Part next!
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Divergent (Veronica Roth)
Beatrice lives in a Chicago that is a long way away from the one we know. Much of it is abandoned. Lake Michigan is a marsh. The inhabited areas are surrounded by a fence. And the people living there are divided into five Factions – Abnegation, Dauntless, Erudite, Amity, and Candor. Those who do not fit in – the factionless and the Divergent – are outcasts and threats, respectively. Beatrice is a member of Abnegation but her tests reveal her to be Divergent, something she must hide if she wants to survive. On selection day, she chooses to be Dauntless, leaving her family for the chance to be initiated into a new faction and taking “Tris” as her new name. There she will find friendship, love and cruelty. She will find the courage of the Dauntless, and receive and dispense the violence that the faction practices as its trade, upon itself and others. And when things go horribly wrong, she will be called to make her stand. I started reading this because it is a favorite of both my daughters – the new hot YA series now that The Hunger Games has moved on to the later stages of its lifecycle – and it is a brisk and fairly entertaining read. It’s rather straightforward, in a simplistic sort of way, and it leaves a great many gaping questions unanswered. But the action moves along crisply, the characters are thin but still feel real, and I can understand why it’s so popular. On to the next volume of the trilogy.
Insurgent (Veronica Roth)
The second installment of this series begins about an hour after the first one left off, and as with all middle volumes of trilogies it has the unenviable task of picking up a story and then dropping it off without either starting or ending anything too critical. In this Roth largely succeeds – the clashes get bigger, the stakes get higher, and in the end she has set herself up for the third book nicely. That said, the book is surprisingly thin and shrill at times. There is an awful lot of over-emotional relationship crisis in here, as you would expect from a book aimed mostly at teenagers. For all the bows made toward the notion of greys the basic moral framework of the book is simplistic and loaded with Big Words. And – one thing that niggled at me throughout – the characters suffer all sorts of injuries over the course of the action-packed narrative yet seem to heal with miraculous speed. Not completely, of course – the pains are always there to be exploited for dramatic tension – but these characters are physically capable of doing things almost immediately that nobody with those injuries could actually do in that time frame. You notice this sort of thing when you get to be my age. Overall this is clearly the work of a young writer (a quick Google search confirms that she was 24 when this was published) with big ideas and small experience. That she can pull off this series as well as she has speaks to a good bit of talent, though, and I look forward to reading her work as she and her stories mature.
Allegiant (Veronica Roth)
The final volume of the series also picks up an hour after its predecessor, which makes this more of a single story carried over three publication dates rather than a trilogy, but trying to get a 1600pp YA novel published would probably have been more trouble than it was worth. So, volume 3. It is astonishing just how American this entire series is in its general attitude – nobody has sex, but everyone has a gun. In this book Roth will attempt two things, one successfully and one not. On the plus side she widens out the focus of the story from the claustrophobic confines of what is left of Chicago to the vistas of the wider world in which it is set. Here we learn what the society of the factions is really about, and we get to debate whether it should continue to exist or not – a debate complicated by the goings on within the city itself even if those goings on are rather distant from the narrative. On the down side, Roth splits the POV of the story. The previous two books were told from Tris’ point of view, and if the characters all ended up speaking with more or less the same voice then you could attribute it to that. With every other chapter told from Tobias’ point of view, however, it is clear that Roth has yet to learn how to tell a story in multiple voices – the chapters sound exactly the same, and often the only clue to the identity of the narrator is the subheading at the beginning. The story moves along briskly for that – Roth is nothing if not generous with bloodletting, both physical and emotional – and the quiet, reflective ending is thus somewhat redemptive. There’s a reason why the POV splits, it turns out. It’s not a bad series, though if you’re going to compare it to The Hunger Games – which everyone seems to do almost reflexively – it will come up a bit short simply on the merits of its writing.
The Books of the South (Glen Cook)
Shadow Games
When The White Rose ended, the Black Company was down to its last seven men – eight if you include Lady (no longer THE Lady). With nothing left to accomplish, the senior surviving officer – the physician and annalist Croaker – decides to seek out Khatovar, where the Black Company originated, somewhere deep in the south of the world. This is the story of their journey. At first the story alternates between the difficulties of their trip (notably the competing responsibilities burdening Lady and the borderline-pathological clumsiness of the mating dance between her and Croaker) and another story centering on three grifters (Swan, Cordy, and Blade) in a town called Taglios. Taglios is on the Black Company’s way, and it is threatened by the Shadowmasters – faceless, vague evils commanding very real forces. As with all Black Company books there is adventure and combat aplenty, challenges faced and won, and challenges faced and lost. The Black Company will grow to thousands, and shrink again. Old evils will reawaken and new ones join them. Through it all the most compelling character remains Lady – struggling to find herself in the wake of past events and discovering a complexity that largely eludes the other characters. Cook is a fun writer with a sharp eye for a story, though not necessarily a profound writer.
Dreams of Steel
Following immediately upon the catastrophe that ended Shadow Games, this book is essentially three different stories. The first belongs to Lady, who takes up Croaker’s old role as Annalist in order, she says, to set things straight in her own mind and document her determination to avenge Croaker’s death at the hands of the Shadowmasters. Along the way she finds herself ever more entwined with the cult of Kina, whose devotees have all sorts of horror in store for her. The second belongs, oddly enough, to Croaker, who isn’t actually dead. Captured by Soulcatcher and turned into a pawn, he spends much of the book gathering himself and – eventually – the remnants of the Company for the resumption of his original mission. And the third, interwoven with both, is the story of Swan, Blade and Cordy, grifters turned stalwarts, as they navigate between the various forces who would do them in. The Shadowmasters threaten both offstage and, in the person of Longshadow, onstage. Old nemeses reappear, new allies continue to make their presence known, and it all ends on an ominous cliffhanger, though one that I figured out chapters beforehand. It was still fun watching the characters catch up, though.
The Silver Spike
This isn’t so much a Black Company book as it is a chance for Cook to tie up a number of loose ends from previous books. Part of the reason he has to do this is that between the sorcery and the deceptions it is damnably hard for some of his characters to stay dead, and several of the main characters in this one have been reported so previously only to have those reports turn out to be exaggerated. At the end of The White Rose the essence of the Dominator was imprisoned in a silver spike embedded in a sapling of the tree god of the plains, and human nature dictates that where anything valuable is, there too shall be petty criminals looking for an easy score. That part of the story belongs to Smed, Tully, Timmy, and Old Man Fish – the last named being clearly more than he says he is, but the others just your basic neighborhood mooks. A second part involves Darling, Silent, and – eventually – Bomanz,. Another part involves Raven and Case, first as they journey to find Croaker in the South and then as they head back north with Darling’s crew to the town of Oar, where the spike has been taken. And finally there is the Limper, or what is left of him, a seething force of hatred and destruction who also wants the spike. They all collide in Oar, with catastrophic results for most of them, and then Cook spends a page or two explaining what happened to the characters left over. It’s an odd book for the series, but a good one.
The Return of the Black Company (Glen Cook)
Bleak Seasons
Listen – Murgen the Annalist has come unstuck in time. He spends the bulk of the first part of this novel flitting about between the besieged town of Dejagore, where so much of Shadow Games and Dreams of Steel took place, and through a Taglios that may or may not be anywhere near there in time. And when he finally does settle down in one chronological location, he learns how to ride the spirit of the comatose wizard Smoke across time and distance so he can travel again. This is a tricky book to follow in many ways, and clearly an experiment in form for Cook. The book also covers – from Murgen’s perspective – some of the same events as Shadow Games and Dreams of Steel, and delves into the history and culture of the Nyueng Bao, a people trapped with the Black Company and the natives in Dejagore but utterly apart from both. Eventually Murgen will find – and lose – a wife. He will get caught up in the larger machinations of the ongoing war between the Black Company, Longshadow, and the Deceivers – a war with so many different angles and subplots that keeping it all straight can be hard even for the main players. And through it all Cook will continue to tell his story of hard men hard used but carrying through anyway.
She is the Darkness
Picking up immediately after the events of Bleak Seasons, the Black Company continues its war against Longshadow and its quest to find its origins at Khatovar. The book divides its time between the Company and its auxiliary forces of Taglians and Ngueyan Bao, who are camped outside of Overlook, besieging Longshadow inside his fortress, and Murgen, who spends much of the book outside of his body, either surfing with the spirit of the old wizard Smoke or dreamwalking on his own. Murgen is the perfect spy, and he discovers quite a number of things that are useful, surprising, or both. Eventually the Company will make its long-awaited assaults – first on Overlook, and then on the Shadowlands themselves, where things will go horribly wrong (as they tend to do at the end of Black Company books, though not often in the ways you expect) and everything will get set up for the next volume in the Glittering Stones subseries. One of the more intriguing questions in this book is just who the “she” is of the title. It could be Lady, whose role in this series grows ever more complex and intriguing. It could be her sister, Soulcatcher, a force for chaotic evil that even Lady can’t predict effectively. It could be the dark goddess Kina, a menacing presence mostly offstage. Or it could be Croaker and Lady’s daughter, who seems to combine most of the features of all of the previous characters in one small but powerful child.
The Battle of the Labyrinth (Rick Riordan)
Percy Jackson’s story continues to get darker and more intense as he, Annabeth, Grover, and Tyson are sent out on yet another quest, this one into the Labyrinth of Daedalus to thwart an imminent invasion by the forces of Kronos. Along the way there will be betrayals and battles, new allies and old enemies. Nico di Angelo’s continuing struggle to come to grips with the death of his sister – a strange struggle, given his parentage – plays a part in this, as does the unusually perceptive mortal Rachel Elizabeth Dare, whose interest in Percy is probably more than friendly and definitely causing issues with Annabeth that Percy at 14 or 15 is too dense to figure out. The stakes and the costs get higher, the action gets more focused, and Riordan sets himself up well for the final volume of this entertaining series.
The Many Deaths of the Black Company (Glen Cook)
Water Sleeps
It’s been a few years since the Captured were entombed beyond the Shadowgate, and the remnants of the Black Company toil in secrecy in a Taglios firmly under the control of the Protector – their old nemesis Soulcatcher. Led by Sahra (as always, it is incredibly hard to actually kill characters in these books, and they often come back to play significant roles) and Sleepy (the narrator of this book), guided by the free-flying soul of Murgen and the now aged and diminished One-Eye and Goblin, and containing the up and coming wizard Tobo, the shadows of the Black Company do their best to stymie the Protector while at the same time furthering their eventual goal of returning to the plain and releasing the Captured. Meanwhile the old Deceiver, Narayan Singh, and the Daughter of Night (nicknamed “Booboo”) are also out there, trying to get their plans for the Year of the Skulls rolling. These books can start to sound a little stilted when you try to summarize them, but Cook keeps them lively and remarkably down to earth, with none of the insufferable posturing that the genre can fall into at its worst. Mostly he’s telling a story of hard men and women, hard used and hard working, trying to do what they think is best in a world that doesn’t really care. Eventually they will make an ally of a demon, journey across the plain to a place that might be Khatovar, and wait for the final volume of the saga to complete their story.
Soldiers Live
The concluding volume of the story of the Black Company – and one of the longest books in the series – opens with the Company coming off of a period of relative peace and prosperity in a different world from the one they started in, so many stories ago. They are across the Glittering Plains and through the Shadowgate, and for four years nobody has died. This, of course, cannot last, and the Company must journey back across the Plain to settle old scores in their home world. Along the way they will acquire new enemies and allies – notably several young wizards from a family known as the Voroshk, from a different world yet again – and they will battle both Soulcatcher and the Daughter of Night for both the survival of the world and the prize of Taglios. This series got progressively more mystical as it went along and I think I liked it better when they were just a mercenary company trying to survive in a brutal and violent world rather than as avatars of gods, but the writing remained entertaining and the stories were more complicated than they might seem on first glance. There are few outright villains – most of the characters outside of the Company (and some inside) can be found on any number of sides as the story progresses – and Cook mostly keeps the focus on the characters and how they would react to things rather than letting the story being driven by the needs of plot alone. Eventually it ends up as any story of war and soldiers must, with few left standing to tell the stories of those who have fallen, and an overtone of regret and pain throughout.
The Serpent of Venice (Christopher Moore)
Moore’s novel Fool tells the story of Shakespeare’s King Lear from the perspective of the titular fool – an orphan named Pocket – and in this book we get a new chapter of Pocket’s life. He has been sent to Venice as an emissary of the Queen of England to stop a Crusade being plotted there against the Muslim world, one that would enrich Venice but impoverish almost everyone else. When he is drugged and nearly killed in the first chapter, his story becomes one of revenge and low comedy in equal proportions. Combining Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello into one bizarre mash-up, and bringing in Marco Polo and a Chinese dragon as major characters, this is one of Moore’s more far-ranging books. It takes a while for it to get going, but by halfway through it is rolling along with Moore’s signature blend of deft plotting and cheerfully vulgar humor. This is not a book for the delicate of sensibility, but for the rest of us it’s a lot of fun.
The Last Olympian (Rick Riordan)
The final book of the first Percy Jackson series finds our heroes in dire straights. The Titan Kronos is moving steadily toward his goal of overthrowing the Olympian gods, and with the gods preoccupied with fighting Typhon as he works his way across the US the demigods at Camp Half-Blood are all that stand in his way. The book opens with a disastrous raid on Kronos’ ship in the Atlantic, and then spends most of its time on the final battle for New York City (where modern Olympus rests). It’s a darker and more serious book than most of the others in the series, and more tightly focused. But Riordan makes it work, and for the moment all seems right with Percy Jackson’s world. And then there’s the next series, which Lauren and I may get to soon.
Raising Steam (Terry Pratchett)
This is another of Pratchett’s “how X came to Discworld books,” a subgenre that runs the gamut from the very good (The Truth – how newspapers came to Discworld) to mostly forgettable (Unseen Academicals – how soccer came to Discworld) with a few stops in between. It’s hard to say where this one fits on the scale of Pratchett’s writing, because for long stretches of the book I wasn’t sure if Pratchett was actually the one writing it. I know that his health has been poor and that his daughter is the officially designated heir apparent to continue the series once he can no longer handle it, and there were long stretches of this book – especially toward the beginning – where it felt like someone was doing a reasonable but not very sophisticated impression of Pratchett’s style. It does get better as it goes, though, so either she is picking up the skill fairly rapidly, or Pratchett himself takes over, or Pratchett was writing all along and the book simply gets better for other reasons. Hard to say. Now that Watch Commander Vimes has moved offstage as the main voice of the Ankh-Morpork-based stories, the central focus of books set in that city has become Moist von Lipwig – forcibly reformed con man, basically good hearted fellow, entrepreneur extraordinaire, and a man about to branch out from previous successes with the post office, Royal Bank, and “clacks” (the Discworld equivalent of telegraphs) to bring the railroad to Discworld. Train engineer Dick Simnel has invented the locomotive and wants to build the railway. Sir Harry King has more money than he knows what to do with and would like to branch out from his night-soil business to fund something more respectable. And the Patrician, Lord Vetinari, would like a rapid form of transportation that could bring him to Bonk, in Uberwald, both to see his consort there and to have someone head off what eventually becomes a rebellion among the dwarfs. It takes about half the book before it finds its stride, as noted, but after that it is a typical late-Pratchett romp – solidly entertaining though not among his best.
Rule 34 (Charles Stross)
Charles Stross’ head must be an interesting place to live, if his writing is anything to go by. I found him through his Laundry Files books and enjoyed one of his hard-SF space thrillers a while back, but this book is part of yet another series. It’s something of a near-future SF-noir police procedural, and it takes place in the same world as Halting State, only a few years later. It’s a swirling kalaidascope of a story – Stross is the only author I’ve ever seen successfully (or, for that matter, unsuccessfully) pull off a book with multiple second-person narrators – centering once again on the efforts of the beleaguered Edinburgh police force in a now semi-independent Scotland where law enforcement takes place almost entirely within the digital confines of CopSpace. There’s old-fashioned legwork aplenty, of course, but everything is logged, filed, and distributed in real time through digital glasses and high-bandwidth networks. At the center of this story are DI Liz Kavanaugh (now treading water, career-wise, in what is unofficially known as the Rule 34 Squad, monitoring the internet for perversions that cross whatever line has been drawn most recently), Anwar Hussein (small-time con artist, parolee, closeted gay family man, and for much of this book the sole employee of the Consulate of the Independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan, a breakaway region of Kyrgyzstan), and John Christie (not his real name – the sociopathic agent of an organized crime outfit called the Operation, in Edinburgh on business). Throw in a semi-sentient monitoring program designed to cut crime, a long-running plot by the Kyrgyz government to break the Operation, and a large and increasing number of bizarre homicides across the world, and it all gets fairly complicated. This is a demanding but rewarding novel, and well worth the effort.
The Wanting Seed (Anthony Burgess)
This is a book that does not quite know what it wants to be. It’s billed as dystopian comedy – the London Times Literary Supplement called it “wildly and fantastically funny” when it came out in 1962 – but that only proves that humor does not age well. There are parts of it that call to mind Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, with its grim portrayal of totalitarian society. There are parts more akin to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, with its drastic solutions to famine and poverty woven through. There are bits of Orwell sprinkled here and there. And the last third or so reads like a particularly bleak version of Carry On, Sergeant. The whole mix really does not hang very well together, and it was a book I was glad to see the end of. It’s set in a future Britain where there is no crime, war, or disease, and as a result there is horrific overpopulation and almost no food. Religion has been banned, and the State controls all of society. Tristram is a history teacher, spouting off his theories of social cycles – society, he says, cycles between a Pelagian period of liberal faith in human nature, an Interlude period of violence, an Augustinian period where humanity is viewed as corrupt, and then back to Pelagius. His wife Beatrice-Joanna (always referred to by her full name) is bored and having an affair with Tristram’s brother Derek. The book opens with her taking her dead son to the proper office to have him recycled into fertilizer, and quickly becomes a farce when she then becomes pregnant again – an illegal and defiant act. Eventually she flees Greater London (a city occupying most of what is now England), and when the social order implodes Tristram is jailed and eventually shoveled into the newly reconstituted Army. Religion is restored, food seems to reappear as if by magic (although it’s painfully clear where the meat comes from), and a new Augustinian age dawns. The last third is mostly Tristram’s army story, a bitterly bleak tale of betrayal and perhaps redemption – Burgess leaves that hanging. This scattershot mess clearly wasn’t the novel that secured Burgess’ literary reputation.
Saturday, January 10, 2015
Friday, January 9, 2015
Books Read in 2014, Part 1
I read. It's what I do.
And since I started this blog I have kept track of the books I read. It makes for some interesting reflection at the end of the year, to see what has caught my eye over the previous twelve months. Or, indeed, the previous years.
Here is this year's list, more or less in order.
Enjoy!
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We Learn Nothing (Tim Kreider)
I found this book when a blog I read posted an excerpt from it. It’s the bit where Krieder explains the difference between liberals and conservatives in the US. According to his theory, liberals are the people who Got Out – who went to college, got ahead, and only come home for holidays. Conservatives are the people who Stayed Put – who married their high school sweethearts, got jobs in town, and still care who won homecoming. It does explain a lot of the general worldview of each side, if you push it far enough. Kreider is a wonderful writer who seems to have lived a fascinating life and his essays reflect this, ranging from laugh-out-loud funny to bittersweet often within a single paragraph. I particularly enjoyed his long story of how his friend Skelly’s secrets all came tumbling out after he died and what that said about both Skelly and Kreider, as well as his essay on reading Tristram Shandy, but they’re all good. The cartoons in this book – Kreider made a living as an editorial cartoonist for most of the early 21st century – are also good but the typeface for the dialogue balloons is both narrow and punitively small, making them hard to read. I need to find more of his essays.
The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)
Percy Jackson is a sixth-grader in trouble. His mother is married to a gold-plated loser. He’s on yet another school, having been thrown out of more of them than he cares to remember. His only friend is a misfit named Grover. And his math teacher turned into a screeching creature from Hades and tried to kill him, but nobody remembers it or even that he ever had such a math teacher. When a much-needed vacation with his mother turns into a flight for his life, he finds himself at Camp Half-Blood, faced with two realizations: one, that his mother is now a captive of Hades, the god of the Underworld, and two, that he is a demigod, a child of an ancient Greek god still very much alive in the modern world. When Zeus and Poseidon threaten war over Zeus’ missing lightning bolt, it falls to Percy, Grover, and their friend Annabeth – a girl about the same age, the daughter of Athena – to set things right. This will involve a trip across the US, a descent into the Underworld, and some face-to-face realization of what it truly means to be the son of a god. Riordan writes with gusto and a sly sense of humor (the chapter headings alone are priceless), and this book is far better than the mess of a movie that was made from it in 2010. Lauren and I read this as part of our continuing effort to read quality books together at bedtime.
Winter’s Tale (Mark Helprin)
How to describe this book? It is a love song to the city of New York. It is a swirl of language that somehow manages to combine the rolling cadences and florid vocabulary of the nineteenth century with the artistic sensibility of the 1970s. It is magic realism, a story of impossibilities taken for granted and realities portrayed in golden light. It is the story of Peter Lake – always referred to by his full name – a master mechanic and a burglar in early 20th-century New York, in the years before the Great War. Pursued by Pealy Soames and his criminal gang of Short Tails, saved by the white horse Athansor, loved by the consumptive Beverly Penn, Peter Lake soars across Progressive Era New York and falls, only to emerge at the turn of the millennium nearly a century later in a different city, one with familiar faces and new challenges whose solutions are ultimately in the hands of the reader. I read this book at the urging of a friend, who said this was his favorite book. “I don't know what the opposite of cynicism is,” he told me, “but whatever it is, this book breathes it in every sentence.”
Fight For Your Long Day (Alex Kudera)
Cyrus Duffleman is an adjunct lecturer in English literature at three different and barely disguised Philadelphia campuses (Urban State [clearly Temple], Liberty Tech [Drexel], and Ivy Green [Penn]), a tutor at another, a security guard in the evenings, and a card-carrying member of the impoverished temporary workforce that keeps modern academia afloat. Adjuncts – as opposed to their more fortunate tenured coworkers now rapidly disappearing from the landscape as the American university system increasingly regards its faculty as a bothersome expense – teach for little pay, few benefits and no job security, and on Thursdays Duffleman has his long day. All of his jobs require something from him on Thursdays, and this book is a narrative of one particular Thursday – One Day in the Life of Ivan Adjunctovich. We follow him from class to class, from subway to light rail, and from one situation of powerlessness to another as he keeps up a running internal monologue that alternates between despair and stubborn persistence and as the events of the day rapidly spiral out of control. There is a certain deadpan dispirited black humor in this that those of us on that treadmill will find amusing, even if it is cloaked in willfully non-PC observations, framed by oddly anesthetized violence impinging on the outskirts of his existence, and interrupted by a fair amount of the futile sort of left-wing political rambling that anyone who survived the reign of George W. Bush (“President Fern” here) would recognize. As a native Philadelphian and graduate of Ivy Green I enjoyed following Duffleman around my former city – Kudera has a strong sense of place, and his narrative is very specific about such things as train station architecture – and I probably liked this book more than is good for me in my current employment situation.
Year Zero (Rob Reid)
Nick Carter is a lawyer in the entertainment copyright field, not one of the Backstreet Boys. This becomes relevant because it turns out that 1) aliens love human music, 2) they love it so much that every last one of them has illegally downloaded every song ever broadcast since the Kotter Moment in 1977, when Earth’s electronic signals were first picked up, and 3) they owe humanity a ton of money in copyright violation fees – more than the sum total of all the wealth of the universe, thousands of times over. To get out of this debt, they may destroy human civilization (or get us to do it to ourselves, which would accomplish the same goal without violating any alien laws). Nick, his neighbor and love interest Manda, his shark of a boss Judy, his self-absorbed cousin Pugwash, and two rather inept aliens (Carly and Frampton – a surprising amount of alien culture was frozen at the Kotter Moment) have to figure out a way to prevent this. It’s a funny book in some ways – not the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the blurbs promise, but then nothing ever is – and a vitriolic satire of entertainment law, as you would expect given that the author founded Rhapsody.com. Much of the humor is designed to appeal to American conservatives – jokes at the expense of unions, government workers, and the whole notion of global climate change abound – but there are more than enough laughs from any perspective to keep the book going, and even the conservative jokes are funny. It was a good book, and thus I’m really not sure why it was such a chore to read at times.
Red Country (Joe Abercrombie)
Joe Abercrombie’s world is a weary, gritty place full of violence and regret, mad schemes and harsh realities, where characters struggle against limits of their own creation and those imposed on them by others, and if they rarely ever win by their own standards, sometimes they come out having not quite lost. Shy South and her adoptive father Lamb scratch out a living on a farm near the town of Squaredeal – a dusty hellhole of a place – but when a bandit burns the place down and steals her younger siblings they head off to get them back and wreak vengeance on the outlaws. Temple is a lawyer for Nicomo Cosca’s mercenary army, a man given to more introspection than is safe in such a position, and he wants out. Dab Sweet is a famous scout, one who knows his way around the Ghost people and Dragon people who make the west such a dangerous place. Caul Shivers is looking for a nine-fingered man. Somewhere is a rebellion, or might have been one. And the town of Crease is about to explode into civil war. Mix these all together and you have a breathtakingly written cross between fantasy and western, full of the mordant black humor that Abercrombie seems to specialize in. For all their bleakness, these books are really funny when viewed from the right perspective. Perhaps the most fascinating bit of this story is Lamb, a character whose real name is never once mentioned in the book but which should be familiar to anyone who has read the other books Abercrombie has set in this grim and unforgiving world. How much does a name mean anyway, Lamb might say, when the person underneath never changes no matter how much he might wish it so?
The Sea of Monsters (Rick Riordan)
Percy Jackson survived his initiation into the world of demigods only to find himself back in the soup. When his gym class degenerates into a fiery maelstrom he, his new friend Tyson, and his old friend Annabeth are forced to flee to Camp Half Blood, where things are not going well indeed. Someone has poisoned Thalia’s tree, the new camp director is actively trying to destroy the place and take Percy with it, Grover is sending messages that he is in grave danger, and the quest to put things right is given to Clarisse rather than Percy. Fortunately for us Percy, Annabeth and Tyson sneak out to join the quest, and adventures ensue. It’s a breakneck tale of danger and escape, told with Riordan’s signature humor, and one that sets up the next book quite nicely.
The Better Mousetrap (Tom Holt)
Continuing his JW Wells series, this book opens with Frank Carpenter – the son of Sophie and Paul from the original books – plying his trade as, well, an insurance adjustor of sorts. JW Wells, the finest purveyor of magical services and pest control in Britain, went broke at the end of the previous book so the various staff and magical items are scattered about and Frank freelances, using his dad’s Portable Door to make sure that catastrophes retrospectively don’t happen and thus no insurance payout is required. Emily Spitzer works for Carrington’s, a firm much like JW Wells, and despite being five feet tall and “slightly built,” she is one of their best pest control people. But when someone tries to kill her – and succeeds, multiple times – it falls to Frank to rescue her and save her insurance company millions. And when a) they fall in love, as you knew they would, and b) the plot thickens all the way to the top, the story gets even better. Holt writes deftly plotted books full of bittersweet humor and delicious turns of phrase, and this book is right there.
May Contain Traces of Magic (Tom Holt)
Trying to keep track of the plot in a Tom Holt novel can be a challenging business, as he is very good at building things up to a point where you think you see how it’s all going to be resolved and then turning a corner to display wholly unpredicted vistas, and then doing it again. Chris works as a salesman, peddling JW Wells products to the various shops who sell them. He has a girlfriend (Karen) with whom he does not particularly get along well, a friend (Jill) with whom he does and who is a demon hunter by trade, a trainee (Angela) who is both a nuisance and several times removed from what she appears, and a GPS unit (SatNav) who may or may not be evil. Throw in a tragic incident from their school days together, an incipient civil war among the demons with humanity as collateral damage, a rogue Fey princess, and more twists and time travel than is probably healthy – as well as more than a few laugh-out-loud passages of extremely British humor (or “humour,” I suppose) – and you’ve got yourself another winner in the stories from the JW Wells series.
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, eds.)
Anders and Strahan divide up the fantasy genre into two different areas. First, they say, there is epic fantasy – the kind of large-scale clash of kingdoms that is perhaps most popularly associated with Tolkien. And second, there is sword and sorcery, which tends to be smaller scale, rather grittier and more nuanced, and currently enjoying something of a revival. Whether you buy this claim or not – Strahan and Anders produce an impressive pedigree of works and authors to support it in their introduction, though I retain my doubts – the simple fact is that this book contains seventeen original stories, almost all of them worth reading. That alone is an accomplishment, though given the contributors perhaps it was to be expected. I bought this because it had KJ Parker and Joe Abercrombie. I enjoyed Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, Michael Shea and Scott Lynch. What surprised me was how much I didn’t like Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock simply because of their writing styles. Moorcock in particular writes like a parody of the genre, which might be because he was so instrumental in founding the genre that he’s what everyone parodies, though in either case I doubt I’ll be reading any more Elric stories as this one was quite a slog. But the book as a whole is very much worth the time, and Lynch, Erikson and Cook in particular have moved up my list of authors to read.
Straight Man (Richard Russo)
William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (Hank to his colleagues, as we later discover) is the interim chair of the English Department at a backwater state university campus in central Pennsylvania. A contrarian, a self-diagnosed mediocrity, and a member of a department riven by faction and several reforms away from being merely dysfunctional, on a campus where chronic underfunding and misplaced priorities mean that expensive construction projects exist side by side with cuts to personnel, Hank is about to have a wild week. He will be mangled by one colleague, nearly seduced by another, and called upon to mediate his daughter’s marriage. He will threaten to execute a goose on live television, teach any number of odd classes, deal with health crises and family situations, and face a recall election over his increasingly controversial term as interim chair. All this told in Russo’s smooth, often laugh-out-loud funny prose. It’s a book that makes me want to find more of Russo’s work.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages (Tom Holt)
This is a surprisingly gentle book for Holt, who tends toward either jam-packed plotting or bittersweet situations or both, even while he consistently provides some of the funniest stuff out there. It’s also one of his more British books, both in feel and language (Holt rarely translates things into American, and a working knowledge of BBC America programming is a helpful thing to have when reading his books on this side of the Atlantic). This is also the latest in the JW Wells & Co. saga, though only by inference. It starts with a pig – hyperintelligent as all pigs are – and then quickly shifts over to Polly (a real-estate lawyer) and her brother Don (an advertising jingle writer) and the weirdness that happens to them when they run into a powerful artifact capable of folding realities one on top of another. There’s also a dry-cleaning establishment that randomly moves every few days, a pair of knights who have been killing each other five times daily for seven hundred years but can’t remember why, a flock of chickens that used to be lawyers, and Stan Gogerty (“he’s a weirdness expert”), whose job it is to sort all this out. And sort it out he does, eventually. And then there is the pig again.
Chronicles of the Black Company (Glen Cook)
The Black Company
If you’ve ever wondered what fantasy novels look like from the bottom up, from the perspective of the grunt soldiers who make up the vast armies and serve the Dark Lords or Fair Princes that make up most of the genre, the Black Company series is for you. The Black Company is a mercenary force of some centuries’ standing – “the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar” – and as all such forces are it is a tightly bound group of men, none of whom have actual names and all of whom are there in order to escape from something in their past. The narrator is Croaker, the company physician and the man responsible for keeping the Annals, for telling the company’s story to the next generation of soldiers. The company has any number of well-defined soldiers – Elmo, the Captain, the Lieutenant, Mercy, eventually Raven – as well as some in-house sorcerers (Silent, One-Eye, Goblin). At the beginning of this novel they are in a decrepit city named Beryl on a commission from its leader that goes all sorts of wrong, and eventually they end up heading north in the service of the Lady, a powerful sorceress even older than the Black Company, recently resurrected and fighting the Rebel (always singular). Her main servants are the Taken, sorcerers she has forcibly converted to her service. The Taken who enlists the Black Company is called Soulcatcher. Eventually the Black Company will find itself tangled in webs of intrigue, enmeshed in battle, and as darkly cynical as ever. Cook writes in a curiously elided style, with gaps and inferences between events, but the grit and black humor make the stories work. This is where Joe Abercrombie – stylistically a much different writer – got his general ambiance from. It’s fantasy noir.
Shadows Linger
After the events of the first book, the Black Company now finds itself the prize fighting force of the Lady, which in practical terms means a lot of hard, thankless work and even more long marches over hundreds of miles of unforgiving terrain in order to do that work. This book – rather more slow-paced than the first one – starts off with two separate stories, one featuring an innkeeper named Shed in a town called Juniper, and the other featuring the travails of the Company in another town called Tally. Eventually an advance party of Black Company soldiers will be sent to Juniper and from there the stories converge. The White Rose has been reincarnated and remains a threat to the Lady though not particularly to the Black Company. And the Lady has an even more dire threat to handle – the possible return of her long buried husband, the Dominator (perhaps the only creature on earth more evil than she is, as Croaker often muses) through the medium of a black fortress built of the dead and overlooking Juniper. As before, the action climaxes in thunderous battle, and the remains of the Black Company move on to the next crisis from there.
The White Rose
Perhaps the most intriguing character Cook has created in this series so far is not actually one of the Black Company – fascinating and sharply drawn as they are – but the Lady, the sorceress whom they have both fought and served, occasionally at the same time, as befits a mercenary company of soldiers. Ruthless, cunning, and one of the recognized evils of their world (even by her own reckoning), she nevertheless has a depth and complexity that is hard to find in similar characters in other works. She has a soft spot for Croaker. She fears the Dominator and knows deeply that she is the only person who can prevent his return. And all that collides in this book, much to Croaker’s chagrin and surprise. “I hate it when they go human on you,” he says at one point. “Enemies are not supposed to do that.” The story opens with the remnants of the Black Company hiding in the Plain of Fear with the White Rose, nibbling at the edges of the Lady’s empire and just trying to hold on. It will take them through missions and perils, history lessons and unforeseen alliances, until at last it ends where it had to end: a final confrontation with the Dominator himself in all his resurrected power. But at the heart of it all is the Lady, a villain who in some ways is more the hero of this story than either Croaker or the White Rose.
The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
The Book Thief is a sad and gentle story of slowly gathering horror. How could it be otherwise? It is a story of children in the Third Reich. It is a story of kindness and poverty, of hard edges and warm hearts, of love, loss, and pain. It is a meditation on the power of words and stories. It is a tale of what happens when all of those things run headlong into the biggest and most destructive war in human history. And it is narrated by Death, a careworn and ragged figure whose sympathy for his charges bleeds through on every page. Liesel Meminger is a foster child, handed over by her mother in the opening scenes and sent to live with the Hubermanns – fierce Rosa and gentle Hans – in the small town of Molching. There she makes a few friends, notably Rudy Steiner. She learns to read. She helps to harbor Jewish Max Vandenburg. She even steals books, mostly from the Mayor’s ghostly wife, though how much is theft and how much is surreptitious gift-giving is hard to say. For a while things work out, and then, as you would expect in the churning catastrophe of World War II, they don’t. This is a haunting book, one that stays with you long after the last page is finished. The final sentence of this book is one of my favorites in all of literature.
The Titan’s Curse (Rick Riordan)
When a rescue mission at a remote private school in Maine, one designed to save two new half-bloods (Bianca and Nico di Angelo) goes horribly wrong, Percy finds himself on yet another quest, this time to save both Annabeth and the goddess Artemis. With Thalia, Grover, Bianca, and the Hunter Zoe Nightshade, he heads off across the country, pursued by indestructible skeletal warriors and finding clues and comfort in strange places. The book climaxes with a battle against the Titan god Atlas and his ever-more-strained servant Luke, but it extends long enough past that to set up the next challenge. Riordan’s writing remains light and humorous, but the series is slowly getting darker.
The Classics Reclassified (Richard Armour)
Humor gets dated very quickly, and as a historian I find that I can often identify when something written just by the bits that are supposed to be funny. This is clearly a product of the 1950s, right down to the subject matter and the illustrations. Armour – who wrote a series of books satirizing any number of topics in literature and history – aims his gentle parody at some of the larger figures and works in the Western literary canon, which alone tells you something. There is no way this book would be published today, as few students have heard of, let alone read, most of the books Armour takes on. In seven short chapters Armour presents short biographies of authors ranging from Homer to Walter Scott to George Elliot, and then takes a light-hearted romp through one of their best-known works. So unless you have some sense of history and some familiarity with Silas Marner or Ivanhoe, the humor will likely escape you. I’ve enjoyed Armour’s books since I found him in high school, back in the 1980s, but the biggest impression I got out of this one was just how far from his world we have come since he wrote it.
And since I started this blog I have kept track of the books I read. It makes for some interesting reflection at the end of the year, to see what has caught my eye over the previous twelve months. Or, indeed, the previous years.
Here is this year's list, more or less in order.
Enjoy!
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We Learn Nothing (Tim Kreider)
I found this book when a blog I read posted an excerpt from it. It’s the bit where Krieder explains the difference between liberals and conservatives in the US. According to his theory, liberals are the people who Got Out – who went to college, got ahead, and only come home for holidays. Conservatives are the people who Stayed Put – who married their high school sweethearts, got jobs in town, and still care who won homecoming. It does explain a lot of the general worldview of each side, if you push it far enough. Kreider is a wonderful writer who seems to have lived a fascinating life and his essays reflect this, ranging from laugh-out-loud funny to bittersweet often within a single paragraph. I particularly enjoyed his long story of how his friend Skelly’s secrets all came tumbling out after he died and what that said about both Skelly and Kreider, as well as his essay on reading Tristram Shandy, but they’re all good. The cartoons in this book – Kreider made a living as an editorial cartoonist for most of the early 21st century – are also good but the typeface for the dialogue balloons is both narrow and punitively small, making them hard to read. I need to find more of his essays.
The Lightning Thief (Rick Riordan)
Percy Jackson is a sixth-grader in trouble. His mother is married to a gold-plated loser. He’s on yet another school, having been thrown out of more of them than he cares to remember. His only friend is a misfit named Grover. And his math teacher turned into a screeching creature from Hades and tried to kill him, but nobody remembers it or even that he ever had such a math teacher. When a much-needed vacation with his mother turns into a flight for his life, he finds himself at Camp Half-Blood, faced with two realizations: one, that his mother is now a captive of Hades, the god of the Underworld, and two, that he is a demigod, a child of an ancient Greek god still very much alive in the modern world. When Zeus and Poseidon threaten war over Zeus’ missing lightning bolt, it falls to Percy, Grover, and their friend Annabeth – a girl about the same age, the daughter of Athena – to set things right. This will involve a trip across the US, a descent into the Underworld, and some face-to-face realization of what it truly means to be the son of a god. Riordan writes with gusto and a sly sense of humor (the chapter headings alone are priceless), and this book is far better than the mess of a movie that was made from it in 2010. Lauren and I read this as part of our continuing effort to read quality books together at bedtime.
Winter’s Tale (Mark Helprin)
How to describe this book? It is a love song to the city of New York. It is a swirl of language that somehow manages to combine the rolling cadences and florid vocabulary of the nineteenth century with the artistic sensibility of the 1970s. It is magic realism, a story of impossibilities taken for granted and realities portrayed in golden light. It is the story of Peter Lake – always referred to by his full name – a master mechanic and a burglar in early 20th-century New York, in the years before the Great War. Pursued by Pealy Soames and his criminal gang of Short Tails, saved by the white horse Athansor, loved by the consumptive Beverly Penn, Peter Lake soars across Progressive Era New York and falls, only to emerge at the turn of the millennium nearly a century later in a different city, one with familiar faces and new challenges whose solutions are ultimately in the hands of the reader. I read this book at the urging of a friend, who said this was his favorite book. “I don't know what the opposite of cynicism is,” he told me, “but whatever it is, this book breathes it in every sentence.”
Fight For Your Long Day (Alex Kudera)
Cyrus Duffleman is an adjunct lecturer in English literature at three different and barely disguised Philadelphia campuses (Urban State [clearly Temple], Liberty Tech [Drexel], and Ivy Green [Penn]), a tutor at another, a security guard in the evenings, and a card-carrying member of the impoverished temporary workforce that keeps modern academia afloat. Adjuncts – as opposed to their more fortunate tenured coworkers now rapidly disappearing from the landscape as the American university system increasingly regards its faculty as a bothersome expense – teach for little pay, few benefits and no job security, and on Thursdays Duffleman has his long day. All of his jobs require something from him on Thursdays, and this book is a narrative of one particular Thursday – One Day in the Life of Ivan Adjunctovich. We follow him from class to class, from subway to light rail, and from one situation of powerlessness to another as he keeps up a running internal monologue that alternates between despair and stubborn persistence and as the events of the day rapidly spiral out of control. There is a certain deadpan dispirited black humor in this that those of us on that treadmill will find amusing, even if it is cloaked in willfully non-PC observations, framed by oddly anesthetized violence impinging on the outskirts of his existence, and interrupted by a fair amount of the futile sort of left-wing political rambling that anyone who survived the reign of George W. Bush (“President Fern” here) would recognize. As a native Philadelphian and graduate of Ivy Green I enjoyed following Duffleman around my former city – Kudera has a strong sense of place, and his narrative is very specific about such things as train station architecture – and I probably liked this book more than is good for me in my current employment situation.
Year Zero (Rob Reid)
Nick Carter is a lawyer in the entertainment copyright field, not one of the Backstreet Boys. This becomes relevant because it turns out that 1) aliens love human music, 2) they love it so much that every last one of them has illegally downloaded every song ever broadcast since the Kotter Moment in 1977, when Earth’s electronic signals were first picked up, and 3) they owe humanity a ton of money in copyright violation fees – more than the sum total of all the wealth of the universe, thousands of times over. To get out of this debt, they may destroy human civilization (or get us to do it to ourselves, which would accomplish the same goal without violating any alien laws). Nick, his neighbor and love interest Manda, his shark of a boss Judy, his self-absorbed cousin Pugwash, and two rather inept aliens (Carly and Frampton – a surprising amount of alien culture was frozen at the Kotter Moment) have to figure out a way to prevent this. It’s a funny book in some ways – not the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the blurbs promise, but then nothing ever is – and a vitriolic satire of entertainment law, as you would expect given that the author founded Rhapsody.com. Much of the humor is designed to appeal to American conservatives – jokes at the expense of unions, government workers, and the whole notion of global climate change abound – but there are more than enough laughs from any perspective to keep the book going, and even the conservative jokes are funny. It was a good book, and thus I’m really not sure why it was such a chore to read at times.
Red Country (Joe Abercrombie)
Joe Abercrombie’s world is a weary, gritty place full of violence and regret, mad schemes and harsh realities, where characters struggle against limits of their own creation and those imposed on them by others, and if they rarely ever win by their own standards, sometimes they come out having not quite lost. Shy South and her adoptive father Lamb scratch out a living on a farm near the town of Squaredeal – a dusty hellhole of a place – but when a bandit burns the place down and steals her younger siblings they head off to get them back and wreak vengeance on the outlaws. Temple is a lawyer for Nicomo Cosca’s mercenary army, a man given to more introspection than is safe in such a position, and he wants out. Dab Sweet is a famous scout, one who knows his way around the Ghost people and Dragon people who make the west such a dangerous place. Caul Shivers is looking for a nine-fingered man. Somewhere is a rebellion, or might have been one. And the town of Crease is about to explode into civil war. Mix these all together and you have a breathtakingly written cross between fantasy and western, full of the mordant black humor that Abercrombie seems to specialize in. For all their bleakness, these books are really funny when viewed from the right perspective. Perhaps the most fascinating bit of this story is Lamb, a character whose real name is never once mentioned in the book but which should be familiar to anyone who has read the other books Abercrombie has set in this grim and unforgiving world. How much does a name mean anyway, Lamb might say, when the person underneath never changes no matter how much he might wish it so?
The Sea of Monsters (Rick Riordan)
Percy Jackson survived his initiation into the world of demigods only to find himself back in the soup. When his gym class degenerates into a fiery maelstrom he, his new friend Tyson, and his old friend Annabeth are forced to flee to Camp Half Blood, where things are not going well indeed. Someone has poisoned Thalia’s tree, the new camp director is actively trying to destroy the place and take Percy with it, Grover is sending messages that he is in grave danger, and the quest to put things right is given to Clarisse rather than Percy. Fortunately for us Percy, Annabeth and Tyson sneak out to join the quest, and adventures ensue. It’s a breakneck tale of danger and escape, told with Riordan’s signature humor, and one that sets up the next book quite nicely.
The Better Mousetrap (Tom Holt)
Continuing his JW Wells series, this book opens with Frank Carpenter – the son of Sophie and Paul from the original books – plying his trade as, well, an insurance adjustor of sorts. JW Wells, the finest purveyor of magical services and pest control in Britain, went broke at the end of the previous book so the various staff and magical items are scattered about and Frank freelances, using his dad’s Portable Door to make sure that catastrophes retrospectively don’t happen and thus no insurance payout is required. Emily Spitzer works for Carrington’s, a firm much like JW Wells, and despite being five feet tall and “slightly built,” she is one of their best pest control people. But when someone tries to kill her – and succeeds, multiple times – it falls to Frank to rescue her and save her insurance company millions. And when a) they fall in love, as you knew they would, and b) the plot thickens all the way to the top, the story gets even better. Holt writes deftly plotted books full of bittersweet humor and delicious turns of phrase, and this book is right there.
May Contain Traces of Magic (Tom Holt)
Trying to keep track of the plot in a Tom Holt novel can be a challenging business, as he is very good at building things up to a point where you think you see how it’s all going to be resolved and then turning a corner to display wholly unpredicted vistas, and then doing it again. Chris works as a salesman, peddling JW Wells products to the various shops who sell them. He has a girlfriend (Karen) with whom he does not particularly get along well, a friend (Jill) with whom he does and who is a demon hunter by trade, a trainee (Angela) who is both a nuisance and several times removed from what she appears, and a GPS unit (SatNav) who may or may not be evil. Throw in a tragic incident from their school days together, an incipient civil war among the demons with humanity as collateral damage, a rogue Fey princess, and more twists and time travel than is probably healthy – as well as more than a few laugh-out-loud passages of extremely British humor (or “humour,” I suppose) – and you’ve got yourself another winner in the stories from the JW Wells series.
Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery (Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders, eds.)
Anders and Strahan divide up the fantasy genre into two different areas. First, they say, there is epic fantasy – the kind of large-scale clash of kingdoms that is perhaps most popularly associated with Tolkien. And second, there is sword and sorcery, which tends to be smaller scale, rather grittier and more nuanced, and currently enjoying something of a revival. Whether you buy this claim or not – Strahan and Anders produce an impressive pedigree of works and authors to support it in their introduction, though I retain my doubts – the simple fact is that this book contains seventeen original stories, almost all of them worth reading. That alone is an accomplishment, though given the contributors perhaps it was to be expected. I bought this because it had KJ Parker and Joe Abercrombie. I enjoyed Glen Cook, Steven Erikson, Michael Shea and Scott Lynch. What surprised me was how much I didn’t like Gene Wolfe and Michael Moorcock simply because of their writing styles. Moorcock in particular writes like a parody of the genre, which might be because he was so instrumental in founding the genre that he’s what everyone parodies, though in either case I doubt I’ll be reading any more Elric stories as this one was quite a slog. But the book as a whole is very much worth the time, and Lynch, Erikson and Cook in particular have moved up my list of authors to read.
Straight Man (Richard Russo)
William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (Hank to his colleagues, as we later discover) is the interim chair of the English Department at a backwater state university campus in central Pennsylvania. A contrarian, a self-diagnosed mediocrity, and a member of a department riven by faction and several reforms away from being merely dysfunctional, on a campus where chronic underfunding and misplaced priorities mean that expensive construction projects exist side by side with cuts to personnel, Hank is about to have a wild week. He will be mangled by one colleague, nearly seduced by another, and called upon to mediate his daughter’s marriage. He will threaten to execute a goose on live television, teach any number of odd classes, deal with health crises and family situations, and face a recall election over his increasingly controversial term as interim chair. All this told in Russo’s smooth, often laugh-out-loud funny prose. It’s a book that makes me want to find more of Russo’s work.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages (Tom Holt)
This is a surprisingly gentle book for Holt, who tends toward either jam-packed plotting or bittersweet situations or both, even while he consistently provides some of the funniest stuff out there. It’s also one of his more British books, both in feel and language (Holt rarely translates things into American, and a working knowledge of BBC America programming is a helpful thing to have when reading his books on this side of the Atlantic). This is also the latest in the JW Wells & Co. saga, though only by inference. It starts with a pig – hyperintelligent as all pigs are – and then quickly shifts over to Polly (a real-estate lawyer) and her brother Don (an advertising jingle writer) and the weirdness that happens to them when they run into a powerful artifact capable of folding realities one on top of another. There’s also a dry-cleaning establishment that randomly moves every few days, a pair of knights who have been killing each other five times daily for seven hundred years but can’t remember why, a flock of chickens that used to be lawyers, and Stan Gogerty (“he’s a weirdness expert”), whose job it is to sort all this out. And sort it out he does, eventually. And then there is the pig again.
Chronicles of the Black Company (Glen Cook)
The Black Company
If you’ve ever wondered what fantasy novels look like from the bottom up, from the perspective of the grunt soldiers who make up the vast armies and serve the Dark Lords or Fair Princes that make up most of the genre, the Black Company series is for you. The Black Company is a mercenary force of some centuries’ standing – “the last of the Free Companies of Khatovar” – and as all such forces are it is a tightly bound group of men, none of whom have actual names and all of whom are there in order to escape from something in their past. The narrator is Croaker, the company physician and the man responsible for keeping the Annals, for telling the company’s story to the next generation of soldiers. The company has any number of well-defined soldiers – Elmo, the Captain, the Lieutenant, Mercy, eventually Raven – as well as some in-house sorcerers (Silent, One-Eye, Goblin). At the beginning of this novel they are in a decrepit city named Beryl on a commission from its leader that goes all sorts of wrong, and eventually they end up heading north in the service of the Lady, a powerful sorceress even older than the Black Company, recently resurrected and fighting the Rebel (always singular). Her main servants are the Taken, sorcerers she has forcibly converted to her service. The Taken who enlists the Black Company is called Soulcatcher. Eventually the Black Company will find itself tangled in webs of intrigue, enmeshed in battle, and as darkly cynical as ever. Cook writes in a curiously elided style, with gaps and inferences between events, but the grit and black humor make the stories work. This is where Joe Abercrombie – stylistically a much different writer – got his general ambiance from. It’s fantasy noir.
Shadows Linger
After the events of the first book, the Black Company now finds itself the prize fighting force of the Lady, which in practical terms means a lot of hard, thankless work and even more long marches over hundreds of miles of unforgiving terrain in order to do that work. This book – rather more slow-paced than the first one – starts off with two separate stories, one featuring an innkeeper named Shed in a town called Juniper, and the other featuring the travails of the Company in another town called Tally. Eventually an advance party of Black Company soldiers will be sent to Juniper and from there the stories converge. The White Rose has been reincarnated and remains a threat to the Lady though not particularly to the Black Company. And the Lady has an even more dire threat to handle – the possible return of her long buried husband, the Dominator (perhaps the only creature on earth more evil than she is, as Croaker often muses) through the medium of a black fortress built of the dead and overlooking Juniper. As before, the action climaxes in thunderous battle, and the remains of the Black Company move on to the next crisis from there.
The White Rose
Perhaps the most intriguing character Cook has created in this series so far is not actually one of the Black Company – fascinating and sharply drawn as they are – but the Lady, the sorceress whom they have both fought and served, occasionally at the same time, as befits a mercenary company of soldiers. Ruthless, cunning, and one of the recognized evils of their world (even by her own reckoning), she nevertheless has a depth and complexity that is hard to find in similar characters in other works. She has a soft spot for Croaker. She fears the Dominator and knows deeply that she is the only person who can prevent his return. And all that collides in this book, much to Croaker’s chagrin and surprise. “I hate it when they go human on you,” he says at one point. “Enemies are not supposed to do that.” The story opens with the remnants of the Black Company hiding in the Plain of Fear with the White Rose, nibbling at the edges of the Lady’s empire and just trying to hold on. It will take them through missions and perils, history lessons and unforeseen alliances, until at last it ends where it had to end: a final confrontation with the Dominator himself in all his resurrected power. But at the heart of it all is the Lady, a villain who in some ways is more the hero of this story than either Croaker or the White Rose.
The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)
The Book Thief is a sad and gentle story of slowly gathering horror. How could it be otherwise? It is a story of children in the Third Reich. It is a story of kindness and poverty, of hard edges and warm hearts, of love, loss, and pain. It is a meditation on the power of words and stories. It is a tale of what happens when all of those things run headlong into the biggest and most destructive war in human history. And it is narrated by Death, a careworn and ragged figure whose sympathy for his charges bleeds through on every page. Liesel Meminger is a foster child, handed over by her mother in the opening scenes and sent to live with the Hubermanns – fierce Rosa and gentle Hans – in the small town of Molching. There she makes a few friends, notably Rudy Steiner. She learns to read. She helps to harbor Jewish Max Vandenburg. She even steals books, mostly from the Mayor’s ghostly wife, though how much is theft and how much is surreptitious gift-giving is hard to say. For a while things work out, and then, as you would expect in the churning catastrophe of World War II, they don’t. This is a haunting book, one that stays with you long after the last page is finished. The final sentence of this book is one of my favorites in all of literature.
The Titan’s Curse (Rick Riordan)
When a rescue mission at a remote private school in Maine, one designed to save two new half-bloods (Bianca and Nico di Angelo) goes horribly wrong, Percy finds himself on yet another quest, this time to save both Annabeth and the goddess Artemis. With Thalia, Grover, Bianca, and the Hunter Zoe Nightshade, he heads off across the country, pursued by indestructible skeletal warriors and finding clues and comfort in strange places. The book climaxes with a battle against the Titan god Atlas and his ever-more-strained servant Luke, but it extends long enough past that to set up the next challenge. Riordan’s writing remains light and humorous, but the series is slowly getting darker.
The Classics Reclassified (Richard Armour)
Humor gets dated very quickly, and as a historian I find that I can often identify when something written just by the bits that are supposed to be funny. This is clearly a product of the 1950s, right down to the subject matter and the illustrations. Armour – who wrote a series of books satirizing any number of topics in literature and history – aims his gentle parody at some of the larger figures and works in the Western literary canon, which alone tells you something. There is no way this book would be published today, as few students have heard of, let alone read, most of the books Armour takes on. In seven short chapters Armour presents short biographies of authors ranging from Homer to Walter Scott to George Elliot, and then takes a light-hearted romp through one of their best-known works. So unless you have some sense of history and some familiarity with Silas Marner or Ivanhoe, the humor will likely escape you. I’ve enjoyed Armour’s books since I found him in high school, back in the 1980s, but the biggest impression I got out of this one was just how far from his world we have come since he wrote it.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
The Difficulties of Teaching Modern American History
The fall semester has been over for a while now. The inevitable pile of grading that has to be done before any thought of holiday cheer can happen in an academic household has long since been put away, and the holidays have been well and truly cheered. It was a good semester in many ways. My classes were fun to teach and my students were interesting and, for the most part, interested. I was well treated by both my department and several different campuses, when all was said and done. I had a friend to carpool with on the long drive to Mid-Range Campus. Life was good.
Still, there was one troubling aspect.
I’ve been rewriting the last third of my US2 class for the last year or so – two full run-throughs of the course now. You have to rewrite classes now and then. This is especially true with any history class entitled “Something-something-something to the present,” as every day there is more of it. Plus my thinking on how the basic mechanics of post-WWII American history has worked – the underlying things that make what you see turn out the way you notice – has shifted considerably in the last few years. You can only tweak it so long before you have to do a complete teardown and rebuild it from top to bottom.
The previous structure of the post-WWII part of the class was all about limits and limitlessness.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, so the old version goes, the US felt that it was effectively limitless and it could remake the world as it chose. Accordingly it adopted a number of policies and shouldered a number of burdens with this in mind – the Bretton Woods System, the Containment of Communism, and NSC-68 in foreign policy; the Politics of Growth at home. This kind of world was a place where it was un-American for people to be left out of the growing prosperity, where you could give to the poor and the marginalized and not mind the rich because there was always more to go around. The Great Society was based on this kind of thinking as were most of the early phases of the social protest movements of the 1960s, such as the Civil Rights Movement.
This mindset basically worked until the mid-late 1960s, when cracks first appeared in the foreign policy angle – notably because of Vietnam – and then in the 1970s it fell apart completely. We discovered limits to both our role in the world and to our own economic and political power at home, and the next four decades became a story of how the return of the Zero-Sum World played out at home and abroad. The Zero-Sum World is a world of limits and harsh struggles over scarce resources, and if you think this doesn’t apply today you can look around you. It’s also a much more conservative world, where generosity can be seen as foolhardiness and a general sense that things were once better pervades throughout.
This was a useful framework for hanging the major developments of post-WWII US history upon, and in some ways – particularly the initial part – it remains embedded in the fabric of the class.
But over time the pesky little details that seemed to resist being explained by this framework became more and more apparent, and I began to think that a more important focus for this unit of the class would be the sharp turn to the right that we’ve experienced over the last forty to fifty years.
How do you get from a place where Barry Goldwater is considered a right-wing extremist to a place where Goldwater is bitterly describing himself as a liberal on some issues because his party and the country in general have moved that far rightward? How do you explain the fact that by any rational post-WWII standard Barack Obama is a moderate conservative – throw an Amy uniform on the man and there is precious little daylight between him and Eisenhower – yet there are legions of Americans who will look you in the eye and tell you with an absolutely straight face that he is some kind of howling Socialist?
That process is interesting.
It usually takes me two to three renditions of a new course or a complete rebuild (which is more or less the same thing) to get things down to my satisfaction – to get it to where the story flows naturally, the points build on top of each other, and the evidence fits without being either distracting or overwhelming. Until then there is a lot of volatility.
Take, for example, the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1970s.
There is a huge shift in American politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the social protest movements radicalized after about 1966 or so, they began to shift their focus from economic and legal issues (segregation, equal pay, free speech) to more cultural issues. “The personal is political,” they said. While this shift therefore begins on the left, it ends up being adopted wholeheartedly by the right, who realized that they had essentially nothing to offer most Americans in economic or legal terms – the vast majority of Americans are objectively better off under Progressive economic policies than under laissez-faire for the simple reason that supply-side economics do not work in a demand-side economy, for one thing, and for another a legal defense of inequality is a non-starter in a nation whose founding creed specifically argues otherwise. If the right wanted to reach voters they needed to shift the grounds of politics to something that they could win on, something that hid the inequalities that inevitably result from the economic and legal policies they espoused. That something turned out to be “values.”
I put the scare quotes in there because “values” becomes something of a buzz phrase that may or may not have anything to do with actual morality. I’ll stop doing that now, though, as even I find it aggravating.
When you shift the basis of politics to values, suddenly supply-side economics is about “freedom” rather than taxing the poor to benefit the rich. Suddenly taxes and indeed all dollars-and-cents issues get lost in the shuffle of moral debate, making sane fiscal policy unreachable. Suddenly treating the marginalized and the oppressed with the dignity they have long been denied is a threat to good old fashioned American values, because the world as it was is changing and They are coming for You, whoever They are and whoever You are. Suddenly compromise is impossible, because nobody wants to compromise their values – and more importantly, nobody wants to be seen compromising their values.
In the long run this shift makes the country essentially ungovernable, as we are discovering here in the 21st century.
The first place you really see this shift happening on a national level is with Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968. The Southern Strategy is an attempt to move the Southern Democrats alienated by the Civil Rights Movement into the Republican Party permanently – not because treating blacks as actual real-live American citizens threatened white jobs but because treating them that way struck those whites as counter to the way the world ought to work. It was a threat to their values, in other words. The Southern Strategy works exactly as advertised. Those voters abandon the party that had opposed civil rights for blacks in the 1870s and move into the party that opposed them in the 1970s, where they remain to this day – the backbone of the GOP and the heart of the social conservative movement.
And once you understand that, you understand a lot about where the Religious Right comes from.
The first time I ran through this version of the class I did a fair amount of handwaving as to the connection between the emergence of the large and influential evangelical voting bloc in the 1970s (if the personal is political, what is more personal than faith?) and the fact that this bloc becomes a hard and fast part of the right wing. But from a historical perspective that identification is strange. Christianity – and specifically evangelical Protestantism – has often been a liberal and reforming force in American history and the most prominent evangelical politician in America in the 1970s was Jimmy Carter, whose personal faith led his politics toward the left of the American spectrum (which is not that far left in broader Western Civilization terms, but that’s another story). How does this group become the central pillar of the New Right?
In the first run-through of this rewritten class, I simply attributed the change to “conservative activists” and left it at that. But that vagueness felt unsatisfactory, so I decided to dig a bit further into the specifics of how and why those activists made that happen.
If you listen to social conservatives today – the sort of people who have turned the GOP from a once-proud defender of Jeffersonian small government and Gilded Age laissez-faire capitalism (coherent intellectual stances, whether you agree with them or not) into a hive of batshit insanity where Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz are somehow considered legitimate candidates for office rather than walking advertisements for the importance of taking one’s medications – they will tell you that the primary impetus for the emergence of the Religious Right was their outrage over Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that removed restrictions on a woman’s right to have an abortion.
This is untrue.
The mainstream evangelical position on abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s was essentially pro-choice. “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed,” wrote Bruce Waltke, an evangelical theologian at the Dallas Theological Seminary, in 1968. “The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.” In 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention called for all Southern Baptists to work for legislation that would allow abortions in many cases, including the emotional and mental health of the mother. And the Roe v Wade decision itself was hailed by W. Barry Garrett of the Baptist Press: “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
The court case that launched the Religious Right – and with it the heart of the modern definition of conservative in America – was a far more obscure case known as Green v. Connally, where a US District Court ruled that private schools that practiced racial discrimination – banning blacks from entering, segregating them if they were admitted, and so on – were not entitled to tax-exempt status under federal laws. Tax-exempt status is not a right – it is a gift of taxpayer money, and it comes with strings. Those institutions who do not respect the rights of American citizens do not have the right to public money.
When the fundamentalist Bob Jones University saw its tax-exempt status revoked in January 1976 for its racist practices, right-wing leaders such as Paul Weyrich seized on it as a pretext to organize the emerging evangelical voting bloc into a right-wing force. They did this by working to convince those voters that religious liberty was at stake – that the message of Christ was about hating one’s neighbor and that this trumped any responsibilities American citizens might have to the Constitutional requirement to treat other American citizens as American citizens. And this, too, worked exactly as advertised.
Indeed, you still hear this nonsense being spouted today and taken far more seriously than a thinking person could possibly imagine, as anyone who has paid attention to the issue of gay marriage will attest.
This is the origin of the Religious Right. This is where it comes from, the notion that being required to treat fellow Americans as Americans is somehow a burden. The bottom line is that the Religious Right and the social conservative movement that derives from it and currently dominates the American right wing is rooted entirely on a defense of segregation.
But, comes the counter-argument, what about all the economic issues that conservatives ramble on about so much? The smaller government, libertarian-themed waltz that gets played over and over again on right-wing radio? This, say those in that camp, does not follow from that.
Actually it does, and the originators of the New Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s were quite open about that. They saw no problem with it. They were defending their values, which included such things, and that was that.
Lee Atwater was one of the architects of the New Right and later served in the Reagan Administration and as the campaign manager for both Reagan in 1984 and Bush Sr. in 1988. He was the guy who brought you the Willie Horton ad. And in a remarkably candid 1981 interview, he laid out exactly how those issues are connected and how you get from opposing civil rights to cutting government services, in language that was at once direct and appropriately racist. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he said. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing, states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
Do you think it’s an accident that right-wing policies consistently harm non-white Americans far more than anyone else? Do you think it’s an accident that all of the big issues being thumped by right-wingers today – “law and order,” “voter fraud,” “welfare reform,” on and on – are just new and more abstract ways to say to suburban and rural whites, “Black people! BOO!”? Think again. They’re designed that way – they’re dog whistle issues harping on themes only the initiated can hear, designed to give plausible deniability when called out but otherwise crystal clear to those who understand.
It’s interesting these days how when armed criminals threaten to shoot the officers sent to enforce the law conservatives cheer the white ones – Cliven Bundy and his band of deadbeats, for example – but bitterly condemn the black ones. The Second Amendment has a long history of being for whites only, after all.
The Atwater quote is the link that makes the connections clear, the prism through which this underlying mechanism can be brought into focus. It sums up the shift from economics to values, grounds the New Right in its racist origins, and explains much of the next forty-plus years of American politics in a way that allows students to connect disparate events that might otherwise seem to be coincidences or randomly unrelated events. They’re not random. They’re not coincidence. And they sure as hell aren’t unrelated. If you want to understand the politics of the last forty years or so, the Atwater quote is pretty much essential reading.
But how do you use that in a class?
Even if you preface it with the kinds of language warnings that are now required to protect the sensitive ears of the modern student from any kind of historical authenticity when it comes to offensive words (and don’t even get me started on that issue), the fact is that these issues are tricky to bring up in a classroom setting. As Ferguson burns and Eric Garner asphyxiates in an illegal chokehold, how do you even broach this topic without turning the classroom into a battlefield?
I never did figure out how to do it this past fall, and that troubles me.
It seems dishonest to punt on the Atwater quote, to leave it out in the interest of preserving the illusion of peace in the classroom. It certainly made the rest of the semester make less sense than it otherwise would have done – the events became divorced from their underlying mechanisms, turned into seemingly unrelated things and students walked away from the class thinking it was just a collection of random observations, many of which they did not like very much. The last couple of weeks of the course really didn’t hold together well as a coherent narrative that way. Without that coherence, students felt free to dismiss the class out of hand rather than trying to grapple with the interpretation presented.
I don’t ask that they agree with me. I do want them to grapple with what I say, though – to consider it and determine rigorously whether and how their own views should change or not. What they think is their business; that they think is mine.
I’m hoping I can figure out how to be more complete about this transition and the mechanics that make it go during the upcoming semester, how to tell the whole story without sacrificing either authentic historical reality or classroom peace.
We’ll see.
Still, there was one troubling aspect.
I’ve been rewriting the last third of my US2 class for the last year or so – two full run-throughs of the course now. You have to rewrite classes now and then. This is especially true with any history class entitled “Something-something-something to the present,” as every day there is more of it. Plus my thinking on how the basic mechanics of post-WWII American history has worked – the underlying things that make what you see turn out the way you notice – has shifted considerably in the last few years. You can only tweak it so long before you have to do a complete teardown and rebuild it from top to bottom.
The previous structure of the post-WWII part of the class was all about limits and limitlessness.
In the immediate aftermath of WWII, so the old version goes, the US felt that it was effectively limitless and it could remake the world as it chose. Accordingly it adopted a number of policies and shouldered a number of burdens with this in mind – the Bretton Woods System, the Containment of Communism, and NSC-68 in foreign policy; the Politics of Growth at home. This kind of world was a place where it was un-American for people to be left out of the growing prosperity, where you could give to the poor and the marginalized and not mind the rich because there was always more to go around. The Great Society was based on this kind of thinking as were most of the early phases of the social protest movements of the 1960s, such as the Civil Rights Movement.
This mindset basically worked until the mid-late 1960s, when cracks first appeared in the foreign policy angle – notably because of Vietnam – and then in the 1970s it fell apart completely. We discovered limits to both our role in the world and to our own economic and political power at home, and the next four decades became a story of how the return of the Zero-Sum World played out at home and abroad. The Zero-Sum World is a world of limits and harsh struggles over scarce resources, and if you think this doesn’t apply today you can look around you. It’s also a much more conservative world, where generosity can be seen as foolhardiness and a general sense that things were once better pervades throughout.
This was a useful framework for hanging the major developments of post-WWII US history upon, and in some ways – particularly the initial part – it remains embedded in the fabric of the class.
But over time the pesky little details that seemed to resist being explained by this framework became more and more apparent, and I began to think that a more important focus for this unit of the class would be the sharp turn to the right that we’ve experienced over the last forty to fifty years.
How do you get from a place where Barry Goldwater is considered a right-wing extremist to a place where Goldwater is bitterly describing himself as a liberal on some issues because his party and the country in general have moved that far rightward? How do you explain the fact that by any rational post-WWII standard Barack Obama is a moderate conservative – throw an Amy uniform on the man and there is precious little daylight between him and Eisenhower – yet there are legions of Americans who will look you in the eye and tell you with an absolutely straight face that he is some kind of howling Socialist?
That process is interesting.
It usually takes me two to three renditions of a new course or a complete rebuild (which is more or less the same thing) to get things down to my satisfaction – to get it to where the story flows naturally, the points build on top of each other, and the evidence fits without being either distracting or overwhelming. Until then there is a lot of volatility.
Take, for example, the emergence of the Religious Right in the 1970s.
There is a huge shift in American politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As the social protest movements radicalized after about 1966 or so, they began to shift their focus from economic and legal issues (segregation, equal pay, free speech) to more cultural issues. “The personal is political,” they said. While this shift therefore begins on the left, it ends up being adopted wholeheartedly by the right, who realized that they had essentially nothing to offer most Americans in economic or legal terms – the vast majority of Americans are objectively better off under Progressive economic policies than under laissez-faire for the simple reason that supply-side economics do not work in a demand-side economy, for one thing, and for another a legal defense of inequality is a non-starter in a nation whose founding creed specifically argues otherwise. If the right wanted to reach voters they needed to shift the grounds of politics to something that they could win on, something that hid the inequalities that inevitably result from the economic and legal policies they espoused. That something turned out to be “values.”
I put the scare quotes in there because “values” becomes something of a buzz phrase that may or may not have anything to do with actual morality. I’ll stop doing that now, though, as even I find it aggravating.
When you shift the basis of politics to values, suddenly supply-side economics is about “freedom” rather than taxing the poor to benefit the rich. Suddenly taxes and indeed all dollars-and-cents issues get lost in the shuffle of moral debate, making sane fiscal policy unreachable. Suddenly treating the marginalized and the oppressed with the dignity they have long been denied is a threat to good old fashioned American values, because the world as it was is changing and They are coming for You, whoever They are and whoever You are. Suddenly compromise is impossible, because nobody wants to compromise their values – and more importantly, nobody wants to be seen compromising their values.
In the long run this shift makes the country essentially ungovernable, as we are discovering here in the 21st century.
The first place you really see this shift happening on a national level is with Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968. The Southern Strategy is an attempt to move the Southern Democrats alienated by the Civil Rights Movement into the Republican Party permanently – not because treating blacks as actual real-live American citizens threatened white jobs but because treating them that way struck those whites as counter to the way the world ought to work. It was a threat to their values, in other words. The Southern Strategy works exactly as advertised. Those voters abandon the party that had opposed civil rights for blacks in the 1870s and move into the party that opposed them in the 1970s, where they remain to this day – the backbone of the GOP and the heart of the social conservative movement.
And once you understand that, you understand a lot about where the Religious Right comes from.
The first time I ran through this version of the class I did a fair amount of handwaving as to the connection between the emergence of the large and influential evangelical voting bloc in the 1970s (if the personal is political, what is more personal than faith?) and the fact that this bloc becomes a hard and fast part of the right wing. But from a historical perspective that identification is strange. Christianity – and specifically evangelical Protestantism – has often been a liberal and reforming force in American history and the most prominent evangelical politician in America in the 1970s was Jimmy Carter, whose personal faith led his politics toward the left of the American spectrum (which is not that far left in broader Western Civilization terms, but that’s another story). How does this group become the central pillar of the New Right?
In the first run-through of this rewritten class, I simply attributed the change to “conservative activists” and left it at that. But that vagueness felt unsatisfactory, so I decided to dig a bit further into the specifics of how and why those activists made that happen.
If you listen to social conservatives today – the sort of people who have turned the GOP from a once-proud defender of Jeffersonian small government and Gilded Age laissez-faire capitalism (coherent intellectual stances, whether you agree with them or not) into a hive of batshit insanity where Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz are somehow considered legitimate candidates for office rather than walking advertisements for the importance of taking one’s medications – they will tell you that the primary impetus for the emergence of the Religious Right was their outrage over Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that removed restrictions on a woman’s right to have an abortion.
This is untrue.
The mainstream evangelical position on abortion in the late 1960s and early 1970s was essentially pro-choice. “God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed,” wrote Bruce Waltke, an evangelical theologian at the Dallas Theological Seminary, in 1968. “The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.” In 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention called for all Southern Baptists to work for legislation that would allow abortions in many cases, including the emotional and mental health of the mother. And the Roe v Wade decision itself was hailed by W. Barry Garrett of the Baptist Press: “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision.”
The court case that launched the Religious Right – and with it the heart of the modern definition of conservative in America – was a far more obscure case known as Green v. Connally, where a US District Court ruled that private schools that practiced racial discrimination – banning blacks from entering, segregating them if they were admitted, and so on – were not entitled to tax-exempt status under federal laws. Tax-exempt status is not a right – it is a gift of taxpayer money, and it comes with strings. Those institutions who do not respect the rights of American citizens do not have the right to public money.
When the fundamentalist Bob Jones University saw its tax-exempt status revoked in January 1976 for its racist practices, right-wing leaders such as Paul Weyrich seized on it as a pretext to organize the emerging evangelical voting bloc into a right-wing force. They did this by working to convince those voters that religious liberty was at stake – that the message of Christ was about hating one’s neighbor and that this trumped any responsibilities American citizens might have to the Constitutional requirement to treat other American citizens as American citizens. And this, too, worked exactly as advertised.
Indeed, you still hear this nonsense being spouted today and taken far more seriously than a thinking person could possibly imagine, as anyone who has paid attention to the issue of gay marriage will attest.
This is the origin of the Religious Right. This is where it comes from, the notion that being required to treat fellow Americans as Americans is somehow a burden. The bottom line is that the Religious Right and the social conservative movement that derives from it and currently dominates the American right wing is rooted entirely on a defense of segregation.
But, comes the counter-argument, what about all the economic issues that conservatives ramble on about so much? The smaller government, libertarian-themed waltz that gets played over and over again on right-wing radio? This, say those in that camp, does not follow from that.
Actually it does, and the originators of the New Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s were quite open about that. They saw no problem with it. They were defending their values, which included such things, and that was that.
Lee Atwater was one of the architects of the New Right and later served in the Reagan Administration and as the campaign manager for both Reagan in 1984 and Bush Sr. in 1988. He was the guy who brought you the Willie Horton ad. And in a remarkably candid 1981 interview, he laid out exactly how those issues are connected and how you get from opposing civil rights to cutting government services, in language that was at once direct and appropriately racist. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he said. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing, states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. … You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
Do you think it’s an accident that right-wing policies consistently harm non-white Americans far more than anyone else? Do you think it’s an accident that all of the big issues being thumped by right-wingers today – “law and order,” “voter fraud,” “welfare reform,” on and on – are just new and more abstract ways to say to suburban and rural whites, “Black people! BOO!”? Think again. They’re designed that way – they’re dog whistle issues harping on themes only the initiated can hear, designed to give plausible deniability when called out but otherwise crystal clear to those who understand.
It’s interesting these days how when armed criminals threaten to shoot the officers sent to enforce the law conservatives cheer the white ones – Cliven Bundy and his band of deadbeats, for example – but bitterly condemn the black ones. The Second Amendment has a long history of being for whites only, after all.
The Atwater quote is the link that makes the connections clear, the prism through which this underlying mechanism can be brought into focus. It sums up the shift from economics to values, grounds the New Right in its racist origins, and explains much of the next forty-plus years of American politics in a way that allows students to connect disparate events that might otherwise seem to be coincidences or randomly unrelated events. They’re not random. They’re not coincidence. And they sure as hell aren’t unrelated. If you want to understand the politics of the last forty years or so, the Atwater quote is pretty much essential reading.
But how do you use that in a class?
Even if you preface it with the kinds of language warnings that are now required to protect the sensitive ears of the modern student from any kind of historical authenticity when it comes to offensive words (and don’t even get me started on that issue), the fact is that these issues are tricky to bring up in a classroom setting. As Ferguson burns and Eric Garner asphyxiates in an illegal chokehold, how do you even broach this topic without turning the classroom into a battlefield?
I never did figure out how to do it this past fall, and that troubles me.
It seems dishonest to punt on the Atwater quote, to leave it out in the interest of preserving the illusion of peace in the classroom. It certainly made the rest of the semester make less sense than it otherwise would have done – the events became divorced from their underlying mechanisms, turned into seemingly unrelated things and students walked away from the class thinking it was just a collection of random observations, many of which they did not like very much. The last couple of weeks of the course really didn’t hold together well as a coherent narrative that way. Without that coherence, students felt free to dismiss the class out of hand rather than trying to grapple with the interpretation presented.
I don’t ask that they agree with me. I do want them to grapple with what I say, though – to consider it and determine rigorously whether and how their own views should change or not. What they think is their business; that they think is mine.
I’m hoping I can figure out how to be more complete about this transition and the mechanics that make it go during the upcoming semester, how to tell the whole story without sacrificing either authentic historical reality or classroom peace.
We’ll see.
Monday, January 5, 2015
The Fourteenth Day of Christmas
We tried the Bacon Wave today. It made crispy bacon, and that’s pretty much all it promised to do. It is nice to know that in this age of hype and hypocrisy you can still trust the manufacturers of the Bacon Wave to deliver on their promises.
The Bacon Wave was the prize from our fourth and final rendition of Christmas this season. It was a drawn-out holiday this year, with all the traveling. We had our first Christmas before we left for San Francisco, just the four of us. We had another in San Francisco. There was a third after we got back, because we missed a few things the first time – we roasted a lovely turkey that came straight from a friend’s farm and had a nice low-key celebration. And this past weekend we did it again with Kim’s side of the family – the traditional Ukrainian Christmas involving all kinds of foods with names I can never remember because they have too many consonants but which are tasty nonetheless. My people are vowel people.
A good time was had by all.
At the end of the evening all the adults play The Game, where each one brings two wrapped gifts to the table – one nice, one odd – and we roll dice for them. And then we roll dice to trade until the timer runs out. There were some nice things out there, but Lauren insisted that one of us come home with the Bacon Wave.
And so we did.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
The Bacon Wave was the prize from our fourth and final rendition of Christmas this season. It was a drawn-out holiday this year, with all the traveling. We had our first Christmas before we left for San Francisco, just the four of us. We had another in San Francisco. There was a third after we got back, because we missed a few things the first time – we roasted a lovely turkey that came straight from a friend’s farm and had a nice low-key celebration. And this past weekend we did it again with Kim’s side of the family – the traditional Ukrainian Christmas involving all kinds of foods with names I can never remember because they have too many consonants but which are tasty nonetheless. My people are vowel people.
A good time was had by all.
At the end of the evening all the adults play The Game, where each one brings two wrapped gifts to the table – one nice, one odd – and we roll dice for them. And then we roll dice to trade until the timer runs out. There were some nice things out there, but Lauren insisted that one of us come home with the Bacon Wave.
And so we did.
Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Tales of the City, Part 4: Photography
One of the most delightful things about San Francisco is that it was seemingly designed for photographers. And the joy of digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you want without having to worry about how much they cost to process.
Lauren and I took full advantage of this.
Lauren does the photography project in 4H, and she can probably pick a few winners out of the ones she took while we were in San Francisco. She has a very good eye for an image. But the photos that follow are mine – I’m not sure what the rules are for 4H about publishing photos ahead of time and I’m not about to find out by disqualifying anything she took.
These are from various portions of our trip. The first one is the Ferry Building. The second is Coit Tower, photographed as we walked along the waterfront. The third is from Chinatown. The fourth is from the AIDS Memorial Grove. All of the rest are from our visit to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Enjoy!
Lauren and I took full advantage of this.
Lauren does the photography project in 4H, and she can probably pick a few winners out of the ones she took while we were in San Francisco. She has a very good eye for an image. But the photos that follow are mine – I’m not sure what the rules are for 4H about publishing photos ahead of time and I’m not about to find out by disqualifying anything she took.
These are from various portions of our trip. The first one is the Ferry Building. The second is Coit Tower, photographed as we walked along the waterfront. The third is from Chinatown. The fourth is from the AIDS Memorial Grove. All of the rest are from our visit to Fort Point, underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
Enjoy!
Friday, January 2, 2015
Tales of the City, Part 3: Christmas in San Francisco
I have now celebrated Christmas in four different states – Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Tennessee, and California. The ingredients seem to be the same pretty much everywhere you go.
You start with good people – family, friends, loved ones – and you add food, conversation, and enough gifts to satisfy the urge to do nice things for the aforementioned good people (which is a variable quantity, really, and one that declines over time as most of those people acquire the ability to get things themselves and as you discover that really what you want to give them and receive from them is time spent together). You surround this with a comfortable place to be, and presto – you’ve got a holiday.
We celebrated Christmas Eve in San Francisco with a lovely meal back at Geoff and Dave’s place, where we were joined by their adoptive granny Denise, who lives upstairs, and their friend Cracker, who actually does go by that name. It was a festive and convivial gathering.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the rainbow measuring cups that Dave received. Not the measuring cups themselves, though they were brightly colored and likely useful items. No, it was more the reaction to them.
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation that started with one small ridiculous observation and then snowballed from there, with each additional comment more ridiculous than the one before until finally you realize that you have spent the last half hour or so laughing maniacally over something as simple as a rainbow assortment of measuring cups?
We have.
The next morning we did much of it again, though the measuring cup conversation did not recur. This is probably for the best. Don’t want to wear out the batteries on that one.
Tabitha was not feeling very well that day, having come down with the winter crud that has slowly worked its way through most of us over the last week or two, so she stayed home for the next part of the celebration on Christmas Day, when the rest of us – including Denise, Cracker, and Dave’s nephew Ben – went over to a dinner party at Adrienne and Dan’s house.
Adrienne and Dan live in one of those neighborhoods that you only really find in San Francisco, where topography has never factored into urban planning in the slightest. This was the other thing we drove to in San Francisco, and when we turned the corner onto their street I genuinely wondered how the car would make it up that hill.
It was actually difficult to walk across the street to the front door of their house.
But once inside we were welcomed warmly and fed royally, and that is about all you can ask of a get-together I think. We had a very nice time, and we thank Adrienne and Dan for welcoming us into their home for the holiday.
It is nice to remember that there are good people wherever you go.
You start with good people – family, friends, loved ones – and you add food, conversation, and enough gifts to satisfy the urge to do nice things for the aforementioned good people (which is a variable quantity, really, and one that declines over time as most of those people acquire the ability to get things themselves and as you discover that really what you want to give them and receive from them is time spent together). You surround this with a comfortable place to be, and presto – you’ve got a holiday.
We celebrated Christmas Eve in San Francisco with a lovely meal back at Geoff and Dave’s place, where we were joined by their adoptive granny Denise, who lives upstairs, and their friend Cracker, who actually does go by that name. It was a festive and convivial gathering.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was the rainbow measuring cups that Dave received. Not the measuring cups themselves, though they were brightly colored and likely useful items. No, it was more the reaction to them.
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation that started with one small ridiculous observation and then snowballed from there, with each additional comment more ridiculous than the one before until finally you realize that you have spent the last half hour or so laughing maniacally over something as simple as a rainbow assortment of measuring cups?
We have.
The next morning we did much of it again, though the measuring cup conversation did not recur. This is probably for the best. Don’t want to wear out the batteries on that one.
Tabitha was not feeling very well that day, having come down with the winter crud that has slowly worked its way through most of us over the last week or two, so she stayed home for the next part of the celebration on Christmas Day, when the rest of us – including Denise, Cracker, and Dave’s nephew Ben – went over to a dinner party at Adrienne and Dan’s house.
Adrienne and Dan live in one of those neighborhoods that you only really find in San Francisco, where topography has never factored into urban planning in the slightest. This was the other thing we drove to in San Francisco, and when we turned the corner onto their street I genuinely wondered how the car would make it up that hill.
It was actually difficult to walk across the street to the front door of their house.
But once inside we were welcomed warmly and fed royally, and that is about all you can ask of a get-together I think. We had a very nice time, and we thank Adrienne and Dan for welcoming us into their home for the holiday.
It is nice to remember that there are good people wherever you go.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
Tales of the City, Part 2: Old Friends
San Francisco is a great place to see and we had a great deal of fun wandering around the city taking in the sights. But my focus when I travel has always been visiting people – seeing the friends and family that are there. This is one reason why I tend to go back to the same places.
The main purpose of our trip was to see Geoff and Dave, but while we were there we were lucky enough to catch up to some old friends as well. And that made the trip just that much better.
Josh and Sarah were friends of mine back in college. There were anywhere from eight to twelve major student theater groups at Penn when we were there, depending on how you counted, and out of the nine thousand or so undergrads there were about a dozen of us who did theatrical lighting. We went from show to show to show during the semesters, feeding on cast parties like locusts. We got to know each other pretty well. I ran the lighting board or a spotlight for several shows where Sarah or Josh designed the lights, for example.
They live out near San Francisco these days, with their daughter Samantha who is a year younger than Tabitha and – as we discovered – cut from very much the same cloth. They hit it off amazingly well. We will have to get them together again as soon as possible, yes we will. They had family coming in for the holiday and still wanted to see us, so they volunteered to pick us up from the airport and take us to dinner before dropping us off at Geoff and Dave’s.
Airport pickups are a sign of genuine friendship.
Once we managed to squeeze all seven of us plus our luggage into their car we headed off toward a lovely Italian restaurant in Burlingame, one that promised good food and was able to handle the food allergy questions with alacrity when I called them the previous week. And they delivered – it was an excellent meal.
But meals are made by the company you enjoy them with, and by that standard it was, well, an excellent meal.
We were also able to visit Jen, John and Rain.
I had known Jen in high school but then lost track of her completely for about twenty-five years. Then through the magic of Facebook we started to get to know each other again, and it has been a lovely thing.
We caught up to them for dinner on our second day there – after we had plundered the Lefty Shop we trekked up to a place called Hot Spud and had baked potatoes and conversation. And then they joined us at Crissy Field and Fort Point as well, so bonus for us!
It was good to see Jen again for the first time since the mid-80s, and finally meeting John and Rain was lovely – they were good people to hang out and talk with, and we shall have to do that again as well.
It is a grand thing to have friends all over, and an even better thing to see them.
Now to convince them all to venture out to Wisconsin...
The main purpose of our trip was to see Geoff and Dave, but while we were there we were lucky enough to catch up to some old friends as well. And that made the trip just that much better.
Josh and Sarah were friends of mine back in college. There were anywhere from eight to twelve major student theater groups at Penn when we were there, depending on how you counted, and out of the nine thousand or so undergrads there were about a dozen of us who did theatrical lighting. We went from show to show to show during the semesters, feeding on cast parties like locusts. We got to know each other pretty well. I ran the lighting board or a spotlight for several shows where Sarah or Josh designed the lights, for example.
They live out near San Francisco these days, with their daughter Samantha who is a year younger than Tabitha and – as we discovered – cut from very much the same cloth. They hit it off amazingly well. We will have to get them together again as soon as possible, yes we will. They had family coming in for the holiday and still wanted to see us, so they volunteered to pick us up from the airport and take us to dinner before dropping us off at Geoff and Dave’s.
Airport pickups are a sign of genuine friendship.
Once we managed to squeeze all seven of us plus our luggage into their car we headed off toward a lovely Italian restaurant in Burlingame, one that promised good food and was able to handle the food allergy questions with alacrity when I called them the previous week. And they delivered – it was an excellent meal.
But meals are made by the company you enjoy them with, and by that standard it was, well, an excellent meal.
We were also able to visit Jen, John and Rain.
I had known Jen in high school but then lost track of her completely for about twenty-five years. Then through the magic of Facebook we started to get to know each other again, and it has been a lovely thing.
We caught up to them for dinner on our second day there – after we had plundered the Lefty Shop we trekked up to a place called Hot Spud and had baked potatoes and conversation. And then they joined us at Crissy Field and Fort Point as well, so bonus for us!
It was good to see Jen again for the first time since the mid-80s, and finally meeting John and Rain was lovely – they were good people to hang out and talk with, and we shall have to do that again as well.
It is a grand thing to have friends all over, and an even better thing to see them.
Now to convince them all to venture out to Wisconsin...
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