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.



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Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

Hardcover, 339 pgs, Pub Sept 4th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812997415

I listened to this novel months ago—just about the time it came out. I haven’t been able to adequately put into words how I felt about it. This was the first time I’ve partaken of a Shteyngart novel, and it is more in every way than I was expecting. There is a shadow of Pynchon’s frank absurdity there, and some bungee-cord despair—the kind that bounces back, irrepressible.

Shteyngart’s novel is overstuffed with funny, sad, true, caustic, simplistic, derogatory observations about life in America that somehow capture us in all our glory. He is not dismissive; I think he likes us. The main character in this novel, Barry Cohen, is nothing if not representative of what we have taught ourselves to be: money-mad and self-pitying, educated enough to capture our own market but too stupid to see the big picture. What introspection we have is wasted on divining the motivations of others rather than our own triggers.

Barry is a man America loves to hate. He is a successful hedge fund manager who emerged from the economic crisis in fine shape—it was only his clients who suffered. And his clients suffered because the government finally caught on to some irregularities in Barry’s operations that allowed him to win so much. While the SEC investigated, Barry left Seema, his wife and an attorney, with his son Shiva to see if he could find an old flame. Last he’d heard she was living in the South.

Right there Barry made a big mistake. One doesn’t leave an attorney for another woman. I mean, how stupid do you have to be? Barry and Seema had been doing okay marriage-wise, though it turns out Shiva is autistic. Unable to speak and often looking as though he does not even comprehend what words and comments are directed to him, Shiva is unknowable.

Barry wants to love him, but maybe wants Shiva to love Barry himself more. Seema handles most of Shiva's care which means she cannot work. More and more absorbed with nurturing her son’s growth, she recognizes and relishes small victories in understanding Shiva's internal world while her husband languishes.

Barry Cohen’s odyssey from New York by bus to various destinations in the south features a man with a skill set that serves him surprisingly well when traveling by bus on limited cash, no credit, and a roller-board of fancy watches. He can’t be shamed because he’s a bigger crook than anyone. Dragging around his collection of fancy watches turns out not to be very lucrative—who recognizes their value? But they do get him food occasionally, and a little tradable currency.

Barry spends relatively little psychic energy pondering the sources of his Wall Street wealth, but somehow recognizes it’s probably not worth as much as he was getting paid to do it. His long-story-short gives us cameos of American ‘types’: street-wise salesmen, long-suffering nannies, practical mothers, and money managers who believe their work confers some kind of godliness on their financial outcomes. Because we win, we are meant to win. Yes, this all takes place in the first year of the Trump administration.

Barry Cohen is hard to take. “See, this is the thing about America,” he tells his former employee in Atlanta, a man named Park that Barry keeps referring to as Chinese, “You can never guess who’s going to turn out to be a nice person.” 


Well. Barry is not a very nice person, really. He simply is not reflective enough. We can feel twinges at his angst, but ultimately we make our own beds, don’t we? Barry is tiresome, that’s the problem. His adventures are quite something, but we grow weary of his blind spots and slow recognition that he does, in fact, love his imperfect family. It’s all he’s got, the silly doofus, and they are worthy of his love. We’d rather spend time with them.

In an enlightening interview with The Guardian, Shteyngart acknowledges the story is about racism:

"I think racism undergirds all of this, no question. It’s a huge part of it. When we were immigrants and couldn’t speak the language, the one thing this country told us was: ‘You’re white, there’s always somebody lower than you.’"

Shteyngart thought he might add a gender dimension to the story, and was going to make his main character a woman, but the few female hedge fund managers he found were rational and didn’t take such big crazy risks that they end up blowing up the world. Right, I think. Exactly right.





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White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

Paperback, 192 pgs, Pub June 26th 2018 by Beacon Press, ISBN13: 9780807047415

The provocative title of this book is a draw. What are we doing, saying, and thinking that is unconscious and yet still brings out some kind of anger or fear response in us when challenged? I am constantly learning how much I don’t know about race in America and much more there is to know. DiAngelo is also white, by the way. She, too, makes racist mistakes, though more rarely now, even years after immersing herself in how it manifests. We can’t escape it. We have to acknowledge it.

That is basically what this book is about. How we must acknowledge our race, that we do in fact see race, that we make assumptions about people based on race, how we need to disrupt habitual patterns of interaction, and then consciously try to put ourselves in the way of disrupting the patterns of racism which are literally claiming the lives of too many people of color for reasons we would never recognize as legitimate in our own lives. It’s been, give or take, one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War. Sometimes it feels as it hasn’t been won by anti-slavers. Shame on us.

The first part of the book is a slow and careful baby-steps leading to a hot-button topic, giving readers/listeners time to blow off their indignation and stop being surprised that yes, she is going to talk about white supremacy in American life and how this consistently sidelines the needs, emotions, and opportunities of people of color. She is going to talk about the ways white people consistently deny this truth, do not recognize it applies to all white people, all of whom benefit from the system as it operates in the United States. But the best part comes at the end, when she cites people like me who have said, "Yeah, but I know this already," or "But I’m not racist," or "I have friends who are black," or "I’ve lived overseas," etc.

DiAngelo talks about white solidarity:

"The unspoken agreement among white to protect white advantage and not cause another white person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racially problematic…Why speaking up about racism would ruin the ambiance [at the dinner table or in a social situation] or threaten our career advancement is something we might want to talk about."

and

"meritocracy is a precious ideology in the United States, but neighborhoods and schools are demonstrably not equal; they are separate and unequal."

and

"We are taught we lose nothing of value through racial segregation."

Racism is systemic, institutional, omnipresent, and epistemologically embedded in our reality, according to filmmaker Omowale Akintunde. It is not like murder: we don't have to "commit it" for it to happen. It can be unconscious.

The best argument I have ever heard for why we falsely assume racism doesn’t exist when we don't mean to do something racist is this: a woman married to a man would never say, "Because I am married to a man, I have a gender-free life." Even a married woman will carry prejudices with her about men. Di Angelo insists we do not set up a false binary: racism is bad, non-racists are good. It is probably better to think of ourselves on a continuum. With effort, we can improve our understanding but because the system operates without our consent, we will never escape it.

We are reminded that the white identity needs black people in order to exist. Around blackness we have created certain myths (about dangerousness, laziness, etc) which we may have thought we’d eradicated until some stray incident makes them come flooding back to consciousness. Whiteness is then a false identity, of superiority. A black person who steps out of their ‘place’ and demands to be treated equally, as in sports stars or popular singers, may trigger a backlash. DiAngelo gives a brilliant exegesis of the book/movie The Blind Side about a poor black high school football player adopted by a rich white family, and how it perpetrates dominant white ideologies. That book came out to great acclaim only in 2007. It seems like a lifetime since then, but it is only ten years.

Race and racism are emotional subjects. We may discover the ways whites have perpetrated a system of injustice against people of color out of ignorance, but ignorance is no longer a good excuse. We have work to do disrupting what we see as race bias in America today, making sure our kids are educated in a way that improves their understanding of conscious/unconscious race bias, and also so they understand that their lives will be deficient without interaction with and understanding of black lives.

We must work to widen our circles so that people of color are a part of our worldview, always remembering we are doing this for ourselves, not for the benefit of people of color. We are not being generous; we are seeking justice. Ask for feedback, but don’t be overly sensitive when people respond. Feedback is useful. Make sure to keep the focus on learning, not on one’s own fragility. And remember, one doesn’t have to intend to be racist to act in a racist way. It’s the water we swim in.

I listened to the audio of this, narrated by Amy Landon, and had access to a paper copy. DiAngelo gives a terrific short ‘Continuing Ed’ bibliography in the back, sharing other excellent titles. There are sure to be a couple of articles or books or podcast you still haven’t seen. There was only one book I admired that I did not see listed there: Good White People by Shannon Sullivan from the University of North Carolina. DiAngelo makes note of the terrific podcast, Seeing White, put together by a team headed by John Biewen out of Duke University. All of it is worthwhile.

Below please find a 22-minute video about the subjects in this book:



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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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The Death & Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan

Paperback, 384 pgs, Pub Apr 10th 2018 by W. W. Norton Company (first pub Mar 7th 2017), ISBN13: 9780393355550, Lit Awards: Helen Bernstein Book Award Nominee for Excellence in Journalism (2018), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for History (2017), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Science & Technology (2017), J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award (2015)

Egan separates a couple of salient facts by the length of a book, but I here eclipse the space between them:

※ The Great Lakes are the largest expanse of freshwater in the world.

※ The Great Lakes are in the midst of a slow-motion ecological catastrophe begun by opening to the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Atlantic.

※ Freshwater is the world's most precious natural resource.

※“The intuition is that a very large lake like this would be slow to respond somehow to climate change. But in fact we’re finding that its particularly sensitive.”

After the last election I became laser-focused on Wisconsin. I watched as a traditionally blue state voted red, and kept Governor Scott Walker and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in office through severe gerrymandering that could not be reversed even by mandate from federal judges. The Wisconsin gerrymandering case was forced to our country’s highest court, and SCOTUS's decision on the fairness of such twisted districts should be heard before the November 2018 election. But decisions made by the severely gerrymandered Republican legislature has been allowed to impact and will continue to impact Lake Michigan’s watershed at a time when it needs urgent attention.

A proposed $10 billion investment in Paul Ryan's District #1 by Taiwan's Foxconn, maker of touch screens for the iPad, was inked in 2017. Foxconn will use 7 billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan per day, five billion of which will be used outside and not returned to the lake's watershed area. By the end of Egan's book, contracts like this and that made with Waukesha city, a suburb of Milwaukee also outside the watershed area, take on far greater meaning.

Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes have been under pressure from invasive species through the Seaway to the north and from the south through the Sanitary & Ship Canal to the Mississippi. Just when scientists managed to tackle the problems caused by one devastating species, they would encounter another, even more overwhelming, until we arrived where we are now, with toxic algae blooms regularly threatening the water supplies of major cities that use lake water for drinking water.

Besides that, we discover the increases in the lake’s winter temperatures means increases in the lake’s summer temperatures, encouraging evaporation and shrinkage of water area. This, along with pollution of existing supplies and inevitable demands from rapidly drying areas of the country who have gone through their aquifers is increasing the pressures on scientists to refresh and preserve this enormously important natural resource. It requires attention and political support, and one fears what would happen should business-influenced politicians force through compromises that have short-term gains for the few and long term consequences for the many.

Dan Egan is a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and has been researching and reporting on the Great Lakes for at least a decade. He has done something we rarely encounter: he has made science and history come alive. As I did my own research into the political conditions in Wisconsin, I thought it would be important to learn more about Lake Michigan which plays such an important role in the life and economy of the state but I expected Egan’s book would be struggle to read. Instead I found it completely riveting and hard to put down. When was the last time you said that about a science/geography/history book?

A few years ago I read another nonfiction title, Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown that was similarly involving. Although the history of the Washington crew team competing in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany is long over, Brown made the book completely propulsive and un-put-down-able. That is the way I feel about Egan's book.

One threat to the lakes follows another, and our hearts squeeze as we hear of dangers and disasters in the last couple of years. It feels absolutely critical that we pay attention to the resource--fresh water--scientists have been telling us for half a century is in limited supply and which has everything to do with life on earth.

I can’t recommend this title more highly. Egan should definitely be on award lists for this title, and indeed has already scooped a couple. The W.W. Norton paperback came out last month (April 2018) and the Random House Audio production is likewise terrific, narrated by Jason Culp. Below please find a clip.





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Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Hardcover, 273 pages Published April 28th 2009 by Doubleday, ISBN13: 9780385527651, Lit Awards: PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominee (2010), Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee for Fiction (2010)

The first time I read this book shortly after publication in 2009 I didn’t like anything about it. I didn’t understand Whitehead’s air of casual privilege. I reread it at the end of 2017 because a review by Brandon Harris in the New York Review of Books (Dec 7, 2017) about James McBride’s new collection of short stories, Five-Carat Soul, mentions Sag Harbor as “ravishing.” What did I miss?

The short answer is that I missed everything. But without going back to interrogate that 9-year-ago self, I can’t be sure I didn’t just miss, but dismiss this gorgeously-written growing-up summer reminiscent of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Whitehead surely didn’t have a white girl in mind as his target audience: he spoke to other young boys in a dangerous world who are uncertain, black, and soon-to-be men. This white girl gets to listen in.

This second time I listened to Mirron Willis read the novel and he gave it the voice I needed for comprehension. And yes, I do get it now. That mid-1980’s summer on Long Island gave a look into a boy’s mind, how he thought, what concerned him most, the dangers that lurked at the edges of his testosterone-soaked consciousness. Even his obliviousness to moves made by the few age-appropriate girls in his cohort rang true. Often boys look poleaxed at that age—fifteen—they are thinking of other things while their body is reacting.

What jerked me aware of my whiteness this time was the jokey nature of the not-quite-ready-for-the-world half-man Benji talking about the radio spot his father listened to about the shootings happening regularly and constantly, the shootings of black men, or women, dropped into the news like yesterday’s weather. All of a sudden I was willing to concede that his reality had real, unreasonable, and unexpected death in it, not mine, and I should shut my mouth and listen up.

Once I gave him the reins, I could see and hear the way language was being used, see how capable that boy was of capturing a mood or the attitudes of his friends, his family. When BB guns crop up in the story, they immediately register as danger, despite the innocence all parties have exhibited to now. A group of teen boys testing the puncture power of BB shot from close range…it sets the blood pulsing and the mind reeling. A sense of danger is here to stay.

A short section near the end telling of Benji’s exciting and mysterious older sister Elena is filled with a barely acknowledged yearning for connection so poignant our hearts break asunder. Benji’s discussion of his parents’ marriage, and the father’s oppressive attitudes towards his wife and children, explains an avoidance in the family dynamic with an authenticity that can’t be faked. Benji’s mother “disappeared, word by word” when his father became verbally abusive, and the sense of propriety Benji had developed somewhere led him to close all the windows in the warm house in an attempt to keep the parents' raised voices hidden from the neighborhood. That sense of shame is a just a shuttercock instant in a boy's life: a few years earlier, the youngster would not feel he had the agency, a few years later, he would realize this happens in every marriage.

Some set scenes may challenge our credulousness, though anyone who has lived with a teenaged male may well be taken in: the pot of writhing maggots, the killing of houseflies with a rubber band, the first open-eyed open-mouthed kiss of a girl—all these elements of a parentless summer by the beach ring so true we feel the grit of wind-blown sand between our teeth. The beginning of the last chapter has some of the most beautiful writing I have seen anywhere, about the passage of time and reaching the end… of summer, of youth, of innocence, and somehow more than all that.

This wonderful fiction deserves all the accolades it got at the time, and it makes me curious to try another of Whitehead’s novels, especially the science fiction. I will look at Underground… again, for my own benefit, but I may owe him an apology for a review that did not acknowledge that however he wants to write about his understanding of slavery is a perspective that I have nothing to say about.





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Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Bela Shayevich

I was eleven or perhaps twelve years old when I learned that ignorance is no excuse for anything.

That revelation completely changed the way I viewed the world. I ran to my parents, separately, I remember, my eyes wide. I said to each of them, “Ignorance is no excuse!” It won’t save anyone from the repercussions of whatever they are ignorant of. You can die as a result of ignorance or you can participate in something evil as a result of ignorance.

As I remember it, my parents did not say anything. There is much I would think as a result of my eleven-year-old coming to me with such a revelation, and I am not sure I would know what to respond, either. But it was a big moment, and it came from reading a novel.

Now I wonder which novel gave me such an insight, but I cannot remember. I was an ordinary schoolgirl, with no special access to literature. I read too much, my sisters said, and most of them were bodice-rippers…

This book reminds me of that moment of realization. The insights into what man is and how he responds to national, political, and personal trauma come fast and hard in this work. Alexievich begins by recording voices from the Gorbachev years: “Those were wonderful, naïve years…” Both for and against Gorbachev, the voices record people’s naiveté. They had an excuse, the lack of reliable, comprehensive news coverage being one of them, but it would not save them from their future nor their past.

There is simply nothing to compare with this fabulous reconstruction of the lives of people under communism and after. Alexievich records the stories of people under the dictatorship of the people, and there is so much nuance, so much pain, fear, crazy love, faith, and delusion tied in with people’s understanding of those years that it becomes as clear a record of what humanity is that we have.

“Changing the nature of man” was on the table. From the sounds of some voices, it succeeded on every measure. But if nature can be changed, we question again that "nature." Naomi Klein tells us man is not hopelessly greedy but it is hard to see that when greed is rewarded and protected. The Soviet Union, Russia, has gone through enormous social upheaval in the last one hundred years, and Alexievich manages to give us a window through which we can begin to see what happened to people. It is breathtaking.

Among the voices are ordinary folk, high Kremlin officials, members of the brigades who spent their days shooting “enemies of the people.” We see what they were thinking at the time and what they are thinking now. Because governance the world over has many similarities, constraints, and imperatives, everyone who can read should see how governance actually plays out, no matter what we believe.

Alexievich has taken memory and made literature. For me, it will be one of the most meaningful books I have ever come across. I listened to the Penguin Random House Audio version of this, narrated by a full cast. It was beautifully done, and I highly recommend this method of consumption.

An interesting piece written by Sophie Pinkham in the New Republic magazine gives us some insight into how Alexievich may have gone about constructing her work. I disagree with Pinkham's conclusions, but her dogged research into the creation of the work itself reveals how this work has become Art.


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When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Hardcover, 228 pages Published January 12th 2016 by Random House

What makes human life meaningful? Kalanithi, a thirty-six year old neurosurgeon, tried to locate the nexus of language between science and philosophy to answer the question. “Literature provide[s] the best account of a life of the mind, illuminates another’s experience, and provides the richest material for moral reflection.” There is messiness and weight in real human life that is not accounted for by science, says Kalanithi. Science and analytics (and atheism) cannot encompass all the mystery of human life. He gives the best argument I have heard for religious faith, suggesting that no one human has any answers because each individual has only piece of the puzzle. It is only in human connection that we can start to put the pieces together, making sense of the world. “Human knowledge grows in the relationships we form between each other and the world.”

Science, created by human hands to make sense of the world, cannot contain the world. It doesn’t account for those things that make literature, and life, so compelling and so meaningful: “hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue…sacrifice, redemption, forgiveness…justice...goodness…mercy.” Questions without answers. Pieces of a puzzle.

Kalanithi died of lung cancer shortly after writing these words. But he strove every day, in his work, in his studies, in his family and friends, to find meaning in life. He thought it might reside in words. Language. As a neurosurgeon he was taught, and he believed, that if a person lost the capacity to communicate--to speak or to understand language—their life became no life at all. He was a student of literature besides being a neurosurgeon, and in language was meaning.

This memoir is Kalanithi’s attempt at connection. The Foreword is written by a Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of the unique and unforgettable novel about medicine and Africa, Cutting for Stone. The Epilogue is written by his wife, Lucy Kalanithi, also a doctor. Their words fore and aft add heft and a kind of imprimatur: this man really existed and, yes, he was as thoughtful as he appears. His life had meaning.

Kalanithi changed my mind about something, and showed up a deficit, a smallness in my own thinking. I have always been suspicious of people who spend their lives in school, even though they might be concurrently working, piling up more and more degrees. Anybody can do that, I thought. Kalanithi completed a Bachelor's in English literature and human biology, a Master's in English literature, a degree from Cambridge in the history and philosophy of science and medicine, a medical degree with neuroscience and neurosurgery specializations. He was in his mid-thirties when he finally finished. And then he died. That last year he wrote this book and he managed to show me that, if one is focused and serious and seeks the critical nexus between life and death, one may begin to perceive the outlines of a moral philosophy that might help answer the large questions. We only have a lifetime to find meaning, and sometimes that lifetime is short.

When Kalanithi talks of his 8-month old daughter shortly before his death, how she is all future and he is all past, we see what he sees: that their circles just touch, but don’t significantly overlap. She will never know him. This has the poignancy, truth, messiness, love, and tragedy of literature. Of life.

I listened to the audio of this book, read by Sunil Malhotra and Cassandra Campbell. I have encountered Malhotra before and he is one of the best narrators in my experience. His pacing is perfect and he makes the reading very easy to follow. I ended up buying the hardcover because the book was so meaningful for me and because it is easy to pass around.

“One key to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love, vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.” –Lucy Kalanithi

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Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hardcover, 152 pages Pub July 14th 2015 by Spiegel & Grau, ISBN13: 9780812993547, Pulitzer Prize Nominee for General Nonfiction (2016), National Book Award for Nonfiction (2015), ALA Alex Award (2016), PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (2016), National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Criticism (2015) NAIBA Book of the Year for Nonfiction (2016), Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction (2015), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Nonfiction (2015)

"The craft of writing as the art of thinking."

I feel as though I have been waiting my entire life for a voice like this one to appear. Ta-Nehisi Coates, however, would be the first to demure. He cites his influences in James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Malcolm X, Lucille Clifton, Nat Turner, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Harriet Tubman, Charles Drew, Kwame Ture, Kenneth Clark, Chancellor Williams, Eric Williams, Carolyn Rogers…the list is nearly endless, and the names spike this narrative composed of a father's letter to his son. “It is important that I tell you their names, that you know I have never achieved anything alone.” The form is immediate, urgent, and intimate.

Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside carefully illustrates that the crime in black neighborhoods cannot be explained except by looking at how we got here. And that is where Coates has come down as well. American history, no matter who writes it, bears witness to what the lives of black folk have been. It is brutal and dispiriting, and Coates is not the first to see and speak the bald horror of it. But somehow his voice is reaching us, finally, from this short book in the form of a letter to his son, and from a series of long articles published in The Atlantic magazine.

Prior to listening to an interview with Coates by James Bennet, his editor at The Atlantic, I was going to say something about how Coates seems to have recognized his historical moment. But he didn’t. He has been shocked by the response to his book. The truth is that Coates is riding the historical moment because he had been working for years to hone his writing skills, his understanding of history, his grasp of where he fits in the canon. Coates wrote this book quickly, in between his long, heavily researched articles for The Atlantic, illustrating that the creation process for an explosively meaningful piece of work is not necessarily in the actual writing, but in the preparation.

The work is compulsively readable, painful and exhilarating at the same time. He talks of his upbringing in a section of Baltimore where mostly what he felt was fear. Leovy and Coates both mention the fear: the fear of walking home from school, the fear of crossing an invisible line on some block, the terror awaiting the unwary or the young. He, and now we, realize it is a crime to have an entire race of people fearing for their lives on streets they cannot escape in a country of such plenty. Policies, deliberately crafted and enforced, have prevented entire groups of people from living well in this country. Those policies, "the product of democratic will," have been and are killing our young men.

I listened to the Random House audio production of this title, read by Coates himself. It is completely mesmerizing to hear him read this long letter to his fifteen-year-old son. Coates did not live in a time of slavery, Jim Crow laws, or civil rights protests. He lived in a time where every black child or man knew where the boundaries were in his neighborhood and took their lives in their hands every time they walked their own streets. And yet he knew that it was important to write this down, to bear witness, and to invite his son, and us, to bear witness.

There was not a moment in this recitation that is not deeply memorable, from the challenge in his opening lines “those Americans who believe they are white,” which he acknowledges is James Baldwin speaking. These things have been said before, but they have achieved a kind of resonance with the repetition that is almost physical, like a wave. The rules and laws that govern us created this idea of race as a defining characteristic rather than as a descriptor. The “one drop of blood” rule separates us artificially, and makes “other” of our countrymen.

Coates manages to survive his youth and a deadening experience at school, and shares with us his experience of leaving his hometown Baltimore, for university in Washington, D.C. Awakened to the wide variety of people that gather under the aegis “black,” his education and learning did not always take place in the classroom. The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center of Howard University preserves one of the world’s largest collections of Africana, writings on or about African Americans and the Africa diaspora. It is here that Coates really began to awaken to his place in the world. He captures those moments of lift-off, and we feel his velocity.

Coates’ language is fluent, relentlessly logical, and insistent. He describes his "intellectual vertigo" at university:

"It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream [of a better life in a quiet, leafy suburb] but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. There was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this."

He talks about how he had accepted “racecraft” and how he “could no longer predict where [he] would find [his] heroes.” The way he intones and repeats throughout his narrative “my body…my body…my body” makes us realize that we may hurt his body, but we will never get his mind. That is his own, and he sees the injustices, and he will speak of the injustices.

He marries, and moves with his family to France, where he could raise his child without the fear. His experience of discovering a different world abroad seals our fascination with him. He highlights moments of breakthrough understanding, of what it means to be alive in the larger world, speaking a new language, away from the terrible yet comfortable environment of home. He sees he is American, not just black. That black was a label someone gave him and had used to define, not describe him.

Coates’ letter to his son is a terrifically moving and important addition to our understanding of how we in America define race, and how we use race to define ourselves. Other countries do not have such definitions, so it is America who has to examine her own history, her own soul. This book goes some way to helping us to do that, but it does not stand alone. So many other experiences must be examined, other books must be read likewise, in light of what we have learned here.

Below, I wanted to embed the Oct 14, 2015 James Barret interview with Te-Nehisi Coates, after Coates won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction for this title, but I could not get the link to work. Watch it. Coates has a magnetism that makes it difficult to look away. His success is not merely an accident of moment, but is rooted in his sense of justice, in his intellectual curiosity, and in his humility. Despite his stated desire to “be the best writer of his generation,” we suspect that he knows just what that will take and what it means. And we want him to succeed. We should be very glad he survived those mean streets.




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Black Flags by Joby Warrick

ISIS appeared to us in the West to have come out of nowhere, but Joby Warrick's careful journalism shows its roots, its alliances, its continuance in light of Western involvement in the Middle East.

Warrick bookends his narrative nonfiction describing the origins of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) with the story of the failed suicide-bomber, Sajida al-Rishawi, who was executed in Jordan just this year, shortly after ISIS put to death-by-burning the downed Jordanian air pilot, First Lieutenant Muadh al-Kasasbeh in Syria in January. This bookending is entirely appropriate for it links the Jordanian thug-turned-radical Abu Musad al-Zarqawi, leader of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) with the later leader of ISIS, Iraqi Islamic scholar Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Just this week (Oct 2015) we learned that al-Baghdadi was targeted in an air strike as he convoyed to a meeting of senior ISIS leaders in western Iraq. It is not known if he has been wounded or killed.

I would be happy never to hear or read the name Zarqawi again, but here he is in the pages of this book. Abu Musad al-Zarqawi was the Jordanian national who created and led AQI during the Iraq War. He gained credibility and followers when American forces labelled him a threat in 2003, just before the American invasion of Iraq. Warrick traces the path of Zarqawi’s radicalism, beginning while he was in a Jordanian jail from 1993-99, through his contact with and split from Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, through to his death in by American airstrike in 2006. After his death his organization, which had attracted many followers amongst the Sunni minority in Iraq, lost its thrust and seemed on the point of disintegration.

The American withdrawal from Iraq gave the remnants of Zarqawi’s group more freedom to operate. They continued to consolidate, now with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gradually rising to third in the leadership in charge of Sharia law by 2010. In 2010 an airstrike took out the other two top leaders, leaving Baghdadi to step into the vacuum and impose his own vision on the men under his command. He announced ISIS involvement in Syria in 2011 with a carefully shot and edited quarter-hour video heralded on Islamic websites for days before its release.

Warrick shows us how the radical insurgent movement could have begun, given impetus through a combination of American bombs and Arab prisons. Western ideology and invasion is an undeniable spur to Islamists of any sort, who resist any foreign influence and incursion into their lands, whether or not bombing was meant to help. Warrick adds Arab jails because this is where Zarqawi got his instruction and indoctrination. Inmates were segregated by creed, and the Islamists lived by Sharia law. Jails became, in effect, jihadi universities which helped extremists inculcate moderates, and fueled the insurgency inside the wire. Like Arab jails, the American military system of corralling all insurgents together as “bad guys” was “dysfunctional and counterproductive”, in Warrick’s opinion.

Baghdadi survived and thrived in prison. He was picked up in a sweep in early 2004 and sent to the American-administered jail called Camp Bucca. His academic expertise as a conservative, educated religious scholar gave him stature. He both taught and spoke classical Arabic and led religious prayers. When he was released in 2004 after ten months in prison, he finished earning his doctorate in Islamic studies and gravitated to the militants operating outside the major cities. By 2010 he was third in the leadership of radicals in charge of Sharia law and when an American airstrike took out two of the top leaders in late 2010, al-Baghdadi stepped up.

Now ISIS has Sunni, Shia, as well as Western governments and Russia, all seeking their demise. One reason is that the predominantly Sunni ISIS organization burned the Jordanian Sunni air pilot flying over Syria rather than behead him. Death by burning is something forbidden in the Koran—a retribution something only Allah can presume. There must be a reason an Islamic scholar would order such a death, but the effect was galvanizing. In the film posted online of the burning death, Warrick tells us the voice of Abu Musad al-Zarqawi intones a voiceover: “Lo and behold, the spark has been ignited in Iraq and its fires shall only get bigger…” drawing a clear connection between the former AQI under Zarqawi and the renamed ISIS under Baghdadi. We can only hope that fire will consume them in the end.

It was not this book alone, but my concurrent reading of a book of essays by Mohsin Hamid called Discontent and Its Civilizations that started the beginnings of a breakthrough in the development of my own opinion about American power in the world. Hamid’s essays discuss the American war in Afghanistan from the point of view of Pakistan. America cooperated with Pakistan, in a manner of speaking, for a time. My thinking runs something like this: if a situation in one’s own country gets so bad one thinks one wants to call upon the strength of the American army to save one, think again. Calling upon their superior forces may just wipe out what you were hoping to save.

American military power is a blunt instrument, no matter what they say about precision strikes. Add to that American reluctance to involve their own blood or treasure in a fight they do not perceive as their own. The tool one wishes would save one’s country or one’s faction may come so late (after the bitter wrangling in U.S. Congress) that one no longer really cares about war’s outcome and only wishes the fighting to stop before everyone is dead. Better not to wish for American military might, for that way lies destruction. Why must we learn this lesson again and again? Because the wise are dead, I suspect. It is painful to contemplate the future when one has no faith in discourse, arms, or aid.

I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of this book, read by Sunil Malhotra. Malhotra reads slowly enough for us to grasp the complicated connections he relates, and reads the Arabic names with comprehension and precision. Great job.

More reading on ISIS:

• The Jihadis Return by Patrick Cockburn
• Too Weak, Too Strong: Russia in Syria (essay in London Review of Books) by Patrick Cockburn
• The Islamic State: A Brief Introduction by Charles R. Lister
• Understanding ISIS and The New Global War on Terror by Phyllis Bennis
• ISIS: State of Terror by Jessica Stern & J.M. Berger

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The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham

As a girl I was not able to understand the attraction of Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as Birmingham tells us, lawyers defending Joyce on charges of indecency used the defense that young girls would neither understand nor be much interested in Joyce’s supposedly great work, and therefore he was not corrupting them. As far as I was concerned, that was true. I never got to the “good bits.” I just didn’t understand what the heck he was talking about. He was crude, he was blunt, and he was clear enough for me to know that if I wanted to hear jokes about farts I could listen to the adolescents on my block.

Now, however, with this enormously detailed and beautifully read book on the genesis and development of the works of Joyce, I finally have a better idea why he was considered such an important author. In the process of explicating Joyce’s work, Birmingham also touches on the life and works of Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach, Bennett Cerf and any number of important writers and publishers of the time in Europe and America during the 1910s through the 1930s.

Joyce suffered from a malady of the eye, iritis, which he first experienced while he was in his twenties. It continued his entire life, with surgeries and administered drugs unable to cure it. Joyce died in 1941. Illness played a huge part in his life, according to Birmingham, though Joyce’s Wikipedia entry does not mention it. He was in the process of going blind most of his adult life, which must be one reason why in photographs Joyce’s eyes look so unfocused. Sadly, the underlying cause of the iritis may have been syphilis, which was rampant in Dublin when Joyce lived there. Joyce also called Europe a "'syphilisation'…and the disease accounted for the continent’s manias.”

This is a big book about one book, really, so if you find yourself short on time, pull up a chair and read Chapter 26. It not only tells one the outlines of what Joyce was doing in Ulysses, but what he meant by the very style of his writing and why Ulysses was considered so groundbreaking. Chapter 26 is the one in which a 10+ year legal battle was resolved in the United States concerning the “greatness” of the work as opposed to the “filth” of the work. It became the longest criminal court case in U.S. history with ninety-eight witnesses and a fifteen-thousand-page transcript. The judge hearing the case was particularly interesting in the text of his opinion.

Judge Woolsey, a U.S. federal judge in New York City, had read the entire work, not just the bits conservatives were hoping would condemn the book, and concluded that the dirty words used by the author were not used merely to shock or corrupt but because lower-middle class Irish folk actually talked and thought like that. Whether or not that is true is kind of beside the point. Enough people “thought like that” and “acted like that” to show the judge that obscenity can’t be something we feel and do but hide—it has to be something completely outside the normal experience of human endeavor.

But Woolsey understood more of Joyce than the dirty bits and he helped me to get a grip on what was going on:

Joyce has attempted—it seems to me, with astonishing success—to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.”

John Keating narrates Penguin Random House Audio production of this book and his accents, pauses, and breaks allow us to hear the greatness of the language. Ulysses charts the course of man across centuries, and collapses it into a single day, tying together the past and the present and the future. Joyce takes the heart of human life—sex—and shows us its relish and life-giving qualities. He does not allude to sex. He talks about how it is conducted frankly, openly, with exuberance and appeal. Ulysses is both funny and real, and like Birmingham and Judge Woolsey point out, in the end, it is several characters and their layers of consciousness all giving voice at one time. That may be why it makes such great theatre.

This book started out with Joyce as a young man meeting Nora Barnacle, the woman who would become his wife, confidant, and the one who, through letters and otherwise, expressed many of the exquisite sexual pleasures explored in Ulysses. Judge Woolsey also mentioned that it is the voice of the woman, Molly Bloom, who remained in his mind after the book was closed, not those of the other main characters: Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, or Leopold Bloom.

I highly recommend the audio edition of this book, though the Random House print copy has some great photographs and is beautifully printed. If at first you wonder at Birmingham's lavish praise of Joyce you will be won over by the end.

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The Infatuations by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

Marías chooses a female character, Maria, to narrate this European-style psychological thriller with a slow reveal that turns on a dime in the final chapters. Maria works in a publishing company and every day on her break from work she sees an intriguing couple, married, having coffee together. They look so happy and in love that Maria finds herself looking forward to seeing them in the coffee shop. Sometimes she overhears scraps of conversation and pieces together a life for them without them taking notice of her.

On the very first page of this novel we learn a man is murdered. It is the man of the couple Maria is so interested in. Maria tells us the last time she saw the man was the last time his own wife saw him. It didn’t seem fair, she thinks, for them to share that intimacy for she didn’t even know his name until she saw the report of his death on television.

Marías, Maria: the names one suspects are intentionally close in sound and structure for it is very rare to find a character give up her thoughts so completely to an author. In this novel Marías resides inside the mind of Maria, and almost everything that she thinks over a period of weeks and months is recorded here for us to consider. The world from her view gives us a distance from the victim, his wife, his friend, and the perpetrator of the crime.

This novel addresses some themes: the closeness of love and envy; our closest friends could become our greatest enemies; love and distaste; the uncertainty that comes with intimacy. In the following brief video interview composed by his publisher, Penguin Random House, Marías talks about an oft-encountered theme in his work: betrayal.



Marías’ style--reflective, reflexive, recursive, chatty, digressive—would not work if it weren’t at the same time fiercely intelligent and deeply thoughtful. He is funny, too, as though he has caught onto a joke before we had and can explain it to us. The author is like translator himself, seeking for ways to express an idea, a word, a concept. Long, long sentences and paragraphs punctuated with ellipses and em-dashes show the ongoing thoughts of the narrator and her interpretation of what she finds out when she introduces herself to the wife of the murdered man.

After listening to this novel, my first foray into Marías’ work, I went looking for information about the author. His Goodreads site mentions Proust, William Faulkner, and the German writer Thomas Bernhard as influences, and it is not difficult to see these influences in the ebb and flow of internal dialogue that runs alongside the action in this novel.

I listened to the audio of this title produced by Penguin Random House, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and read by Justine Eyre. The translation is extremely impressive for stream-of-consciousness writing and reading, perfectly understandable and involving. A capacious mind and a brilliant translator will keep one occupied for days.




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The Road To Character by David Brooks

In this book David Brooks gives what might be considered the longest, and best, commencement speech ever. He speaks personally, yet universally also. He is not just talking to college-leavers, but to any of us ready to embark on a new quest in our lives. He takes the reading, experience, and thought of a lifetime and presents us with what he considers to be more important than the pursuit of happiness: the pursuit of goodness, character, morality. Happiness comes as the byproduct of a moral life, of a life of striving to be good. We don’t have to actually become good, and free from error or ‘sin’. We have to strive to be good. As we strive, so we become. The process is as important as the goal.

It occurs to me that the framers of the U.S. Constitution, most of whom might be supposed to exhibit character, might have known that the Pursuit of Happiness was chimerical. That is, they may have believed that we citizens should be free make mistakes and to fail in our pursuit of happiness until we realized it comes from some inner depths more related to character than to immediate gratification. That, it strikes me, makes the men and our Constitution all the greater, and also makes it a laudable goal for a nation.

Brooks suggests that spending one’s life pursuing the “resume virtues” of wealth and fame may, sooner or later, leave us questioning ourselves and our lives unless we attempt to see and focus on something(s) outside of ourselves that needs doing that we are uniquely equipped to do. He suggests that finding and beginning and pursuing this outside goal may lead to satisfaction and happiness when focus on oneself cannot. Pursuit of this outside goal will lead to “eulogy virtues.”

What struck me about the examples that Brooks provides of people who have exhibited the eulogy virtues is that they were of either sex, and came from every century, every background (wealthy, middle class, or poor), every race, every political stripe. These people achieved eulogy virtues by different methods. The diversity of examples provided by Brooks distracted at times from his central point, but perhaps with more study this richness of exemplars would become reassuring rather than overwhelming.

We do not find what we were put here to do by looking within. We do not have the material with which to work at a young age. We find what we were meant to do by looking outside ourselves and using our natural inclinations and talents to pursue a larger goal than that of personal aggrandizement. In this way we can remain pointed in the right direction as the winds of change swirl around us, refashioning popular sentiment. Money, fame, and stature in society are insufficient to achieving lasting happiness and the virtue worth eulogizing, character.

"What the Victorians were to sex, [our generation] is to morality. Everything is covered in euphemism."

I am reminded of a book written by a young woman just out of school. Kathryn Schultz’s book called Being Wrong talks also of how embarrassed and agonized we are over errors we commit that come with being human. We can’t avoid errors, but we can improve our error rate by being humble, and by listening more than speaking.

Brooks encourages us to aim higher than self. Best of all, we can begin at any stage in our lives, rich or poor, experienced or not. We do not have to be college graduates or paid employees of a large firm. We can simply begin. It strikes me as the most insightful and useful graduation speech I’ve never heard.

For those of you who prefer to listen to the book read aloud, this nonfiction is very ably read by Arthur Morey with an Introduction by the author. Although what Brooks is saying often requires deeper thought, you can always rewind when one finds one's thoughts shooting off in another direction as a result of what he's written. Better yet, listen again.


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The Circle by Dave Eggers

As a novel this huge piece of work has almost too many faults to name, but Eggers’ imagination and style makes the experience of reading or listening to it a special kind of pleasure. Filled to the brim with fledgling discussions of privacy, freedom, fairness, democracy, and control, the novel has in its DNA all the previous great works who have posed the questions “What is privacy and is it good?” and “What is democracy and is it good?” and “What is personal freedom and is it good?”

This is a long but easy read because it brings us a glimpse of a world many of us have only heard of and yet cannot help but be intensely curious about: the campuses of the technology giants like Google or Facebook. The company in this novel is called The Circle, based loosely on what is known of the more famous real life companies. We have heard enough, perhaps, to know Eggers is not making all of this up: the campus, company structure, and internal reporting requirements are drawn (and undoubtedly exaggerated) from life. But the mania and mindthink of bright young things anxious to gain approval in a large, successful, innovative, and fast-moving company is perfectly believable.

Eggers creates a character, Mae, who unwittingly is drawn into becoming the “voice” of company philosophy. Her not-well-thought-out responses to carefully posed and invasive questions by the company leadership are too-highly praised and said to exemplify what the human populace really wants. Her soundbites are clipped and pasted to the walls of the media space created by the company as though she had expressed the unfettered will of all the people, when in fact, Mae had been groomed, prodded, bullied, corrected, corralled into making the utterances that became an command that can not be challenged.

I enjoyed Eggers’ imagination and willingness to engage the important subjects of technology, privacy, education, and democracy but grew weary before the end. This may be a great book for teens who may have a larger appetite for the glamour of high technology campuses and need a point hammered home by a thousand blows. Part of the story involves Mae developing a crush on someone she does not really know, as well as instructive incidents ill-considered sex with someone she doesn’t even like. These ring true, as does the celebrity side of Mae’s meteoric rise to stardom at The Circle.

Certainly the questions at the heart of Eggers book are not merely for teens. The pace and direction of our lives leaves little doubt that technology has changed concepts of privacy, celebrity, and participatory democracy. These are issues we need to consider now. Opting out of the whole system is not really a possibility. In Eggers book, the person that tried that did not end well and he ended early. Eggers also points out that our politicians are not going to do this for us, being “bought” as it were by corporate interests. This is up to reasonable people taking reasoned positions and fighting like hell.

I listened to the audio of this title, produced by Random House Audio, read by Dion Graham. Graham did a terrific job, especially with the Human Resources folk at The Circle. The absolute conviction in the right of the company to know all came through in their voices and gave this a very spooky feel.


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A Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer

This work of creative nonfiction will undoubtedly catch many Asia-watchers by surprise. Facts about North Korea are thin on the ground here in America, but this book blasts open a personal history of Kim Jong-Il with a canny, graceful, and wise commentary that is far beyond what anyone else has been able to manage. It is an enormous feat of research, but more than that, it is so compulsively readable that we are held captive.

It begins detailing the history of two individuals who were instrumental in the South Korean film industry in the 1940s and 50s. Before you ask how relevant that information is to us today, just remember that the author is a film producer who claims these early films have a cult following now, perhaps because of the Gangnam rage that has spread worldwide, and has opened a glimpse into a world never before considered worthy of serious study. We couldn’t have a better introduction to film in South Korea nor have we ever had a more detailed look at the North Korean film fanatic Kim Jong-Il, who kidnapped the two leading lights in the South Korean film industry to bolster his own propaganda machine.

The beautiful and talented South Korean film star Choi Eun-Hee was kidnapped first. Fischer compares her favorably to Marilyn Monroe (with whom she was photographed) in terms of star quality and stage presence. Choi's former husband, the film director and producer Shin Sang-Ok, was taken later, though because he’d tried to escape he was imprisoned in North Korea for a number of years. Eventually they were reunited in Pyongyang and began producing films for Kim Jong-Il’s ailing film industry. This book is partially based on their memoir of their time in captivity and their successful escape to the West.

Perhaps more importantly, we learn a huge amount about the Kim regimes. This material may be out there somewhere, in a hundred escape memoirs, spy reports, or academic papers but I have never seen so much information about Kim Jong-Il and North Korea in one place before. Besides all this great new information, the writing is absolutely first-rate, the story fantastic, and the immersion into film so well-informed that it seems like a trick.

Who is Paul Fischer and how does he know so much about North Korea? The Introduction and Afterword discuss sources, and mostly my concerns about veracity of content were allayed. It may be possible that no one ever bothered before to gather together the dispersed information in just this way before. I just don’t know. Frankly, it is Fischer’s skill that is simply stunning, besides the vast trove of collected information about the Kim regime and North Korea. Fischer's sentences are rich and coherent in a way writers only dream of, and the sections pass easily into one another while we readers are led deeper into the intricacies of film lore and the strange and frightening propaganda machine of Kim Jong-Il.

I have no idea whether or not Shin Sang-Ok and his wife Choi Eun-Hee were abducted or if they defected to North Korea. In my mind it is regrettable either way but not particularly relevant now. It is not what I focused on. I have heard some of the details of kidnapping, of prisons, of life in North Korea, but nothing like this detailed look north of the 38th parallel. This book has everything: grandeur, mystery, terror, and a fluency that makes this tremendous storytelling no matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on.

This book must be labelled creative nonfiction because of the conversations recounted verbatim and the reconstructions of scenes so complete you would think Fischer 'produced' them. I don’t care. If one-fourth of the information in this book is true we have made great headway in understanding and demystifying a completely obscure regime. You will recall the splash Truman Capote made with his fictional recreation of the nonfiction event he wrote about in In Cold Blood. Let’s call this in the same vein until we can verify, but remember this man Paul Fischer. He has burst on the literary scene with a truly stupefying and important offering. If he can make films the way he can write we are in for a real treat.

I listened to the Random House Audio production of this book, beautifully read by Stephen Park. I have ordered the Flatiron Books print edition to look it over more carefully. As I say, books like this don’t come along very often. To think this was a debut that took about two years to put together is extraordinary.

Paul Fischer answers a few questions here. Boston radio station WGBH's Forum Institute filmed a portion of Fischer's reading at the Harvard Bookstore in February 2015. That YouTube video is available here.

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Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham

Hardcover, 265 pages Pub 2014 by Random House ISBN13: 9780812994995

I am late to the Dunham phenomenon, but am fully onboard now. I am gob-smacked by this book of essays by the creator of the TV serial Girls, the Third Season of which I came upon recently and absently slipped into my VCR late one night. I didn’t know there was a controversy about her work, but of course now I realize there must be. She is a red-hot societal critic. She appears highly evolved to me. She is not cruel.

She astonishes me by her willingness to put her finger right there and point at something significant that many of us will twist to avoid confronting in a thoughtful way. To say Dunham’s work is refreshing doesn’t capture it. It is bracing, like standing in a winter wind, but not caring because you are with friends and are going back in where the fireplace is blazing and someone is going to say something funny and real.

This series of essays must be taken separately from her work as writer, director and character on a television show. This is not Hannah. Both are a kind of memoir, that is, they recreate some of Dunham’s lived experience. But we hear much more in the essays that exhibit her shrewdness, her now-adult clarity and experience, her ability to withhold (“There are things I will not say, that I will think and leave in my head”). But by golly, the things she does say, about the directors and producers she met in Hollywood, about her obsessive fears, about the cringe-producing dates and sex, ring so true, so exactly true, that even if they are not our experience, we believe.

Years ago I read a piece of literature and remember thinking then that some human experience was universal. When I mentioned it one day in a university literature class, the professor snarled “not everyone has the same experience and feels the same way.” I was shocked. It is probably true what that teacher said. Certainly not all of us are white, rich enough to go to Oberlin, bright enough to realize that getting a job, any job, is not enough for any kind of real life. But I argue it doesn’t matter where you came from or how you grew up. There is something in Dunham’s conclusions and experience that resonates. When she writes of visiting her dying great-aunt and receiving her warped and misshapen knitted scarves as gifts, when she writes of her fear of death, sickness, pregnancy, when she writes of the kindness and boredom she encountered in the baby-clothes shop, of the condescension she encountered in school and Hollywood—this stuff translates. We may not have done what she did, but we know that stuff. And she is both bright enough and brave enough to point to it.

In the section when Dunham describes her summer camp experience, she admits to being more attuned to her adult caretakers, the camp counselors, than to her camp mates. This doesn’t surprise me. She wanted more the attention and experience of the adults than of the teens. She was always observant, curious, outside. Psychologists must have helped. She spent a lot of time in their company over the years. It doesn’t appear to have hurt her, thank goodness, but instead may have given her a framework for her questions.

Thank goodness, in fact, for Lena Dunham. She survived the indignities of youth, not unscathed but whole. She understood enough to guess that her confusion and desperation was, if not universal, at least interesting and helpful in allowing us to recognize and celebrate our own authentic selves. She shares her experiences so that we, hopefully, can laugh and see the absurdity of the same. Women and men don’t have to go through elaborate rituals others have created just so that we can connect in a real way, but there are always the painful bits we get just a little bit wrong.

Towards the end of these essays Dunham confides that her real loves are “gossip, food, and the internet.” Those interests aren’t broad enough for her to earn the label “voice of a generation” since that hardly constitutes a voice. But her work is political, which may be why there is conflict when considering her work. It is political because it considers commonly accepted (and sometimes even legislated) ways of interacting, which she shows to be deficient in some way. She has given us enough thoughtfulness and authenticity to make us wonder what she thinks about things other than slipping into bed with another disaffected youth. We’ll have to wait for that. She might never share her thoughts on pressing international issues with us, but her work on the internal rather than the external is just as important if it spurs us to think. Art, wherever it manifests, is a win for all of us. Reign on, Lena Dunham!


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The Painter by Peter Heller

"The way death is both near and infinitely remote, the way it freezes and somehow kindles the heat of something grotesque and maybe irresistible and sexy, which is life at its most desperate….this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it."

Well. It’s a word Heller uses almost as punctuation throughout the novel, ending a thought, a conversation, a statement. The word has all the resonance of a bell, signaling the moment we must think for ourselves, decide its inflection, trust our narrator or not. Because we have here an artist who sees the world uniquely and reacts quickly, almost instinctively, to what he sees, to what he senses. He’s dangerous…until he is allowed to express and release his guilt and sadness over the death of his child, until he realizes he has a choice.

A couple of years ago I decided Heller’s debut The Dog Stars was one the best fiction books I’d read that year. After reading this novel I conclude that I am simply susceptible to his writing. His characters’ responses have a physicality so completely "other" from my own that I read his work with a deep curiosity. In this novel Heller addresses the nature of celebrity, the essence of evil, the knowledge of guilt, the awareness of choice, the balm of redemption.

A painter who likes to fish comes upon a man beating a tied horse. Meeting that man again in the dark while fishing a river, the painter kills the man.

I began by listening to this book on audio. I knew from the moment he began talking about fly fishing that I would read it, so I could go slow. Hot sun on cold water, a rushing river, a swirling pool, a limb casting shade…these things I must savor. When he mentioned cadmium yellow, I went out and got the paper copy.

Reading made this more accessible to me. When I saw the way the sections were divided, with gallery descriptions of paintings on display, and noted the spacing of paragraphs, everything slowed to the proper pace and got much more manageable. I sunk into this book like a lead weight through clear water. Heller hooked and played me, only to let me go at the end. It was fun; there is a little regret in being released.

Heller raises important questions about art, and the celebrity of art: does great art require emotional upheaval? He gives us his influences: Stegner, Hemingway, McCarthy, Beam (as in Jim Beam), Homer, Picasso, Delvaux. He answers the question he raises this way: Great art evokes emotion and the artist must be brave. Why brave? Because bravery is breathtaking, inspiring. Was Jim Stegner brave? Perhaps: not in the violence of his killings, but in his resistance to the characterization of criminal, of wrong-doing.

"Paintings [and novels] can take on a life of their own. It’s like stuff happens in them when you’re not looking. The crow and the horse started out as adversaries—I mean the crow would like to eat the horse, if he ever, say, jumped off the cliff and became a carcass. But instead they began to talk. I think maybe the crow cursed the horse. I told you that I thought the crow was telling the horse that he had a choice, that he didn’t have to jump after all. Well, I think that’s sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it’s like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death."

I can't let this review go without saying that Stegner's walk up to Ten Thousand Waves, the first sex scene with Sophia, and his description of a death-defying chase over mountains and through rivers felt positively lived. But the main argument--the grief-stricken father, the violence (thrice!), the celebrity--lacked some kind of convincing soul. I liked reading it anyway, but it struck me as a blue coyote.

Heller has the goods to write about nature, art, and us ordinary folk...what we feel when we feel deeply. We don't have to murder to screw everything up.

The audio is a Random House Audio production, read by Mark Deakins. The book in hardcover by Knopf is a lovely thing, printed as it is with the paintings’ description as section dividers. One may linger over those descriptions, getting a feel for size, for color, for sense.


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World Order by Henry Kissinger

This is a book that begs to be studied, not just read. Kissinger has spent his career thinking about world order and in this book he looks both forward and back, eliminating much of the static in the view we have of historical events. The result is a clear outline of national interests, power, and its balance through recent history, centered especially on the U.S. perspective, its intents and its perceived responsibilities.

The discussion is helpful, and useful. However, in eliminating the “noise” from the systems and structures he presents, Kissinger may lead us to think within the framework he has created. In looking forward, a new world order must be something outside any previous framework: “wisdom counsels that a different path must be chosen. To undertake a journey on a road never before traveled requires character and courage…” The cyber world developing around us changes everything.

A reconstruction of the international system is the ultimate challenge to statesmanship of our time.

Beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia after the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-48 in which nearly a quarter of Central Europe’s population was decimated, we see the structure of world order based on national sovereignty:

The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in Europe’s contests. Instead, each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religions vocations of its fellow states as realities and refrain from challenging their existence. With a balance of power now perceived as natural and desirable, the ambitions of rulers would be set in counterpose against each other, at least in theory curtailing the scope of conflicts. Division and multiplicity, an accident of Europe’s history, became the hallmarks of a new system of international order with this own distinct philosophical outlook. In this sense the European effort to end its conflagration shaped and prefigured the modern sensibility: it reserved judgment on the absolute in favor of the practical and ecumenical; it sought to distill order from multiplicity and restraint.

Although China had little involvement with the world and no interest in the Westphalian system of order for centuries, it adheres to and calls on its principles now, when that system of beliefs is being eroded and perhaps even abandoned by the West. Kissinger points out that the Westphalian system of world order based on precepts of national sovereignty and non-interference in other nations’ affairs, is not working in the way it had been for centuries. Kissinger suggests that while in Asia states still adhere to the Westphalian model, the system is breaking down in Europe where economic and military interests are grouped while political power is based on the nation. Business interests of global corporations exceed national interests and boundaries. In the Middle East, a radical Islamic group seeks to operate regionally, ignoring state boundaries. Since 2001 the United Nations has adopted new responsibilities that directly challenge Westphalian principles: asserting the “the responsibility to protect and intervention as a duty of care” even within the boundaries sovereign states. The cyber world features asymmetric power imbalances in which one laptop outside the boundaries of a nation can disable powerful national and international systems.

Regarding technological changes that have changed our notion of speed, and information, Kissinger says

Cyberspace has become strategically indispensable…The history of warfare shows that every technological offensive capability will eventually be matched and offset by defensive measures, although not every country will be equally able to afford them, Does this mean that technologically less advanced countries must shelter under the protection of high-tech societies?...Nor is it possible to base deterrence in cyberspace on symmetrical retaliation, as in the case with nuclear weapons…In the end, a framework for organizing the global cyber environment will be imperative…
The dilemma of such technologies is that it is impossible to establish rules of conduct unless a common understanding of at least some of the key capabilities exists. But these are precisely the capabilities the major actors will be reluctant to disclose…In this manner, asymmetry and a kind of congenital world disorder are built into relations between cyber powers both in diplomacy and strategy. The emphasis of many strategic rivalries is shifting from the physical to the information realm, in the collection and processing of data, the penetration of networks, and the manipulation of psychology. Absent articulation of some rules of international conduct, a crisis will arise from the inner dynamics of the system.

I guess we have Snowden to thank for revealing that “all is known.” Warfare can now move to the psychological: What is it you think you know? There is perhaps no better time to think about the imperative for establishment of a new world order. Kissinger suggests that America must retain her moral compass but not abandon her sense of realism.

Society needs to adapt its education policy ultimate imperatives in the long-term direction of the country and in the cultivation of its values. The inventors of the devices that have so revolutionized the collection and sharing of information can make an equal if not greater contribution by devising means to deepen its conceptual foundation. On the way to the first truly global world order, the great human achievements of technology must be fused with enhanced powers of humane, transcendent, and moral judgment.

The suggestion that the technologists that bring us our systems for connection be involved in “deepening its conceptual foundations” is an interesting one. But perhaps more importantly, we need to move as the people of one nation to make that understanding of the internet's uses and abuses a part of our moral and ethical decision-making. These things can be taught.

The task ahead seems insurmountable, and the tasks addressed without knowing the outcomes of our choices. Kissinger reminds us that

the Westphalian system was drafted by some two hundred delegates, none of whom has entered the annals of history as a major figure, who met in two provincial German towns forty miles apart (a significant distance in the seventeenth century) in two separate groups. They overcame their obstacles because they shared the devastating experience of the Thirty Years’ War, and they were determined to prevent its recurrence. Our time, facing even graver prospects, needs to act on its necessities before it is engulfed by them.

Kissinger leaves us with a series of questions we need to ask ourselves in order to frame an outline to begin discussing this issue in earnest. It is a gift. Elder statesmen are rare beings, and whatever else he may have been called, Kissinger can claim that title. He is now an old man, an old man with long vision. He helps us by reminding us to get a grip, look within, take stock of our urgent responsibilities to our children, to be brave and take the steps needed to preserve and protect our country and our liberty.

To this point, I have addressed and quoted only the first and final pages of this book. In the rest of it, Kissinger gives us distilled observations, opinions, and insights from a lifetime of looking at historical underpinnings and the foreign affairs of nations, and of our own. There is no flab in these pages. It is enlightening. Kissinger was at his influence apogee in the Nixon administration and he speaks longingly of Nixon’s willingness and ability to think in strategic terms:

Nixon treated foreign policy as an endeavor with no end, as a set of rhythms to be managed. He dealt with its intricacies and contradictions like school assignments by an especially demanding teacher.

We have that teacher in this book, challenging us to lead.

I listened to the Penguin Random House Audio of this title, read with appropriate pacing and gravitas by Nicholas Hormann. Listening helped to bring some elements of the discussion into clarity. I supplemented listening with the text, published by Penguin.


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