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'Forty Autumns' a Moving Memoir

5/4/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
It's impossible to control the reception of your work—the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.
Kim Edwards
Born May 4, 1958

K. Edwards

My Book World

Willner, Nina. Forty Autumns: A Family’s
Story of Courage and Survival on Both
Sides of the Berlin Wall. New York:
Morrow, 2016.

Just under twenty-one, young Hanna flees East Germany to pursue a life of freedom in the West, and she must do it twice to succeed. The second escape, however, sticks, and she makes a life in America.

Her daughter, Nina, is the author of this amazing and absorbing account of what the division of Germany following World War II did to Hanna’s family. Under the heavy thumb of Erich Honecker, the East German regime was perhaps more repressive than its mother, the Soviet Union.

This forty-year tale follows the lives of those left in East Germany, as well as the life of Hanna and her children in America. Daughter Nina winds up working for the US government in West Germany and comes very close to where her family lives, but she is unable to visit with them or even let them know she is present.

Hanna’s father, Opa, is a respected and revered school teacher in the town where they live, but eventually he is exiled to a small village because he will not fully support the Communist line. His children who remain in East Germany, however, become somewhat more compliant, although none of them ever joins the Communist party—which does inhibit their success.

Wellner’s story of how the family finally unites after forty autumns is more than touching; it is the richest kind of poignancy.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-13 New Jersey

'Russian Roulette' is a HOt Read

4/27/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind. People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.
Russell T. Davies
Born April 27, 1963

My Book World

Corn, David and Michael Isikoff. Russian
Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s
War on America and the Election of
Donald Trump. New York: Hachette,
2018.

This book is a hot read, mostly because these two journalists have taken the patchwork of daily news that we all read every day and transformed all that information into a seamless narrative that is easy to understand. And important, easy to appreciate. If Americans aren’t concerned about the Russia investigation, they aren’t very concerned about the survival of their country.

Nuggets:

“Putin had once called the collapse of the Soviet Union the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.’ He was a Russian nationalist to his core. H wanted to extend Russian power, restoring its spheres of influence. He was an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies—or winning its approval” (31).

“But the feedback the U.S. official received was mostly about what the secret source had to say about Ukraine. That was the crisis of the moment. The secret sources’ warnings about Russia’s information warfare plans in the United States and Europe garnered little attention. ‘Anybody who had any doubt about Putin’s intentions,’ the U.S. official later said, ‘just wasn’t reading what we reported’” (54).

“It appeared that the DNC had been hit twice by separate teams of Russian cyber bandits. And the Russian hackers, CrowdStrike could tell, had been exfiltrating—that is, stealing—a host of DNC material, including emails and databases. Among the pilfered materials was the DNC’s entire opposition research file on Donald Trump.
It was a complete compromise. There was no telling what the Russians had. Or what they would do with it” (76).

“And Trump Jr. touted Russian as a key source for profits. ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets . . . certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York,’ he explained. ‘We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia’” (89).

“According to Source C, a senior Russian financial official, the Trump operation was part of Putin’s overall plan to sow disunity within the United States and the trans-Atlantic alliance. This source reported having heard Putin express his desire to return to the nineteenth-century style of ‘Great Power’ politics in which nations would pursue their own interests rather than an ideals-based international order” (147)

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-12 Virginia

Life Among the Savages Still Delightful

4/20/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
One of the advantages of the book's [The Best Little Boy in the World] having been out there for more than a quarter century is that there's been time for people to report back on what it's done for them.
Andrew Tobias
Born April 20, 1947

A. Tobias

My Book World

Jackson, Shirley. Life Among the Savages.
New York: Farrar, 1948.

Jackson’s memoir about family life up through the birth of her fourth and final child is entertaining and timeless, though it is written in the 1940s. What contributes to this timelessness is Jackson’s grasp of the universal through developing the specific.

This is a woman’s story to tell, though it is for everyone to read. Jackson published many of these narratives in women’s magazines before releasing them in this book. She develops the universal by delving into the concrete. She never names her husband: it is always my husband this, my husband that, objectifying him as the head-in-the-clouds academic that he is, in the same manner in which she, as housewife, is objectified in this post-World War II period. She has pet names for her oldest three children: Laurie for Laurence (which he vehemently sluffs off at one point); Jannie for Joanne, and Sally for Sarah. It’s as if by naming them something more intimate, they cannot possibly belong to someone else, the world at large.

What saves her persona from being a martyr is that Jackson actually enjoys being a mother and wife while at the same time pursuing a serious career as a writer of fiction. She would be considered a permissive mother, but such a free household allows all her children to develop unfettered: Laurie is allowed to take on a boisterous, all-boy personality; Jannie develops as one who expresses herself as bluntly as Jackson herself does; and charming little Sally is a princess, who quotes fairy tales and talks in oblique sort of riddles when she is angry about something. To be sure, Jackson spars with her children (and her husband) on occasion, nudges them back and forth over the goal line, but she allows them simply to be. One would love to know how they developed as adults, and how their children fared.

This free and delightful yet sophisticated read is timeless and should be perused by everyone: women and men, old and young, especially those who think they know everything about raising children. They could learn a thing or two from the late Shirley Jackson.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-11 Maryland

Shirley Jackson's Haunted Life

4/13/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Born April 13, 1906

S. Beckett

My Book World

(Liveright)

Franklin, Ruth. Shirley Jackson: A Rather
Haunted Life. New York: Liveright,
2016.

Roger Straus, Jackson’s first publisher, often called her “a rather haunted woman” (2). She had plenty to haunt her life, especially a mother who fiercely dominated her daughter, even after she became a literary success.

“Jackson’s awareness that her mother had never loved her unconditionally—if at all—would be a source of sadness well into adulthood. Aside from a single angry letter that she did not send, she never gave voice to her feelings of rejection. But she expressed them in other ways. All the heroines of her novels are essentially motherless—if not lacking a mother entirely, then victims of loveless mothering. Many of her books include acts of matricide, either unconscious or deliberate” (25).

Jackson spends nearly the rest of her life fighting against her mother about how to raise her own children, how to cook and keep house, how to go about her career even though her mother had never had one of her own. At the same time that Shirley attempts to establish a literary career while being supportive of a husband in the related business of literary criticism and raising four children, she seems to love being with her children. She often packs them up into the car to go on day trips. She more or less lets them have free run of the house and town, while at the same time, scolds her children with the same invisible criticism that she learned from her mother.

Franklin goes into great detail about Jackson’s literary life, each novel, her famous story, “The Lottery.” She paints an honest picture of Jackson’s life, one that is so interesting, I didn’t want the book to end.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States—10 West Virginia

Famous Mother and Son Ponder Lives

2/16/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I've heard people on panels say, “You must have a Web site. You need to tweet. Repeat the title of your book constantly,” and I just want to say, “Shut up. Everything you're saying is wrong.” People will know instantly if your only motivation for tweeting is to sell books.
Maureen Johnson
Born on February 16, 1973

M. Johnson

My Book World

Cooper, Anderson and Gloria Vanderbilt. The
   Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and
   Son on Life, Love, and Loss. New York:
   HarperCollins, 2016.

The epistolary nature of this book (if emails can be considered letters) makes it interesting at times. TV journalist Anderson Cooper exchanges emails with his mother, both of them attempting to make sense of their lives as mother and son. At times, the exercise feels belabored as if Cooper is indeed a writer interviewing another celebrity. Yet there are enough genuine moments to provide readers with the feeling they’re witnessing something real. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, makes a startling statement:

“Although I have never told you or any one else, I did this [to work under her birth name] because I believed that if I succeeded in writing, or acting, or painting, it would expiate in some mysterious and secret way the public vilification of my mother and free her to love me as I longed to be loved” (101).

One issue that deeply affects both of their lives is the death of Anderson’s father, Wyatt Cooper. Gloria is totally dumbfounded. Anderson’s brother, Carter, will commit suicide. And Anderson himself declares his life would have been so different if his father had lived:

“I certainly longed for that sense of safety as a teenager. It would have been nice to have a male figure in those years. It always surprised me that none of the men you were friends with made an effort to reach out to Carter or me after Daddy’s death. I kept secretly hoping someone would come forward as a mentor or a friend, occasionally taking me out for a slice of pizza or to a movie” (204).

Cooper turns inward after his father’s death, obtains a fake press pass, and begins his adventurous and often dangerous career in journalism overseas. He admits that if his father had lived, he might not have burned such a trail. Lucky for us that he did.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-7 Indiana

Katy Tur's Unbelievable Trip with Trump

2/10/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
Boris Pasternak
Born February 10, 1890

B. Pasternak

My Book World

Tur, Katy. Unbelievable: My Front-Row
    Seat to the Craziest Campaign in
    American History. New York: Morrow,
    2017.

This engrossing book seems to be made up of at least three strands: 1) MSNBC reporter Katy Tur’s narrative of her assignment to follow then candidate Donald Trump throughout the entirety of the 2016 presidential campaign. 2) In doing so she shares a great deal about what it’s like to be a reporter placed in such a position, the great moments, the uncomfortable moments, the shortchanging of her personal life. 3) And speaking of that, Tur interweaves bits of her personal life—including her childhood and youth, her love life, and her travels—into the weft of her fascinating storytelling.

With regard to 1) she has mixed feelings about leaving her assignment which places her in London, England. Accepting it means moving to New York, giving up her flat in London, her friends there, a boyfriend in Paris, I believe. Turning it down would mean giving up the opportunity to cover one of the most controversial presidential candidates in history, and might also mean squelching her career by not playing ball with the producers at MSNBC.

Katy Tur shares with the reader the details of her travels with DT: flying coach, packing economically yet in a way that allows her to appear fresh on camera (dry shampoo?); a significant lack of sleep because she can be wakened at any moment to be given an assignment; keeping up with tens of thousands of work-related emails, many of which she winds up dumping. Sad, sad meals grabbed here and there, the lack of exercise on any given day or week. But most of all, we see what it feels like to be on camera nation-wide:

“Hardball wants me live. I take a deep breath, stand up, put in my earpiece, and hook back into MSNBC’s live coverage.
‘Well, let’s go to Katy Tur. Katy, are you used to this kind of trash talk from him?’ I hear Chris Matthews but I can’t understand what he’s saying. Trump is still bellowing behind me. Chris tries again. ‘I’m trying to couch this in the most politically correct way. Are you used to the trash talk that Donald Trump threw at you tonight?’” (77).

Finally, Tur’s personal history adds a tantalizing touch to her career. It seems that her parents, Bob and Marika Tur begin in the 1970s a helicopter service in which they cover in Los Angeles such happenings as “fires, shootings, and most unforgettably, police pursuits. Their first big get was Madonna’s 1985 wedding to Sean Penn” (108).

From her parents, especially, father, she learns the thrill of the hunt. As a child, she goes up with her dad in his ‘copter, and one point she, without benefit of a harness, hangs out the cockpit a bit too far. Her dad says little but apparently turns white. At thirty-two or -three Tur must feel jaded in some sense, as anyone who’s been in a business for a decade must, but she’s got a long career ahead of her if she can sustain this kind of reporting and writing—if she can continue to hang out there without a harness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-6 Illinois

Forgiveness for a Mother

2/2/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
Our conventions, our conventional signs have a [sic] Active function to perform; thinking in its lower grades, is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Havelock Ellis
Born February 2, 1859

H. Ellis

My Book World

Alexie, Sherman. You Don’t Have to
Say You Love Me: A Memoir. New
York: Little, Brown, 2017.

I once attended one of Mr. Alexie’s readings in Iowa City; it was for his most recent publication, The Toughest Indian in the World. He’s tall and lanky; at that time his hair was of medium length. Handsome. His performance was half stand-up act, for he is acerbically, wickedly funny, and half dramatic reading in which he voiced all the parts. Not only the parts written on the lines, but you could hear the voices of his ancestors in the background, encouraging this talented young man to voice the Indian truth.

Once again, in this painful but poignant memoir in which Alexie explores the relationship with his mother, he does not fail to delight, does not fail to sear our consciousness with the wrongs of our white ancestors. Just as his skin color condemns him, an innocent man, anyone with white skin must share the blame of our ancestors who ravaged the land and its native peoples as if it were all one prehistoric wellspring of riches. The book composed of 160 short chapters is NOT linear in structure; I do not think that is a particularly Indian way to tell a story. The author begins in 1972 when his family moves into a HUD home on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, when the author is six years old. Some chapters are as short as a four-line poem. Other chapters are poems several pages in length (including one about his mother as quilter), each one a work of art in itself, enhancing a lyricism spread throughout the entirety of the book.

By beginning with an intimate description of the HUD house, Alexie gives us a double-edged view. On the one hand, the house represents a major step up for the family from the cramped quarters where they’ve lived before. The HUD house is not huge, but it does have a toilet, a bathroom, and that means a great deal to the family. Yet these new cramped quarters are an important metaphor for the Spokane Indian, whose entire tribe has been smothered, crammed into a piece of earth that represents a fraction of what it once owned. Alexie is always shoving against these boundaries of what white people expect of Indians, knowing their place. One must wonder how this nation would have developed if the white man had approached the Indians with respect and conceded to their wishes. If the white man had purchased land instead of stealing it, what then? If the white man had formed a government with native Americans instead of one that killed them off, what would we have today? Would any of us be here?

NEXT TIME: Barcelona Photographs2 — Its People

Call Me by Your Name, Romance with a Big "R"

1/26/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I know that many people kill off their real personality just to fit into this society, but why do we have to compromise? I never understood that. I decided to try to be myself and to live by my own values rather than those of others.
Novala Takemoto
Born January 26, 1968

N. Takemoto

My Book World

Aciman, André. Call Me by Your Name.
New York: Farrar, 2007.

This novel is a romance, both with a capital “r,” the kind that emphasizes subjectivity of the individual, and the small “r” kind, the Harlequin type that you must devour page by page, word by word, until you come to the final sentence of this desperate love affair between two young men.

I found the first half tediously slow. But then I thought, Aciman must want us to be inside the head of the protagonist narrator, Elio. These are the mind and heart of a seventeen-year-old boy who can’t decide who he is whether it’s with regard to sexual orientation or his prodigious musicianship (he transcribes manuscripts from one instrument to another and sells them). His mind belabors everything including the appearance of a young graduate student, Oliver, who comes to live in his family’s Italian villa for the summer of 1983, a tradition Elio’s father, a professor, has begun years before: the summer intern.

Both Elio and Oliver waste half the summer semi-rejecting one another, making love to girls, until finally Elio becomes more aggressive and discovers Oliver has wanted him since they first met. Their first kiss doesn’t occur until page 81. But for a short, intense two weeks they become so close that they almost become one, wearing each other’s clothing, Elio especially in love with a red swim suit of Oliver’s. The very idea of calling each other by their own names—taking the name your parents have given you and calling your lover by that name—is a mental flip the reader must make to understand the depth of their intimacy:

“Perhaps the physical and the metaphorical meanings are clumsy ways of understanding what happens when two beings need, not just to be close together, but to become so totally ductile that each becomes the other. To be who I am because of you. To be who he was because of me. To be in his mouth while he was in mine and no longer know whose it was, his cock or mine, that was in my mouth” (142-3).

Aciman carries the development of this intimacy, which in the form of a deep friendship is to last forever, to the very last sentence of the book:

“If you remember everything, I wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow, or when you’re just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there’s not a thing left to say in this life, then, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name” (248).

Through the specificity of this scenario, Aciman reveals a universal story of desire and love. We’ve all been there, and wow, should our lives turn out as exciting as those of the two men characterized in this romance.

NEXT TIME: My Literary World

Code Girls Are Brave Women

1/19/2018

A WRITER'S WIT
I find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial.
Patricia Highsmith
#bornonthisday
January 19, 1921

P. Highsmith

My Book World

Mundy, Liza. Code Girls: The Untold Story
   of the American Women Code Breakers
  of World War II. New York: Hachette,
   2017.

Award-winning author Mundy writes of 11,000 women recruited in the early 1940s to help break codes of Japanese and German intelligence. The Navy recruits from exclusive women’s colleges in the Northeast, and the Army recruits from the ranks of teachers (mostly math but some who teach foreign languages), many of whom are disenchanted with their poor salaries and tough classroom conditions.

“Sworn to secrecy, the women were forbidden from telling anybody what they were doing: not their friends, not their parents, not their family, not their roommates. They were not to let news of their training leak into campus newspapers or disclose it in a letter, not even to their enlisted brother or boyfriend. If pressed, they could say they were studying communications: the routing of ordinary naval messages” (5)

This dictum is one that is repeated throughout the book until the very end. Even as some of these women survive into their nineties, even after the government grants them permission, finally, they are reticent to tell their stories. However, Mundy does a superb job of seeking out these sources, still sharp mentally, and getting their stories down. Mundy also combs written sources to fill out her epic narrative of quiet courage among these women—not only their work lives but their personal lives as well.

The code girls tackle many important difficulties, including the one of German U-boats sinking US ships in the Atlantic (as many as 500 by 1942). The women slowly but methodically solve this problem so that American ships are able to get supplies and matériel to troops in Europe. They are also paramount in intercepting official messages between Japanese and German leaders and confounding their strategies. Because of their unique skills the women make the work look far easier than it is. With a combination of innate ability and extreme dedication they are able to shorten the war and help save lives.

Every man should think about what it would be like to minimize his intellect, to hide what he does for a living, to keep it a secret for almost seventy years—and come to the conclusion that it is not fair. And never again in our history should women be called upon to keep silent in this manner. It’s not only unfair but it cuts in half the sources our country could be using to solve problems. This book is not only a tribute to these particular women but to the idea of women taking their true place in the world as multifaceted individuals.

NEXT TIME: My World of Short Fiction

The Miracle That Is Trevor Noah

9/30/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market—it knows nothing about target markets.
Julianna Baggott
Born September 30, 1969

J. Baggott

My Book World

Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime: Stories from a
South African Childhood. New York:
Spiegel, 2016.

Noah, host of Comedy Central’s Daily Show, has written a touching and transformational memoir. In writing honestly of his metamorphosis through the years, he thus transforms the reader. Most Americans, myself included, probably have only a vague idea of what South Africa’s apartheid was really like. Noah makes it crystal clear: blacks, whites, coloreds, the latter having a different definition than it had in the US. Noah was colored: half white and half black. Under the first nine years of his life, his birth was illegal, according to apartheid; his life with his black mother and his white father was illegal. But it wasn’t nonexistent.

This joyful book reveals the ways in which he and his mother negotiate their way around Noah’s lack of existence. He tells tales of attending church on Sunday, his mother seeing that he always makes it to three services in three different churches. Noah divulges tales of naughty behavior when he is in his teens and twenties. He even does a short stint in jail but avoids a long prison sentence, all for illegal sales of pirated audio material. But though he is enterprising and makes a good living for the ‘hood, he realizes he will never do any better than that if he doesn’t get out. The book’s climax takes place when a near-fatal fit of violence occurs between his stepfather and mother, itself a miracle of survival. I had hoped to read of Noah’s continuing education, as he becomes a comedian, and now host of an incredibly important source of satire and news. But we will have to wait for his next book, when he will hopefully be as generous as he is in the first and share once again his miraculous story. Can’t wait.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction

Rebellion Runs Deep

9/1/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I've always said that in politics, your enemies can't hurt you, but your friends will kill you.
Ann Richards
Born September 1, 1933

A. Richards

My Book World

Andreas, Peter. Rebel Mother: My
Childhood Chasing the Revolution. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2017.

This book is one of those that drew me in and would not let me go until I had finished it. I made not a single annotation or underline because the narrative was so compelling that I didn’t wish to stop and write.

Carol Andreas is raised as a Mennonite in North Newton, Kansas, and in the 1950s she marries another Mennonite seven years her elder. From this marriage she gives birth to three sons, one of whom is author, Peter Andreas, the youngest. As the Andreas family lives in suburban Detroit, Michigan, Carol eventually earns a PhD and radicalizes her political thinking. Against her husband’s wishes (he refuses to grant her a divorce), she packs up all three sons and moves to Berkeley, California, the epicenter of 1960s and 1970s radical politics.

As part of her radicalization, Carol Andreas abdicates her traditional role as mother and allows her three sons to make many of their own decisions, for example, whether they want to attend school on a particular day. However, when she decides to move to South America to aid the revolution there, she takes eight-year-old Peter with her—partly to spite her husband, partly because the child is too young to care for himself, but mostly so that she can mold his socio-political views. The other two sons prefer to remain in California and reside in the commune where they’ve all been living.

The heart of the book is about the years that Carol and Peter spend in three different South American countries. Instead thriving in the warmth of a middle-class Michigan home, Peter lives a rather deprived life. He is subject to the harshest living conditions as his mother does what is necessary to aid others in their political goals. He witnesses her many different boyfriends, sometimes having to sleep in the same room with them as they make love.

In one situation, his hair is infested with head lice. Worse yet, his mother places him in adult situations, “assignments” he accepts because they make him feel grown up. He even participates in his own kidnappings from Michigan schools, after his father has been awarded custody so that he can live with his mother in South America. His allegiances to each parent are probably stretched even tighter than most children of divorce, because his parents represent two different extremes and because both are set on having their way.

However, the narrative illustrates the strength of a love that can develop between parent and child. Carol Andreas makes many mistakes, yet even so, son Peter never stops loving his mother. At one point, as he reaches college, he does realize he will never be like his mother, nor like his father. He must become his own person, and he informs each parent of his desires. If Peter has learned anything from his mother it is that he is responsible for his own life, his own happiness, and as he matures he begins to pursue the one he wants. Today, he is the author of ten books and John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University. His childhood must in no small way inform his adult life.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

To Be Clear

8/18/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
The Chinese people have been forced to forget the Tiananmen massacre. There has been no public debate about the event, no official apology. The media aren't allowed to mention it. Still today people are being persecuted and imprisoned for disseminating information about it.
Ma Jian
Born August 18, 1953

M. Jian

My Book World

Evans, Harold. Do I Make Myself Clear?
Why Writing Well Matters. New York,
Little, Brown, 2017.

The field of English grammar can be a pedant’s paradise (or nightmare), what with Twitter and texting divining their own rules, and for over 400 pages noted wordsmith Evans sounds off about his favorite peeves. He also, if readers take away nothing else, reminds us that the passive voice (not tense) can bloat a sentence, whereas active voice (subject+verb+object) allows for clearer and briefer writing. Evans takes governmental babble and rewrites it so that one can understand it:

White House:
“Despite these opportunities and multiple intelligence products that noted the threat AQAP could pose to the Homeland, the different pieces of the puzzle were never brought together in this case[,] the dots were never connected, and, as a result steps to disrupt the plot involving Mr. Abdulmutallab were not taken prior to his boarding of the airplane with an explosive device and attempting to detonate it in-flight” (374). [passages written in passive voice appear in bold font]

Evans’s rewrite:
“CT staff never connected the dots, so no one attempted to prevent Mr. Abdulmutallab boarding the plane with an explosive device” (375).

The author reduces the passage’s bloat from 68 words to 46, without reducing its meaning; in fact, he clarifies its meaning. And this goal becomes his overarching purpose. As a journalist Evans hasn’t much use for other inflated language, including what he calls flesh-eaters. One should, for example, use “although” instead of the flesh-eating “despite the fact that” or “like” instead of “along the lines of.” He reiterates what every good eighth-grade English teacher tries to teach: “Don’t pad your writing.” He might have followed his own advice when explaining “flesh-eating” by reducing his verbiage from half a page (plus a photograph of Zoophagus insidians) to a sentence or two. His metaphor is self-explanatory.

Overall, Mr. Evans provides a fine review for persons who write or wish to. He directs his writing to the journalist, who is attempting to reach as many readers as possible, but his “Ten Shortcuts to Making Yourself Clear” (Chapter Five) alone are worth the price of the book, and could assist all writers in making themselves clearer, regardless of the genre. Kudos to Evans.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Book-TV Update

8/11/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
With theatre, we all agree to suspend our disbelief about so many things, but not about race. It's totally OK to have one actor playing five roles—people are willing to believe that. But they won't believe it if there's a black or Asian kid who has white parents. What does that say about us?
David Henry Hwang
Born August 11, 1957

D. Hwang

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six-hour segments covering book festivals around the U.S. C-SPAN is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can view any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can download and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Below I profile an August 7, 2017 presentation I found very compelling.

Eisinger, Jesse. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. New York: Simon, 2017.

I’m always a sucker for a provocative title, but I’m particularly drawn in when the content of the book delivers on the title’s punch. In a recent C-SPAN Book-TV presentation of his Chickenshit Club, Eisinger takes readers into the bowels of the 2008 financial meltdown and explains why neither the CEOs nor the corporations they headed were ever prosecuted, why individuals responsible for such bad deeds never went to prison. Not to give away too much, Eisinger’s explanation is at once simple and complex.

Simply, Department of Justice officials are afraid of certain aspects, for example, so-called collateral consequences, in which innocent employees lose their jobs when a corporation is put out of business. To explore the complexities, Eisenger lays out the history of why our country has arrived at this point where the financial-sector tail is wagging the law. He concludes that without individual accountability reforms are meaningless. Hedge fund managers and CEOs continue their heinous practices knowing they have an excellent chance of not going to prision.

In a perfect world the author would recommend, one, paying prosecutors much more money so they will have the incentive to work as hard as they would for private law firms that can pay more. Two, he recommends diversity in hiring, not merely more women and persons of color, but individuals from different parts of the country, who have graduated from a variety of law schools, not just the elite ones. Also, he would hire older, esteemed attorneys with a track record and a wider vision of the world, as well as those who have experience in consumer protections. Eisinger’s book expounds on what Matt Taibbi introduces in his excellent book, The Divide. Read both if you’re concerned about the fragile yet powerful world of finance.

NEXT TIME: My Book World

Frankly Frank

7/28/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
Beatrix Potter
Born July 27, 1866

B. Potter

My Book World

Frank, Barney. Frank: A Life in Politics
from the Great Society to Same-
SexMarriage. New York: Farrar, 2015.

In this tersely written memoir (yet verbose in places), Frank memorializes his forty years of public service. Though I find the word “service” can have a false ring with people in the US Congress who, over time, increase their wealth considerably, such a word rings strong and true with regard to Barney Frank. For four decades he serves, in one capacity or another, the people of Boston, Massachusetts—but also many citizens from coast to coast. During his tenure as congress member, he evolves into an ace legislator who is instrumental in getting landmark legislation through Congress: undoing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, strengthening laws that govern Wall Street (Dodd-Frank) after 2008, and any number of LGBTQ issues. He has a way of stating the truth that only stings if you are the guilty party:

“If every issue is always on the active agenda, if an issue that was already disposed of by a majority can be reopened whenever the side that lost regains an advantage, instability infects not just the body that made that decision but also the society that it is governed by. It is the explicit rejection of that principle by the Tea Party Republicans that contributes heavily to political gridlock. A representative or senator’s effectiveness thus is based on his or her ability to deal with a very wide range of issues, with never enough time, and with little guidance from others” (73).

Frank is able to articulate the why and wherefores of legislation and government, as in this statement justifying taxation:

“In a civilized society that needs a profit-driven private sector and a tax-funded public sector, it is all the people’s money. The task facing sensible people is to distinguish between the personal or family needs and wants best fulfilled by individual spending choices and those societal goals that can be achieved only if we pool our resources to buy collective goods” (171-2).

Frank speaks to how our country can dovetail capitalism with democracy:

“Representative government in a capitalist society involves the coexistence of two systems—an economic one, in which a person’s influence necessarily increases with his or her wealth, and a political one, in which every citizen is supposed to have an equal say. If the mechanisms of the free market are going to work, that is, if they are going to increase productivity through incentives and allocate resources efficiently, money must drive decisions. For democracy to fulfill its moral promise, everyone’s vote should have the same weight in making the rules by which we govern ourselves” (183). Hallelujah, he should be teaching civics in high school!

Frank is blunt about the issues that Democrats face:

“Democrats will regain a fighting chance to win majority support among working- and middle-class white men only when we demonstrate the will—and capacity—to respond to the economic distress inflicted on them” (187).

“The NRA does what I have long begged my LGBT allies to do, at first with mixed results, and more recently with much greater success. They urge all of their adherents to get on the voting rolls. They are diligent to the point of obsession in making sure that elected officials hear from everyone in their constituencies who opposes any limits on guns, especially when a relevant measure is being considered, and they then do an extraordinary job of informing their supporters of how those officials cast their votes” (203).

One only hopes that new Democrats now filling slots in Congress are half as dedicated, knowledgeable, honest, and generous as Barney Frank. In the coming months and years we’re going to need such people to face the issues that plague citizens across this country.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

The Men in Bosworth's Life

6/30/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened. If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
The Atlantic, March 2017
David Frum
Born June 30, 1960

D. Frum

My Book World

Bosworth, Patricia. The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.

For the same reasons I enjoyed reading her biography Montgomery Clift years ago, I sucked down Patricia Bosworth’s memoir of her own life. She is not afraid to search out and write the truth of any situation and do it with dignity and empathy for involved parties. Because for about a decade she is an actor, she becomes acquainted with Montgomery Clift personally, and she approaches her subject with honesty and a certain kindness. The same can be said for her book: all of the members of her family are loved ones, but they are also, at times, bad actors who undermine her life. Her father is a narcissistic alcoholic attorney, a closeted homosexual (according to her mother) whose love is not entirely unconditional; he profoundly affects Patricia’s life when he commits suicide. Her mother is a published novelist (Strumpet Wind) whose career stalls and becomes an ambitious stage mother who plays on all Patricia’s insecurities: Patricia’s actions and achievements are never good enough. The relationship that affects Bosworth the most, perhaps, is her brother, Bart.

When they are young they establish a special bond, with even their own form of Pig Latin which their parents cannot understand; they share that language for many years until Bart ceases to think it appropriate. A particularly effective tool peppered throughout the book are her continued conversations with Bart’s ghost. Eerie how she makes it seem as if he’s still alive as he advises her. In his teens, her brother is attracted to males and has sex with a couple of them, including a friend at an exclusive boys’ boarding school. There, after they are discovered together, the friend commits suicide, an act from which Bart never recovers. He, too, eventually kills himself before reaching the age of twenty-one. Bosworth’s father and brother are not the only men she writes about in her page-turner; she outlines in detail her love (and sexual) relationships with several different men, including two husbands.

She reminisces about her acting career in which she appears on Broadway with the likes of Daniel Massey and Elaine Stritch. The highlight of this period may be when she appears with Audrey Hepburn in a film, The Nun’s Story. Nonetheless, in spite of Bosworth’s success on the stage, she comes to the realization that she can no longer bare her soul in that manner but must establish a writing career instead. And glad we are that she does. Bosworth’s book—taken from her diaries, her notes, but most of all her remembrances—is a stunning read.

[I’m still amazed in this day and age how a book produced by one of the top companies in the country can make it through all that scrutiny with a typo:

“I was able to slip into the wings just as Bobby begain [sic] belting out ‘I Believe in You,’ the signature number” (350).

How many copyeditors overlooked this error and how many times? How many times did the author or her staff herself read the galleys? Amazing.]

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Some Sleepy time Advice

6/16/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.
Deb Caletti
Born June 16, 1963

D. Caletti

My Book World

Huffington, Arianna. The Sleep Revolution:
Transforming Your Life, One Night at a
Time. New York: Harmony, 2016.

I’m not sure why I stayed through to the end on this one. Huffington does provide interesting anecdotes as well as convincing arguments as to why contemporary life (with at least a hundred-year history) does not allow for good sleep habits—including the introduction of devices into our lives. Yet when one reads through her bibliographic notes, one sees many of the sources are more popular-culture in nature rather than hard science. Or if she does cite a strong source, she fails to build a case for its importance. When speaking of dreams, for example, she quotes from an e-mail she’s received from Mary Hulnick, “chief creative officer of the University of Santa Monica, who teaches dream incubation” as part of a “Spiritual Psychology course” (159). Hmmm. Even so, the book managed to hold my attention to what I believe the climax of the book may be, which is Huffington’s discussion of how lack of sleep affects athletic performance. She uses a number of top professional athletes, among scientific sources, to build her case. The rest of the book is a quiet recap of what has come before: sleep is right up there with diet and exercise. In fact, Huffington asserts, the other two don’t mean a thing unless you get the zzzzzs as well, and I would tend to agree with her.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Book-TV Update-Baker's 'Rigged'

5/19/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Gay teenagers are four times as likely to attempt suicide as straight ones. I wish they knew that there's nothing wrong with them; that they are just a different shade of normal.
Jodi Picoult
Born May 19, 1966

J. Picoult

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation I believe to be of interest to a broad audience.

Dean Baker. Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the
Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.
Washington DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research,
2016.

In this book Baker “argues that government policies, not globalization or the natural workings of the free market, have led to the upward redistribution of wealth seen around the world over the past four decades.” His logical and comprehensive lecture offers one of the most compelling arguments I’ve ever heard on the subject. First aired January 17, 2107.

Click here to view Baker's presentation at C-SPAN's Book-TV.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Uncovered Ground

5/13/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I always thought the saddest feeling in life is when you're dancing in a really joyful way and then you hit your head on something.
Lena Dunham
Born May 13, 1986

L. Dunham

MY BOOK WORLD

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground
Railroad. New York: Doubleday, 2016.

The tight structure of this novel is based on twelve chapters—six named for characters and six named for states or regions in the US. Each one shifts readers to where they need to be to follow the life of a runaway slave, Cora, in the pre-Civil War South. Cora’s grandmother, Ajarry, was a slave, and so was her mother, Mabel, who abandons Cora when she’s eleven. Rage governs Cora’s life, fuels her temper and her senses, both of which serve to save her life as she shapeshifts to fit varying situations above ground. The unsuspecting reader who learned in elementary school that Harriet Tubman’s underground railroad was not literal is in for a fantastical ride as Whitehead brings it alive, with stations and steam engines and schedules, even a pump handcar that serves as Cora’s final vehicle of escape. The author’s grasp of history, his simple yet elegant prose, and his understanding of the complex humanity of master and slave serve to create a novel that is worthy of all the praise and accolades it has received.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Book-TV Update: Clavin's Dodge City

5/5/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
How can a doctor judge a woman's sanity by merely bidding her good morning and refusing to hear her pleas for release? Even the sick ones know it is useless to say anything, for the answer will be that it is their imagination.
Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochran Seaman), Ten Days in a Mad-House
Born May 5, 1864

N. Bly

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation I believe to be of interest to a broad audience.

Tom Clavin. Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West. New York: St. Martin’s, 2017.

Clavin’s reading, held at Watermark Books and Café in Wichita, Kansas, is one that holds your attention throughout, as he reveals the real history of Dodge City, this infamous town of the Wild West. The author digs deep to dispel all the myths. The players—Earp, Masterson, and others—are neither all bad nor all good. With the dogged pursuit of a fine journalist Clavin uncovers the truth, and it is more interesting than the myths! Tune into find out. This first aired March 8, 2017.

Click here to view Clavin's presentation at C-SPAN's Book-TV.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Book-Tv Update: Wiesel's 'Night'

4/29/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
We need sex education in schools, but we need it at home first. We need parents to learn the names of the teachers who are teaching their children. We need families to question day-care centers, to question other children and their own as to what goes on.
Rod McKuen
Born April 29, 1938

R. McKuen

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation that recently affected me very deeply.

Elie Wiesel. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, FSG, 2006.

On January 29, 2017, 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., the Museum of Jewish History in New York City presented an oral reading of Wiesel’s moving work, Night. Readers of all kinds—actors, directors and producers, rabbis and other Jewish leaders, authors, students, journalists, police and politicians, among many others, about a hundred—read straight through with only two ten-minute intermissions, until the late Wiesel’s horrific account of the Holocaust was told.

Each reading segment was no more than five minutes, and some segments were read in Yiddish. There were old readers, young, black, white, Jewish, Gentile, Asian, Latin—the total effect being that six million ghosts were telling their stories through Wiesel. In his work, night serves as an extended metaphor, that the entire ordeal is one long, hellish night, is every murdered Jew’s story, every detail, and this simple production/tribute may be one of the most powerful of its kind that I’ve ever witnessed. Everyone must view it, then read the book. You may view the five-hour presentation at one of the following Web sites:

Book-TV
Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust
YouTube

#WeRemember | #nycReadsNight

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Book-TV Update

4/21/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I spent a lot of time in the White House in the public areas where reporters are allowed to go, but I spoke to people about the private quarters as well. Some of the things I learned were small, novelistic details. For example, the fact that there were still pet stains on the carpets from the Bush cats when the Obamas moved in.
Jodi Kantor, New York Times Correspondent
Born April 21, 1975

J. Kantor

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below one presentation that recently piqued my interest.

Daniel Connolly. The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America. New York: St. Martin's, 2016.

This panel presentation was part of the Tucson Festival of Books, in which author Connolly speaks of the status of children of undocumented immigrants. In the book that takes five years to research and write, he says that the vast majority of these children are citizens, yet they are often not only mistreated but when their parents are deported they have no lifeline. He states that enforcement of immigration laws varies from region to region. For example, in Arizona there are guards and walls. In Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives, the workforce depends heavily on immigrants, and the laws are not always adhered to. A fascinating discussion, and it looks like a fine read—on my wish list, for sure. He shares the stage with Julissa Arce, author of My (Underground) American Dream: My True Story as an Undocumented Immigrant Who Became a Wall Street Executive.

Daniel Connolly's Book-TV Presentation

NEXT TIME: Earth Day 2017

Book-TV Update

4/14/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
We might be on the brink of an apocalypse if, instead of poor people with suicide bombs killing middle class guys, middle-class people with suicide bombs started killing rich guys. The Difference Engine
Bruce Sterling
Born April 14, 1954

B. Sterling

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below two presentations that recently piqued my interest.

Maureen Dowd. The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics. New York: Twelve, 2016.

I’ve viewed both of these presentations, one held at the Miami Book Fair and the other at the Tucson Festival of Books. In the first one, shortly after the 2016 election of our forty-fifth president, she speaks directly to her book, how, after covering 45 for over thirty years, she’s arrived at some conclusions as to how he won the election. In the second video, she is questioned by host, Peter Slen, of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, a fine interviewer, who speaks to her about not only the book but her entire career. In both events the New York Times columnist from Washington, DC, is quite candid and astute in her assessment of President 45. She says we’re in for quite a ride. Tune into to one or both talks to find out why!

Maureen Dowd at the Miami Book Fair
Maureen Dowd at the Tucson Festival of Books

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

E. M. Forster: Of British Tradition

4/7/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Reagan and Bush . . . made the world safe for hypocrisy.
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again
Julia Phillips
Born April 7, 1944

J. Phillips

My Book World

Furbank, P.N. E. M. Forster: A Life.
New York: Harcourt, 1977.

After reading Christopher Isherwood’s entire oeuvre in 2015-6 and seeing what an influence Forster had been on the man, I felt compelled to read this Forster biography, as well. Isherwood credits Forster with, among other things, providing him with a creative mantra: Get on with your own work; behave as if you were immortal. Isherwood reminds himself, page after page in his journals, that he must remain industrious. Since Furbank does not provide a complete list of Forster’s titles but offers them up in the narrative (and index) instead, it is difficult to realize that Forster, too, produced a broad variety of works, well over twenty. So, a generation apart, Forster provides the model for Isherwood’s ethic. They seem to share similar ideas on literary quality, standards, a certain fussiness in regard to everything. Yet there exist differences between the two men born a generation apart.

Forster, though he does write about sex between men, does not allow it to be seen, particularly Maurice (which is written in 1913-4 but published posthumously in 1971 and made into an Ivory-Merchant film, in 1987) until after his death. Though he becomes sexually active with men at one point, it is not to the degree, I believe, that Isherwood does, the latter claiming to have had over four hundred partners, and yet sharing his last thirty-three years with one man. Forster is never able to find that one man, though I believe he would have liked to. He did have close emotional relationships with other men, but they were mostly married, and in no way did he wish to interfere with those, or gay friends to whom he was not physically attracted, such as his peer, J. R. Ackerley. Isherwood made a break with British culture by making his home in America in 1938-9. Though well-traveled throughout the world, and though he empathized with a great many others, Forster’s being was too deeply rooted in Britain ever to leave. Just the story of the home he lived in with his mother for so many years is enough to complete this picture. When finally vacating West Hackhurst, a rather large estate, it takes the man many months to categorize all the collections of things that had come down to him, and, that as an only child, he now must be rid of: decades, if not centuries, of useless family letters and documents, furniture, clothing, carpets, dishes, art.

Nuggets:

Personal writing of Forster, in which he goads himself to improve his lot:

(1) Get up earlier, out of bed by 9 (2) Smoke in public: it gives a reason for you & you can observe unchallenged (3) try to plan out work, at least by the week (4) more exercise: keep the brutes quiet (5) don’t ever shrink from self analysis, but don’t keep on it too long (6) get a less superficial idea of women (7) don’t be so afraid of going into strange places or company, & be a fool more frequently (8) keep accounts (122).

Here Forster expresses his dismay with how most British authors treat point of view in novels :

A different kind of difficulty was that he had come to feel bored with orthodox fictional form. He told Dickinson (8 May 1922) that he was tired of the convention that one must view the action through the mind of one of the characters. If you can pretend you can get inside one character, why not pretend it about all the characters? I see why. The illusion of life may vanish, and the creator degenerate into the showman. Yet some change of the sort must be made. The studied ignorance of novelists grows wearisome (II, 106).

Furbank’s biography combines two volumes with separate pagination, totaling over six hundred pages, a slog of a reading but well worth the time if one is interested in how a particular author writes, his opinions, his family, his friends and lovers. If one is searching for, as Isherwood does, a literary hero, E. M. Forster possesses a generosity of spirit that, dead or alive, is difficult for one to reject.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Is Duckspeak the Same as #Trumpspeak? Is TWITTER THE NEW DOUBLESPEAK?

3/31/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it's apathy. It's not giving a damn.
Leo Buscaglia
Born March 31, 1924

Buscaglia

My Book World

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four.
New York: Harcourt, 1949.

For summer reading in 1966, I was required to peruse Nineteen Eighty-Four for my first college humanities class, along with Huxley’s Brave New World and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes a book begs to be re-read because it whispers to you. Yes, as I pass by my bookshelf words like HATE WEEK (two minutes of hate is rather like 140 characters of venom) and BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU carry a familiar ring, yet as if for the first time making sense. Other Orwellian terms spring from this novel: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, a language called NEWSPEAK in which words are deliberately manipulated by the government to control people’s thoughts. When I first read this book at eighteen, I did not stop to realize that the character Winston Smith, by Orwell’s own calendar, was born in 1945, a few years before me, his girlfriend Julia, in 1957. At the time, 1984 didn’t seem like eighteen years away; it seemed like FOREVER.

Now one has to wonder. Like citizens of Orwell’s London with telescreens in every room (two-way cameras), we can be hunted down at any moment by way of our cell phones, the GPS systems in our cars, the fact that a certain G entity has photographed every one of our houses and connected them to our addresses so that anyone in the world—whether a relative or an assassin—can locate us within minutes. That the government can record our telephone calls at will or monitor our Internet use are ubiquitous realities that have become invisible to us. And how much does Orwell’s term DOUBLETHINK smack of 45’s ALTERNATE FACTS, DUCKSPEAK OF #TRUMPSPEAK?

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy” (80).

And how is this for Orwell’s prescient definition of DOUBLETHINK:

“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”? (214).

“It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is” (215).

Upon my first reading years ago, I rather shrugged off Orwell’s dystopian depiction of life in the future. I wasn’t overly upset by Winston Smith’s treatment in the end, where he is severely punished physically and mentally for not believing in Big Brother because, to Smith, it is all make believe. Yet, in spite of the novel’s ugliness, Orwell does manage to limn the purity of human love, how Winston and Julia fall for one another but must hide their love, how the glass paperweight with a colorful piece of coral embedded inside is an extended metaphor for their hidden relationship, how in the end the paperweight is shattered like their love is shattered once they are discovered. In spite of the State’s efforts to “change” the two individuals, to erase their thoughts and make them party members, the State really doesn’t quite succeed, for in the end Winston sheds tears of love for who else, but Big Brother himself.

I purposely omit plot elements because many of you will already have read the novel, and if you haven’t, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. It would not be a waste of time to work it into your schedule at some point. If around today, characters Winston and Julia would be about seventy-one and sixty, yet it's hard to believe, given their plight in the novel, that they would be much more than folds of skin with hair.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017

Book-TV Update

3/24/2017

A WRITER'S WIT
Everything has two sides—the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.
Olive Schreiner
Born March 24, 1855

O. Schreiner

My Book World

Each weekend I try to view selected portions of C-SPAN’s Book-TV, forty-eight straight hours of recorded author readings of nonfiction now hitting the shelves, and sometimes six- or eight-hour segments covering book festivals around the US. C-SPAN, by the way, is supported by most cable and satellite TV providers, so check your listings. You can also view at any time any reading at Book-TV’s Web site. And if you do wish to tune in, you can view, download, and print a copy of the weekend’s schedule off the Web site. Please find below a presentation that recently piqued my interest.

Adrian Miller. The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, from the Washingtons to the Obamas. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2017.

I found Mr. Miller’s reading, held at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, not only entertaining but quite edifying. His book scours history to locate the African-American men and women who cook for the nation’s first families and tells of their struggles. He includes anecdotes about presidents without much of a palate to tantalizing recipes that have survived. He describes one concoction, which sounds fascinating, in which one empties out a jar of pickles, mixes a packet of Kool-Aid with the remaining juice, repacks the jar with pickles, and lets the concoction cool in the fridge for two weeks. Mm, yum! The sweet-tart nature of that description creates a curiosity I can’t pass up (this book is on my Wish List). Perhaps you’ll find it tempting, as well, and tune in to Adrian Miller's presentation. I hope you'll be moved to buy a copy of his book.

NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2017