September 21

Larry Hagman, who dreamt of Jeannie before moving to Dallas, is 76 today.

Bill Murray is 57 today. Nominated for an Oscar for Lost in Translation, NewMexiKen still thinks Murray’s best effort was as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day.

Faith Hill is 40.

Owen and Andrew Wilson’s brother Luke is 36 today.

September 21st is an important date in fantasy literature. Stephen King is 60 today. He was born on H.G. Wells’ birthday (1866-1946) and on the 10th anniversary of the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit (1937). The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media has a little about each of the three.

411 years ago today (1596) Spain named Juan de Oñate governor of the colony of New Mexico. 223 years ago today (1784) the nation’s first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, began publication. The Library of Congress has a little more about each.

H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken

… essayist and editor, was born on September 12th in 1880. I’ve posted many of these before, but Mencken has some great lines that I never tire of reading:

• Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
• A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• The first kiss is stolen by the man; the last is begged by the woman.
• It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

1491

Professor Brad DeLong assigns an essay by Charles Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, to his American Economic History class and requires the students to comment. Surfing the web, Mann himself finds the discussion and responds to some of the comments.

Interesting if you are familiar with Mann’s book (or the essay). If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the link to his Atlantic Monthly article. It may get you to rethink what you probably were taught about the Americas before Columbus.

Some of DeLong’s other assigned readings also appear interesting. He teaches and blogs at Berkeley.

Been Readin’

NewMexiKen finally got around to finishing Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West last night. I had started it when it first came out last year, but set it aside about a 100 pages in and just got back to it.

Despite that personal experience with it, I do recommend this book. As Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote in his review:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

It is a fascinating and important story well told. Surely anyone with any abiding interest in New Mexico and Arizona history should read it. I must say, however, that I found the episodic mixed chronology in the first third of the book terribly annoying. And Sides does let some anachronism float into his text — I don’t think Matthew Brady used flash bulbs, for example — and some lapses of fact. It’s not, in other words, a dry encyclopedic narrative. He tells a good story fervently and fairly.

The book I began before I was interrupted by my interest in Kit Carson — and will take up again today — is Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Childs, who grew up and lives in the southwest, takes a personal look at the Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloan) ruins across the Four Corners area (Chaco, Aztec, Mesa Verde) as well as southeast Arizona and Mexico, and speculates about the people who lived there 700-1000 years ago and what happened to them and their magnificent cultures.

One in four read no books last year

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.

AP via Yahoo! News

NewMexiKen has read seven Harry Potter books alone since April.

Additionally:

Liberals read more books than conservatives. The head of the book publishing industry’s trade group says she knows why — and there’s little flattering about conservative readers in her explanation.

“The Karl Roves of the world have built a generation that just wants a couple slogans: ‘No, don’t raise my taxes, no new taxes,’” Pat Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers, said in a recent interview. “It’s pretty hard to write a book saying, ‘No new taxes, no new taxes, no new taxes’ on every page.”

AP via Yahoo! News

Blue Blood

“[T]he smallness of people and the grandeur of their demands.”

Edward Condon Conlon, in Blue Blood, his first-rate memoir of life in the NYPD.

Conlon, a detective, formerly wrote the “Cop Diary” columns for The New Yorker.

“The entire criminal-justice system functions as an editorial process, as a story is refined, supported, and checked from the complainant to the cop, to the sergeant and maybe the lieutenant, and then to the ADA, and then to the judge, and sometimes to the jury.”

Even more stuff

Take a Cognitive Mental Abilities IQ test from the International High IQ Society. 36 questons; takes about 12-15 minutes. Yes, it gives you your result as an IQ. (I refer to the eCMA test.)

A video of a half-time show in Korea that has to be better than the game could have been — Incredible Halftime Show.

The books may be over but J.K. Rowling goes Beyond Hogwarts in interviews.

Oh, and from Scholastic, “find out how to say Hermione, Eeylops, and Azkaban, using our handy” Harry Potter: Pronunciation Guide.

Worried About iPod Theft? Hide It In a Zune!.

Snuggly. The Security Bear.

Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America

From a review by Nathaniel Philbrick of Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America.

It was in 1507, with the publication of a large cut-out map suitable for creating a do-it-yourself globe, that Vespucci’s first name, if not Vespucci himself, achieved lasting renown. On this map, published in the intellectual backwater of St. Dié in Lorraine, the designation “America” (the feminine of Amerigo) was chosen for the portion of the hemisphere where Vespucci claimed to have landed during his second voyage. In 1538, the noted mapmaker Mercator, apparently referring to the earlier map from St. Dié, chose to use the name America to mark not just the southern but also the northern portion of the continent. The rest, as they say, is history. “The tradition was secure,” Fernández-Armesto writes, “the decision irreversible.” And so, because of Mercator and assorted others, more than 350 million of us now call ourselves Americans.

Harry Potter

A good, if not altogether glowing, look at the Harry Potter series by Christopher Hitchens.

For my part, I have finished Book 6 and now, only three weeks late, am ready for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The New York Times has a topic page with all its Harry Potter news and reviews.

Cut God Some Slack

Freakonomics author Steven Levitt is dismayed by the rush of anti-god books recently.

I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God. I’m definitely not interested enough to go out and buy books explaining to me why I shouldn’t believe in God….

There’s more (including a list of books).

The ultimate rags to riches story

“She was living in Scotland as a single mother, and her apartment was unheated, so she would go to the local café and write, while her daughter slept in the baby carriage. She eventually quit her job and lived on public assistance to finish the book.” (The Writer’s Almanac)

And so the book was published in 1998 and today she is a billionaire (a first ever for an author).

J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, 42 today.

According to another source Rowling has denied the lack of heat in her flat: “I am not stupid enough to rent an unheated flat, in Edinburgh, in mid-winter; it had heating.” Still, a good Dickensian touch, that.

Reader’s digest

NewMexiKen read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix over the weekend. Just Books 6 and 7 left (and six is on its way).

Meanwhile, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA sits bookmarked under last week’s New Yorker.

Even so, over the weekend I also read Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. Jean Shepherd was a radio personality who, Garrison Keillor-like, told stories, many of them about growing up during the depression. This book is the written version of many of those semi-auotbiographical stories including four that form the classic Christmas film A Christmas Story, which Shepherd wrote and narrated. “You’ll shoot your eye out.” Thoroughly enjoyable.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been re-reading Edward Abbey’s classic Desert Solitaire, one of Outside Magazine’s 25 essential books for the well-read explorer (number five). The Amazon link is to the 1988 hardback version that includes an introduction by Abbey. If you’ve never read this book, you should.

How Walter Scott Started the American Civil War

Scott Horton argues that the Romanticism of Sir Walter Scott altered the Southern character and led to the Civil War. A fascinating short essay, which includes this quote from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.

NewMexiKen would argue that the influence extends to this day.

NewMexiKen is an Omega

Aldous Huxley was born on this date in 1894. This is from The Writer’s Almanac:

The result was Brave New World (1932), about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called “soma.”

Brave New World was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality. When George Orwell’s 1984 came out a few years later, many critics compared the two novels, trying to decide which one was more likely to come true. Huxley argued that his imagined future was more likely, because it would be easier to control people by keeping them happy than it would be by threatening them with violence.

Harry Potter

OK, I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire now — and I get it.

Forget Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, I need Harry Potter 5, 6 and 7.

Update: Actually I read instead Gene Kerrigan’s wonderful police-detective novel set in Dublin, The Midnight Choir; a first-rate page turner.

Update update: After dinner Wednesday, I began Legacy of Ashes and got as far as 1950. Already the CIA has failed to predict the Soviet atomic bomb, the Korean war and the Chinese invasion (into Korea). Indeed, the Agency was saying China wouldn’t invade after it had already begun to in early November 1950.

Best line of the day, so far

“… Mr. Flannery in his engaging and, yes, bouncy tour of the kangaroo family and the landscape of his native Australia.”

William Grimes in a review of Chasing Kangaroos. It’s an interesting review.

What I’ve been reading

On the way to Virginia, finishing up while there, NewMexiKen read Richard Rodriguez’s Brown: The Last Discovery of America. While interesting, it was a little too abstract for me. I kept looking for more than his opinions. And the anecdotes were largely the same as those he told in the very good talk I recently heard Rodriguez give.

While in Virginia I began Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Book 4 in the series of seven. I’m about two-thirds through.

Later today I expect to begin Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Stumbling on Happiness

Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness. This is an informative and funny book by a Harvard psychologist that explains how our brain, mind, memory and emotions work — and why they lead us to such poor decisions about what makes us happy.

As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”

Trust me, too.

First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.

Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.

… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …

“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”

Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.

The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.

Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.

Sharpest critical lines of the day, so far

“But on the whole her book is bound to be dull, because she is averse to examining what actually happened.”

Tim Parks reviewing a new biography of Garibaldi.

“Long ago, when the impact of ‘Star Wars’ was beefed up by a line of merchandise, some of us noticed that the five-inch Lukes and Leias possessed a depth and mobility that was denied to their onscreen counterparts….”

Anthony Lane in a review of Transformers.

Brown

NewMexiKen attended a talk Saturday evening by Richard Rodriguez. His presentation was sponsored by The Chicano, Hispano, Latino Program (CHIPOTLE) of the University Libraries at the University of New Mexico. He was excellent.

Rodriguez is an author and journalist, his most recent book being Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002). He appears on The NewsHour on PBS.

Rodriguez’s 75-minute talk was on the browning of the world. It was an anecdotal, amusing, entertaining and provocative presentation. My notes are fleeting but include:

• The Senate voted to designate English the only language. Won’t they have to stop selling burritos in the Senate cafeteria? How could you even describe a burrito — tortilla, no, guacamole, no, chile, no.
• We don’t speak English, we speak American. (German words, Spanish words, French words, American Indian words.)
• Outside the U.S. there is no such thing as Hispanics. It’s a number of cultures not a race.
• HBO did a documentary on white culture. It was 15 minutes.
• The Census suggests there will be no racial distinctions by the 2020 census. The races are becoming too intermingled.
• One of his aunts, like Rodriguez part Spanish and part Indian, married an East Indian. Their daughter, his cousin, is an Indian Indian. (And she married an American Indian so their child is Indian Indian Indian.)
• Why is Barack Obama considered an African-American (i.e., black)? His mother was white.
• He’d gotten a letter from a woman who’s father was Muslim and mother was Jewish. She didn’t know what she was but Americans think of her as the frugal terrorist.

These one-liners, of course, do not do the talk justice. Underlying it all was the theme that individuals everywhere are crossing racial lines — as they have for centuries in some cultures. It’s the browning of the world. And now people are crossing religious lines, too. Reacting to it all are the extremists, doing all that they can to stop the mingling.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born on June 29 in 1900. In January 2003, Outside Magazine listed its 25 essential books for the well-read explorer. At the top was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Like his most famous creation, The Little Prince, that visitor from Asteroid B-612 who once saw 44 sunsets in a single day, Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. Killed in World War II at age 44, “Saint Ex” was a pioneering pilot for Aéropostale in the 1920s, carrying mail over the deadly Sahara on the Toulouse-Dakar route, encountering cyclones, marauding Moors, and lonely nights: “So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited out the night.” Whatever his skills as a pilot—said to be extraordinary—as a writer he is effortlessly sublime. Wind, Sand and Stars is so humane, so poetic, you underline sentences: “It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.” Saint-Exupéry did just that. No writer before or since has distilled the sheer spirit of adventure so beautifully. True, in his excitement he can be righteous, almost irksome—like someone who’s just gotten religion. But that youthful excess is part of his charm. Philosophical yet gritty, sincere yet never earnest, utterly devoid of the postmodern cop-outs of cynicism, sarcasm, and spite, Saint-Exupéry’s prose is a lot like the bracing gusts of fresh air that greet him in his open cockpit. He shows us what it’s like to be subject—and king—of infinite space.

I know, I post this every year (well, actually just three out of four), but it’s a great book. And the Outside Magazine Adventure Canon is an interesting list.

Harry Potter as literature

Must reading from Michael Bérubé, Harry Potter and the Power of Narrative. It’s a insightful (and touching) analysis from a literary critic (and a pdf file).

I can’t possibly do justice to any of the plots of these books, let alone the subplots, sub-subplots, and moments of inspired levity and bewildering pathos. Indeed, that’s one of the complaints about Rowling’s creations—that they are too baroquely plotted, too cloak-and-dagger-and triple-reversal-with-a-double-axel, as if they are children’s versions of spy fiction in the mode of Robert Ludlum. But it’s astonishing to me that tens of millions of young readers are following Rowling through her five-, seven-, and even nine-hundredpage elaborations on the themes of betrayal, bravery, and insupportable loss; it’s all the more astonishing that one of those tens of millions is my own “retarded” child, a child who wasn’t expected to be capable of following a plot more complicated than that of Chicken Little. And here’s what’s really stunning: Jamie remembers plot details over thousands of pages even though I read the books to him at night, just before he goes to bed, six or seven pages at a time. Well, narrative has been a memory-enhancing device for some time now, ever since bards got paid to chant family genealogies and catalog the ships that laid siege to Troy. But this is just ridiculous.

Book four, here I come.

Link via Unfogged.

The Rock

NewMexiKen read Alcatraz last evening, a book by prisoner #1422, Darwin E. Coon (now 74 years old). Coon did time at Alcatraz from 1959 to 1963.

It’s a quick read, just 145 pages, much of it on Coon’s criminal career, which culminated in a federal armed robbery conviction and an eventual transfer from Leavenworth to Alcatraz. Though brief, the details about life in the island prison are interesting. Coon claims to have lent his raincoat to the infamous Morris-Anglin escape (portrayed in the Clint Eastwood movie, Escape from Alcatraz) and there are a number of other short vignettes and profiles. The writing is fast-paced, if somewhat basic.

Amazon has several interesting reviews.

NewMexiKen and family toured the prison about 25 years ago. If you haven’t been, I’d recommend it.

Thanks Byron for sending the book, autographed by #1422.

The Assault on Reason

I think Annette has written an excellent brief review of Al Gore’s book — and made the case that you should read it.

Way off the Road

Some pretty good stuff from the “first chapter” of Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America by Bill Geist.

A sample:

Hal is the oldest licensed pilot in the nation. He joined the UFOs (United Flying Octogenarians)-although technically he’s too old. Has he considered starting a club for nonagenarian pilots? “No,” he answers, “I don’t want to be the president, secretary, treasurer, and the board of directors.”

In addition to his other duties at the Sierra Booster, Hal is also in charge of circulation and is its only paperboy. In this sparsely populated area, with subscribers scattered over six hundred square miles, he decided to deliver papers to the ranches in his airplane. Hal invites me along on his paper route. Driving out to the airstrip, he tells of his three (or is it five?) heart operations, at which point our cameraman, Gilbert, says that, although he’d love to come along, he’ll be mounting a camera inside the cockpit and staying on the ground. It’s a sunny day. I mention to Hal that his windshield wipers are on.

Read more from the book.

Reading Judas

The beginning of the review of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King in The New York Times:

As anyone who has read Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked” or seen the subsequent Broadway show can attest, the Wicked Witch of the West was framed. Elphaba, as Maguire calls her, wasn’t really wicked at all. She was a good girl set up by the powers that be (in this case, the Wizard) for, among other things, the green color of her skin. So it goes with the recently unveiled Gospel of Judas, which posits a theory as impertinent as Maguire’s about the wickedest character in Christendom.

Now Would Be a Good Time

McSweeney’s is holding a big sale and auction to make up for $130,000 lost in a distributor bankruptcy; click here for the full story. A thousand thanks to everyone who has helped out the past few days. The sale is going great, and we are humbled by all the encouragement and support. We’ve just added one-of-a-kind pieces from John Hodgman, Miranda July, Sarah Vowell, and Marcel Dzama, and gems from Michael Chabon, Art Spiegelman, and David Foster Wallace are coming soon. Meanwhile, every single thing we’ve got is on sale, cheap.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

Thanks to Veronica for reminding me I meant to link to this.

On the Rocks

John McPhee disciples will appreciate Douglass McCollam on McPhee’s Annals of the Former World — On the Rocks.

McPhee then offers a try-at-home exercise to help break the bonds of animal time:

With your arms spread wide again to represent all the time on earth, look at one hand with its line of life. The Cambrian begins in the wrist, and the Permian Extinction is at the outer end of the palm. All of the Cenozoic is in a fingerprint, and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.

The First Post

Wow a new blog. As if there was a shortage. Oh well, this one could prove interesting.

Welcome to the first post of the Book Review’s first blog.

Paper Cuts will be a daily round-up of news and opinion about books and other printed matter. Make that an almost daily round-up. There won’t be posts on weekends. Or holidays. Or on the mornings after the Book Review’s bimonthly drinks nights at Jimmy’s Corner, a bar in midtown Manhattan.

But most days, we’ll be here.

Paper Cuts

The Lady Vanishes

Elizabeth Kolbert reviews the two recent Hilary Clinton biographies — The Lady Vanishes.

It’s a revealing essay about Clinton more than it’s about the books.

History books

A few weeks back NewMexiKen read The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution by David O. Stewart and said, “It’s a readable, rather well-told narrative about the Constitutional Convention.” I also went on to say, “The classic work on the Constitutional Convention is Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle At Philadelphia, but that I had never read Bowen’s book. I’ve now read it.

Of the two I recommend Stewart. His is clear, concise and more analytical. Bowen’s book is, I think, reflective of much history written a generation or two ago — a little too much he said, he said (there was no she said). It also changes approach in the middle, going from day-by-day to topic-by-topic. This is disconcerting. You know how today you can sometimes read nonfiction and it seems you can almost sense the cutting and pasting? With Bowen you can almost sense the “I’ll never get done doing this; I have to try another approach.”

Which isn’t to say Bowen’s book isn’t worthwhile. It is. It has been the standard work on the Constitutional Convention for more than 40 years.

But I’d read Stewart first.

Meanwhile, I’ve learned about A Glorious Defeat: Mexico and Its War with the United States. In this book, Professor Timothy J. Henderson tries to take a look at the war and its impact from a Mexican perspective.

There’s a interview with Henderson at the American Heritage Blog and, among other things he has this to say:

As for our own time, my suspicion is that most people nowadays don’t have many strong feelings one way or another about the [Mexican] war, simply because they know almost nothing about it. I talk to people all the time—intelligent, educated folks—who are genuinely surprised to learn that the Southwest came to us by way of a war with Mexico. That’s true even of people who’ve lived their entire lives in the Southwest, and of people who grew up in towns with names like “Buena Vista” and “Monterrey.” If more people knew the circumstances under which the United States began the war with Mexico, they might have cause to cringe. But my impression is that folks who like to read about wars tend to favor military history, and from a purely military standpoint the United States acquitted itself very well in Mexico.

The bottom line, I think, is that for Americans—and most peoples of the world, I would guess—winning counts for a great deal, and the United States won the war with Mexico decisively. In the bargain, it achieved the objective of territorial expansion, which I think most Americans broadly supported. And when I read some of the rhetoric in the debate on immigration, I don’t see a nation wracked by guilt over past injustices to Mexico.

I’ll let you know what I think when I get Henderson’s book.

Assault on Reason

Completed Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason. An important book, certainly a strong indictment of Bush. At times however, the book borders on being a screed; just when you think Gore’s exhausted a subject, he comes back around at it again — and sometimes yet again. Frankly, a more heavily edited and sharply argued work would have been better.

Still, compelling in making the case that we live in perilous times and that Bush is the worst and most dangerous president ever. That alone should make it required reading for concerned citizens.

Should we amend all of the textbooks in America to explain to schoolchildren that what has been taught for more than two centuries about checks and balances is no longer valid? Should we teach them instead that the United States Congress and the courts are merely advisory groups that make suggestions to the president on what the law should be, but that the president is all-powerful and now has the final say on everything? Should we teach them that we are a government of men, not laws? Should we teach them that we used to be a democracy but now we only pretend to be?

Reading list

Finished God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens. Interesting. Very erudite. Will persuade the already persuaded.

Beginning The Assault on Reason by Al Gore.

FDR

Acclaimed biographer Jean Edward Smith (John Marshall, Ulysses Grant) has published a new biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR.

Early reviews are glowing. Smith’s Grant book garnered him a Pulitzer nomination in 2002.

(Actually, I figured this was an important book when I saw it stacked on the table at Costco the other day.)

June 3rd

Larry McMurtry is 71 today. The Writer’s Almanac had a good piece on McMurtry two years ago and NewMexiKen posted it here. About a year ago NewMexiKen and Dad visited McMurtry’s hometown of Archer City, Texas. Here’s my report.

Tony Curtis is 82. Curtis received a leading actor Oscar nomination for The Defiant Ones.

Dr. Zaius was born on June 3rd in 1901. That’s Maurice Evans, famed stage actor, two-time Tony winner, who is perhaps most remembered for playing the Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith in Planet of the Apes.

Jefferson Davis was born on June 3rd in 1808.

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Several well-known writers tell The New York Times what they’re reading.

How about you? Anything you can recommend?

Update: At Duke City Fix, Coco has superb introduction to some Albuquerque books, fiction and non.

Angels and Ages

A fascinating survey of recent Lincoln literature by Adam Gopnik in this week’s New Yorker. He begins:

This all began on a very long plane ride, East Coast to West, when I was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” her book about Abraham Lincoln and his political competitors, and how, in the course of the Civil War, he turned them into a collegial Cabinet. It is a well-told, many-sided story, which attempts to give context to Lincoln without diminishing him, to place him among his peers and place him above them, too.

Coming to the end of the book, to the night of April 14, 1865, and Lincoln’s assassination, I reached the words that were once engraved in every American mind. At 7:22 A.M., as Lincoln drew his last breath, all the worthies who had crowded into a little back bedroom in a boarding house across the street from Ford’s Theatre turned to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s formidable Secretary of War, for a final word. Stanton is the one with the long comic beard and the spinster’s spectacles, who in the photographs looks a bit like Mr. Pickwick but was actually the iron man in the Cabinet, and who, after a difficult beginning, had come to revere Lincoln as a man and a writer and a politician—had even played something like watchful Horatio to his tragic Hamlet. Stanton stood still, sobbing, and then said, simply, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Or did Stanton say, as others have claimed, “Now he belongs to the angels”? Read the article and . . .

And the hits just keep on coming

The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. — Hunter S. Thompson

The above is from Marc Fisher’s Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation.

Fisher, a Washington Post columnist, has written a book any fan of radio will enjoy, an anecdotal analysis of how Top 40 evolved, then FM and talk radio and finally the bland, every station sounds alike — because they’re all owned by about three companies — niche radio of today. We learn about Jean Shepherd, Cousin Brucie, Wolfman and Imus, Bob Gass, Big Daddy Tom Donahue, Rush Limbaugh and others. We find that Dick Clark got away with Payola and Alan Freed didn’t. (And how the payola scandal was mostly a political backlash against “race music” being played for white kids.) We read who came up with NPR, and we read about the consultant who has, to many people’s ears, just about ruined it.

If at times just a little too drawn out with the analysis, when another story would be more welcome, it’s still a very interesting sociological-economic study, with enough pop culture thrown in to make it a good read. (Especially, I suppose, if you’re old enough to have lived through the whole thing.)

Stumbling on Happiness

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

Here’s part of what Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, wrote about Gilbert’s book last year.

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

Atheists with Attitude

From a review in The New Yorker of recent books on the dangers of religion:

And now there is “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens, which is both the most articulate and the angriest of the lot. Hitchens is a British-born writer who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a columnist for Vanity Fair and Slate. He thrives at the lectern, where his powers of rhetoric and recall enable him to entertain an audience, go too far, and almost get away with it. These gifts are amply reflected in “God Is Not Great.”

Hitchens is nothing if not provocative. Creationists are “yokels,” Pascal’s theology is “not far short of sordid,” the reasoning of the Christian writer C. S. Lewis is “so pathetic as to defy description,” Calvin was a “sadist and torturer and killer,” Buddhist sayings are “almost too easy to parody,” most Eastern spiritual discourse is “not even wrong,” Islam is “a rather obvious and ill-arranged set of plagiarisms,” Hanukkah is a “vapid and annoying holiday,” and the psalmist King David was an “unscrupulous bandit.”