#106: The Outsourced Self

The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times, 

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012)

Summary:
"From the famed author of the bestselling The Second Shift and The Time Bind, a pathbreaking look at the transformation of private life in our for-profit world.

"The family has long been a haven in a heartless world, the one place immune to market forces and economic calculations, where the personal, the private, and the emotional hold sway. Yet as Arlie Russell Hochschild shows in The Outsourced Self, that is no longer the case: everything that was once part of private life—love, friendship, child rearing—is being transformed into packaged expertise to be sold back to confused, harried Americans.

"Drawing on hundreds of interviews and original research, Hochschild follows the incursions of the market into every stage of intimate life. From dating services that train you to be the CEO of your love life to wedding planners who create a couple's "personal narrative"; from nameologists (who help you name your child) to wantologists (who help you name your goals); from commercial surrogate farms in India to hired mourners who will scatter your loved one's ashes in the ocean of your choice—Hochschild reveals a world in which the most intuitive and emotional of human acts have become work for hire.

"Sharp and clear-eyed, Hochschild is full of sympathy for overstressed, outsourcing Americans, even as she warns of the market's threat to the personal realm they are striving so hard to preserve."

Table of Contents:

1. You Have Three Seconds
2. The Legend of the Lemon Tree
3. For as Long as You Both Shall Live
4. Our Baby, Her Womb
5. My Womb, Their Baby
6. It Takes a Service Mall
7. Making Five-Year-Olds Laugh Is Harder than You Think
8. A High Score in Family Memory Creation
9. Importing Family Values
10. I Was Invisible to Myself
11. Nolan Enjoys My Father for Me
12. Anything You Pay For Is Better
13. I Would Have Done It If She'd Been My Mother
14. Endings 
15. The Wantologist

My Take:
Another Second Shift or Time Bind this ain't. I suspect Hochschild's decision to write it was born of her own conflicted, guilt-spiked feelings at seeking a paid caregiver for her elderly aunt, and I think the book might have been stronger and more compelling had it focused on those intimate activities -- child and elder care, for example -- that pretty much everyone needs, and which have increasingly been moved to the market sphere and paid for. That story's been told many times, though, so what we're left with seems less like a thoughtful exposition and discussion-starter and more a voyeuristic "Wow, look at all the crazy, unnecessary stuff the 1% (or maybe just the 0.1 or 0.01%) will pay people to do for them!" Sure, it's interesting and may seem creepy or just weird that someone who's rich enough will spend beaucoup bucks on a kid's birthday party or various aspects of the wedding-industrial complex, but it's hardly a social problem on the order of the second shift.

#95: Victory

Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, by Linda Hirshman

(New York: Harper, 2012)

Summary:
"A Supreme Court lawyer and political pundit details the enthralling and groundbreaking story of the gay rights movement, revealing how a dedicated and resourceful minority changed America forever.

"When the modern struggle for gay rights erupted—most notably at a bar called Stonewall in Greenwich Village—in the summer of 1969, most religious traditions condemned homosexuality; psychiatric experts labeled people who were attracted to others of the same sex 'crazy;' and forty-nine states outlawed sex between people of the same gender. Four decades later, in June 2011, New York legalized gay marriage—the most populous state in the country to do so thus far. The armed services stopped enforcing Don't Ask, Don't Tell, ending a law that had long discriminated against gay and lesbian members of the military. Successful social movements are always extraordinary, but these advances were something of a miracle.

"Political columnist Linda Hirshman recounts the long roads that led to these victories, viewing the gay rights movement within the tradition of American freedom as the third great modern social-justice movement, alongside the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement. Drawing on an abundance of published and archival material, and hundreds of in-depth interviews, Hirshman shows, in this astute political analysis, how the fight for gay rights has changed the American landscape for all citizens—blurring rigid gender lines, altering the shared culture, and broadening our definitions of family.

"From the Communist cross-dresser Harry Hay in 1948 to New York's visionary senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010, the story includes dozens of brilliant, idiosyncratic characters. Written in vivid prose, at once emotional and erudite, Victory is an utterly vibrant work of reportage and eyewitness accounts, revealing how, in a matter of decades, while facing every social adversary—church, state, and medical establishment—a focused group of activists forged a classic campaign for cultural change that will serve as a model for all future political movements."

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: How an Army of Good Gays Won the West
• 1. Gays and the Cities: Community First, Politics Later
• 2. Red in Bed: It Takes a Communist to Recognize Gay Oppression
• 3. It Was the Sixties That Did It: Gays Get Radical, Radicals Get Gay
• 4. Stonewall Uprising:  Gays Finally Get Some Respect
• 5. The Good Gays Fight the Four Horsemen: Crazy, Sinful, Criminal, and Subversive
• 6. Dying for the Movement: The Terrible Political Payoff of AIDS
• 7. ACT UP: Five Years That Shook the World
• 8. Failed Marriages and Losing Battles: The Premature Campaign for Marriage and Military Service
• 9. Founding Fathers: Winning Modern Rights Before Fighting Ancient Battles
• 10. Massing the Troops for the Last Battle: The New-Media Gay Revolution
• 11. With Liberal Friends: Who Needs Enemies?
• 12. Victory: The Civil Rights March of Our Generation
• Epilogue

My Take:
I've gotten backlogged in my blogging again (backblogged?) and don't recall either any especially profound reactions to the text or vivid pictures of what else was going on while I read it, but this was a thorough, informative, and engaging history of the U.S.'s final (as of right now) civil rights frontier. Victory should be required reading not just for the LGBT community (many of whom won't require a mandate anyway) but for their mostly straight allies (even if they/ we're afraid of what someone will think if they see them/ us carrying it at work) and for anyone interested in contemporary politics, culture, and social movements.

#83: 1491

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

by Charles C. Mann

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

 Summary:
"In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

"Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew."

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION / Holmberg’s Mistake

1. A View from Above

PART ONE / Numbers from Nowhere?

2. Why Billington Survived
3. In the Land of Four Quarters
4. Frequently Asked Questions

PART TWO / Very Old Bones

5. Pleistocene Wars
6. Cotton (or Anchovies) and Maize (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part I)
7. Writing, Wheels, and Bucket Brigades (Tales of Two Civilizations, Part II)

PART THREE / Landscape with Figures

8. Made in America
9. Amazonia
10. The Artificial Wilderness
11. The Great Law of Peace

My Take:
Interesting, I guess, but as something to read on my own, somewhat dense and slow (or maybe that's just me).
 

#70: Under the Banner of Heaven

Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, 

by Jon Krakauer

(New York: Doubleday, 2003)

 Summary:
"Jon Krakauer's literary reputation rests on insightful chronicles of lives conducted at the outer limits. In Under the Banner of Heaven, he shifts his focus from extremes of physical adventure to extremes of religious belief within our own borders. At the core of his book is an appalling double murder committed by a pair of Mormon Fundamentalist brothers, Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a revelation from God commanding them to kill their blameless victims. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this crime, Krakauer constructs a multilayered, bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, savage violence, and unyielding faith. In the process, he uncovers a shadowy offshoot of America's fastest-growing religion, analyzes the abduction of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart (and her forced 'marriage' to her polygamous kidnapper), and raises provocative questions about the nature of religious belief.

"Krakauer takes readers inside isolated communities in the American West, Canada, and Mexico, where some forty thousand Mormon Fundamentalists believe that the mainstream Mormon Church went unforgivably astray when it renounced polygamy. Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the leaders of these outlaw sects are zealots who answer only to God. Marrying prodigiously and with virtual impunity (the leader of the largest fundamentalist church took seventy-five 'plural wives,' several of whom were wed to him when they were fourteen or fifteen and he was in his eighties), fundamendalist prophets exercise absolute control over the lives of their followers and preach that any day now this world will be swept clean in a hurricane of fire, sparing only their most obedient adherents.

"Weaving the story of the Lafferty brothers and their fantastical brethren with a clear-eyed look at Mormonism's violent past, Krakauer examines the underbelly of the United States' most successful homegrown faith and finds a distinctly American brand of religious extremism. The result is vintage Krakauer, an utterly compelling work of nonfiction that illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behavior."

Opening Line:
"Almost everyone in Utah County has heard of the Lafferty boys."


My Take:
I'll give Krakauer credit, and assume that much of what he describes was more shocking when he first published his book 9 years ago, before so many similar news and fiction accounts have been aired. That said, it's a good book and I still like his work, but would have liked him to have focused more on contemporary Mormon Fundamentalism and less on the history of Mormonism. I know his point is that the faith's violent past somehow leads to the fundamentalist horrors that bubble up now and again, but he doesn't sufficiently convince the reader how Mormonism is different in this regard from, oh, Judaism or Christianity -- both of which have plenty of violence in their own histories. Is it just because Mormonism is more hierarchical and values absolute obedience more highly? Or is there something else? A decent read, but again, the history seemed a bit too Wild West for my liking without a clear explanation of how it got us (or Mormon Fundamentalists, anyway) where we (they) are now.
 

#61: Rebels in White Gloves

Rebels in White Gloves: Coming of Age 

with Hillary's Class -- Wellesley '69, by Mirian Horn 

New York: Times Books/ Random House, 1999

 Summary:

"'Freak out, Suzy Creamcheese. Drop out of school before your brain rots,' urged Frank Zappa. 'Protest boxy suits! Protest big ugly shoes!' exhorted the Wellesley News. 'Get your ring before spring,' cooed the women's magazines. Reject 'inauthentic reality' in favor of 'a more penetrating existence,' advised Hillary Rodham to her fellow graduates. Whipsawed by these conflicting mandates, the Wellesley Class of '69 were women on the cusp, feeling out the new rules. Rebels in White Gloves is their story.

"When these women entered Wellesley's ivory tower, they were initiated into a rarefied world where the infamous 'marriage lecture' and white gloves at afternoon tea were musts. Many were daughters of privilege; many were going for their 'MRS.' Four years later, by the time they graduated, they found a world turned upside down by the Pill, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Roe v. Wade, the Vietnam War, student protests, the National Organization for Women, and the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment. 'Coming of age at a rare moment in history and with the equally rare privilege of an elite college education,' writes Miriam Horn, 'the women who graduated from Wellesley in 1969 were destined to be the monkeys in the space capsule, the first to test in their own lives the consequences of the great transformations wrought by the second wave of feminism.'

"For the thirtieth anniversary of the Class of '69 -- 'Hillary's class' -- Horn has created trenchant, remarkably nuanced portraits of these women, chronicling their experiments with sex, work, family, politics, and spirituality. Horn follows them as they joined SDS, tumbled into free-love communities, prosecuted pot growers, ministered to Micronesian natives, fled trust-fund security, forged and surrendered marriages, plumbed the challenges of motherhood, and coped with the uncertainties of growing older. As Horn writes, 'The women of '69 have come out as debutantes. They have also come out as lesbians, as victims of domestic abuse, as alcoholics.' In all their guises, these are wise, well-spoken women who look back on the last thirty years with great eloquence and humor, and whose coming of age mirrors all women's struggles to define themselves.

"On Commencement Day at Wellesley thirty years ago, Hillary Rodham told her classmates, 'We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us understands and attempting to create within that an uncertainty. The only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives.' In Rebels in White Gloves, Miriam Horn has created raw and intimate portraits of women on the verge. Their tumultuous life paths -- wild, funny, heartbreaking, unforgettable -- are a primer in women's history of the past fifty years and a timely attempt to make sense of the increasingly blurred line between the personal and the political."

Table of Contents:

1. The Wellesley Years
2. Mothers and Daughters
3. Rebellions and New Solidarities
4. Reinventing Womanhood
5. Breaking the Barriers
6. Balancing Work and Family
7. Full-Time Moms
8. On Their Own
9. Spiritual Journeys
10. In Search of Self
11. Life's Afternoon

My Take:
Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed this one -- not least because it didn't purport to offer any neat, tidy answers. An intriguing read for anyone interested in latter twentieth century history, women's history, or how our paths are shaped by and diverge after our college experiences (I can check all of those boxes). Thankfully, less navel-gazing than some accounts I've read that try with less skill to extrapolate some greater significance from a small, non-representative sample of individuals' experiences.

#46: Sophie's World

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, by Jostein Gaarder, translated by Paulette Moller (New York: Berkeley Books, 1997, c1994)

Summary:
"A page-turning novel as well as an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World -- with more than thirty million copies in print -- has fired the imaginations of readers all over the world.


"One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, each with a question: 'Who are you?' and 'Where does the world come from?' From this irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through successive letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while also receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To answer this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning -- but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined."


Opening Lines:
"Sophie Amundsen was on her way home from school. She had walked the first part of the way with Joanna. They had been discussing robots. Joanna thought the human brain was like an advanced computer. Sophie was not sure she agreed. Surely a person was more than a piece of hardware?"

My Take:
Finally got around to reading this one after having it on my shelf for, well, longer than I can remember. Fascinating concept and an accessible, even enjoyable overview of Western philosophy for those who (like me) somehow didn't take that particular elective in college. The story and/or plot do get a bit bogged down at times, with the philosophy often overwhelming the Sophie-and-the-philosopher frame story ... but to be fair, part of this may be a result of the translation. Not quite a page-turner, at least for me, but still much more interesting than browsing Wikipedia or lugging around a college textbook for a taste of the history of philosophy.

#6 - The Debt

The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, by Randall Robinson (New York: Dutton, 2000).

Summary: "In Randall Robinson's view, racial problems can't be solved until America is willing to face up to the devastating effects of slavery and educate all Americans, black and white, about the history of Africa and its people. In his recent book, the highly successful Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America, Robinson makes a stirring call to form the next legion of African-American leadership. Now, in The Debt, he argues that reclaiming the lost history of Africa and African-Americans will help provide a much-needed springboard for solving many of today's problems -- from finding new leadership within the black community to developing meaningful educational programs to helping black people empower themselves economically. Robinson also argues that the United States must be prepared to make restitution to African-Americans for 246 years of slavery, and the century of de jure racial discrimination that followed, via major educational programs and economic development. Robinson offers a solution-oriented approach to controversial issues of social justice in a style that is both personal and informative."

Table of Contents:

1. Reclaiming Our Ancient Self
2. Taking Account of the Long-Term Psychic Damage
3. Race to Class to Race
4. Self-Hatred
5. Demanding Respect
6. Race, Money, and Foreign Policy: The Cuba Example
7. The Cost of Ignoring the Race Problem in America ...
8. ... and in the Black World
9. Thoughts about Restitution
10. Toward the Black Renaissance

My Take: If you haven't guessed, I'm focusing on the theme of race and culture this month. It's interesting to be finishing and reviewing this book, with its discussion of the lasting impact of a 350-year history of slavery and racial discrimination, and simultaneously starting Some Sing, Some Cry, which begins just after emancipation as a former slave whose three children were all fathered by her white master prepares to leave the Low Country plantation on which she's lived her entire life.

This is a hard, hard book for me to review. As with so many other subjects, I'm both eager to learn more, and not sure I know enough to offer any intelligent criticism. The fact that it's a book about race and racism in the U.S., and on paper I'm as white-and-privileged as it gets, makes this post all the more challenging. Bottom line, though, is that I'm glad I read The Debt, and have just added its successor, The Reckoning, to my book list. While I'm not sure I agree with Robinson's call for reparations to the descendants of former slaves, or how on earth a reparations program might work in practice, the book made me think about much of America's history and culture in a new light. That's a valuable outcome, just by itself.

To be brief, Robinson's argument is that the 250-year practice of American slavery and the hundred-plus years of racism and de jure discrimination that followed it were, no question, the greatest crime against humanity the world's ever seen. There's no way to eliminate the socioeconomic gap between African-Americans and whites, he says, until we not only acknowledge the magnitude of this wrong, but truly commit to righting it.

The book's middle chapters were for me the most persuasive and compelling. Here, Robinson argues that the Middle Passage and the slave trade, by kidnapping and killing so many young, strong, and able people; separating countless children from their parents and extended families; and doing so on such a broad scale over so many generations, virtually annihilated many of Africa's ancient, highly sophisticated civilizations. The impact of this crime was compounded by a U.S. and Europe that consistently overlook both the role of African people in history and the racism of our own esteemed leaders. We know, if we give it much thought, that Jesus, born in the Middle East to a Jewish woman, was unlikely to have been blond and blue-eyed; that Cleopatra probably didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor; and that George Washington owned slaves. At this point, we've even heard something or other about Thomas Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings. But Robinson makes us think about what we don't hear: that Haiti owes its independence to those slaves who revolted against Napoleon's soldiers in 1791; that Jefferson's relationship with Hemmings likely began when she was in her mid-teens and he thirty years older; that even Abraham Lincoln considered shipping all American blacks back to Africa after emancipation; that Charles Lindbergh was "a self-described racist [who] had written in Reader' Digest in 1939 that aviation was 'a gift from heaven ... a tool specially shaped for Western hands ... one of those priceless possessions which permit the white race to live at all in a pressing sea of yellow, black, and brown" and urged the U.S. to enter World War II on the German side. Nor is Robinson inclined to let any of these popular heroes off easily, on account of their living in different times with different standards:

"It is often argued in Jefferson's defense that it is unfair to hold his behavior with regard to race to modern standards, that after all he was 'a man of his time.' But who isn't? ... What about Genghis Khan? ... As the first ruler of united Mongolia, he is thought of by Mongolians much the same way as most Americans think of George Washington. In the West, of course, he is remembered as a ruthless scourge. But he was every bit as much a man of his time as Jefferson was of his.

"For that matter, the same specious excuse can be offered for Ataturk or Franco or Lenin or Mao or Hitler. All of them committed great wrongs within permissive if not supportive environments. But this cannot be allowed to render their heinous wrongs any less reprehensible."

Robinson notes that Thomas Paine, a man of the same time as Washington and Jefferson, called the slave trade "lamentable," "wicked," "inhuman," and "barbarous." He also asks the reader to consider why Washington, D.C. boasts a Holocaust museum but not a slavery or African-American museum:

"For wasn't the practice of slavery at least as serious a system of human rights wrongs as the Nazi holocaust? Did not the holocaust of slavery last longer -- indeed, 234 years longer? Did it not claim at least twice as many lives, in the Middle Passage alone? Did it not savagely eviscerate the emotional core of a whole race of people on three continents?"

Understand that Robinson is not seeking here to blame the Jews for American racism, or minimize their own experience of discrimination and human rights crimes; in fact, on several occasions, he cites the Jewish community's call for post-Holocaust reparations and the German government's relative generosity in paying them as positive examples to be emulated. Rather, he argues that the utter absence of black or African faces in the American story as generally told tells African-Americans that they and their contributions are valueless.

"Since this nation's inception, taxpayers -- white, black, brown -- have spent billions on museums, monuments, memorials, parks, centers for the performing arts, festivals, and commemorative occasions. Billions more have been spent on the publication of history texts, arts texts, magazines, newspapers, and history journals. Formulaic television and large-screen historical fiction treatments virtually defy count. Almost none of this spending, building, unveiling, and publishing has been addressed to the needs of Americans who are not white. ... And, indeed, needs are what we are talking about here. ... Ancestor worship is not alone the exotic preoccupation of quaint people mired in superstition in some remote corner of the world. Larger-than-life evidence of its industrialized-world variants can be seen in virtually every public park in America. ...

"Trouble is, George Washington is not my ancestor, private or public. He owned my ancestors, abused them as chattel and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death. I and mine need to know about George and Martha but, assuredly, we do not need to revere them. Indeed, psychically we cannot afford to revere them. ... Blacks need to remember who we are, not remember with others who they are."

I'm not sure this distinction is as black and white as Robinson suggests here; the U.S. is, after all, a nation of immigrants and mutts, and I suspect many of us see Washington and Jefferson not strictly as ancestors or owners, but as both -- or neither. Even if his argument is oversimplified, though, his broader point is at least worthy of consideration.

"In every competitive society, instruction in history and the humanities is a valuable instrument with which the dominant group, consciously or unconsciously, attempts to sustain its primacy, ill-gotten or not. In America, whites control virtually every mainstream purveyor of instruction, academic and ephemeral. And in America, whites have caused all Americans to read, see, hear, learn, and select from a diet of their own ideas, with few others placed to make suggestions, not to mention decisions. ... State and federal budgets, to which Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans contribute, are uniformly controlled by whites who seem to uniformly believe that the only ancestor worship worth funding is theirs."

The end products of this whitewashed history, asserts the book, are a persistent self-hatred within the black community and pervasive low expectations that extend beyond it.

"[A] static, unarticulated, insidious racial conditioning, to which all Americans are subject, lifts the high-expectation meritless (Dan Quayle comes to mind here) and, more often than not, locks down in a permament class hell the natively talented but low-expectation black. The gap mocks the efforts of the best of us, black and white, like some ageless yawning crevasse that separates the perennially privileged on their gilded higher ground from those who learn from birth to expect and therefore to reach for little."

Or, from a later chapter:

"[I]t is the very normalcy of our self-denial, our self-ignorance, that is so troubling. It all leads me to wonder whether any group of people in the world has been more resolutely, if unconsciously, committed to notions of self-abnegation than blacks. Well-trained, quiet-flowing, oblivious, uncritical, near total cultural self-abnegation. It is akin to driving in heavy night fog. Little can be seen of where we're going, less still of where we've been. The thickness of the blanket pitch steals our confidence. We conclude that the only hope is to follow the broken white line that snakes in the darkness."

Self-hatred, says Robinson, is evident in the performance of many black comedians, but is not limited to African-American images and experience; Native Americans are marginalized in much the same way. This is a tough argument to make convincingly (here's the danger of reviewing this book while I'm in the middle of reading The Race Card), as it's easily trivialized by those who think the struggle for civil rights and equality is so over already, but an extended thought experiment offered here at least makes you think twice about how insidious and offensive the cultural mainstream can be:

"On occasion, between [televised sports] plays, I have allowed myself to imagine certain franchise transmutations. I would change the team's name and logo, and then try to gauge public reaction.

"The Washington Redskins would become the Washington Blackskins. The logo on the helmet would look like the old caricatured Aunt Jemima. That Sunday, the Blackskins would be playing in Atlanta against Ted Turner's renamed football team, the Atlanta Mafia, who were coached by an Irishman named Maloney but known to all America variously as the Don and the Assassin. On the side of their helmets was a likeness of Al Capone. Before the game, toy machine guns had been handed to the Turner Field faithful, who screamed throughout on cue from Miss Fonda: Rat tat tat. Thatsa deada Blackskin. Thatsa deada Blackskin.

"That same Sunday, the New York Jews had a bye and did not play. One nationally syndicated sports columnist had written that the Jews did not play because they had a 'buy.' No one seemed to notice. After all, it was all in good fun.

"Across town at George Armstrong Custer Stadium, the New York Genocidists were wrapping up a four-game World Series sweep of the Massachusetts Pilgrim Feeders. The Indians had lost the first three games by large margins. The Genocidists, who wore blue and yellow uniforms reminiscent of the old U.S. horse cavalry, were led by a coach who called himself the General. The team's logo was a half-tone of a slightly inebriated Ulysses S. Grant. That evening, when the eleven-to-one score was announced on the evening news, the New York announcer said, 'The Genocidists have slaughtered the Pilgrim Feeders once again.' ...

"As inclined as blacks understandably are by painful experience to believe the contrary, racism is not black-specific. It is like the Hydra, the lethal many-headed mythological snake whose heads regenerated as fast as they were severed. Racism is a social disease that exempts no race from either of its two rosters: victims and victimizers."

Robinson also acknowledges the complex interplay between race and class. A long anecdote about a poor, black girl growing up in Boston who's got the deck stacked against her suggests that this interaction is most apparent in education. Many middle- and upper-income people of color are doing so as we speak; likewise, many white people, especially those who are poor, are not. The key difference, however, is that one can be poor and white without people assuming you're poor because you're white; poverty isn't thought to be intrinsically linked with being white in America. By contrast, if you're poor and black, it's just assumed that you're poor because you're black. We believe poor students can succeed, and we believe black students can succeed -- but consciously or otherwise, teachers often expect students who are poor and black to fail. While I don't agree 100% with everything Robinson says in this book, I find him most persuasive when he's arguing for the vital role education must play in combating inequality and injustice:

"Give a black or white child the tools (nurture, nutrition, material necessities, a home/school milieu of intellectual stimulation, high expectation, pride of self) that a child needs to learn and the child will learn. Race, at least in this regard, is irrelevant. ... It is obvious that in any effort to balance America's racial scales, education, defined in the broadest sense, must be assigned the very highest priority."

Where The Debt loses me is in its final two chapters, where Robinson actually makes the call for reparations that he's been working up to all along. I started the book knowing very little about the particulars of the reparations discussion, but skeptical about the overall concept. By the time I reached Chapter 9, though, Robinson's claims had hit their mark; I was sufficiently moved by his discussion of the suppression and denial of the African and African-American role in US history and culture that I was at least willing to be persuaded. Perplexingly, though, the last two chapters don't even begin to do so. Having spent the bulk of the text convincing the reader that a grave injustice was done to black Americans, orders of magnitude greater than other now widely-acknowledged crimes against humanity, Robinson's last two chapters are curiously vague: long on well-written oratory about how something material is owed, but short on specifics as to what, how, and to/ from whom. And personally, that's exactly what I wanted to hear at this point: How, exactly, might reparations for slavery be funded? Who would reap the benefits? Again, look at the racial, ethnic, and class makeup of our country; not everyone fits neatly into a "former slave" or "former master" box. Some of us may be both; some neither; still others may have no way of knowing. Sure, a comprehensive answer to these questions is about as easy as a hard-and-fast definition of race, but given the book's title, I at least expected Robinson to take a more substantive stab at it.

#44 - The Shock Doctrine

My (ahem) legions of followers will recall that often, when I like a book well enough to finish it but am less than overwhelmed, I'll say something along the lines of, "Well, it's worth a read, but I'm glad I checked it out of the library rather than shelling out for my own copy."

Well, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007) is different. For this one, it'd probably have been safer and cheaper if I had purchased my own copy -- not so much because I'll want to read it over and over again, but for all those times I was this close to hurling it across the room and/or plunging my favorite chef's knife through the photographic bullet hole in the cover.

Don't misunderstand me; this is a brilliant and provocative book -- but it's also by turns maddening, infuriating, and utterly depressing (which is why it took me almost 2 weeks to slog through).

Jacket summary: "The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global 'free market' has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq. In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Naomi Klein introduced the term 'disaster capitalism.' Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic 'shock treatment,' losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine tells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years."

Table of Contents:

Introduction - Blank is Beautiful: Three Decades of Erasing and Remaking the World

Part 1 - Two Doctor Shocks: Research and Development

• 1. The Torture Lab: Ewen Cameron, the CIA and the Maniacal Quest to Erase and Remake the Human Mind
• 2. The Other Doctor Shock: Milton Friedman and the Search for a Laissez-Faire Laboratory

Part 2 - The First Test: Birth Pangs

• 3. States of Shock: The Bloody Birth of the Counterrevolution
• 4. Cleaning the Slate: Terror Does Its Work
• 5. "Entirely Unrelated": How an Ideology Was Cleansed of Its Crimes

Part 3 - Surviving Democracy: Bombs Made of Laws

• 6. Saved by a War: Thatcherism and Its Useful Enemies
• 7. The New Doctor Shock: Economic Warfare Replaces Dictatorship
• 8. Crisis Works: The Packaging of Shock Therapy

Part 4 - Lost in Transition: While We Wept, While We Trembled, While We Danced

• 9. Slamming the Door on History: A Crisis in Poland, a Massacre in China
• 10. Democracy Born in Chains: South Africa's Constricted Freedom
• 11. Bonfire of a Young Democracy: Russia Chooses "The Pinochet option"
• 12. The Capitalist Id: Russia and the New Era of the Boor Market
• 13. Let It Burn: The Looting of Asia and "The Fall of a Second Berlin Wall"

Part 5 - Shocking Times: The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex

• 14. Shock Therapy in the U.S.A.: The Homeland Security Bubble
• 15. A Corporatist State: Removing the Revolving Door, Putting in an Archway

Part 6 - Iraq, Full Circle: Overshock

• 16. Erasing Iraq: In Search of a "Model" for the Middle East
• 17. Ideological Blowback: A Very Capitalist Disaster
• 18. Full Circle: From Blank Slate to Scorched Earth

Part 7 - The Movable Green Zone: Buffer Zones and Blast Walls

• 19. Blanking the Beach: "The Second Tsunami"
• 20. Disaster Apartheid: A World of Green Zones and Red Zones
• 21. Losing the Peace Incentive: Israel as Warning

Conclusion - Shock Wears Off: The Rise of People's Reconstruction

My take: If I haven't made this clear yet, I thought the book was brilliant. Klein's controversial thesis is that over the last several decades, Milton Friedman and his disciples -- Chicago School, laissez faire economists -- have sought to do for many of the world's political economies what Scottish psychiatrist Ewen Cameron and the CIA tried to do for individuals' psyches in 1950s and '60s experiments: apply traumatic shocks to break them down completely, erasing all remnants of what had been there before, and then rebuild them anew with totally different structures and parameters. According to Klein, the Friedmanites (or Chicago Boys, as she often calls them) were at least as brutal as, though sometimes more subtle than, Cameron's experiments, but can't succeed forever; as she suggests in the title of her concluding chapter, eventually, shock wears off.

I had high hopes of including an extensive summary of Klein's book (I don't feel like enough of an expert on the subject to offer a good critique), but as it was already overdue, it's gone back to the library before I had the chance. Thus, I'll fall back on my old trick of citing a handful of Real reviews for those whose interest has been piqued: Joseph Stiglitz's, in The New York Times (he really liked it); Tyler Cowen's, in The New York Sun (he didn't); and John Gray's, in The Guardian (not just because he was also a fan, but because a non-U.S. perspective on politically-oriented books is always a good thing).

115 - A Short History of the United States

Same old song here. I'm hoping for real reviews later, but in the meantime, I'm just noting titles and authors to whittle down the backlog:

115 - A Short History of the United States, by Robert V. Remini (HarperCollins, 2008). OK, I have to admit, the title and format of this book made my eyebrows shoot up. Simply put, it's not a lengthy book; 373 pages, including the references and index, and the dimensions are about the size of a hardcover novel. How on earth does one do 500+ years of history justice in 11 short chapters? Some of the answer lies in how the chapters are constructed; for example, Chapter 7 lumps together "Manifest Destiny, Progressivism, War, and the Roaring Twenties," while its successor covers the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II.

Add to that the whole "are you smarter than a 5th grader?" angle. I consider myself pretty well-informed about U.S. history, but certainly there are gaps in what I know. From the Great Depression, even the 1920s, on, I'm in pretty good shape, but when it comes to the real olden days, I pretty much jump from one war to the next, without much recollection of what's in between save the motley stew of misinformation I've picked up from historical fiction. Perhaps that's why I chuckled at Remini's lumping the Great Depression and WWII together, but didn't really bat an eye at the "Emerging Identity" or "Jacksonian Era" chapters, even though those covered longer spans of time (1797-1829 and 1829-1846, respectively).

And so I checked out Remini's book. While it was a bit of a slow starter, I'm glad I stuck with it, warts and all. It has its flaws, but overall, provides a decent overview of U.S. history, and an extensive but not overwhelming reading list at the end for those (like me) who find that the 25-cent tour only whets our appetite for more details. The text really shines in two areas. One is its discussion of presidential selection. While the treatments are necessarily abbreviated, Remini does manage to give the reader a flavor for all but 2 of the presidential elections (the 2008 election hadn't yet happened when the book was printed, but I'm not sure why he fails to mention the 1852 election of Franklin Pierce) the U.S. has seen in its 233-year history. Anyone who remembers holding their breath in November 2000 and listening to yet another joke about hanging chads will enjoy reading about the election of 1824, when John Quincy Adams became president in exchange for making House Speaker Henry Clay Secretary of State, even though Andrew Jackson had more popular and electoral votes; or 1876, when allegations of fraud in Louisiana, South Carolina, and, yes, Florida, put the election in the hands of a 15-member Electoral Commission, which eventually split 8 to 7 along strict party lines, giving all the disputed votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes over Democrat Samuel Tilden (again, even though Tilden led the popular vote). Likewise, more than 100 years before George Bush the elder's Willie Horton ads in 1988, and the era of the sound bite, came the elections of 1884 ("Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine" vs. Grover "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha" Cleveland) and 1840 (William Henry Harrison, a/k/a "Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too," vs. incumbent Martin Van Buren, which Remini describes as "a rollicking campaign of songs, parades, noise, and nonsense. ... Complete with hard cide, coonskin hats, rolling balls, and other such paraphernalia, this campaign was one of the liveliest and funniest in American history.")

The other thing that impressed me about the book was Remini's ability to describe not just what happened, but why it was significant. For example, he notes Henry Clay's vehement objection to then-General Andrew Jackson's 1816 invasion of Florida, which set the stage for an enmity between the two that continued to affect politics for the next 20 years; James Garfield's election in 1880 as the first president to be elected directly from the House of Representatives; Grover Cleveland's record-setting 414 vetoes in his first presidential administration; and Ross Perot's 1992 performance as the strongest by a third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose in 1912.

As I noted earlier, the book has its flaws. One, though this will sound picky, is the maps. I'm usually a big fan of maps, but here, they're poorly executed, many are difficult to read (blurred, and with tiny text, which makes me think someone just shrunk 81/2" x 11" documents down to be roughly index-card sized), and they're often inserted at a point in the text that has nothing to do with what the map's illustrating. For example, a map illustrating westward exploration and expansion from 1803 to 1807 is tucked away amidst the Revolutionary War, and a map of the 50 states and their 2-letter postal abbreviations lands smack dab in the middle of the Cold War and Sputnik. (The latter makes some sense, I guess, as it comes just before a note about the election of 1960 being the first in which the new states of Alaska and Hawaii voted, but the lack of content or explanation made me look at it and say, "Huh?") Remini also has a habit of jumping around chronologically, and while I understand the reasons for this (it makes sense, for example, if you're writing about World War II, to talk about the North African, European, and Pacific campaigns separately, rather than follow a strict time line that jumps around from place to place and makes it tough to follow the big picture), some additional help (i.e., clarifying dates) would have been appreciated.

I also take issue with some of the book's presentation of late 20th and early 21st century history. Perhaps this is inevitable; Remini is primarily a Jacksonian-era historian, and the challenges of interpreting cause and effect and other relationships is different when we're looking back 200 years than when we're considering a more recent period from which frankly, all the dust is still settling. For example, in the "Cold War and Civil Rights" chapter, he notes that the 1950s saw the emergence of a youth culture that found its expression in rock and roll music. Fair enough, but the latter half of this paragraph conflates events which, while they may have happened around the same time, weren't all that closely related otherwise:

"With the arrival of the British rock group the Beatles, the popularity of rock and roll dominated all other forms of music. What soon evolved was an anti-establishment counterculture in which 'hippies,' as they were known, wore long hair, engaged in communal living, became sexually promiscuous, experimented with marijuana and other drugs, and foreswore political involvement. This hippie phase of the youth movement faded by the early 1970s."

While there was likely some overlap between Beatlemania and hippiedom, the Fab 4's stuff was at best, a small fraction of the counterculture's music. What happened to Jimi Hendrix? Bob Dylan? CSN? I recognize that a book of this breadth necessarily sacrifices some level of depth, but given the full page devoted to the Roaring '20s jazz age culture, it seems like a bit more light could have been shed on the youth movement of the 1960s and '70s, rather than implying that all Beatles fans were pot-smoking, free-loving communitarians straight off the set of Hair. Mr. Remini, allow me to present my mother.

The last chapter, entitled "The Conservative Revolution," makes me further suspicious about the chip Remini may have on his shoulder about contemporary history. The title itself seems, if nothing else, a bit premature; as an historian, he should know better than to proclaim events of 15 years ago "revolutionary" without at least some disclaimer about how they'll be viewed in a generation or 3. Moreover, some of the comments about social changes are just plain wrong, or at least misleading:

"Of particular concern to an older generation was the fact that the family in which children were raised by two parents of the opposite sex, one of whom (usually the male) worked and the other (usually the female) stayed home and raised the children, was disintegrating at an alarming rate. Marriage was often put off until the male had reached his mid-thirties and the female her late twenties."

While I won't argue with his assertion that "an older generation" may be concerned about this trend, I do think he's remiss in taking this concern at face value. Granted, this is my chip on the shoulder, but I feel compelled to point out that a) it's not that the average age of first marriage today is unusually high, but that in the 1950s, it was unusually low; and b) while it's true that compared to 50 years ago, far more children now live in single-parent homes because their parents are divorced or were never married, we also have far fewer children lose a parent to death (from wars, illness, etc.). I won't hijack my own review for the sake of my trusty soapbox, but I do think Remini does better when he sticks to legislative and political history, especially in the modern era, and leaves contemporary social history to those who specialize in this field (Stephanie Coontz's work makes fascinating reading, if you're interested.)

That said, I still consider A Brief History on balance as a book that did what I wanted it to do: provided a mostly-balanced and thorough introduction to U.S. history, and provided a refresher in some of the pre-WWII era stuff that I either didn't learn or have forgotten since high school. I appreciate the Reading List at the end of the text, too, and am adding several of Remini's recommendations to my TTR list as we speak.

#111 - Columbine

No pat words to describe this one, folks. My 111th book of the year was Dave Cullen's Columbine (Twelve, 2009) -- a Denver-based journalist's account of the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the repercussions (and more than occasional mistakes) that followed on the part of law enforcement and the media, and the many, unfathomable steps that led Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to commit the deadliest U.S. high school shooting in history.

Simply put, the book is devastating. It's not especially graphic until the last chapter, when Cullen takes the reader through the minute-by-minute unfolding of the nightmarish events of April 20, but nonetheless leaves images that haunt you: the first two victims' bodies lying outside the school uncovered for hours; teacher Dave Sanders bleeding to death in a science lab while waiting in vain for help; the already-depressed mother of an injured survivor committing suicide. Cullen's primary thesis seems twofold: First, much of what's become common knowledge about the Columbine tragedy is patently false. Second, related to the mythologizing of Columbine, there was no trigger. Harris and Klebold weren't goths or members of a Trench Coat Mafia, and weren't targeting jocks or African-Americans or any other identifiable group; rather, their initial intent was to blow up the entire high school, and shoot only those survivors who ran from the blast. As New York reviewer Will Leitch summarizes in this review:

"Ten years later, the Columbine High School massacre is still about nothing. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did not go on a killing spree because they were picked on, or because they were pagans, or because Colorado had lax gun laws. Eric was a cunning, calculating psychopath who wanted to kill as many people as possible, and Dylan was a depressive who wanted to kill himself. That is it.

"Such information vacuums are dangerous, which is why the incident, memorialized in Dave Cullen’s new book, Columbine, continues to fascinate, horrify, and confuse. Confronted with the lack of recognizable human logic, we have provided our own, to make us feel better, to profit, to justify the way we see the world. If we are Christian, the shooting showed the imperative of others sharing our faith. If we were unpopular in high school, it cast a light on the dangerous petri dish of public schooling. If we believe in gun control, it reflected the recklessness of the gun lobby and our country’s frightening obsession with firearms.

"But none of these things had anything to do with Columbine. It was just about two boys, stupid and vain, one dangerously charismatic, the other painfully awkward and tragically impressionable. Together, they decided that murdering as many people as possible was the only logical action; the book argues convincingly that the shock of their attack does not come from the fact that they killed thirteen people but that they didn’t kill more"

The book proceeds forwards and backwards in alternating chapters. It begins with the principal addressing the student body a few days before the prom, reminding his students to celebrate safely and come back healthy and alive on Monday morning. (The irony, of course, is that they did, only to have 12 of them and a teacher be killed the next day by 2 of their classmates.) From here, we move forward through the media coverage and legal investigations that followed the massacre, exploring the chaos and confusion of that day and the apparent police maneuvering, jurisdictional wrangling, and covering-up that unfolded in subsequent years in often-excruciating detail. Cullen devotes extensive time and space to debunking some of the more persistent Columbine-related myths, particularly those concerning the killers' motives and Harris' supposed conversation with Cassie Bernall (who, according to an eyewitness, didn't have time to speak to Harris in the library before he shot her). Simultaneously, there are chapters addressing Harris's and Klebold's histories up until the shooting: Harris's likely psychopathy, Klebold's suicidal depression, and the long trail of plans and clues that went overlooked in the year or more before the attack.

New York Times reviewer Jennifer Senior alleges that "Cullen’s storytelling doesn’t approach the novelistic beauty of In Cold Blood," but as she herself admits, that may not be a fair standard of comparison. I can't speak to Truman Capote's motives, but Cullen is first and foremost a journalist, and it's in this capacity that he offers this book. Notes Senior:

"It’s to his credit that Cullen, a Denver journalist who covered the story for Salon and Slate, makes the reader care about getting it right. Columbine is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the same reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old-fashioned journalism. While Cullen’s storytelling doesn’t approach the novelistic beauty of In Cold Blood (an unfair standard, perhaps, but an unavoidable comparison for a murder story this detailed), he writes well enough, moving things along with agility and grace. He leaves us with some unforgettable images — like the pizza slices floating aimlessly about the school commons, which was flooded with three inches of water because the sprinkler system had gone off — and he has a knack for the thumbnail sketch."

If you're at all interested in this grim chapter of contemporary U.S. history, I highly recommend this book. Be prepared, though, for it to stay with you in somewhat unexpected ways. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking I can't look at adolescent rage or arrogance quite the same way again.

#46 - Nixonland

Whew. I finally finished Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, by Rick Perlstein (Scribner, 2008) last night. I'll write a real review later, but in the meantime, the Cliff Notes version is: Long and slow-going at times, but a fascinating read if you're at all interested in contemporary U.S. history and politics.

Well, looks like I won't have time for much more than the above, as I've fallen several books behind. So, the short version it is. Nixonland is a history of Richard Nixon's rise to power (the bulk of the action occurs between Lyndon Johnson's defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1965 and Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972, though Perlstein does detour back in time to revisit Nixon's earlier years), and an argument about how his use of that power continues to affect American politics today. In short, he traces many of the politics of division that we now take for granted -- specifically, of the right wing's appeal to middle America (a/k/a The Silent Majority, or the Orthagonians ... for a definition of the latter, you'll need to read the book) on Nixon's actions. For a more detailed review, check out this one in the Atlantic Monthly, or this one by George Will in the New York Times. I will add, though, that I especially enjoyed the cameo appearances by many who would later rise to political power: young Oxfordite Bill Clinton leading an anti-war rally at the U.S. Embassy in London; Karl Rove as a sleazy-even-then young RNC campaigner; Jesse Jackson as the leader of the first post-Daley Illinois delegation to the Democratic Convention; a less-than-articulate George W. Bush describing the thrill of his first solo flight