"Drift" by Rachel Maddow (2012)

You have wanted to read this one for a while now, but you weren't sure you wanted to dive in to a book written by such an obvious liberal spokesperson. You've tried to read nonfiction written from a one-sided political point of view before and you've never enjoyed it much. When you read the reviews for "Drift," however, you changed your mind. If Ira Glass, Matt Taibbi, Roger Ailes, and the Military Times all agree that a book is worth reading, you'll give it a shot.

You first started listening to Rachel Maddow back when she was on Air America and you were charmed by her combination of wit and intelligence. Now that she has moved to a cable news format, she has kept those same qualities, but now she often borders on silly, her wit often threatens to turn into snarkiness. You've always been annoyed by this. She is a Rhodes scholar. It's okay for her to be serious. Even if you find her jokes funny, you sometimes feel that the frivolous attitude she can adopt robs some of her subject matters of their importance. Unfortunately "Drift" flirts with that same problem. In her attempt to keep her voice authentic, she gets dangerously close to losing imoqartial readers who might not be familiar with her quirky personality. Maddow lays out some pretty astonishing things in this book, some pretty weighty and important things. But she uses the same voice in the book that she uses on her show, and it doesn't quite translate to the different medium. TV shows are over in an hour. Books are forever.

But "Drift" is important. In it Maddow chronicles how the United States over the last fifty years has handed over the power of making war to the executive branch (and to corporations) and how we have foolishly divorced ourselves from the emotional pain of asking our young men and women to make war on others. She starts by quoting Madison condemning war, not because war is inherently terrible, but because it so often robs citizens of liberty, imposing debts and onerous taxes, bringing out the worst in people and tempting nations towards aristocracy or monarchy. Madison framed the Constitution specifically to make going to war difficult. By forcing the executive branch to seek the declaration of war from the legislative branch he tried to ensure that there would be public debate about the merits of any looming conflict. Maddow spends the rest of the book outlining how America has strayed far from Madison's framework, and drifted closer to the society he warned we might become if we ignored him.

President Johnson started the problem as Maddow sees it. He went to war in Vietnam using only active duty forces swollen with draftees, without mobilizing the National Guard or Reserves. This divorced the American public from the war in a way that had never been done before. Those weekend warriors remained just that, most of them staying home instead of risking their lives on the battlefield. With the result that many Americans began to think of the war as something that other people were fighting, not something the nation was fighting. General Creighton Abrams was US commander in Vietnam before returning to wind the war down as the Army Chief of Staff. He was not amused by Johnson's decision or by how his troops were regarded when they returned from such an unpopular war. He quickly restructured the Army to make it nearly impossible to ever go to war again without mobilizing the Guard or the Reserve. He gave these citizen soldiers jobs that were essential to fighting a war of any significant size. It was called the Abrams Doctrine: presidents couldn't go to war without making damn sure that the people of the United States were supportive of that war.

Congress was also not amused with the way President Johnson had mislead them into allowing him kingly war-making powers (Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) that would have been anathema to the framers of the Constitution. They decided to make the rules more strict and passed the War Powers Act into law even after President Nixon vetoed it. This was how the government was designed to work and when President Ford wanted more funds to bolster the falling government of South Vietnam, no one less than Senator John Glenn himself (former Marine and astronaut) told the president that he was out of luck. Ford's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld was not pleased at Congress' reassertion of its place as the branch of the government endowed with the power to declare war (this comes up later).

At this point, "Drift" moves into the era of President Reagan. Maddow was not a big fan of The Gipper as president. Candidate Reagan had made a series of terrifying claims about the threat that the USSR posed to America. President Reagan acted on those claims. Even though these claims were provably untrue, the Reagan administration doubled the amount the US spent on its military, despite the fact that we already spent more than anyone else in the world. Under President Ford, a virulent anti-communist DC think tank (The Committee on the Present Danger) had been allowed to contribute to the CIA's secret analysis of the Soviet Union's military strength. Their claims were wildly inaccurate and the team had no business taking part in any intelligence briefing. They admittedly based their most alarmist findings on speculation and intuition rather than on, you know... facts. Nevertheless, their findings were taken as gospel truth by the Reagan administration. President Reagan began hiring members of this think tank into the government as soon as he was sworn in.

You remember being a kid growing up in the world that this kind of hysteria created. You read your uncle Jimmy's copies of "Soviet Military Power" (which Maddow refers to as propaganda) and worried about a looming Soviet invasion. You played war games always assuming that the bad guys were communists and that there were Russians hiding behind every tree. You rarely questioned why this was. It just was. President Reagan operated in the same way. The Russians were the bad guys, they were very very dangerous, and they were getting stronger every day. Never mind that all actual intelligence pointed to the opposite conclusion. Never mind that Soviet leaders were expounding on the madness of nuclear war. Never mind that objective fact pointed to the US as the international saber rattler, not the USSR. President Reagan was granted his wish and the United States doubled its military spending, arming up for a war that would never come against an enemy it had largely made up.

President Reagan did get one real war though. The US invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada and that invasion, now almost forgotten, has proven to be a template for later wars. Trump up a bullshit reason for invasion (like freeing American medical students from possible captivity). Lie to reporters (and the public). Insist you were right about the need for war all along (even when the facts show different). Relate this military action with a previous one (like the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, half a world away). Use the boost in polls to jack up military spending even higher afterwards.


When the Reagan administration was busted breaking lots and lots of US and international laws by supplying terrorists with modern weapons and using the extra cash to fund anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua, they started rewriting the rules again. The excuse they came up with to defend their actions was preposterous enough to be almost funny if it hadn't become de facto policy ever since: "The president couldn't have committed any crime because, as Commander In Chief, he can wage any war he wants and employ any military might in his prerogative without seeking Congressional approval." This was patently untrue. And furthermore if it were true, why had the administration worked so hard to keep their actions secret in the first place?! In any case, this excuse added to the perceived power of the executive more than any previous presidents had committed.

President Reagan had stripped from the US government any vestiges of checks on the executive's ability to make war... except the checks within the military itself. The Abrams Doctrine was still there, making sure that presidents had to get approval from the public before waging any big wars. When Reagan's predecessor, President Bush, was preparing to invade Iraq in 1991 to kick Saddam Hussein's armies out of Kuwait, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisted that the war plans must include overwhelming force, clear objectives, a well defined exit strategy, and popular support at home. This idea, the Powell Doctrine, also ensured that the Reserves and National Guard would be deployed as well. This was not some quixotic scheme by the highest ranking soldier in America to avert war, but simply General Powell asserting the Abrams Doctrine and stepping in where Congress could no longer, to ask the American people if we were absolutely sure we wanted this particular war.

President Bush got his war, but General Powell got his debate too. Congress eventually approved the use of force in Iraq. Still, President Bush and many of the people who worked for him (and would later work for his son) took the ideological view that President Reagan had. The President of the United States is not required to seek approval from Congress for any military action ever. Anytime. Anywhere. Against any foe. Using any number of troops and spending any amount of money to do it. The authorization from Congress was viewed as merely a formality.

Maddow then chronicles how Presidents Clinton and Bush and Obama perpetuated this belief. But these three presidents took the unmooring of American military power even further. They privatized or outsourced much of what the military does to the point where the cost of the wars they fought was even more deeply hidden from the public's consciousness. Presidents can now deploy the smallest number of war fighters, contract out the logistical support to private corporations, and voila'! you get wars that almost no one protests! The contractors also grant the added bonus that they don't have to report anything to Congress and they don't have to ask permission before taking actions that US soldiers might be court-martialed for.

President Bush and his Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfled clearly stated after September 11th 2001, that the War on Terror would have no declaration of war, it would have no clear borders or surrender documents. The War on Terror would go on exactly how the executive branch of the US government wanted to wage it. There might be warrant-less wiretapping, or torture, or America might be asked to embrace the idea of preemptive war (a notion the WW II generation loathed when Japan used it to justify attacking Pearl Harbor). The United States might be involved in propping up more terrible regimes or toppling dictators who never attacked us. The president could do whatever he wanted wherever he wanted. No matter the cost. Congress might be notified about some of it, but they would sure sign the huge checks required to pay for it.

And now today, President Obama regularly orders the bombings of suspected terrorist targets in nations with which we are not at war, some of whom have turned out to be American citizens (if that's not more power than the framers of the Constitution wanted the president to have, then you have been reading that document wrong for years). Two years ago, the US lead a massive air campaign that allowed the rebels in Libya to oust their long time dictator (something Reagan could never do) and we are now openly arming rebel forces in their attempt to overthrow their dictator in Syria. All with no declaration of war. All without seeking approval from Congress. Remember? The president can do whatever he wants. Whenever he wants. No matter the cost. You shiver to think of what else the next president might do with this unprecedented power, or the next, or the next.

There are checks and balances written into the Constitution with the intent to keep the power to take our nation into war out of the hands of one person. They have all but disappeared. No one party or president was solely responsible for this. Each piled onto the previous precedents. And Congress has become too feckless and too obsessed with their own reelections to fight it. Maddow makes it clear that this is not some partisan issue. It is an American one. We should do something about it, but we probably won't.

You just have to hope that someone will run for office on a platform of changing this. You hope that someone will have the guts to take office and give power back to the branch it belongs in. Until then...



On to the next book!




P.S. There was a whole chapter about our aging nuclear arsenal. The most shocking part was how it has completely deteriorated. Detonators are failing from old age and accelerators are in need of replacement, but there is just one small problem. We don't remember how to make those things any more and no one wrote down how to do it what with the Russians and all. Very Top Secret, you know. So now we have thousands of weapons that could destroy the Earth a thousand times over which no one really wants to do anymore, and those weapons are slowly becoming useless because of old age and our own fetish for secrecy. But they did cost the United States eight billion dollars to create, so they're probably not going anywhere. This chapter was in "Drift" and it was fascinating, but you weren't exactly sure what it had to do with the premise of the book, so you are mentioning it here in the P.S. because you don't want to forget it.

"Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card (1985)

Apparently, they are just going to make every single book into a movie now. That's okay. As long as you know the movie is coming out in time to read the book first.

***SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!***

So here's an embarrassing story. You were first turned on to this book because you saw a preview for the movie. Well, that part isn't so embarrassing. What is embarrassing is that you saw the preview and misread the caption and thought is was just a baddass trailer for cool sci-fi book. "That is awesome!" you yelled when you saw that. "I hope this is a new thing," you said, "Spending lots of money on glossy, super high def trailers for books, not just movies!"

Yeah.

No.

You're an idiot. The book was written in 1985 (although the short story that it was based on was published in '77). The preview you saw was for the actual movie and you were just confused. Oh well. You got a fantastic book out of your mistake so no harm, no foul.

You've never read any of Card's stuff before, but he has a large body of work. His recent stupid remarks on gay marriage didn't keep you from reading his book. You've never had a problem listening to the opinions of people even when you disagree with those people on other issues. In fact, you've always been of the opinion that if you never listen to the people you disagree with, you can't really disagree with them. It's why you listen to Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow and Alex Jones. Listening to all three helps you figure out where you stand on certain issues. If you can't figure out why you don't agree with one of them, maybe you don't know as much about the issue as you thought. Even better, maybe you're wrong. And sometimes you can even find yourself agreeing with someone on certain issues, even when you've never seen anything else eye to eye.

In short, Card's opinion on same sex marriage has no affect on his ability to write a fantastic sci-fi novel. And that's what "Ender's Game" is. Fantastic. Another one that you just couldn't put down.

The bulk of "Ender's Game" follows the life of a gifted child named Ender Wiggin, six when the story begins, as he is honed and trained to become a commander in a looming war against an insectoid alien enemy. Humanity was only saved from utter annihilation in the last alien war by the skin of its teeth, and the Powers That Be don't intend to let luck be the deciding factor in the next close encounter. The political reality on Earth is deep into an alternate future where the Cold War is still sort of being played out, and organized religion is frowned upon. Spouses are only allowed to have as many children as their governments allow. The citizens of all the nations of Earth have joined together to resist the "bugger" invasion, but those alliances are more fragile than anyone realizes.

But high above the political squabbles of the Earth, Ender Wiggin attends an orbiting Battle School, where he learns to navigate and fight in three dimensions. He is an extraordinarily quick study, having been selected for this duty by his off-the-charts aptitude for strategy, and empathy. Strategy and battle smarts without compassion and empathy are just a recipe for psychopathic tendencies. Humanity doesn't need more psychopaths. Ender's siblings left back on Earth can testify to this truth. Ender excels at everything he does at Battle School, infuriating some and inspiring others. He finds he is capable of more than he ever wanted to know.

"Ender's Game" moves quickly and without indulging in the painstaking detail of other fantasy novels. Card allows your own imagination to fill in the gaps he leaves. That's one of the things you don't like about movies adapted from books. A movie, however dazzling, is only ever one perspective of a story that was intended to allow for infinite possible interpretations, for endlessly varied imaginings of the same tale. Even though Card's clairvoyance for future technologies is uncanny (the kids log on to world wide information "Webs" and carry around their touch screen "desks," which we call "tablets" today, with them everywhere they go) he leaves the specifics to be fleshed out in your own mind, giving you just enough to let your imagination go wild. Man, you love it when authors do that.

The book explores the concepts of leadership (for good or otherwise) and the curious ethics of a culture that allows their children to be sacrificed on the altar of war whenever it is deemed necessary. It also dives into questions of morality without any heavy-handed obviousness. It makes sense that some children should die and kill others in order for a species to continue its existence, but that's not what any war in human history has been. As effective as our propaganda machines have been, no war has ever been fought to preserve the entire human race. In fact, at this point, if one of our wars gets too out of hand, it could result in the destruction of all life itself. Where is the line there? What is moral in warfare and what is not?

"Ender's Game" is as psychological as it is sci-fi. Ender is able to quickly sum up people and alter his behavior accordingly, like we all do. But the way Card writes these moments is intriguing. He brings clarity to that murky reality that describes how humans are often capable of intuitively anticipating a far distant end result and instantly adjust to either allow or resist that same result from coming to fruition. Card left you thinking, "Yeah... We do judge people like that sometimes, don't we? What is that instinct that enables that?" Ender knows that he is being used for something important, but it doesn't mean he has to enjoy it. His dreams reveal his moral dilemma in being used as a weapon and also a longing for the comforts of the presence of people who love him unconditionally. As childishly honest as he is, Ender knows he can't allow himself to make friends. But his soldiers come to love him anyway. His dreams reveal his moral dilemma in being used as a weapon and a longing for the comforts of the presence of people who love him unconditionally.

This was another book you just could not bring yourself to stop reading.

What is it with novels as opposed to non-fiction? You can become immersed in the story of a great non-fiction book, but it almost never grabs you like a great novel. It must be because you almost always already know how the non-fiction one ends, so you are free to savor the story and dive deep, indulging in the analysis. Whereas with a novel, you become so addicted to the story itself that you aren't nearly as worried about analyzing as much as simply finding out what will happen. Allowing yourself to enjoy the ride.

But as good as the main body of the book was, the ending was far better. It left you with the nagging doubts that most fictionalized war stories tend to forget. What if the wars we choose to fight are all really over some tragic misunderstanding? What if the fights we choose are not necessary? How can we ever know that we are communicating clearly enough to ever think that any war is justified? Can we ever be truly satisfied that we own the moral high ground? How much of a role should forgiveness and grace play in our international (or interstellar) affairs? How can empathy help us as a people, how can it hurt us? How can two cultures, as different as aliens must be from one another, by definition, ever hope to be able to communicate?

In the end, whether it is defeating your enemy on the field of battle, or forgiving them of the atrocities they committed, it all comes down to you learning how to genuinely understand their culture and the way they think. "Ender's Game" helped you begin to understand your own culture a little bit better than you did before. For that, you were grateful.



On to the next book!





P.S. Oh, who am I kidding? Here are a couple clips from the movie that's coming out in a few months.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP0cUBi4hwE

"To End All Wars" by Adam Hochschild (2011)

You read so many books about war, you thought it might be wise to read one about some of the people who tried to stop the one they called The Great War. You find value in studying war, so it's a good bet you can find value in studying resistance to war as well.

First of all, what a great title, right? World War One was labeled the "War to End All Wars" by those in England who believed it needed to be fought, but those who thought WWI was unnecessary and a massive tragedy worked hard, literally, to end all wars. Very clever.

Second, man, you really need to study more about WWI. It is absolutely fascinating. In those four years, most of what we all think of as the modern world came about. Rapid global travel, mechanized militaries, 'Total War' that targeted civilians and economies as much as the enemy's soldiers, the emergence of submarines, aircraft, instant electronic communications, and the very shape of the countries we all recognize on our maps today, all of these things sprang up when the world went to war in 1914.

Speaking of maps, this book has some good ones. They aren't very pretty, but they are actually useful. Maps of both European Fronts clearly show where the action all happened, and there is even one map numbering the dizzying sequence of domino-like events that lead to so many nations declaring war on one another where only days before there had been peace and prosperity. See, Erik Larson? Using good maps to make your story more understandable is not that hard!

To tell the story of the fight against the Great War, Hochschild has to start with two other stories, the movement to attain women's suffrage in England, and the rise of International Socialism. Both of these groups existed because their members felt they had no power over their own lives. Women (and roughly 40% of British men) weren't allowed to vote at all, and workers all over the world (the proletariat) were feeling the oppression of laboring for an economic system that was demanding much from many to improve the lot of only a very few. When you have those same groups of people being told that they and their loved ones need to fight and die in a war in order to spread freedom and democracy while their allies hail from Tsarist Russia, and they are asked to fight alongside soldiers from India and South Africa, where the natives also aren't allowed to vote, you have a recipe for some serious social conflict.

In fact things in Britain were growing worrisome enough for the government and the upper class of English society that some British Hawks actually welcomed the coming war in the hopes that it would help quell what was fast becoming a full fledged revolution at home. Suffragettes were attacking MPs, burning down homes and churches, throwing bricks through windows, and had even attempted to bomb the house of David Lloyd George, who would become the wartime Prime Minister. Ireland was straining to be free from the rule of the British crown. The great British Empire was beginning to fray at the edges. It is remarkable what people will do when they decide to fight for the right to have their voices to be heard. It is also remarkable what people in power will do to stay there.

You found it fascinating to see the run up to the war from the perspective of the average citizen. Like Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," "To End All Wars" takes history that you knew failry well and flips it on its head, showing you what you thought you knew from a different angle. History does not just happen in the halls of power or on the fields of battle. It happens in people's homes and on their streets, in their churches and in their classrooms. Hindsight always makes history seem like a foregone conclusion, but it is important to you to remember that there were activists and pacifists who fought against the outbreak of war at the time, not because it was merely symbolic, but because there really was a chance to avoid what seemed inevitable. There really was. The way the war ended proves that. Sadly the people on the home fronts of the world realized the futility of the war far too late.

"To End All Wars" leads you through the events of The Great War, the unimaginable slaughter, the awful waste of lives thrown into hopeless shoulder to shoulder marches against the weapons of modern warfare with horrific consequences. Fifty thousand British soldiers dead in one day and a quarter of a million dead in one battle, and the casualty lists kept growing month after month, year after year. The situation became so perverse, that the British commander on the Western Front began measuring his forces' success, not by the ground they gained, but by the casualties they took. He was assuming (mistakenly) that the Germans must be suffering an equal amount. He even became disdainful of officers whose units did not sustain appalling losses. What kind of a general wants his men to die!? If ever there was a war to protest, this was it.

The military leaders of the Western Front were slow to realize that the world had changed. Wars needed to be fought differently now. It took many years and millions of lives before either side began to develop alternative tactics to suicide charges. A public which was quick to cheer the war at its beginning and quick to vilify its critics, slowly came around to the side of the people who had been protesting the war for years. By the time the war was almost over the aristocracy that had ruled Russia for 300 years had been murdered and replaced by a revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet government, the French armies were refusing to fight in suicidal assaults any longer, the British military was withholding forces from the front in order to keep them at home to maintain order, British women had been given the right to vote in order to prevent a full-fledged revolution, and the armies of Germany, still undefeated on the battlefield, were starving and abandoning their positions at the front with words of revolution on their lips. The German navy refused direct orders to sail from their ports and the Kaiser's own brother, commander of the entire Baltic Fleet, had to disguise himself to get out of the port city of Kiel alive. Germany's allies didn't surrender so much as give up fighting because their armies just evaporated.

Shockingly, none of the members of the belligerent governments tried to find a diplomatic coourse that would lead to stopping the bloodshed. Emily Hobhouse, British antiwar juggernaut, was the only person from either side of the bloodiest war in human history (up to that point) to visit the other side seeking peace. She failed. However, Armistice Day arrived not because one army emerged victorious, but because of a mass realization by both the soldiers and the populations of the belligerent countries that the war was stupid. You had no idea that Europe had come so close to an actual continent-wide socialist revolution only 100 years ago. But that is how senseless the violence of this war was, that is how far the madness of it all drove people. Even though the body count in WWII was far, far higher than that of the Great War, at least the armies of '41 and '44 moved! The armies of 1914-18 remained so close to their original starting points that the first and last British soldiers killed in the war are buried in a battlefield cemetery under the shade of the same tree! It proved almost impossible to continue on with the charade that the war was for any noble purpose when mothers and widows were being told all of the male members of their family had died in order to move the front a few hundred yards.

Suddenly, the radicals from 1914, the Pankhursts and Hobhouses and Bertrand Russels and socialist revolutionaries were beginning to sound far more sensible than the governments which demanded more and more sacrifices for less and less benefit. To quote Bertrand Russel on pages 112 and 113,

"As a lover of truth, the national propaganda of all the belligerent nations sickened me. As a lover of civilization, the return to barbarism appalled me. As a man of thwarted parental feeling [he as yet had no children] the massacre of the young wrung my heart... This war is trivial, for all its vastness. No great principle is at stake, no great human purpose is involved on either side."

Eventually the people of the world agreed with Russel and those who, like him, were brave enough to speak out against the stupidity of the war. They would also, in time, come to trust the voices they had once tried to silence. Many of the British citizens jailed for refusing the draft later came to serve as members of Parliament or in the Cabinet. One who had not gone to jail but had spoken out loudly against the war, Ramsay MacDonald, was elected Prime Minister of England in 1924.

The propaganda machinery set in motion to swell the ranks of the Allied armies was a little too effective. It certainly inspired millions of boys to enlist, but it planted a seed of hatred that grew in the minds of even those who should have known better. In the days and months following the end of the war, British and French leaders had a choice. They could choose to be lenient on the German people, and show them mercy and some small forgiveness, or they could choose to be vengeful and petty, disguising their bullying with words like "justice" and claims to their own innocence in all the violence. They chose the later option, inflicting an overly burdensome treaty on Germany and demanding more than was just or necessary from their former adversary. The Germans had become a "them," and when we humans make anything about "us v. them" we are capable of committing some of the greatest mistakes in our history. Their mistake in this moment, their inability to rise above their own human frailty set the stage for another, even more destructive conflict. Their refusal to show forgiveness and mercy allowed the reactionary rise of the Nazi party and virtually guaranteed that World War II would be even more inevitable than the War to End All Wars.

But there were moments of hope. There always are. That first Christmas of the war, both sides were still feeling very chivalrous towards one another. The war was all still a game played by boys and men who thought of themselves as Victorian gentlemen. As the sun rose that Christmas morning in 1914, all along No Man's Land between the enemy lines, white flags were raised. Silence filled the air instead of bullets. Young soldiers crept from their trenches and started towards the battlements of their enemies with nothing in their hearts but goodwill. To this day, historians call it the Christmas Truce. Gifts were exchanged and songs were sung. Beer and wine flowed. Animosity was forgotten. Soccer games were played, and old friends, now turned adversaries, were once again united. Peace broke out in the middle of the Great War. If only these soldiers could have kept this attitude for the rest of the war, they all would have made it home alive. For this one day, these men were not soldiers, they were simply citizens of the world. For this one day they looked at the soldiers across the field from them and they did not see the enemy. They were just people, and, despite all evidence to the contrary, people are good.


On to the next book!



P.S. Don't think WWI was all bad. The Victorian era did feature some of the most epic facial hair styles of any war. Check this out.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/50929/8-awesome-mustaches-world-war-i

"Galapagos" by Kurt Vonnegut (1985)

You thoroughly believe that everyone should read more Vonnegut. It's good to practice what you preach.

Vonnegut is brilliant, and his brilliance lies in his weirdness. "Galapagos" is a weird book, but it is brilliant. It is set in both 1986 and exactly one million years later, and the narrator is dead. The central premise of the story is the de-evolution of humanity, primarily to rid ourselves of our worst feature, out great big brains. Those things do nothing but get us into trouble anyway.

Vonnegut tells the story in his characteristically familiar voice, with humor and informality, as if he and the reader are old friend. He never flinches from the unexpected, whether that means jumping from time frame to time frame, or placing a star in front of the names of characters who will die before the sun goes down, or even revealing that the narrator of the story is a ghost. Vonnegut's unique style always keeps you turning the pages of his novels and short stories, but the stories themselves are just as riveting.

"Galapagos" is about the end of humanity, or at least humanity as we know it. There is a small war, a few murders, the "Nature Cruise of the Century" (featuring Jackie Kennedy Onassis), and a pestilence that threatens all of human kind. Eventually humans are relegated to one isolated colony, the place where the miracle of biological evolution was first recognized, the Galapagos Islands. Safe on the rocky islands, humanity promptly continues to evolve and do away with our extraneous bits. Vonnegut is unclear about exactly what we become, there are flippers involved and many fish are eaten, but he is very clear about the biggest evolutionary step we achieve over the next one million years; our brains shrink. They weren't really necessary anyway. The rest of the book is example after example of this idea. Humans aren't all bad, in fact, we are really good at heart, but our over-sized brains keep us from becoming as superior as we could be.

The whole book reminded you a lot of a conversation you and your oldest son had last year. One day, from the back seat of the car he asked, "Dad, what's the smartest animal in the world?"

Reminding him that questions like that don't have easy answers, you replied, "Well, buddy, some people think humans are, but it really depends on what you mean when you say 'smartest'."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well, what is smart?" you asked him. "I mean, some people think we are the smartest because we can build all of these things." You gestured around the car as you drove down the highway. "Cars, airplanes, roads, skyscrapers, things like that."

"Yeah?" six year old Nico responded, obviously wondering where you were going with this.

"But dolphins are pretty darn smart too." you reminded him. "Just because we can't communicate with them doesn't mean they might not be smarter than us."

"But... they can't make all of this stuff," he pointed out. "Cars, airplanes, roads, and skyscrapers."

"Ah," you said, savoring the moment. You had walked him right into the trap. "But what if dolphins are smarter than us because the realize that they don't NEED all of this stuff?" Nico's brows furrowed and you kept leading him down the rabbit hole. "All of these things are destroying the environment we live in. We keep building them anyway, even though they all might end up killing us in the end. What if dolphins are really the ones who are the smartest because they realized that making all of this stuff doesn't make you smarter or better? What if what really makes you smart is being happy with just swimming in the ocean eating fish and leaping out of the water and raising a pod of your own little dolphins? It all depends on what you mean when you say 'smart.'"

"Yeah!" Nico said, realizing what you were saying. "Maybe dolphins are the smartest, or maybe whales are... or maybe elephants! I've heard they are really smart too. What if they've got this all figured out too?" You stole a glance in the rear view mirror to see his face. The look he had as he reexamined the world outside the window... As he began to see reality in a new light... That's the same look you had on your face as you read "Galapagos."

But Kurt Vonnegut will always be a better story teller than you.



On to the next book!

"The Nine" by Jeffrey Toobin (2007)

"...The Nine... became mighty in their day. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their undoing... The Nazgul were they, the Ringwraiths, Sauron's most terrible servants; darkness went with them, and they cried with the voices of death."

God, Tolkien is the best!

Wait... this isn't a Tolkien review? But it's called "The Nine!" Oh... right. As in the nine Justices on The Supreme Court of the United States. Yeah, no. That makes more sense. That's cool too.

People have been telling you to read this one for a while. They were right. It is fascinating. Every page made you feel like you were learning really important things about the history of the US. "The Nine" focuses mostly on the court that served from 1994 to 2005. They served together longer than any other justices in the history of the nine member court. Toobin focuses on the conservative counterrevolution sparked by the Reagan administration. By the 1970's, liberalism was assumed to be written into the DNA of the United States. President Reagan and some influential think tanks and powerful organizations have been moving ever since to counteract that assumption. Their aims were simple, but bold. Expand the powers of the Executive Branch. End racial preferences intended to assisst African Americans. Speed up the executions of condemned prisoners. Welcome religion, and specifically Christian values, into the public sphere, and even into government itself. But, above all, to reverse Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban all abortions in the country. This conservative ideal, what Toobin calls a counterrevolution, is closer to reality today than it has ever been.

However much the book is about the culture wars of the past thirty years, it is much more about the lives of the nine justices, and Toobin invites you into those lives in a very intimate way. "The Nine" is much more about the personalities of the justices and their relationships with one another than you thought it would be. More than a dry collection of dockets and case names, it brings you into the decision making process and shows you how the law has been shaped during your own lifetime.

Even though the book opens with the death of William Rehnquist in 2005 and even though he was the Chief Justice for 19 years, it focuses mainly on the career of Sandra Day O'Connor, who was the "swing" vote for those eleven years with no vacancies on the highest court in the land. The book acknowledges that she was the most powerful woman in America until her retirement. If you wanted to win a case before the Supreme Court while justice O'Connor sat on the bench, you tailored your argument to move her opinion more than the other eight. As a justice, she loved the middle of the road and strove to reflect the opinions of the majority of the American people. Even though she was appointed by the Republican champion, President Reagan himself, her passion for women's' rights and her slow drift to the left (or the Republican party's slow drift to the right) has infuriated a generation of conservatives in the United States. For decades, Sandra Day O'Connor held back the conservative counterrevolution.

Her most crucial vote might have been the one which decided Bush v. Gore. It was O'Connor's vote that stopped the recount in Florida and decided the 2000 election for her party's candidate, George W. Bush. But simply deciding the outcome of a presidential election is not what made that vote so monumental, it was the result of that presidency reflected on her court that will shape the future of the United States. It was during President Bush's second term that O'Connor's husband's health deteriorated to the point where she realized she needed to retire. Even though the Bush Administration, which she had brought to power, proved to be a disaster for her country and for her party, and even as she watched the president erode all that she held dear, Sandra Day O'Connor had to hand over her crucial swing vote to the man she felt had corrupted her beloved party. The Supreme Court has been shaped more by her retirement during President Bush's tenure than anything in generations. Her retirement may be the thing that finally ushers in the conservative counterrevolution she fought so long to hold back.

The other justices are not forgotten in the pages of "The Nine." Each one became much more of a person to you as you learned of their distinctive peccadilloes and idiosyncrasies. Justice Scalia is a much more likeable character than his combative gruff persona had lead you to believe, and Thomas, with his infectious booming laughter, remembers the names of every clerk working at the Court, even those working for the other Justices. Learning about the new Chief Justice John Roberts' near perfect rise to the Court gave you much greater respect for him than you had before reading the book.

Toobin recounts notorious moments from the last fifteen years that influenced the court's decision making process. President Clinton's impeachment, Terry Schiavo's tragic case, Tom DeLay's brief tenure as the House majority leader, the ongoing imprisonment of terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He reminded you how insanely unwise it is to have elected officials (Secretaries of State) in charge of each state's election procedures. He also reminded you that the law is not above politics, and being a judge or Justice means being active in society, not merely "calling balls and strikes." 

The Justices are just people. They are asked to make tough decisions in difficult cases. Many of them decide along party lines, but Kennedy and O'Connor searched for compromise solutions, ones that reflected public and world opinions. There are fascinating paradoxes on the court as well. Justice Thomas has admitted to being the greatest beneficiary of Affirmative Action in the history of the United States, but he despises the institution and has voted to overturn it every time he has had the opportunity. Many of the members of the court claim to be Constitutional Originalists, yet they still believe the Supreme Court has the power to strike down legislation it sees as unconstitutional, even though this power is granted nowhere in the US Constitution. People are filled with contradictions, and the Justices of the Supreme Court are just people.

Overall, you found "The Nine" to be charmingly readable and disarmingly educational. Now someone needs to write a book about how the dynamics of the court have changed with the four new justices who have on board since this book was written. Roberts, Alito, Kagan, and Sotomayor will shape the future just as much as the previous court has shaped the past. Even as you write these words, the citizens of the United States are waiting for opinions to be announced from the Supreme Court in the next few days. Just four of the cases to be decided include the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, California's Prop 8 which stuck down gay marriage in that state, Affirmative Action at the University of Texas (and maybe every university in America), and a little thing called The Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Elections matter in the United States. Presidents appoint Supreme Court Justices and those Justices determine the character of our society. The Supreme Court has always been a bellwether for where the United States stands as a culture. It's successes and failures are signposts we can all point to to show how far we've come and how far we still have to go. In a very real way, the lives of all Americans are beholden to the opinions of a few select people... The Nine.


On to the next book!

"Wicked" by Gregory Maguire (1995)

 The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.

You have read this one before. It was over a decade ago, before the musical hit Broadway, and you've wanted to reread it ever since. You borrowed the book the first time you read it though, so you've been searching for a inexpensive copy for years now. A few weeks ago, you found a pristine paperback edition for $1.50 and you were like, "I'll get you, my pretty!"

You're a nerd. You know that right?

Gregory Maguire specializes in novels that re-imagine familiar stories with new and interesting twists. He has taken on such classics as "Cinderella," "Snow White," and "A Christmas Carol". In "Wicked," he tackles the story of the Wizard of Oz (obviously) and it is the best work of his career. It is never clear whether Maguire draws more from L. Frank Baum's book or from the 1939 movie, but what is clear is that this is more than a story about a familiar character. "Wicked" is an examination of the nature of evil itself. It is an attempt to see a familiar character, one who is automatically thought of as evil (Wicked is right there in her name), from a different point of view.

One of the great sages of your life, Obi Wan Kenobi, is quoted as telling Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi that "you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." As you have gotten older, and tried to see things from different perspectives, this quote keeps becoming more and more true. Heroes and villains are often easily interchangeable depending on the point of view. Nelson Mandela is now seen as a hero and the father of modern South Africa, but he was seen as a terrorist for decades before. Martin Luther King Jr. is such a hero to you that you have raised your boys with his speeches ringing in their ears, and his words guiding their beliefs, but from a different point of view, Doctor King was a dangerous revolutionary who was bent on the destruction of an entire society's way of life. The same can be said of Vaclav Havel, Caesar Chavez, Ho Chi Minh, or even Jesus of Nazareth.

So it is with Elphaba. Maguire created her name as an homage to the author of Oz's initials, L. F. B... "El-Pha-Bah." Elphie to her friends. Fabala to her devout father. The Wicked Witch of the West to generations of American children who grew up not caring if she had a back story, only fearing her for her skin color and her hatred of a girl named Dorothy and her little dog too. But Maguire fleshes out the witch's personality in ways that lend her a familiarity beyond your childhood fear. In fact, you quickly came to love Elphaba.

One of the most interesting things about the book is how Maguire tells most of it, not from the witch's perspective, but mostly from the perspective of her friends and loved ones. First, through the eyes of  her lonely and promiscuous mother, her long suffering Nanny, and her religiously zealous father. Then from the perspective of her college roommate Glinda, who is revealed to be more of a self serving, servile, class conscious bitch than any kind of good witch. Next you see Elphaba from the perspective of another classmate, the stalwart and clear headed Munchkin boy, Boq. But it is when Fiyero, a dark hued pagan prince from the West, and Elphaba begin their love affair a few years after college that we see Elphaba as a lithe, sexual, passionate person.

She is bold, curious, skeptical, and iconoclastic. She has a depth of compassion for those of the social classes most often pushed aside. She is politically passionate, dropping out of school to become a revolutionary. She is misunderstood and she is prejudged. Elphaba's only desire after the heartbreak of her life is to go forth and do no harm in the world. The Wicked Witch. Do no harm. But you wouldn't know it from the way others think of her.

Indeed, it is a full 200 pages before the voice of the novel comes from Elphaba herself, until Maguire allows us to hear her thoughts in her own head, not spoken out loud to another character. She is almost always presented from other people's perspectives.

And that is what the book is about. What we call evil is only that from a certain perspective. Good witches and bad witches. Good Guys versus Bad Guys. Us versus Them.

But the truth is that there never really is a Them. There is only Us.

True evil, not the stuff of children's stories, but true evil begins when one of us allows ourselves to begin thinking of some of the rest of us as enemies. Maybe evil is not just the violence and suffering we inflict on one another. Maybe the greatest evil of all is when we choose to stop caring for others, even if those others are a Them. Only then are we able to allow ourselves to excuse all kinds of savagery being inflicted on others. Only once we think of them as just that. Others. Them.

"Wicked" uses one of the most iconic cultural images of evil and shows that it may not be that at all. Elphaba isn't one of Them. She is Us. And if the Wicked Witch of the West can be shown to be one of Us, who else could be too? Who else do you consider evil only because you have been told to? How many other times do you assume someone just IS the way they are without considering their history, without putting their lives in perspective?

For years now this book has helped you try to be aware of not making that mistake. It has helped you to  consider things from the perspective of the Other. That's pretty powerful. Maybe that's why you've been looking to get your hands on another copy for over a decade now.

Maybe that's why you are always looking for new great books too. Because they can affect you so powerfully.

On to the next book!

"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson (2003)

America's first serial killer on the loose during the Chicago World's Fair. This should be interesting.

Your first book review on this blog was of Erik Larson's "In The Garden of Beasts." The only reason you even read that book was because you had heard of Larson through everyone talking about how good "The Devil in the White City" was. So this review feels like you are coming back full circle to the beginning of the blog.

As with the last Larson book, the multiple pages of praise at the beginning were a bit of a turn off, as was Larson's fleeting, almost offensively casual relationships with maps. He gives you two maps but neither are of any actual help when it comes to locating any of the action in the book. Honestly, why would anyone even include them if they don't do any good? It's just infuriating to those of us who have unhealthy obsessions with maps. So, in all honesty, you found the parts of the book before it even started a bit frustrating.

After that (as in, once you started actually reading the book) it got much better. Larson is one hell of a story teller. He starts building tension from the very beginning, peppering his prose with copious foreshadowing and insinuation, hinting at plot lines that promise to reveal themselves in the next few hundred pages. Well crafted tension like that always encourages you to speed through any book. It's why Dan Brown novels are so easy to read.

The story of "The Devil in the White City" promises on the cover to be about one of America's first serial killers, but there are really two almost unrelated plot lines. One certainly follows the murderer, H. H. Holmes, as he ensnares and kills dozens of women and children, but the other plot line follows the preparation for, and the construction and running of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and has almost nothing to do with Holmes. The Fair, officially called The World's Columbian Exhibition, was set to commemorate the 400 year anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World. In actuality, it was an attempt to show up the French who had just concluded their record-breaking (and Eiffel Tower erecting) World's Fair in 1889. The architects, artists, and entrepreneurs of the United States were eager to show the world that they could out shine the spectacles of Paris. This was all about honor and pride.

"The Devil in the White City" is an enchanting (if at times disturbing) snapshot of what life was like as America became the modern nation you think of it as being today. Much of what you think of as being integral to your concept of America began there at the Chicago World's Fair, and yet it was happening only 100 years before you were attending high school.

The more history you read and the more you internalize the timeline of world events, the more you realize how very young the United States really is.

You've never been much for the True Crime section of the book store, so the parts of "The Devil in the White City" chronicling the serial killer and his sins weren't nearly as satisfying to you as the historical perspective of Chicago's coming of age party at the tail end of the Gilded Age. It was a time between two terrible wars, the Civil War had been over for thirty years, and the First World War wouldn't be fought for another twenty. Men who faced Pickett's charge at Gettysburg also watched the buildings of the Fair rise from the banks of Lake Michigan, and it is possible that many of those same men would also live to see some of the world's first airplanes riding the wind in the first decade of the next century. It was a time of huge changes and growing pains for a nation which was just beginning to feel the responsibilities of a major world power.

Many of those huge changes and novelties presented at the Fair became permanent fixtures of American life. The Chicago World's Fair was where incandescent light bulbs finally grabbed hold of the population and became a mainstay of modern life. Elias Disney was one of the workers who helped construct the jaw-dropingly beautiful, self-contained city nestled inside a major metropolitan area. His son Walt paid close attention. The Pledge of Allegiance was created to celebrate the day the fair was dedicated. Children throughout the U.S. recited it that day (without mention of God or even the United States of America) and they have been ever since. L. Frank Baum walked among the gigantic buildings whose beauty earned the Fair the nickname The White City. He was bewitched by the sights, and soon went home and wrote a book about an Emerald City and a yellow brick road. Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley rode every night of the Fair and Thomas Edison even recorded Mrs. Oakley's prowess with a rifle on his new video camera (footage here). The negotiations between Daniel Burnham (the architect who was in charge of the Fair's construction) and striking carpenters and other workers who were building the Fair's White City lead to major concessions by the Fair's management. The workers were given minimum living wages and overtime pay. This showed the United States how effective organized labor could be and it served as a major catalyst to America's Labor Unions at the dawn of the 20th Century.

On October 9th, 1893, "Chicago Day," no fewer than 750,000 people attended the events at the Fair. No single event in the peacetime history of the world had ever had so many people attending it at one time. So many people attended the Fair over the six months period it was open that it is hard to overstate its influence on American culture. Men like Houdini, Tesla, and Darrow wandered  along the Fair's Grounds, drinking in the spectacle. Teddy Roosevelt was there, and Woodrow Wilson. Susan B. Anthony and Helen Keller were drawn to the event as well. The world's first Ferris Wheel gave 2,000 people at a time a bird's eye view of the park grounds and Lake Michigan. It was a heady, joyful time and it inspired generations of American's to go on and shape the world around them in ways that you still feel today.

But there was darkness too. There were snowstorms that delayed construction and there were wind storms that collapsed buildings and terrified everyone. There were fatal accidents and there were fires.

And there was murder.

H. H. Holmes was a physician who had built a three story building near the fair grounds. He used it as a hotel during the Fair and he lured women into this house of horrors. And then he killed them. Holmes was a true psychopath, showing no remorse or sympathy for his victims. In fact, on more than one occasion, if his targets had children, he simply killed the children as well. But he wasn't a Jack the Ripper type, grabbing strange women and eviscerating them in the darkness. No, Holmes lured his prey into his arms. The thrill of being in absolute control was his motivation. He was manipulative and disarmingly charming and he used these talents to build relationships with his victims, even going so far as to marry some of them before suffocating them with gas or chloroform. Holmes then cremated the bodies of his victims in his custom built kiln in the basement of his World's Fair Hotel.

Psychopaths are not born evil, but they are also not simply conditioned to become evil either. It seems that producing a serial killer requires a combination of both nature and nurture. The World's Fair wasn't what caused Holmes to become a killer, that tendency was already in his character, but the huge influx of unsuspecting women into his city sure didn't discourage his predatory nature.

As you neared the end of "The Devil in the White City" you were sure there was some metaphor waiting to be teased out from the juxtaposition of these two stories; something about how even as a nation step onto the world's stage and into the light of true modernity, there are also some corners of darkness that remain; or about how no matter how good we think were are, as individuals or as nations, there always remains some violent fragment of ourselves lying inside of us just waiting for an opportunity to lash out... or something like that.

But mostly you were simply impressed by Larson's ability to add excitement and dramatic flair to a book that could have easily become a boring litany of disconnected events, and you were impressed by his talent for making history come alive, to read more like a novel than nonfiction. Some authors can take a good story and ruin it. But it takes impressive talent to take many, unconnected stories and find the narrative thread that connects them all together. The best historians are really just the best story tellers.

Isn't that why you read books anyway? For the great stories?

On to the next book!




P.S. While you were reading this book, there was an interview on Fresh Air with Adrian Raine, author of "The Anatomy of Violence," a book about the biology of psychopathology and certain people's tendency towards violence. Fascinating stuff. Maybe this should be added to your list of books to read next.