The Helicopter Heist by Jonas Bonnier, translated by Alice Menzies

Paperback, 404 pgs, Pub May 28, 2019, Other Press Paperback Original. (first published April 2017), Original Title: Helikopterrånet translated by Alice Menzies, ISBN: 978-159051-950-9.

Have I got a summer read for you! This fictional Scandinavian thriller is based on true events, which makes it even more ravishing. I can’t wait for you to read it.

All you who love the TV series, movies, mysteries and thrillers to come out of Scandinavia, to say nothing of Karl Ove Knausgård’s bestselling fictional autobiography, are going to be reminded why you love those stories so much. This book has the daily life detail of Sweden that makes the journey so different from ordinary American novels.

To make it even more interesting, we are privy to the intimate thoughts and intentions of recent and not-so-recent migrants to Sweden, three of the main characters originally hailed from Lebanon, Iran, and Yugoslavia, though all are Swedish citizens now. Already we are interested. Add to that these folks struggled in their first years and turned to what appeared to be easier: theft and sometimes intricately designed robberies. Several of the characters met in jail.

Throw in some gorgeous Swedish blondes, female, at least one on the side of the law, the other working for the largest cash depot in Västberga, not too far from Stockholm, except there is water in between.

The beautiful blonde probably should have been harder to get, but one of the unattached, recently released, always-looking-for-an-angle young men is pointed towards her by a legendary thief, a thief who is in ‘retirement’ in a remote cottage filled with eight big labradors, and a stash of cash moldering in a root cellar.

The young man discovers the blonde is a talker, and she likes to talk about work, and that is the cash depot.

The absurdity of the plan to rob the depot is so far out that we can’t imagine these guys, who have already been to jail once and are so obviously outsiders in every way, can manage to pull it off without serious damage to their lives, if not their reputations. But still they persist. So many things go wrong: they lose key personnel regularly and must replace them with someone less knowledgeable or less skilled. The plan is wildly oversized in every way.

Then the police find out. They know what will happen, where and when. They prepare for weeks in advance. They contact the National Guard and SWAT. They have the judiciary involved and have bugged a key member of the team ten different ways.

The robbers are screwed.

That’s all I’m telling you, but believe me, this is about as stressful a situation as I can imagine. Each member of the team doesn’t know the other members well. It’s a total crapshoot. Wait until you see what happens. What struck me as most bizarre and yet so ridiculously true, is the media reaction. When the absurd robbery was underway, the entire world became riveted at this audacious plan.

This is a translated novel. There are some moments when one is completely aware one is not reading an ordinary American thriller of the more usual kind. This, my friends, is something completely different. If you did not get that Scandinavian vacation this year, never fear. You will be in Sweden for the two or three days it takes you to read this one.

And you will spend a lot less money.

This terrific novel has been optioned to be made into a Netflix film original starring and produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. Do not wait! Read the book first, if you have time in your book-reading schedule. I will make an admission: for almost a year now it has been very difficult for me to read fiction when our daily nonfictional lives are so eventful. Somehow this fiction of nonfiction is the perfect fit.

Enjoy!



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Amity and Prosperity by Eliza Griswold

Hardcover, 336 pags, Pub June 12th 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374103118

This scientific and legal drama recounts the harrowing ordeal of several families suffering terribly from toxic chemicals leaching from storage pools of fracking waste into their drinking water and into the air in western Pennsylvania. New Yorker staff writer and journalist Eliza Griswold has excellent instincts for a story and she has honed her skills so that unwieldy real life is put into a clear timeline; we not only understand, we are desperate to learn the outcome.

It is nearly impossible to imagine this kind of deceit and coercion happening today in ‘sacrifice zones’ around the country. After all, it is written in Pennsylvania’s own constitution that

“The people have a right to clear air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit for all the people.”

Residents who survived—many of their farm animals did not—had to leave their newly worthless property because the water was not fit to drink nor the air fit to breathe. This is the story of how these families fought the state and federal agencies (EPA, DEP) charged with protecting them; Range Resources, the company responsible for the fracking work; the companies responsible for testing blood and water for chemical components causing the damage; their own neighbors; and the political leadership including the governor in Pennsylvania who instituted Act 13, giving zoning overrides to fracking companies.

When their lawyers, John Smith and his wife Kendra, finally argued a case about the pollution before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in October 2012, two years after they began researching the cases, the lawyers were afraid the conservative judge known to side frequently with Republican politicians would throw out the challenge to Act 13. [Pennsylvania is known today as the poster child for such severe political gerrymandering that Republicans in state and national government far outweigh their Democratic challengers.] State governor Tom Corbett didn’t want “to send a negative message to job creators and families who depend on the energy industry.” Corbett was voted out in 2015.

Speaking of families who depend on the energy industry, the neighbors of these folks who had been so wrongly done by sometimes begrudged the families their lawsuits since it might lessen their opportunity to sell the rights to whatever gas or right-of-way lay beneath their own land. This is a horror story that is difficult to tear one’s eyes from.

“[Range Resources] tried to appeal to those who stood to make money with an unusual letter writing campaign. One mass mailing was addressed to a fictitious ‘Mr. and Mrs. Joe Schmo at 10 Cash-Strapped Lane.’ It urged residents to bring pressure on their local officials to allow companies wide latitude to drill where they needed to, or there’d be no gas, and ‘no gas means no royalties.’”

The royalties, by the way, weren’t very impressive to someone who was going to lose their health, possibly members of their family, their livelihood, their land, their house, their way of life. This was farmland, so most of people discussed here in detail had barns, large animals, etc. This says nothing of the downstream pollution of the groundwater. People can drill on their own property, but not if it affects their neighbor.

Fracking waste is toxic, but much of the time so is what fracking dredges up from deep earth pockets holding Pleistocene-era bacteria and ocean salts. No one wants this waste. Range Resources paid Alan Shipman to truck away waste that didn’t fit in the holding ponds. Shipman was convicted in 2011 of mixing the fracking solutions with less lethal waste so technically it would fall under less stringent guidelines for placement and then he dumped it illegally into public waterways.

A few local public officials thought some of the difficulties lay in the corruption of government by money flowing from the gas companies to people in political office who thereafter tended to cater to those business interests. Even Obama changed his tune from “no fracking” during his campaign, to “gas is good” during his term. Some individuals argue that despite some pollution, gas extraction has made the U.S. practically energy independent, moving the U.S. from importing two-thirds of it’s oil needs to one-fifth. A degree of pollution here may prevent global ocean rise because gas is less carbon-emitting, etc, etc.

To all of this could be argued that the costs of gas are not adequately taken into account by companies operating by deceit. Have the companies pay the real costs and then go find investors. They will, and we will be protected. If gas is judged to be “just too expensive,” we may need to rethink the way we do business or the way we live.

One final note is a very short discussion Griswold adds about the Tragedy of the Commons. I’d never heard of this concept, so I quote her here at length:

“Economists describe the Tragedy of the Commons like this: cattle herders sharing a pasture will inevitably place the needs of their cows above the needs of others’, adding cow after cow and taking more than their share of the common grass. This ‘free rider’ takes advantage of the commons, and consumes it until it’s gone. This, the argument goes, is human nature, which sets individual gain over collective good. Traditionally, the Tragedy of the Commons has supported the case for individual property rights: since it’s impossible for people to act together to protect commonly held assets, we might as well carve up those assets and leave individuals to look after their own. But what if the commons did not need to end in tragedy? What if people were able to work out effective practices of sharing the commons and transmit those traditions to their descendants? Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, argued that the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons for the twenty-first century lies in common sense. Sharing has succeeded in the past and could succeed in the future. Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. She died in 2012.”

This is a terrific, propulsive, horrifying, and important read you are not going to want to miss.



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My Brother Moochie by Issac J. Bailey

Hardcover, 304 pgs, Pub May 29th 2018 by Other Press (NY)

This book will challenge you. I agree with Bailey on his notions about ‘remembered trauma’ and how it seeps into the soul of individuals. Recent studies have shown that trauma can actually change the DNA of the traumatized person so that it affects generations. A trauma can be passed on. The implications of this just changes everything, particularly when discussing generations of American black families.

Bailey writes exceptionally well, and he forms an argument so that you can acknowledge points you would surely have argued against. Bailey raises the hard issues. Everything we have talked about to now about mass incarceration and the over-representation of black men in American jails is brought under discussion here. But Bailey is tough. We’re not talking about the wrongly-accused or set-up arrests.

Bailey’s brothers, several of them, were the scourges of his small South Carolina town and spent time—a long time—in prison. One brother, Moochie, was the eldest and was responsible for taking care of the family. The father was a serial abuser and alcoholic, traumatizing the children. When Moochie, defender of the family, was taken away in handcuffs when Issac was nine, Issac’s stress reaction developed into a severe stutter that has lasted his entire life.

Moochie killed a man. He came home one night calling to his brothers to bring him fresh clothes which he changed into. He didn’t get far before he was picked up. Naturally for the place and the time, he was questioned before he was given counsel. Eventually, he admitted his guilt. The whole case was shrouded in secrecy from both the family and the town, the wildest rumors about how the event went down still circulating nearly forty years later.

Moochie’s brother Issac Bailey makes the case that his youngest brothers and Moochie’s own son, a toddler, suffered even more psychological impacts. His three youngest brothers and Moochie’s son have all been in conflict with the law since high school, which none of them actually finished.

There is some research showing these very early insults to one’s psyche make long-lasting effects throughout one’s life and cause early deaths among sufferers, should they live so long. Issac Bailey wants us to consider these factors when assigning blame to young black men. He thinks we should acknowledge what we as a country have done to the families of black Americans; change the circumstances so these insults no longer negatively impact self-worth; add our knowledge of black lives to calculations of right and wrong, death or life.

Issac did not really defend Moochie while he was growing up, and in fact, did not frequently visit him in prison. Early on he’d dreamed that Moochie was innocent and was heartbroken to learn that, no, he was guilty. Once he, too, became a man, Issac believes that Moochie was guilty of youth, stupidity, and wishful thinking rather than a pathological need to murder someone. The situation in which Moochie found himself offered an opportunity to use the knife he carried. No matter how Issac explains it, it is difficult to excuse it.

But Issac is not asking us to excuse it. He is asking us to acknowledge the damage we have done to generations of black Americans and then ask ourselves what we expected the result would be. And this is where I am with him, shoulder to shoulder. White Americans are still displaying dominant aggression to black Americans, even now, after all we know about the real indistinguishability of genes among human beings, and how differences among us are attitudinal and cultural only.

The obvious answer, if we want different outcomes in incarceration and achievement and attitudes, is to change the culture. Our culture. It is so obvious as to appear elementary. And if you think that is hard, try continuing down this road of helplessness and hopelessness a little longer and throw other methods at the problem. Then tell me we don’t need to change the culture. Issac is completely right about the ridiculous statues of dead Confederate generals still around. What on earth is the message that is intended to send? Can we please do the barest minimum to treat black Americans like they are honored citizens of our country?

In the last pages of this memoir, when Issac is a Neiman Fellow at Harvard, two big things happen to him personally. One is that he discovers he has a rare chronic life-threatening medical condition (he is only in his fifties), and the other is that Moochie finally is granted parole. It is in these circumstances that Issac raises the question surrounding the award withdrawn from convicted murderer Michelle Jones for a scholarship to attend Harvard University. He uses her case to illustrate what he’d been talking about throughout his memoir: one can’t simple equate Michelle Jones’ circumstance with any other. One simply has to consider her case in the context of her life.

This book will challenge you. It is brilliantly argued. Read it.



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Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar

Hardcover, 295 pgs, Pub Feb 7th 2017 by Random House, ISBN13: 9780812995800, Lit Awards: Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Nominee for Longlist (2017), Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Nonfiction (2018)

Steven Cohen is back running hedges (or do we call them dodges?) on Wall Street after being banned for two years from investing other people’s money. He is sixty-one years old, and has houses filled with beautiful things. His lifetime focus is trying to edge others in the market using whatever means necessary. He is said to have a reptilian cool when it comes to trading on the margins, making him one of the best traders ever. Cold-blooded is one thing. Cheating with inside information is another.

He can deny it all he wants. Nobody believes him because “everybody does it.” Proprietary, nonpublic information, the ‘black edge’ of the title, “is like doing in elite-level cycling or steroids in professional baseball. Once the top cyclists and home-run hitters started doing it, you either went along with them or you lost.” But it is also that kind of wrong: it corrupts the process so completely that winning no longer means anything.

Kolhatkar wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek for most of the time she spent gathering material for this book, but now she works as a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has the skill to make a boring story about old white men on Wall Street buying stuff interesting. We learn what didn’t work the last time government lawyers went after Cohen. If we are going to stop the kind of self-aggrandizement that leads to corruption of our most important governing principles, we need people who are brave enough to take on the cheaters.

That wouldn't be current and former employees of Cohen’s staff who were so internally corrupt already, like lifelong liar and cheat Matt Martoma, serving nine years for his part in the Elan trade that made Cohen dump and short stock he held in a company with a new Alzheimer drug, netting Cohen an estimated $275 million. Martoma had to change his name from Ajai Thomas because he was expelled from Harvard Law School for illegally modifying his transcript to get a clerkship.

Kolhatkar gives Martoma the slightest bit of cover by suggesting Martoma was traumatized in his childhood by a demanding father, but I’m afraid what we see is a character weakness so severe that Martoma felt entitled to criminal behaviors despite being a young, handsome, privileged man. His father says at his trial that he "maxed out" his gifts. Steve Cohen is the same kind of man. He has one gift that we can see. He is also more willing to be criminal than we are, perhaps as compensation for a kind of social and spiritual impoverishment. He will be remembered for…what? For buying things? Illegally. Wow. Big man.

If I understood the investigations into Steve Cohen, it was conducted separately by three different branches of government: the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s office, and the Securities & Exchange Commission. These players got together occasionally to share information, but were all the time afraid they could not make a case with the information they had gleaned unless someone in the Cohen organization flipped. Kolhatkar has an especially interesting discussion on why the ethically-challenged Martoma did not flip. To date we do not know why.

Several cases were being investigated and litigated by this same group at the same time, i.e., cases for other insider trading by the same miscreants, individual cases against Cohen’s current and former employees, cases against Cohen’s company, etc. Cohen did end up paying more than a billion dollars in fines, but he was never jailed. He was just prevented from playing with other people’s money for two years. One of Cohen’s former traders, David Ganek, actually countersued government entities, the FBI and Preet Bharara’s office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, for abridgment of his constitutional rights during that investigation. Ganek lost that challenge in October 2017.

Shortly after the decisions on Cohen's company SAC and Mathew Martoma, two cases decided earlier setting precedent on insider trading (Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson from Diamondback and Level Global, two firms with ties to SAC) were reversed, in effect reprimanding Bharara's office of zealotry. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Newman overturn was too lenient. The fight for right is ongoing.

Kolhatkar draws the contrast between those working for the government with fewer resources and those sleek white men working for Cohen. In the years after the investigation, some attorneys moved from one side to the other: the New York Times reports

“A day after Lorin L. Reisner announced that he was stepping down as head of the criminal division of the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, the law firm Paul Weiss on Thursday named him as a partner in its litigation department.”

Paul Weiss supplied Cohen’s legal team. Antonia Apps, the attorney who tried the Steinberg case, went to Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. A high-level FBI investigator, Patrick Carroll, went to Goldman Sachs' compliance department. Amelia Cottrell of the SEC went to the firm where Cohen’s longtime defense counsel, Marty Klotz, worked. Sure, why not? Maybe one day, one of those who know both sides of the street will do the right thing for the right reasons.



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The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú

Hardcover, 256 pgs, Pub Feb 6th 2018 by Riverhead Books

This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We are here to listen, to understand. It is such a quiet read, immediately alert to the tension inherent in a grandson of immigrants policing the border.

This is a beautiful book, a beautiful physical object. Riverhead Books formatted the inside to be a kind of art, using gray pages to separate the sections and lines to guide our eye, delineate our thoughts. We recognize we are privileged to see what an American thinks of the border, an American with reason to care about the migrants, who shares our history and theirs.

The real terror that migrants bring or flee is not hidden; it is one of the first things the border guards encounter. A drug capture is a feather in one’s cap. The people ferrying the drugs are not as important; they are allowed to struggle back to where they came from, or continue onward if they dare. Not much thought is expended in their direction by the border patrol.

Before long, Cantú becomes aware of his own muted, muffled response to the hideousness of the choices facing his human captures. The job itself appears to be a reason why he cannot envision himself in their place. Then we discover Cantú’s stress is coming out by a grinding of his teeth when at rest. He dreams of captures—his response and theirs—and how it could be different.

He moves to a different job, a different state. He watches, in a computer lab, movements in the border area. He researches reasons for population movement, the drug dealing, gang murders, a capture’s history. This knowledge does not abate his nighttime fears. He starts to try to imagine the humanity behind the statistics, quoting the historian Timothy Snyder, “Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life….it is for humanists to turn these [deaths] back into people.”

He goes back to El Paso and the Rio Grande and finds himself more confused than ever. “…studying…and reading…international affairs…I had the idea that…the patrol…would somehow unlock the border for me…but…I have more questions than ever before.” Exposure to the violence of the border region gave him a kind of moral injury: “Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”

In contemplating the migration of individuals from Mexico and Central America to North America, Cantú must examine the horror facing those migrants in their own countries. He gives us a taste of it, leading us to question our own understanding of government, laws, fairness, money, profit, coercion, protection. We realize we do not know the answers to the questions these migrants raise: How are we to live? What do we have to lose?

Cantú leaves the border patrol to think, write, read, study. In trying to make sense of his own history, his recent past, and his future, he takes a job in which he meets a man who becomes his friend. That man, it turns out, is what Americans call an illegal, though he has lived and worked more than thirty years in the United States. All the understanding Cantú learned at the border is put into practice now as he couples his sensitivity and sensibility with experience.

This gorgeous, thoughtful read is replete with references to poets and novelists, as well as to those who write history, philosophy, international affairs. Cantú took time and had the resources to assimilate his feelings about illegal border crossing—the indignity, the futility of it—and he is eloquent in his expression of it.

What I came away with, putting financially-motivated drug traffic aside, was that the movement of individuals is migration, something that is not going to stop because we disapprove. When things get bad enough, people move. Cantú’s title alludes to the water-like quality of the stream, and the possibilities for growth.

Flood. We, and the people of other great nations, should think about restructuring our attitudes to accept the reality of a world in crisis and how that affects us whether we want it to or not. We must look at ourselves and the world, ourselves in the world, to see what we need to do to keep ourselves from moral injury.

Following is an interview of Cantú conducted by author Elliot Ackerman at the Washington, D.C. bookstore, Politics & Prose. The 53-minute interview gave me a different impression of the man: Cantú paradoxically seems younger in person than he does in the book.





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Winter by Ali Smith (Seasonal #2)

Hardcover, 336 pgs, Pub Jan 9th 2018 by Pantheon Books (first published November 2nd 2017), ISBN13: 9781101870754, Series: Seasonal #2


Ali Smith wrote this book fast, and I think that is how she intends us to read it, at least at first. We slow down when her images and meanings start to coalesce on the page and we suspect there is much more to this than the twitter-like, depthless sentences that don’t seem like they are adding up to anything. Afterwards, an image emerges. What is more suited to tweeting than a Canada warbler?

The story, as such, is that a young man breaks up with his girlfriend Charlotte right before a Christmas he’d wanted to bring her to his mum’s house to introduce her to his mother. He finds a substitute girl, who happens to be waiting at a bus stop, rather than go through the humiliation of saying he no longer had a girlfriend. He pays her—Lux she is called, though he’d never asked—to stay the three days of the holiday.

Art grew in the course of this book into a grander vision of himself. He writes about nature, the churn of seasons, in a blog he calls Art in Nature. Though he rarely writes anything political, he is thinking about making his work a little more political, like the “natural unity in seeming disunity” of snow and wind, “the give and take of water molecules,” and “the communal nature of the snowflake.” He, Art, is not dead at all, though he is being crushed by his ex-girlfriend Charlotte on Twitter.

Charlotte is pretty clear-eyed:

The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one…the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history…like plastic carrier bags…damaging to the environment for years and years after they’ve outgrown their use. Damage for generations.

Plastic carrier bags? This is where Smith shines, making her argument so clear and relatable and yet so absurd. She’s funny. She’s right and wrong at the same time, like most of us. Like Art. Smith draws environmental degradation, suggesting chemical (nuclear?) drift in the air can settle like snow, like ash, like slow poison on our lives. She compares the influx of refugees fleeing for their lives in the Mediterranean to exhausted holidaymakers using their friends’ recommendations on the ‘best places to stay.’

Many images float around this book, inviting us to make connections: Iris-eye, art-Art, stone with a hole in it-eye, stone with the weight and curvature of a breast-Mother Nature…once we begin, we start looking for these parallels everywhere. Lux— she had some kind of luxurious brain, a luxurious education studying what she wanted (like Shakespeare, violin, human nature), and the luxury of floating through the world unencumbered and unafraid.

Lux is an out-of-body experience, an angel who appears and disappears, a Canada warbler blown off course. Lux is grace. Lux brings the two sisters together and reminds them of their shared history, of love, of the importance of struggling to create bonds. Lux tries to convince Art to stay after the three-day Christmas holiday to talk, late at night, to his mother. At first he refuses, but when Lux says she will help, he looks forward to it.

Soph, Art’s mother, is not crazy but prescient, depressed, and old. The word Sophia in ancient Greek and early Christian times meant wisdom, and clever, able, intelligent. Iris, the sister from whom Soph was estranged, is not a religious do-gooder but is targeting critical needs to save what’s best of the human race. She is named for Iris, the Wind-Footed Messenger of the Gods. Her presence signifies hope.

Smith is also concerned with truth, and at some point Lux points to the notion that the truth of a thing may be confused with what we believe to be true. Is there objective truth? This question has been argued since time immemorial. It is back with a vengeance, and must be adjudicated daily, moment-by-moment within each of us.

Art in Nature continues to exhibit itself throughout the novel: a female British MP is barked at by the grandson of Winston Churchill, who is also an MP. He says it was meant as a friendly greeting, she accepts the non-apology. Smith interprets this incident as snow melting on one side of furrowed ground in slanted winter sun. It turns out the stuff Art writes in his blog material is invented. Lies, one could say, but close enough to real to sound remembered. This novel has a lot to do with art and politics and what the difference is between them.

Iris writes

& th diff dear Neph is more betwn artist and politician—endlss enemies coz they both knw THE HUMAN will alwys srface in art no mtter its politics, & THE HUMAN wll hv t be absent or repressed in mst politics no mtter its art x Ire

Ali Smith—and this is only the second novel of hers I have read—is a skilled interpreter of our lives. She is involved in the struggle with us, and has enough understanding to recognize #MeToo began with the Access Hollywood tape; the rest, on both sides of the Atlantic and around the globe, is fallout. She doesn’t want us to lose hope, but recognizes the route to betterment is long and arduous, which is why she occasionally blows a Canada warbler off course in the middle of winter to thrill us with what is possible.

I note Recorded Books and narrator Melody Grove won Audiofile Magazine's coveted Earphones Award for "conveying every nuance in the second movement of Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet." Sounds like it would be a wonderful experience, to listen to this marvelous book speaking of a very dark time in all our lives.



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Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship by Gregory Boyle

Hardcover, 224 pgs, Pub Nov 14th 2017 by Simon Schuster, ISBN13: 9781476726151

This book radiates such loving-kindness, one wishes everyone could share in the bounty. I had not heard of Boyle’s 2009 No. 1 bestseller, called Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, before I heard Krista Tippett interview Father Boyle for her podcast On Being. This second book is a series of true stories about the gang members, former convicts, drug dealers and addicts Father Boyle knows from his ministry, Homeboy Industries, in Los Angeles. Each anecdote carries with it a reminder of the burdens people carry, a prod to do better in our lives, and something small (or big) to meditate on.

A highlight of this book are Boyle’s pointing to and holding up some of the homies’ mangling of common phrases—phrases so ordinary to many of us that we rush by them, never stopping to think them through carefully. By misunderstanding phrases only heard and never read, the homies sometimes hit upon a better, deeper meaning that speaks to their experiences, e.g., “I’m at a pitchfork in my life.”

Father Boyle is following the teaching of the Dalai Lama, Pope Francis, Dorothy Day, Mother Theresa, and every other effective practitioner of faith and loving-kindness on earth by going with the exhortation to “Stay Close to the Poor.” He discusses this in his usual discursive style near the end of this book, asking

“Is God inclusive or exclusive?…In the end, though, the measure of our compassion with what Martin Luther King calls ‘the last, the least, and the lost’ lies less in our service to those on the margins, and more in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.”

Radical kinship. If you’ve ever experienced a blast of radical kinship—an openhearted, limitless generosity—you will know it is transformative. And that is where Father Boyle is going.

There are no bad people, only bad actions. We’re all in a stage of becoming. We all are equally able to find grace and create the kind of environment we seek, if given a place to rest and to experience love without expectation of return.

“We are charged not with obliterating our diversity and difference but instead with heightening our connection to each other.”

This is his answer to reconciling diversity and connectedness. It is often thought that the more diverse we are, the less we have in common, the less we can come together over shared goals. This book tells a different story.

Father Boyle’s book about gang members in L.A. finding a place of peace to gather their thoughts together is the antidote to a political world in which power and money are operative goals. We’d all like a little more power, to live as we like without anybody else’s say so, but sometimes the lack of power is the key to humility, and thus to a wide and deep world of loving-kindness. But as Boyle tells Terry Gross in a Fresh Air interview: “Prayer is not going to fix our healthcare system. Stop it. Don’t think that. You actually have to do something about guns, you can’t just pray.”

This is powerful stuff, folks, and will be my gift to family and friends at this year-end. When you get your own copy, look carefully at the author photo on the inside back jacket. Have you ever seen a group of people more radiant in your lives?

The Nov 13, 2017 Fresh Air interview, Terry Gross speaking with Father Greg Boyle (36 minutes):




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The Secret Life: Three True Stories of the Digital Age by Andrew O'Hagan

Hardcover, Pub Oct 10th 2017 by Farrar Straus and Giroux ISBN13: 9780374277918, Lit Awards: Longlisted for 2017 Gordon Burn Prize

Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan is a difficult man to dismiss. Here he tells three stories based around computers and two strange Australians and makes something weird and wild and kind of spectacular. The first story, "Ghosting," regards the time he was asked to interview for the opportunity to possibly ghostwrite Julian Assange's biography. O'Hagan is distant, observant, and precise, early on telling us

"It was interesting to see how he parried with some notion of himself as a public figure, as a rock star, really, when all the activists I've ever known tend to see themselves as marginal and possibly eccentric figures. Assange referred a number of times to the fact that people were in love with him, but I couldn't see the coolness, the charisma he took for granted."

Assange comes across as a paranoid narcissist, deeply confused about his role and his life, about what he does and how he wants to be remembered. O'Hagan put the time in, listening and writing, and comes away burned.

The second story, "The Invention of Ronald Pinn," feels dangerous. O'Hagan takes on the identity of a young lad who'd died young, Ronnie Pinn, so that he, O'Hagan, could enter the Deep Web and see how it operated. O'Hagan's invented Pinn

"tended toward certain enterprises of his own volition...[including] with secretive experts about drugs and false documents and guns...The 'people' now moderating the Dark Web don't care about the old codes of citizenship and they don't recognize the laws of society. They don't believe that governments or currencies or historical narratives are automatically legitimate, or event that the personalities who appear to run the world are who they say they are. The average hacker believes most executives to be functionaries of a machine they can't understand."

When O'Hagan finally gives up the online ruse, he finds Pinn lingers longer in cyberspace, and in his psyche, than he'd anticipated.

The final essay, "The Satoshi Affair," was originally published in LRB a year or so ago. It is a very long, totally immersive essay about the possible originators of Bitcoin, and what the currency will mean for revolutionizing business and banking. If you haven't read much about the subject, this is a good place to start. Don't worry if some of it slips by without your understanding. I have a feeling we're all going feel that way for quite awhile.

O'Hagan is special. You won't be wasting your time, reading about his fascinating digital interface with the world.





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Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, Edited by Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman

Paperback, 448 pages, Pub May 30th 2017 by Harper Perennial ISBN13: 9780062431783

These collected essays about the writers’ separate experiences in the occupied territories of Israel/Palestine have a kind of cumulative bludgeoning effect. The reader passes through stages of rage and resistance to the kind of stupefaction one encounters in a bombing war. Why on earth would anyone do such things? They’ve been led to it slowly, gradually, until the ‘enemy’ is ‘other’ and normal human rights rules do not apply.

In a very short introduction, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman admit they’d not paid attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for many years because it was such a dispiriting subject. But in 2014 Waldman attended a conference organized by Breaking the Silence, a nonprofit organization composed of former Israeli soldiers who had worked in the occupied territories and who opposed Israel policies there as a result.

When Waldman related to Chabon what she had learned and seen during and after the conference in 2014,

“…we both began to realize that storytelling itself—bearing witness, in vivid and clear language, to things personally seen and incidents encountered—has the power to engage the attention of people who, like us, have long since given up paying attention, or have simply given up.”

The stories are absorbing and diverse and really give us an idea what life has been like, and is like now, for Palestinians. An international cast of writers, Geraldine Brooks, Colm Tóibín, Madeleine Thien, Dave Eggers, Anita Desai, among many others, have each looked, thought, and written their experience. It is exhilarating, infuriating, surprising, and meaningful. We learn new things. We see what they have seen. Injustices are recognized, spoken, acknowledged. And the writing, well, it is everything we anticipated.

Reading this book all at once puts pressure on one’s peace of mind. Read it in pieces if you like, one or two by authors you admire, or by authors you’d never heard of. Just read a couple to get a sense of the crisis again, to see how it has evolved. Just bear witness a little while. This is something happening right now, as we sit down to a plentiful dinner in a comfortable chair. Just a moment to recognize that this is something we can actually do something about. This isn’t a natural disaster. It is policy grown gnarly and twisted over years.

Mario Vargas Llosa has an essay in the collection and his view is long, and wide. “…I feel that the ever more colonialist bias of recent governments—I am referring to the governments of Sharon and Netanyahu—may be terribly prejudicial to Israeli democracy and the future of their country.” He, like most of us in the U.S., love Israelis for being irrepressible, but we do not love what they have done in this case. They are losing their national identity, not enhancing it.

My two three favorite essays in the bunch are written by Michael Chabon, Rachel Kushner, and Helon Habila. In “Giant in a Cage,” Chabon visits with a Palestinian businessman who set up some mini-malls anchored by a grocery store in Ramallah. There is something Chabon did that made me feel like I was sitting in that car that was forced to go the long way around an arbitrary checkpoint: he left the uncomfortable silences in his story. His host stopped speaking for a time after encountering the soldiers manning the checkpoint.

“The soldier roused himself from his torpor long enough to shrug one shoulder elaborately and give Sam Bahour a look in which were mingled contempt, incredulity, and suspicion about the state of San’s sanity. It appeared to have been the stupidest, most pointless, least answerable question anyone had ever asked the soldier…[he] had no idea why he had been ordered to come stand with his gun and his somnolent young comrade at this particular fork in the road on this particular afternoon, and if he did, the last person with whom he would have shared this explanation was Sam…”

Encountering the young soldiers completely derailed Sam Bahour and Chabon’s plans, apparently so common an occurrence that another incident of it just added to the indignities and humiliations suffered daily by Palestinians, even Palestinians who have gained some stature in the community. But look also what the circumstance has done to the Israeli soldiers. They are stupid with boredom at their post, and have learned to treat Palestinians as lesser beings. They are likewise suppressing their natural human dignity and are trashing the social contract humans have with one another. This isn't war, remember, or so they've told us.

Occasionally when reading these pieces, one gets a glimpse of what the policies surrounding the illegal occupation are doing to the children, our future. Rachel Kushner’s story, “Mr. Nice Guy,” centered on her visit to the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem. Her description of the high-rise buildings there evoke an involuntary embarrassed laugh, they sound so…unsound. The young boy following her around as she looks up at the structure says, “This building is stupidly built. It’s junk.” He and his family live there. See what I mean about infuriating?

And Habila's "The Separation Wall" gives us a honest man's incredulity. Just read it.

Each story gives a different aspect of living in the occupied territories that you’d never thought of. Read one or two three just to get a sense. A brief Interview with the editors Chabon and Waldman gives a sense of what they intended by writing this book.



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Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner

Paperback, 272 pages Pub March 29th 2016 by Text Publishing Company ISBN13: 9781925355369

There is something old fashioned about Helen Garner’s essays. We are therefore surprised to see a reference to Amy Winehouse makeup, Obama, or the brutality of Russell Crowe films. It could be her work seems old fashioned because it is so exquisitely shaped: who would have picked out that particular incident or phrase out of all the incidents and phrases one experiences in a lifetime and held it up, gemlike, for us to admire? This restraint, clarity, exactitude is so rare in a world where everyone writes for a world audience every day.

Helen Garner may be a household name in her native Australia. I’d never heard of her until I came across a reference to her on Goodreads recently. She is an Australian novelist, essayist, journalist…let’s call her master wordsmith. Her essays jump into your life with two feet and settle in forever, never to be forgotten. Her voice is woman writ large. I adore her sense of entitlement to her own opinions, now she is in her seventies. If only Australia didn't keep its best to itself.

This collection of essays was published last year by Text Publishing of Melbourne, Australia. I wonder how that works nowadays, that a book published in Australia is sold in the United States. In any case, I am very grateful it is possible to have read these brave, crazy, funny, deeply interesting and beautifully written pieces on growing up in fifties and sixties Australia, writing for a living, marrying badly, being a grandmother to a boy who can calm down and relax when he can slip into his cowboy outfit after the stress of a vacation away.

These essays were all written in the last twenty years or so, but some look back: “In the late 1970’s I lived in Paris for awhile…” and “When I was in my forties I went on holiday to Vanuatu…” It is certain that we get the best of all possible worlds because these stories are the ones that float to the surface after a lifetime of writing, and because of that lifetime of writing the words are crafted with economy for clarity and meaning. Each idea is distilled so dramatically that we are mainlining experience—a short sharp shock of memory and what it meant in the context of a life.

Her curiosity inflames us. Garner has harbored a fascination with crime, not with psychopaths, but with ordinary folk under extraordinary pressure. Her essays and stories can be dark, but she is so intimate with her thinking, we get distracted into self-examination. She captures something that we, had we been careful, thoughtful, and honest, might recognize as the lesser side of being human: a kind of despair, confusion, uncertainty, and a search for quiet, clarity, stability, and love. She looks at our crisis moments and wonders, what caused this?

Garner looks for telling moments in her own life, and listens to what those moments tell her about herself, which she then conveys to us, making us laugh, sign, commiserate. She is tough on herself, and sometimes on others: one of her early essays tells of her long friendship with the Australian author Tim Winton. The younger man got more attention with his writing than she did, so she could sometimes rough him up a little for payback.

And Garner herself admits to being “scorched” by the journalist Janet Malcolm who apparently reviewed The First Stone: Some Questions of Sex and Power in The New Yorker (I can’t find that review, alas!). Malcolm was always Garner’s role model, the one “who has influenced and taught me more than any other.” Garner tells us of Malcolm’s phrase, “the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience,” which describes perfectly what I feel when I read Garner’s essays.

New Yorker staff writer James Wood reviewed this collection of essays last year. If I had seen it then, I would have known of Garner a year earlier. Somehow that seems important. This collection I would love to have on my shelf to dip into again and again to see how she did that sense of immediacy and intimacy and personality.



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A Hope More Powerful Than The Sea by Melissa Fleming

Hardcover, 288 pages Pub January 24th 2017 by Flatiron Books Orig Title A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival ISBN13: 9781250105998

Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with horror and disbelief. Of a boat holding 500 people, eleven survived.

Even before the cruelty of rival smugglers (I only assume that’s who they were), Doaa’s life was filled with harsh treatment and a constant threat of kidnapping or physical abuse at the hands of strangers. Forced to leave Syria as a seventeen-year-old when government forces started targeting rebellious youth in her hometown of Daraa and outright killing townspeople and dumping their bodies, Doaa was sympathetic to the rebellion. The rebellion, however, was diffuse and never allowed to develop widely before government forces came down hard.

The Al Zamel family fled through Jordan to Egypt, where they were welcomed at first by the the local populace and by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were distributing food and blankets under the protection of the Morsi government. This Egypt piece of Doaa’s journey I didn’t want to skim over: I had so many questions about why young men were constantly asking for the girls hands in marriage, unless this was meant as a jibe, a joke, or a kind of harassment. Did Egyptians perceive Syrians as wealthier, more educated, or more sophisticated? If so, why? Why did I get the impression that Doaa looked down on the Egyptian locals? Was it just a cultural distance?

When a another young Syrian expatriate, Bessem, decided upon seeing Doaa that he wanted to marry her, I started feeling that distance one does when viewing another country’s cultural norms. This is so far from acceptable in the United States, despite Bessem’s friendliness and gift-giving to the family, that I was uncomfortable with the inevitability of it all. I understand the family was under duress. That is really the only condition under which such a decision to marry that man could be acceptable. Sure enough, shortly after agitating constantly and finally getting his way, Bessem, then insisted the two of them depart Egypt for either Syria or Europe.

Doaa was emotionally coerced into accepting the decision to move, and I resent this, even from my distance of several years and many miles. That she later recalled this man as the great love of her life shows us how circumstances change perceptions. I resent that change in her emotional landscape, and can’t help but see it as a kind of dishonesty. However, placed next to all the other things in her experience, a kind of fake love is surely least awful. She had a horrific experience getting to Europe, and deserves all the support she can get. Or handle, really. When many countries combine their attention, it can be another kind of overwhelming horror.

Doaa’s story reminds us how fragile is our careful calm construction of a life, and how easily it can be disrupted through no fault of our own. I recognize Doaa’s insistence that her destination be Sweden, despite Greece offering her a stipend and citizenship. Sweden was the original goal, and the confusion she, all alone, must have felt when all her constraints suddenly fell away must have been monumental. Now that she has many choices, instead of one uncertain one, which should she choose? Fleming’s retelling of Doaa’s options allows us to feel those uncertainties along with her.

During all Doaa went through, she must have asked herself repeatedly if in fact she and Bessem really had “no choice” but to attempt a migrant illegal crossing. As sorry as I am for what their situation was in Egypt, I would have to conclude that in fact, it was their hope for a better, more prosperous existence with more opportunity that led them to attempt the crossing, not once but three times.

They had a choice. After all, their parents and family stayed in Egypt. I understand conditions were bad in Egypt. I understand they had limited understanding of what went on outside their circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. But I am not sure they have the right to attempt to move to another country just because they want what that country offers its citizens.

What reasonable people must ask themselves is how they can help communities torn apart by war or natural disaster. This kind of migration is humanity’s problem. It doesn’t have to be as deadly as it is at the moment. There may be solutions that address the root issues and do not require the kind of dangerous, deadly journey that Doaa passed through. In some ways her story tells of a kind of grim lottery. If one makes it through the gantlet of death, all kinds of benefits are bestowed upon one.

That viewpoint, however, doesn’t take into account Doaa’s personal bravery to engage the world in this critical conversation about the best way to pursue one’s dreams. I’m quite sure she would rather have not gone through that horror, but sometimes we have…no choice.

Doaa's story was translated twice, from Arabic to Greek and from Greek to English, before it became this book. This fact lends a little distance to the narrative that one must overcome to get at the real experience of this woman and millions like her. The really difficult task of organizing the material fell to Melissa Fleming, and of asking questions that readers like us wanted to know.

I was especially grateful for her including things someone speaking of their own experience may not have included, e.g., what was the composition of the migrants on the boat, their ages and country of origin, who were the ones who rammed the boat (we never learned who they were, but their manner and words were included), the manner the ship went down, and all her time in Egypt, information which was supplemented by interviews with Doaa's mother and sisters. Doaa probably couldn't have done that on her own so soon after her ordeal.



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The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger

Hardcover, 400 pgs Pub July 11th 2017 by Simon Schuster ISBN13: 9781501121364

Eisinger explores “Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives” in this book that introduces us to the heyday of criminal prosecutions for white collar crime to its nadir today.

“The Department of Justice is a loose federation of ninety-four offices around the country, each a realm unto itself, run by a U.S. attorney who is almost untouchable by headquarters in faraway Washington, D.C…The [SEC] has civil powers and must team up with various offices of the Department of Justice when a securities law violation turns into a criminal investigation….Of all of these offices, the Southern District of New York, located at the bottom tip of Manhattan, has the smartest and ablest prosecutors in the land. Any alum of the office will be happy to verify that.”

Eisinger’s detailed introduction to the men and women of the Southern District of New York begins with the Enron investigation, and later he tantalizes us with early peeks at the careers of Comey, Chertoff, Holder, Ruemeller, Weissmann, Breuer. There were plenty of folks who tried going after the big guns, Paul Pelletier, Jim Kidney, and Jed Rakoff for a few. There is a reason these last three men’s names are not as well known as the others. It’s not because they were less able. It’s because they dared to challenge powerful forces in business and government. They didn’t lose so much as get sidelined and discredited. They weren’t part of the cabal using the revolving door from government to business and back.

The title of this book comes from a statement James Comey made in an early speech to lawyers in the Southern District when he was appointed head by George W. Bush in 2002. He exhorted the prosecutors to bring cases whether or not they felt they could win. “If it’s a good case and the evidence supports it, you must bring it,” he said, otherwise you would be a member of the chickenshit club, cowering before powerful forces arrayed to stop your investigations.

What Eisinger tells us later is that many prosecutors working during the financial crisis of 2007-08 never even looked for evidence of wrong-doing. Lips and teeth, I think to myself. The chief financiers responsible for the toxic asset meltdown and the chief prosecutors responsible for bringing them to justice are like lips and teeth.

Seeing early glimpses of now-famous actors in our government drama is informative for what we didn’t know when we were reading laudatory newspaper articles about what they accomplished in the past. Eisinger has long shed his rose-colored glasses and is critical of how the Department of Justice leadership evolved into a group who was reluctant to bring cases, cases that had merit and enough evidence to expose and shame these organizations in public, even if the U.S. government never got a cent of ill-begotten gains back. The public might be able to handle some portion of the payback--witness the difficulties Bank of America experienced for years after its thievery, lies, and overextension became daily news.

Much is made of the headliners like Preet Bharara, former U.S. Attorney of the Southern District until fired by D.J. Trump this year, but Eisinger deconstructs his cases and finds him wanting as well, eager to go after the “easy” cases involving insider trading. Eisinger goes further, showing us how difficult and unsure major fraud cases against, say, the head of Goldman Sachs, but how necessary if the public is to have any faith in the fairness of the system.

“The Southern District [under Preet Bharara] did not bring criminal charges against big investment and commercial banks. The office did not take on the power structure of American finance. Bharara did not charge top executives at the biggest companies. After the biggest bubble and financial crisis in generations, bankers at the biggest institutions sold defective products, misrepresented them, played games with their own finances, and almost crashed the global financial system, save for a multitrillion-dollar taxpayer bailout, the most important prosecutorial office in the country took on hedge funds. It was a prosecutorial non sequitur.”

The Obama administration “engineered preventive measures to stave off similar future crises” or, in the words of Brooklyn Law School scholar K. Sabeel Raman, ‘prioritizes “good” government over “democratic" government.’ There would be no feeding the populist thirst for blood, but neither did we see justice.

In 2005 the Supreme Court took up mandatory sentencing in United States v. Booker, giving judges more latitude in sentencing, the result of which executives are more inclined to take their chances than to plead guilty or plea bargain. This appears to be a corollary to the notion that corporations can police themselves. What has become glaringly obvious in the past twenty years is that corporations serve themselves.

Eisinger, whether or not you agree with him, is a terrific read. He gives a level of granularity that many will not have heard in alcohol-fueled late-night back-slapping sessions. It is useful for proponents of his tough-on-crime stance to see how we got to this point where it can appear corrupt business has government regulators over a barrel. And it can be useful for opponents of this view to see what is getting the public mad as hell.



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Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Hardcover, 400 pages Expected publication: June 13th 2017 by Viking ISBN13: 9781101980965

Many publishers claim “explosive new content” for their nonfiction but in this case it is not hyperbole. This political history of the Radical Right is a worthy companion to Jane Mayer’s Dark Money. It reveals what Mayer did not: what on earth were the Radical Rich thinking?

This is the book we’ve been waiting for—a book which explains the philosophical underpinnings of the Radical Right and the scope and direction of their plan for political and economic control. For years I have struggled to understand how they could imagine a small group of people should be more privileged than the majority, but now I get it. The Radical Right has divided human beings into makers and takers, “makers” being those who own the means of production (and pay taxes) and “takers” being those who do not. For some reason I still don’t understand, they have concluded that the superrich fit the first category and the bulk of the economy’s workers fit the second. Which, as we all know, with regard to taxes at least, is a logical fallacy in today’s America.

Though sometimes it may appear the Radical Right are inarticulate because they never seem to explain what they are aiming at, they apparently wanted to keep their philosophy and intent quiet, to work in secrecy. This is because most people in our democracy would oppose their thinking. The Radical Rich freely acknowledge this. The Right believes that the majority in a democracy can coerce individuals to pay for things the minority do not want to pay for, like public schools, health care, welfare programs, jails, infrastructure. The Right believe they should be free to do as they choose, and services should be privatized. The market will take care of any climate change-related environmental controls that the majority might wish businesses to adopt. The Right’s view of an efficient business and political environment might look like the early 20th Century when oligarchs roamed the earth.

It sounds bizarre, I know. The Right knew we would react this way, which is why they have been unable to say what they were thinking straight out, but instead made common cause with the Republican Party, and the Religious Right, cannibalizing both and leading those two groups to their own demise. An important piece of their thinking is that only the national government has enough clout to stop them from dominance, which is why they are so insistent on weakening the central government and passing “power” to individual states, which would of course diffuse power.

Things are so much clearer to me now. When the Black Lives Matter movement said opposition to President Obama was about race, they were right. Opposition to Obama was ginned up by this group, who spread rumors and undermined his attempts to compromise by refusing cooperation. The genesis of the thinking in this far right group has its roots in slavery.

The roots of Radical Rich thinking goes back to John C. Calhoun, slave holder intent upon “preserving liberty” [of the elite], and keeping the demands of the many off his “property.” Up until the 1960’s, the majority of wealth in this country was in the South, leftover generational wealth from slave-holding days now invested in tobacco, cotton, energy products like oil and coal, etc... MacLean calls it “race-based hyper-exploitative regional political economy…one based first on chattel slavery and later on disenfranchised low-wage labor, racial segregation, and a starved public sector.”

It is fascinating to hear how Nancy MacLean, investigating a tangential issue to those she explores in this book, came upon the personal papers and writings of Nobel Prize winner James M. Buchanan (October 3, 1919 – January 9, 2013) at George Mason University in Virginia, which included private letters between Buchanan and Charles Koch. The letters illuminated the train of thought of both men, including their insistence that their thinking be kept secret lest people object to their belief that democracy would ruin capitalism and their right to rule. Eventually the two men diverged in thought and Koch sidelined Buchanan decisively.

At last I can understand why the Republicans would put forth a health care plan that actually harmed people. It bothered me that I didn’t understand, but I do now. I struggled to understand why this group of individuals, which include Mike 
Pence, Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Mitch McConnell, and a host of others, oppose government-subsidized affordable college education, corporate and personal taxes, environmental protections, and state-subsidized drug rehab programs. They actually believe the majority of the American people are stealing their wealth.

Of course there is room in the world for people with fundamentally different ideas about what man is. But there may not be enough room for these thoughts together in one nation. They can go off to live by themselves if they wish, on an island somewhere outside a country founded on the principle of “by the people for the people.” But, you know, without our willing slavery, they are just old men stashing meaningless bits of paper. They can’t even eat without our labor. They can’t live in all the houses they own. They can’t get where they are going without us. They can’t dress themselves without us. No, in order for them to win we must agree to be ruled by them, and we don’t.

You will want to preorder this book and read it immediately. I understand now why there was no buzz about this. Remember when Jane Mayer was asked in an interview¹ if she was afraid to criticize the secretive Koch brothers because they were so powerful? MacLean, I am quite sure, had to be extremely careful until this became public. The audio is excellent, read by Bernadette Dunn, produced by Penguin Audio. The audio file is about 11 hours, and it is completely enthralling. Now I can tell a conservative from someone indoctrinated by Koch. I can see the strategy.


¹Pamela Paul’s January 24, 2016 podcast for NYTimes Book Review



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Hostage by Guy Delisle

Hardcover, 436 pages Pub April 25th 2017 by Drawn & Quarterly (first published September 16th 2016) Orig Title S'enfuir. Récit d'un otage. ISBN13: 9781770462793

With this new book released in the U.S. in the spring of this year, French Canadian graphic artist and animator Guy Delisle takes a departure from his more usual graphic novels about his life as the spouse of a Médecins Sans Frontières physician to tell the story of a real innocent abroad, Christophe André, on his first assignment for MSF in Ingushetia, in the North Caucasus in 1997.

Christophe was taken hostage, driven across the border into Chechnya, and outside of Grozny he was held for ransom for three months. He had been in his post for three months when they came for him. He spent the bulk of his captivity chained to a radiator in a small room with a mattress stuffed with straw. He was fed watery soup and allowed bathroom breaks, but otherwise had no opportunity to speak, see the sky, move freely.

Ransom negotiations were slow: when he escaped, finally, the translator assigned to his office in Ingushetia told him other foreigners had been kidnapped in the time he was being held. The 400+ pages of this book are not a struggle; readers spend the time thinking about what they might do in similar circumstances, and interrogate themselves about the scene and their own strengths. André himself passed the more terrible stretches by recalling in great detail the military commanders, battles, and outcomes he had studied when he was younger, including Russian, French, and American battles.

The escape at the end is harrowing, and stomach-dropping. André simply did not know whom to trust. Eventually he made it back to his home in Paris, and six months after that went back to MSF and asked for a new assignment. He worked twenty years for MSF after that experience.

Here is a Public Radio International The World radio interview with the artist Delisle about this new book, Hostage, the kind of story that lingers in one's memory:




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Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A short audio clip of the narration is given below:




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Ratf**ked by David Daley

Hardcover, First Edition (U.S.), 288 pages Pub June 6th 2016 by Liveright Publishing Corporation/W. W. Norton & Company ISBN13: 9781631491627

This book infuriated me but also lowered the decibel level of my political retorts. I can clearly see now the utter cynicism with which Republican strategists set about grabbing as many seats as they could with the intent to hold onto them for a decade or more by controlling the redistricting process. “When you have power you exercise it.” The gerrymander is the reason Blue states can appear to vote Red. What is so pitiful is that we can still hear voters talking about what they believe like it actually makes any difference to the operatives in Congress.

It is difficult to keep the partisanship out of discussions of politics, but I am going to try because the issue discussed in this book, gerrymandering, was/is really practiced by Democrats as well as Republicans. The Republicans, under the leadership of a legendary Republican campaign strategist called Lee Atwater, recognized in the 1980s that controlling the right to draw the lines of voting districts could mean greater Republican representation in local, state, and national races.

They began a strategy which would not see results for thirty years. This decade it has come to fruition. Several states are laboring under gerrymanders so severely skewed to the Republicans that although Democrats win a majority of the votes, their representation actually falls. This book gives some of the background, especially for those states we watch closely in the national elections: Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania.

An international non-profit which specializes in vote monitoring around the world turned its analytic eye on the United States, the “greatest democracy in the world” according to some, and discovered that North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had electoral representation more skewed to favor one party than many third-world countries.

Wisconsin, the state that brings you Speaker Ryan, has greater than 50% Democratic votes but has 60+% Republican seats. Wisconsin’s redistricting is currently handled by their Republican legislature, which allowed the national Republican party, with funds provided by Koch Brothers, to draw their redistricting maps. In closed sessions, deep secrecy, late night and storm days they would gather to prevent transparency of their process and to ensure Republican voters were the largest voting block in most districts. Even in a largely Democratic state, they managed to break, stack, crack, pack the districts with enough Republican voters to grab Congressional and state seats, and the governorship. Wisconsin used to be a Deep Blue state.

In November 2016 a federal court ordered that the voting districts in Wisconsin be redrawn by November 2017. Wisconsin Republicans (including Paul Ryan) refused, and appealed the decision to the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). Meanwhile, voters in Wisconsin are seriously disenfranchised. This is happening now, folks, and can be watched as it progresses through the courts.

Pennsylvania is the third most voter-obstructed state. Last year a youth pastor, Carol Kuniholm, noticed extraordinary discrepancies between the schools in some city districts and suburban schools and discovered one of the main reasons was underrepresentation due to gerrymandering. Kuniholm began a movement in PA which has taken on enormous momentum within the state and is garnering national recognition. You can watch progress of her attempt to introduce a bill to require an independent nonpartisan committee to decide contiguous, compact districts that do not break communities, cities, or racial blocks at fairdistrictspa.com. She wants nothing less than the democratic process to work as intended.

Daley shows that state legislature-managed redistricting can be severely partisan and that citizens in some states have managed to pass referendums requiring a nonpartisan independent committee to manage redistricting. The independent committee works well in Iowa but is still subject to vicious partisan wrangling in Arizona. Some academics have taken on the challenge of trying to envision a better, more democratic process and Daley discusses these at the end of his book.

And this is the part of the book that I liked best of all. At the end Daley points out that gerrymandering has been ‘stealing people’s votes’ for centuries and it may have come up against its logical limits this decade. Because of the advances in computer modeling, coupled with voter awareness and rage at the government we have been handed, it may be possible to do something completely different. He points out that if Hillary had won the electoral college vote, she would have faced the same intransigence in Congress that stymied Obama. Instead, we got Trump. Daley quotes a Republican operative, Grover Norquist, talking with utter cynicism to a Conservative Political Action conference in 2012:

”We are not auditioning for a fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We just need a president to sign this stuff. Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.”

The GOP will keep Trump around as long as he can sign stuff and listens to what they say. So, okay. This is what we are dealing with. It means we need to pay attention, focus our energy, rely on each other, and tell our legislators we want fairness and representation. This book is a very easy read because it is so eye-opening. It gives you the basics, suggests a fix, and points a direction. What more do we need?



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Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

Hardcover, 228 pages Pub January 17th 2017 by St Martin's Press ISBN13: 9781250135995

I never took the time to read or listen to Michael Eric Dyson before. He became an ordained Baptist minister at nineteen, so for very nearly forty years now he’s been using words to educate and persuade. He’s very good at it. He teaches now at Georgetown University, but he has taught at many major universities around the country. He doesn’t sound like an academic; his language is salty, strong. It appears that in addition to teaching, he consults for MSNBC, has a podcast, lectures at other universities, and has been publishing lectures and books for at least ten years.

White people may not see race because they were the dominant race & their view became normalized. This is not news. White culture was the norm. We didn’t feel the need to think or talk about race. Now we do. Dyson obliges by telling us what it is like growing up in America as a black man. He assures us neither he nor his black family are more exceptional than any other black family: “it can happen to any of us; it can happen to all of us.”

Dyson explains that a sermon was the only way he could get across the information he wants to convey in this book. The sermon is not scholarly, but in vernacular. It is filled with anecdote either he or members of his family experienced. He clearly feels white folk have some things about their behaviors or their compassion to consider in the context of God, goodness, and fairness. He has a tendency to insist on superlatives and opinion (e.g., Beyoncé & MLKing are the best…ever) when his opinions on gradations of excellence don't matter. But the bigger issues he addresses are really critical to our understanding of race and the functioning of our democracy.

“Whiteness has privilege and power connected to it, no matter how poor you are.” Dyson explicitly addresses the objections some white ethnics may have about their experience with discrimination being similar to those of blacks. It is not so, he says, gives many examples of how it is not so. I agree with him that white people are not going to have as hard a time of it as people of color. It has nothing to do with culture. If we do not see this yet, we need to pay more attention.

In 1995 O.J. Simpson was acquitted when he was tried for murder. Many white folk didn’t understand why some black people were pleased that Simpson got off, given that he was clearly guilty. But that trial came a year or so after the trial of the police acquitted after the beating of Rodney King. Dyson takes a stab at explaining the thinking on both sides of the color line at that time. All this was twenty years ago and Dyson argues that white ignorance and police brutality is still happening. He is full of righteous anger when he says whiteness is a privilege and a shield…and an addiction. Sure it is.

Dyson is blunt, and he doesn’t let up after this point. All he things he has seen that need attention are laid on the table. There is more than enough here to make anyone feel full…even overwhelmed. But he has some stake in making us understand the urgency here: it is his kids and grandkids that are in danger every day. He talks at length about the terror black people feel when police become involved. This is an important discussion for white folks to internalize.

Discussion around criminality takes up most of the final third of this work. Dyson does not try to avoid difficult questions about policing, black-on-black crime, and incarceration. He wants this conversation and will provoke many listeners and readers to face their fear and their anger. Dyson asks why social engineers blast black communities for growing the seeds of their own destruction, when the same questions were not asked when crime was a problem when ghettos were filled with Irish, Italians, or Jews. This is worthwhile.

Here is a link to 45-minute WBUR Boston radio show where Michael Eric Dyson discusses the subjects in his book, but adds a few more topics, expanding his themes in response to an interviewer’s questions. Interesting.

I listened to the audio production of this, read by the author and produced by Macmillan Audio. Dyson talks fast, but clearly, and firmly. One can’t mistake what he is saying: white America needs to study and imagine what it is like to be black if we want to begin to understand, begin to heal the racial divide. We may not like all the things Dyson says and yet we can still agree with him about the “plague of white innocence.” No more saying we didn’t know. He's telling it. It feels urgent.

Below find a short audio clip of the book:




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