Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer

Hardcover, 291 pgs, Pub Jan 29th 2019 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812995701

I just love this book. When I first heard Terry Gross interviewing Dreyer on NPR’s Fresh Air, I thought he was trying too hard to make amusing something that can be utterly stultifying. However, when I had the chance to listen to Dreyer reading the book, published by Penguin Random House Audio, I was entranced and delighted. How can this be, you ask. It is counterintuitive that reading a style book on writing would be amusing.

Dreyer’s delivery is dry, dry as a bone, so-o-o dry that I would be laughing aloud, missing his next entry, as he lined up all the stupid stuff we write—the adverbs, extra adjectives, and the ‘very unique’ emphasizers. I was amazed Dreyer could read this text aloud and make sense, filled as it is with examples he needs to capitalize or spell a certain way. I could follow it! And it was interesting. He rarely read from his footnotes, which are copious and useful and also funny, one good reason to get both the book and the audio.

One can even make the case that audio is an excellent format for this material, as rules run into one another and it is complicated and time-consuming to both separate the rules and look them up. Dreyer just gives it to us conversationally, in context, without taking out the ruler.

Practically all of us are writers—indeed, publishers—now, whether we write blogs, notes to friends, or posts for social media. We need to take care our words communicate what we want them to say and not what we did not wish to say. We all must be copy editors as well, and we need Dreyer to tell us what we really mean.

Benjamin Dreyer has worn a lot of hats, all at the same company. He began as a freelance proofreader, moved to Copy Editor, then Production Editor, and finally Copy Chief at Random House, now one of the largest book publishers in the United States. In this B&N podcast interview, Dreyer describes the distinction between those jobs and how, after he moved into management, he had an opportunity to circle back and spend time highlighting discrepancies between good and bad writing. He’s awfully good at it, he’s funny, and he’s seen it all in his nearly thirty years in the business. I kept thinking how much there is to know about using language, even for native speakers, and how useful this material is to all of us. So I went and bought the hardcopy.

Dreyer admits to hating grammar, that is, he hates grammar jargon. Which is just fine because I usually just skip those parts. What the heck, I figure. If I haven’t learned it yet, what good will it do me? I am not a completist. I tried to follow his rules in this review so far as I recall them, having laughed through half of them and listened with half an ear when he hit on something I'd worried over in the past…my memories probing that sore place like a tongue in the socket of a lost tooth. How reassuring it is to me to know that the past tense of wreak is wreaked, something with which I have struggled.

There was a point on a long drive when I started laughing uncontrollably at the sometimes stupid stuff he says. In this case it was

GRISLY/GRISTLY/GRIZZLY/GRIZZLED
Gory crimes are grisly.
Tough meat is gristly.
Some bears are grizzly.
Mistaken references to “grizzly crimes” (unless committed by actual bears, in which case OK) are extremely popular, although good for a chuckle, and to be avoided strenuously.
“Grizzled” refers to hair streaked with gray—and by extension, it does make a decent synonym for “old.” It does not mean, as many people seem to think it does, either unkempt or rugged.

It’s okay if you didn’t laugh at that. I’m telling you, Dreyer’s wit is cumulative. If you have ever seen those old books by Richard Lederer, I recall one was called Anguished English, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Three generations of my family sat shouting and crying with laughter at the difficulty of writing well.

People who write for a living won’t want to miss this. Journalists, novelists, public speakers, politicians, business people who write reports, social media junkies: When he actually points out our common errors, we admit with chagrin it looks, and sounds, silly.

Below is a sample of Dreyer reading from the book. You can listen to this on a commute, can't you?




Tweet

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.





Tweet

The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris

Audible Audio, Pub Jan 8th 2019 by Penguin Audio. Hardcover, 336 pgs, Jan 8 2019, Penguin Press, ISBN13: 9780525560715

It is difficult to critique political memoirs without seeming to be critical the high-minded ideals these writers espouse. Kamala Harris appears outside the norm for the kind of Washington politician we’ve put up with these past twenty years. Formerly Attorney General of California, she had to find solutions to big thorny problems that plagued governance of that state. If she didn’t “solve” the problems for all time, she always came down fighting for the side of individuals against corporate entities, big business, or thoughtless, inadequate government.

Early on in this memoir Senator Harris speaks with some awe of the work of Maura Healy, current Attorney General of Massachusetts, who has been firm in defending statewide consumer protections in that state unlike any other. She mentions the work now-Senator and presidential-hopeful Elizabeth Warren has done to protect consumers from predatory lending practices and investment scams of big banks, or the greed of big pharma.

Harris’ own work is strictly in this vein: criminal justice reform, racial justice, environmental protections, wage equality, regulation of banks and corporation, fair practices for consumers. For a woman who has never served in the military, no one could ever argue this woman doesn’t know what war looks like. She has investigated the heart of drug smuggling from Mexico, immigration, sex trafficking, and other rough criminal ventures that make our hair curl. She knows what government power means and when and how to use it. She’s tough. And disciplined. And principled.

After seeing how the country suffers when the presidency is filled by someone inadequate to the demands of the job, we should ever be grateful that someone of Harris’ gifts stands up to take on the brutality we’ve witnessed in Washington. Harris is winged Nemesis wielding a sword; she is implacable justice, avenger of crime. It will be bloody but it will be over when she’s done.

Until Donald Trump (and more and more I am convinced the 2016 election was not a fair demonstration of the national will), we’ve never elected someone with as little support from the major parties. Democrats now have very little patience left for what is the husk of a Republican Party, and Republicans detest what Democrats stand for. Harris will not be a cross-over candidate. She will be vengeance.

This book is an introduction to Harris and is very good for that. Kamala was born in Oakland in the sixties of a Jamaican-economist father and a Tamil Indian-endocrinologist mother who’d met at Berkeley during the civil rights movement. She and a sister, Maya, who is two years younger, were brought up by her single-parent mother after the breakup of her parents while Kamala was still a child. She married Douglas Emhoff, a lawyer, in 2014. Emhoff had two children during a previous marriage.

Harris begins her book talking about her youth and the importance of recognizing that our nation has been enriched by immigration. She is proud of her black heritage and chose Howard University for her undergraduate degree and graduated University of CA Hastings College of Law in 1989. She admits to terrible embarrassment at failing the CA bar the first time, but her employers supported her next, successful attempt.

Harris began as Deputy District Attorney in San Francisco, then won the race for District Attorney in San Francisco in 2003. By 2004 she’d begun a program called Back on Track, to help youthful nonviolent offenders to get back into the community through work. The program was considered a success though it had a low graduation rate. It was instituted in several other counties and eventually became state law.

When Harris won the election for CA State Attorney General in 2010, the race tally was so close the election results were not announced for three weeks. One of her first successes was against banks liable after the sub-prime mortgage crisis, winning $26 billion from the banks, including $12 million for homeowners. As AG, Harris initiated investigations into sex and drug trafficking, hate crimes, environmental degradation, predatory lending, school truancy and foster care, as well as prison conditions and sentencing reform.

Barbara Boxer announced she was going to retire as Senator to CA in 2016, and Harris was one of the first to announce her candidacy for Boxer’s seat. Harris is generally well-regarded at home in CA and among those who search for and vet candidates for high national office like Supreme Court and Attorney General of the U.S. There has been some grumbling that Harris defends misconduct by law enforcement, but overall these complaints have not hurt her popularity in the state. Harris won the 2016 congressional election against Loretta Sanchez with 62% of the vote, winning in all but four counties.

Since being in Washington, Senator Harris has been a hard-hitting and outspoken critic of Trump’s policies and the Democratic Party now considers her a front-runner for president. We learn that her name Kamala (COMMA-la) means lotus, a flower that blooms above the water while its roots are planted in mud. That’s quite a visual for a successful presidency.

I listened to the audio of this read by the author and produced by Penguin Audio. It is a successful sprint through the high points of a career not yet over. We get a sense of her personality, her drive, her family and friends. She is quite an opponent.



Tweet

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:



Tweet

Facts & Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence by James Clapper

Hardcover, 432 pgs, Pub May 22nd 2018 by Viking, ISBN13: 9780525558644

James Clapper has had a very long career in intelligence collection and he goes through it all for us here. He’s had practically every job out there in leadership in this field, capping his career as Director of National Intelligence. The DNI serves as head of the now seventeen U.S. intelligence collection agencies, and advises the National Security Council which advises the president. Listening to Mark Bramhall narrate the audio of this autobiography, it is easy to see why Clapper had such a long and successful career in government. He gets along well with others.

Most others. Clapper freely disagrees with Congressional Republicans who used government policy or intelligence outcomes to lash out politically at their opponents (Democrats in office), and he spares no pity for Snowden, Poitras, and Greenwald in their pursuit of borderless-ness in secrets uncovered during surveillance.

Which led me to a queer insight: Greenwald as a journalist does as much spying on government as it does on him. Both want the other side’s secrets uncovered and their own preserved…(“only I can preserve individual liberty…”) Snowden was most outspoken about individual rights, and therefore on the far right of America’s political spectrum, and yet he chose a far-left journalist to reveal his secrets to. Strange bedfellows. I was never completely onboard with Snowden or Greenwald but I think Clapper does himself and his agency a disservice by not acknowledging that these folks provided a corrective to potentially invasive intelligence collection, a fact he does in fact concede near the end of this very long book.

I picked up this book because I read a couple of interesting conclusions he’d come to in his nearly sixty years in office. An intelligence chief is an unlikely one to write a tell-all. By the end of his career Clapper acknowledges that the secret aspect of intelligence doesn't have as much cache as it used to, and agrees that it is probably for the best that their activities are out in the open. If you don't mind my saying, this is a result of those men and women who forced this information to be revealed, and yes, it probably is for the better in some ways. Clapper doesn’t seem to hold back on describing the reporting responsibilities and personalities in the agencies he headed, which should save foreign governments time trying to work it all out.

Clapper claims one reason he wrote this book is to want to encourage interested young people to join the intelligence community. The other reason would undoubtedly be countering the criticism he has gotten for major intelligence successes and failures of the past forty years. His last posting as Director of the Office of National Intelligence sounds kind of a bum job: no power but lots of responsibility to make sure all intelligence departments are singing off the same sheet of music. That’s the kind of job they give you if you last long enough in a sea of sharks. Big enough to blame, old enough to bury.

There is no doubt that Clapper had a congenial personality and was able to hold his own among those who did not self-destruct over the years. Anyone’s career that lasted sixty years is worth listening to, I reckon. In my opinion, he gave himself more credit than he should have for allowing gay and trans individuals to serve in the military and intelligence services--after all, this was a very long time coming and too late anyhow. It was a real shock to most Americans not directly attached to the military to discover how many individuals had been undergoing sex-change treatment before Chelsea Manning put a spotlight on the fact.

This book is necessary for anyone interested in intelligence as a career, or anyone who wants to know how we got from there to here. I listened to the audio, read by Mark Bramhall and produced by Penguin Audio. Viking produced the hardcover.



Tweet

War on Peace by Ronan Farrow

Hardcover, 392 pgs, Pub Apr 24th 2018 by W. W. Norton Company, ISBN13: 9780393652109

Who could have known Ronan Farrow would develop into such a remarkable thinker? He credits his mother, of whom he speaks with genuine awe in his voice. Not only has 30-year-old Ronan Farrow been a diplomat, in his early twenties working closely with Richard Holbrooke, special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the midst of American’s longest war, but just last year he broke the story published in The New Yorker which set America on a new trajectory for gender relations.

War on Peace is an examination of American foreign policy in the last two decades, though Farrow occasionally wanders further afield to highlight a trend or to stress a break in continuity. Did we have a foreign service in the past two decades that was not consumed by military matters? Believe it or not, we had a robust diplomatic core who was toiling away unsung, trying to wrest decision-making from generals focused on anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency. Richard Holbrooke was one of these.

Holbrooke wasn’t well-liked in Washington, but was effective in his role in the Bosnia peace talks. He was hard-headed, obsessive, egotistical. He’d wanted to be Secretary of State during President Clinton’s administration but the job went to Madeleine Albright. He was Secretary of State Clinton’s choice for envoy to the Afghanistan war zone. It was a bum job, but Holbrooke was happy to get it. Ronan knew Holbrooke as a family friend and was invited onto Holbrooke’s team. We get a view of Holbrooke from someone who knew his gifts and his faults.

Ronan has a disarmingly frank manner. For this book he interviewed on the record every living Secretary of State, and just about every other Washingtonian who had anything to do with international work. What he charts herein is the militarization of the diplomatic corps, starting way back in Bill Clinton’s presidency through Bush and Obama, neither of whom did anything to slow or halt the trend. Farrow does talk about the current president, but only to highlight how diplomacy has become a dirty word in D.C.

Most interesting for me was the access that Farrow had in talking about American foreign policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how we never seemed to actually get anywhere. In Pakistan especially we never seemed able to take advantage of cooperation with the people who could bridge the trust gap. Farrow makes it sound like we were so close to better, more cooperative relations but the ship of state is hard to steer. Our relationships with other countries tended to impact our relations in Pakistan, to say nothing of the assassination of Bhutto, the misuse of aid funds, and bin Laden living in hiding there.

Farrow gives some idea how DJT is playing in Europe at the moment, as if we didn’t know. He quotes Merkel's dry and damning statements about "we really should all be trying harder to work out problems with our allies..." But when this 30-yr-old says we must stay engaged in the leadership of the world because if we don’t, someone else will, we understand and we believe him. When Clinton said this during the campaign, actually answering a question I’d posed about America’s role in the world, I was resistant. I am still working through disappointment that she couldn’t manage to make even her countrymen want her to be that leader.

Our dysfunctional relationship with Colombia is spelled out in painful detail. How stupid and disrespectful has America ever been in South America? America’s war on drugs became a sordid saga of the U.S. training drug runners. Towards the end of Farrow’s book, this story is just so sobering and souring. Perhaps we come off looking like the buffoons we are because of the unending corruption in every single South American country. It is just exhausting and hard to believe an honest person cannot rise to the top anywhere in South America. But we just keep playing out the worst examples of bad behavior, on both sides of the border.

In the end this book is an impassioned call to young people to create the change they want to see. Farrow is trying to gin up some enthusiasm for a diplomatic corps who can think, talk, and make treaties around the world rather than militarize our relationships. It is obviously true that if you start with a gun in your hand you are going to have a very different mindset about solving disagreements. Diplomacy is long, frustrating, and often useless seeming…until it isn’t.

Great book. The inside scoop on how the Department of State functions is worth the price of admission. I listened to the audio of this, read by Farrow himself and it was terrific. Produced by Audible.



Tweet

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opioid Epidemic by Sam Quinones

Hardcover, 384 pgs, Pub Apr 21st 2015 by Bloomsbury Press (first published April 15th 2015), ISBN13: 9781620402504, Lit Awards: PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Nominee for Shortlist (2017), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Current Interest (2015), National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction (2015)

The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuristic, not having been visited by the scourge of opioid addiction myself. Good lord, I kept thinking, so this is what we are dealing with. I knew something was different, I just didn’t have any conception of the size, scope, method, and means of this problem.

Quinones starts his story in the early 1980s when the first ranchero Xalisco marketers came up from Mexico with an innovative method for just-in-time drive-by selling of drugs to rich white kids in the suburbs. They explicitly avoided cities and black people because they admitted they were afraid of them, their violence and their gang activity. Besides, the thinking went, blacks never had any money. They’d just as soon steal from a dealer as pay him. The white kids had money and wanted convenience above all.

At almost the same time, and a cultural habitat away from small-time drug dealers of black tar heroin from Mexico, a drug company owned by the Sackler medical empire released an opiate derivative in pill form meant to alleviate pain. Early on, it is possible that creators, marketers, and prescribers of this plague did not know what they had unleashed. But within a couple of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great numbers of people within and without the company sold the product in full knowledge of its wicked potency and addictive properties.

Quinones has been researching and reporting on this topic for a couple of decades, and lived in Mexico for ten years, observing the supply-side. Before having a comprehensive understanding of the subject, Quinones thought the heroin problem began with U.S. demand for drugs. After researching the situation in the heartland United States, he has decided that our problem now with heroin and fentanyl overdoses was paradoxically caused by a huge supply of opioid pills, prescribed by doctors in legal clinics, and condoned at every level of society and government in our country.

The story Quinones shares is un-put-down-able and truly remarkable, particularly his discussion of the marketing techniques for black tar heroin used by the small farmer-seller systems first set up by residents of Xalisco. Their method of growing-packaging-selling expansion into the heartland of America should make us sit up and pay attention. Ground zero for the meltdown of middle America is identified by Quinones as Portsmouth, Ohio, a middle class town at the center of a web of major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh. The first known vector of the opioid infection was an unscrupulous doctor who overprescribed pills, knowing they were addicting his patients. Aided by ordinary well-meaning doctors who listened to marketing spiels by the drug makers, and who believed the pills to be non-addictive, the infection spread rapidly. Quinones tells the tale as it unfolded, involving Medicaid scams and cross-state purchases and sales.

What Quinones tells us gives us lessons for many other supply-side problems (marijuana? guns?) we may face in our society, now or in the future. When asked in an interview why restrictions on Class A prescription pills or opiates of any sort would produce the better outcomes, Quinones points out that when prohibited liquor was once again allowed to be sold openly, it was classified as to strength and sold differently. He warns that we are rushing to sales of marijuana with potency levels unknown fifty years ago and may wish we’d instituted some restrictions or controls before it becomes socially acceptable.

This nonfiction is dispassionate enough to allow us time to adjust our thinking around the problem of young people—entire families, really—losing their place in a productive society, with almost no way out. Now, with the recognition of the problem being forced upon our politicians, teachers, medical personnel, and law-enforcement officers, some changes are being instituted which may help after the fact of addiction, never a good time to try and solve a problem. With discussion and buy-in by ordinary citizens it may be possible to attack this problem before it begins.

There are at least seven interviews with Quinones free on Soundcloud, ranging in length from 15 minutes or so to an hour and a half. You have to hear some of these stories. It's mind-blowing. I listened to audio version, very ably read by Neil Hellegers, and produced by Bloomsbury. It is a must-read, must-listen.



Tweet

Happiness in This Life by Pope Francis, translated by Oonagh Stransky

Hardcover, 272 pgs, Pub Dec 5th 2017 by Random House Publishing Group, ISBN13: 9780525510970, Edition Language: English

I don’t have anything against popes per se. It seems to me that some men are genuinely holy men, in that they have thought long and hard about life on earth and prefer the alternative: heaven. Pope Francis seems to have absorbed more than a few of the lessons taught in Christianity, and he is a good spokesperson. When he says he makes mistakes, we believe him.

Earlier this month, Pope Francis defended Bishop Juan Barros for being unaware of sexual abuse committed by his mentor, the Reverend Fernando Karadima, who was notorious and hated within Chile. Unfortunately, parishioners in Chile are not satisfied with the investigation that cleared Barros.


Bishop Juan Barros

Pope Francis’ support for Barros could very well be one of those ‘mistakes’ the Pope speaks of. At first the pontiff seems to be sympathetic to the victims of abuse and then backs off, suggesting the Church is being scammed by ‘supposed’ victims. He must be getting information from internal sources.

If I were him, I would have to doubt internal sources at least as much as believers. After all, the Church has failed its believers badly in the past, with abuse of minors, corruption, graft, and lack of humility right at the top of the list of wrongs. It must be hard to be part of such a large and wealthy organization and still preach humility with any degree of sincerity. Pope Francis managed it better than anyone, but he may be struggling now. When he preaches forgiveness, I might find forgiveness in my heart for him, but not so much for the pedos. Let them deal with the law first and then let's talk.

This book is divided into four sections; within those sections are very short statements he has given on different occasions between the years 2013-2016. The pieces are lessons that contain admonishments or suggestions. Those who like to meditate each day on spiritual lessons may find this form very successful for their practice.

Nearly every passage I marked out as insightful, useful, or on a subject discussed for years within the Catholic community came from the summer of 2013 when Pope Francis addressed celibacy:

“Once made, these vows of chastity never end, rather, they endure…when a priest is not a father to his community, when a nun is not a mother to all those with whom she works, he or she becomes sad…This sadness comes from failing to live a truly consecrated life, which, on the contrary, always makes us fruitful, fertile…the beauty of consecration is joy, always joy.”

We can see he means well, but not everyone is cut out to be a priest, let alone a pope, perhaps even less so today.

On another hot-button topic, the role of women in the Church, Pope Francis says this:

“The Church recognizes the indispensable contribution that women make to society, their sensitivity, their intuition, and other distinctive skills that women, more than men, tend to possess. For example, the special attention that women bestow on others, an attention often—but not exclusively—expressed in maternity. I happily acknowledge how many women share pastoral responsibilities with priests, how they guide people, families, and groups and thoughtfully contribute to theological studies.

But we need to create even more opportunities for women in the Church We need feminine genius in every aspect of society. So women must be guaranteed roles in the workplace and wherever important decisions are made, both within the Church and in social structures.”

Dear Pope Francis sounds like he is trying to make nice but his words are so old-fashioned I am not reassured. I would not be the person interested in reforming this edifice and in cranking open the brain boxes of men who long ago closed their minds to an entire sex. No. But I credit any woman willing to take it on. It is truly a labor of generosity and love.

The question remains, is the Church relevant today, or is it still standing but dead inside?

The audio produced by Penguin Random House and beautifully read by Arthur Morey is a good way to enjoy this title, though if using each little entry for meditation you may prefer the written copy. Translated by Oonagh Stransky. Pope Francis was born in Buenos Aires December 17, 1936, and was christened with the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He became the Bishop of Rome and the 266th Pope of the Catholic Church on March 13, 2013.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

Tell Me More by Kelly Corrigan

Hardcover, 240 pgs, Pub Jan 9th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780399588372

The subtitle of this book is “Stories about the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say” and her chapter headings are those twelve phrases. Corrigan’s grandmother always reassured her that she was “good enough,” and would be able to withstand the vicissitudes of life because when she failed, she just got right back up again and did something else. That resilience is a quality more important than beauty or intellectual horsepower when it comes to success in life, though nobody believes that when you’re young.

Some of these stories are sad, like when Corrigan loses her dad, and at little later, her best friend Liz. Corrigan can be eloquent when describing how important her best friend was to her, and what a horrifying shock it was to discover she would die. But she leavens her memories with the funny bits…the bits where both their families travelled together with the kids and shared laughs and more.

She is irreverent about her own accomplishments, a career writing, two daughters and a loving husband, but we can tell how much it means to her to be with them. It’s all she wanted: “Four by Forty,” is how she put it. Well, she did not have four kids because breast cancer intervened, but there were still four of them when she turned forty, two kids and two parents, so she satisfied herself with that. Corrigan volunteers to hold newborns at a local hospital once a week, getting her baby fix while giving relief to the corona of families and staff that surround a baby at risk.

One thing Corrigan had learned to say was “tell me more,” which works when someone is upset or when they are angry. The very fact of listening draws people out and clarifies their anxieties so that those stressors can be dealt with or dismissed. One doesn’t have to have any special expertise for this listening and yet people often find it most consoling.

The lesson I liked best was her learning to say ‘No.’

“Sexually, professionally, personally…saying ‘No’ takes balls. One friend told me her one big take away from three years and $11,000 of therapy was ‘Learn to say no and when you do, don’t complain and don’t explain. Every excuse you make is like an invitation to ask you again in a different way.’”

I learned this lesson early and all my life it has been my super power. Corrigan tells us her mother was a ‘No Pro’ who had no desire to curb another’s activities. “She had her own mind and she used it.” If she didn’t want to go somewhere everyone else wanted to go, she’d wave them off and settle happily to spend her evening alone.

“It must be possible to say ‘No’ nicely and still be loved,” Corrigan opines. Her mother must have managed it, since Corrigan loves her now. She may not have at the time, however, and we know this because of Corrigan’s earlier book Glitter and Glue in which Corrigan settles into recognition and love for how she was as a mother.

“Very few people I’ve known are able to set themselves free the way my mother has, liberated by the simple act of saying “no,” which I submit is impressive for any woman and downright radical for one raised in the “nice and easy” generation. My Mom had always been able to find outs where others could not. Looking back I think it came down to her impressive willingness to be disliked and her utterly unromantic position that people should take serious, if not total responsibility, for their own happiness.”

Corrigan has lots of personality—that used to be a way for men to say women are loud—but she actually says stuff rather than just blow air, and she can be really funny. It you listened to her describe using her daughter's round-tipped scissors to cut off a shirt she’d bought on sale but couldn’t manage to take off past her boobs once on, you know what I mean. She may actually be a little bit loud, but she is definitely the one you’d aim for at a party or for a long walk—she’d never be without some observation worth developing into something bigger and deeper. I am nothing like her, but I appreciate that mother nature of hers to the end. I have always admired mothers for their stop-gap practicality and their attention to the things that matter.

The end of this memoir reads like a long eulogy for Liz, and what her friendship meant. It is the best darn eulogy I have ever heard…in a way it sounds like a wedding toast, it is so full of life and love and gratefulness and remembrance. It would be a wonderful model for someone wishing to find a way to say what is in their hearts for their own friends or relatives. We’ll all have to face it one day and judging from Corrigan’s experience, we are never ready.

Corrigan reads the audio of this book herself, and it is a good way to enjoy the Penguin Random House production. The book would be good as well because the eulogy passages you may want to read again.

Attached please find Corrigan in a very short NYT video discussing Glitter & Glue, and below that, a 5 minute audio clip of Tell Me More:





You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories by Denis Johnson

Hardcover, 207 pgs, Pub Jan 16th 2018 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812988635

I’d never read any Denis Johnson before this, though of course I knew of his work. I thought I had endless days to finally show my appreciation.

A GR friend describes the eponymous first story as if watching a magician at work. That story is actually a set of very short stories, each so well-conceived and trimmed of fat that worlds are conveyed in a sentence. Perhaps he could have been a lyricist; another GR friend says he was a poet “first and foremost.” Yes.

Both these GR friends cite that first story along with “Triumph Over Grave,” the penultimate story in this collection, as their favorites. So it is with me. These two stories are worth seeking out the collection to read. Probably you will not get a better idea of the art and the man than these.

“What have you been doing with yourself out here?” one character asks another who is naked beneath his open lab coat.
“Thangdoodlin’,” the other man replies. —from “Triumph…”

Johnson knew too much about addiction. It saturates his stories and while in some we get the sense of an understanding compassion for fellow sufferers, at the same time it gives us the claustrophobic I-can’t-breathe quality of hearing the same goddamn story again in its millionth iteration, perhaps even from the same person. Empathy, even sympathy, turns sour over too much time with addicts.

“We alkies are just a tangle of lies like the insides of a golf ball.”

At the same time I want to press this book into the hands of AA & NA attendees to talk about at their choreographed meetings. Surely the vision of someone managing to describe their common symptoms and regrets is restitutive, reflexively imitative. But how would he know these things except to have succumbed more times than can be counted? Some folks manage to escape. We have to hold onto that. Besides, he never asks for more.

Penguin Random House does a magnificent job on the audio of this collection, and provides some Soundcloud clips for stories read by different actors. Below Nick Offerman reading from “Ad Man,” one of the very short stories in “Largesse…”; My favorite voice among all these favorite actors is Michael Shannon reading the first page of “The Starlight on Idaho,” sounding so much like Sam Shepard in voice and subject matter that we remember a time when these men roamed the earth. They meant something to us, addictions or not; Will Patton reads the first pages of “Triumph…”, his voice all shaky and smoky like someone who will never lose the jitters anymore; the first page of “Strangler Bob” read by Dermot Mulroney sounds all brawny and seen-it-all; Liev Schreiber reads the last story in the collection, “Dopplegänger, Poltergeist.”




The Audible edition of the audiobook has all five actors reading one each of five different stories. But be careful with this listen: Denis Johnson’s work is so unflashy that its skill can be easily overlooked when someone reads it aloud just right. The book is small and easy to carry: it allows one to appreciate the shortness of the stories, the way he laid it all out and wrote it down, and what he didn’t say.



You can buy this book here: Tweet

The Iliad by Homer, translated by Various

Foolish me. I thought I was going to look at the different editions of The Iliad and choose the one most readable but did not reckon with the overwhelming beauty of the language and story. The truth is, it does not matter which edition you choose, so long as you read at least one. It is inevitable that you will find yourself drawn to the question of the most beautiful and complete rendition but you may (wisely) concede defeat at the beauty of each.

The Homeric epics are said to be the greatest martial stories ever sung or written of all time, so if for some reason they did not resonate for you in high school, you may want to revisit what your teachers were talking about. When they describe the death of a man in the full bloom of his strength looking like an flower in a rainstorm, head and neck aslant, unable to withstand the beating rain, we understand. I listened to the audio of Stephen Mitchell’s streamlined translation, and it was utterly ravishing and compelling.

The Iliad is one episode among many in Homer’s epics, and it may have been assumed that listeners of the original spoken performance would be familiar with all the players in this war. It is argued by some, including British scholar M.L. West, that The Iliad has had pieces added to it over the years. Stephen Mitchell follows West’s scholarship and strips out the extra passages, a notion expanded upon in a review of Mitchell’s translation by classicist Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker (2011). Mitchell’s translation may be the most readable, the most listenable one in English. It is also the shortest. Mitchell also shortens the lines in English so that they have speed and momentum for an impressive delivery.

The recent (2017) Peter Green translation, begun when Green was nearly 90 years old, is similarly easy to read; Green tells us that he began in a relaxed attitude for diversion and completed the whole within a year. Colin Burrow reviewed Green's translation in the June 18th 2015 edition of the London Review of Books. Neither the writing or the reading of this version is anguished or tortured, and Burrow points out that Green was a historian but didn't allow that to obfuscate or weigh down the poetry.

The Green & Mitchell versions both retain a long recitation of those who prepared their ships to sail with Agamemnōn to Troy to bring back Helen, the wife of Menelaös. One imagines ancient listeners shouting when their region is named, much along the lines of the cheering section of a field game, when each player’s name is called. And later, as the blow-by-blow of the battle proceeded, one imagines each region cheering when mention of their leader is declaimed, though some died horrible deaths.

This is another reason to read this ancient work: We live and die not unlike one another, we who lived so far apart in time, and perhaps the ardor young men of today have for the sword and for fame will be doused by the utterly desolate manner of death recounted here, one in particular that I cannot forget: a spear through the buttock and into the bladder meant a painful and ugly death. However, it is true that Achilles chose fame over life, knowing that his exploits in Troy would mean his physical death but his fame amongst men would be sung for “thousands of years.”

One wonders how the ballad was delivered—in pieces or over a period of days—perhaps in sections by different singers? Caroline Alexander, after a lifetime of her own research into the Homeric epics argues in The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War that the work certainly required days to recite, and may have been performed in episodes. The length of the piece now suggests the work was once short enough to be memorized, with a few repeated lines leaving headspace for the singer's invention and modification as befits the oral tradition.

I wonder now which European language has the most translations, and do they sometimes dare to attempt translations from ancient Greek to, say, French, and then to English? It seems we have enough scholars understanding ancient Greek to give us satisfactory versions without resorting to piggybacked translations. An attempt was made by John Farrell in the Oct 30, 2012 edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books to untangle the English translations and sort them for clarity and poetry. Those of us who love this work will read all the versions, especially the fascinating introductions to each in which the translators themselves wax eloquent about what they loved about it. Mitchell's introduction is especially accessible and impelling: I couldn't wait to get to the story.

I have read reviews of people who prefer Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald, or Lombardo translations and all I can say is I’m not the one to quibble about great works. Daniel Mendelsohn "graded" four translations in the article discussing Mitchell's translation. It must be a curse and a blessing both (for one's self and one’s family both) to understand ancient Greek and to feel the desire to translate Homer. All the questions any editor/translator must address, e.g., spelling, which edition is ‘original,’ more poetry or prose, whether to render the translation literally or by sense…how exhausting the decisions, but how fantastically exciting, too.

In the end, whichever edition gives you the greatest access for your first attempt to breach the ramparts of this ancient work is the one to choose for a first read. The other editions will naturally come later, once you have the sense of the story, a few names nailed down, and have that deepening curiosity about the poetry and the beauty.

One last observation is that the men in this epic were mere playthings of the gods, gods that could be cruel, petty, jealous, and vengeful. These gods were helpful to individual men or women insofar as it helped their cause vis à vis other gods. There was striving among men, but most of the time human successes or failures had less to do with who they were than with who they knew. Was it ever thus.

※ Mitchell: Paperback, 560 pgs, Pub Aug 14th 2012 by Atria Books (first published -750), Orig Title Ἰλιάς, ISBN13: 9781439163382; Audio Pub: Simon & Schuster Audio, 10/11/2011, Unabridged, ISBN-13:9781442347311

※ Green: Paperback, 544 pgs, Pub May 14 2015 by University of California Press, ISBN13: 9780520281431

※ Alexander: Paperback, 608 pgs, Pub Sept 13 2016 by Ecco, ISBN13: 9780062046284

※ Fagles: Paperback, Deluxe Edition, 683 pgs, Pub Apr 29 1999 by Penguin Books, ISBN13: 9780140275360

※ Fitzgerald: Paperback, 588 pgs, Pub Jan 2 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374529055

※ Lombardo: Paperback, 574 pgs, Pub Mar 12th 1997 by Hackett Pub Co, Inc., ISBN13: 9780872203525

※ Lattimore: Paperback, 599 pgs, Pub Nov 15th 2011 by University Of Chicago Press, ISBN13: 9780226470498


You can buy this book here: Tweet

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.





You can buy this book here: Tweet

You Can't Spell America Without Me by Alec Baldwin & Kurt Andersen

Hardcover, 288 pgs, Pub Nov 7th 2017 by Penguin Press, ISBN13: 9780525521990

I have a hard time listening to DJT at the best of times, and listening to him at all now is a drain, nearly a year into the most bizarre presidency ever. Therefore I almost didn’t bother with Alex Baldwin’s parody which would have been a pity. I later learned (via NYT Book Review editor Pamela Paul interviews Kurt Andersen) this book was written in collaboration with novelist Kurt Andersen, who knew Trump back in the day. Andersen and Baldwin manage to channel DJT to an extraordinary extent, using DJT's actual words, sentence constructions, and speech idiosyncrasies for reconstructions and deep dives into his psyche.

This is deeply funny and unsettling stuff. Racist, sexist, religionist attitudes leach into his writing ("talking is the new writing"), surely not intentionally—he seems so completely ignorant of it. He makes juvenile jokes about Japanese names and the extent of Japanese disquiet over the cancellation of T.P.P., and expresses a kind of shocked surprise at how much the African American security people earn to protect him, especially after that discrimination suit they won…He blissfully mispronounces Philippine proverbs throughout the work, rendering them in his version of Tagalog, and mangling the translations.

Actual DJT tweets and quotes run into plausible extensions which elaborate his thinking gut feelings. Constantly finding ways to plug his golf courses and properties, branded steaks, wine, and ties, Trump finds his new job is awash in business opportunities: one could use military jets, perhaps, to bring same-day Nebraska grass-fed beef direct to the tables of his hotels. Andersen and Baldwin pick out current themes in American masculinity, politics, art, and critical thought and introduce the rogue element that is DJT.

“The chapter you just read was written personally by me, Donald Trump…this entire book, the words and sentences and the larger sections…the paragraphs, the chapters, all mine…and it's the best...”

By the end of the book, DJT is willing to ship Melania back to Yugoslavia ("I didn’t realize she’d come in illegally…" and "she's 50 years old this year") and he poses himself in front of a camera waving at the departing plane carrying his third wife while, written into the script, a single tear falls silently in the closeup. Sad.

"The president has unlimited Presidential Pardon Power (PPP), which means I could even pardon myself…PPP…"

DJT seems only to love his now 11-year-old son, Barron. He’s "so smart,""he’s like an adult now." One of the riffs I enjoyed most was about Paul Ryan, who looks

"like a smiling vampire…always glances at himself in windows and mirrors…it’s kinda gay…that afternoon Paul Ryan definitely looked untrustworthy. When I have strong instincts, they always mean something."

When you get to the part on North Korea, you will understand the depth of his delusions.

"I’ve never been to North Korea, I never took a course…but discussing it strongly for ten minutes, not with some CIA analyst or some State Department know-it-all, I now totally, completely, absolutely understand…that’s how CEO’s do it."

And his conflation of vote tallies:

"I won sixty percent of the electoral vote which is the same as Reagan and FDR…won of the popular vote."

Arghh.

These two men take the time to make us see the absurdity in DJT’s utterances…they go through all of it…right through his hiring family for jobs hardened professionals have trouble handling, to our foreign relations, the collusion, the shallowness of businessmen’s understanding of cultural relations, the voting…”It Finally Felt Real Like a Movie” is a chapter title, but it does tend to put the whole thing in perspective.

I suggest we take every opportunity to laugh while we can, all the while building up energy to take this clown down. Even if you think you are tired of all things Trump, these men have done a brilliant job of it, so have a listen, or a peruse. Laugh with friends at enemies. The audio is produced by Penguin Audio, and this book has a Whispersync option, a good choice for this title. Published by Penguin Random House.





You can buy this book here: Tweet

Asia's Reckoning: China, Japan, & The Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century by Richard McGregor

Hardcover, 416 pgs, Pub Sept 5th 2017 by Viking, ISBN13: 9780399562679

This deeply researched look at the China, Japan, U.S. triangle of strategic alliances is thickly studded with anecdote and new material uncovered in Freedom of Information requests, document declassifications, on-the-ground observation, and high-level meeting transcripts. Even the Introduction and Afterword are packed with unique material when these areas are more commonly places for overview and summing up. Altogether it is an achievement that will be the backbone for Asia-gazing for years to come.

McGregor looks at the trilateral relationships from the post-WWII period through the election of 2016 when Japan was the first to greet the month-old American president in New York City, not even waiting until Trump reached the White House. “The U.S. withdrawal from T.P.P. was the biggest shock to the alliance since Nixon went to China,” McGregor quotes Japan’s premier foreign policy commentator Yoichi Funabashi. After Abe had time to sit down with Trump in February 2017 and a joint statement drafted by Abe’s team to be delivered from the White House was proffered, Trump only insisted upon one change. “In place of ‘Donald Trump,’ the president said it should read ‘Donald J. Trump.’” So much for substance. “By the way, I love China. I love Japan.” Trump protests too much.

The book is arranged by decade until the “The Twenty-First Century,” a mammoth section encompassing fifteen years of toxic rivalry between the two Asian giants. McGregor has been on the ground in Asia for nearly thirty years and he shares the hopes, dreams, and personalities of leaders in China, Japan and America with the distance and caution good journalists cultivate. Compared with the rest of the world, Asia has been an explosion of good news, economic powerhouses doing what they do best, not waking up each morning, as Obama notes, “thinking about how to kill Americans.” (North Korea aside.)

But American economic and military presence in Asia paradoxically may have kept the Sino-Japan rivalry from resolving, despite their economic bilateral relationship that is among the most valuable in the world. If America packs up and goes home now, forces in Asia could amplify disputes and aggressions unacceptably. In answer to the question posed by Harvard professor Graham Allison whether China and America can avoid Thucydides’ trap, the conflict that arises when an established power (U.S.) is challenged by a rising rival (China), McGregor makes the point that Thucydides also said that as dangerous as it is to build an empire, it is even more dangerous to let it go. It is this second point that I worry about more when looking over the region.

McGregor’s special skill in this terrifically interesting and detailed reference work is humanizing the figures of government leadership and staff. We learn about the mostly men and few women involved in setting policy, their positions in their own governments, the official face of discussions and the more free-flowing and often contradictory attitudes in prep sessions and afterwards. We learn about specific American negotiators and their preparation [or lack of] for their Asia talks, their likes and dislikes, their knowledge and ignorance, and how these came to influence their official attitudes.

Thirty-seven black-and-white photographs punctuate this history, and illustrate the number of leaders each country has churned through in the past half-century of diplomacy. Both Xi Jinping of China and Shinzō Abe of Japan are long-running formative leaders who will leave deep imprints on their nation’s psyches. DJT’s presidency is a kind of lacuna in American foreign policy, a gap that will be filled with these two Asian powerhouses.

We all lived through the past eight years when Obama was forming relationships with allies in Asia. McGregor makes us feel as though we missed a lot. While I’d thought Obama was warmly received in Asia generally, we learn here that Obama “did not do chemistry… but he learned to do face.” Obama left the stage having made few friends, but he had reassured Japan, negotiated the T.P.P. which would eventually accrue benefit to the U.S., if not necessarily in strictly economic terms.

I hadn’t been aware that Abe had floated the idea that Japan would be willing to form a loose alliance among the Asian democracies (India, Australia, the U.S., and Japan) to promote democracy. None of the other countries was enthusiastic, Australia being resistant to being drawn into the possibility of Sino-Japanese conflict down the line.

McGregor reminds us that “forging, building, managing, and sustaining alliances and other partnerships had been one of America’s greatest skills in the postwar era.” That compliment comes as McGregor recounts the final overseas trip of Ash Carter, Obama’s fourth and last secretary of defense.

Asia had lately been touted as the most important region of the world for the United States, but which had gotten the least amount of attention. Obama had been willing to accommodate China’s regional expectation of dominance to some extent, for which he got unceasing criticism in Japan. Trump’s attitude is that Japan “used to routinely beat China.” Therefore, he is said to reason, why defend Japan at all?

The U.S. willingness to accommodate China’s ascendency, and to encourage Japan’s increase in defensive weaponry and capability, is part and parcel of “letting go” of America’s strong, some might say stabilizing, role in Asia. We’re about to find out which is the more dangerous route, and for whom.

This book is available as a Penguin Random House audiobook, beautifully read by Steve West. The audiobook is a wonderful choice to make progress on the book when other obligations are pressing. However, I still liked having the hardcopy to refer to: there is a lot of information here, much of it new. You may need access to both vehicles to get the most out of this. It's worth it.





You can buy this book here: Tweet

Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Hardcover, 338 pgs, Pub May 9th 2017 by Dey Street Books, ISBN13: 9780062390851

Maybe everyone does lie. But they don’t lie all the time. Stephens-Davidowitz makes the good point that asking people directly doesn’t always, in fact may not often, yield true answers. People have their own reasons for answering pollsters untruthfully, but it is clear that this is a documented fact. People sometimes lie to pollsters.

Stephens-Davidowitz was told by mentors and advisors not to consider Google searches worthwhile data, but the more he looked at it, the more he was convinced that Google searches contained the best data for determining what people are concerned about. He has uncovered some interesting trends that are not apparent through direct questioning because people are sometimes ashamed of their fears, feelings, prejudices, and predilections.

This book was better read rather than listened to, though the production by HarperAudio and the narrator, Tim Andres Pabon, were excellent. Stephens-Davidowitz gives charts, graphs, data points that obviously cannot be represented in the audio version. These usually help me to grasp things easily and maybe bypass pages of material that is not as interesting to me. It wasn’t that his material was hard, it was that I oftentimes did not like what he was talking about. He had a tendency to focus on deviant behavior, e.g., sexual predators, abuse, porn, etc. One might make the argument that these behaviors are important to understand and therefore worth looking at. Possibly. However, if ‘everybody lies,’ one might make the argument that we do not have to look at deviance to find untruthfulness.

What we discover is that to test Stephens-Davidowitz’s thesis that ‘everybody lies,’ we have to spend quite a lot of time with statistics and creating studies, which is fine. Stephens-Davidowitz argues that 'big data' is the source of the insights, not the insights themselves. This is kind of important and may overlooked. The true point he makes about lying is that big data probably irons out discrepancies in the reasons for our Google searches, e.g., that it is not me that is interested in the herpes virus, it is my brother, because in the end it doesn’t matter why we did the search; what matters is that we did the search. Besides, maybe I’m lying about my brother having the virus, but my interest in the topic is not a lie.

Stephens-Davidowitz has made a career so far out of the study of big data, showing us ways to slice and dice it so that it is useful to our view of the world. Only thing is, I am not as interested in what big data tells us as he is. He’d trained as an economist, and towards the end of the book he hit a couple of areas I did find more interesting, like the notion of regression discontinuity, a term used to describe a statistical tool created to measure the outcomes of people very close to some arbitrary cut-off.** S-D talks about using this tool on federal inmates, discovering criminals treated more harshly committed more crimes upon their release. But S-D also studied students on either side of the admissions cut-off for the prestigious Stuyvesant High School: those who attended Stuyvesant did not have a significant performance difference in later life than students who did not.

Apparently Stephens-Davidowitz went into data science because of Freakonomics, the bestselling book by Steven D. Levitt. He believes that many of the next generation of scientists in every field will be data scientists. I did finish the audiobook, another study he took note of in the last pages. Apparently few readers finish ‘treatises’ by economists. He believes this is his big contribution to our knowledge base, and there is no doubt his contrariness did highlight ways big data can be used effectively.

If I may be so bold, I might be able to suggest a reason why many female readers may not be as interested in the material presented, or in Stephens-Davidowitz himself (he was/is apparently looking for a girlfriend). Stay away from the deviant sex stuff, Seth. It may interest you but I can guarantee that fewer women are going to find that appealing or reassuring conversation material.

An interesting corollary to this economists’ data view is the question of whether the truth matters, which is how I came to pick up this book. Recently on PBS’ The Third Rail with Ozy, Carlos Watson asked whether the truth matters. At first blush the answer seems obvious, and two sides debated this question. One side said of course truth matters…but most of us know one man’s truth to be another man’s lie. The other side said ‘everybody lies.’ It got me to thinking…I do think the two ways of coming to the notion of lying dovetail at some point, and one has to conclude that truth may not matter as much as we think. What matters is what we believe to be true.

Finally, it appears Stephens-Davidson agrees to some degree with Cathy O'Neill, author of Weapons of Math Destruction, in that he agrees you best not let algorithms run without human tweaking and interference. The best outcomes are delivered when humans apply their particular observations and knowledge and expertise along with big data.


** S-D describes it this way:

“Any time there is precise number that divides people into two different groups, a discontinuity, economists can compare, or regress, the outcomes of people very very close to the cut off.”

You can buy this book here: Tweet