A new book, an old book on inequality (an old problem)

This New York Times book review points to a new book about income inequality in the U.S. and how it is shaping up to threaten our democratic institutions.

On the theme of inequality, a global perspective on the problem is reviewed here, with my review of The Bottom Billion. The phrase refers to the poorest billion people in the world, and the book is written by a World Bank official with wide-ranging expertise in the area.

Also of interest: the One Campaign to get the U.S. and other developed nations to devote 1% of GDP to world-wide efforts to combat poverty. It's unlikely to get much traction with Pres. Trump in charge, but I thought I'd link to it anyway.

Advice for liberals -- let's support the news!

Pres. Trump's cult of personality thrives on media and liberal opposition. Liberals should be "wise as serpents, innocent as doves" in response, to quote Jesus. The clever tweets and opinion pieces help to relieve the tension, but they don't address the real impact Pres. Trump's policies will have on real people. Americans and Nevadans need better news, not just more shouting. Yes, action against what is wrong is needed, but so are facts on the ground. If liberals stick to their guns, not just with demonstrations but also with research and evidence to back up their claims, they will win the day and elect a Democratic Congress in 2018. It worked for Republicans in 2010 -- "grass-roots" or "astro-turfed" action coupled with conservative think-tanks created the Tea Party phenomenon, which Pres. Trump embraced. It can work for liberals now.

For this reason, I invite all my Nevada friends to check out and support two news sites here in Nevada that have responded to Pres. Trump's "alternative facts" with real reporting. They both have a more liberal slant than some news outlets, but this structural bias, which they try to avoid, is different than the overt, "info-tainment" slant of Rupert Murdoch and Stephen Bannon's creations. The first is KNPR and the other is the Nevada Independent. I trust both sites to give more impactful news coverage than anything you'll see on the mainstream media, and they are undoubtedly more fact-based than any tweet storm the Donald can dream up.

Other independent news sites will undoubtedly crop up on the national scene, but two liberal news sites are Huffington Post and Politico. A fact-checker I like is Politifact.com. The "grey lady," the New York Times, also has a valuable website, as does the Washington Post. Both sites have paywalls, but it is worth it to me to subscribe to these news sources, as they try to be balanced in their coverage and let the public officials "hang themselves" with their own comments.

As far as liberal think-tanks go, they like to maintain their independence, but I recommend the Pew Research Center for in-depth look at polls and public opinion. Check out the Pew Research Center's fact sheet on refugees, for example, for some perspective on our current situation.

So my advice to liberals is, invest in journalism!

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

This book, the first novel I have finished in a long time, drew me in from the opening preface through to the ending scene, deepening its evocation of 1930s New York City right up to the closing sentence.  This 2011 first novel offers vibrant, complex characters, and deploys a surprising plot revolving around a romantic love triangle, but without succumbing to cliche. Differences in class and temperament complicate the plot, and twists and turns throughout the novel offer plenty of surprise and delight. A sense of time and place pervades the novel, ultimately enveloping readers in a delightful setting.

The strong and subtle voice belongs to the narrator, Katey Kontent. The male author writes in a woman's voice, which can be problematic, but he mostly avoids common pitfalls and presents Katey as a fully rounded character, writing skillfully and unobtrusively. The author playfully offers glimpses of Katey's character, doling out bits and pieces of her history as the plot advances, and the sharp observations he places in her mouth and pen add to the pleasure of reading. For example, when the main male character, Tinker Grey, learns her name and asks if she is -- content, that is, --  she answers, "not by a long shot." Then, when she ruminates on Tinker's name, she explains how WASPs tend to nickname their children after long-lost trades (Cooper, Smithy, etc.). Both observations offer clues to Katey's and Tinker's character that become significant later in the novel. The third leg of the love triangle, Eve Ross, "one of those surprising beauties from the American Midwest" who came to New York to make her way on her own, fits a type in some ways, but she is more than she appears to be at first, and her strength of character comes through in the end. After a scene involving a meeting at the Rainbow Room between Katey and Eve, Katey sums up Eve as a "butterfly" -- "with two dramatically different colorings -- one which serves to attract and the other which serves to camouflage -- and which can be switched at an instant with a flit of the wings." While Katey's summary may actually be wrong, it is a skillfully extended metaphor, and beautiful in its own way.

Part of the art of crafting a novel is hiding significant facts from readers until their revelation later on. In this sense, Rules of Civility is a classic novel, along the lines of Great Expectations or even an Agatha Christie mystery -- both of which Katey significantly references in the closing chapters. The novel is also fresh and inventive, though, in that the revelations point toward the readers' own presumptions without compromising the characters. I can't be more specific without giving too much away, but suffice to say that this reader is impressed with the way the novelist positions his chess pieces. The setting, too, becomes a part of the story, with 1930s New York casting a shadow over the action. Instead of a brooding presence, this New York is very much alive, in spite of the Depression. The wealthy few who were insulated from the crash still live high in Manhattan, even as working class people face some raw realities. 

My one critique of the novel would be that it doesn't quite register the desperation of the lower classes -- when Katey talks of "inner Californias that were just as abject and unredeeming as the real thing" in the preface, I thought there would be more than just acknowledgement of that economic desperation. Only one character, Tinker's brother Hank, an artist with the WPA, seems to represent these lower-class people, and he is not as desperate as others, refusing support from his banker brother. Blacks and Hispanics play only bit roles. One use of jazz in the novel is to try to bring these people into the story, but it only succeeds in part.

The conclusion satisfies, and the preface and epilogue, along with an appendix, George Washington's "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation," offer an interesting frame for the novel. The last line is a beauty. The quips I have read compare the novel to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Truman Capote, and film noir of the era. While these references represent high praise to some, for me it is higher praise to state that the novel stands on its own two feet as a worthy way to spend your reading dollar and time.

Time Travel by James Gleick (kindle edition)

This mostly accessible book covers vast cultural, philosophic, and scientific terrain, under the premise of examining time travel -- a possibility, a paradox, a phenomenon? First, James Gleick is my favorite non-fiction author, bar none. So I'm a big fan. Second, the topic is of deep interest to me, not just because of my last name (Rip VW could be called a time traveller, sleeping for 20 years), but also because it is a fascinating trope in our culture that allows for some pretty fun storytelling. So, this is going to be a positive review, nicht wahr? Of course it is, but you don't have to skip to the end to know that.

The scientific worldview that Gleick comes from is a frame for examination of ideas. He takes the idea of time travel and traces its origins, beginning with the H.G. Wells novel The Time Traveller, but of course starting much earlier than that, in fits and starts, with let's say the industrial revolution. That's where we get our "modern" sense of time as something that can be synchronized and structured by things like time zones. In physics, time begins to be "measured" around the time of Sir Isaac Newton, but Newton used his heartbeat to time his experiments, I believe. The invention of mechanical clocks and the discovery of longitude are outside the scope of Gleick's book, but they are important scientific and technological achievements -- not the subject of the book, but related to it. Newton's laws of physics take time as an essential element (velocity = distance/time). But what is time?

Now we're really thinking. We discover through Gleick's analysis that time is both psychological and experiential, as well as paradoxical -- we know what it is until we try to describe it. Is it subjective or objective? Does it "flow" like a river? No, Gleick concludes, that is strictly a metaphor. And, I discovered by reading this novel, the Latin motto tempus fugit means not, as I had assumed, time flies, but rather, time flees. Time escapes rational characterization. And time travel turns out to be both a logical impossibility (causes lead to effects, after all) and a possibility in physics (time can run backward or forward, based on the sign in an equation -- just as the irrational number i, the square root of -1, is a logical impossibility that creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, so too is -t).

So, Gleick is having some fun with the idea of time travel, in a discursive, almost deconstructive way. He mentions an artist almost in passing, Chris Marker, who "may have been a time traveller," it appears, but created a work of art (film) named la jetee, about memory, remembrance, forgetfulness, and film, that I defy any modern filmmaker to beat. I haven't seen it, so I can't say with confidence that it is a good film, but it is interesting, to say the least. In any event, Gleick takes us through cultural and scientific ideas of time travel, ranging from time capsules (which he says are a somewhat foolish way to try to evade death) to novels like The Time Traveller, to Dr. Who (a hard-won favorite of mine, too), and aims at answering the question of whether time travel is possible or desirable, based on such cultural phenomena.

His answer is yes, but with some caveats. First, he believes time travel is an act of the imagination that is valuable, much as dreaming or fiction generally is valuable. He isn't interested in the paradoxes or "rules" of sci-fi time travel so much, though he does mention them. Instead, what he's interested in are the stories that break the rules -- the so-called "bootstrap paradox" gets a whole chapter, for example, based on Robert Heinlein's comic short story in which a character named Bob interacts with various versions of himself who have traveled through time. What he's after is what those stories reveal about the nature of time and life itself. Second, he doesn't think time travel is really possible, although it turns out the laws of physics don't contradict it necessarily, except maybe entropy. He talks about popular physicist Richard Hawking holding a dinner party for time travellers, invitations issued after the fact, to which no one came, as an example of the logical fallacy of cause coming after effect. He also mentions the Biblical account in Joshua where God stops the sun to create a longer day, but dismisses it as wishful thinking, "who hasn't wished for more hours in the day?" He doesn't dismiss the possibility of time travel outright, either in fiction or in real life, but he comes to a conclusion of sorts about the limitation of the scientific equations to really describe reality, in that what appears possible in some senses based on Einstein's space-time continuum and other physics equations, isn't possible in our experience, except in fiction.

Time travel is therefore essential to our culture. It is both possible and impossible. It is a paradox and a mystery, but also a cold hard fact, that time travel is not possible. Or is it? So much of our storytelling these days involves time travel that we've gotten used to it; it's part of the culture. In the end, Gleick's concluding chapter on our current times is a little disheartening. The future is dystopian these days, not just because that view of time travel has won out, whether from 1984 on or from the invention of the Internet, I'm not sure; but also because we have shorter memories and shorter futures than we thought we did in the 1960s, say. The Internet has a way of foreshortening both past and future -- after all, we have access to a wealth of knowledge there, but, as Gleick says, "who has time to think?" Books like Gleick's, though, give me some hope that we can rise above our current predicament and invent a future that is better than our present, still.

The Martian by Andy Weir

I liked this novel well enough to finish it, even though I had seen (most of) the movie prior to picking it up. It has a lot of talk about measurements in it, which will be off-putting to some and reminded me too much of high school chemistry class and calculations of limiting factors. Still, if you skip some of the analysis of how much the hero needs of what, the story is  very entertaining and the characterization of Mark Watney is fun. Yes, I dare say fun in a scifi novel about a scientist likely to starve to death on Mars after being mistakenly abandoned there. His voice has enough humor and humanity in it to keep me reading through the end. I liked the ending better than the movie's ending, even though it is pretty outlandish, and that's all I'll say so as to not ruin it. Read the book before seeing the movie if you can.

Three novels I haven't finished and four books I'm still working on

I haven't been able to finish many novels lately, and I promised myself I would only post on books I've actually finished. However, some rules need to be broken. The thing is, I enjoyed each of these novels up to a point, and I think they're well crafted, with good stories to tell. I just couldn't get through them, for the following reasons.

Station Eleven (Kindle book about 1/2 way through) -- I think I stopped because I couldn't picture the world as well as I would have liked. It's a sci fi novel about a Shakespearean acting troop wandering in a post-apocalyptic world taken over by a massive viral attack, but there's not much Shakespeare in this novel so far.

The Goldfinch (trade paperback about 1/5 of the way through) -- a sense of foreboding over the ending stopped me. It's a long literary novel that won some awards and had some people comparing it to Dickens, which intrigued me. The beginning is shocking, and the in-depth description of what happens is very well done, but I couldn't help feeling the novel was a little too artful.

City on Fire (hardcover about 1/5 of the way through) -- an intentional interlude in this murder mystery (a letter written by a main character's grandfather) threw me out of the main plot and provided a long backstory, so it was a slog to get back to the main plot -- once I got back, I wasn't as interested as I was at the beginning. Then new characters get introduced pretty far into the novel, so I wasn't sure where it was going. I may pick this one back up if I get time.

I also am still working on the following books in various genres:

Life on Mars, a poetry collection by Tracy K. Smith (almost finished) -- I liked this book for its honesty and clear imagery, not sure about the anger and where it's directed.

The Science of Interstellar, a science textbook by a theoretical physicist who consulted on the film (got through the first few chapters) -- I determined that the science had been stretched considerably to fit the film, and stopped reading

God is with you every day (read almost every other day through January) a devotional by Max Lucado that I discovered is random snippets of his books, with a little bit of scripture thrown in -- not as inspiring as I'd hoped

Glory Days (not started) by Max Lucado

Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

I read this memoir in about four hours of uninterrupted time on two recent flights.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, not just because I found the author engaging and interesting but also because he is a kindred spirit -- a Christian with some unorthodox leanings.  I would say Don is a liberal Christian because I am more political than the author, who tends to be more mystical and spiritual than I am.  Nonetheless, we agree on an awful lot, which made this a good, quick read for me.  I don't read many Christian authors who avoid cliche as studiously as Don Miller.  I liked his style and personality coming through the pages.  I wondered if he might be less liberal than he was letting on, whether he was dark-skinned or light-skinned, whether it had all gone as smoothly as it was told.  In the end I decided those labels and doubts didn't matter.  Don seems to me to be genuinely trying to represent Jesus in his own unique way.  I don't use the word unique lightly.  I think Don's stories are personal, true, unembellished, and his own.  I really came to see Jesus in a different light because of this book, and I can give no higher praise.

Feed by M.T. Anderson

This satirical young-adult novel caught my eye in the bookstore because it had been nominated for the National Book Award.  I wasn't aware at the time that the National Book Foundation had a category for YPL, or Young People's Literature, but I am glad I picked up the book anyway.  Feed takes the current commercialized Internet, facebook, and texting, and fast-forwards into a future where people have constant streams of information fed directly into their brains.  The feed has infiltrated so much into the culture that it is the dominant force in the people of the novel's lives, and its influence commercializes everything. The feed offers mostly advertising information to its users, including lingo and images, and the pieces of the feed that are included between chapters illuminate the extent to which even political speech is dumbed-down. In this future, space travel to the moon and Jupiter is also relatively easy, people can "feel" their credit being taken from them, and radiation lesions are commonplace. These facts are taken for granted, and no one seems to question things very much

The language in the novel at first is jarring, not just because it is "typical teen"-speak, but also because it has future slang in it.  After a while, though, the slang is easy to decipher, and doesn't become much of a barrier to enjoying the story, at least for this reader.  There is plenty of crude current-day language in the novel, too, which may stop some parents and does stop me from recommending it for young readers.  The novel tells a boy-meets-girl story, with the twist of a hacker invading "the feed" at a party in the first few chapters. The teens at the party who were affected by the hacker end up spending some time in the hospital to ensure their feeds are still working -- an episode that doesn't stop the main character, a teenage boy, for very long, but which has lasting consequences for Violet, or Vi, his main romantic interest.

The novel is written from the boy's perspective, which is shallow and self-absorbed, as most of us are.  The boy's perspective is an extension of the feed, in some ways, and Vi tries to teach him to resist it.  Vi's character fascinates the boy due to her "old-fashioned" vocabulary, common sense, and wit. She was home-schooled, and her father is a former professor whose vocabulary is even more old-fashioned. I related to the father, as an old fuddy-duddy who loves some old novels/literature and tries in some ways to resist the pull of technology on our lives. The boy sees the father as behind the times, and he is in many ways.  However, even the father cannot resist the feed completely, and he tells his own story toward the end, explaining why he felt he had to provide the feed to himself and his family.

The novel has a somewhat cliched plot buried in all its satirical commentary on consumerist culture.  It is definitely a YA novel, but the thoughts it provokes make it worth reading.  I enjoyed the author's take on where we are headed, and wondered what kind of nightmare the culture can produce if some of the novel's predictions become true.  I ached for the characters by the end.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The narrator of The Book Thief first encounters the title character in three awful moments when she witnesses a death. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator describes these moments in fragments, focusing on the color of the sky in each moment -- white, black, and red.  The reason he gives for describing these moments this way is that he needs a distraction from his job -- that is, carrying the souls away from human beings when they die.  The novel never describes where these souls may be going or how the narrator came into existence -- save that for a bigger book, say The Bible -- but the wry humor and astute wisdom in the voice of the narration, along with the heart-rending story itself and the numerous insightful descriptions of life, make this a book worth reading.  The setting is Nazi Germany and the title character is a lonely girl who learns to read and write, but please do not confuse this book in any way with the diary of Anne Frank or with typical young adult literature.  The novel avoids the fiction world's formulas and digs deeper into what it meant to be a child in Nazi Germany, even a non-Jewish child, than any fictional work I have read.  It also approaches the concentration camps obliquely and shields young readers in some ways from the worst horrors of that time, as fiction can and non-fiction cannot.  Instead of describing the mass murder in institutional terms, as a non-fiction work might, the novel treats it much more intimately.  The staggering number of souls lost in World War II and the Holocaust (or Shoah, the more appropriate term) is mentioned, but the primary aim of the novel is not to catalog the horrors but to put a human face on the suffering.  Liesel Meminger, the title character, experiences joy, learns to love, and experiences loss, all within the overwhelming presence of Nazi Germany. She learns to fight for herself and her friends, not just with fists but also with words, as well as acts of compassion.  She is a heroine who discovers who she is through language, but it is not an intellectual story -- her first book theft is closely tied to her brother's death, and her adoptive father helps her learn to read it in the middle of the night when she awakes from her nightmares about that death.  The most intense emotions of the story (at least for this reader) come from this father-daughter relationship, but there are many other relationships in the story that pack an emotional punch or reveal some surprising truths.  The narrator is somewhat detached from human emotion, but his observations are coming from the perspective of a reader who has read and re-read Liesel's story, interweaving it with his own.  He has insight into Liesel's story, he is not detached from it, and it is this glue that brings the story to a satisfying close, even in the midst of grief and death.  The novel is highly recommended for those with some understanding of Nazi Germany, although I probably wouldn't use it to introduce the subject to young readers.  A non-fiction work like Night or the diary of Anne Frank might be more appropriate for teens who may not grasp the reasons for the ominous overtones of the novel.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I saw this movie halfway through reading the book. Which I suppose is appropriate, since the interlocking stories in the novel all get interrupted except the one in the middle. The novel is constructed to be a Russian doll that splits open to reveal another doll inside, recursively.  The stories are the dolls, and the author lets his audience in on his tricks through meta-comments in the stories.  The main character of one story finds a copy of the preceding story torn in half, for example, then says to his pen pal how frustrating it is to lose a story halfway through -- he compares it to an interrupted love affair.  The style of the novel is jarring -- just as the reader starts getting used to the 19th Century reconstructed journal's style in the first story, it stops mid-sentence.  (I also read this book on a Kindle, so it wasn't as easy to flip to the end or skip the boring parts.)  The language is frequently stilted, purposely so, and aims at high art. The stories also jump forward in time with each interruption, so the author takes us to two futuristic settings, two contemporary settings, and two in the past.  These stories have great plots with many twists and turns, and though I did get lost a little in the theological discussion of the 19th Century story, which also centers on the Pacific slave trade, I found that I wanted to know how all the stories would turn out in the end.  The stories in the novel are sadder and stranger than in the movie, as they almost always are.  I enjoyed them, even though I knew, or thought I did, how they would end.  Having seen the movie in that sense helped sustain me through the jolts described previously.  However, it was hard not to put the movie version back into the novel in my head once I had seen it, so in that sense the movie was a hindrance.  I would have loved the book more if I had read it all the way through first.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Divergent (Photo credit: prettybooks)

This young adult novel grabbed my attention over the weekend -- I listened to the first half on audiobook, then read the second half on an iPad.  It tells a by-now familiar story of young heroes finding love in a dangerous fantasy world (familiar to fans of The Hunger Games or Twilight, to be sure), with just enough imagination to make the story feel new.  The love story is pretty predictable, but it gave enough interest to the story to keep me reading.  The fantasy world is a future version of Chicago divided into "factions" based on personality and values, in which 16-year-olds are given a choice of which faction they will belong to for the rest of their lives.  The heroine, Beatrice Pryor, chooses between "Abnegation," the selfless faction from which all the government is formed and to which her family belongs, and "Dauntless," the courageous faction that defends the city, toward the beginning of the novel.  The other factions, "Erudite," "Candor," and "Amity," all have roles that fit their values -- seeking knowledge, truth, or getting along, respectively -- in the society created by the novel.  The choice she makes, to forsake her family and join Dauntless, introduces her to a new family of sorts that she must compete against in initiation -- her peers, other 16-year-olds who have chosen to switch factions.  It is an interesting conceit, mirroring contemporary high school and the switch from family to peer loyalty.  The Dauntless initiation is risky, involving physical fights, mind games designed to force initiates to overcome their worst fears, and ruthless competition.  In this dangerous initiation, Beatrice (her name shortened to Tris), meets and ultimately falls in love with Four, a trainer within the process, age 18.  The main obstacle to these two lovers coming together is that Tris is preoccupied, and rightly so, with surviving the Dauntless initiation.  Four has his own demons, which aren't fully explored until the end, when we learn the reason for his unusual name.  I don't want to spoil anything, so I'll leave the plot description there.

The main reasons I like this novel are its focus on confronting fear, its authenticity in describing the internal world of a teenager in this conflicted society, and its simple prose, which makes it a quick read.  One chapter, in particular, stands out for its depiction of fear -- the chapter about ziplining from the top of a skyscraper, which strains credulity but also provides a glimpse into how overcoming fear creates a bond among those who have done so.  The teenage heroine's internal consistency is shown in multiple scenes, but particularly in the scenes involving a technology that allows her to be tested through a sort of shared hallucination -- the "aptitude test" before she chooses her faction (from whence we get the novel's title), then again when she confronts fears as part of the Dauntless initiation.  Finally, the stripped-down prose allows the reader to focus on the plot and doesn't get in the way, with the possible exception of the fact that the faction's names are not parallel -- something that probably only bothers a grammar geek like me.
 
Young adult (YA) literature has reached deeper into the culture since Harry Potter became a pop culture phenomenon, with both good and bad effects.  Twilight, The Hunger Games, and now The Mortal Instruments (City of Bones) have all been made into movies.  I have read bits and pieces of all three of these series and have seen most of the Twilight movies and The Hunger Games movie, mostly because of my wife's influence.  I also loved the Harry Potter series, and thought the movies did a decent job of bringing the books to life.  Harry Potter bent the children's lit/fantasy genre in some ways, while more recent books have been following a YA genre formula. Some have been called "dystopian" futures, especially The Hunger Games, but I don't think they fit that term precisely.  (I tend to think of A Brave New World, 1984, and Bladerunner as more dystopian than The Hunger Games, but maybe that's just me.)  Divergent will also be made into a movie in 2014, part of the trend toward YA lit in moviemaking.  It does fit neatly into the genre of "dystopian" YA fiction, and I hope it is a stepping stone toward those classic dystopian fiction novels for young readers.  The only place it really falls short is that its themes do not come close to the questioning of norms that truly dystopian fiction evokes.

Related articles

• Divergent and the virtues: a review of sorts
• Some More Dystopia: Divergent
• Review "Divergent" - Veronica Roth
• How a City of Bones and a Dystopian World Can Teach Us The Value of Choices and Trust!
• 'Divergent' Trailer: Shailene Woodley Shows Bravery in a Dystopian Future

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

Jon Meacham's biography of the third US President argues that Jefferson sought power and used it to his advantage, even as he claimed not to do so. While this could be said of virtually everyone who became President, in Jefferson's case it is a little surprising because he has such an aura of being a philosopher-sage, as opposed to simply a politician. Jefferson definitely had literary talents, he pursued scientific knowledge, and he had unique philosophical views, but he was more of a politician than most people probably think.

In Meacham's account, he devoted his life to the principle of democratic republicanism, as opposed to monarchy, and viewed many political questions through the prism of defending the American experiment against the threat of monarchy or sympathizers of monarchy.

Jefferson's life is a progression from the plantation life of his father's family to the House of Burgesses in Virginia, then to the Governorship of Virginia, then to the Continental Congress, where he drafted the Declaration of Independence, then to a diplomatic mission to France. From there, he became Secretary of State under George Washington, the Vice President under John Adams, and the President. Meacham treats the progression of Jefferson's life toward power as a kind of given -- he was born into privilege as the son of a landowner and slaveholder in Virginia, although he also inherited debts from his father -- and the book offers little explanation of the ways in which Jefferson rose to greatness, other than an innate brilliance. There are mentions of important teachers in Jefferson's life and turns of fate that led him to be in the right place at the right time, but it all seems to fit a little too neatly in Meacham's formulation of his life. The only troublesome step in the progression is the Governorship of Virginia, which Jefferson may have been unsuited for and for which he faced charges of cowardice because he had to flee from the capital when British troops advanced on it during the Revolutionary War.

Confront and Conceal by David Sanger

This book clearly describes the internal debates that have dominated Pres. Obama's foreign policy, giving plenty of fodder for the President's enemies to accuse him of a "lack of leadership."  On the other hand, it also comes close to defining an "Obama Doctrine" of a limited American role in the world and describes how the President and his team have dealt with an unprecedented series of crises.  The book includes at least three key victories for the Obama team -- the killing of Osama bin Laden, the delaying of Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons through a cyberattack called "Olympic Games," and its managing of the conflict in Libya.  However, none of these victories came without a cost, and the book outlines some of those dire side effects.  Overall, it is a well-researched, balanced look at the President's foreign policy, and it offers a good "rough draft of history," as all political journalism does.

The title of this book doesn't quite do justice to Pres. Obama's foreign policy, but it is apt enough.  The author himself doesn't use the phrase very much in the book, if at all, but it does describe Obama's strategy in some cases.  If there is an "Obama Doctrine," it could reasonably be described as "confront and conceal," meaning that the President is not afraid to confront American enemies through tough action, such as drone strikes and cyberattacks, but that he tends to keep those actions secret. While the author faults Pres. Obama for not communicating a grand strategy for American power in the world, he generally asserts that his problems in foreign policy arise from the world he inherited from Pres. Bush -- an involvement in two ground wars in the Middle East, the virtually unchecked rise of China as a global economic and political power, the lack of engagement with North Korea and Iran, which were labeled as part of the "axis of evil" by Pres. Bush, and so on.  The author asserts that Pres. Obama has adapted his foreign policy to events such as the uprisings in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria -- the Arab Spring -- since taking office, but that the "big questions" in many cases remain unanswered.  That is probably true, given the way Pres. Obama has reacted to each revolution individually and was caught by surprise on numerous occasions -- how could the President define answers to the big questions given the fact that the world is continually bringing new challenges to his plate?

I don't have the expertise in foreign affairs to judge the accuracy of the author's conclusions, but I can say that the book seems well-researched and fairly well balanced.  The author clearly talked to several key administration officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Pres. Obama, and he describes the internal debates in the administration with clarity and precision.  He tends to view the world through a Washington lens, which presumes that the U.S. ought to have a leading role in the world, but he is doing most of his reporting from Washington, so that kind of makes sense.  Perhaps the biggest "surprise" in the author's view is that Pres. Obama views the U.S.'s role as more limited than other Presidents have, and has fought to narrow the definition of American interests and wind down the wars.  In my view, though, the President deserves a little more blame for telegraphing the U.S.'s timetable for withdrawal in Afghanistan, which emboldened the Taliban and other enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The President wanted the world to know that the U.S.'s commitment to Afghanistan was not "open-ended," but in announcing a timetable for withdrawal, he pretty much gave the enemies of the U.S. a reason to think that we would simply walk away from whatever gains we have made in the country -- we became another occupying force that was not interested in remaking the Afghan society and that the Taliban could then claim victory over.

The book gave me a greater appreciation for the challenges facing the President in foreign affairs, and how much effort and debate goes into each international crisis.  The President's leadership in foreign affairs is under attack in the current election cycle, but he has done well, I think, overall, in trying to reduce expectations that the U.S. can continue to be the world's guarantor of security at any price.  However, there are some real problems with the President's approach, one of which is that the rest of the world really isn't ready to step up to solve some of these problems, such as Libya, and another is that commitments made in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, are going to have to be broken.  The author argues that we could leave Afghanistan in much the same condition as we found it, still a "petri dish for terrorism."  He also states that Pakistan is a much more important strategic problem than Afghanistan, and things haven't been going particularly well there since the bin Laden raid.  

I pretty much skipped the final chapter of the book on China and North Korea -- I think the author might have gotten too much detail from the Wikileaks release of secret diplomatic cables, so that chapter got a little too complex for me -- but I think the overall picture the author paints of Pres. Obama wanting to "pivot" toward East Asia but being frustrated by squabbling Chinese officials who always manage to deflect the blame or responsibility for any concerns the Americans might have seems accurate.  

The biggest victories of Pres. Obama's foreign policy -- the killing of Osama bin Laden, the largely successful cyberattack on Iran's centrifuges that delayed the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb, and the successful deposing of Qaddafi in Libya -- all have some negative side effects, and none of them are unqualified successes.  Perhaps that is the nature of foreign policy, that even the victories raise challenges, and nothing is as simple as it would seem.  I appreciate the book's perspective in raising some of those questions and shaping my understanding of how the President has handled these challenges.


Also, I noted this quote, that accurately describes "progressives" around the world, in the context of explaining how the Muslim Brotherhood was so successful electorally after the protests in Tahrir Square brought down Egypt's Hosni Mubarak: "One thing that most progressive political activists have in common, whether it was the McGovern campaign or Occupy Wall Street, is they don't really like politics and they somehow think that if they just show up and speak eternal truths, people will agree with them."  I found that observation particularly ironic right now.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

The Information is a terrible title, but it disguises a brilliant book.  With clear storytelling and thoughtful analysis, James Gleick demonstrates the power of information and traces its development throughout history. While the prologue mentions the invention of the transistor and the "bit" in 1948, Gleick begins his story with information that was passed along in a pre-literate society through African "talking drums," metaphorical message bearers that share some characteristics of encoded messages today.  From there, he expounds on cuneiform tablets that contain what we would call algorithms, compares the first dictionary ever compiled to the modern online Oxford English Dictionary, and devotes a poignant chapter to the story of Charles Babbage and Ada Byron Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.  The pair theorized about programming as part of an exchange centered around a mechanical "difference engine" in the 1800s, before electricity was well understood.  Ms. Lovelace died young put peered briefly into the future, and Mr. Babbage never did complete his engine.  Still, they were precursors to modern day computing.  The hero of the book is Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory (a mathematical concept of information that reveals it to be a lack of predictability) and the bit (a unit of information that can be expressed as a binary choice between one state and another -- 0 or 1).  Gleick traces the scientific and mathematical development of information theory, then explains how that theory informs and enlivens the sciences and culture from 1948 forward.  The explanation of the mathematical theory requires an in-depth look at Turing's hypothetical machine, but Gleick does not focus on the advances in hardware throughout history.  Instead, he describes the "software" of information, from the telegraph operator's codes and compressions through to Google's search engine algorithm, which views links among web pages as "recommendations."  In the process, he illuminates science and several scientific theories in a new way -- the gene, for example, is seen as information, while quantum mechanics make an appearance in a chapter on quantum computing.  Gleick's ultimate goal is to guide readers to an understanding of information as a whole, and in the process he puts us through our paces in our efforts to understand him.  It's hard to keep up, but the driving intellect behind this book keeps aiming at a higher and higher understanding of the concept.  Ultimately, he makes his case that information is the key discovery of the 20th century, based on advances in science throughout history, and leading to a "flood" of information in the 21st.  Similar to Newton's discoveries in the 16th century, the "discovery" of information promises a sea change in history.

The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

This short story collection is surprisingly political.  I only sampled a few of the stories, and aside from one top pick, "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" by Jim Shepard, they all had a political edge to them.  All in all, I liked them for being "fierce" stories, as editor Laura Furman writes in her introduction to the collection, but after a while it became obvious that the panel that picked the stories had a bit of an axe to grind.  They chose stories with liberal themes or preoccupations -- one story, for example, imagined a world after global warming in which food was scarce in Britain, complete with an attempted rape and many other unexpected horrors in a world with few resources; another imagined a horror of horrors in Budapest at the end of World War II.  Rape or the threat of rape seemed to hang over many stories.  One story I skipped was entitled "Melinda" -- just from the title, I feared that it would be about rape, but from the description at the back of the book it seems to be about a meth addict.  I'm not sure I need to be exposed to this kind of fiction, no matter how adult I am or sophisticated as a reader.  The most important short stories are about people who break rules.  I understand that.  I just don't see the need to be badgered in fiction.  The story I liked the best was the aforementioned "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," which studiously avoids the politics of the Alps in the 1930s (not very pretty politics, I assure you).  It is a fierce story without being polemical or obvious.  It continually surprises with subtlety and tension in a set of family dynamics that matches the tension in the snow before an avalanche.  The extended metaphor of the avalanche dominates the story, and it makes for compelling reading.  I am glad I bought the book just for that story, but I can't say I recommend the whole collection.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

This novel traces the roots of a remarkable book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, through several hundred years of history.  More importantly, it brings the creators of the book to novelistic life through the imagination of the author.  It also tells a taut, dramatic story about the restoration of the book in the modern era, centering around a young fictional Australian expert named Hanna Heath.  Hanna's story could stand alone as a novel all its own, and it provides quite a bit of drama in the end parts of the novel.  It also allows us to see the survival of the book through to contemporary times, and that it is always more complicated than we would expect for something like the Haggadah to survive.  The "people of the book" are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, and the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah tells of the complex interplay between these faiths.  First of all, the book is Jewish, but it is illustrated in a style influenced by Christian prayer books, or books of hours.  It ended up in the hands of Muslim caretakers, and the novel ultimately traces the art back to a Muslim source, although that supposition is not proven as it would be in a non-fiction work. The creators and preservers of the book come into the book through artifacts that are found in the binding or on the pages when Hanna restores the book -- she finds a butterfly wing, for example, that leads into a story of survival during the Nazi era. 

Decision Points by George W. Bush

The 43rd US President's memoir conveys quite dramatically some key decisions of his time in office.  The transformation of the Presidency from peacetime to what the former President calls a "war footing" is striking.  The first few chapters focus on Pres. George W. Bush's family life, the decision to run for President, and stem cell research.  Then, he describes learning of the attacks on September 11 while attempting to promote testing in public schools, and the book shifts into a different gear. The former President attempts to describe the way September 11 forced him to confront some stark realities, in a chapter entitled, "A Day of Fire," but it skirts some other important issues.  The use of what Pres. Bush terms "enhanced interrogation techniques" and others have called torture gets some explanation, but Abu Ghraib and the abuses there get about one sentence -- an off-hand reference when someone says Guantanamo is "no Abu Ghraib."

Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben

I found this book at the local bookstore -- they were featuring the author at one of the front displays.  It is the first novel in a crime series that centers around sports, specifically through the detective/investigator in the case, sports agent Myron Bolitar.  The novel made me want to keep reading, and really was a page-turner in the best sense of the word.  The plot centers around the disappearance of a young woman from a college campus -- she was the cheerleader dating the star quarterback, who happens to be Myron Bolitar's first big client as a sports agent.  Myron is funny and sarcastic in the first scene, in which he negotiates with the team's owner over the quarterback's contract.  This disarming humor throughout the book helps keep readers on Myron's side, even as he and his sidekick/enforcer, Win, descend into some dirty business and commit acts that could be called morally questionable.  The morality level isn't too heavy in this one, though -- it's clear there are good guys and bad guys, and the scenes showing prostitution and drug dealing go out of their way to make those crimes seem completely unappealing.  The author does the standard crime novel trick of releasing just enough information to leave readers guessing, right until the very end.  The twist at the end was a surprise, at least to me, although I probably should have seen it coming.  I am not very good at guessing these things, but I had some hunches that turned out to be right.  Overall, this novel is a very entertaining read.  I noticed a few details from the early 90s that stick out now as outdated, but the novel holds up pretty well with all the changes we've been through since then.

Anne Frank: The book, the life, the afterlife by Francine Prose

This interesting book re-introduces Anne Frank as an intelligent, observant writer and her diary as a work of art.  The author divides her book into three sections -- the life, the book, and the afterlife -- and devotes a final section to teaching the diary in classrooms and college.  The book made me want to attempt to tackle the diary in the classroom again -- the closest I got was showing a film called Anne Frank Remembered (a more complete version of her story than other documentaries) as part of a non-fiction unit.  It is a complex work, though, and putting it in historical context is difficult.  Reading the diary as a whole is something I've never really done -- I've been informed mostly by a dramatic version I saw in high school and excerpts from various textbooks and study books, and I agree with the author of this book that the play oversimplifies the realities of Anne's life and the reasons she was in hiding.  I may go back to the original diary and read it if I get a chance now.  Reading this book inspires a healthy respect for Anne Frank as an author with a self-conscious desire to be published.  A key revelation in the book is that Anne Frank herself went back and revised her diary, intending it to be published at some point.  She recognized that, even if she were "an oridinary girl" in extraordinary circumstances, her story has relevance beyond the walls of her "secret annex."  Her observations of herself and her companions in the annex make for vivid stories, and they symbolize what was lost in the Holocaust in very personal terms.  But beyond that, the work of her diary is to record the humanity and civility of a group of people, the vast majority of whom did not survive the Holocaust, and to document in terms of daily life the privations they endured.  She also explores herself and wishes for things to be different than they are, as most adolescents do, but in a specific context that crystallizes her wishes in very concrete ways.  The fact that her final entry, in which she wonders what she would be like if there were no one else in the world, is her final entry, reminds us that her story ended not in the way she wished but in Bergen-Belsen, a horror of horrors.  It is not enough to wonder what kind of writer Anne Frank might have been had she lived; rather, we have to wonder at the kind of writer she already was, and at the inhuman extermination edicts that placed her in such difficult conditions.  Anne Frank is not an easily reduced author.  She is not the poster-child for optimism that is represented in the play and film versions of her diary, nor is she a saint or a sex-obsessed teenager, as some have made her out to be.  Instead, she is a human being, a Jew, an author who lives on in her work.  That message came through in clear, direct language in Prose's book, and I am grateful for the portrait she offers of Anne Frank, the author.

At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch

This third book in the monumental series depicting "America in the King years" offers an amazing look into the struggles and real-life complexities of Martin Luther King, Jr's life.  The book does not shy away from awkward facts like the internal struggles against King's Poor People's Campaign in 1967-1968, or his "casual affairs" with women who were not his wife, but it does portray the civil rights struggle in such vivid detail as to give it new life.  The author does downplay those affairs a little bit, sometimes failing to name the woman with whom King was having the affair.  The overall effect of the book is to bring King into focus as a central figure in American history, who has failings like many others but whose  doctrine of non-violent protest of injustice brought about sweeping change in the country.  The villain of the story is definitely J. Edgar Hoover, who actively opposes King's campaigns, planting bugs and wiretaps to record his operations and glean embarrassing details, and often plants stories in the press in an attempt to discredit King.  The book does venture into some explanation for the reasons why civil rights became such a struggle, but it mostly sticks to the narrative, which is compelling in various ways.  First, there are the stories of pioneers who face hardship and suffer martyrdom in rural counties in Alabama in an effort to win voting rights.  Second, the dramatic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 is portrayed in vivid detail as the "last revolution" of the civil rights movement.  King's oration upon finally arriving at Montgomery is particularly well described.  Finally, there is the Vietnam War, which enters the story through the Johnson White House.  Apparently, the White House was full of gloomy predictions about the prospects for success in this war, even as the President is asked for more and more troops to be committed.  According to this book, the war comes to dominate thinking on a national level and eclipses civil rights as the Johnson administration's focus.  The war is also one reason given for the failure of a protest march in Chicago to ignite a national debate on Northern racism.  These stories are important to remember in our era of supposedly post-racial politics.  It is true that we have come a long way from the 1960s, but we still have a long way to go.