Last night I turned on MSNBC, delighted to see her again. There she was, sharp as a tack, with her ready smile, rich contralto, and unmistakable Chica Last night I turned on MSNBC, delighted to see her again. There she was, sharp as a tack, with her ready smile, rich contralto, and unmistakable Chicago accent, wearing a stylish scales-of-justice pin, and summing up Barr’s firing of Geoffrey Berman so succinctly that all the other legal analysts were reduced to ancillary commentary. And—yes, I know it sounds sexist, and probably ageist too, but … she’s the prettiest 77-year-old lawyer I’ve ever seen.
Okay, I’m biased. But I’m also someone who prides himself on writing objective reviews, and I can unequivocally recommend Jill Wine-Banks Watergate Girl as an enjoyable and informative look, not only at the inside of the Watergate prosecution, but also at what it was like to be that rare thing, an attractive and successful “mini-skirted lawyer,” in the sexist world of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Wine-Banks is not a great writer, but she is a very good one, able to paint a vivid scene and write clearly and concisely. She is particularly good at brief comparison / contrasts, and using them to illuminate issues that matter to her. For example, if you wish to get a good idea of what she thought of the people and personalities of Watergate affair, read the following set pieces: McGruder/Dean, Cox/Jaworski, and—most revealing of all—Rosemary Woods/Jill Wine-Banks. Wine-Banks is perceptive enough to see Woods—whom she grilled fiercely about the Watergate tapes—as an ambitious woman, much like herself, but of an earlier age, when becoming the secretary to an important political figure would have been the height of what a woman could achieve.
Those who seek a comprehensive treatment of the Watergate affair will not find it here, though they will learn quite a lot about the subject. This is a memoir, after all, and covers not only her Watergate experiences, but her childhood, her disastrous first marriage, her first great affair, her happy second marriage (to an old high-school flame), and the highlights of her professional career, including assistant Watergate prosecutor, private litigator, first female General Counsel to the U.S. Army, first female National Director of the American Bar association, and vice president at Motorola and Maytag. Throughout, Wine-Banks concentrates on important facts and vivid anecdotes, and has produced a book that is short, interesting and to the point.
One of the best things about this book is that Wine-Banks catalogs many of the sexist challenges and petty humiliations that came with the “lady-lawyer” territory throughout her career. There are at least three memorable anecdotes concerning Watergate, but the one I prefer to share here happened after Wine-Banks had been appointed General Counsel to the Army. She was not aware of how traditional Army social occasions could be, so traditional they even adhered to long-abandoned Victorian customs:
[After] a dinner for top Pentagon officials and their spouses at the beautiful home of General Rogers and his wife Ann … I walked into the living room with another guest, General Max Thurman, who years later would go on to lead the US invasion of Panama …. We were in middle of a lively conversation when I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Ann Rogers. “We’re in there,” she whispered, pointing to another room where the wives had gathered. No one had warned me that cigars and cognac in the living room were for men only. I looked at General Thurman and spoke firmly. “If you get in trouble, I said, “I’ll talk to someone else, or stand in the corner, but I’m not leaving.”
General Thurman smiled as he signaled the server and gave a command: “Bring this woman a cognac and a cigar!”
This graphic memoir by George Takei—who was imprisoned, along with his family, in the U.S.’s World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans—i This graphic memoir by George Takei—who was imprisoned, along with his family, in the U.S.’s World War II concentration camps for Japanese Americans—is timely, moving, remarkably objective, and historically necessary.
It is timely because, once again, we have concentration camps in America. Children, snatched from the arms of their mothers, are confined in large wired enclosures as demeaning as cages. Their crime? They dared to cross the border into what was once considered to be the Land of Freedom, in a desperate attempt to escape hunger, poverty, gang violence, and sexual exploitation. It is true that Takei and his family were the victims of yet a crueler irony: they were American citizens. Yet the callous brutality of what is essentially a white man’s government toward people who are different from themselves makes these two situations much the same.
This memoir is particularly moving because it is viewed primarily through the eyes of the children, the most undeniably innocent of all victims, and often the most oblivious. We see them playing contentedly through the railroad journey the camps, unaware—until years later—of the humiliation their parents suffered and the challenges they faced. The pain of the adults becomes more poignant in isolation, and the distance it causes between children and parents compounds the crime.
It is also remarkably objective, taking care to show the occasional non-Asian American who acted with compassion and courage, from the anonymous man who regularly delivered carloads of books to the internment camps to lawyer Wayne Collins who led the fight against deportation during the “renunciation crisis.” It also shows its objectivity—as well as a little irony too—in its account of how many Japanese—including Takei’s father—worked to organize the detainees into a mutually helpful community, organized democratically in a quintessentially American way.
We all owe our thanks to George Takei because, above all other things, this memoir is historically necessary. For it is only by seeing the evil our nation has caused in the past that we are able to recognize the evil happening now and do what we can to stop it. ...more
Fun Home isn’t your average graphic autobiography. As a matter of fact, Fun Home isn’t your average anything. Perhaps that is one reason why it was a Fun Home isn’t your average graphic autobiography. As a matter of fact, Fun Home isn’t your average anything. Perhaps that is one reason why it was a finalist for “The National Book Critics Circle Award,” and the winner of “The Stonewall Book Award” for non-fiction, in 2006. Perhaps it is also why it became a Broadway musical too, winning five Tony Awards in 20015. Yet its great success is somehow baffling, just because it’s so … well, just because it’s “odd.”
Sure, you can make it sound normal if you phrase it right. A young girl gradually awakens to her lesbian sexuality, but continues to be haunted by the ghost of her father, the director of a funeral home (the “fun home” of the title), whom she learns was himself bisexual, and whom she suspects of having taken his own life. Before his death, father and daughter reach some sens of each other’s sexuality, but the hint of what could have blossomed into a growing intimacy is cut off—alas!—when father is killed by a truck in the highway.
Sounds pretty normal, right? But the two of them are each eccentric, chilly people, demarcated by their preoccupations—he with home restoration, interior decorating and gardening, she with journalling and a bizarre fixation on numbers—and their great mutual passion: a love for great literature.
Perhaps it is literature itself that makes this graphic “novel” rise from its particular oddness into universality. First of all, Alison Bechdel, unlike many graphic novelists, writes with an exquisite and precise sense of language, and the great writers—Joyce, Fitzgerald, Proust, Wilde, Camus—are never far from her narrative. Not only do the stories they tell offer psychological insights, but their techniques—like the “tricky reverse narration” Bechdel mentions at the end of her tale—give the author useful ways to organize and inform her tale.
These great books give Fun Home unusual resonance and warmth, and that resonance never seems unmerited, never hijacked or misappropriated. In much the same way that Alison and her father both transcend their oddness through literature, Fun Home transcends its oddness through literature too....more
If you are drawn to the colorful personalities of the Roaring Twenties and the Hungry Thirties, or if you have a particular interest in the history ofIf you are drawn to the colorful personalities of the Roaring Twenties and the Hungry Thirties, or if you have a particular interest in the history of sex-work in the U.S.A., then you will probably enjoy Polly Adler’s autobiography, A House is not a Home.
Polly Adler was one of New York City’s most notorious madams, not only in the prosperous heyday before the Wall Street crash, but for many years after. She was friendly with gangsters (“Dutch” Schultz, “Lucky” Luciano), and celebrities (Robert Benchley and the Algonquin crowd, Wallace Beery, Jack Dempsey), and catered to politicians (Mayor Jimmy Walker), the sons of Gotham’s best families, and the Wall Street elite. Polly’s business card (no name—just a picture of a parrot and a phone number) was well-known; “going to Polly’s”—if only for drinks or for breakfast—was (even for women) a fashionable thing to do.
Polly tells us of her early years in Russia, as the eldest of nine children. Although she wished to go to school—the rabbi tutored her a little—her father decided his children would be better off in America, so he began sending them, starting with Polly. She stayed with relatives in New York and began working in a corset factory; there she was raped by her boss, became pregnant, and had an abortion. The family she was living with turned their backs on her, and Polly was out on her own.
Her career as a madam began almost casually, when a bootlegger buddy proposed a deal to her: he would finance a nice apartment for her, provided she would reserve a room where he could bring his lover, a socially prominent married woman. Polly agreed, and sometime later, after the bootlegger’s romance went bust, he asked her to find him a new girl—for a finder’s fee. Before long, she had established her own “house.”
Polly tells us about her career, the good times and the bad, and there are plenty of interesting stories along the way, about the girls, the johns, the crooked cops, the Manhattan high-life and low-life. She also tells of her entanglement with the Seabury Investigation (1931) into municipal corruption, and her conviction five years later for running a disorderly house, which resulted in a 30-day sentence. From there, the account becomes sadder, and—frankly—somewhat less interesting. But Polly is a trooper to the last; she soldiers on.
I’ll end with a couple of passages that characterize my favorite part of the book—the Twenties.. First, a description of Polly’s “house” in “the fifties near Seventh Avenue”:
Most of the décor was period French—Louis Quinze and Louis Seize, which is sort of traditional for a house—and I acquired some really valuable antiques. Cabinets and tables, a Sevres dinner service and a Gobelin tapestry depicting Vulcan and Venus having a tender moment while Eros took over Vulcan’s smithy and forged a set of arrows. The bar was supposed to be Egyptian in style—King Tut’s tomb had been opened just the year before and there had been a lot of publicity about it—and there was also a Chinese room, as mah-jongg was all in vogue.
Here, an account of the typical conclusion of a fashionable night-on the town—in Harlem:
Or perhaps the boys tooled up to Harlem to one of the rent parties at which jazz musicians helped their friends collect the dough for the month’s nut. And maybe they kept on rolling until they landed in the hands of “money,” a little hunchback who was one of Harlme’s best-kown characters. Money really cleaned up steering white customers on what they called ‘slumming tours,” which usually ended up at a dive run by a girl called Sewing Machine Bertha. There they would be shown lewd pictures as a preview to the performance of the same tableaux by live actors, white and colored. Money also supplied reefers and cocaine and morphine so that the “upper classes” could have themselves a real low-down time.
Remember this old joke? “How boring is Al Gore? Al Gore is so boring that his Secret Service code name is ‘Al Gore’.” Well, Andrew McCabe is so boring Remember this old joke? “How boring is Al Gore? Al Gore is so boring that his Secret Service code name is ‘Al Gore’.” Well, Andrew McCabe is so boring that his code name requires a middle initial. Andrew McCabe’s code name must be “Andrew G. McCabe.”
Perhaps I’m not being fair. I learned valuable things from McCabe’s book, and enjoyed much of it too (particularly the parts about Mueller, Comey, and Trump). McCabe is a lucid, no-nonsense human being who writes lucid, no-nonsense prose, and his book has convinced me that he is also an essentially honest and reliable person, a man whom I am grateful fate or chance put in charge of one of our country’s vital institutions at a perilous and difficult time.
And yet . . .
Perhaps the most boring parts of this book are the parts that are supposed to be exciting. McCabe, who was on hand for some crucial counter-espionage moments—the interrogation of the “underwear bomber,” the pursuit of the Boston marathon bombers, “Operation Overt” (the aftermath of the attack in the London Underground), to name a few—likes to begin his accounts of such events with clipped, take-charge, declarative utterances, ludicrously laconic sentences that seem torn from the pages of a paperback spy thriller. Take this passage, for example: “I picked up the phone. The Director’s hair was on fire. I asked, ‘When do you need me in L.A.?’ He said, ‘Yesterday.’” (OK. I admit it. I wrote this passage myself. But you get the idea.)
The second most boring parts of the book can occasionally be his accounts of FBI procedure. McCabe is a by-the-book sort of guy, and sometimes he includes a bit more of that “book” than this desultory reader would have liked.
But not always. Sometimes he’s right on the money, like when he details the differences in the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) between an assessment, a preliminary investigation, and a full investigation, and specifies the “tools” available to an agent at each particular stage. (My understanding of the FBI’s conduct in both the Clinton Email and the Trump Russia investigations is now enriched by what McCabe has told me.)
Now that I’m on the subject of things McCabe does well, I must admit that his passion for procedure and thoroughness—all admirable qualities in an FBI agent if not always in a writer—lead him to reveal the kind of detail that is often valuable and enjoyable to a reader. For example, he speaks about the raid on the Denver residence of known Afghani terrorist Najibullah Zazi:
. . . agents opened the door to a bedroom closet and found a five-gallon Igloo cooler filled with white powder. Who keeps five gallons of white powder in a cooler on the floor of a bedroom closet? The team immediately though it might have found enough of the peroxide-based explosive TATP to take down the entire building. So, on an already full day, Denver had to cordon off the area, lock down the apartment complex, evacuate the building, and bring in bomb-recovery personnel. It turned out the bucket the agents had left in place contained . . . five gallons of flour.
Then there’s this passage when he speaks of the difficult aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing:
. . . the entire crime scene, the zone encompassing the scene of the attack on Boylston Street and the area around it, had been filled with spectators,, most of whom got away unscathed. Practically all of these people, when the bombs went off, dropped whatever they were carrying—backpacks, purses, briefcases, bags of groceries—and ran. So at a scene where bombs had likely gone off inside some sort of bag, the ground was covered with thousands of bags and backpacks, everyone of which had to be cleared by a bomb team before we could even begin the process of evidence recovery. And how would we keep track of everything?
Unfortunately, his command of detail deserts him when he defends himself against the findings of “lack of candor” issued in a report by the Inspector General. He declines to be specific about the circumstances—namely, that he authorized a leak to The Wall Street Journal in order to defend his own reputation and later deceived Comey about it—and instead speaks of how, during the interview with the IG staff, he was “disconnecting from questioning,” “wasn’t following their questions,” that his “mind was elsewhere.” (In McCabe’s defense, this interview was also the first time he encountered the notorious Strzok-Page texts, a public relations bombshell that must indeed have been distracting. Still, the “my mind was elsewhere” defense seems incommensurate with the circumstances, especially coming from a veteran counter-terrorism interviewer like himself.)
McCabe, however, is effective in recreating his meetings with President Trump. During Michael Cohen’s recent Congressional public hearing, I was struck with how Cohen said Trump never asked you to lie, but instead had a certain way of talking. He would say,”This is a beautiful tie, isn’t it?” and you knew you were supposed to answer “Yes, that is a beautiful tie.” McCabe gives us an excellent example of what Cohen meant in his account with his first interview with Trump after the firing of Comey:
”He started off telling me, We fired the director, and we want you to be the acting director now. We had to fire him—and people are very happy about it. I think people are very happy that we finally got rid of him. I think there’s a lot of people in the FBI who are glad he’s gone. . . . The president claimed there had been a rebellion inside the FBI and asked me if it was true that people disliked Director Comey. I replied that . . . the general feeling in the FBI about this director seemed positive. He looked at me, with a tilt of the head, an expression of dismay or disagreement, or both. I had not given the answers he expected or wanted. The subtext of everything he was saying to me, clearly, came down to this: Whose side are you on?
McCabe is also good on the subject of Comey, and even better when he speaks of Mueller:
Mueller would kick back in his chair, sitting very straight. Put his hand to his mouth. Circle his chin—really, polish it—with his knuckles. You could see him thinking, making connections, preparing questions. . . . If he learned forward, it was a very bad sign. Mueller leans forward only when frustrated. . . If he leaned forward, looking at the chart, and then smacked the side of his hand against his head—then it was all over . . .
Now that this review is all over, I have decided that, even if McCabe may be a little boring, he hasn’t written a boring book. He has been close to the center of action in very interesting times, and has more than a few interesting things to say.
Besides, I’m getting tired of “interesting.” Donald Trump is a very interesting phenomenon. but I’d feel safer if the country was in the hands of a boring straight-arrow like Andrew G. McCabe.
The Life of Josiah Henson is not only an interesting slave narrative and the memoir of an important leader of Canada’s black community, but is also an The Life of Josiah Henson is not only an interesting slave narrative and the memoir of an important leader of Canada’s black community, but is also an important source of a classic of American popular literature. Josiah Henson’s Life is widely recognized as the inspiration for what of the American novel’s most noble and unfairly maligned characters: “Uncle Tom,” the morally principled Christian slave of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Henson’s brief as-told-to memoir presents a rich portrait of the life of an honorable and determined man, but—at least for me—three things about Henson’s life stand out. The first is that, as the trusted supervisor of his master’s estate, he agreed to lead a score of slaves from Maryland to Kentucky, and, although he could have easily lead them all—including himself—out of slavery, he led them to Kentucky instead because he refused to break his word. The second thing is that Henson only decided to run away after his master cheated him out of the money he had saved up to buy his freedom, thus absolving him of his obligation of faithful service. Third, after he escaped to Canada, he became a minister and leader of the Dawn Community, a self-sufficient group of half a hundred former slaves who bought and worked their own land.
The style in which the memoir is written—as you may see from the passage below—is a little too formal to capture completely the voice of the former slave. But, as it seems to adequately reflect Josiah’s beliefs and sentiments, it nevertheless gives us a memorable portrait of the man.
Below is the account of how Josiah justifies leading his fellow-slaves from a free state back into the land of slavery:
In passing along the State of Ohio, we were frequently told that we were free, if we chose to be so. At Cincinnati, especially, the colored people gathered round us, and urged us with much importunity to remain with them . . . From my earliest recollection, freedom had been the object of my ambition . . . No other means of obtaining it, however, had occurred to me, but purchasing myself of my master. The idea of running away was not one that I had ever indulged. I had a sentiment of honor on the subject, or what I thought such, which I would not have violated even for freedom; and every cent which I had ever felt entitled to call my own, had been treasured up for this great purpose, till I had accumulated between thirty and forty dollars. Now was offered to me an opportunity I had not anticipated. I might liberate my family, my companions, and myself, without the smallest risk, and without injustice to any individual, except one whom we had none of us any reason to love, who had been guilty of cruelty and oppression to us all for many years, and who had never shown the smallest symptom of sympathy with us, or with any one in our condition. . . But it was a punishment which it was not for me to inflict. I had promised that man to take his property to Kentucky, and deposit it with his brother; and this, and this only, I resolved to do. . . . What advantages I may have lost, by thus throwing away an opportunity of obtaining freedom, I know not; but the perception of my own strength of character, the feeling of integrity, the sentiment of high honor, I have experienced.—these advantages I do know, and prize; and would not lose them, nor the recollection of having attained them, for all that I can imagine to have resulted from an earlier release from bondage. I have often had painful doubts as to the propriety of my carrying so many other individuals into slavery again, and my consoling reflection has been, that I acted as I thought at the time was best.
William Wells Brown was a formidable figure in his day. A well known lecturer in the U.S. and Britain on the abolition of slavery (and women’s rights William Wells Brown was a formidable figure in his day. A well known lecturer in the U.S. and Britain on the abolition of slavery (and women’s rights and temperance too), he was also a pioneering African-American novelist (Clotel), playwright (Experience, or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone and The Escape; or, a Leap for Freedom), travel writer (Three Years in Europe), author of brief biographies (The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements), and an historian (The Negro and the American Revolution). Inspired by the autobiography of his friend—and rival in excellence—Frederick Douglass, he decided to write this account of his own early years: Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave.
Although his autobiography lacks the eloquent rhetoric and astute observations that make Douglass’ book a classic, Brown compensates by pleasing his reader with a straightforward narrative style and the considerable breadth of his experience. In his early Kentucky years Brown learned to work a farm (and learned to endure the overseer’s whip as well), but later, when his owner moved to St. Louis, Brown was frequently hired out to work an astonishing number of jobs : tavern boy, hotel bellhop, steamboat servant, printer’s devil for the St. Louis Times (where he learned to write a little), and—most interesting of all—as the servant of a negro speculator or “soul-driver” as they were called, that is, the buyer and seller of slaves.
Like most slave narratives, Brown Narrative features instances of injustice that anger you, moments of pathos that move you to compassion, and an account of escape that will fill you with excitement and apprehension. But perhaps the best thing about Brown's book is the variety and specificity of Brown’s work experience. We learn more than a little of what it is like to be a slave by seeing the things a slave does, and it is this which makes Brown’s book uniquely informative and enlightening.
Here, in one of my favorite passages, Brown describes how, at the direction of his “soul-driver” employer, he endeavored to make old slaves appear younger, so that they would fetch a better price downriver at Rodney, Natchez, and New Orleans:
In the course of eight or nine weeks Mr. Walker had his cargo of human flesh made up. There was in this lot a number of old men and women, some of them with gray locks. We left St. Louis in the steamboat Carlton, Captain Swan, bound for New Orleans. On our way down, and before we reached Rodney, the place where we made our first stop, I had to prepare the old slaves for market. I was ordered to have the old men's whiskers shaved off, and the grey hairs plucked out, where they were not too numerous, in which case he had a preparation of blacking to color it, and with a blacking-brush we would put it on. This was new business to me, and was performed in a room where the passengers could not see us. These slaves were also taught how old they were by Mr. Walker, and after going through the blacking process, they looked ten or fifteen years younger; and I am sure that some of those who purchased slaves of Mr. Walker, were dreadfully cheated, especially in the ages of the slaves which they bought.
We landed at Rodney, and the slaves were driven to the pen in the back part of the village. Several were sold at this place, during our stay of four or five days, when we proceeded to Natchez. There we landed at night, and the gang were put in the warehouse until morning, when they were driven to the pen. As soon as the slaves are put in these pens, swarms of planters may be seen in and about them. They knew when Walker was expected, as he always had the time advertised beforehand when he would be in Rodney, Natchez, and New Orleans. These were the principal places where he offered his slaves for sale.
There are two things every reader should know about James Comey and his book. First, whatever your politics, whatever you may think of his decisions, There are two things every reader should know about James Comey and his book. First, whatever your politics, whatever you may think of his decisions, Comey is a fine writer who has written an excellent book about leaders and leadership, a superb story teller with a knack for bringing his object lessons to life. Second, however much MSNBC you watch, however much of The Times and The Post you have read in the last year, you will still find stories here—good stories—that you have not heard before.
Here, as a teaser, I offer four snippets—one per decade--culled from Comey’s stories.
1. 1985. The great man, showboat Federal prosecutor Rudy Guliani, drops by for a rare chat with young government attorney Comey:
I had been assigned to an investigation that touched a prominent New York figure who dressed in shiny tracksuits and sported a Nobel-sized medallion around his neck. The state of New York was investigating Al Sharpton for alleged embezzlement from his charity, and I was assigned to see if there was a federal angle to the case…. My heart thumped with excitement as [Guliani] gave me a pep talk standing in the doorway. He was counting on me. He turned to leave, then stopped. “Oh, and I want the fucking medal.”
2. 1995. Jim’s wife Patrice copes with the death of her infant son—from streptococcus infection transmitted through the mother—by lobbying for a change in the law.
Patrice wrote publicly about our son and traveled the country supporting efforts to change the standard of care. She poured effort into speaking to the Virginia legislature, and succeeded in getting statutory language passed enbracing universal testing and treatment for Group B strep. She didn’t do anything alone, but her voice, along with the voices of many other good people, changed our country. All mothers are tested now, and their babies live. Something good followed the unimaginable bad. Other mothers will never know what might have been, which is as it should be.
3. 2004. Comey, as acting attorney general, has offered his opinion that “Stellar Wind”—a government program of warrantless wiretapping—is illegal, but Vice President Dick Cheney won’t be deterred by claims of illegality:
After the analysts rolled up their charts and left the room, the vice president took over…. [He] looked at me gravely and said that, as I could plainly see, the program was very important. In fact, he said, “Thousands of people are going to die because of what you are doing.”….The purpose of the meeting was to squeeze me, although nobody said that. To have the vice president of the United States accuse me of recklessly producing another 9/11—even seeming to suggest that I was doing it intentionally—was stunning.
4. 2017. Donald Trump, during his tete-a-tete dinner with Comey, speaks of the White House menu cards:
On my plate, I had found a large cream-colored card describing the entire four course menu in cursive script. Salad, shirmp scampi, chicken parmesan with pasta, and vanilla ice cream. The president began by admiring his own menu card, which he held up.
“They write these things out one at a time, by hand,” he marveled, referring to the White House staff.
“A calligrapher," I replied, nodding.
He looked quizzical. “They write them by hand,” he repeated.
There are plenty more stories where these four came from: some are amusing, some inspiring, some infuriating, but they all tell us something about leadership. And the last hundred pages give an absorbing account—inevitably biased, but not intentionally so—of some of the crucial decisions surrounding the last election.
What is my impression of this man as a leader? Although of high moral integrity, he is also a man of lofty self-regard, someone who believed he could best protect America by safeguarding his own reputation and the reputation of the government institution he represented. In normal times, this might have made for a profile in courage, but, awash in our extraordinarily politicized climate, enmeshed in the black swan event of the Trump/Clinton election, our hero made one flawed calculation—namely, that Clinton would win. This mistake colored and contaminated the crucial decisions and non-decisions—about Hillary and her emails, Trump and his Russians—that his subtle (perhaps too subtle) intellect made in the summer and fall of 2016.
Funny, but reading over the previous paragraph, I find that this is exactly what I think of President Obama too....more
It was the evening before the inauguration, and I was looking for something to read, something that would fortify me against the dark rhetoric of soon It was the evening before the inauguration, and I was looking for something to read, something that would fortify me against the dark rhetoric of soon-to-be president Trump. I decided on March 3, the final volume of Congressman John Lewis’ graphic autobiographical account of the civil rights struggle, and it turned out to be an excellent choice.
I read half of the book that night, from the Birmingham church bombing in September of ‘63 to the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to seat their delegates at the convention in August of ‘64. I read of Lewis’ painstaking organizing efforts during the dangerous “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” when the brave young activists of SNCC labored to register black people to vote. Afterward, I reflected on the recent attempts to suppress the black vote with voter I.D. laws—in Wisconsin, in North Carolina, in Florida, in Texas—and I realized how vital to the health of democracy the courage of heroes like John Lewis can be.
I finished the book the next morning, waiting for the inauguration to begin. I read of “Bloody Sunday,” the attempt of civil rights activists to march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights, and how it ended on a bridge in Selma when non-violent marchers were beaten by the billy clubs of Alabama state troopers, how John Lewis himself was beaten severely, suffering a concussion and other injuries. I read, too, how America’s horror at such gratuitous violence led to the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Soon the inauguration began, and I heard our new president speak. He spoke of “American carnage” and—although it was a different “carnage” he spoke of—I couldn’t help thinking of four little girls blown to pieces by a bomb in Birmingham, of the murdered civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, and of John Lewis himself: sprawled unconscious, bleeding from the head on the pavement of the Edmund Pettus’ Bridge.
Our new president continued to speak. He reminded us that “whether we are black or brown or white, we all bleed the same red blood of patriots, we all enjoy the same glorious freedoms.” I thought again of the black voters of Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Texas, and of young black men dead by police violence on the streets of Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Then I thought of the recent confirmation hearings of Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, how he defended vigorously the concept of voter I.D. laws, and I began to pray that what our president said about our freedoms may hold true, that it may continue to be true.
Amid the uncertainty of this new era, there is one thing of which I am certain: if we wish to preserve--or to gain--those “glorious freedoms" for all, we must follow the heroic example of Congressman John Lewis and people like him. Reading the three volumes of this excellent autobiography is a very good place to start....more
Twenty-six months after Lee surrendered to Grant, the thirty-one-year-old Samuel Clemens, a ‘special traveling correspondent” for San Francisco’s Alta Twenty-six months after Lee surrendered to Grant, the thirty-one-year-old Samuel Clemens, a ‘special traveling correspondent” for San Francisco’s Alta California newspaper, boarded the recently decommissioned USS Quaker City—a steamship once active in enforcing the Union blockade—and embarked on a five-and-a-half-month “pleasure excursion” to Europe and the Holy Land. The Alta California payed Clemen’s $1,250 fare (more than $20,000 in today’s money) in return for a series of letters describing the travelers’ adventures, but Clemens—then known only as an itinerant reporter and a minor regional humorist—got more out of the deal than just a fancy trip. Two years later he published The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869). The American public not only loved it for its humor, but also valued it as a travel guide. In spite of the classics that came after, it was always his best-selling book. By 1870, Mark Twain had become a household name.
Twain’s tone can often be uneven and problematic, and this is doubly true of Innocents. He alternates plain-spoken folksy humor with flowery praises for the scenery, and it is often difficult to tell whether Twain is satirizing the boorish American, or whether he is indeed the American boor personified. (His almost complete lack of appreciation for the paintings of Italy particularly irritated me. Yes, I know, there are a helluva lot of Madonnas, but still.) Some of the flowery passages are impressive: his descriptions of Venice and the Acropolis at midnight are excellent. But it is the blunt, skeptical Twain that is the most memorable, always suspicious of the historicity of an ancient tradition—particularly if it is being used to pick an American’s pocket. (His treatment of the landmarks and relics of the Holy Land are some of the funniest passages in the book.)
For the Twain fan, one of the interesting things about this book is its unevenness, its variability of tone. It shows us a writer who is in the process of crafting his voice, and, by the end of the journey, he has found it.
Here are few excerpts showing Twain’s range. First, Twain the skeptic’s exposes the “English Spoken Here” fraud of the shopkeepers of Paris.
In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign “English Spoken Here,” just as one sees in the windows at home the sign “Ici on parle francaise.” We always invaded these places at once — and invariably received the information, framed in faultless French, that the clerk who did the English for the establishment had just gone to dinner and would be back in an hour — would Monsieur buy something? We wondered why those parties happened to take their dinners at such erratic and extraordinary hours, for we never called at a time when an exemplary Christian would be in the least likely to be abroad on such an errand. The truth was, it was a base fraud — a snare to trap the unwary — chaff to catch fledglings with. They had no English-murdering clerk. They trusted to the sign to inveigle foreigners into their lairs, and trusted to their own blandishments to keep them there till they bought something.
Second, Twain the romantic describes the city of Venice:
We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an airing. We see staid families, with prayer-book and beads, enter the gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church. And at midnight we see the theatre break up and discharge its swarm of hilarious youth and beauty; we hear the cries of the hackman-gondoliers, and behold the struggling crowd jump aboard, and the black multitude of boats go skimming down the moonlit avenues; we see them separate here and there, and disappear up divergent streets; we hear the faint sounds of laughter and of shouted farewells floating up out of the distance; and then, the strange pageant being gone, we have lonely stretches of glittering water — of stately buildings — of blotting shadows — of weird stone faces creeping into the moonlight — of deserted bridges — of motionless boats at anchor. And over all broods that mysterious stillness, that stealthy quiet, that befits so well this old dreaming Venice.
Third, Twain the cynic takes us on a tour of the grottos of the Holy Land:
They have got the “Grotto” of the Annunciation here; and just as convenient to it as one’s throat is to his mouth, they have also the Virgin’s Kitchen, and even her sitting-room, where she and Joseph watched the infant Saviour play with Hebrew toys eighteen hundred years ago. All under one roof, and all clean, spacious, comfortable “grottoes.” It seems curious that personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes — in Nazareth, in Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus — and yet nobody else in their day and generation thought of doing any thing of the kind. If they ever did, their grottoes are all gone, and I suppose we ought to wonder at the peculiar marvel of the preservation of these I speak of. When the Virgin fled from Herod’s wrath, she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same is there to this day. The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was done in a grotto; the Saviour was born in a grotto — both are shown to pilgrims yet. It is exceedingly strange that these tremendous events all happened in grottoes — and exceedingly fortunate, likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever. It is an imposture — this grotto stuff — but it is one that all men ought to thank the Catholics for. Wherever they ferret out a lost locality made holy by some Scriptural event, they straightway build a massive — almost imperishable — church there, and preserve the memory of that locality for the gratification of future generations …. The old monks are wise. They know how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to its place forever.
Oh, I almost forgot. The Quaker City cruise not only made Sam Clemens famous: it got him a wife as well. One of the friends he made on the voyage was Charles Langdon, who showed him a photograph of his sister Olivia. Twain later declared it was love at first sight. Soon after the Quaker City returned to New York, Sam and Olivia had their first date: they attended a reading by Dickens. On February 8, 1870, Sam and his beloved “Livy” were married....more
Have you ever wondered what became of the Scotch-Irish, who dug America’s coal, forged America’s steel and built America’s automobiles, who worked for Have you ever wondered what became of the Scotch-Irish, who dug America’s coal, forged America’s steel and built America’s automobiles, who worked for the American Dream Monday through Friday. prayed to The Good Lord on Sunday, and revered F.D.R. and J.F.K. every day of the week? The last thing I heard, they elected Donald Trump. And I am still looking for explanations.
If you want somebody who knows Appalachian culture from inside to explain it all to you, I highly recommend Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. Vance has his roots in Eastern Kentucky, a troubled childhood in the rustbelt city of Middletown, Ohio, and yet has succeeded in graduating from Ohio State and matriculating from The Yale Law School. He tells us about his family of “crazy hillbillies,” and, in the process of telling us the story of his family, he tells us the story of America too.
The hillbilly seeking the American Dream in industrial Ohio was always “a stranger in a strange land”, for he cleaved to his Appalachian identity—the church in the wildwood, the old folks in the hollers—and returned to the welcoming hills every chance he could get. But economic decline left its mark on both mountain culture and urban manufacturing. Opportunities shrunk, hard liquor was supplemented by painkillers and heroin, church attendance fell and so did belief in the American Dream.
J.D.’s were most powerful influences were his grandparents Mamaw and Papaw: fierce, hard-drinking battlers with a proud belief in individual honor and family solidarity. They might beat their kids, sure, only when they deserved it...but no outsider better say one harsh word to them, much less lay a finger on them. They probably did their own children little good—especially J.D.’s mother, addicted to heroin and a bewildering succession of men—but by the time J.D. needed them they had mellowed a little, and gave him the love and determination he needed to succeed.
The early chapters about family are compelling, but the last few chapters, touching on the cultural hurdles a hillbilly in a high class East Coast law school must overcome, are fascinating too. J.D. shows us how many things the upper middle class takes for granted—how to dress for an interview, how to schmooze a prospective employer, how to strive for what you really want not what you’re supposed to want—are difficult for a young man from a poor background.
J.D. Vance’s insights are noteworthy not only because of his family background but also because of his political philosophy. He is a conservative, one of those cautious, reflective conservatives who are growing increasingly rare these days. (Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is one of his heroes, David Frum is a former employer and mentor). He is critical of specific government practices (the high barriers grandparent’s face if they wish to be foster parents, for example), but he also realizes that government has a role—although limited—in raising the Appalachian people from poverty. The major responsibility, however, he puts squarely on the shoulders on the hillbilly himself:
There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.
Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers...What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.
This first volume of the graphically realized three-part autobiography of civil rights stalwart John Lewis covers the congressman’s life from his days This first volume of the graphically realized three-part autobiography of civil rights stalwart John Lewis covers the congressman’s life from his days as a poor farm boy dreaming of becoming a preacher to his work as an organizer of the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville and the founding of the Students’ Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. As it it shifts from its frame story—a gathering of Lewis with friends and constituents minutes before Obama’s first inauguration—to the tales Lewis relates of his early years, the book manages to convey both the heroism and charm of the man, his steadfastness, his shrewd strategic mind, and his loving, almost childlike simplicity.
Nate Powell, the graphic artist and co-author, makes the excellent choice of stark black-and-white illustrations to tell John Lewis’ story. They evoke the 60’s news films of the civil rights era, at times suggesting a noir-like menace, at other times a quiet melancholy. Very effective too are his scenes of crowds, protest, and violence, for Powell brings a vivid sense of movement and drama to the conflicts in the southern streets.
There is much important public history here to be savored and remembered, but I have to admit that my favorite part of this book is Lewis’ accounts of his first efforts to be a preacher by delivering sermons to an unlikely congregation: the family chickens. His obvious affection for these humble creatures and his determination to spread the Good News are both important parts of the man who is John Lewis.
I liked this book a lot, and intend to read Book Two and Three....more
True Arthur Machen lovers know he wrote his best stuff before WW I began, so, if you are one of us, don't be put off by the fact that The Secret Glory True Arthur Machen lovers know he wrote his best stuff before WW I began, so, if you are one of us, don't be put off by the fact that The Secret Glory was first published in 1922. It was actually written in 1907, and this first literary use of the theme of the Holy Grail surviving into modern times bears the mark of Machen's best literary style on every page.
This strange little book depicts the ghastly utilitarian world of the pompous, ostentatiously Christian public school, obsessed with team spirit and spiced with sadism, and contrasts it with true spirituality, exemplified by the voices of nature and the survival of ancient traditions in the obscure hill of Wales. The school boy Andrew finds himself intensely drawn toward the old traditions, and we follow him on his journey toward a spiritual coming of age.
The ending of the book comes suddenly, with a hint of ritual sacrifice, and, although this suddenness may intensify the narrative's power, it also mars its completeness. Nonetheless, although it never quite equals The Hill of Dreams, it is still a worthy companion to that great work, for it is written in Machen's finest style....more
In addition to the gorgeous photographs taken by Milton Greene, I find this half-formed book fascinating for three reasons: for the way the ghost of M In addition to the gorgeous photographs taken by Milton Greene, I find this half-formed book fascinating for three reasons: for the way the ghost of Marilyn Monroe haunts our image of sensuality, for the way the ghost of Norma Jean Mortenson haunts the image of Marilyn Monroe, and for the way the ghost of ghost-writer Ben Hecht haunts the first person voice of this artful, unfinished narrative.
Three nights ago, for the umpteenth time, I watched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and for the first time in many viewings I took my eyes off Jane Russell (my favorite, the sex symbol a man could have a beer with) and gazed steadily at the perfectly-crafted image of Marilyn Monroe. It was weird for me, for, in spite of how fascinating she is, I felt compelled to avert my gaze, as if I were peeping at the nakedness of a divinity, as if I were staring presumptuously into a sacred fire. How could the image of one woman, dead for fifty years, still channel so powerfully the archetype of The Goddess? My Story provides a few hints, but no real answers.
Perhaps it is easier for The Goddess to possess a girl who is unsure of her own identity. Young Norma Jean Mortenson was unsure of everything: who her parents were, what it might feel like to be loved, even the legitimacy of the name by which she was called. (She did not know her father, but she knew his name was not “Mortenson.”) Later, when she began to “develop,” she felt alienated from her own body, and thought of it as something other than herself, her “magic friend.” She states that she never realized her “magic friend” was causing sexual feelings in the boys in her math class, because she, at this stage in her life, had no sexual feelings at all. Sure, she consciously dressed in a revealing sweater, and practiced a new “languorous” walk, but still she continued to be bemused and surprised at her effect on the men around her. Perhaps that way it was easier for The Goddess to begin to do her work.
I think, though, that one of the most intriguing thing about My Story is the presence (and absence) of the voice of its ghost writer, the legendary screen-writer Ben Hecht (Scarface, Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, and more than a score of uncredited contributions to classics such as A Star is Born, Gone With the Wind, and The Shop Around the Corner). A couple of years after he scripted one of her best early comic performances (Monkey Business), he was hired to get her story down on paper, based on personal interviews and taped conversations. I surmise that the cynical ex-newspaper reporter only gradually warmed to the collaboration, that he often wearied of her tearful delivery and her doeful revelations: his nicknames for her were “the Ex-Orphan” and "La Belle Bumps and Tears." Eventually, though, Hecht seemed to see her emotional reaction as an advantage for him, for as he remarked, “the moment a true thing comes out of her mouth, her eyes shed tears. She's like her own Lie Detector." The completed memoir was also supposed to include her ascension to stardom, Gentleman Prefer Blondes, the death of her Aunt Grace, and her wish to give birth to a child. But—alas!--the marriage with DiMaggio became too combative, and the whole project was scrapped.
Hecht does an excellent job of re-creating the voice of the wide-eyed Norma Jean, but there are moments—references to pushcart peddlers, a sexual “vampire,” a woman with a rose in her teeth—that sound more like the voice of the 60-year-old screenwriter than the superstar still in her late 20's. And there's one anecdote--about a nice young war veteran hawking miniature silver stars in Union Station who asks Norma Jean to marry him--which sounds just like one of Hecht's "cold city with a warm heart" vignettes, straight out of something like his own Miracle in the Rain.
But that's okay. Looking for the ghost of the cynical old screenwriter in this book's simple, well-crafted prose is one of the fascinating pleasures of reading My Story....more
When Kenneth Millar (detective novelist “Ross Macdonald”) read in a New York Times interview that Eudora Welty had once almost sent him a fan letter b When Kenneth Millar (detective novelist “Ross Macdonald”) read in a New York Times interview that Eudora Welty had once almost sent him a fan letter but then refrained because she feared to do so might be “icky,” he sent her a fan letter of his own. Thus began a correspondence that would last twelve years, from 1970 to 1982, only ending six months before Millar's death from the complications of Alzheimer's.
The times they met face to face could be counted almost on one hand, yet their first meeting—a year plus a week after the letters started, in the lobby of Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel—established a close bond which grew more intense with each year. Although Welty was a maiden lady in her early 60's, conventional in her morals, and Millar was a man in his late 50's committed to his marriage (he was the husband of mystery novelist Margaret Millar), their epistolary romance—nuanced, deliberate in its purity, yet filled with an intense personal regard—is a testimony to human love just as moving as the letters of Heloise and Abelard or Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
I have heard it said that intense flirtation is tantamount to adultery, and I will concede that, in this age, it is often true. But not here. Not in these letters.
Welty and Millar refuse to create any sort of mutual fantasy world. What they do instead is to share and explore the particular details of each others lives, their likes and dislikes, discovering in otherwise insignificant connections—a mutual friend, the joint affection for an obscure novel, a city they both once visited (or plan to visit), a shared literary contact or political opinion, a recent bird sighting, a few strikingly similar (or dissimilar) days of weather--a confluence of correspondences that may serve to bring the great rivers of their two selves together. (It is a metaphor that Welty would explore in her Pulitzer prize winning novel, The Optimist's Daughter (1972), where she speaks of the union of the Mississippi and the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois: “All they could see was sky, water, birds, and confluence. It was the whole morning world.”)
This can be a sad book, and it gets even sadder toward the end. The reader feels each writer's desire for the other's presence in almost every line, a desire more poignant as Millar's Alzheimer's progresses. His letters grow more laconic and less frequent, until at the last it is just Welty who writes, conjuring the particular connections they share in an ever continuing litany, desperate to keep the confluence flowing even as it ebbs away.
Both are long dead now of course. But—thanks to biographers and editors Marr and Nolan—“there are letters.” And although they may not be “the whole morning world,” these letters are certainly a resplendent piece of it, a reminder of how two people—through the magic of their words and their chaste and ardent imaginations—once contrived to make “the whole morning world” shine....more
Sometime early in my reading of this book, I felt in my gut I had encountered a classic. Not a best-seller—this book is already that—but a classic. I Sometime early in my reading of this book, I felt in my gut I had encountered a classic. Not a best-seller—this book is already that—but a classic. I envisioned stack upon paperback stack piled on metal shelves in university bookstores, shelves labeled Black Studies 301 but also Basic Comp 100. I could see pirated copies of large portions of Part One passed out to high school juniors and seniors, to be carefully annotated in AP Language and AP Literature, and I could see smaller sections distributed (with the customary "scaffolding" materials) to freshmen and sophomores in Basic English I and II.
But even now--after the winning of The National Book Award--I doubt my own vision. Coates book deserves to be a classic, just as much as The Life of Frederick Douglass, The Souls of Black Folk, The Fire Next Time, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X—all first-class books—deserve it. But a classic, after all, is not only a book of “first-class” quality, but one that is taught in “class”--and Coates book may be too bleak to appeal to educators--not to mention schoolboards and parents--who prefer books like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Secret Life of Bees that agree to temper (to dissipate?) their truth with the comforts of warmth.
Coates book--presented as an open letter to his teenage son--is undoubtedly bleak. He grew up on the streets of Baltimore in the early '90's, and describes the experience in physical, visceral terms. As a black boy growing up in such streets, you knew that your body was continually under mortal threat, often under attack. At any moment your body could be controlled, violated, by the hands or weapons of another—often by the policemen employed by “the Dreamers,” those who define themselves as white in America and wish to preserve for themselves the privileges of the American Dream. And you knew that any of these random violations of the body could lead to the ending of your life. And if you were a young unbeliever—as Coates was and is—you were conscious that this act would end the only life you would ever know.
Coates has no faith in America or in its dream. For him, unlike Martin Luther King, the arc of the moral universe bends not toward justice but chaos. The Dream itself is built upon the despoliation and violation of the bodies of black men and women, and may only end when it has finally violated and despoiled the entire planet:
Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could order the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.
Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And the revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.
But this book is more than its bleakness; although it is never hopeful, it is earnest, honest, and aware. Coates describes his odyssey from the narrow streets of Baltimore, to the black “Mecca” of Howard University, to the diverse neighborhoods of NYC, and to his encounter with a profoundly different culture on the boulevards of Paris. He welcomes his increasingly wide world with open eyes (if not always open arms), and his encounters with it deepen—although they do not substantially alter—his perceptions of blackness or the toxic nature of the Dream.
Finally, even his atheism seems to be something like a gift. Perhaps it is only by realizing that the body is ultimately all we have that we can finally get our priorities straight, stop believing in forms of “magic” like “salvation” or “the Dream” or "progress," and instead concentrate on making sure that the bodies of all young people are protected and respected, so that each may discover the world with her own unique eyes.
Between the World and Me is undoubtedly a great book. Even if its bleakness prevents it from becoming an official classic, there is still a part of my vision that I am sure will come true. I see fathers giving copies to their sons, mothers to their daughters, for generations to come....more
Loading...
