A Few Good Books

THE VICES by Lawrence Douglas

(Other Press - 2011)

A witty and urbane novel, about a writer's friendship with an unusual fellow college professor, who is strangely charming and impenetrable, has uncommon girlfriends and a mysterious family history. As one blurbist put it, this book's central virtue is a compassionate intelligence of its depiction of pain, and the unexpected consolations of uncertainty. Recommended.

STATE VS. DEFENSE by Stephen Glain

(Crown - 2011)

Highly-readable history with a point. The title suggests a rivalry between State and Pentagon, but this book is really a big-picture explanation of how the U.S. has pursued the goals of empire since the 1940s, recounted through the stories of larger-than-life characters who shaped our history, like George Marshall and Douglas MacArthur. Glain is an excellent storyteller, and it makes this book a pleasure to read. In chapter after chapter, he homes in on exactly the issues that you want to understand better, from Dean Acheson’s battles against the McCarthyites who witchhunted China experts out of the government, to Kennedy’s trajectory as a military leader from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the maneuvering that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It is incredible, to learn how the Pentagon sallied through one era after another, always expanding, always marshalling scary-sounding reasons why more funding was necessary. At the end, it is chilling to see Glain’s view on how Pentagon voices are now training their sights on China, as the next competitor, and hyping military danger where little exists. Much food for thought, here. Highly recommended for anyone who likes to look at global trends and understand the history behind them.

BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James McPherson

(Oxford University Press - 1988)

Overall, standard, irreplacable, insightful, immensely readable account of the Civil War by a great historian.

TRIED BY WAR Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief -- by James McPherson

(Penguin Press - 2008)

A steller little collection of essays about Lincoln and the Civil War by our master historian.

UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe

(1852)

After reading several books about race, and about the South, I took Nicholas Kristof's suggestion and read this classic for the first time. To my surprise, it remains remarkably readable, and even riveting. It really was a brilliant stroke, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, to convey the horrors of slavery by describing the wrenching pain of separating families, particularly mothers from their own children. All the South's justifications for its old systems melt away here. Reading this book, I could more easily grasp how it had a tremendous galvanizing effect, in the 1850's, on abolitionist forces that helped force the Civil War.

THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett

(Putnam/​Amy Einhorn Books -- 2009)


A classic women’s book group nominee. The idea -- seeing life in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s through the eyes of Negro maids -- is a smart one. I was hooked from the start. Using local dialect for two of the three main narrators, while imperfect, adds a sweetness that infuses the story. Minny is a character to remember. The others, less so. The story is engrossing, if not particularly deep. It is the portrayal of these women in a place not so long ago, yet so far away, that makes it compelling. After finishing, I read an interview with Kathryn Stockett where she says she would not presume to speak for black women who worked as maids in that era. But that is exactly what she does in this book. It is gutsy and presumptuous, but acceptably so, because she pulls it off. Easy to read, enjoyable.

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS by Isabel Wilkerson

(Random House - 2010)

This book grabbed me, enthralled me with story after story for more than 500 pages, and ended up making me think about America history in a richer, more textured way. Wilkerson traces the paths of three ‘colored’ folk from their birthplaces in the segregated South, on their journeys up north, to the trials of assimilating to a new culture as American society transforms them from Negro to black to African-American. The architecture of the book is complex, yet so skillfully constructed that it reveals no cracks. In between personal episodes, Wilkerson blends historical research with sharp insight to yield broad conclusions. Each of her main characters captures a major stream of the Great Migration of 1915-1970, a movement so vast (6 million people) and unled that it has gone far less recognized than far smaller movements like the Gold Rush and the Dust Bowl, which lent themselves to shorter, more accessible portrayals. Wilkerson is a fine writer, and she left me caring deeply about each of her protagonists, as they bring the movement alive. Yet Wilkerson takes us from those tales to a larger awakening, about how the Great Migration mirrored, sometimes inversely, the American story of immigration. There are parallels – new arrivals from anywhere are routinely discriminated against as unwashed and uneducated troublemakers, when in fact they are more hard-working and family-oriented. But there are striking differences, too – immigrants from overseas were quickly afforded a superior legal and social standing, while black migrants who were theoretically full American citizens at birth actually suffered terrible discrimination and racism.

The Great Migration was fueled by numerous causes and carried numerous dynamics. One was the “pull” of growing availability of jobs up North, starting in World War I. But Wilkerson does not skimp on the “push” of lawlessness, lynching and caste society in the South, with details that reminded me how crazy, and crazy-making, Jim Crow laws actually were.

A supremely memorable book. Highly recommended for anyone interested in America history.

MASTER OF THE SENATE by Robert Caro

(Knopf -- 2002)

So we knew that Lyndon Johnson was an overbearing, colorful, ambitious, tender, obnoxious and ultimately tragic character. And we knew that before all his Vietnam Agonistes, he had been a power in the Senate. Not just a power, this book shows. Johnson was a legislative genius, with a superhuman determination and unmatched skills of persuasion. Even more of a surprise, to me, was that at the center of Johnson’s great run as Majority Leader in the 1950s lies a remarkable story – how he pulled a U-turn on civil rights in 1957 and succeeded in passing legislation that no one else could possibly have achieved. It’s a story of great drama, with significant consequences for American history.

Robert Caro’s third volume on Johnson, even better than his first two, is a fully absorbing chunk of history with an utterly fascinating character at its core. Caro takes 1040 pages to tell his tale, and it is not one too many, as he earns our trust to follow the narrative through all the extra background on the Senate, how it came to be, how it stagnated and faltered, and how Johnson revived it. I had only been vaguely aware of the firm chokehold on the Senate by conservative Southerners, and didn’t realize that they had actually prevented a single piece of new civil rights legislation for nearly a century. To explain how Johnson broke the logjam, and why he did so after all along suggesting that he’d do the opposite, Caro draws a broad picture of the state of race relations in the 1950s, the specific dynamics within the Senate at that time, and the coalescing of forces that finally allowed him to lead a remarkable change. Totally engrossing.

Caro is a master of describing the dynamics of power, and Johnson may be a perfect match for him. The book covers Johnson’s term in the Senate, from 1948 to 1960, starting with his quick realization that the path to power lay first through kissing up to the grand old bears, the aging senators from the South who wielded all the authority when he arrived. Richard Russell, in particular, comes across as a compelling figure, and Johnson’s relationship with him was complex and tender. While Russell was as racist and change-intolerant as his fellow southerners, he was also a wise Senator, who gracefully defused MacArthur's power-grab against Truman in 1951.

Johnson is outsized in every way – his appetites for food and women, his energy and will, his smarts and knack for timing – and he harnesses it all in pursuit of political power. Johnson’s ambition drove him to find little levers of power in the arcane rules governing the Senate, and them expand them and wield them forcefully. Knowing that Johnson’s presidency, and his struggles with the Kennedys, lie beyond this book in Caro’s next volume, only added extra poignancy and expectation. Highly, highly recommended.

TO A MOUNTAIN IN TIBET by Colin Thubron

(Harper - 2011)

Colin Thubron is an acclaimed British travel writer who has ventured through Russia, China and Central Asia. With restrained, spare prose, Thubron is a versatile painter of place, capturing the look and the language of locale. This slender new book, reads more like an elegy than a traditional story of travels. His trek takes him toward the ‘lonely peak’ of Mount Kailas, considered by Tibetans to be the holiest mountain of all in their highly-elevated desert. Following an itinerary through a remote section of Western Nepal, passing tiny, impoverished villages, on foot and by Jeep, ordinarily would offer a firm framework for his story.

On this journey, however, Thubron reaches beyond his customary traveler’s tale. He cannot quite contain his grief of recently losing his mother and his sister, whose deaths have made him the last surviving member of his family. He refers to it with understatement and discretion, British though he is. Yet his grief undulates through the narrative and gives it an emotional rawness that fits with the forbidding landscape.
“We clamber down towards the frontier by slopes already fractured and slippery.” Thubron writes. “Torrents of shale oversweep the track. The colours around us are pastel grey and shell pink.”

His eyes are alive, but his mind muses on mortality. In places, he slips easily into distracted thought. He trusts the strange intuitive path of unprompted memory recall. He admits the ultimate pointlessness of a tough journey, and he does not waste our time searching for any artificial sense of resolution. In his mental disorientation, made worse by the thinning air, we sense a softly beating human heart.

Thubron is an expert guide for the region’s complex topography of Tibetan Buddhism, Hindu practices, and the deities and spirits of the Bon religion, which preceded and then informed Buddhism in Tibet. He is refreshingly clear, and unintimidated, in his descriptions of the temples and prayer practices of pilgrims he meets along the way.

Tibetans look death in the face as bluntly as any culture. Monks have been known to use human skulls to sip tea, as a daily reminder of the darkness that awaits. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a classic, and Thubron traces its belief that a dead person’s spirit takes a well-defined journey of its own in the days after a last breath. He also describes the traditional and still common practice of ‘sky burial,’ where Tibetans take a dead body, chop it into small pieces, and let a pack of vultures devour it.

All along, Mount Kailas looms as Thubron’s destination. Stunningly beautiful, remote and austere, Mount Kailas stands alone, to the west of the Himalayan chain of more famous peaks. It has been a spiritual target for Tibetan pilgrims for longer than any recorded history can recall. India’s four great rivers find their source at its foot. Mount Kailas has never been climbed to the summit. Like other pilgrims, Thubron aims only to get to a path that circles the mountain, which is journey enough.

COLONEL ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris

(Random House - 2010)

The third volume. As carefully and compellingly written as the earlier volumes. Can't quite reach the magic of 'The Rise,' but still a fine piece of history, with all the right WWI context.

OLD FILTH by Jane Gardam

(Chatto & Windus - 2004)

I never heard the term 'Raj orphan' before reading this story, and I am now surprised that I had never heard of this author, either. She's a marvelous writer. Sharp, funny, resonant. Having lived in Hong Kong, I knew the acronym, FILTH. But it doesn't capture the full-blooded character that inhabits this tale. Highly recommended.

THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET by David Mitchell

(Random House - 2010)

Hard to imagine a less-relevant-sounding setting for a novel than a corrupt port at the foot of Nagasaki in late 1600s Japan, as Dutch and British traders struggle for a foothold. A waif-like Jacob de Zoet is our unlikely protagonist and his odd obsession for midwife Orito Aibagawa is a bizarre way to set a romance. The story follows a highly unlikely trail of woe that I found completely believable, moving and engrossing. I even made it through a long and intense section on the politics of a British ship, in order to get to the part about a mountaintop nunnery where sinister rituals take the story in yet another unexpected direction. David Mitchell is a literary genius. His ventriloquism, as one reviewer put it, is as sharp as ever.

THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris

(Random House - 1980)

Deeply absorbing and satisfying. A magical pairing of subject and biographer. Theodore Roosevelt comes across as a bucking bronco – intense lover of nature, voracious reader and writer, devoted friend and husband, uncannily talented politician. Morris is more than equal to the task of capturing all sides of this kaleidoscopic life, and simultaneously delivering concise and enjoyable explanations of the concurrent history. Each chapter seems to bring forth yet another incredible story, from election to the State Senate at age 23, to hunting down horse thieves in the outback of Dakota territory, to puncturing corruption in the New York Police Department. Morris’s writing is elegant, clear and artful. Not surprised to see that this book won the Pulitzer and National Book Award after it came out in 1980. Reading this book feels like riding Roosevelt’s irresistible rise to power. Highly recommended.