I’d never read anything by him before this book. Bergen, with Peter Arnett, was responsible for the first TV interview of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997. Bergen is now CNN’s national security analyst, a print and broadcast journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is also a Vice President at the New America non-partisan think tank based in Washington. Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars was a former president of New America, an institution now led by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Anand Gopal, author of No Good Men Among the Living, is a fellow in the International Security Program at New America. Bergen's long list of books on security threats have won many awards, but it wasn't until I heard Bergen interviewed by Trevor Noah on Comedy Central and heard Bergen's laugh that I wanted to look at this book. Call me shallow.

You can buy this book here: Tweet

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead manages to sort George Eliot’s personal life from her fiction, enlightening us on both:

"[Eliot’s] most straightforwardly autobiographical character is Maggie Tulliver, and as a grown woman Eliot discussed with a friend the ways in which The Mill on the Floss was inspired by her own history. Everything in the novel was softened, she said; her own experience was worse."

This nonfiction is a hybrid of criticism and biography, but I argue it may be best viewed as a series of connected essays. It can’t be strictly chronological but at the end of each chapter Mead leaves us with a large conclusion and insight that would stand alone but only leaves us wishing to know more.

Mead was able to lay out with ravishing clarity the twists and turns of a long-ago life, pair it coherently with the novels that were the result of that life, while at the same time making us interested in the life and work of Mead herself. Many of us have a favorite novel, but perhaps not so many of us revisit it at different stages in our life to see how our perceptions have changed and what it means for our understanding, and for our judgment. One of the loveliest true things Mead shares with us is how her distaste for the "sad, proud, dessicated" Middlemarch character of Casaubon waxed and waned through the decades she revisited the book:

"He is a frail creature tortured by his own insufficiencies…Once Eliot was asked whom she had in mind as the original Casaubon; in response, she silently tapped her own breast. As I read Middlemarch in middle age, [Casaubon’s] failures and fears no longer seem so remote or theoretical to me as they once did, when I was in my Dorothea youth."

Mead begins by telling us she wanted to understand why some people considered it the greatest novel in the English language, but she was also simply captured by its relevance and urgency though written nearly one hundred years before her birth. She wanted to see how Eliot’s life shaped her fiction, and how that fiction might have shaped Mead herself, it being a lens though which she looked at life time and again. What a large task for even an experienced biographer! But Mead was a journalist, and this may have been her salvation: "how to ask questions, how to use my eyes, how to investigate a subject, how to look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle." Even so, what Mead has done is nearly mystical in both its containment and inclusion.

When describing Eliot’s beginning consciousness of an artistic life, Mead tells us Eliot

"greatly admired the novelist George Sand: 'I shall never think of going to her writings as a moral code or text book,' [Eliot] wrote to a friend…'I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results…that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages will suggest.'"

Yet in the very next paragraph Mead admits she’d never read George Sand. I haven’t either, though I have tried in youth and again lately as an adult…I just couldn’t manage it. The experience reminds me that all of us find our inspiration in such disparate and (can I say?) unlikely places. We are all working within our own limited spheres and with "dull faculties" but it turns out finding inspiration has as much to do with the inspired as it has to do with the object of that inspiration.

Much has always been made of Eliot’s looks and yet she managed to make a life so full of love she wondered if she had enough in her. In middle age (when she was thirty-two), she was pursued by George Henry Lewes, a man married in law only, and moved in with him, adopting his name to fit in better with society. She was brave in spite of social constraints, and had enough fierce intelligence to know that her life was her own to live. "One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy," Eliot wrote to a friend. Her long liaison with George Henry Lewes ended only when he died twenty-four years later. Eliot displayed such boldness and intellectual courage in her unconventional life.

Eliot, born in 1819, died in 1880, only eight years after finishing the fourth book of Middlemarch. It had been published in eight five-shilling installments from December 1871 to December 1872 and was received with great acclaim among the general populace. The critics were, well, critical. Lewes died in November 1878, and seventeen months later Eliot married John Walter Cross, a man younger by twenty years. Both Lewes and she had known Cross since 1869 and had addressed him as "nephew." She had her reasons, she told a friend, and once again proved her independence of thought and great social courage.

Now for my admission: I have never read Middlemarch, though I think I might try now. I especially liked the final sentence of that novel, which Mead tells us was not always as it appears in the books. It went through drafts until finally Eliot thought she said what she’d intended. Below, it reads to me like a sad but painfully true kind of epitaph:

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been in half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

You can buy this book here: Tweet

Without You There Is No Us by Suki Kim

This book is subtitled My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite; A Memoir. Suki Kim spent about seven months teaching English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) built in an empty suburb of Pyongyang in 2011. She left Pyongyang the day after the news broke of the death of Kim Jong-Il in the Juche Year 100, which counts time on the calendar beginning with the birth of the original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung.

Kim’s memoir of that time teaching is full of her fears—fears that she will be kicked out of North Korea, fears that she or her friends or family or students will be retaliated against, fears that she will be poisoned by the food, or that she will suffer nutritional deficiencies. All these fears have their basis in the conditions she faced there. She put her life as an American reporter and novelist on hold to teach in North Korea and she needed enough information to make a book or the effort was wasted. What she didn’t count on was the very real impact she was able to have on her students, and they on her.

Kim’s students at PUST were talented college-aged sons of high-level government cadres, hand-picked to attend intensive English-language training. Kim taught Level 1 and Level 4, so she could see the range of skills. Many of the students had excellent English language ability and comprehension, but it was concepts like “internet,” “hip-hop,” “women’s studies,” and “Social Security” that threw them. Gather together all your experience of the culture of Koreans or Korean-Americans that you know and multiply it by a million. The culture is so intensified and distilled in its isolation that college-aged boys sleep with pictures of their mothers and claim their only interest is to serve the Great Leader, though in private they admit to a heartbreaking homesickness and desire for intimacy.

While we begin to imagine what they would think were they ever confronted with the true diversity of American artistic life, Kim brings us back to the harsh reality that these young men have been taught since childhood to abhor and detest the filth of America’s cultural richness. She was startled to discover that the boys sang songs every day both praising their leader but also promising a bloody vengeance on his enemies. When she would point out that she could technically be considered one of those enemies, the boys would look away.

Just before Kim left her post at PUST a student wrote to her a letter expressing his anger at a grade she had given him. When they met to discuss his feelings about her explanation, he thoughtfully remarked that he’d actually cared both about her opinion and about the grade. And he believed she would listen to him. He’d never had a conflict with a teacher before. This may seem a small thing, perhaps, but for seven months work, it is Kim’s great achievement.

We in the United States have grown used to students who actually challenge teachers and who care about their grades. It is true this student was one of the top performers and wanted to keep his class ranking. But he also thought he’d be listened to which is something he may not have expected in his normal schooling and which is why he’d never protested before.

We get used to Suki Kim saying she was afraid to ask questions or speak freely to provoke reactions but in fact she did figure out something about what ordinary North Korean lives were like from her protected and restricted perch. She saw the folks who picnicked on the tarmac of a highway, having travelled halfway from their villages to meet up in a convenient place; she met older folks in Pyongyang suburbs who were friendly and inquisitive until the minders barked at them to “get inside”; she heard the bus drivers for a school outing playing a counterfeit Simon & Garfunkel tape until the minders came back from the hike; she passed on the gossip that rabid dogs fed rat poison were subsequently eaten by the school staff (that really could have/should have been confirmed—it would have made a far better anecdote).

Has it occurred to anyone else that countries divided by foreign powers often don’t work in the way they were intended? I wonder if arbitrary division by uninvolved parties is a good choice. I am thinking now of Korea, but also of the Middle East. It seems to me we should just force them to the bargaining table and insist on some kind of negotiated settlement. The outcomes of divided lands are always so prolonged and damaging. Let the ones doing the negotiating take responsibility for their choices.

What Kim tells us about the knowledge base of North Korean students, even the elite ones at a university for science and technology, is truly frightening. They are terrifyingly ignorant of the latest advances in science and technology, and are nationalistic to the point of mania. One cannot see this ending well. That there exists among the old a remembrance of things past is a relief. Hopefully restrictions can be eased before they pass so that some remembered joy can be passed on.

I used to think China ridiculously restrictive and the government overbearing, but now I see China as the wild and uncontrollable environment it really was. North Korea is small enough to manage the control—it is surely a test case for how dictatorial control works and how it doesn’t. It should be pointed out that PUST was a school set up by Christian ministries and although they were not allowed to overtly preach a Christian message, they still worshipped among themselves while they were there. Kim makes the point more than once that the kind of worship of the Great Leader paralleled in unattractive ways the worship of these loyal followers for their version of Christianity. Both groups were equally close-minded about other choices, other paths.

Thanks to Suki Kim for doing what we couldn’t or wouldn’t. Her notes from the other side add to growing evidence and shore up earlier reports that we found hard to believe.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

Law of the Jungle by Paul M. Barrett

It is difficult to comprehend how the relatively straightforward attempt by Ecuadorian plaintiffs to extract damages from oil companies for pollution caused in the course of their work became the perfect definition of a clusterf**k. Everybody got screwed.

Barrett goes through the history of the decades-long lawsuit on behalf of Ecuadorian peasants and tribespeople against Texaco, now part of Chevron, and highlights the bad judgment, culpable wrongdoing, bribery, fraud, and coercion committed by and on behalf of the plaintiffs and the defense.

Petroecuador, the national oil company of Ecuador, should have been named as co-defendant in the case to clean up pollution from seeping pits of oil byproduct left by the oil extractors because they partly owned the oil wells and pits and derived revenue from it but also because they already received some compensation from Texaco toward alleviating the environmental damage. They were not named as co-defendants, however, and did nothing to ameliorate the damage or the plaintiffs’ suffering. The plaintiffs were represented in Ecuadorian court by American lawyer Steven R. Donziger, who began as part of a legal team in 1993 and emerged as lead counsel in 2003.

In February of 2011 the Ecuadorian court ruled against Chevron, ordering them to pay damages for clean-up of USD$18.1 billion. The award was later reduced to USD9.5 billion. Chevron filed countersuit in New York District Court, alleging misconduct by the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, Donziger, and after several iterations of decisions, managed to obtain an injunction against collection of the damages anywhere in the United States. It is not over yet. Chevron may be named in a lawsuit in another South American country which may seek to recover that big payoff from Chevron.

What struck me about this fiasco is that everyone played to their worst selves. In wanting so badly to avoid being victimized, each group managed to create an environment of social toxicity to go with the demonstrated environmental toxicity. The Ecuadorian state did nothing to demand and enforce clean-up from its own state enterprise which was shoveling profits to them, and once the peasants were offered incentives to claim damages, some appeared to develop illnesses attributed to the illegal oil runoff. Everyone was implicated, everyone was venal, everyone failed.

The plaintiffs' lawyer, Donziger, spent so much time and money on the case he had to bring in a series of investors to keep the case going. Donziger promised percentages of the take to investors once the case was settled (read: won)—so much in fact that had investors all been paid back for their capital infusions, nothing would be left for clean-up!

Donziger, just out of Harvard Law School when he entered the case for the plaintiffs, stated early in the proceedings that he wanted this case to be a “business” model for future attempts to secure damages from large corporations operating without sufficient environmental controls overseas. Even a blatant cynic might blanch at the thought of such stupendous arrogance and this surely went some way to alienating and hardening the positions of Chevron executives, who could have easily fixed the environmental damages with some arm-twisting of Petroecuador, because they came to the case knowing Texaco’s legacy in the country.

But one might say the Americans were the dupes in this fight. They were stupid and arrogant and stubborn, but it was the corruption in Ecuador that really brought both sides to their knees and exposed their idiocy. In a state where the legal system is so little developed that politicians, judges, and lawyers are free to line their pockets at the expense of the people they are sworn to protect, all attempt to recoup losses by legal means are chimerical.

The author, Paul Barrett, is also a Harvard Law grad, and now works as an investigating journalist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He has written several other nonfiction books, one of which is called Glock. He manages to bring the mass of information produced by this case into manageable form so that we can understand the progress of the case quite well. He does not appear to take sides, though it is clear he found Donziger’s behavior an affront to his profession.

I came away thinking that this should be read by every law student dreaming of working in international or corporate law for the lessons and warnings it contains. A corporation cannot carry on in this manner and escape unscathed. Needless to say, one would want no law student to imagine they could emulate the hubris of Donziger; failure, in this world or the next, must surely be their fate. This history is positively Dante-esque in the venality of the actors.

I listened to the audio presentation of this book, published by Random House Audio and read by Joe Ochman. Ochman does a good job, threading the legal morass and making it comprehensible. The writing, and therefore the reading, was not completely dispassionate: there was some level of editorial disdain for the parties (who could help it?). There were times I wished I had the hard copy while I was listening, so if you have the opportunity to buy or borrow one or the other, you might like to get both. The hard copy is published by Crown.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames by Kai Bird

Kai Bird believed Robert Ames exemplified the best of American values: sober, diligent, thoughtful, and fair. Ames was an enthusiastic family man, and despite being occasionally short of funds, he wanted a big family. When stationed in Washington, he often kept regular work hours, leaving at the same time every morning and arriving home in time to listen to music and read a bit before dinner with the family. When someone keeps a regular schedule, it is difficult to imagine what goes on in the hours he or she is gone, and Ames’ children never knew until his death that he was not the Foreign Service officer he purported to be.

Ames’ career as a covert CIA agent spanned the decades from the nineteen fifties to the eighties, when he was killed in the 1983 Beirut Embassy bombing. Outside of his personal life, Robert Ames has always been a device. During his lifetime he was a device for listening to and interpreting activities in the Middle East and a means by which to influence events. Now he is the contextual device by which Kai Bird personalizes and focuses his history of the modern Middle East featuring cameos by important players.

I’m not sure how I convinced myself I needed to read another book about spies. I must have been in the midst of Ben McIntyre’s compulsive read, A Spy Among Friends, when I agreed to take on this true tale of the American spy Robert Ames who was operating about the same time and same location as the infamous British mole Kim Philby. After finishing McIntyre’s book and PBS documentary and doing the attendant research, I admit to exhaustion with the idea of spies. I have a better idea of what they do but I can’t say I am particularly impressed with what they accomplish.

Spies often feel the same way. Bird quotes letters from Ames to his wife in the 1980’s in which he says he feels he has written the same cables over and over during his career and “nothing seems to change.” Of course, he was writing of the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict which even today is no closer to resolution, despite Ames’ help in preparing the ground for the 1993 PLO-Israeli Oslo Accords.

It is tempting for us civilians to imagine the CIA as an agency of super-humans, knowledgeable and capable beyond the capabilities of ordinary folk. But however good they are, these individuals operate in a deadening bureaucracy peopled with outsized egos holding differing opinions, and they may be held hostage by swift changes in policy that come with newly elected officials and administrations. Bird explicates the environment in which Ames navigated, introducing us to Ames’ superiors (Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, among others) and presidents (including Reagan and Bush), and concludes that everyone gets cynical after years in the Agency. Bird reports that some CIA officers are amazed when academics are found to have “incredible understanding” of political scenery overseas despite having no access to confidential information or restricted cables. (!)

Robert Ames was an Arabist. Bird paints him as a serious man, not given to frivolity or drinking and carousing, in contrast to many operatives at the time (the British esprit and bonhomie appeared to revolve around alcohol). Ames had an earnestness about resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue that he acted upon by forming a liaison with a close associate of Yassar Arafat, the flamboyant Ali Hassan Salameh, with whom he corresponded throughout his years studying the Middle East. Bird goes to great lengths to cast doubt on Salameh's involvement in the 1973 Munich Massacre at the Olympics. Ames was sympathetic to the Arab position and distrusted the leadership in Israel, and apparently did not believe Salameh would take such an action. Bird, the son of two Foreign Service Arabists, appears to agree with this view. Bird writes that “all the Foreign Service officers who spent any time in the Middle East felt a deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians.”

Bird writes in detail about the changing alliance of Arab factions and how one group would morph into another with the death or sidelining of one or another key player. With this background we can chart in hindsight the growth in strength of radicalist factions in the Middle East, and locate particular times when things might have been steered differently (other than eliminating people we disagree with). What remains chilling is how little we know despite our “intelligence,” and how little we affect for good the larger picture.

Perhaps Robert Ames deserved his own book; I thought Bird’s final chapters in which he places Ames’ work in the context of larger happenings in the Middle East more instructive than focus on a bookish Arab specialist bushwhacking the CIA bureaucracy. I am suspicious of people called “fine examples of American values” simply because America has so often proven herself tone deaf and ignorant rather than a courageous and open-minded example of democracy at work. I am not sure, however, that Bird was lauding the man Ames so much as showing us that his type of covert CIA officer, the learned specialist who dignifies with his consideration positions our political leadership claims to oppose, may be a better risk for us as a country to take than to have extrovert, fast-talking non-specialist operatives offering our stated enemies monetary bribes (in English!), thinking they’d “recruited” them. Probably both are necessary, if only to keep one type from thinking they "know it all," though I often wonder about the use of the Agency for intelligence-gathering anyway. Surely a giant bureaucracy is hardly the way to obtain secrets.

In the end, I found I was more interested in the broader context of Ames’ work in the Middle East, and in the final chapters after the Beirut bombing, Bird expands from Ames to give us the larger context. It is in these chapters that all the personal attempts by various individuals acting in their own circles come together to create a drama large enough for the world stage. All the personalities begin to make sense and we see places we might have had a moment for rapproachment. One could argue that Ames died without accomplishing his dream of ending the Arab-Israeli conflict but that Kai Bird’s retrospective of his work in context shows us both the errors and the possibilities for the future.

That this book is written today may be another indication that the tide of public opinion is shifting in America regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict. Historians and reporters may write unpopular positions but they usually don’t get recognition unless there is a groundswell of appreciation of their arguments. My guess is that the tide is (finally) shifting to support of the Palestinian cause. With this history we can see the outlines of American policy in the Middle East in the past fifty years. Bird makes no excuses for Israeli intransigence on the issue of a Palestinian state and instead highlights Israel’s role and responsibility for current conditions in the Middle East. There are indications the American public is ready to hear this argument. Our government will come along when we do.

Random House Audio provided me with an audio of this book in exchange for an honest review.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben MacIntyre

How amused and flattered the infamous British traitor Kim Philby would be to discover he is again the subject of fascinated scrutiny in his home country and in America fifty years after his defection to Moscow. Ben MacIntyre has managed to reignite interest in Philby by presenting the most rounded and detailed picture yet of this uniquely talented and duplicitous man through the use of newly declassified material from MI6 files.

Kim Philby rose within the ranks of British Intelligence and gave secrets to the Soviets during WWII and at the beginning of the Cold War. The outwardly charming diplomat was responsible for the deaths of possibly hundreds of covert agents working in British interests. The especial charm he radiated may have come from his “flashes of insecurity beneath his debonair exterior, the unpredictable stammer…his intellectual curiosity…and his old-world manners.” [Yuri Modin] But reading about a man whose great skill was “charm” falls strangely flat without access to the man himself; it is a little like trying to describe the performance of a great actor. In order for the reading audience to really understand how this man escaped censure for so long, we need to see the man in action.

Fortunately, Macintyre seems to have understood this and the publication of his book in Britain was accompanied by a two-part BBC documentary showing essential photographs and a (too short) video clip of Philby’s 1955 demurral of his involvement with earlier defectors Burgess and Maclean. Macintyre calls the videotaped press conference a “virtuoso performance” revealing a master of duplicity and misdirection, yet he shows us only a fraction of its contents. The November ’55 press conference is apparently still used as a MI6 training tool: “a master class in mendacity.”

One other audio record of Kim Philby we know exists: Philby’s debriefing in 1963 Beirut by his longtime friend and colleague, Nicholas Elliott. We need to hear, not just read, this interview in order to make our own assessment of Philby’s extraordinary charm and manipulative skill, but that debriefing is still being withheld by MI6.

For these reasons, Macintyre’s description of Philby’s legendary rise within the ranks of British Intelligence is incomplete and two-dimensional, despite the fulsome detail that is far more exciting than any fiction. It still boggles the mind that Philby was allowed the access he was; only his particular personality can explain that access. A spy of Philby’s particular gifts may need four or more dimensions to fully reveal his fatal charm. People who knew Philby often used the same words to describe Philby’s effect on people, which only serves to further occlude our vision of the man and his talent. Like the story of the blind man and the elephant, this biography catches some truths but the reader has the disconcerting feeling that the man himself has once again absconded with his secrets intact.

One could argue that good nonfiction cannot answer every question but is successful if it impels a reader to avidly seek out additional materials in the subject area. By this standard, MacIntyre’s book succeeds admirably. While at first I was entranced by MacIntyre’s concurrent descriptions of Philby’s work for British Intelligence and his work for the Soviet Comintern, by the end of MacIntyre’s book I had more questions than answers about his work and the reaction to it in Britain. MacIntyre also (to propel the narrative I suppose) was a bit sketchy with dates. I needed some basic scaffolding to support by queries.

To fill in some of the holes in my understanding, I found the gossipy 1980 history by Douglas Sutherland, The Great Betrayal: The Definitive Story of Blunt, Philby, Burgess, and MacLean, a useful addition to MacIntyre’s since it came at the material from a different angle, and gave me a more solid understanding of the thinking in MI5 and -6.

That MI6 did not react to Philby’s betrayal in the way we might expect--by jailing Philby, for instance—was something I needed to understand more fully. Sutherland’s analysis was “that under no circumstances could we have afforded to put [Philby] on trial. He was a man of immense ambition, hungry for power and with a mental dexterity which made him a very formidable character…he might have convinced a jury that he was the innocent victim of a witch hunt…” MacIntyre makes the point that the spy agencies in Britain couldn’t go through a drawn-out trial revealing the vast amount of damage Philby had wreaked upon them. So they stood by and let him defect to Moscow.

Sutherland’s account helped me to grasp that in those days the British government had a completely different reaction than the average citizen might expect to the discovery that some of their intelligence agents were spies. In some ways those defections, identified by former KGB Controller Yuri Modin in his book My Five Cambridge Friends: Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, and Cairncross by Their KGB Controller, shaped the government we have and the people we are today. Loss of faith by government, and in government are two different things. Kim Philby, charismatic British traitor, had something to do with both.

Another thing I needed to understand after reading MacIntyre’s history was what spies actually do. I believe MacIntyre expects us to already understand this and he is not going to be the one to reveal any real secrets. The spies in this book don’t act like my idea of spies, and the government that uncovers them doesn’t act like any government I’ve known. These spies spend a great deal of time drinking and carousing with other spies, and everyone seems to know who they are. The only ones that appear to use spy craft are those acting as double agents. And our drunken spies don’t reveal anything either, according to MacIntyre, except to each other.

Yuri Modin ran five British spies for only a short time (1948-1951) but he is frank in what makes a successful spy: “I know from experience that a high IQ should never be the main criterion for recruiting the average secret agent…On the other hand, certain other qualities…are absolutely essential for a spy…he should have a childish, gleeful, mischievous side to his nature…I also believe that a good intelligence agent should have a strong political awareness. [A good agent will] possess physical and moral strength…being in good physical shape will help him stand up to all kinds of peculiarly nasty pressures…[and] will help him to view problems with complete clarity…” Philby was a long-term penetration agent working in Soviet interests, “probably the best ever.”

MacIntyre also points out the insular world of spies at the time shared the common vocabulary of public schools, private clubs, and high-born parents. Many simply could not conceive that ‘one of their own’ could or would deceive them so completely for so long. I expect that has changed now.

This is a blood-curdling story of deception and intrigue, one that must be read alongside the documentary. It is an unsettling, but essential read.

An advance of this title was sent to me as part of First Reads from librarything.com and Netgalley.com. The advance does not have photographs, but I understand the hardcopy, when it is released in the United States in July 2014, will have pictures of the personalities featured in this book.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam

For readers interested in recent Chinese and Vietnamese history and culture, this novel is an intensive course. The tale begins with a young boy born to Chinese parents in Shantou, China during a period of change (the 1930s). The story takes on epic proportions when he relocates first to Hong Kong and then to Cholon (near Saigon) in Vietnam during the tumultuous period when a series of foreign powers (the Japanese, the French, the Americans) fought wars over Vietnam’s governance and managed to turn a home-grown, bottom-up revolution into a full scale civil war.

Lam succeeds in showing us Vietnam in its blisteringly hot lush beauty, its violent history, and its complicated lines of distinction between natives and non-natives and skin colors: white, brown, yellow. The time period is recent and familiar, but the angle is unique. Events in Vietnam in the 1960s and ‘70s already familiar to readers are imagined from the point of view of residents on the ground and give us an eerie dislocation. We begin to perceive the difficult sets of choices people had for living with war and occupation.

We are also treated to remarkable insights into Chinese mores and mindset when this culture can be maddeningly difficult for Westerners to grasp. The backdrop of what we call the Vietnam War makes the story cinematic, particularly one scene when the Tet offensive hits Saigon and spills into Cholon during a celebratory and drunken banquet hosted by Chen Pie Sou, the Headmaster of the title.

There was one area, however, that I thought Lam didn’t get quite right as a novelist. Lam created a complicated and flawed main character in Chen Pie Sou, which should add to the drama of the unfolding story, and does…eventually. But I had difficulty liking Chen (or any of the characters) through Part I and felt dragged into Part II only by obligation. By Part III, I started to marvel at what Lam had managed to construct, and relished the details of Vietnamese life, and Chinese habits.

Vincent Lam is a doctor as well as a novelist, and he has written a couple of nonfiction medical-related books already, one of which is an info-book for the public on a possible flu pandemic. A nonfiction book of stories, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures: Stories, won many awards and was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover New Authors title. This is his first novel.


You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Great Northern Express by Howard Frank Mosher

I love fishing stories. Lord know why, since I can remember only fishing a couple of times in my life. There is something about the sinuous dance of the line, the exotic choice of flies, the murmur of water, the glint of sun that mesmerizes me. And perhaps there is something about that wily fisherman hatching his next story in the big outdoors that makes even failure seem like a good day.

Howard Frank Mosher did not write a fish story. Well, not really. But it felt like one. He gives us long, lazy, drawling storytelling as he rolls from one state to another on his cross-country book tour. You might say he was casting a line in all those independents he visited: some holes were dry and some were hopping. In bookstore readings with an author we get perhaps an hour of the author’s time, giving a reading, telling anecdotes. In The Great Northern Express we have hours of stories, the best ones, about what it is like to live in a mill town in far north New England, to be an author, to travel the country flogging one’s wares in a vehicle so ragged that every mile gained is both a prayer and a miracle.

We learn of the man and his life, his influences, his decisions, his joys and cankers. And we get some of the best yankee backcountry jawing around. More than once, he reminded me of the classic book Go With Me by Castle Freeman about northeastern Yankees sitting around an abandoned chair factory for fun.

I’m glad Mosher took his long-promised trip, but I wish he’d had more time for fishing.


You can buy this book here: Tweet