Walking on the Moon

In A Colony in a Nation, Chris Hayes made me reframe my thinking on several topics that I thought I’d thoroughly understood. It’s always hard to lead people to seeing things new ways, and more so when you have an interest, some study, and strong opinions.  The topic here is how people – mostly white American people – treat people different from them.  The topic is incendiary and the sides dug in.  Hayes is in the midst of this as an MSNBC commentator and journalist, and it is tempting to dismiss his views from that bias.  I think that would be unwise.  Agree or disagree with his conclusions, he repeatedly shifts the camera to reveal facts one knows from a new perspective.  Every chapter of this made me reconsider ideas I thought I understood completely.

Part of this is his eloquent and effective writing.  He corrals ideas effectively and channels the reader’s impressions powerfully.

Finally, and crucially, Hayes resists any urges he might have to suggest quick fixes.  He’s looking at the system that makes up our society and admits his complicity without condemning himself – or anyone else – for being part of it.  Despite that, he does not leave anyone off the hook either.  It’s a powerful position.

A must.

I read a lot when I was a kid, reinforced by being pretty good at school.  When you read all the assignments you get sent to the library to “read quietly.” Reading quietly was a treat for me – a way to explore the world from a small town.  I read lots of stuff, including things like collections of ghost stories and UFO investigations.  I also read histories of science and Norse mythology.  Don’t judge me.

Hunt for the Skinwalker would fit nicely on the bookshelf of my past next to say this charmer.  It purports to be a scientific investigation of a bunch of UFO/ghost stories coming out of a Utah ranch investigated by a set of folks called the National Institute for Discovery Science. It’s a book of common conspiracy and UFO stories and the unconvincing investigation that follows.

I wound up reading it based on a mention from The Desert Oracle.  The Oracle is an unflinchingly weird view of art, rumors, and craziness in the western deserts. As a tour of the particular rumors that form in the desert, Skinwalker is a fine example.  Beyond that there’s not much here.

I do have to say that “skinwalker” is a cool name for an Navajo shapeshifter.  So, two things.

“That’s the impossible middle ground we’ve established for ourselves,” (or something like it) is how Kevin Porter, who hosts the Good Christian Fun podcast with Caroline Ely, describes their work.  The conceit is that the hosts and some guests review items from Christian-targeted pop culture and toss out their impressions.  Along the way they talk about their relationship to American Evangelical Christianity.  Both of them grew up attached to the Church in different ways though – as they freely admit – neither has the resume to be talking about any of professionally.

That’s the aspect I find charming about it.

Both are young socially liberal folks who care about their religion.  They freely and deeply share their doubts and moments of affirmation.  And some appalling popular culture.

It reaffirms my faith in people to hear personable, openly religious people who care about justice and decency.  If you feel like you need a dose of that now and again, come check it out.

Luis Fuerte is Huell Howser‘s collaborator and camera operator who worked with him on many iconic shows across Howser’s storied career.  In many ways it’s a straight ahead memoir that shows great respect for both his collaborator and their shared work.  If you’re looking for tales out of school, don’t look here.

What are here are telling details of how creators become collaborators.  Luis has a real touch for describing the unspoken dance that emerges as he learns to trust Howser’s storytelling instincts and interview skills and Howser comes to appreciate Fuerte’s composition skills and operational brio.

It is not deep, but is diverting.

James Forman, Jr. is a defense attorney and community activist in the District of Columbia who has been in the courts’ trenches.  Inspired by the toll that decisions of the last 50 years have taken on people he has met, he relates a well researched history of national and DC criminal law.  There are a many books that wade into this history and tell similar stories.  Forman brings a fascinating matter-of-factness to the issues.

He is clear that DC’s environment is driven by the forces that drive DC’s nascent black-driven power structure.  DC unique in that its government is essentially formed in this time.  Until the 1970’s the city was administered half-heartedly by Congress.  In 1973 Congress cedes control to a locally elected government.  Because the populace was largely black, so was the government.

Despite that unique formation and evolution, the DC drug possession and gun violence laws are among the most draconian.  DC is a “law-and-order” style city despite that phrase often signifying such laws imposed by whites.  Forman delves into his memories and the historical record to show how class, violence, and the drug epidemic all combined into the powerful brew from which those laws emerge.  His research and ability to connect it to his own experiences is fascinating.

His sense of balance also restrains him from looking for quick fixes to the complex problems those laws have engendered.  He never claims the easy answer or the simple motivation.  That sort of balance is rare and valuable.

Strongly recommended.

Gnomon mashes up several genres – police procedural, technothriller, heist movie, historical fantasy, and a few others that are harder to name – into a sparkling oroboros of an SF masterwork.  That is a genre that often shines a light onto today’s society by turning a knob past 11.  Here, Nick Harkaway twists the knob of privacy and surveillance past the peg and we’re off to the races.

He does a nice job building a world that’s believable enough to spark ideas and arguments without distracting overly much from those ideas.  And the ideas and allusions start coming fast.  The magic is that those genres and allusions spotlight the ideas in addition to obfuscating them.  Ideological sounds ring out and randomly reverberate more deeply as Gnomon progresses.

Gnomon is rich with ideas inside and calls outside its universe; those ideas reverberate, rattle, and ultimately pervade the genres and entangled narratives that form it. Those narratives outline the ideas of self, democracy and representation, persuasion and coercion, and privacy.  The multi-genre, multi-narrative style shows how these ideas dance with and tussle against one another. By wrapping them in various forms of story and literature, Harkaway makes them elemental.

Now allusion and reverberation is all well and good, but if the story doesn’t engage people, it’s pointless.  Gnomon is pointed.  Each arc is propulsive on its own terms and spiced with the questions and tension of figuring out how it all connects to the others.

Hardaway’s Gnomon was one of the best things I’ve read in a long time both for thinking and for fun.

A must.

Daniel Ellsberg walks in controversy.  Specifically he’s an anti-war activist who has made a life’s work out of exposing the internal operations of the US government.  He’s the person who stole and published the Pentagon Papers, internal documents describing Vietnam War internal motivations and policies.  He believed that the government behaving hypocritically and risked his freedom to draw attention to those policies and actions.  Despite that playing out when I was a child, it’s still controversial.

Whatever you might think of him, Ellsberg is consistent. In Doomsday Machine he continues to speak out about what he believes are immoral government policies.  Doomsday Machine aims at US nuclear policy throughout his tenure in the government.  Unfortunately he doesn’t have the physical copies of the documents he cites, which means readers have to treat Doomsday as a memoir.  He does make some pretty serious accusations about how branches of the government and military are competitive when they should be cooperative.  He claims that military branches routinely misrepresented the intelligence they had about the USSR to the State Department and the President.

I’m making that sound more diplomatic that Ellsberg does.  I don’t have any idea what the truth of the matter was in the 1960’s and 70’s much less now.  Still, these stakes are high and as a call for transparency, I find it compelling.

There’s a second half of Doomsday that Ellsberg devotes to persuading readers that the concept of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war – or any such extermination system – is unsound.  He does a nice job of bringing that home, IMHO, and it’s certainly worth deep thoughts.  It is natural to mentally distance yourself from the destructive power that a doomsday machine entails, and Ellsberg reminds you that the plan is to kill as many people as possible.  People have to decide for oneself if there’s a benefit worth that price, but I think there’s real value in seeing the price clearly.

Doomsday is certainly a reflective surface.  Readers will see themselves as much as Ellsberg in it – know it or not – but as a nucleation site for these ideas, I think it’s worthwhile.

Recommended.

Rituals of Dinner is the sort of charming book that feels like a palate cleanser between scholarly tomes.  That is just a facade, though.  Margaret Visser has crafted a soundly built exploration of our table manners that supports her elegant tableware.

That said, Rituals abides in an odd niche.  It’s scholarly, but not academic, informative but not authoritative, and traces the roots of ideas without being historical.  In addition, Visser does not pretend to be unbiased.  Her reasoned support for both the Emily Post and Miss Manners traditions warms this etiquette nerd’s heart.  It’s not an etiquette manual, either.

It is an informed depiction of the range of behavior at the table focused on but not limited to American and European traditions.  If you’ve ever wondered why knife etiquette involves where the weapon, er, utensil is pointed this is a book for you.  Visser has spent many hours in the library.

The erudition would fall flat under lesser writing.  She hits an impossible tone with perfect pitch. Digressions are just long enough and deep enough.  The main narrative moves along briskly.  Her organization lends itself to spending a few hours or a few minutes.

Strongly recommended.

Amy Goldstein has crafted quite a kaleidoscope in Janesville.

In 2008 GM closed the manufacturing plant that was the anchor of the city’s economy which had huge effects on everyone in the town.  Goldstein brings a journalist’s eye and compelling research to follow those waves and then ripples into 2016. The reporting is powerful and enlightening.

I have never lived through such a focused economic upheaval as an adult.  Elmira has certainly seen a steady economic contraction over my lifetime, but never the kind of hammer blow that Janesville did. I fancied that the result was the sort of economic crater from which the population just scattered, though I know that never happens.  Lives don’t move that suddenly.  Janesville gives a fantastic view of this from the ground to the Speaker of the House.

I thought about this a little more and I want to be a little more concrete about Goldstein’s multi-faceted portrayals.

Because Goldstein presents the lives of many folks who play different roles in how Janesville takes the blow, she presents the effects on both the people playing those roles and the institutions in action.  The federal government is far away and somewhat aloof; vague promises never become concrete and many efforts are misguided.  Worker retraining at the local community college is difficult to get funded and over the years its effects are a mixed blessing.  (Goldstein includes a compelling study on the efficacy of their retraining as an appendix, so data nerds (guilty) can compare her conclusions with theirs).

To be fair, neither the college facilities nor its funding structure was built to absorb demands like the ones this crisis presented. That is part of the larger point that Janesville is a small city that takes an enormous blow.  This plant was the majority employer for the city and it vanished over months.  Most of the civic structure was adapting to cope with the slow sort of decline my home town had, if they were planning for decline at all.  While the blast of trouble more clearly reveals the cracks in the people and the institutions, its magnitude almost certainly overwhelmed institutions and humans who could have adapted to smaller shocks.

In addition to showing one view of civic institutions in crisis, Janesville also illuminates larger societal trends in concrete terms.  After 8 years the reader can trace see the decline of union influence, increased income disparity, and shifts in social strata through the individual stories of those living it.

Goldstein’s tapestry is well crafted from strong threads that resolve into an enlightening picture.

Recommended.

I was hoping that Ian Black’s Enemies and Neighbors would enlighten me about the Israeli/Palestine conflict and give me some hope about the future. Well, I understand it better.

That’s not an indictment of Black’s work.  He’s done a fine job digging through more than 150 years of historical records to hear the voices of the people in the middle of this ongoing storm.  I believe everyone has biases when they look at the world and when they tell others what they think. Situations like this conflict bring out strong opinions and biases. As far as I can tell, injustices abound here and that angries up the blood.  Outsiders like me do want to find out what those injustices are, and less biased writing helps.

Fortunately Black does great service. He’s not without bias – of course – but he does cast a wide net for facts and presents them fairly even-handedly.  His biases are detectable if your antenna is up, but mostly he presents facts and evidence. He does come out and say that he believes that both major parties have completely incompatible stories of the conflict. Sad and sobering.

As with most quality education, it made me smarter bur not happier.

The work covers the situation well and as fairly as possible.  It’s important to understand. Strongly recommended.