Books

A 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.

Good 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.

Doig’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.”

The Rule of Unintended Consequences

Most students of 20th Century American history know that the 18th Amendment to the Constitution – Prohibition – helped spawn the rise of organized crime. Al Capone, Mayer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, not to mention a host of lesser crooks and thugs, owed their spectacular rise to the misguided reformers of the 1920’s who thought they could put the Constitution between a thirsty citizen and a bottle of rye.

But until I popped open Daniel Okrent’s fascinating new book – Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition – did I realize that so much else has resulted from the great experiment to do away with booze in America.

Take, for example, the rise of the now ubiquitous Walgreen’s Drugstore. You can find a Walgreen’s on every other corner in many U.S. cities today and we can thank Prohibition for that. Okrent notes that Chicago-based Charles Walgreen had built his “chain from nine locations in 1916 to twenty just four years later.” Family history says it was the introduction of the Walgreen’s milkshake that drove the chain’s remarkable growth spurt in the 1920’s, but it wasn’t milkshakes alone that allowed Walgreen to operate 525 stores by the end of the decade.

Physicians prescribing “medicinal” alcohol had a lot to do with the rise of the drugstore chain. Doctors typically charged two bucks for a script for a pint of whiskey and the local pharmacist filled the order. That must have been almost as good as a modern day Viagra concession.

Prohibition also sped the evolution of the speedboat, something like the kind George H.W. Bush ran aground yesterday on the Maine Coast. Rum runners needed the extra horsepower to outrun the Coast Guard along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Many of the big names in today’s California wine industry – Mondavi, Beaulieu, Wente – thrived during the 1920’s thanks to the dramatic increase in the consumption of “sacramental” wine. Jewish “wine congregations” suddenly appeared around the country.

Okrent also makes an effective case that modern coalition politics can trace its dry roots to Prohibition. A motley and unlikely crew of anti-booze zealots, women’s suffrage advocates, progressive reformers in favor of an income tax and even the Ku Klux Klan, came together to convince the Congress, and then most state legislatures, to end the liquor trade.

We know how this story ends. It didn’t work. Yet both political parties and politicians as diverse as William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding went along with a national wave that, while politically expedient was also really stupid.

Okrent – he is the former Public Editor of the New York Times – writes with genuine insight based on exhaustive research. He quotes the Mayor of Boise and bar owners in Butte; the Governor of Utah and the sheriff of King County, Washington and paints wonderful portraits of the cast of characters that drove the politics and the policy.

George Will recently called Okrent’s book “darkly hilarious” and it is downright laugh out loud funny at times. One big-time bootlegger in New York was so impressed with the closing arguments of the prosecutor who was trying to put him in jail that he told the lawyer, “I almost think I should be convicted.”

Will also said, and its true, that Prohibition was doomed from the start.

“After 13 years, Prohibition, by then reduced to an alliance between evangelical Christians and criminals, was washed away by “social nullification” – a tide of alcohol – and by the exertions of wealthy people like Pierre du Pont who hoped that the return of liquor taxes would be accompanied by lower income taxes. (They were.) Ex-bootleggers found new business opportunities in the southern Nevada desert. And in the Second World War, draft boards exempted brewery workers as essential to the war effort.”

By 1932, the fizz had gone completely out of Prohibition and Franklin Roosevelt, in the political parlance of the time a “dry-wet” – he supported Prohibition, but also enjoyed a martini (with entirely too much vermouth, according to contemporaries) – could openly call for repeal. The photo at the top of this post is of the caustic columnist H.L. Mencken drinking to the end of Prohibition in his hometown of Baltimore, a place that never, even remotely, took to the notion of no booze. Mencken pronounced his first drink – make that legal drink – “pretty good – not bad at all.”

Prohibition, like so much of our history, is a cautionary tale. Excess in almost everything is a bad idea. It is hard – impossible maybe – to redirect basic human instinct; harder yet to ban a substance that many enjoy responsibily and fundamentally think should be no one’s business save their own. Prohibition proves that there are limits to what governments can do.

Last Call, a good summer read, full of insight into American politics and culture, is – pardon the pun – spirited. It might even go a bit better with a drink of something. You choose.

Salinger and Zinn: American Originals…And More

J.D. Salinger (left) might have become the greatest American writer of the post-war period, but opted out of fame and as the New York Times notes became “the Garbo of letters.” Salinger died yesterday, a mystery man to the end, with his masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye rolling on and on, discovered by each new generation; immensely popular and controversial.

The leftist historian, teacher and activist Howard Zinn also died this week, content to the end to tell the American story through the eyes of “little people” he long contended had been left out of most history books. Zinn’s million-selling A People’s History was a surprise and runaway best seller; immensely popular and controversial.

Zinn shrugged off criticism that his approach to history was more polemic than fact, once telling an interviewer: “If you look at history from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated, it’s a different story.”

Salinger, the famous recluse, pursued his craft in just as individual a manner. His reputation established, he moved to New Hampshire to live the life his great character Holden Caulfield hoped for, building: “a little cabin somewhere with the dough I made and live there for the rest of my life,” away from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.”

A People’s History and The Catcher in the Rye…true American classics from two American originals.