Air Travel, Books, Libraries, Mortality

The Value of Nothing

Libraries Aren’t Dying, Just Starving

You only need to stroll by the New York Public Library building on 5th Avenue in the big city to know that serious business is done here. The main New York Public Library is a beautiful, iconic building – two handsome lions stand guard out front – that opened in 1911, almost exactly 100 years ago.

Best of all, virtually everything is free. The NYPL notes on its website that the only price of admission if curiosity. Of course, taxpayers support libraries, but the value of the investment pays off to an individual a thousand fold over, or maybe a thousand thousand fold.

Unfortunately, the public library, the great leveler of a society that is increasingly made up of haves and have nots, is having less and less to work with. One of the great myths about libraries, expressed primarily by penny-pinching politicians and folks who never set foot in a library, is that the Internet is making libraries obsolete. It’s a foolish notion on par with thinking that computers can somehow replace teachers or smart librarians.

Yet, even the venerable NYPL is staring down a potential $40 million budget cut that could keep the doors closed three days out of seven.

This devaluing of libraries seems to be a occurring world-wide and it is definitely a step backwards. In England a debate has been raging for weeks about proposed cuts to the library system there. Writing in the Guardian, Robert McCrum, calls the proposed cuts “a thoughtless cultural crime whose after-effects will linger for decades.”

In a piece both celebrating the 100th anniversary of the NYPL and lamenting the real and potential reduction in support of libraries, Laura Miller writes, “Not everything we need or want to know about the world can be transmitted via a screen, and not every experience can be digitized.”

Libraries are valuable for many, many reasons, not least for the sanctuary, solitude and security they provide. In most American communities the library is the safest, most egalitarian place you can visit. Moms bring kids. Grandpas bring grand kids. High school kids bring dates. Old guys read the papers. Young girls study. People lose themselves in books and magazines and folks queue up to get on a computer or, increasingly, check out an e-book.

I’ll get some debate on this assertion, but Boise High School in the north end of Idaho’s capitol city in about the best high school in Idaho and one of the best in the country, yet prize winning writer Tony Doerr found that the Boise High library, smack dab in the middle of a very good school, is depending on donations and fundraising in order to have any new money this year.

 Doerr wrote Sunday in the New York Times, that his mom, a school teacher, introduced him to the magic of libraries. “Thanks to her, in my imagination libraries were little holy lands, as integral to a school as functioning toilets, or lockers, or bad pizza. They were a place where a child could learn that books could be mind-blowing, unpredictable, bawdy and frightening, that books could break down the divisions between nations, between foundations of thought, and between fantasy and reality.”

When societies seek to control ideas – think Nazi Germany – they come after the books. When societies are unthinking about ideas and how knowledge is accumulated and used, they ignore or diminish libraries. Libraries are, quite simply, the repositories of human knowledge. There is no substitute for them. Sure you can find a lot of stuff on the Internet, but you won’t ever find the spirit and soul of a library.

The great writer Umberto Eco says this in the recently published This is Not the End of the Book, “a library is not necessarily made up of books that we’ve read, or even that we will eventually read. They should be the books that we can read. Or that we may read. Even if we never do.”

Exactly. Libraries are neither obsolete nor too expensive. They are, unfortunately, victims of too many folks who, in the words of the old saying, know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

The next time you hear a politician saying that no one uses libraries any more, ask to see his library card.

 

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

President’s Day

buchananGreat Readers

James Buchanan was the 15th President of the United States and by nearly universal assessment the worst we’ve ever had. He dithered while the Union came apart, helped precipitate Bleeding Kansas and did nothing to help Lincoln during the succession crisis in the last days of his administration. Mark Buchanan as a near complete failure…except as it turns out the guy was a great reader.

The Daily Beast website has a fun series of short profiles of the presidents who were most in love with books. You would guess, of course, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and the two Roosevelts, but Buchanan or Rutherford B. Hayes? Hayes amassed a personal library of 12,000 volumes and Herbert Hoover, a very smart man and not a very effective president, had a library of rare books on obscure science subjects and many were in Latin.

The same website has a Presidential Trivia Quiz today.

Who was the first president to fly in an airplane? Hard to believe, but true, only one president is buried in Washington, D.C. and, believe it or not, Jimmy Carter was the first president born in a hospital.

So…on President’s Day, a toast – a rare toast – to James Buchanan, a bad president, but a book lover. With that knowledge, he can be modestly redeemed in my eyes.

 

Air Travel, Al Gore, Books, Theodore Roosevelt

Colonel Roosevelt

Teddy RooseveltThe Most Famous Man in the World

We have become accustom to former presidents writing their memoirs, establishing the presidential library and undertaking a good cause here and there. That’s what ex-presidents do.

Jimmy Carter has led an exemplary post-presidential life and has, with single-minded determination, come close to eradicating a deadly disease in Africa. Bill Clinton’s Foundation has focused on AIDS and third-world development with considerable success. George W. Bush is still settling into the post-White House role and reportedly his recent book has become a best-seller on, of all places, college campuses.

As impressive as they have been, none of these recent ex-presidents come anywhere close to matching the life Theodore Roosevelt lived from 1909 to 1919. He packed a near lifetime of activity, scholarship, authorship and politics – including his own and many other campaigns – into the ten years after he left the White House.

This amazing Roosevelt history is superbly recounted in Edmund Morris’s new biography – The Colonel. The volume is the third in Morris’s life of T.R. and it will doubtless stand for a long, long time as the authoritative source on the larger-than-life personality who in his time was called “the most famous man in the world.”

One things our recent ex-presidents are loath to do is criticize their successors. Clinton and Bush 43 have been particularly careful – we can excuse Clinton’s role in stumping for his wife – not to mix their former status with current politics. Teddy had no such reservations. He literally sought every opportunity to bash his own hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft, and the man who wrenched the progressive label from him Woodrow Wilson.

Yet even without his deep and prolonged forays into partisan politics post-White House, Roosevelt would have been a world celebrity on the order of, say, Bono or Michael Jackson. The guy was a rock star before we had rock stars. He seemed to know everyone and write about everything.

The press of the day covered his African safari, his European tour, complete with marching in the funeral procession of England’s Edward VII, his near-death expedition into the Amazon jungle and, of course, his 1912 run for the presidency that included Roosevelt being shot in Milwaukee. Were this life a novel, it simply would not be believable.

We have certainly had supremely accomplished presidents since Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson earned a PhD, served as a university president and was a fine writer before the presidency. Herbert Hoover was a world-class engineer who also wrote well. John Kennedy won, with a little help from Ted Sorensen, the Pulitzer Prize. None could touch the breadth and depth of Roosevelt’s writing – books, hundreds of magazine pieces, essays, speeches and letters, thousand and thousands of letters.

This is a great book about a great man and, a little prediction, Morris will win another Pulitzer for producing what, as the New York Times said, “deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject.”

In the end, as with much great literature, T.R. story is tragedy. Roosevelt’s enless agitating for American involvement in World War I served, in Morris’s telling, to glorify the tragic, wasteful, useless war that came to define the 20th Century. The senseless slaughter – only later did Roosevelt come to realize that war is not glory – also cost the life of the youngest Roosevelt, Quentin, who died flying over German lines in 1918.

Quentin’s father, worn out and dispirited, died the next year. Theodore Roosevelt was only 60; the youngest man to ever serve as president and still and forever one of the greatest.

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

Great Political Reads

political booksA Top Ten List

Legislatures are in session, the president is poised to deliver the State of the Union and we just marked the 50th anniversary of JFK’s inaugural. All politics all the time.

So…writing recently about Richard Ben Cramer’s political classic What It Takes got me thinking about some of my favorite political reads. Here, in no particular order, is a Top Ten List of Political Reads – or a Top Eleven counting Cramer’s tome, which has to be on any list of mine. Here goes.

1. Truman by David McCullough. Certainly among the greatest political biographies, McCullough won the Pulitzer for his great writing and research and this booked helped rehabilitate the reputation of the Man from Missouri.

2. They Also Ran by Irving Stone. This is the fascinating story of the men who ran for president and lost. In chapter length profiles, Stone groups these “losers” into categories like “Generals Die in the Army” and “Wall Street Lawyers.” This classic was published in 1943, so it ends with the story of that “loser” Wendell Willkie who, with the full benefit of hindsight, seems to have been a remarkable man. In fact, Stone makes a compelling case that many of those who ran for the White House and lost were every bit as able – and often better – than those who won.

3. Shooting Star by Tom Wicker. There are many, many good books about controversial Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but if you read just one you will find none better than Wicker’s little volume. The great one-time New York Times writer establishes McCarthy in his times with all his well-documented excesses, but also offers a nuanced view – too nuanced for some critics – of McCarthy’s troubled personality. This is a critical book, but also fair and full of color sustained by the perspective of a political reporter who knows politics and politicians.

4. Huey Long by T. Harry Williams. Another biography, this one exhaustive, of another demagogue. Long was a brilliant Louisiana communicator/politician who rose from humble beginnings to command a virtual state dictatorship. Williams’ book is highly readable and, some would argue, more sympathetic to the Kingfish than it should be, but it is also a classic work of political history. By 1935, Long had become a national figure – his radio speeches were powerful, funny and frightening. He also became a threat from the left to Franklin Roosevelt’s re-election. Long’s life ended in September 1935 in a hail of gunfire in the hallway of the capitol building he had built in Baton Rouge, but the Long dynasty survived. The Long family produced another governor, a congressman and Huey’s senator son Russell who, like his papa, was one of the great political figures in the history of the United States Senate.

5. Advice and Consent by Allen Drury. Drury was a Congressional correspondent when he wrote his classic 1959 novel about a bitter Senate confirmation battle. The book has lasting appeal as a look inside the exclusive club, complete with deals, double crosses, sex, scandal and statesmanship.

6. Senator Mansfield by Don Oberdorfer. Montana’s Mike Mansfield was a great Senator and perhaps, with apologies to Lyndon Johnson, the most constructive Senate Majority Leader in history. In former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer’s masterful biography, Mansfield emerges as a great thinker and a profoundly decent man; the model of a modern senator.

7. The 103rd Ballot by Robert K. Murray. It is hard to believe these days, with our national political conventions little more than carefully choreographed TV commercials, that years ago the conventions were great political theatre where presidential candidacies were both born and buried. In 1924, Democrats took an unbelievable 103 ballots to nominate a compromise candidate John W. Davis who, not surprisingly, took the horribly divided party to disastrous defeat. That convention – one observer noted that Democrats had taken a week to commit political suicide – is detailed in Murray’s colorful history, complete with the KKK, prohibition, religion and, did I mention, large doses of bare knuckle politics.

8. Five Days in Philadelphia by Charles Peters. There have been, I think, two absolutely pivotal presidential elections in American history: 1864 when Lincoln was re-elected and thereby able to prosecute the Civil War to its ultimate end and 1940 when Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term and a chance to lead the country away from isolationism. Peters’ great little book centers on the GOP nominating process in 1940 and the convention in Philadelphia that nominated Wendell Willkie. Willkie was the last true “dark horse” to win a presidential nomination.

9. Mick – The Real Michael Collins by Peter Hart. I’m both fascinated and repelled by the complex and frequently awful history of modern Irish politics. Any effort to understand the complex tale of modern Ireland must include the story of the great Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. Collins was both general and politician, but mostly brilliant political strategist and manager. He was also clever, ambitious, brave and brutal. He lost his life during the Irish Civil War in 1922. Collins had a pivotal role in the negotiations with the British – the British delegation included Winston Churchill – that resulted in the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty helped secure Irish independence, but was so unpopular with some that it also precipitated the civl war. As a practical, pragmatic peacemaker, Collins defended the treaty and knew that in doing so he might well have written his death warrant. Nearly 90 years after his death, Collins’ grave in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery is still every day festooned with fresh flowers.

10. Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro. Caro’s monumental, multi-volume biography of LBJ is notable for the vast reach of his research, but also for his unrelenting (and at times unfair) critique of Johnson’s remarkable career. Still, the third volume on Johnson’s years as Senate Majority Leader, is as good a portrait of the Senate as any every crafted. The publication of the final volume of Caro’s nearly life-long work on Johnson will be a major milestone, but who knows when he’ll be finished with it. Caro took 12 years to write Master of the Senate. It is a huge book and hugely important.

There you have it – a Top Ten list for a political junkie.

Air Travel, Baseball, Books, Politics

Richard Ben Cramer

cramerThe Best Political Book No One Bought

Before Richard Ben Cramer, the campaign political book genre was dominated by the great Theodore White and his remarkable Making of the President series. That changed after the appearance of Cramer’s monumental door stop of a book on the 1988 presidential campaign.

Now every book about American politics is measured against Cramer’s masterpiece – What it Takes: The Way to the White House. Cramer’s book, a classic piece of “new journalism,” not only provided the inside account of the campaigns of politicians like Richard Gephardt, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, Bob Dole and the eventual nominees, George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, but also offered fascinating, in depth profiles of the candidates. It was a book about character as much as politics and it has become a classic for political junkies and Cramer and his approach have become a role models for a new generation of writers who see politics as less an insiders game and more a study in character and motivation.

[One might argue that the 1988 campaign did a great deal to shape the current presidential campaign environment. Just remember some of the moments: Biden’s plagiarism, the Willie Horton ad, Dukakis is a silly helmet in a tank, Bush 41’s “read my lips” and Lloyd Bentsen’s put down – “you’re no Jack Kennedy” – delivered at Dan Quayle expense.]

Politico has produced a must read profile of Cramer with insights into his book – the book was panned by reviewers when it came out years after the ’88 election and never sold well – that is also a great look into what now passes for political reporting. Most big-time Washington reporters continue to focus their political coverage on the inner workings of the campaign. It’s reporting analogous to covering a baseball game – report on the balls and strikes, throw in a little strategy, compose a clever opening graph and you’re good to go.

Cramer’s book – he claims to have done more than 1,000 interviews – concentrated instead on why these remarkable men came to be where they found themselves in 1988. He was interested in who they were as people and what made them tick. This approach – the motivations of people, their background and the details of their lives – is vastly more enlightening to voters than most of what we get in more standard political reporting.

I suspect that one of the reasons we don’t get more of the kind of reporting Cramer does, in addition to the fact that it is darn hard work, is that candidates generally hate this kind of reporting. As Cramer told Booknotes interviewer Brian Lamb in 1992, most politicians aren’t introspective. They never spend 15 minutes thinking about who they really are and what they really hope to accomplish. Cramer’s book gets to these questions.

The big book of the 2008 campaign was Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, a book full of gossipy detail and the interesting, but not always insightful, “inside baseball” of politics. Cramer, never one to mince words, is dismissive of Game Change because, as he told Politico, it “almost religiously eschews any understanding of who [the candidates] are.”

Cramer became disillusioned with reporting on politics after the initial tepid response to What it Takes – he still owes his publisher $200,000 from the advance he received – and hasn’t written about politics or candidates since. Instead, Cramer has produced books on baseball, including a book on Ted Williams and a devastating biography of Joe DiMaggio, and is now at work on a book on Alex Rodriquez.

It’s never too early to get ready for the next presidential election – candidates are already planning trips to New Hampshire and Iowa – so, if you haven’t read What it Takes, haunt a used book store and lose yourself in one of the best political books ever written. What it Takes is a classic.

And thanks for checking in here during 2010…a Happy New Year to you and yours.

Air Travel, Books

My Reading Life

conroyA Window Into All Worlds

It has taken me half a century to figure it out, but I now know how to start a conversation with anyone. It worked again on Saturday. I was in a room with total strangers; people I had just met and knew nothing about. I eventually got an opening to ask the question that never fails to make a friend: What are you reading?

The 60’ish woman across the table instantly became animated. “Unbroken,” she said, referring to Laura Hillenbrand’s new and widely praised book about a World War II hero. I had an immediate connection and just as fast an insight into my new reading friend. You can’t long be a stranger to a person who is opening up about the books they love and why.

The burly guy in the photo is a big time reader, too. Pat Conroy’s new little book My Reading Life tells the story of how the best selling author of Prince of Tides and The Great Santini became a great writer by becoming a great reader. For anyone who loves books, its a good page turner.

Conroy’s survey of reading and the bookish life ranges over the enduring importance of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, touches Dickens, praises Thomas Wolfe and James Dickey, proclaims War and Peace history’s greatest novel, explores the wonders of a really good used book store and, most of all, praises his book consuming mother for her lasting influence on his reading and writing.

“Reading great books,” Conroy says, “gave me unlimited access to people I never would have met, cities I couldn’t visit, mountain ranges I would never lay eyes on, or rivers I would never swim. Through books I fought bravely in wars of both attrition and conquest. Before I ever asked a girl out, I had fallen in love with Anna Karenina, taken Isabel Archer to high tea at the Grand Hotel in Rome, delivered passionate speeches to Juliet beneath her balcony, abandoned Dido in Carthage, made love to Lara in Zhivago’s Russia, walked beside Lady Brett Ashley in Paris, danced with Madame Bovary – I could form a sweet-smelling corps de ballet composed of the women I have loved in books.” Good stuff.

I’ve also discovered that my simple question works to not start a conversation with someone I may be well advised to avoid. When you ask, “what are you reading,” and get the standard brush off response of “I just don’t have time to read” or “I read so much in my work,” it may be time to move on.

I still have the first book I can remember my father reading to me. He had written his name in the front cover when Warren Harding was in the White House. I read the book to my sons and it is just one of thousands of books I love. The Story of the Bold Tin Soldier, that first book, certainly isn’t Faulkner, but it started me on a reading life and that has made all the difference.

Air Travel, Books

Books, Books and Books

booksGood Reads for Winter

The Lonely Planet guidebook recent published a Top 10 list of the world’s greatest bookstores. (I’m happy to say I’ve browsed in three of the Top 10, including the stores that LP lists as No. 1 and No. 2.)

That list of great bookstores got me thinking about the best books I’ve come across in the last few weeks. So in no particular order, here are a four good reads for winter.

Two new presidential bios are out.

Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life is a big, sprawling book about the president we all know, but really don’t. As the Christian Science Monitor noted in its review: “From Washington’s churning emotions beneath a cool exterior to his love of ladies and dance, the hero of the Revolutionary War and America’s first president emerges as an admirable, flawed, and human figure.” In other words, a more interesting and approachable man and politician than the stone figure of statues and myth.

The long awaited final volume of Edmund Morris’ three-volume life of Theodore Roosevelt – Colonel Roosevelt – is also in the bookstores. I haven’t read it yet, but the NPR interview with Morris about the post-presidential life of the great TR was absolutely fascinating. The first two volumes of this trio were simply superb history and biography and, I’m betting, the final volume will be just as good.

The New York Times said of Morris’ opus that it “deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.”

Two new books on United States foreign policy in the post-war world deserve praise. Presidential historian Robert Dallek has produced an assessment of the post-World War II blunders of most of the world’s major leaders – Truman, Stalin, de Gaulle, Churchill, among others. The book – The Lost Peace – argues that the Cold War wasn’t inevitable and might well have been avoided.

Dallek reminds us, for example, that Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh spent significant time during his younger days in the United States, Britain and France. Ho’s guerrilla activities, aimed at the Japanese and Vichy France during the war, were all about Vietnamese nationalism. Dallek makes a compelling case that a lack of imagination on the part of American policy makers coupled with de Gaulle’s desire to maintain French colonies after the war pushed Ho toward open confrontation with the West. Ho repeatedly petitioned President Truman for acknowledgement of Vietnamese aspirations for independence. Truman never responded.

Another book of note examines the Cold War from the perspective of two giants of American foreign policy from the 1940’s to the end of the century. The Hawk and The Dove by Nicholas Thompson tells the story of the friendship and rivalry between “the hawk” Paul Nitze, a career Washington policy insider, and “the dove” George Kennan, a Soviet expert who spent most of his life trying to influence policy from the outside. Thompson is a deft storyteller and great researcher who is also Nitze’s grandson, but he never plays favorites.

As the Washington Post said, “In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one.”

Late in life the two brilliant men reconciled their political differences and Nitze, while never admitting it, came to embrace Kennan’s view that nuclear weapons must be reduced and eventually eliminated. This is a great book if you want to better understand American foreign policy from Roosevelt to Reagan.

If you’re not quite ready to tackle Sarah Palin’s latest, any one of these four very good books will provide real insight into American politics and history and provide a great way to spend a winter evening or weekend.

 

Air Travel, Books, Clinton, Montana

The Red Corner

LeninCommunists in Montana? You Must Be Joking…

See if you can transport yourself to 1920 in extreme northeastern Montana. It must have been a heck of a place; booming settlement, bootlegging, truly radical politics and real support for a guy named Lenin.

Sheridan County, Montana borders on North Dakota to the east and the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan to the north. It is about as far removed from Soviet Russia as you can imagine, yet Sheridan County from about 1920 to 1930 was at the very center of the tiny American Communist movement. Led mostly by radical farmers and a bombastic newspaper editor, Sheridan County voters sent an openly Communist state senator and a state representative to the state legislature in Helena. The sheriff and most other county elected officials operated, as they say, under the Red Flag.

The local newspaper – The Producers News – published in the county seat of Plentywood, eventually became an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party USA. The editor, Charles “Red Flag” Taylor, was a brilliant propagandist who, after serving in the Montana State Senate also ran for the U.S. Senate and actively participated in Communist Party activities nationally. Taylor was on friendly terms with William Z. Foster, the perennial Communist Party candidate for president, and brought Foster to Sheridan County in 1932.

This fascinating, and mostly forgotten story, has been well chronicled in a fine new book by Verlaine Stoner McDonald. The book – The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana – was published earlier this year by the Montana Historical Society Press in Helena. Professor McDonald grew up in Sheridan County and her great-great uncle, Clair Stoner, was elected to the state legislature in the 1920’s. He was a Communist.

One of the most interesting aspects of McDonald’s book is that for decades, as she writes, “during the McCarthy years in the 1950’s and the Cold War, the people of northeastern Montana tried to forget their brush with notoriety.”

McDonald, who graduated from Plentywood High School, “without having heard of the Sheridan County Communists” and knowing that her relative had been a leader of the radicals.

In his review of The Red Corner, Montana historian Donald Spritzer notes that once the New Deal relief efforts of Franklin Roosevelt brought benefits to Sheridan County – the WPA built a courthouse in Plentywood, for example – the county’s Communists faded from significance and the locals seemed more than happy to have the history disappear, as well.

“Today residents are not particularly proud of what occurred in that bygone era,” Spritzer said. “But they are no longer so ashamed that they seek to hide it from their schoolchildren.”

Montana native Ivan Doig, whose splendid book Bucking the Sun, is set in northeastern Montana in the 1930’s gets the last word on the radicals of Sheridan County.

“When there was enough rain,” Doig wrote in his story about the Montanans who built Fort Peck Dam, “the soil of the northeastern corner of Montana grew hard red wheat. When drought came, politics of that same colorization sprouted instead.”

Harry Truman said,“The only thing new in this world is the history that you don’t know” How true.

McDonald’s book tells a great story that has been long forgetten; a rich history of the rural American west and one area’s flirtation with – truth stranger than fiction -Communism.

 

Air Travel, Books, Intelligence, September 11

The Nazis Burned Books, Too

book burningNo Good Comes From This

Unfortunately there is a long history of humans believing they can destroy ideas by burning the books that contain those ideas. The practice hardly began with a crackpot preacher in Florida, but dates back to the Inquisition, the Spanish conquest of the “New World” and even ancient China.

In May of 1933, in the town where Martin Luther nailed his famous Theses to the church door, pro-Nazi students burned 25,000 books deemed “un-German.” Included were works by the German Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, a guy named Hemingway and, of course, works by Karl Marx, Socialists and Jews. The pictures and what they foretold are haunting and should tell us something.

Two things about the story out of Florida are worth noting it seems to me. The first is the enormous media attention lavished on Rev. Terry Jones. Not bad for a guy, as Gail Collins pointed out, who has built a thriving congregation of “about 50 people.” In a matter of hours, Jones’ plan to burn the Quran went viral sparking protests in Afghanistan, worry about the impact on our soldiers in the field, comments from every politician in the nation, etc. More important, perhaps, the Aljazerra website has been all over the story.

Additionally, I’m struck by the fact – as we approach the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks – how far we have come, in the wrong direction, in building a worldwide consensus to oppose the radical forces that operate in the shadow of Islam.

I remember George W. Bush – megaphone in hand, standing on the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center – and the profound sense that the United States, at that huge moment in time, had the moral force to lead a worldwide effort to confront extremism. For a brief moment, the world was with us, but…well, apparently we blew it and here we are nine years later.

Now I fear the message sent by Rev, Jones, and folks like Newt Gingrich fulminating against a Muslim Cultural Center in lower Manhattan, paints America as unfaithful to our own professed and cherished traditions of religious freedom and tolerance. A perception of hypocrisy doesn’t play well in any culture.

Books – even books we would never read or whose content we abhor – are important things. They are symbols, as well as repositories of history, culture and, at a very important level, tolerance.

I’m not a big fan of Sidney Shelton or Barbara Cartland. In fact, I’ve never cracked a cover of either of those best selling authors, but they have huge followings and you have to respect that. I don’t read the Quran, either, but 22% of the people on the planet do and their numbers are growing at a rate faster than the world’s population.

Sending a billion and a half people regular telegrams from America with a message that we hate them doesn’t seem like a winning strategy.

It also doesn’t seem like America.

 

Air Travel, Books

The Richest Hill on Earth

butteDoig’s Historic Fiction…Butte in 1919

By 1919, Butte, Montana had fully made the transition from mining camp to industrial city. It is no exaggeration to say that the copper mining city, a mile high in the Rockies, was the most important mining center in the country. What a place it must have been – ethnically diverse, a cauldron of labor unrest; a place where culture, politics and big business collided.

Ivan Doig’s latest book – Work Song – deals with all this history in a compelling, engaging way that liberally mixes a novel’s plot with historical background. Doig understands what makes Butte such a fascinating and enduringly important place. In a recent interview with the Seattle Times the author of novels, non-fiction and a great memoir This House of Sky said that he encounters people from Butte at his book reading/signing sessions and “they’re still proud of Butte and still taken with it.”

Julia Keller, the cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, like me, really enjoyed the new Doig, saying it captures the American spirit.

Keller wrote, “Doig, grand storyteller that he is, understands this (spirit). His books — with “Work Song,” the tally hits 13 — explore the American West with humor and pathos. His men and women are drifters, gamblers, barkeeps, landladies, cowboys, thugs, poets and librarians, and that’s just the smallest peek at his census.”

The New York Times featured Work Song in the Sunday Book Review and also did an interview with Doig about his own work and reading habits. Big surprise for a guy writing about Butte, he loves Roddy Doyle’s book The Commitments about a band of young Irish musicians in Dublin.

Doig has long objected, in his gentle and gentlemanly way, to being characterized as a “western writer.” Tim Rutten, writing in the Los Angeles Times gives him his due. “Ivan Doig is an exemplary regional voice in American letters,” Rutten says, “which simply means he is a very fine writer who has chosen to site his work in the West, particularly in Montana, where he was born and grew up.”

Among the reviews of Work Song that I reviewed, only the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley took shots at the tight, little historical novel calling it “uninviting” and “a world-class dud” among other pejoratives. I can’t agree.

I wonder if the typically provocative Yardley has ever been to Butte. In 1919, the Anaconda Company, the powerful economic and political force in Montana, secretly owned virtually all the newspapers in the state and, of course, in his book Doig pokes many sticks at “the company.”

I’m not suggesting that the eminent critic of the Washington Post is some how secretly carrying water for the long-dead Anaconda Company, but his review is every bit as much of a polemic as you might have found on the front page of the company’s Butte newspaper in 1919. Which is to say, read Work Song for yourself and see if its not a pretty decent summer read with a realistic dose of the truth-stranger-than-fiction history of the “richest hill on earth.”