Category: Books & Writers

Best opening to a non-fiction book I may have to read

Inside the white ghetto of the working poor

“73 virgins in arab heaven and not a dam one in this bar!”

—Men’s room wall, Burt’s Tavern

Faced with working-class life in towns such as Winchester, see only one solution: beer. So I sit here at Burt’s Tavern watching fat Pootie in a T-shirt that reads: one million battered women in this country and i’ve been eating mine plain! That this is not considered especially offensive says all you need to know about cultural and gender sensitivity around here. And the fact that Pootie votes, owns guns, and is allowed to purchase hard liquor is something we should all probably be afraid to contemplate. Thankfully, even cheap American beer is a palliative for anxious thought tonight.

Then too, beer is educational and stimulates contemplation. I call it my “learning through drinking” program. Here are some things I have learned at Burt’s Tavern:

1. Never shack up with a divorced woman who is two house payments behind and swears you are the best sex she ever had.

2. Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, no matter how big the bet gets.

From Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant.

America’s best auto critic begins this week’s review

A couple of weeks ago, when the temperatures dipped into the 40s — or as we call it here in Southern California, the extremes of human endurance — I went shopping in West L.A. It was like base camp at Annapurna. High-heeled hotties had turned in their sex spurs for pairs of Merrell hiking boots. Guys were walking around in zero-degree quilted Marmot jackets. I’m sorry — I just don’t think crampons and bottled oxygen are necessary to make the traverse to the valet stand.

God knows, high-end technical gear is fun. Suunto watches, Adidas glacier glasses. I love it when people use Black Diamond trekking poles and Platypus hydration packs to assault the untamed reaches of Griffith Park. You sure don’t want Jon Krakauer writing a book about you.

Dan Neil

A review that makes me want to hear the song

From the playlist of short-story author Jack Pendarvis:

8 ) God Moves On the Water, Blind Willie Johnson. I don’t care if you’re the most committed liberal secular humanist in the world, I don’t care if you’re Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, Blind Willie Johnson will make you afraid of God. He will also make you afraid of Blind Willie Johnson. There are dozens of recorded songs about the Titanic disaster and what it means. This one is the best.

Update: Here’s part of what All Music has to say about Johnson:

If you’ve never heard Blind Willie Johnson, you are in for one of the great, bone-chilling treats in music. Johnson played slide guitar and sang in a rasping, false bass that could freeze the blood. But no bluesman was he; this was gospel music of the highest order, full of emotion and heartfelt commitment. Of all the guitar-playing evangelists, Blind Willie Johnson may have been the very best. … Not for the faint of heart, but hey, the good stuff never is.

Another book list

The National Book Critics Circle lists the top books of 2007 as voted by its members and former finalists and winners of its awards.

Fiction

1. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
2. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
3. Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (HarperCollins)
4. Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin)
5. Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf)

Nonfiction

1. Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
2. Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (St. Martin’s)
3. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books)
4. David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts (HarperCollins)
5. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (Doubleday)

Poetry

1. Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005* (HarperCollins)
2. Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems: 1956-1998 (Ecco)*
3. Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)*
4. Rae Armantrout, Next Life (Wesleyan University Press)
5. Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)

*There was a three-way tie for first place in poetry

Two of the fiction works — Tree of Smoke and Out Stealing Horses — are on this list and The New York Times list.

The 10 Best Books of 2007

The New York Times lists its top 10 books of the year.

Fiction

MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14.

OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company, $23.99.

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.

Nonfiction

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books, $22.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books, $27.50.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.

William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway

… were married on November 28th in 1582. He was 18, she 26. As with many facets of Shakespeare’s life, there is some confusion about the marriage. Among other things, Shakespeare received a marriage license with an Anne Whatley the day before. Secondly, relatives of Anne Hathaway (or Hathwey) posted bond so that her marriage to Shakespeare could proceed with only one reading of the bans. Perhaps the confusion is best resolved by noting that, six months later, on May 26, 1583, William and Anne’s daughter Susanna was christened. It appears the Bard had a shotgun wedding.

Triumphs and Tragedies

You never know what you’ll find at Costco. Yesterday it was Joseph Ellis’s newest book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, published just last week.

I’ve barely begun, but the book is constructed in the style of Ellis’s Pulitizer prize-winner Founding Brothers — somewhat independent chapters relating stories that illustrate his broader point.

Anyone with an abiding interest in the founding of America should read Founding Brothers. I’ll let you know about this sequel in a day or so.

(Ellis’s His Excellency: George Washington is quite good too, and recommended.)

12,000 and other idle chatter

NewMexiKen has 11,999 songs (tracks) in my iTunes library. And while I have more CDs to import, I thought I should celebrate by getting something special from the iTunes store for number 12,000. Any ideas?

I spilled a lot of bird feed yesterday and this morning the film crew for the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds is sizing up my backyard — a dozen mourning doves, sparrows, finches, a partridge or two, scrub jays.

Apple stock rose more than 8 percent in the first hour this morning on yesterday’s earnings report of $1.01 a share. I keep thinking it’s peaked and “now” would be a bad time to buy — and it’s up nearly 30% in a month. As Jimmy Jones sang:

Oh you need timin’
A tick a tick a tick of good timin’
Timin’ timin’ timin’ timin’
Timin’ is the thing it’s true
Good timin’ brought me to you

Big fuss because J.K. Rowling told an audience Dumbledore was gay. That’s a surprise? Didn’t people read the books?

The Cleveland Indians logo, Chief Wahoo, has got to go. Can you imagine them getting away with that type of a caricature with African or Asian-Americans or Hispanics (think of the fuss over Sambo or the Frito Bandito)?

Overnight Annie and SnoLepard added some interesting pairs in the comments to the Whom would you rather be? list.

The Santa Ana Winds

TalkLeft has a great excerpt from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem on the Santa Ana winds, those east-to-west hot winds that blow in southern California and fan the fires.

Just an excerpt of the excerpt:

The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushes through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.”

In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn.

National Book Awards Nominees

“God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” a vigorous attack on religion by Christopher Hitchens, and “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.,” by Tim Weiner, a reporter for The New York Times, both appeared on best-seller lists this year. A from-the-ground-up look at the founding of the United States, “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution” by Woody Holton, joined those two finalists, as did Edwidge Danticat’s wrenching memoir of her family in Haiti, “Brother, I’m Dying,” and Arnold Rampersad’s “Ralph Ellison: A Biography.”
…

[T]he fiction finalists included first-time novelists as well as familiar storytellers. The novices — Mischa Berlinski for “Fieldwork,” about a journalist living in Thailand, and Joshua Ferris for “Then We Came to the End,” a comic story about office life — were joined by Lydia Davis for her seventh collection of short stories, “Varieties of Disturbance”; Denis Johnson for “Tree of Smoke,” a tale of espionage in Vietnam; and Jim Shepard for “Like You’d Understand, Anyway,” a group of stories told in the first person.

The New York Times

Follow the link for the poetry and young people’s literature nominees.

NewMexiKen has read the first two of the non-fiction works, but none of the others. How about you?

Good Morning

The Wall Street Journal has a good review (and a chapter) of Rick Atkinson’s The Day of Battle — A Terrible Slog.

If you decide to buy the book, here’s the link — The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. NewMexiKen intends to go curl up with the landing at Salerno in a few minutes. It’s a really great read.

I’m experimenting with a new feature that allows you to find material related to the subject matter of any post (any post having more than 30 words). I noticed the WSJ was using the feature — and my very own blog was one of its links — so I thought I’d give it a try. Let me know what you think; the link is in the post metadata. NewMexiKen has almost no control on the selection.

The two strongest Democrats, Governor Richardson and Representative Tom Udall (Stewart’s son) say they aren’t interested in Domenici’s senate seat.

The neighborhood phantom has been back this week after a month when I hadn’t noticed him. Nice new Cadillac sedan, at least. We don’t allow no low rent suspicious people in this neighborhood.

Any ideas for an exciting new NewMexiKen poll?

This week’s New Yorker

A quick look at health-care politics from Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. It wouldn’t take you long to click and read it all, but NewMexiKen liked this summary:

Our health-care system has continued to deteriorate. We spend twice as much as the French and the Germans and two and a half times as much as the Brits, yet we die sooner and our babies die in greater numbers. Thirty-eight million Americans were uninsured in 2000; now it’s forty-seven million. Employer-based health insurance is increasingly expensive, stingy, and iffy. Companies, especially manufacturing companies, are beginning to realize that being deputized to pay the health-care costs of their employees and retirees puts them at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy.

Whether change comes will depend entirely on the next election. If a Democrat wins the Presidency after outlining his or her intentions as specifically as the leading contenders have done, and if the Democrats substantially increase their congressional majorities, then it will happen. If they don’t, it won’t.

Elsewhere in the magazine, Louis Menand has an informative essay about Jack Kerouac and On the Road (50 years old this year): Drive, He Wrote.

And I liked the lead from Anthony Lane’s review of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford:

“It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.”

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

In “The Day of Battle,” Rick Atkinson picks up where he left off in “An Army at Dawn,” his history of the North African campaign, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A planned third volume, on the Normandy invasion and the war in Europe, will complete “The Liberation Trilogy,” which is shaping up as a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written, thick with unforgettable description and rooted in the sights and sounds of battle.

The New York Times

Indeed, Atkinson’s first volume was superb and highly recommended. I’ve been anxiously awaiting volume two — so much so, I’m placing my order as soon as I decide whether to go buy it at the store so I don’t have to wait until next week, or just get it from Amazon. (Update: D’oh, it’s not out until Tuesday in any case.)

I recommend you read An Army at Dawn first.

An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943

The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944

And, by the way, the article from The Atlantic I mentioned, Victory at Sea, is quite good.

[Update October 4: I’ve commented on the book here.]

Pure car porn

Let’s assume there’s a bright side to the universe, a place where mercy and justice prevail, where the good are rewarded and the bad punished with equal alacrity. On this sunny shore, public school teachers make six figures, all stray kittens find good homes, and yard gnomes never get their little ceramic heads caved in.

Do not look for the Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG there. This is the Car of Sauron, a black-hearted sin of mechanical seduction, an automobile to make you eat all your pretty little words about carbon footprints and warming greenhouses. A veritable neutron star of gas-burning evil, this stupendous, beautiful two-door — the rakish coupe version of the obsidian-souled S63 sedan — has the power to corrupt, oh yeah, absolutely. I honestly believe if you loaned this car to Ralph Nader and Ed Begley Jr. for the weekend, by Sunday night they’d be doing doughnuts in a Ralphs parking lot.

Dan Neil

0-to-155 in less than 30 seconds. 518 hp. Neil was getting “about 9 miles per gallon at one point.”

The Nine

No, not baseball. It’s the title of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book: The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.

David Margolick has the review in The New York Times. His summary:

So, not surprisingly, “The Nine” is engaging, erudite, candid and accessible, often hard to put down. Toobin is a natural storyteller, and the stories he tells — how a coalition of centrist justices saved Roe v. Wade; why Rehnquist, despite having loathed the rights granted to criminal suspects by Miranda v. Arizona, eventually declined to overturn the decision; how right-wing firebrands deep-sixed the Supreme Court candidacies of Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers — are gripping. But its greatest surprise is that there are few great surprises. Toobin writes about the court more fluidly and fluently than anyone, but his buddies on the bench didn’t tell him much we don’t already know.

Here’s the “first chapter” of The Nine.

Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick review the reviewers of Toobin’s book.

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.