• A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan **** (of 4)

    May 19, 2023

    Following more than 100,000 American casualties in WWI and the death of 450,000 Americans from viral influenza in 1918, most Americans roared into the 1920s with abandon. They drank, they danced to America’s indigenous musical invention – Black jazz, they smooched in the back seats of cars and in public. The backlash from Christian Nationalists was swift, brutal, and shockingly widespread across the heartland.

    By the early 20s, Indiana alone boasted more than 400,000 Klansmen, Klanswomen, and KlansKiddies. Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania added hundreds of thousands more. The Klan grew in status and popularity under the spell of D.C. Stephenson: a fabulist with no allegiance to truth, an abuser of women, an orator who reflected the fears and desires of white Americans concerned for the purity of “their” nation, a money-hungry businessman anxious to make the next deal, a strong desire to become America’s dictator, a virulent anti-woke activist who said clearly and repeatedly that America was threatened by Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and especially Blacks, and a politician who dominated and controlled other politicians. Ultimately, Stephenson said aloud, and believed completely, that he was above the law.

    Timothy Egan never mentions any contemporary politicians with similar proclivities, but makes clear that Stephenson was as much a man of his time and place as he was a leader of it. In response to Reconstruction, the Klan and Jim Crow were born. In the 1920s, the Klan rose again. In the 1940s, as Ultra makes clear, American Nazis were more prevalent in society and in Congress than most of us realize. For those who care about the rights of racial, ethnic, sexual minorities, and others deemed unacceptable, Timothy Egan’s well-told history is a reminder that vigilance remains a necessity in America.

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  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman *** (of 4)

    April 21, 2023

    Neil Gaiman, a British author, has written an Icelandic saga about American gods. Equal parts fantasy, history, sociology, and Americana, Gaiman’s protagonist, and our guide to the gods, is called Shadow. Shadow is only recently released from prison, and about to embark on a roadtrip of epic dimensions. Sometimes traveling by Buick and sometimes upon the back of a flying Thunderbird (an eagle-like deity) through a violent thunderstorm, Shadow finds himself betwixt the old gods of North America and the new ones. The old gods were brought to North America by natives crossing the Bering Straits in the last Ice Age, by Vikings, by Irish immigrants and others arriving on the great continent.

    The new gods are threatening to displace the old ones, who are being forgotten with increasing rapidity. The new gods came to the country on televisions, computers, and the internet, and they take as much devotion and as many offerings as their predecessors. As is true with all sagas, there are twists, hairpins, treachery, violence, and love. Gaiman, though he apologizes for his presumptuousness, is just the man to write about Americana. He can see us as we appear in our roadside attractions as only an outsider can.

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  • These Truths by Jill Lepore **** (of 4)

    March 21, 2023

    It is no small feat to write a history of the United States. Choose any event, say, for example the Presidency of George Washington, The Civil War, the long, and ongoing struggle for Civil Rights in America and you will discover that on just a single subject there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books on the subject. What Jill Lepore does so expertly in this book is summarize key events, lots and lots of them, and place them in a political continuum that is America’s history.

    Lepore says at the outset that her focus is politics and beginning in 1492 when Christian Europeans planted flags on the American continent in the name of Christian conquest for Europe. At nearly the same time America became a far away home for Europeans, and then others, some of them enslaved, seeking freedom from religious and state orthodoxies. America started as a country of contradictions. A country of immigrants, wherein a very significant portion of the population today is anti-immigrant.

    From the first days when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…” Lepore makes clear that internal inconsistencies and conflicts were going to be papered over with daub and wattle. At the time of the writing of the Constitution, a first of its kind, the notion that citizens were not inferior to noblemen was truly revolutionary. Yet, “all men” failed to include enslaved men, or women.

    The title of the book is so multilayered as to become an unbreakable wire threading the entire book together. Especially interesting are the final fifty years of American politics (perhaps because I have lived them and can observe how Lepore selects and summarizes the events she highlights) when the notion of truth has become so personal that the question of whether we can hold together as a nation that believes in something unifying feels like it might be hanging in the balance. The expansion of the Internet and with it Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and Truth Social (Trump’s personal twitter), has allowed both the insertion of genuine Fake News (see the work of Russian troll farms during the 2016 election) and the selection of personal, unedited news selected by each and every consumer to suit her or his preconceived beliefs. The book was published before the January 6 uprising and attack on Congress, which is the predictable outcome.

    These Truths is not an optimistic book, and the work of right wingers to promote hundreds of years of inequality, racism, sexism, anti-foreigner sentiment, misinformation, and objection to facts is wholly dispiriting (I suspect the right dismisses Lepore’s book precisely because it raises uncomfortable truths). The new Left’s closed-door approach to speakers and writers whose views they find dangerous to insecure minorities or their definition of an illegitimate history is scarcely more encouraging. Still, there is nothing like observing a master putting history into a clear and readily accessible context.

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  • What it is Like to go to War ***(of 4)

    February 2, 2023

    There are not a lot of books about the philosophy of war, but there should be, especially as we are a country that in the last couple of decades has sent our troops to Iraq (twice), Afghanistan (for the longest war in U.S. history), Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya, Uganda, Syria, and Niger. The goal of war, this book makes perfectly clear, is to kill people. Karl Marlantes asks a simple question. What happens when we send our youth — young people whose full sense of judgement and character has not yet reached maturity — to contravene the fundamental tenets of society.

    Raised with the legal, moral, and religious tradition that Thou Shalt Not Kill, we nonetheless ask 18-year olds to kill other human beings. Often the requirement comes in a situation where opposing youth are being asked to do the same to them. Increasingly, however, the use of so-called smart weapons means a gunner or drone pilot could be 100s or 1000s of miles away. Still, their job is to kill, and to know that no weapon is smart enough to always distinguish between an enemy combatant and innocent bystander.

    Karl Marlantes descriptions of battles he engaged in while in Vietnam are surreally alive and frighteningly tangible. Interspersed with battle scenes are Marlantes’ discussions of what it feels like to kill another person, to be involved in a life and death situation, and to try to reintegrate into society afterward. Marlantes calls upon literature from the Illiad and Baghavad Gita forward. He investigates psychology and spirituality. He talks about PTSD and pain and love and recovery.

    Unfortunately, he, like many military professionals is still processing the last war, rather than thinking fully about the next one. Hand to hand combat and trench warfare, though they are at play again in Ukraine, have been displaced by drone and satellite driven technology. Killers take lunch breaks and go home to their spouses at 5 PM. Their spouses, unlike in Vietnam, are often husbands. Today’s volunteer Army is comprised of individuals whose motivations and backgrounds may well be different than those drafted in the 1960s. His book needs to be updated to match the trials of more modern warfare, but his principles remain very much in need of discussion.

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  • Mercury Pictures Presents *** (of 4) by Anthony Marra

    January 17, 2023

    Anthony Marra starts off well enough. His lead characters Art Feldman, a 1940s B-lot movie producer and his plucky assistant, an Italian immigrant named Maria Lagana, together make crummy movies on a tight budget. The movies are worth paying attention to because Art and Maria both have relatives trapped by Nazis and Fascists in Europe so they see it as their duty to call truth to power. They battle wartime censorship and American fascists (America First members) looking to shut down a Jewish filmmaker by making schlocky films about the hypocrisy of American propaganda.

    At its strongest, Marra captures the patois of an indomitable, snarky Jewish director with six toupees, each toupee bearing its own name, and the Italian banter of Maria’s three aunts who communicate only in insults. Listening to the dialogue is as joyful as watching an old black and white movie.

    Then Marra introduces Art Feldman’s twin brother, Maria’s father entrapped in Italy, the village of San Lorenzo in Italy and all its villagers, a Chinese American actor, German refugees seeking work in the film industry, an Italian policeman and his ambitious sidekick, a Senatorial hearing on acceptable film making, a German American architect working as a miniaturist in a film studio who is later called up by the U.S. Army to build a painstakingly accurate, life size depiction of Berlin in the middle of the Utah desert to be used as target practice, and rebuilt each time it is burned, a Black prisoner wrongfully convicted and sentenced to fifty years in jail, an on again, off again relationship between Maria and her mother, an archaeological dig, and rapacious stockholders anxious to promote profit over art upon Hollywood.

    Mercury Pictures Presents is one of those books reviewers refer to as a sprawling novel, and most reviewers loved Mercury Pictures Presents. Alas, sprawl overtakes Anthony Marra as he tries too hard to cover too much. His story of a B-level movie studio comes off as a B-level book.

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  • Ultra by Rachel Maddow **** (of 4)

    December 7, 2022

    Not a book or, at least, not yet a book, but a podcast.

    The genius of the production is that it is ostensibly a recounting of the hidden history of American duplicity and sedition during WW II, during which members of Congress in collusion with right-wing nationalists tried to abrogate American democracy, overthrow the Constitution, and install a fascist President.

    Armed insurrectionists, whipped up by pro-Nazi, virulently anti-Semitic, extremely popular media hucksters attacked Congress, American industries, and Jews.

    An American munitions plant blown up by Americans who supported the Nazis in WW II.

    Congressmen used their political privilege to distribute Nazi propaganda (while being paid by the Nazis to do so) to tens of thousands of their constituents.

    Do those look like ordinary Congressional waves to the crowd to you?

    Every episode of this podcast is a masterpiece of storytelling and revelation of a chapter in America’s past most of us were unaware of. The value of the U.S. Justice Department’s ability to withstand overwhelming political pressure becomes paramount (powerful Senators forced the Justice Department to end its investigations of the events outlined in Ultra). The actions of journalists and ordinary citizens committed to protecting democracy cannot be overstated.

    The consequences of right-wing politicians willing to condone insurrectionists, remain silent, or lie following acts of violence against Jews, Blacks, and law enforcement officials instigated by their rhetoric is horrifying. The direct line from what was then called America First to today’s MAGA is self-evident.

    I challenge you to listen to the first episode, and resist listening to the next one.

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  • The Girls in the Stilt House by Kelly Mustian *** (of 4)

    December 7, 2022

    A somewhat predictable, but well-told story about a motherless, white daughter with an abusive father living in a 1920s Mississippi swamp. Once Dad disappears from the picture she is joined by an also motherless Black girl with a history she does not want to reveal. The two teenagers take on the swamp, their neighbors, a newborn, and deadly Jim Crow racism. They find their footing and gain their independence, or, at least the white girl does. To be Black and live in the south under Jim Crow apartheid laws is a balancing act between hopelessness and subversive defiance.

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  • The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich **** (of 4)

    November 18, 2022

    A fictionalized account of Louise Erdrich’s grandfather, who worked as a night watchman in a factory on the Chippewa nation in North Dakota. He battled the U.S. Senate as the American government made one more effort to remove Indians from their native lands: In the 1950s, a Mormon senator, with considerable support from his colleagues, decided it was time to “emancipate” America’s Indians. In practice, emancipation meant absolving the U.S. government of support for any Indian activities – like healthcare, housing assistance, food security. Equally valuable to the U.S. government and its supporters, emancipation included tossing “independent” Indians from their reservations. Imagine the land rush afforded non-Indians if Indians were no longer recognized, but “emancipated.”

    Erdrich’s fictionalized Indian characters are full of life, defiant in the face of daily trauma and mean-spirited hardships. What makes The Night Watchman such a fine read is that the Chippewa, in addition to having devilishly great senses of humor, tangle with love, jealousy, envy, icky-bosses, shifting friendships, relatives gone off the rails, and making dinner. In short, The Night Watchman makes us recognize the fundamental humanity of Native Americans and all people whose cultures are different from our own. Erdrich deals truth to power calling out elected officials bent on setting up walls, real and invisibly enforced by laws and economic restrictions around people whose history has been torturous, and whose difference can be distinguished by their skin color.

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  • Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar **** (of 4)

    October 24, 2022

    The title says the book is a novel, but the voice is the author’s and the story is about his life. News events, timelines, and characters are real and it is impossible to discern when fact is being replaced by fiction which makes the story only that much more intriguing. Akhtar’s elegies, generally defined as serious poetic odes to the dead are largely long form, stand alone descriptions of his life in America: the American born, Muslim son of Pakistani immigrants.

    His father loves America, his mother not as much. The laments are for the losses of home back in Pakistan as seen through rose colored glasses of hindsight; for the breakdown of a relationship between father and son; a father’s loss of his bearings as a doctor in the United States; a mother’s loss of health offset by his parents pride and befuddlement at a son who succeeds in America as a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. Akhtar’s plays have won Pulitzers and his ability to write a scene and fill it with authentic dialog feels so realistic it is hard to imagine it was conceived by an author and not simply filmed on the spot.

    Running the full length of the book are the tribulations of being Muslim in a country in the throes of deep anti-Muslim sentiment. Akhtar’s recounting of his experience in Manhattan on 9/11, what he endures upon being pulled over by a state trooper near Wilkes Barre, PA, or how Trump gave voice to anti-Muslim attackers are horrifying.

    His conclusion about America is subtle and surprising. While he makes a decent case that our country was founded by Christians for Christians, he makes a stronger case that our true object of worship is money and that the drive to acquire monetary status at the personal, political, and corporate levels of society are insatiable and insidious.

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  • The Last Slave Ship by Ben Raines *** (of 4)

    September 30, 2022

    On the face of it, the story of 100 enslaved Africans smuggled into Mobile, Alabama does not feel that significant among the 12.5 million Africans shipped to the New World (10.7 million survived the Middle Passage.) Aside: I am only now figuring out that more than 90% of the people kidnapped, chained below decks, and, if they survived, sold, went into the Caribbean and South America. America’s four million enslaved people were mostly bred (breeding is a term used by slavers) by their owners here.

    The Clotilda was the last ship carrying human cargo to arrive in the United States, running past naval patrol ships into Mobile Bay in 1860. After the south lost the Civil War, many of those transported by the Clotilda settled in Africa Town just outside Mobile. They lived long enough to be interviewed and photographed. They provided firsthand accounts of their lost African families, details of their capture by Dahomian warriors, the life-threatening Middle Passage, and sale to other humans to do animal-like labor. They also recall African customs that persisted inside Africa Town.

    The author, Ben Raines, describes the Clotilda from the days of its inception as a ship bound for Africa in contravention of American law, its scuttling after disgorging its human cargo into the swamps of Alabama, until its rediscovery 2019. The ship’s story brackets the story of its enslaved Africans and their offspring.

    A century of racism haunts Africa Town and its descendents to this day. And yet, The Last Slave Ship grows stronger until its finish, describing a sordid history that somehow still points a way toward recognition and finally, forgiveness.

    Africa Town today. The commerce is gone now, and you see boarded up homes and vacant lots in the neighborhood. Link to NPR story.

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