Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep

 

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep, is certainly a well written and engaging work, but only if you care for certain narrow concerns.  I care little for the generation of post-war writers who had problems writing, Lee, Salinger, or those who wanted to be left alone, their photographic legacy only a buck toothed portrait from their Cornell days (Pynchon).  Who cares?  Lee never wrote another book after Mockingbird because she did not have the power, stamina, and or creativity to do so.  The fact that she is somehow hailed for this shows that we often worship failure as much as success in our writers.  Why did she never write again, we whisper.  A mystery!

Cep shows that Lee had the material to write a far more complex non-fiction or novel about race in America.  She had gathered the materials, but failed to write the book.  Cep wrote the book while explaining why Lee did not write the book.  So why should we care about Harper Lee, or the others?  We should not.  We should allow those who wanted to hide and disappear remain in such a state.  That is what they wanted. 

American Guerrillas: From the French and Indian Wars to Iraq and Afghanistan—How Americans Fight Unconventional Wars

American Guerrillas: From the French and Indian Wars to Iraq and Afghanistan—How Americans Fight Unconventional Wars, by Thomas D. Mays, shows how important guerrilla warfare has been to America for much of our history.  The French and Indian War was primarily a guerrilla conflict fought on the frontier.  

For the next two hundred years, one of America’s key goals was to rid itself of Native Americans.  The European-Americans who settled in what would become the United States quickly adapted themselves to “Indian” style warfare, with devastating results for the tribes - and lessons to be applied elsewhere. For much of our history, irregular warfare has played a prominent role, even during conventional conflicts like World War II.  

As Mays illustrates, irregular warfare is the style of war of the twenty-first century.  A book like this is necessarily for scholars of this topic. 

The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World's Oldest Bible by Chanan Tigay

The documentary hypothesis of the bible’s creation and redaction claims that several different sources were combined together to create the book and stories we know today.  This has been a rock solid theory since the nineteenth century, and nearly all biblical scholars support its veracity.  Finding a manuscript of the bible from before this great merger of sources has been an ardent wish of many scholars – one that has been unfulfilled.

The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World's Oldest Bible, by Chanan Tigay, is just such a search.  Of course, there is no such “primal” bible, and it seems unlikely one will ever be found.  Tigay, however, presents a great story of the quest for just such a document.  If he did not find it we can’t fault him.  When the bible was stitched together, why would the redactors keep the scraps?

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know - I think

Whenever I read a Malcolm Gladwell book, I get excited and energized by what he writes, but after a few days, I forget much of what he wrote.  This is certainly the case of Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know.  I’m not sure why this happens.  Why do I read his books, and then forget them?  Why don’t I know what we should know about talking to people I don’t know?

Part of it is, I believe, that while Gladwell is the consummate storyteller,  he is relying on a discipline, the social sciences, which generally does not translate well as stories.  Gladwell always casts a wide net – even when his thesis is tight – so I get caught up in his stories, thrilled by them and their details, and then forget how they fit in the overall picture.  It happens with every book.  Don’t ask me what Tipping Point was about.  

Why We Need the Electoral College (we really don't)

Why We Need the Electoral College by Tara Ross presents a decidedly conservative view on the subject.  Ross does make some great points.  But overall, she presents arguments in favor of the Electoral College according to its rules.  Sometimes she claims how the EC is better than the popular vote, or other outside influences, but mainly her arguments are based on the inner structures and configuration of the EC, and her arguments are therefore circular.

She is a member of the Federalist Society, who adhere to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.  A strict interpretation of the constitution is an inherent contradiction, as all readings of a document are an interpretation.  Interpretations are always changing, as she points out; for many times the EC has changed with the times.  She also whitewashes the EC’s more dramatic failures, like the Election of 1876.  This is like painting a face on a baboon’s rear and calling the likeness a super-model.

Once upon a time Senators were not elected directly.  That was changed, and the Senate did not collapse.  My sense is that our republic can survive the retirement of the EC.  Only those who treat the Constitution as a religious document, like Ross, will lament its passing.

Hotel du Lac

 

Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner, is a meticulously well-written book.  Brookner has the ability, often found in writers of a certain kind, of slicing a moment down to its human mechanics.  She takes a facial expression, a few words, and makes the world move in slow motion as she parses out what all these motions and words we perform and speak represent.

The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America

 

A truly fascinating book, The Princess and the Prophet: The Secret History of Magic, Race, and Moorish Muslims in America by Jacob S. Dorman, examines the  proliferation of groups of African Americans in the late nineteenth and twentieth century who formed organizations professing resistance narratives to white Christian religion and society – often under the guise of some form of Islam.  

This came about through curious twists and turns.  Dorman shows how European Orientalism had a profound influence in America, and its most common expression was in circuses, sideshows, and world fairs.  Black men and women played Moors, Hindus, and other “exotic” peoples who had power and charisma.  At this time the Shriner movement of the Fez hats arose, which had its own Orientalist origins as a secret society with Islamic roots.  As African Americans moved north these organizations became increasingly popular, and powerful among a dislocated people.  Organized Shrinerism and Circus Orientalism combined in novel and powerful ways  

Dorman’s subject, the Moorish Science Temple of America, was the direct antecedent of The Nation of Islam.  His work helps to explain why a man like Malcolm X knew so little of Islam, yet called himself a Muslim in his early years in the Nation of Islam (before he embraced more “normative” Islam).  Moorish and Islamic movements were trying on guises that were in direct contraction to the narrative of white supremacy with amazing results.

Via November

 

Via November

Of brown and gray

The downward day

Hissing grasses

And naked trees

Asleep for eternity 

Scapegoats of the Empire: The True Story of Breaker Morant's Bushveldt Carbineers

 

Scapegoats of the Empire: The True Story of Breaker Morant's Bushveldt Carbineers by George Witton is an unfortunate book. Witton is not a writer, and has little sense of how to tell his story.  If you have not seen the 1980 Australian film, or are aware from another source of the war crimes that Witton, Morant and Handcock allegedly committed, this book would be completely cloudy.

In the end, this book does nothing to prove the crimes of Witton, Morant and Handcock were anything but that, crimes.  Even if orders existed to kill Boer prisoners, it was an unethical order, and should not have been obeyed.  Their defense that war on the Northern Transvaal was simply of this nature, irregular and total, is also no excuse.  This is like the defense that I am not culpable because all cars are traveling seventy in a fifty-five mph zone, I do not deserve to get a ticket if stopped.  The illegal actions of others is no excuse for my own illegal actions.

This case, and this book, really calls out for the dire need for a military to maintain discipline and order.  In the stress and turmoil of war, a lack of discipline is the slippery slope toward war crimes.

Book as Bomb

Does a book really matter?  Is the world better if a book is published?  In The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, the authors prove that a book can really have impact in the world, especially when it is entangled in politics and ideology.  The tug of war over Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is a fascinating case study of how in times and places of political turmoil, the written word can be a weapon and a piece of art, even for art’s sake, a bomb.

The Truth of War

What is war like without jingoism or a distorting ideological lens or patriotic glorification? Madness Visible: A Memoir of War by Janine di Giovanni is one of the most honest accounts of war and its costs I have encountered.  

The author recounts her experiences in the Balkans in the 1990s and early 2000s, and is exposed to the extreme limits of the utter barbarism our species is fully capable of achieving.  Her book is the closest to war one can experience on a page.

This is also an achievement of pure journalism.  Certainly, di Giovanni did not have report in the Balkans as it disintegrated into war, death, ethnic cleansing, systematic rape,  forced expulsions  and genocide.  The people around her in Kosovo and Sarajevo had no choice but to be in the war.  But she went as a professional calling and duty, detailing crimes that we always say should no longer happen, but ultimately, and sadly, are replicated.

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

 

In Jill Lepore’s If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, we learn of a data collection company which anticipated, in many ways, our current era of Big Data.  Lepore does an excellent job of showing how the scientists at Simulmatics were ahead of their time, and although formal failures in most of the tasks they set to predict, showed the path to the future.

Yet the book is underwhelming at many points.  Lepore is not consist in showing her interest and enthusiasm in telling in the topic.  When parts like these occur in the book, I wondered why I should be interested as well.   The Vietnam section  is far too long for the payout.  The book would have been better served, I believe, if it was shorter.  This way, the author could have maintained her interest in the topic she wants us to read enough to write a book. 

The Testaments: A Novel

The Testaments: A Novel by Margaret Atwood is extremely savvy.  Atwood always delivers quality books; most may not be masterpieces, but she consistently tells interesting stories, in a register that is wide enough to be of interest to many people.

Normally, a sequel to her extremely successful The Handmaid’s Tale would be a daunting task.  But she gets help here.  The extremely successfully TV series has given her a leg up.  She was and is involved in this series, and the first novel, the series, and this sequel, work together in lock step.  And all of it is high quality material.  The pro-Canadian anti-American jabs are quite fun, too

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora

 

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, by Emily Raboteau, tells the fascinating story of the connection between Zion as a concept and place of homeland among the world’s far flung Africans.  

This is also a personal journey, as Raboteau has a father with African ancestry and a mother of European ancestry.  As she does not look “African” she is constantly negotiating not only her own self of identity, but how others place her in their own categories of identity.  Her search for Zion, for home, is therefore both social and personal.

Raboteau is an often harsh observer of those living in African diasporas' Zions.  She has a difficult time reconciling herself with how people of African descent have adjusted the concept of Zion to their own circumstances, and the ideal of Zion. 

She realizes this, I believe.  Zion is not in Israel, or Ethiopia, but instead ourselves and our communities.  No home is really “home.”  Home is something we must work to create through our own ethical and moral behaviors.  Zion lives in us.

The Rules Do Not Apply

Memoir always strikes me as a particularly cruel genre.  This is certainly the case with Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply.  The work is well-written, at times funny and self-depreciating, honest and open, but also grating and mean.  She has a lot of beefs and expressively tells us about them. There is a lot to admire in this work, and a great deal of honesty that is just plain cruel.  I cannot discount Levy’s obvious talent.  She has told her truth with great precision and painful beauty. This work is worth reading.  But one cautionary note: if you become close with Levy be wary.  You might become grist for her mill.

The Gift of Isle of Dogs, Part I

 

Jon Frankel’s Isle of Dogs, Part I, is a book written on a large canvas, War and Peace style.  Frankel is a deft writer who, like Tolstoy, is able to handle both the vast sweep of history, and the details that make a novel feel real and living.  He keeps this dichotomy throughout, and it is an intimate and revealing view of a richly imagined world.  The reader does not get lost in either the big or little picture.  Things keep moving along. 

I am especially struck by the sense of a lost Eden, the sister having her brother, but also her father, as a lover.  Like any Edenic motif, this harkens to an age before sexual rules; a pre-fall view in a world that has already toppled.  This novel is cursed by a sense of loss and longing.

Toward the end, I was especially struck by the depictions of downtown Manhattan with both its street battles and everyday scenes of life.  Although this is a New York City set far in the future, Frankel still gives us a deeply and undeniably NYC novel.  But he also bows reverently to the genre, providing a strange otherness to the great metropolis.  

We are all fortunate this this is only Part 1 of Frankel’s epic.  More gifts await us.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

 

For a long time, I avoided reading about the history of Northern Ireland.  I have a smidgen of Irish ancestry, and carry a bit of baggage from that side of the family.  So, I never believed I could read a history of Northern Ireland without oonfronting some of the intractable “self-hating” aspects of my identity.   Why would I want to read about Protestians and Catholcs refighting the Thirity Years War?  Weren't these sectarian disputes settled by other peoples a long time ago?

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe did not help me at all in this regard.  I still self-hate.  I see nothing enobling about The Troubles.  But that is not Keefe’s fault.  The Troubles is presented as what it was, a largely senseless, sectarian conflict that ended when there was little left to save in the end.  The violence ended because the match had burnt out.

That said, Keefe does an admirable job of presenting this history.  This is a gripping story, and he tells it well.  He humanized the terrible cost of communal violence.

The Moro War: How America Battled a Muslim Insurgency in the Philippine Jungle, 1902-1913

 

The Moro War: How America Battled a Muslim Insurgency in the Philippine Jungle, 1902-1913, by James R. Arnold, is a well-researched and written book, about a time when America sought an empire outside of the confines of North America.  Many white Americans have problems seeing the white supremacy behind that ‘standard’ history of our country.  We are too close to it to see it with clarity. The task is much easier when we read this book, as the fight against the Moros is so far removed from our standard national narrative. 

The Roosevelt government viewed the Moros as not fully evolved, and this idea granted the United States the supposed right to use extraordinary force in “pacifying” them.  We see all the tell-tale signs of a western power subduing a ‘native’ people.  Massacres, indiscriminate killing, destruction of property, ethnic cleansing bordering on genocide.  In armed encounters with Moro warriors, their numbers of dead and wounded far exceeded the US by many orders of magnitude.

The strategic goals of this war were so very limited that they are forgotten today.  I doubt this war needed to be fought at all.  People died in large numbers for immediatate and forgetable goals. 

Radical Breaks, Remakes and What Comes Next

Despite the title, End of the Jews, author Dan Mendelsohn Aviv is not predicting the end of Jews or Judaism.  Quite the contrary.  His sub-title reveals more about the substance of this book: Radical Breaks, Remakes and What Comes Next.  This book is about how Judaism is constantly evolving, always has and always will.  If you have never been exposed to this idea before, this is a great place to begin.  Rather than destroying your faith or Jewish practices, End of the Jews illustrates how when one part of Judaism gets played out, another rises to take its place, more often than not with great success.

Flappers and Philosophers

 

Flappers and Philosophers was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories, published in 1920. I had high expectation of these stories.  Scott made his name and most of his money through the publication of short stories.  But my expectations were tempered.  Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast reveals claims, perhaps falsely, that Scott would change the endings of his short stories (to happy endings) so that they would sell.  So, what to expect?

The first story, The Offshore Pirate, ends with the female character acting in a way substantially different then throughout the story.  Was this such an altered ending?  Benediction has another strange ending, with a different feel and texture than the story.  I wonder.

The only story that rises to the level of F. Scott Fitzgerald is Bernice Bobs Her Hair.  The rest revolve around cheap gimmicks and cute tricks.  For the most part his prose is superb.  This is what kept me reading.

The Kabbalah Reader: A Sourcebook of Visionary Judaism

The Kabbalah Reader: A Sourcebook of Visionary Judaism by Edward Hoffman is a rare book about Kabbalah in English in that it is not an introductory text as I define it.  Hoffman does not pick the standard Jewish figures or quote from the well-known works.  Rather, Hoffman provides a wider range, and in effect, moves us out and away from well throd self-referential books about Jewish mysticism.  Hoffman’s book is sweeping, bringing many under the tent of Kabbalah who are not typically allowed within.

The Taiping Rebellion

God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, by Jonathan D. Spence, is a fascinating history of one of Chinese largest rebellions.  Taking place from 1850 to 1864, tens of millions died.  Hong Xiuquan created a type of Christian religion, where he was the younger son of Jesus.  Elements of Confucianism and Chinese folk religions were added to this mix.  In a time of social and political turbulence, his movement gained strength, threating to topple to regime in Beijing.

The Taiping Rebellion still lives on in the collective life of the Chinese.  The CPC recognizes five official religions, Buddhism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam, and Protestantism, which are monitored by the state.  Other religious groups, no matter how benign, are illegal and often disbanded.  The CPC knows full well that the Taiping Rebellion began as a splinter group from mainstream Christianity, and grew in political and miltary might.  If infighting for power and religious prestige had not weakened them, the Taiping rebels may very well have taken power in China. 

Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City

 

Death in the Air: The True Story of a Serial Killer, the Great London Smog, and the Strangling of a City, is the story of two crimes, the death by air pollution of thousands of Londoners in 1952, and from a serial killer.  The book paints an excellent portrait of post-War Great Britain; it was the victor in WWII, but in economic and social shambles.  The city is gritty, unsafe, and dirty (look at pictures from that time).  Food and other items are rationed. George Orwell was inspired by the post-war decay of England when he wrote 1984.  This book does an excellent job counting the cost of victory for Great Britain.

I do not see much of a connection between John Reginald Christie’s murders and the killer smog, except that they both deprived people of air.  So, the two threads of this work do not necessarily belong together.  Still, the author paints an excellent picture of post-War London in all its grays and blacks; and the book largely succeeds on that count.

Read Bloodlands First

I tried to read Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder and put it down at least twice.  Although interesting, I found it thematically repetitive   A much shorter work could have packed more punch.  I suggest you first read his Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (which he wrote first) which is in many ways a more accomplished and complete work.  Then Black Earth will have a firmer context.

The Talmud – A Biography: Banned, censored and burned. The book they couldn't suppress

 

The Talmud – A Biography: Banned, censored and burned. The book they couldn't suppress, by Harry Freedman, is a superb idea for a book, which the author executes quite well.  

The Talmud deserves a biography.  It is a most unique book, difficult to define, harder yet to read and study – but it has become crucial to Jewish religious identity in the last thousand years.

Freedman provides a well-researched and clear account of the vicissitudes of the Talmud's long, and at times troubled, life.

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories

Alien Virus Love Disaster: Stories by Abbey Mei Otis, is certainly an interesting collection.  As the title suggests, the stories delve in the well-trod areas of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, climate change, and then a series of tales that defy categorization, and sometimes sense.

This lack of conventional clarity occurs toward the middle of this book, and by the end is fully in bloom.  I did not necessarily mind it, although I missed the voice of the first few stories.  Otis was balancing the demands of genre with a very deep investigation of character.  She was weaving beauty in ugly situations.  

Then there is the shift, and Otis loses me.  In the end it does not matter.  She probably planned the stories this way.  As our world sinks further into a morass of non-meaning, our fiction should reflect this as well.

Not Really on the Go

 

Despite its title, this is about 26 hours of instruction in Israeli Hebrew.  Shy of taking a class or hiring  a teacher, this is the best you can get from a book/audio source.

Where God Begins to Be: A Woman's Journey into Solitude

Where God Begins to Be: A Woman's Journey into Solitude by Karen Fredette is a gentle book about a former nun’s journey to a solitary life.  In many ways, her journey to solitude in small house in West Virginnia is the inverse of what most of us would experience.  She became a nun when she was a teen, and lived in a community for twenty years.  Then she lived a solitary life.  Eventually, she left that life, and married (this is not covered in the book).  Most of us would approach solitude from the angle of having a family, entering a religious community, and then seeking solitude.

Fredette is a a gentle soul, telling a heartening tale of simplicity and the quest for compassion without tricks or artifice.

The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition) by Cold Mountain

 

The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition) by Cold Mountain, is a translation of the legendary poems of Han Shan, who lived in the ninth century.  Translated by Bill Porter, these poems, and their notes, provide a window into the world of blended Taoist/Buddhist Chinese traditions; especially as related to the path of hermits and solitude.  Bill Porter explored this in his incomparable work Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits.  Read Road first, and then this work.  You will understand the context of the poems far better.

The Unfinished Work

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara, is certainly an interesting work, but a few things hold this book back.

Unfortunately, Ms. McNamara died before completing it; so, parts are done, while others are taken from notes, still others from articles she wrote in other places.  The latter half of the book was writen by others.  So what we get is a disjointed account of the Golden State killer’s crimes.  I learned more from a brief documentary of these crimes than this book.

No doubt this would have been a far better book had the author lived.  Her writing is clear and interesting and no doubt she could have completed accomplished work. 

Jewish Cossacks and then a Jewish State

 

The Sword And The Olive: A Critical History Of The Israeli Defense Force by Martin Van Creveld delivers just what he promises in the title.  Van Crevald takes focues an historical mircoscope from the rise of a Jewishself-defense organizations in Palestine, right to the end of the Lebanon War. 

While the author tries to distance himself from post-Zionist historians, he strips quite a bit of myth and legend surrounding Israel's fighting forces himself.  Take one of the earliest forms of Jewish self-defense in Palestine, Hashomer, the Watchman.  We are told they lacked discipline, wore Arab garb, modeled themselves as Jewish Cossacks, and rode horsese, often letting style rule over substance.  Van Crevald suggests that some Watchman may have been involved in protection rackets against their fellow Jews!

This is a fascinating book about a stateless people who build a state and an army from the ground up.  Van Creveld details the good and ugly of this process – and all shades between.

Lost Girls and the Other

Lost Girls and Love Hotels: A Novel, by Catherine Hanrahan, is a rather standard expat novel, both in form and tone.  The main character is lost, drifting, and buries her pain in booze, drugs, and transgressive sex in Tokyo – which obliges her needs.  

We have seen and read this before.  But Hanrahan has a snappy prose style, and wit, so this novel, while sticking to the “script” is never uninteresting or even fully predictable.

As an expat novel, some people will wonder if the Japanese are treated like the Other, just players in the background of a westerner’s narcissism romp. Maybe. If I was Japanese or Asian I would probably think as much.  Which opens up a wide field of questions about how we treat characters and cultures in our art.  I have no ready answers to this kind of complexity.  This is the beginning of a long discussion.

The Pain of Not Speaking a "Dialect"

Yorkshire Dialect Poems (1673-1915) and traditional poems, compiled by Frederic William Moorman, gives the reader a wonderful flavor of the Yorkshire form of English.  Both familiar and extremely dissimilar from the Standard English we speak today, at times, Yorkshire reads like another language.  I suggest reading the poems aloud.  This way, even if you don’t understand the words (some words are translated in footnotes, others are not) you get the taste of the words in your mouth.  You hear their musicality.

I envy those who can speak this language; how wonderful it would be to speak a Standard English and a so-called dialect like Yorkshire.  What a far more expansive world.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston, tells the story of Kossula Lewis, kidnapped from West Africa in 1860, and interviewed by Hurston in the 1930s. Lewis, and the others from his ship, formed the nucleus of Africa Town, near Mobile Alabama (which still exists today).  

His memories mainly focus on like in Africa, and the collusion of fellow Africans who captured and sold Lewis to white slavers.  This is a part of the slave trade that is often not discussed: the active collusion of some Africans enslaving other Africans for profit.  This should not be a surprise; African were and are many people, and not one.  There was not a Pan-African sentiment.

The number of narratives such as this, where an African is captured, enslaved, and brought to America, can be counted on one hand.  Yet, the story of Lewis is the story of all Africans in America. Therefore, this work is vitally important; it gives a voice to millions were deprived of a voice.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

 

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, by Hallie Rubenhold, is an important book, as it shines a desperately needed light on the women killed by the notorious White Chapel serial killer.  Rubenhold gives these woman what they have long deserved: their humanity.  They were not merely victims of murder, but people living as best they could – and nearly all these women suffered from unfortunately circumstances.  They were people, and the author treats them as such.

Rubenhold claims that there is no evidence that three of the five women were involved in sex work.  This is a startling, as for over a hundred years these woman have been labeled as prostitutes.  In fact, Rubenhold tells us, they were called prostitutes because Victorian England had no other category for women who were essentially homeless, not married (either divorced, or estranged from their husbands) and destitute.  The five were homeless people.  Every day they scrambled money for a bed that evening. The serial killer may well have picked them some appeared sleeping in lanes, doorways, and backyards.

This is the story of the failure of a society to care for its working class women.  Most women were one step away from destitution.  There was no real safety net to keep these woman off the street and protect them.  Law were meant to protect men.  What was true in Victorian England is true today: poor women suffer higher percentages of  disease, mental health issues, substance abuse, and crime.   

One thing all five had in common was addiction to alcohol.  In a world with little pleasure, it was a cheap and fleeting away to avoid pain and anguish.  These are sad, but important stories to read.

Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits

 

Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, by Red Pine (Bill Porter), is a fascinating look at Daoist and Buddhist hermits just as China was “opening” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

After the havoc of the Cultural Revolution, Porter was unsure if a hermit tradition still existed in China.  In the middle of the tumult of 1989, he travels to the country to see if there are still religious isolates.  With great physical effort, he does find some, mostly old men and women who live in isolation, mainly in the Zhongnan Mountains.  This mountain range has a centuries old tradition as the site of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and hermits from both traditions.  Against the odds, they survived the purge of the Cultural Revolution.

Now that China has experienced its capitalists explosion, many millennials, disenchanted with materialism, have joined the hermits in Zhongnan. The lure of these mountains continue to call, despite the erosion of personal freedoms under Chinese government rule; and attempt by the government to keep people "on the grid" to track their movements.

As much as any human institution or inclination is ineradicable, the hermits of Zhongnan are close to being what legend purports them to be, immortal.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

 

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford, explores the promise and disappointments of the project to map the Human genome.  The story is interesting, and pops the bubble of the early days of the project, with the heady promise of genetic determinism. We can cure diseases!  We can link genes to criminal tendencies!

No, we can't.  Two decades out, the picture is considerably more muddled.  Most questions about genetics and individuals can’t be answered with certainty.  We can know about populations; we can talk broadly.  Genetics is about statistics, not Newtonian physics.  We are not our genes, but a complex interplay between our environment and our genes.

This book is informative, if at times muddled.  I found the author’s organizing principle behind the work a bit confusing.  There does not appear to be an overarching organization.  This book is more an interconnected series of essays on the topic.  At times, it lacks thrust.

Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

 

Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca by John McWhorter is fascinating exploration of  the use of “Black English” in the United States, and how this form of English is simply a natural and normal part of how languages exist and develop.  

In almost every country, more than one language is spoken.  In Switzerland, the local Swiss dialect is used at home, on the streets, and in casual settings.  In school, the quite different version of “standard” German is taught, and used during formal occasions.  No one thinks this arrangement is bizarre or unnatural. 

“Black English” is much the same, McWhoter tells us.  It is simply another way to speak English, along the great sweep of language differences among all English speakers.  The distorting lens of racism has cast “Black English” as some degraded form of expression.  Which  it is not.

Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi, was written before How to be an Antiracist and in it you can see where many of the ideas and theories of that book were first fleshed out.  This book is detailed, intelligent, and insightful.  The American nightmare of racism, and its intersection with sexism, heteronormativity, and  white patriarchy, is shown in its various guises throughout our history.

In the end Stamped asserts that American racism only benefits the small number of white men who control the wealth and political structures of our country.  This is kind of a Marxist conclusion to the problem of race in America.  Race is used by the elites to cloud our real interests and protect theirs.  For Kendi, that is how racism in American will end; when economic disparities are addressed and fixed.

The Birth of Jewish American & Israel

Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History by Steven J. Zipperstein examines the influential and, at this point, little known attack on the Jewish community of Kishinev in 1903.  At the time, the pogrom became international news, and brought the spotlight to the desperate plight of Russian Jews.  Zipperstein sees Kishinev as at the tilt of history, as a moment when Jewish history began an irreversible slip.

Zipperstein writes that although the pogrom had government sanction, it was only on a local level. Victims were blamed for the pogrom, both because of a spurious blood libel charge, and because there were too many Jews in Kishinev for gentile comfort.  Zionists leaders also blamed the Jews of Kishinev for their supposed passivity during the pogrom.  H.N. Bialik, "The City of Slaughter" outright condemned victims, and accused Jewish men of cowardliness.  

And this leads to the main point: This book shows the intersection where Russian Jews realized that all roads led out of that  troubled land.  Russia hated its Jews. Burgeoning Zionism hated old world Judaism.  Jews could either fight or flee.  Those who fought went to Palestine; those who fled, to American, to form the backbone of American Jewry today.  Before the Holocaust forged Judaism into the binary (but spurious)  Israeli and an American identities, the violence at Kishinev cleared the path.

Really? Really??

Philip Short’s Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare documents the rise and fall of both Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.  Pol Pot was not a madman; he did not have Hitleresque personal qualities.  Quite the contrary, he was social in a retiring way, not wanting the spot light, and seeking, throughout his “career,” to avoid scrutiny in part by frequently changing his name and hiding his location.

As a student in Paris, he was not the most intelligent, or even the most ideologically driven among expat Cambodian students.  But as he entered political life, he became a more fervent advocate of complete and total social engineering.  Small believes that Pol Pot was just as influenced by the more bloody aspects of the French Revolution as by Marx, Lenin, or Mao.

When he gained power in 1975, he emptied Cambodia’s cities, and started year zero, an attempt to create a new kind of person who was not a person at all; an entity that was devoted to the state.  This was a pure totalitarian vision.  Pol Pot only cared for this vision; human life meant nothing alongside of this ideal.  More than a million Cambodians died in the process.

Short make some interesting assertions.  One is that America and China, new allies, supported the Khmer Rouge against the trio’s common enemy, Vietnam.  In that case, our government is an accessory to genocide. 

Short also makes a great many negative generalizations about Cambodians (if he  wrote such things about African-Americans, they would be deemed racist).  It is disturbing to read that Cambodians are lazy, or prone to extreme violence despite their outward smiles and politeness.  He also believes that the kind of Buddhism practiced in Cambodia, with its world denying theology, was one of the elements that molded the Khmer Rouge nihilistic joyride.

Really?  Really??

Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage

If you are at all serious about observing Jewish religious practice and want to shake up your notions of why you follow religious Jewish practice, then you must read Jewish Law as Rebellion: A Plea for Religious Authenticity and Halachic Courage by Nathan Lopes Cardozo.   

Rabbi Cardozo is as courageous as his book’s sub-title. He reminds us, again and again, in different contexts, that halacha is meant to disrupt our lives; it is designed to make us live more authentically, and not automatically.  Halacha itself makes us question halacha – when we approach it properly.  

It is difficult to praise this book enough.  Rabbi Cardozo's voice is essential, and probably the most accomplished book on Judaism I have read in some time.  

A View of Hell

Ponary Diary, 1941-1943: A Bystander’s Account of a Mass Murder by Kazimierz Sakowicz, are pages from a diary kept by Sakowicz that offer a first person account of the murder of the Jews of Vilna, and others.  

Sakowicz was a journalist who left Vilna to live in  a cottage in the forest outside of the city, Ponary, at  the outbreak of the war.  There, Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered Jews by the tens of thousands in pits dug by the Soviets to store fuel.  His house was both near the train depot, and the pits.  Sakowicz was determined to document what he saw, and he does so dispassionately, with a reporter’s eye for detail.  Much of what he writes about is appalling and realistic.  The pits at Ponary were hell and  Sakowicz does not spare us.

This journal was unavailable for years.  The Russians wanted to downplay the specifics of the Holocaust, and instead view all as Communist martyrs, and the Lithuanians did not want to be implicated in the Nazi mass murder (which the journal accomplishes).  Now the diary is available for all to read, in English; it is a vital resource.

Sakowicz was murdered in 1944, and supposedly kept his diary up to the day before his death.  We only have pages up to 1943.  We can only hope the rest of his journal will someday come to light.

Brevity Sinks A Good Thesis

Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents by Margaret Kimberley is an important book that is just far too short for such an important topic.  

Kimberley’s basic thesis is that no president, not a single one, has been good for the advancement of African-Americans.  Certainly, the presidents up to the civil war are low handing fruit: slave holders, northern men who compromised with slaveholders to hold the union together.  This is a shameful history; and with the exception of stealing land from Mexicans, Indians, and staving off British influence in North America – no topic was as important as slavery was to the United States  before the Civil  War. 

But Kimberley’s brevity opens her to charges of cherry picking.  She picks two or three openly racists policies, actions or utterances from a president, and rarely, one positive policy, action or utterance of a president, related to Africa Americans, and moves on.  

This technique is damaging.  People who would rather not admit that the United States is a white supremacist state can just dismiss this book as too narrowly focused.  Kimberley’s brevity also eliminates the chance of even  nuance.  Take Lincoln.  Kimberley uses the example of his support of a scheme to settle blacks on an island off Haiti to show he had no intention of keeping Africans in America.  She believes this shows his inherent racism.  But does it?  He may just as well be trying to mollify conservative  northerners who feared large numbers of freed slaves in their cities and towns.  This scheme was advanced at the same time as the  Emancipation Proclamation.  Whether Lincoln supported the Haiti scheme, or merely used it as a political tool, is not debated by Kimberley.  For her it is a proven fact.  But the topic is debated by scholars  and has been for years.   It is far from a settled matter.

Presidential motivation is the authors fixation.  Kimberley cites, again and again, that presidents only courted black votes for reasons of expediency, and not through moral zeal.  This is most likely true, but could this not be said of every president on nearly every issue?  What president continues to pursue policies that he or she knows are not popular, and will hurt his  political future?  Did FDR, a wealthy white man, want to enact the New Deal, and its socialist-type initiatives, from conviction, or was he forced to do so by a clambering, unemployed electorate and a fear of communism?  This is yet another criticism that someone who does not wish to view America as a white supremacist state can deploy.  How do we know the real motivations for a president’s policy decisions?  When policy a true of racist motivation or a political ploy?

Sadly, Kimberley provides too little agency to Africans in American.  She renders them a kind of naive blank slate, hoping that a president they  just voted into office will keep his promises and better their conditions, which never happens.  They just hope things will get better by uncritically listening to white men seeking power.  This is unfair.  People of African descent in America have always had some form of power, and used it shrewdly for their benefit.  They were real people and not simply victims.

But perhaps the most harmful element of this book is the ‘is it good for black people question’ she returns to again and again.  This is similar to the question that my fellow Jews ask, half in jest, is it  good for the Jews?  But the question, when raised about an entire group of people, has little value.  Some Israeli Jews, especially in the current government, see Trump as good for the Jews.  He supports settlement, annexation and Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  Many Jews in American, especially progressives, view Trump as bad for the Jews.  He supports white supremacists who are brazenly and violently anti-Semitic.  So, is he good for the Jews?  This depends on who you ask.

The same applies to African-Americans, who are not homogeneous, and  have varying opinions of what is good or bad for them, depending on when, where, and how they live or lived, their gender identity, and their income.  So her yardstick in measuring presidential value via African Americans is too blunt.  Kimberly’s book once more suffers from its compression; rather than expanding her notions to tackle these complex issues, she has gone for brevity. The work, therefore, suffers. This could have been a large, important book about the intersection of race and the executive branch in its many manifestations – instead it reads like a poorly reasoned polemical booklet. 

How To Be an Antiracist

How To Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, is setting much of the tone of how race is discussed in America, and therefore is an important book.  In order to understand the new terms and parameters of the discussion of race in America, Kendi’s book is key.  He makes important points. 

Most of us know that race, as a biological category, is meaningless.  Since the sequencing of the human genome science helps us to understand that there is very little genetic difference between so-called races; in fact, there is far more genetic diversity within groups, like Africans, than there are outside of groups.  If we don’t know this, we should.  Race is a social construct.

That social  construct was recently created.  It was 'crafted' by the Portuguese in the 1400s to justify the slave trade in Africans.  This, in turn, leads to Kendi's major thesis: racists policies create racists ideas, and not the other way around.  Also, racism is not caused by ignorance of racial groups, a common idea, but by those in power who are very aware of the group they are trying to suppress through racist policies.

These are Kendi’s main ideas, and he runs them through various scenarios.  This book, part policy statement, part memoir, presents concepts in a clear manner.  Some will find his arguments circular.  Sometimes they are.  Others will think he is too repetitive.  This happens too.  Some will find his largely binary scheme too confining.  Perhaps this is the case.

Regardless,  this is an important book.  In the right hands, it can begin important and meaningful conversations about a topic that haunts our nation.

Today's Voices

PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 is a surprisingly accomplished collection of work. Confession: I skipped the editor’s introductions, which may be important, but I did not want to have any framing device to read these works.  

Solid throughout, there are, for me, some standouts: “The Rickies,” “The Manga Artist,” “Tornado Season,” and especially, “Bad Northern Women.”  This last story has a particularly unique style and rhythm, and is a voice we rarely hear and very much need to hear it; I eagerly await more work from Erin Singer.

The range of stories here truly represent the voices of our time, tackling the challenges of this strange American moment.  This is a worthy book all around.

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy

Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy, by James S. Hirsch, documents what would be called in  a pogrom in Jewish studies.  In 1921, the Greenwood section of Tulsa, where a fairly affluent black community lived, was destroyed in a day and night of carnage by armed white people, both acting officially for the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma, and unofficially as rioters and looters.

Until recently, this event, which probably left three hundred people dead, and thousands displaced, was not widely known.  When I read about it in the 1990s, I had never learned of it;  thankfully, that is now changing.  Probably the most crucial historical issue of the massacre is mass graves.  Almost all scholars of the Tulsa Race Riot agree that more African Americans died than the official tally.  Stories of mass graves in at least three sites in Tulsa have long been rumored.

White Tulsa is finally facing its legacy, to some degree.  In late 2019, ground anomalies were found in two areas of Tulsa long rumored to hold mass graves.   This summer, an excavation will take place (if all remains on schedule).   As we approach the one-hundred year anniversary of the massacre, learning more about the final resting place of its victims is long overdue.

This book is informative and necessary.  The one flaw is a wave of typos, as if parts where not closely copy edited.  Some of them ruin the flow of the narrative.  Clown is used for down.  Sims for seems.  Cut for but.  There are many others.  They are words closely related to the intended word, as if someone was asleep at the wheel.

Collapse and Rebirth

Last time I read about the collapse of the Bronze Age civilizations the Sea People, in a cue the barbarians moment, wreaked havoc on more settled empires and plunged the eastern Mediterranean into a dark age.  Highly literate cultures like Mycenaean were overrun by less civilized Dorian Greeks; illiteracy and poverty spread, fortress cities emerged like medieval castles, and bards like Homer kept the culture of Mycenaean alive orally through tales of the Trojan War.

Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, shows how these older notions are too simplified, based on theories rather than fact, conjecture rather than consensus; as in the study of all ancient culture, there are far more questions generated than settled answers about the last years of the Bronze Age.  

Cline brings us up to date. Rather than a single answer, the global culture of the late Bronze Age went down from invasions of the Sea Peoples (whoever they were), internal revolts, climate change, drought, earthquakes, and demographic shifts.  Cline also, rightly, reminds us that such a thing as a dark age is too gloomy a moniker.  The collapse of the Bronze Age ushered in the Iron Age, where a small group of confederated tribes called Israel filled the power vacuum in Canaan.  We still live with the impact of their stories today; without the destruction of the Bronze Age behemoths, this would not have happened.  The Homeric tales ushered in the great age of the Greeks.  These stories became their foundation texts, and until recently, along with the bible, the anchors of so-called western civilization.  For the new to grow the old must often die.

Readin' & Writin'

The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park, by Jack Lynch, is a playful and informative treatment of how we speak, write, spell, and pronounce English, and how we have tried, and most often failed, to impose order on the English language.

Lynch brings us through the early history of the language.  It is hard for us to imagine when English did not have a standardized spelling.  But there was a time; at the vernacular stage of English, when Latin and Greek were used for education, English was not considered a priority.  But later, as English was used in more rarefied circles, it was felt that it needed dictionaries and grammars like classic languages.

The author works through several layers of the history of attempts to tame the English language, especially the perennial battle between descriptivist and prescriptivist sides of the language. 

Lynch has written an entertaining and enlightening work on what could be a very dry subject.