Doing Justice by Preet Bharara

Audio CD, Expected pub: March 19th 2019 by Random House Audio Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525595762; Hardcover, Pub March 19th 2019 by Knopf Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525521129

The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) tries cases that originate in New York’s financial centers, but also covers high-profile cases that have national and international resonance. Over two hundred lawyers and equally as many support staff work to administer law enforcement oversight to eight New York counties. Its resources, reach, and independence have earned it the nickname “The Sovereign Court” among members of the legal profession. SDNY attracts capable and driven prosecutors not distracted by limelight.

James Comey was once Chief Prosecutor of the SDNY for two years (2002-03) before he became Deputy Attorney General of the U.S. At the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Preet Bharara was Chief Prosecutor of SDNY. He had taken on the role in 2009, nominated by then-President Obama, and developed a reputation as hard-charging.

Bharara was asked to resign his role by Jeff Sessions who had been appointed by the new President Donald Trump to head the Justice Department. Bharara refused. He was subsequently fired, leaving SDNY in March 2017, months into the Trump presidency. New York was Trump’s stomping ground, and the Southern District was the court most likely to prosecute crimes DJT committed, if any, before his ascension to the presidency.

Like anyone leading a group of intensely-committed, capable lawyers holding the powerful to account, Bharara had to develop a set of priorities and criterion which could direct his team to choose from among bad behaviors, determining the prosecutable. Every kind of crime has been tried in SDNY, from crimes of treason, terrorism, mob and gang violence to massive fraud and murder. Bharara reflects that “anybody can be guilty of anything.”

Divided into four sections, Bharara’s book examines first how successful prosecutors select their cases and prepare the evidence they will use in court. Certainly one consideration was whether a case was winnable or not but Comey, in his time as Chief Prosecutor for SDNY, argued that wasn’t the most important criterion: “If it’s a good case and the evidence supports it, you must bring it,” he said, even at the expense of possibly losing the case and adversely affecting one’s reputation and the reputation of the court.

Jesse Eisinger, now a reporter for ProPublica, reported extensively on high-profile cases in his book about the SDNY published in 2017 called The Chickenshit Club. He did not give the credit to Preet Bharara, who he saw as going after “easy” cases featuring insider trading rather than the rampant fraud and financial misconduct that nearly caused the world’s economy to melt down in 2007-08.

Bharara doesn’t address Eisinger’s criticisms directly but suggests getting the job done includes building cases that have the best possibility of success, and showing the public the judiciary is working on their behalf. It is hard to argue that Bharara wasn’t tough on crime. While he may not have secured convictions for the worst abuses of the biggest players responsible for the financial crisis, his offices had 85 straight convictions of insider-trading cases before losing one in 2014.

Bharara’s office also presided over a string of successes in prosecuting instances of cyber-crime, organized crime activity, art fraud, and instances of public corruption, among other things. Whether or not one thinks he was tough enough, his book is informative for what it tells us about our own justice system when it is performed in the biggest fishbowl in the land.

After first introducing the role of prosecutors and some of his cases, Bharara then moves to being effective in a court of law: looking at the importance of preparing the case as though you were arguing for the defendant, judging the judges, reading the court, and expecting unpredictable outcomes and verdicts. “Justice is not preordained.” How badly you want to win the case is often the most important ingredient in winning a case, pushing a prosecutor’s risk-aversion to the dangerous range.

Bharara reads the audio of the book himself, allowing him to tell the stories and place emphases where he wishes. The stories highlight what he was working for: providing a measure of justice to the powerless. Bharara’s job in the judiciary is a very important one in our three-legged system of government and he had a very long, uninterrupted run of it. His predecessors’ tenures could be measured in months. His observations are intrinsically interesting.

Bharara mentioned the importance of his family several times in the book, and knowing the all-encompassing nature of his job, one expects he missed many important family moments. He recounts a scene in which he proudly presents a laudatory article about himself and his work to his teenaged daughter to read. He waited impatiently while she carefully read and then slowly reread portions of the piece. Eventually she responded to his “Well?” with “You’re such a drama queen, Daddy.” Which may be the most succinct capture of a personality we are likely to enjoy.



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Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Hardcover, 339 pgs, Pub Sept 18th 2018 by Knopf Publishing Group (first pub August 2nd 2018), ISBN13: 9780525521426, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee (2018), Scotiabank Giller Prize (2018), Governor General's Literary Awards / Prix littéraires du Gouverneur général Nominee for Fiction (2018), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction (2019)

I finished Edugyan's third novel in a fog, reading the last hundred pages completely engrossed in the strange unreal world and story Edugyan had created, about a former slave, physically damaged from years in captivity but involved in the science of creating an indoor aquarium in London—something never done before.

If at first—and I have seen such criticism—the story seemed derivative of Jules Verne with wondrous and far-flung adventures, Edugyan pulled it off. There were wondrous adventures when naturalists and people of science began to turn their attention outside their own environments to the larger world. Anything they could conceive of was about to be tried…travel to the Arctic, say, or to the bottom of the ocean, or ballooning long distances. The story is an absolute feast of imagination.

Race is an important component of the story in that we have an abolitionist white scientist who chooses a young slave boy to be ballast for his balloon adventure. When the white master discovers his black ballast has exceptional drawing skills, the boy’s role changes. Though the two become close, there is always a power differential in their relationship that keeps the friendship from meaning as much to the white man as it does to the black man.

Edugyan sketches this kind of unconscious racism so clearly, and points to it, that one can hardly walk away from the book with one’s vision unchanged. We can put words to a feeling of distance or alienation we may have seen or felt before but weren’t able to express.

It turns out the history of the world’s first public aquarium is much as is described in this novel, though I was unable to discover whether a very young black man was the first to come up with the idea and design of the tanks for public display of sea creatures in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems perfectly likely, as does the fact that such a man would never be acknowledged, his history expunged as a matter of course.

Edugyan is Canadian, which is not obvious. She sets a portion of the novel in Newfoundland, but otherwise the characters travel far and wide on nearly every continent. She adds an intriguing love interest for George Washington Black, the main character and former slave from Barbados. We presume Black is originally from Dahoumey in west Africa because that place name is buried deep in his subconscious and is resurrected when his life is in danger.

Black’s love interest is a mixed-race island woman of great beauty and intelligence and a rounded sense of her own potential. Her father, also a scientist, did not encourage her to develop her physical charms. One day he allowed her to purchase a few small concessions to beauty that she craved: red lipstick, a diaphanous dress, an emerald clasp. She discovered that people noticed her more but saw her less. This lesson all women must learn and decide whether to exploit or not.

The start of the novel was not particularly convincing and had the feel of a young adult novel, but it began as it meant to go on, and by midway I was involved, suspending belief, rapt, curious. There was something about the way the role of the one-time slave was progressing that held some hope that his potential would be developed. And the history of race is not yet finished being told, since we write it every day.

It's a wonderful novel. Edugyan has written two other critically-acclaimed novels and at least two collections of stories. She has taught creative writing and has won several international awards for her work.





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There There by Tommy Orange

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub June 5th 2018 by Knopf, ISBN13: 9780525520375

This novel references Gertrude Stein’s comment about her memories of Oakland, CA, “there is no there there,” upon discovering her family home was taken down to accommodate an office park. I think the characters in this book would say it differently, that there is indeed something in Oakland, home of the fictional Big Oakland Powwow with which it concludes.

Distinct Indian voices tell stories about their lives, whatever they want to tell and not necessarily to an immediate point. Somehow it all comes together at the end, at the powwow. Family members find one another, and there is some recognition of their losses. It is a fantastic imagining of the experiences of many.

The chapters are long and rangy at the beginning, shortening as the pace quickens and the powwow approaches. The interconnection between characters comes clear. It is beautifully woven together, each party distinct and yet having a similarly destructive upbringing.

What struck me most was, finally, the recognition of what happened to Native Americans and how diminished their legacy within their own tribes. There are many reasons for this, much of which we now realize was a shared responsibility we did not manage well. Orange doesn’t shy from painful truths; there is a psychic cost to the lives our ancestors took, or oppressed, a cost that has been playing out for hundreds of years. Although there may have been writers before who captured that karma, Tommy Orange is particularly skilled at showing us the ravages in a range of folks who struggle under the burden of what they have lost.

I alternately read and listened to the audio of this, produced by Random House Audio and featuring a full cast of readers: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Ceurvo, Kyla Garcia. It’s a wonderful listen, and an equally a fine read. However you do approach this, you will appreciate the insights.

One of those insights helped me with a phenomenon I have never understood: the alcoholic uncle of one character came to visit his sister and her son. When he wasn’t drinking, the uncle was full of interesting stories and was a pleasure to be around. One day the uncle told the boy he was dying and was visiting people he knew and liked before his time was done. The young boy asked him why he was still drinking if it was killing him. The uncle answered

“I’m sorry you gotta see it, Nephew, it’s the only thing that’s gonna make me feel better. I been drinking a long time. It helps. Some people take pills to feel okay. Pills will kill you too over time. Some medicine is poison.”

I never understood that.



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Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub May 8th 2018 by Knopf Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525521198

What a beautiful book this is, and how it reminds us how many people go before us, unsung, unremarked, unremembered. A teenaged boy and his slightly older sister find themselves attending separate but proximate boarding schools rather suddenly one year while their parents have taken off for Singapore. The schools are not happy matches and the kids meet up and decide to run away. They return home where a curious bachelor holds fort in their absence. The teens begin a whole new type of education.

The central mysteries in the novel unfold gradually, some we are never privy to. One cannot but thrill to the fascinating similarity between this story and John LeCarré's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, about an impressionable boy and an incorrigible teacher.

The boy and his sister find their way among an oddball group of scammers and outsiders, none of whom want the wider world to know what they are doing. When the teens find their mother's trunk--the one she packed for Singapore-- hidden in the basement, much confusion and uncertainty ensues.

I listened to the audio, beautifully produced by Penguin Random House and read by Steve West. Audio is a wonderful way to enjoy this title, though truthfully, the Alfred A. Knopf hardcover is small, beautifully printed, and self-sufficient. This is a great choice for summer reading, as it is short, terrifically atmospheric, and full of mystery. The action is not so fast the reader doesn't have time to think while reading.



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God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright

Hardcover, 352 pgs, Pub Apr 17th 2018 by Knopf Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525520108

This is a fast and fabulous, smart and funny read…the kind that reads so effortlessly because the author has a lifetime of writing experience. There is a big-hearted generosity in Wright’s view of Texas, though he doesn’t hesitate to point out personalities or policies that diminish what he believes the state could be. Wright lived many years in Austin, the big blue liberal heart of Texas, a city that attracted so many people to what the city once was that it no longer resembles that attractive mixed-race, mixed-income diversity so rich with possibility.

Having read Wright’s big books on Carter’s peace talks at Camp David, and his exhaustive study of Christian Science, I was unprepared for the deep vein of “will you look at that” humor that richly marbles this piece. It is an utter delight to have Wright use his insider status as a resident to call out especially egregious instances of Texas bullshit.

The book is a memoir, really—the memoir of a natural raconteur from a state where cracking jokes about serious issues is an art form. But before page ten Wright makes clear his assessment of the state:

"Texas has nurtured an immature political culture that has some terrible damage to the state and to the nation. Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West. the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation. Illinois and New Jersey may be more corrupt, Kansas and Louisiana more dysfunctional, but they don’t bear the responsibility of being the future."

Wright is so skilled now at writing big books that he manages to give us lots of detail and information even in this more relaxed telling, all the while being really funny. He is clear-eyed about why Texas can be a big fail and yet he clearly loves the place.

"To strike it rich is still the Texas dream...Texans are always talking about how much they loved the state, but I wondered where was the evidence of that love."

Wright admits he considered leaving during the oil boom/bust in the 1980s when the state never seemed to live up to its obligations. He dreamed sometimes of decamping to liberal California, where he could flog his screenwriting skills...and make more money. He thinks that a country that can hold together two such immensely powerful and opposing forces as California and Texas has got to be something worthwhile and important. I used to think so, too, but feel less confident now. Sometimes I want to saw off those pieces of the country that claim to want so much freedom, and seal the borders. No trade. We’ll see then who comes out on top.

Music and art are sprinkled throughout this biography, obviously an important part of Wright’s attraction to the state. Each chapter sports woodcuts by David Dantz describing the chapter’s subject and Dantz’s endpapers illustrate the arc of the book. The art, like the prose, is rich with humor and attitude. Music is a part of Wright’s own biography and so he writes particularly well about the scene and historical influences. It’s rounded, this book, and interesting and fun and full of reasons to like Texas, despite its particularly awful politicians.

Texas was a reliably blue state until the 1990s. Houston is the only major city in America without zoning laws. AM Texas radio hosts Alex Jones. Ted Cruz makes jokes about Machine Gun Bacon on Youtube but as usual when Cruz is trying to be funny, it’s an epic fail. Dallas had been a city fostering extremism until Kennedy died there. After that humiliation, Dallas became more open and tolerant, more progressive…and developed more churches per capita than any city in the nation. Wright thinks Dallas has the ability to transform suffering into social change. I say we shouldn’t be blamed for being a little suspicious of all that supposed holiness. Evangelicals have shown what they are thinking where they are standing.

In the last chapters, Wright is open about searching for his final resting place. He is only seventy years old, but he is calling it for Texas. I really like that about him. He can conceive of life and death, Democrat and Republican, north and south in one sentence. He can love Texas and laugh at it, too. He has written a truly wonderful, un-put-down-able book about the biggest second-biggest state in the union.

I'm from Texas.





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Autumn by Ali Smith

Hardcover, 263 pages Pub February 7th 2017 by Pantheon Books (first published October 20th 2016) ISBN13: 9781101870730 Series Seasonal #1, Lit Awards: Man Booker Prize Nominee (2017), Gordon Burn Prize Nominee Longlist (2017)

It is November and outside my front door roses are still blooming. Their color is a deep rich clear pink. They look better than they did in the dry heat of summer.

Smith’s first novel in her proposed quartet of volumes is an utter delight. I’d never encountered her voice before but when I got to the end, I looked again at the beginning. Just as well, because I had forgotten that Daniel speaks, briefly, before the story gets picked up by “his granddaughter,” Elisabeth, with an “s.”

What I find queer, now having finished the novel, is why people talk about this as a Brexit novel. It is a novel of our times, told by a smart and savvy observer, but I would have put the emphasis squarely on the exploitation and disregard of women, their work, their point of view. Especially at this moment of lurid sexual scandal with roots supposedly in the 1960’s, “when the ethos was different,” we hear a voice that pierces that veil of ignorance and disregard and looks squarely at the mystery of history. Smith has caught our moment perfectly.

The real beauty of this novel is the heart of the novelist. She sees the hard truths we negotiate every day and does not deny them but looks instead at our vulnerabilities, and how we need one another to perfect our world. The work is something reminiscent of pop art, jazzy and clever but with echoes…instead of a piece of pink lace stuck variously under paint on the canvas, a memory…of children washing up on a beach, or women being pushed and herded onto buses…so slight a mention they are mere shadows.

But then Daniel asks explicitly, the first time they play Bagatelle, “Sure you want war?” before patiently instructing Elisabeth in the importance of diversity of thought: how the idea of ‘threatening’ is not unidirectional and can all be in one’s own mind. Daniel becomes companion, teacher, friend to adolescent Elisabeth, dismissed by Elisabeth’s mother as ‘that old queen.’

What to make of Elisabeth’s mother?

[One should feel some resentment for her unvarying philistinism, whose harshness for things outside her experience is tempered only late in the novel when she discovers love, and sex…with another woman. Are we to conclude that an intellectual woman’s willingness to see beauty and charm in the mother’s ugly harsh truth is also a kind of diversity…a necessity…if we are to escape war?

Smith marks time in this novel by describing the physical environment, the state of the roses, the chill in the air, the gossamer filaments of spider webs bearing beads, the color and position of leaves (on the trees, fallen to the ground). It positions us in a shifting timescape, though Daniel’s lifetime, and encapsulating the art of the first (and only?) female pop artist in Britain. Pauline Boty was…dismissed is too intentional a word…ignored during her career as an artist because she was beautiful and female. It makes one want to pair those two descriptors forever, in solidarity.

“And whoever makes up the story makes up the world…So always try to welcome people into the home of your story…”

I felt welcomed into the kindnesses Smith creates in this novel. There is wickedness in the world, and tragedy, but it doesn’t have to define us. We can create a world that turns inexorably, like the seasons, to longer days and more clement weather. And we can find people to love in the most unlikely places. Love may be the [only?] thing that makes life worthwhile.

This novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2017.



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Dinner at the Center of the Earth by Nathan Englander

Hardcover, 272 pages Expected publication: Sept 5th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9781524732738

Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall.

Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle the state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths?

The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love.

During eight years of that twelve year-period 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone was willing to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further.

The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with few degrees of separation. Most appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made.

In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers.

Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been.

A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love.

I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel (7 hours). Below please find an NPR Scott Simon interview with Nathan Englander about this latest novel:




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Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

Hardcover, 352 pages Expected publication: April 18th 2017 by Doubleday ISBN13: 9780385534246

That we as a nation, less than one hundred years after the Osage Indian killings, have no collective memory of these events seems an intentional erasure. The truth of the killings would traumatize our school children and make every one of us search our souls, of that there is no doubt. David Grann shows us that the systematic killings of dozens of oil-wealthy Osage Indians were not simply the rogue deeds of a psychopath or two in a small town in Oklahoma.

The tentacles of guilt and the politics of fear extended to townspeople who earned their reputation as “successful” because they allowed these murders and thefts of property to go on, as well as implicated law enforcement. Grann outlines how the case was solved and brought to court by the persistence of FBI officer Tom White and his band, but Grann is not full-throated in his praise of Hoover's FBI. He leaves us feeling ambiguous, not about White, but about Hoover.

The Osage Indians once laid claim to much of the central part of what is now called the United States, “a territory that stretched from what is now Missouri and Kansas to Oklahoma and still farther west, all the way to the Rockies.” The tribe was physically imposing, described by Thomas Jefferson as “the finest men we have ever seen,” whose warriors typically stood over six feet tall. They were given land by Jefferson as part of their settlement to stop fighting the Indian Wars in the early 1700s.

Jefferson reneged on the agreement within four years, and ended up giving the once-mighty Osage a 50-by-125 mile area in southeastern Kansas to call their own. Gradually, however, white settlers found they liked that particular Kansas farmland and moved onto it anyway, killing anyone who challenged them, oftentimes the legal “owners”. The government then forced the Osage to sell the Kansas land and buy rocky, hilly land in Oklahoma, land no white man would want, where the Osage would be “safe” from encroachment. This was the late 1800s.

In the early 1900s oil was discovered on that ‘worthless’ Oklahoma land and because a representative of the Osage tribe was in Washington to defend Osage interests, he managed to include in the legal agreement of the allotment of Indian Territory “that the oil, gas, coal, or other minerals covered by the lands…are hereby reserved to the Osage Tribe.” Living Osage family members each were given a headright, or a share in the tribe’s mineral trust. The headrights could not be sold, they could only be inherited.

The Osage became immensely wealthy. The federal government expressed some concern (!) that the Osage were unable to manage their own wealth, and so ordered that local town professionals, white men, be appointed as guardians. One Indian WWI veteran complained he was not permitted to sign his own checks without oversight, and expenditures down to toothpaste were monitored. But this is not even the most terrible of the legacies. The Osage began to be murdered, one by one.

When Grann discovered rumblings of this century-old criminal case in Oklahoma, he wanted to see the extent of what was called the Reign of Terror, thought to have begun in 1921 and lasted until 1926, when some of the cases were finally successfully prosecuted. The “reign,” he discovered, was much longer and wider than originally imagined, and therefore did not just implicate the men who were eventually jailed for the crimes. “White people in Oklahoma thought no more of killing an Indian than they did in 1724.” said John Ramsey, one of the men eventually jailed for crimes against the Osage. A reporter noted, “The attitude of a pioneer cattleman toward a full-blood Indian…is fairly well recognized.”

What we learn in the course of this account is that a great number of people had information that could have led to answers much sooner than it did, but because there was so much corruption, even the undercover agents and sheriffs were in on the open secret of the murders. Those townspeople who might be willing to divulge what they knew were unable to discover to whom they should share information lest they be murdered as well. Grann was able to answer some questions never resolved at the time, with his access to a greater number of now-available documents.

Why this history is not better known is a mystery still. Memory of it was fading already in the late 1950s when a film, The FBI Story starring Jimmy Stewart, made mention of it. The 1920s are not so long ago, and some of the people who were children then have only recently passed away, or may even be still living. Among the Osage there is institutional memory, and still some resentment, naturally, and a long-lasting mistrust of white people. Need I say this is a must-read?

The audio of this book is narrated by three individuals: Ann Marie Lee, Will Patton, and Danny Campbell. Interestingly, the voices of the narrators seem to age over the course of the history, and it is a tale well-told. But the paper copy of this has photographs which add a huge amount of depth and interest to the story. This is another good candidate for Audible's Whispersync option, but if you are going to choose one, the paper was my favorite.

A short audio clip of the narration is given below:




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A Horse Walks Into A Bar by David Grossman translated by Jessica Cohen

Hardcover, 208 pages Pub February 21st 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group (first pub 2011) Orig Title סוס אחד נכנס לבר / Sus eḥad nikhnas le-bar ISBN13: 9780451493972 Literary Awards Man Booker International Prize Nominee for Longlist (2017)

Everyone knows that successful stand up routines are laughs at the expense of grief, or embarrassment, or pain of some kind. The laughing picks a sore and in many cases, starts the healing. The novel-length comedy routine given by Dovaleh Greenstein one night in a worn-down beach town is unique. The night of the performance is his birthday. He will be fifty-seven. He will give a one-of-a-kind, career-ending show that looks at his life, his heritage, and one particular loss that shaped him as a youth. He wants to connect the dots. He invites a witness.

David Grossman manages an extraordinary breakthrough in the consciousness of readers. Dov is not an appealing man. He is old and his jokes are not funny. He often berates his audience and embarrasses them. He is not politically correct. Most of his audience walks out. But somewhere in there is a sense of history itself, the whole boring humiliating sordid joyous beautiful and yes funny ball of wax…the thing that forms us…the things that make us human.

"He darts across the stage like a windup toy, cackling: ‘Being! Being! Being!’ He stops and slowly turns to the room with the gleaming face of a crook, a thief, a pickpocket who got away with it. ‘Do you even grasp what a stunning idea it is to just be? How subversive it is?’"

Somehow, in playing the scales of history up and down for several hours, Dov makes us sense the depth of humanity again behind the historical markers. The witness he invites to his show is a former judge, a man who knew him as a child, right before some mysterious personality-shaping event of his childhood. Dov asks this former judge to watch his show and tell him if he sees

"That thing," he said softly, "that comes out of person without his control? That thing that maybe only this one person in the world has?"

The radiance of personality, I thought. The inner glow. Or the inner darkness. The secret, the tremble of singularity. Everything that lies beyond the words that describe a person, beyond the things that happened to him and the things that went wrong and became warped in him. The same thing that years ago, when I was just starting out as a judge, I naively swore to look for in every person who stood before me, whether defendant or witness. The thing I swore I would never be indifferent to, which would be the point of departure for my judgment."

Dovaleh sees another person in the audience he recognizes, though he pretends he doesn’t. He makes her explain why she feels she knows him, and whenever she expresses tendency towards kindness in her memory of him, he humiliates her a little, challenging her and memory. The audience becomes restless, angry. One man leans over to the woman and suggests she leave:

"'This guy’s not right, he’s taking us all for a ride. He’s even making fun of you.'

Her lips tremble. 'That’s not true,' she whispers. 'I know him, he’s just doing make-believe.'"

That defense, the surety of her knowledge of Dov’s goodness, is as much about the woman herself as it is about Dov. Dov is the ultimate recreation of the tortured soul so familiar to us from other works of Jewish literature. There is nothing so tempting and hard to resist as the chance to look into another man’s hell, Grossman tells us. But the woman looks only for his humanity, his kindness.

Dov was pulling in and wrapping up that night, making sense of the whole long parade of his life. Being itself is subversive, comedic even. But Grossman's tale is just as much about the judge who was witnessing that night, who’d been shown early retirement because he’d been too caustic and furious in his decisions. This judge, who'd had to crawl through his own prejudices while watching Dov's show, who got back to that place where he could recognize the spark of humanity Dov was searching for. He’d wanted to remember so that he could be remembered. And it worked.

This novel has been long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. It was translated from the original Hebrew by Jessica Cohen. An interview about the translation can be found here. A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio interview interview with the David Grossman is here.



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Celine by Peter Heller

Hardcover, 352 pages Pub March 7th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9780451493897

Peter Heller is completely his own man, his work unlike anyone else’s. Almost everything we love about a Peter Heller novel is here in spades: descriptions so fresh we can smell the creek water, glimpses of people so painterly a photograph would ruin the image, a manly strength and confidence that gives his main character a tiny swagger when confronting mother bears, bad-ass motorcyclists, or CIA operatives with orders where their hearts used to be.

Heller places a woman at the helm of the story this time, and his Celine is exceptional. She is too big a character to describe here; Heller allows her depths to unfurl slowly, each mention of her like fine dining--surprising, unusual, uniquely satisfying. She is too daring a character to be created out of whole cloth, so she must be modeled on someone Heller has bulked up for the occasion. One feels slightly jealous such a character exists outside of our experience.

Celine is a private investigator. She works with her husband, Peter, who hails from Maine and says “ai-yuh” to indicate agreement. “My Watson,” Celine suggests, “or I may be his Watson, but nobody knows because he doesn’t say much.” Celine doesn’t do infidelity or corporate intrigue, the usual PI work. She looks for missing children, missing parents, or helps those who are desperate or destitute. Her focus makes us wonder what got her into the ‘family’ business exclusively.

This felt to me to be the most personal of Heller’s novels. The Penguin Random House website tells us

Born and raised in New York, Heller attended high school in Vermont and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Winner of the Michener fellowship, he received an MFA in both fiction and poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

He is writing what he knows, and we are there, listening to his voice, sense of humor, and perceptions when Celine and Peter sit around a daytime campfire outside the shack of L.B. Chicksaw Chillingsworth, the tracker. It’s maybe not as plausible as Heller makes it seem, but is warming, interesting, and plausible enough.

The detail that 68-yr-old Celine has emphysema from a former four-pack-a-day habit added something to this story. It added realism: we often read stories of talented investigators who are strong, clever, and attractive. We don’t often see the limitations under which most folks labor. This handicapping serves the imagination of readers: Celine is closer to readers’ world and all the more admirable for it. A protagonist with a flaw makes for more interesting pursuits. Besides, her skill set with a pistol is enviable and more than makes up for not being able to run away from bad guys.

The attention Heller lavishes on guns is not so much indulgent as generous. He is able to impart a bit of his fascination to us, his readers, particularly if we know a bit about the pieces he describes. He is entirely correct in observing that, as precision instruments, they are gorgeous pieces of work, and he shares cleaning, oiling, and polishing techniques as though we were sitting beside him, watching him work. Being able to shoot well seems a communicative skill useful in today's world, able to make points that words simply can’t.

My favorite character by far was the rarely-speaking Pete, or Pa, as Celine often called him. Celine and Peter had a fierce bonding going on, so thoughtful are they of one another. Pete’s intensity of care was entirely necessary to someone with Celine’s health history, for she experienced terrible moments of not being able to breathe, and Heller was able to convey to us Pete’s desperation to find help. My least favorite character was Gabriella, a character Heller wasn’t as successful in fleshing out. He almost got there, but I never had a sense of her as an adult woman with a child of her own rather than as a teen who had lost her father.

The standout difference between this book and Heller’s earlier works, each of which have been different from one another in terms of genre-type, is that this book is longer. The length did not improve the experience for this reader. The novel could have been pared further, words rearranged for elegance or streamlining, but Heller's work doesn't strain. There is something to be said for not taking oneself or one's work too seriously. Regardless, I thought this a wonderful mystery/thriller and would gladly enter into conversation with Heller again. His painterly attention to detail, fulsome imagination, and his locales are hard to pass up.

It turns out that the novel is a thinly-disguised memoriam of Heller's mother, who sounds like a very special person. Two articles explain the connection is here and here.

I listened to the audio of this book, read by Kimberly Farr and produced by Penguin Random House Audio. Farr managed some of Maine's language peculiarities, though she added a Katherine Hepburn-like upper class drawl to Pete that became endearing only eventually. He was IV-educated after all, so perhaps he could claim the blue blood accent. Celine came through perfectly, as Heller had intended.

Below find a short excerpt from the audio reading by Kimberly Farr:




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South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion

Hardcover, 160 pages Pub March 7th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9781524732790

Joan Didion’s notebook of her drive across Louisiana and Mississippi with her husband in the summer of 1970 is filled with glimpses and impressions of the blazing heat, canopies of kudzu, a sense of disintegration and insularity. Didion interviewed friends of friends and folks who knew about important local happenings, but she had a hard time gathering the ambition to follow through with attending events in the muggy heat. She made notes, but the aimless drift through a South she knew was important somehow never fanned into flame...until now. Her instincts were right. The South tethers us still, to a past we cannot escape.

Didion’s experience of the South is that of confederate flag beach towels at the motel pool, debutante dresses, and plans for dinner out with local literati, illegal bottles of liquor smuggled in a large leather handbag carried expressly for that purpose. The childhood of a young white boy in the South may be the best childhood in the world, she imagines.

The house of one family had a slave certificate still hanging on the wall and servants that dated back a generation. Everyone seemed sure of where they stood on the race question, and stated it openly. The order to integrate schools immediately (80% black, 20% white) came in February: why didn’t they wait until September when a little more time might have gotten some folks to go along, a local white man with school-aged kids opined. "I can't sacrifice my kids to idealism," he concludes.

Didion and her husband sought the gravesite of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi but found only a young black man leaning against a two-tone sedan in the heat, waiting for customers, selling marijuana, perhaps. It was too hot to think too much about it. They never found the grave but the graveyard feel of the South pervaded her writing nonetheless. Death is a feature of the South. It feels close, as does rot, and subsidence. And yet, the South holds a history, slavery, which will not die, no matter how we wish it would.

The University of Mississippi is in Oxford with that elusive gravesite of Faulkner’s. The university library carries only textbooks, a few bestsellers, and Faulkner novels. Didion mentions her visit there:"…I saw a black girl on the campus. She was wearing an Afro and a clinging jersey and was quite beautiful with a NY/LA coastal arrogance. I could not think what she was doing at Ol’ Miss or what she thought about it." One cannot help think that the piece would have been infinitely improved if she had roused herself enough to ask the girl that question. All through this book she never crossed the color barrier once except to be introduced to the maid or gardener of a white homeowner.

Fireflies, heat lightning, heavy vines and soggy ground, fainting heat, water that smells of fish, vacant expressions, algae-covered ditches, fast-melting ice. The South is present everywhere in her words, in the barely-stirring observations she makes from a sitting position. But the 1970s South is evoked as surely as the 1950s and 1960s South. Things change only incrementally, imperceptibly.

The travel by car was onerous, and Didion tells us she had to avoid cities with airports because she would immediately book a ticket out. It was a struggle, this trip, and one evening they stopped late for dinner:

"The sun was still blazing on the pavement outside. The food seemed to have been deep-fried for the lunch business and kept lukewarm on the steam table. Eating is an ordeal, as in an institution, something to be endured in the interests of survival."

The point of view is distant and unconvinced when a dinner host says something about how the blacks would return to the delta if there were jobs anymore because “this is a place with a strong pull.” Didion’s judgment is as clear as a torch in a muggy dark night.

We return to California and it is here that Didion's intimacy with us becomes the story. She tells us of her upbringing and we see where she gets her sense of confidence and superiority. She’d never had anything blocking her way, in the “peculiar vacuum” of her childhood. She’d come from an affluent family and only saw in hindsight her extraordinary luck in a world that offers most people little certainty. She’d “been rewarded out of proportion to her scholarship,” but she remembers only her failures. Looking back, sometimes she does not “feel up to the landscape.” She tries to place herself, place us, in history.

The sentences in this book are a remarkable evocation of place, even if she “never wrote the piece” and her notes on her upbringing at the end are scattershot, gorgeous, real, thoughtful, meaningful, relatable, full of atmosphere and intimacy.

Kimberly Farr narrated this audio collection of notes, and her quiet sophistication is quite up to the task of looking askance at the deep-rooted and culturally-queer habits of the South, and at the naiveté of Didion's upbringing in California. Didion thinks people make too much and too little, both, of their effect on, say, the South, or the West. She takes the long view now, musing that we all seem so inconsequential except when we are not.

A clip of the Penguin Random House audio production is given below:




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The One Inside by Sam Shepard

Hardcover, 192 pages Expected pub: February 7th 2017 by Knopf Publishing Group ISBN13: 9780451494580

This gorgeously-conceived and -written memoir is simply delicious to hear. Bill Pullman reads it, sounding so much like Shepard’s remembered craggy, crusty voice crossing the ranges of a human heart on its journey from teen to seventy years. He is sly, self-serving, and somehow sincere, still sexy, selective, remembering his father’s young mistress, confusing us and himself about when he eventually becomes his father (now “one year older than his father was when he died”) and when any indiscretions become his own.

"…forty years of movie sets….a great blue heron waiting for a frog to rise… the wind moans through the aspens…and Nabokov says the reason he writes is ‘aesthetic bliss’…"

Patti Smith, Shepard’s long time friend and one-time lover, writes the Foreword and she claims the memoir is both “him, sort of him, and not him at all,” containing “altered perspectives, lucid memory, and hallucinatory impressions.” Reading it, we think we know what might be real and what will always be desire. He is a man of a certain age, one foot in the grave and one hand on his genitals; his descriptions of the twenty-something wearing a pink frilly skirt, sitting straight up, knees together, her spine not touching the back of the chair, recall to us hunger, sharp smells, flavor, and oh yes, something the old man had never forgotten….his first lover, the red-haired Felicity, his father’s fourteen-year-old lover.

Nabokov is heralded at the beginning, and his fantastic mental contortions are mirrored throughout the naughty little remembrance of an old man romancing a pretty young thing adrift, his Blackmail Girl. She is not as young as his father’s jailbait and he is older than his father but still working in film. Descriptions of what the production team does to ‘authenticate’ a film in production is impressive and maybe even wasteful and unnecessary. Extravagant, certainly. It is absorbing to hear the details interspersed with his little problem—pretending the little miss accompanying him is friend rather than prey.

"[Feelings about her] were like warm water running down my back."

Comfortable, pleasurable, and maybe not so dangerous. Certainly not wrong. Well, maybe…was it wrong?…what about Felicity? Felicity, we see at the end, was clearly too young. Shepard recalls the name of one of the world’s great prose stylists, Heinrich von Kleist, who is known also for his double suicide in 1811 with a married female friend who was dying of uterine cancer, so she wouldn’t have to die alone.

This book details the metamorphosis of a man, once a boy who, like Felicity, was too young, innocent, shocked by what his body wants and what his mind does, not grousing, not explaining, just writing…describing life through language, lush, foxy, exact, observant…just look, he says, just…listen.

"Who knows what is real anyway?"

We chart, as Patti Smith suggests, the “shifting core of the narrator,” from boy to man, from uncertainty to awareness, from innocence to culpability. He was always “confused and amused by women” but in senescence seeks to grasp a moment, a feeling, a memory. Literature, language, and its portrayal in film or on stage, has been his work for forty years. He may be winding down, but this he can still do: write with clarity, dreams or memories or lies or wishes or denials. This may be a memoir, but who’s to say the memories of an old man aren’t half fiction?

I loved this work. Shepard always read a lot of books but famous writers like Mailer, Capote, or Nabokov confused him. Shepard knew what was important, and stashed language like memory, in red naugahyde suitcases, ready to be pulled out in wonderment years later, and used to describe this world of his, or ours. He may be an ordinary man (who knows?), but he has extraordinary skill. This is a special, wonderful, joyful, ugly, painful look at our past century, a western landscape, and a man in it.

“Good enough for a book.”

I listened to the Penguin Random House production of this memoir, read by Bill Pullman. Check out the portion excerpted below:





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The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories by P.D. James

The 2016 Preface to this collection of stories invokes Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie. James mentions that short story mysteries are challenging to write because the author must give their psychological studies an immediate point, without all the space that a novel presents, all in service to the surprise and satisfaction of the reader. Agatha Christie is explicitly mentioned in at least one story, but it is Sayers and Conan Doyle who I think are evoked most completely. This collection brings together four very short detective stories all centered on the Christmas season and, no matter when James actually wrote her preface, there can be no doubt that these are a substantial Christmas gift to her readers.

I listened to the Penguin Random House (Faber Audio) production of this book, and enjoyed them absolutely. The stories are not new: one was written in 1969, another in 1979, 1995, 1996. It may be possible to find the stories elsewhere, but I am going to recommend you listen to these. Altogether the reading is about 3 hours, and the time spent listening places you way back in time, out of your daily life and into the early 20th Century, recalling a time when the mystery greats were stalking the earth.

Born in 1920, James centers her first story, "The Mistletoe Murders", about the time she in real life married Ernest Connor Bantry White, an army doctor, in 1941. Her husband White developed a psychological illness during World War II, and James subsequently had to support the family which included two young daughters. She did not begin writing until the 1950s, but from the time of the war she worked in hospital administration for a London hospital board, a job she held until her husband died in the mid-1960’s, two years after her first novel featuring Adam Dalgliesh, called Cover her Face, was published. James then took a position as a civil servant within the criminal section of the Home Office. [info courtesy of Wikipedia].

There are two Dalgliesh stories in this collection, both deliciously demonstrating his unrivaled talent for observation and deduction, which prompts one character in “The Twelve Clues of Christmas” to compare him to Ms. Marple. Dalgliesh was of course a man in a man’s world and was recognized as a great detective by his own colleagues and those of the local constables. It is reassuring for me to find in this story the understanding of the staff of a local CID is quite up to the standards of the Met, though they allow Dalgliesh to strut his stuff before they take the case in hand themselves, on Christmas Day.

Each of these stories have James’ special intelligence and quiet control about them. If I had to choose a favorite from among these, it might be the first story, “The Mistletoe Murders,” which reveals the abyss most creepily, the dark river flowing beneath the surface of our world.

This Penguin Random House CD set or audio download is a great Christmas treat for parents or anyone who appreciates stories told in the vein of those earlier great mystery story-tellers, Conan Doyle, Sayers, Christie, and Poe. The reading is done most ably by TV and film star Jenny Agutter and Daniel Weyman, narrator of the complete series of Dalgliesh novels. Publication date is set for October 25, 2016. Of course the set will be available in e-reader and paper formats from Knopf as well. Don’t miss these little gems.


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The Bangkok Asset (Sonchai Jitpleeheep #6) by John Burdett

It is difficult to know if Burdett is so far out of touch he is creating a science fiction world or if he is so in touch that we are the ones inhabiting a present we know little of. He repeats often during this book that the West has so destabilized itself with the corruption of our spirituality and morals, and its support of divisive financial and corporate policy that all is left is for it to collapse into a state of oligarchy, state control, and slavery. The natural outcome of this disintegration are the trans-human creatures he introduces to us in this book: creatures bred to control humans.

All the things we liked about the Burdett series are still there but they are wrapped in this new black packaging. Burdett is funny and insightful. I loved his new character, Krom, a smart, capable lesbian with a full-body tattoo and a fierce libido. Burdett has a point when it comes to trans-humans: eventually we are probably all going to be installing little technological aids into our bodies to prevent problems or enhance features…he just jumped the gun a little with his physically perfect though psychologically stunted spawn.

Our beloved Sonchai is struggling with his history. He wants to know who his father is, and for some strange reason his mother has been withholding. In this episode she finally shows him pictures which helps only a little: it was all too long ago and old men often do not resemble their younger selves.

There is a mystery here, but the old police procedural format seems to have gone out the window. This is far more a psychological thriller with super-elements. It is interesting that Burdett chose to call his freaks trans-humans considering we are just going through trans-talk in the States at the moment. One of his Chinese characters, offered a choice of straight, gay, or trans bars, chose trannies as his far-and-away favorite. Perhaps it is the notion of infinitely adaptable human experience? Are we infinitely adaptable?

Speaking of Chinese, there is a strong suggestion of Chinese influence deep in Thai government business, and throughout Southeast Asia, which probably has an element of truth. It would be difficult to imagine they wouldn’t have a great deal of influence, given China’s size, wealth, population, needs, and proximity.

“War is always a balance between wanting to win and needing to survive.”

The book takes a dog-leg into Cambodia to visit the jungle site of Vietnam-era LSD experiments that sort of fit with the search for Jitpleecheep’s search for his father, but it is so dark and weird that it seemed Burdett wanted to add this to the historical record regardless of whether or not it fit perfectly. Is it true? Again, there may be elements of truth, though it is infuriating America’s secret spy agency would have this kind of reach in a country with which we had no diplomatic relations for at least four years in the 1960’s. Maybe it is folklore kept alive by people Burdett meets in Bangkok—it must be very strange at times in Bangkok with all those old operators hanging around.

Burdett also reminds us of three U.S. citizens who self-immolated in front of government buildings to protest the Vietnam War. I’d never heard of this. Alice Herz, Roger LaPorte, Norman Morrison. November 1965. How effectively they were erased.

One reviewer said the book was open-ended, suggesting a further installment in this vein. Perhaps that is true, though I felt Burdett was just offering questions for us all to consider. Who wouldn’t want enhancements of one sort or another? It depends. It depends on what we give up in the process, and what kind of society we eventually want. He has a couple of zinger quotes that seem appropriate to present-day America:

“Haven’t you noticed how childish the West has become? Just when it most needs men and women of mature judgment it seems there aren’t any. Such a society is vulnerable to the most radical manipulation…what do dissatisfied children do? They complain, they cry—but it never occurs to them to rebel effectively…Infantilism and slavery go hand in hand…”

I am only marginally sad to lose Sonchai Jitpleecheep to Burdett’s changing fictional world. It seems Burdett is giving us something new, filled with the insights of a lifetime. Thought-provoking.

A word on the audio: Actor Stephen Hogan does an excellent job with the material but he has a way of dropping his voice to indicate a character's thought or the narrator speaking. The change in register is so great that unless one is wearing headphones, one has to adjust the volume constantly, otherwise the other characters' voices are much too loud. This is only a problem in a car or on a stereo system. A suggestion to Recorded Books then, is that Hogan can drop his voice, but not to such a great extent. The difference in loudness is the problem.



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The New Tsar: The Rise & Reign of Vladimir Putin by Steven Lee Myers

During the election pre-season in America, I was as surprised and intrigued at the support for Donald Trump as the rest of the thinking universe (not the pundits, of course). As I laughed at his unscripted policy-free speeches and intentionally note-worthy off-the-cuff remarks, I remember thinking I would love to see the effect of his ‘shock and awe’ campaign on someone like Putin. I thought Trump would be too unpredictable and outspoken for Putin. I am ready to take that back. In a weird kind of way, both men, neither political operatives at the start of their careers, are a similar kind of not-liberal, not-conservative, whatever-works nationalist kind of politician. And both have created a cult of personality to facilitate a kind of one-man rule.

Myers allowed me to catch this glimpse of Putin at his start in government as an ordinary man unused to and previously uninterested in political power. When he began in the Sobchak Leningrad government, he may or may not have been involved in skimming from contracts he arranged with the newly burgeoning private sector after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He certainly was in a position to do so, and many of the people he awarded contracts did so: he formed firm friendships and nurtured loyal apparatchiks in Leningrad that reappear throughout his political career. But it is also true that Russia in the early 1990’s was a wild place with many crime lords jockeying for power. Putin’s family was targeted at least once. Putin did not at that time appear to have the trappings of new wealth, though we learned only recently of monies in his name from the Panama Papers. It is possible that his wealth accumulated from later dealings.

It has always been difficult to understand why Putin was reputed to enjoy such wide public support in Russia, but I realize now that our media reporting emphasized bad judgment and outcomes while Russian media outlets emphasized good intent and nationalism. Myers gives a far more nuanced picture of Putin growing into his role as president—prime minister—president again in this book. If Putin didn’t begin as a friend to oligarchs, he gradually relaxed into the role. He began as a man with he stated goal of “making Russia great again.” He could see that some people were gaming the system by purchasing national reserves of commodities improperly priced and selling them at more realistically priced international values. This was not illegal at the time, just morally suspect. Rather than trying to fix the system of laws that allowed this rape of mineral and energy resources to continue, Putin selectively applied legal and taxation rules on the books to hamper, entangle, or otherwise inhibit the activities of people who did not work closely with him.

Myers charts the hardening of Putin’s character, from his shock and dismay upon learning that Yeltsin had chosen him as a political successor to his chagrin upon learning that his chosen successor, Medvedev, had both an opinion and a weakness that didn’t partner Putin well. And what was very clear in Myers’ telling was the perception of U.S. foreign policy decisions by Russians and Putin. By the time Edward Snowden comes on the scene late in the book, we laugh at Putin’s pleasure in pointing out political dissidence and jail is not just a Russian thing.

”Ask yourself, do you need to put such people in jail, or not?”

Putin was more confident during his second presidency and yet the moment he assumed power the second time his poll ratings began to fall. It was the moment citizens realized that there was really no conversation, no political discussion going on. It only takes twenty years for a political climate to change irrevocably: ask Hillary Clinton. In twenty years, young people with no historical memory bring a new clarity to what is happening right now, with no regard to what came before. Pussy Riot called out Putin; Sanders’ supporters are calling out Clinton.

Putin operated, and operates now, by relying on a close and loyal group of political “friends” from his time in the FSB and his time working for Sobchak in Leningrad. Loyalty is so prized that it would not surprise me to learn that some of the political murders committed during Putin’s reign were not “ordered” by himself. It seems entirely possible to me that elements in a large bureaucracy might prove their loyalty by eliminating static that was damaging to the leader. The problem with a large bureaucracy is that it can take on a character of its own and is not easy to change.

A really strange event occurred early in Putin’s first presidency: the bombing of the apartment buildings in Moscow and the sacks of FSB-sourced explosives found in the apartment building in Ryazan. These incidents have never been satisfactorily explained, and could be an example of a bureaucracy grinding out [imperfect] solutions to perceived problems that impact Putin & Co. In a case like that, or in the case of sheer incompetence (also an enduring feature of large bureaucracy), it is not hard to see Putin keeping mum out of loyalty to those he is protecting. Bill Browder’s account of his time making money hand-over-fist in the 1990’s in Russia, Red Notice, mentioned that powerful figures known to Putin wanted the real estate on which those apartment buildings were built and were meeting resistance. Some actions, like poisoning political opponents or shooting reporters in the the stairwells of their buildings, are simply too crude, destructive, and beneath the dignity of someone in power to imagine they are a “command.” Whatever the truth of the matter, this did not have to originate in the Kremlin to be horrifying in its motivation. It does appear, however, that it was condoned by the Kremlin since a good explanation was never uncovered.

One of the things that motivates Putin is the expanding power of NATO in Europe. Putin still thinks in terms of great powers and feels he is being hemmed in by Western Europe nibbling away at his satellite countries. It is hard not to sympathize. Certainly that is happening, and will continue to happen in a Clinton presidency, further exacerbating Putin’s bellicosity, and sense of infringement and inferiority.

Russia is a huge country. “Too big, really” says Ian Frazier in his big book Travels in Siberia. Putin says its size and different cultures is the reason there cannot be a representative democracy like that in America. Since even America doesn’t seem to the have the process working very well at the moment, it is difficult to pretend to know what difficulties arise when trying to restore the kind of power that was shattered by the overthrow of the tsar in the twentieth century in Russia. The only thing I would concede is that ruling Russia must be a very difficult job, particularly when one is looking backward. One must look ahead, not backward, when one is leading, it seems to me.

I feel like I have gotten a terrific education reading this book and am much better able to parse news coming out of Russia, Europe, and the Middle East today. I can now put Putin into the context vis-a-vis U.S. diplomatic relations. Clinton must be the last person Putin would want to see be elected president in the United States, and in some ways Trump is as unpredictable as Putin has claimed he has tried to be. But I am not recommending a vote for Trump. I think a better choice might be neither of these two.



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Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke

Hardcover, 175 pages Published November 10th 2015 by Knopf ISBN 0307962334

This handbook for knights is a 6” x 4” hardcover bound with green cloth and a gold ribbon to place as you read. Hawke initially did not intend it for wide circulation: It was begun when his wife and he decided to have some “rules of the house,” which became more like “rules for living” the more he tried to think about what was really important to share with his children.

The format and the content suit one another. Twenty chapter headings address key attributes or phenomena that face each person as they grow, accompanied by a pen-and-ink drawing of a long-lived bird and a short statement around the concept. This is followed by a longer (two-page) story, parable, lesson, or illustration of the concept in action. For instance, one of my favorites was “Discipline,” pictured with a grey heron:

”In the field of battle, as in all things, you will perform as you practice. With practice, you build the road to accomplish your goals. Excellence lives in attention to detail. Give your all, all the time. Don’t save anything for the walk home.The better a knight prepares, the less willing he will be to surrender.”

The story that follows sounds like eastern philosophy: “Often we imagine that we will work hard until we arrive at some distant goal, and then we will be happy. This is delusion. Happiness is the result of a life lived with purpose.” Hawke goes further, articulating the need for discipline: “Without it, locating your saddle may take all morning.”

On that tricky question of “Honesty,” Hawke tells us that often

“people lie because they feel the truth will cause pain to themselves or others. Do not fear suffering. The strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire. The facts are always friendly. Without a little agony, none of us would bother to learn a thing. The earth has to be tilled before the seeds can be planted.”

Hawke adds chapters on surprising things, like "Equality", and his chapter on "Love" is heartfelt and personal. His chapter on "Death" shares a wisdom we can all use.

"Life is a long series of farewells, only the circumstances should surprise us."

In this small book we sense naked emotion and lived experience at the same time it is charming, and useful. Perhaps it is his actor's gift, to do that. Hawke’s stories are often not his own: he has chosen stories and lessons he learned from Native American myth, Buddhism, high school coaches, Bob Dylan, among others and has turned them to his own purpose. Hawke adds a list of those he considers knights at the end of the book, in which list we find the names of Julian of Norwich, John Keats, and Martin Luther King, Jr. along with Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Papp, and River Phoenix.

In a New Yorker interview about this book, Hawke says that he learned just enough to entertain rather than be scholarly. I sensed that lack a depth just a little at times, but we can all use what he has collected. We can imagine how purposeful and meaningful it must have been for him to pull together the more constant precepts he has encountered in his life and to have pared them all down to a few short pages. Very satisfying indeed, and an admirable attempt. We may not always agree with what Hawke has chosen to highlight or his interpretation, but placing our thinking next to his raises his challenge. This collection is well worth the perusal for teachers, parents, novelists, poets as well as middle-graders and teens.

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Mothering Sunday: A Romance by Graham Swift

Hardcover, 208 pages Expected publication: April 26th 2016 by Alfred A. Knopf

This delicious short novel is in many ways a Mother’s Day dream. It is a novel short enough to be read in a long, lazy afternoon; it is a novel for mature audiences, weathered in relationships and outcomes, who bring a kind of life knowledge to one remarkable spring day in 1924 when sunlight poured over yellow and green fields and not a smudge marred the bright blue of the sky. In March a day like June, warm and golden, pregnant with potential and possibility. The strange undercurrent of foreboding that springs unbidden feels like something we bring as we recall in some remembered way the lovemaking in the big house empty in the afternoon with the windows opened wide to streaming sunlight and perhaps a breeze: “the sunlight applauded their nakedness.” A young scion and the maid…

He says they were “friends.” He did treat her as a friend—exactly as a friend. Their lovemaking was like a sport. He did not talk of the future…there was no need. He needn’t say goodbye, since it wasn’t goodbye was it? He would marry, but perhaps they would continue their “friendship” long after. One doesn’t lose one’s friends when one gets married. Not necessarily. Our judgement makes us uncomfortable, but we’d be wrong. The foreboding won’t point to that at all. The lovemaking was the maid’s liberation, not her downfall. She learned to be comfortable in herself there.

Swift shows his mastery of the form in this novel, telling us pieces of backstory interspersed with conversation and movement…a phone call bidding the maid, fragrant air filled with light and birdsong, a bike ride past still-leafless trees casting skeleton shade on new green and buds ready to open. We will never forget the day, so rare and so precious. Mothering Day. The staff are off to visit their own parents and the scion is preparing for his wedding in a fortnight to the daughter of a wealthy family. His own parents lost two sons in the last war and he is the last of the brood. This is usually a day of remembrance, but it is such an unusual day, coming as it does a fortnight before a wedding…

The beauty of the day suffuses the story and works its magic on us, despite our reservations. We are unprepared, then, for the foreboding to manifest when it does, finally. And we are unprepared also for the “long course of history” that plays out from the maid’s point of view—how this day will remain in her memory forever and what it meant to her life’s work. It raises questions about the nature and role of fiction and how one gets to the place where fiction can be truth. True things can be imagined, just as fiction can spring from truth. Sometimes fiction might even get closer to truth than real life, getting as it does “to the quick, the heart, the nub, the pith.” That is the trade of fiction, the “trade of truth-telling…It was about being true to the very stuff of life, it was about trying to capture, though you never could, the very feel of being alive.” And that is what what this book does. It feels lived.

I hope it is not too late for everyone to buy this gem of a novel before Mother’s Day. It is a real gift. And if anyone knows what body part is pictured on the dust jacket of the American edition, please let me know. I have meditated on it for days, and am still unable to make a guess.


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Books I Wish I Had Time to Read - new and upcoming 2016

Am getting lots of information about interesting books these days and cannot get to them all. However, you bright things out there may be able to enjoy them. Below please find the offerings of a few publishers or authors that I wish I had time to read:

Columbia University Press
Published in 2012, this title just won CUP's Distinguished Book Award. From the CUP website description of this book:

"Wael B. Hallaq boldly argues that the 'Islamic state,' judged by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both impossible and inherently self-contradictory. Comparing the legal, political, moral, and constitutional histories of premodern Islam and Euro-America, he finds the adoption and practice of the modern state to be highly problematic for modern Muslims. He also critiques more expansively modernity's moral predicament, which renders impossible any project resting solely on ethical foundations.

The modern state not only suffers from serious legal, political, and constitutional issues, Hallaq argues, but also, by its very nature, fashions a subject inconsistent with what it means to be, or to live as, a Muslim. By Islamic standards, the state's technologies of the self are severely lacking in moral substance, and today's Islamic state, as Hallaq shows, has done little to advance an acceptable form of genuine Shari'a governance. The Islamists' constitutional battles in Egypt and Pakistan, the Islamic legal and political failures of the Iranian Revolution, and similar disappointments underscore this fact. Nevertheless, the state remains the favored template of the Islamists and the ulama (Muslim clergymen). Providing Muslims with a path toward realizing the good life, Hallaq turns to the rich moral resources of Isl...(continued on CUP website)"

Knopf Doubleday, a division of Random House

From the promo materials:

In the late 1890s, Mark Twain made the terrible mistake of pouring his and his wife’s life savings into a publishing company. Needless to say, they lost everything. At the peak of his fame, Twain went bankrupt and at risk of losing control of his most beloved masterpieces, such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, decided to pay the debts quickly by embarking on a round-the-world speaking tour. Along the way, Twain delivered one hundred and twenty-two standup comedy performances — the greatest hits of his career in a ninety-minute one-man show — across the USA in places such as Butte and Spokane, and on to Australia, New Zealand, India, Ceylon and South Africa. The performances were funny, poignant, strangely thought-provoking, and wildly popular. No American author had ever talked his way around the world. And on the cusp of success, his family suffered a horrific tragedy, but Twain survived and returned triumphant to New York City in 1900. [Aside: Richard Zacks sounds a bit of a character, too.]See the website blurb

Penguin Random House
From the promo:

For readers of Lorrie Moore, Jennifer Egan, and Lena Dunham, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL is a dark, hilarious, acutely written collection of vignettes which skewers our body image-obsessed culture while simultaneously delivering a tender, sympathetic portrait of a difficult but unforgettable woman whose lifelong struggle to lose weight comes at a high cost.
Caustic, hilarious, and heartbreaking, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL introduces Mona Awad as a major literary talent. From the website blurb

Other Press
From the promo lit:

This best-selling debut novel from one of France’s most exciting young writers is based on the true story of the 1949 disappearance of Air France’s Lockheed Constellation and its famous passengers. On October 27th, 1949, the newest crown jewel in the Air France fleet, the Constellation welcomed thirty-eight passengers aboard a flight from Paris to New York, including the world famous boxer Marcel Cerdan and virtuoso violinist Ginette Neveu. In his best-selling debut novel CONSTELLATION...Bosc is as a detective trying to solve a crime, drawing a spider web of connections that grows exponentially in spectrum; in telling these stories, Bosc brings us to the Italian-American mafia in pre-revolution Havana, to the private love letters of Édith Piaf, to the quickie divorces of the rich and famous in 1940s Reno, Nevada, to his own correspondence with the son of one of the Constellation’s victims.
Go to the website

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