Half Changed World

I usually don’t do book reviews of books that I read a long time ago, but since we’ve been talking about Paul Robeson, I though I’d make a plug for Martin Duberman’s wonderful biography of Robeson.  It’s a long book, but it illuminates a fascinating and complicated man, as well as what it meant to be a successful black man in pre-civil rights America  (he was born in 1898 and was the third African-American man ever to attend Rutgers), and the Red scare.

The anti-communist hysteria of the 50s certainly caught up many people who weren’t really communists, but Robeson wasn’t in that category.  He may or may not have ever been a formal member of the Community Party USA (he always denied it; Gus Hall claimed he was), but there’s no doubt that he was a communist sympathizer.  To his credit, he truly believed in the universal brotherhood of man; to his shame, as Dave noted, he continued to insist that Stalinist Russia was an exemplar of that ideal, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.  Duberman doesn’t shy away from that failing in Robeson, but he makes a convincing argument for how a proud and idealistic man could avoid confronting a truth that would give aid and comfort to those who had persecuted him for years, and embarrass the people who had stood up for him.

If you didn’t listen to the song I posted last week, go back and listen.  His voice is awesome.  This is the CD of Robeson singing that I have.  It’s an eclectic album that doesn’t quite hold together, but shows off the range of his repertoire.  It has his version of Ol’ Man River, as well as the House I Live In, and Joe Hill.  It also has him singing Motherless Child, Ode to Joy (in German), a Yiddish folksong, a song from The Magic Flute, discussing how "hello" sounds the same in many languages, and reciting the final speech from Othello. 

I’ve been slowly working my way through Nixonland, and I’m reading Whatever It Takes for work, but you want to know what I’m really reading? (other than about a hundred blogs, but those don’t count, do they?)

• Down River, by John Hart.  This was my book group’s pick, and since I was making it to book group for the first time in about six months, I figured I should read it.  I enjoyed it, and stayed up later than I should have in order to finish it, but can’t say that it was a particularly memorable book.  The plot kept moving nicely and the writing stayed out of the way.

• Heart Shaped Box, by Joe Hill.  This is a book that I’d never have bought, since I’m not particularly a fan of horror stories.  But it showed up in the box of books that I got from Books4Barack and I started reading it, and got hooked.  Again, it’s not great literature.  But it was a good read, and not too scary.  I was actually somewhat reminded of Sharyn McCrumb’s Appalachian stories.

I guess I needed some downtime.  That’s ok.

This week’s book is Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  It’s the story of how Mortenson’s failed attempt to climb K2 led to his receiving hospitality from the residents of a small village in Pakistan and to a promise to build them a school.  This promise eventually led him into founding the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and building dozens of schools in the hardest to reach corners of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It’s a pretty amazing story, as Mortenson started out as a climber and a night nurse, without any particular expertise about that part of the world, building schools, or raising money.  But he plunged ahead anyway, and learned what he needed to do along the way.  And he did it more or less in obscurity, until 9/11 suddenly made a lot of people start to pay attention to that particular corner of the world.  Mortenson and Relin argue persuasively that the CAI’s work does a great deal to create peace, in part by showing people that the US can do things other than drop bombs, but more significantly by providing an alternative to the radical madrassas that have filled the gaps left by the lack of government schools in much of Pakistan.

While it’s an amazing story, I can’t say it’s an amazing book.  It focuses directly on Mortenson, without ever pulling back to provide a greater context about the culture and history of the area.  And while his successes in building the schools are improbable unto the point of miraculous, if you pick up the book, you probably know already that he’s going to build the school, he won’t get killed driving off a road, neither the Taliban nor the CIA will leave him in a jail cell to rot, etc.  So, while it was clearly very suspenseful to live through all of this, it’s not that suspenseful to read.  My sister in law gave it to me last spring, and I read about half of it right away, and then got bogged down in the middle.

But read it anyway.  Because you’ll learn a little about that part of the world, and because you’ll regain some hope about one person’s ability to make a difference.  And you’ll be inspired to give what you can to CAI.  And to tell our elected officials to live up to their promises to help rebuild Afghanistan.

I seem to have fallen out of the routine of doing regular weekly book reviews.  I’m going to try to get back into the habit, since they often provoked good discussions, and the deadlines helped me control my bad habit of reading five books at once and not finishing any of them.

This week’s book is The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon.  The discussions of this book that I’ve seen mostly treat it as a dancing bear — e.g. they don’t criticize its skill in dancing, because the impressive thing is that it dances at all.  But I don’t think the idea of rendering a serious topic as a comic* is such a radical idea.  So, I’m taking it seriously, and asking whether this is an effective use of the medium.

The first chapter of the book absolutely blew me away.  Telling the stories of the four flights that took off on the morning of September 11, 2001 as four parallel stories playing out horizontally across the page is a very effective move.  I’ve always been a little blurry on the timeline of that morning — I spent it alternating between television and trying to contact people in NYC, and never sorted out what I was seeing live and what was replayed — and this made sense of it.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book didn’t live up to this start.  The main problem is that, while the format is that of a comic, the rest of the book doesn’t conform to Scott McCloud’s definition in Understanding Comics — the sequencing of the images does not contribute to the narrative; they simply illustrate the text.

Even as illustrations, the images don’t always contribute to our understanding. I totally don’t understand why the statement that Bin Ladin drew terrorists from at least 21 countries is followed by half a page of flags, rather than by a map of the world.  And in at least one case, the images confuse the story — a discussion of what went wrong in the evacuation of the World Trade Center after the 1993 bombing is accompanied by a picture of the towers on fire, an image from from 2001.

The book includes a forward from the chair and cochair of the 9/11 Commission, praising it strongly.  It is, by all accounts, a fair and honest abridgment of the report.  And I do think that making the key findings of the report accessible to people who would never pick up a 1000 page book is a valuable and important task.  But as a work of graphic narrative, it doesn’t quite work.

* I’m calling it a comic because it’s clearly not a graphic novel and we don’t have a better word in English to use.  And because McCloud calls the whole category comics.

The title of the book Infinite Jest comes from a film within the story.  it’s been a long time since I read the book, but as I remember it, people who come to see the movie see a projection of themselves sitting in the audience.  Nothing else happens, and eventually, some of the people give up and leave, but the film keeps going as long as a single person stubbornly sits in the auditorium, keeping the movie going.

My personal theory about the book is that Wallace intended it like the movie — he didn’t really expect that anyone would slog through the 1000 plus pages (including footnotes).  While he wrote darkly funny prose, and a lot of things happened in the book, it was just one thing after another, without a clear plot trajectory.  To be honest, you could  stop anywhere along the way and not miss too much.  Just as the audience had the power to end the movie by simply leaving, I think he was suggesting that his readers had the power to end the book just by saying "enough" and closing it.

This week, David Foster Wallace seems to have decided that he didn’t need to find out what comes next in his story.  I didn’t know the man personally, and I didn’t even love his book.  But I feel diminished by his passing.

I’m busy getting ready to go on vacation, and the computer’s going into the shop, so don’t expect to hear from me for a couple of weeks.

I’ve got a stack of books that need to go back to the library before I head out of town, but what I’ve actually been reading is Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.  It’s propaganda (the long lectures from the main character’s history teacher wear thin), but fun propaganda, and unfortunately only slightly beyond what’s believable.

The tomatoes I planted this year did even worse than last year.  A few of the plants just got drowned in the torrential rains shortly after I transplanted them, and the one plant that got big and healthy hasn’t produced much in the way of fruit.  I don’t really get enough sun here for tomatoes, but I can’t help myself. 

Today, we finally had a ripe tomato, and I let N pick it.  He came in with it and asked "Can we make First Tomato soup?"  This was, of course, a reference to one of the Voyage to the Bunny Planet books* by Rosemary Wells** where in the day that should have been, Claire gets to pick the first ripe tomato and her mother makes her First Tomato soup. 

I couldn’t resist a request like that, but I also didn’t want to waste one of my few homegrown tomatoes on something that could just as well be made out of store-bought tomatoes.  And I strongly suspected that neither of the boys would actually eat whatever I made.  So after a few minutes of googling, I made the simplest soup possible — tomato, olive oil, and salt, pureed together without cooking.   D refused to taste it and N had just a few bites, but T and I enjoyed it.

*In each of these books, a young bunny has a terrible day, and then the Bunny Queen takes them to the Bunny Planet, where they get to experience the day that should have been.  Each of the days gives the child what they were really missing — quiet and solitude, parental attention, warmth and affection.  The link is to a book that contains all three stories, but if you can find the out-of-print box set in a used bookstore or yard sale for less than the unreal prices being asked by Amazon sellers, I’d vote for that.  The books are larger than the classic Sendak Nutshell Library but only about half the size of a standard paperback and there’s something about the small books fitting into their own little case that is absolutely irresistible for preschoolers.

**Yes, Rosemary Wells, better known as the creator of Max and Ruby.

I gave blood this afternoon and am feeling logy, so you get another bulleted post.

Landismom posted recently about giving up cable.  It made me realize that I haven’t watched TV in months, not since the end of The Amazing Race and Heroes.  Here’s some of what I am watching, etc:

• Right now, we’ve got Spiderman 3 playing.  Boy is it lousy.

• This weekend, I finally got a chance to see 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days.   It’s painful, austere, brilliant, horrifying.  Watching it wasn’t exactly enjoyable, but it’s worth watching. 

• I’ve been listening to the podcasts of This American Life.  This week’s episode, Switched at Birth, is truly haunting.  The women in question didn’t find out about the switch until they were in their 40s.  But what makes the story absolutely bizarre is that one of the mothers realized the switch right away, but didn’t do anything about it.  This could have been just a freakshow, but the interviewer has such empathy for everyone involved that it works.

• Dr Horrible’s Sing a Long Blog is pretty funny.  Except when it’s not.  Don’t try to watch when your kids are anywhere in earshot.

• I just read The Miracle at Speedy Motors.  Fun, nothing profound.

• I started reading Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, and got about 200 pages into it (it’s 600 pages long) when it needed to go back to the library.  One of the problems is that’s just too heavy to haul back and forth on the metro every day.  So I bought it in eReader format — I figure this will be a good test of whether reading books on the Touch is really something I’d do.

Updated: Meant to ask — what am I missing by not watching TV?  Anything I should be adding to the TiVO?  (I assume I’ll watch at least some of the Olympics.)

This week’s book is (Not) Keeping Up with Our Parents: The Decline of the Professional Middle Class, by Nan Mooney.  In many ways, it covers the same ground as The Trap, Strapped, and  The Two-Income Trap— how families today are squeezed by the high costs of housing, child care, health care, and college loans. 

The only problem is that — as we’ve gone over here before — there’s not actually a lot of evidence that this generation is overall worse off than their parents were, and if their parents weren’t college graduates, they’re probably earning a lot more.  Mooney deals with this by narrowing her subjects down to what she calls "the professional middle class" — those with college degrees, but excluding doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, and anyone else who is actually making decent money.  She focuses on teachers, social workers, journalists, artists, workers for non-profit organizations, etc.   

I wanted to like this book, but I found myself muttering that the subjects seemed to believe in Marjorie Williams‘ "no fault fairy."  I’m not sure who they think promised them that there would be no tradeoffs between interesting work, living in expensive vibrant urban areas, and living a middle class life with homeownership and a secure retirement.  Easy credit may make it possible to postpone these tradeoffs (and may even make things worse by thus increasing the supply of people who are willing to take interesting jobs at non-sustainable wages), but the existence of these tradeoffs isn’t something new. 

When I wrote about Farthing, I wondered why so many alternate histories take World War II as their point of departure from our world.  In The Explosionist, Jenny Davidson takes a different tack.  This story is set in the 1930s on the possible eve of a second world war, but the two sides are an apparently fascist united Europe (unified by a Napoleon who won at Waterloo) and a "Hanseatic League" of Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, and Russia.  Oh, and Sophie, the heroine, is a somewhat skeptical medium who really can talk to the spirits of the dead.

I ordered this book because I read Davidson’s terrific blog, Light Reading, and her broad reading and lively interest in the world shows through.  The plot of the book drew me in, and kept me turning the pages, but it’s the subtle jokes and suggestions about the world that I expect will keep with me — touches like the Wittgenstein Uncertainty Principle, and the phone having been invented by Alexsandr Bell.  (A main topic of the book is terrorist attacks — which certainly existed well before the 1930s, although I’m not sure when they started being called "terrorist" attacks — the English word itself apparently dates to the French revolution and the reign of terror.)

Until I clicked through from Davidson’s blog to Amazon, I didn’t realize that The Explosionist was being sold as a young adult novel.  It almost stopped me from buying the book, but I’m glad it didn’t.  Davidson says that she didn’t particularly think of it as YA, but they were the editors most interested in it.  She says that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy was one of her mental models, but it actually reminds me far more of the Sally Lockhart books.

My one complaint is that the girl on the cover has long hair, and the first page of the book says that Sophie has "straight black hair bobbed short with a fringe to keep it tidy."