Books and Writers

Obama’s Story, Written by Obama

Via The New York Times, an interesting account of Barack Obama as literary lion: Obama’s Story, Written by Obama. Excerpt:

Senator Obama understands as well as any politician the power of a well-told story. He has risen in politics less on his track record than on his telling of his life story — a tale he has packaged into two hugely successful books that have helped make him a mega-best-selling, two-time Grammy-winning millionaire front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination at age 46. According to his publisher, there are more than three million copies of his books in print — and two more books on the way.

The story of Mr. Obama’s life as an author tells as much about him as some of the stories he has recounted in his books. It possesses at times the same charmed quality sometimes ascribed to his political ascent — an impression of ease, if not exactly effortlessness, that obscures a more complex amalgam of drive, ambition, timing and the ability to recognize an opportunity and to do what it takes to seize it.

Just as he was eager to promote his first book to Ms. Hartman, he has made the most of his second. When his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention sent his memoir soaring out of obscurity and straight onto the best-seller list, he untethered himself from his longtime literary agent in favor of Robert B. Barnett, the Washington lawyer who had gotten Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton an $8 million book advance and then landed Mr. Obama a $1.9 million, three-book deal.

Jane Jacobs Warns of a New Dark Age

From The Tyee, January 5, 2005: Jane Jacobs Jars Our Memories. Excerpt:

Last spring Jane Jacobs, the renowned philosopher of what makes cities and societies work, was in Vancouver. She took the occasion to publicly attack the whole concept of the RAV line:

“There’s been very sad experience of the last generation of ill-planned routes, transit routes,” she said. “This is partly the onset, the genuine onset, of a genuine Dark Age. The traffic engineers have forgotten how to plan successful routes. They used to know how. Their ancestors used to know how.”

Jacobs sees that kind of forgetfulness as the very definition of a Dark Age, and it’s not only traffic engineers who suffer from it. But early in her latest book, Dark Age Ahead, she triggered a memory from my boyhood in Los Angeles, a memory almost no Angeleno under 65 can share.

My brother and I had traveled from our grandparents’ East Hollywood home near Vermont Avenue. We went down Hollywood Boulevard, through Cahuenga Pass, to the train station near Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. I was 8 and my brother 7. Unescorted, we had traveled across Los Angeles and into the San Fernando Valley by streetcar.

I don’t recall if our parents met us at the station on that 1949 afternoon, but we could have walked safely from the station to our home a half-mile away on Burbank Boulevard. We might even have gone down to play before dinner in the dry streambed we called The Wash. When our mother wanted us home, she had only to call from the front yard; two blocks away, we would hear her.

The streetcars have been gone for fifty years. Highway 170, a roaring freeway, now fills The Wash. Los Angeles is a half-century older and immeasurably poorer than it was in 1949. And most Angelenos have forgotten that it was once very different.

People with Pots of Money

A review of Robert Frank's book Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich: Rich as Hell. Introduction:

Scott Fitzgerald was wrong: the rich are just like you and me.

No matter how much money they have, they'd feel more secure with twice as much. They tend to spend more than they make. They have trouble teaching their kids the value of a dollar. They even need support from peer groups.

So says Robert Frank, who for years has covered the "wealth beat" for the Wall Street Journal. Now he's published Richistan, about the lives and influence of America's very, very wealthy. Their lives are largely banal, but their influence is considerable -- and not always what we might think.

Harold Innis

A review of Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, published in The Tyee in September 2006: Innis Found Truth on the Edge. Excerpt:

Harold Innis lives in the shadows of Canadian history. If we know him at all, it's as a precursor of Marshall McLuhan and some vague kind of early nationalist. But for 30 years he was the country's leading economist and historian, an influential academic and a scholar who anticipated the hypertextual age of the web.

A recent book about him brings Innis back to life, and reminds us that the issues he dealt with are still with us. Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, by Alexander John Watson, portrays a man more radical, and more conservative, than any other scholar of his time or ours.

The metaphor of the margin was ingrained in Innis's thought: the periphery, not the centre; the province, not the capital; the blank edge of the page, not the text. Millions of Canadians have seen themselves as marginal, distant first from the British Empire and then from imperial America. A century ago, ambitious young Canadians moved to London to advance their careers. Now they move to New York or L.A. Only then do we here at home see them as truly successful.

Early in his life, Innis took one enormous step beyond that parochial view: he stayed home. Once taken, that step led him farther than most of us have dared to go.

'Crossings' Rewrites Slave History

From The Tyee, August 15, 2006: 'Crossings' Rewrites Slave History. Excerpt:

It's a shock to read a history that revises what had seemed carved in stone. The shock is doubled when the history throws new light on one's own book.

Simon Schama gave me such a shock in Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution. He forces us to look again at Canada's origins as well as the birth of the U.S.A. Even B.C.'s early history looks different in the light of Rough Crossings.

The winners write history, but this is an account of the losers: Britain and its loyalist supporters in the American Revolution. Schama makes us realize that the revolution was really the first American civil war. And like the second one, slavery (not tea taxes) was the critical issue.

Stalin: The Prequel

The Tyee has published my review Stalin: The Prequel. Excerpt:

One hundred and thirty years after his birth, Josef Stalin remains a present force. Saddam Hussein modelled his regime on Stalin's. Countless Russians still admire him and look back on his era as a golden age.

So his life deserves study -- for what he did to create our world, and for what he tells us about ourselves. Stalin was not a monster. He was a man capable of monstrosities, and capable of making others commit monstrosities as well. He was not the last of his kind.

An Odd, Bad, Almost Good Novel

I've just finished reading When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro's 2000 novel about Britain and Shanghai in the last days of the British Empire.

I knew nothing about it, but found the writing in the first pages very attractive: The narrator, Christopher Banks, seemed like a sober version of Bertie Wooster, living in an agreeably Wodehousian London in the 1920s.

Banks is young, educated, wealthy, and strangely determined to become a detective. He succeeds, and as he does so we get some glimpses of his expatriate boyhood in Shanghai's International Settlement during World War I—and his mysterious return to England without his parents, who have apparently been kidnapped.

The narrative appears to be written by Banks at long intervals about events that have just passed. But it seems unlikely that anyone could write such long passages at the end of a harrowing few days (or months, or years) like those Banks experiences.

Still, the plot and the settings kept me going, especially when Banks returns to Shanghai in the late 1930s to determine his parents' fate. The depiction of Shanghai as a battlefield between the Kuomintang and the Japanese is vivid; the behaviour of Banks and the other characters is impossible.

While Banks is supposed to be a famous private detective, with Shanghai's European cops at his service, his investigation is based on the assumption that his parents—kidnapped some 20 years before—have remained in the same house ever since. No one ever asks him if he's barmy to think so, and even a Chinese officer, battling the Japanese, takes time out from combat to help Banks find the house.

Ishiguro demands even more credulity from us when Banks encounters a boyhood friend, Akira, now a Japanese soldier wounded behind Chinese lines. By now I was reading only to see how much sillier the story would become.

As the odd couple scramble through the ruins, Banks behaves with the hysteria of Frederick Henry in the retreat from Caporetto in Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, yet still manages to describe his hysterics in the same calm, smooth prose.

OK, so the author thinks his hero is an idiot. But why, then, write such an elegant novel about him? And why couldn't his publisher provide an editor to have a quiet word with Ishiguro about how to rescue this silly story?

Galbraith Revisited

I reviewed Richard Parker's John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics in March 2007: Summoning Galbraith's Spirit. Excerpt:

As a postwar academic at Harvard, Galbraith argued that the concept of the ideal free market was a delusion. Instead of free individuals with perfect knowledge, exercising free choice, the market was the outcome of "countervailing power": government, corporations and labour were a form of checks and balances.

His ideas were unwelcome not only to the corporate conservatives but to economists who wanted their discipline to be a science based on mathematics. An economy run by messy political processes was very unattractive.

Galbraith further annoyed his colleagues by making his points in books and articles that any reasonably educated person could read and understand. He sold millions of copies of books like American Capitalism, The Affluent Society, and The New Industrial State. The expressions he coined, like "conventional wisdom," entered the language as useful concepts.

He didn't confine his ideas to print. In the 1970s he starred in a BBC TV series, The Age of Uncertainty, explaining the history of economics to millions who would never pick up a book.

The funniest Canadian since Leacock

Even more infuriatingly, Galbraith was funny -- probably the funniest Canadian-born writer since Stephen Leacock (also an economist).

He was funny on every level from the throwaway line (he once described a very young Chinese girl as being "of negligible age") to the satirical novel (an economics professor who becomes incredibly rich by investing against every economic fad). He ridiculed the great men of his age, and included himself among both the great and the ridiculous.

The cap on Galbraith's annoying traits was that he repudiated Disraeli's consoling promise: "While there is death, there is hope." Retirement from Harvard at 67, in 1975, scarcely slowed him down. He published five books and countless articles in his '80s, and his last book, a memoir called Name-Dropping, appeared when he was 90. In his last decade he continued to write and speak as a committed public intellectual.

Parker's biography is also an economic and political history of the United States, and an intellectual history of economics itself. Too often that history resembles the theological conflicts of Protestants and Catholics or Shias and Sunnis. We are all collateral damage in those religious wars, survivors (barely) of Nixon's corruption of Keynesian ideas, Milton Friedman's monetarism, and a host of other sectarian solutions to the problems the last sectarians created.

Galbraith lived to see them all discredited, and his own views gradually regaining respect. This book shows why Galbraith won in the end. He wasn't just too tall, too smart, too clear, too irreverent and too funny. He was also too right.

Philip Pullman's Dark Materials

From The Tyee: A Dangerous 'Golden Compass'? Excerpt:

Pullman is a brilliantly merciless storyteller. Just when you think things can't get any worse for his 12-year-old characters Lyra and Will, they get worse. They may have some special talents and tools, but they pay a high price for them. The characters are complex, plausible, and driven by understandable motives to pay that price.

He also has a wonderful imagination, shooting off ideas and images that coalesce into alternate universes full of concrete detail, from "anbaric" lights to the metallurgic skills of polar bears.

Reactionary fantasies

All fantasy is political, and here is where Pullman upsets his adversaries. Most of the fantasy epics we know and love are safely reactionary. The plots are always about restoring some dynasty to its lost throne in a picturesque country that's never experienced an election, much less a U.S.-style primary campaign. The fantasy kingdom may have evil aristocrats, wizards and priests, but the good guys will eventually win

His Dark Materials isn't about the restoration of the old order but the creation of a new one -- the overthrow of God's Kingdom and the establishment of the Republic of Heaven. This may seem like wicked Bolshevism, but it really reflects Pullman's literary influences: a couple of radicals named John Milton and William Blake.

The Curse of the CIA

A review of Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA: Curse of the CIA. Excerpt:

In 1959 or 1960, I spent three consecutive evenings in McMillan Theater on the Columbia University campus listening to former president Harry S. Truman deliver a series of speeches.

I remember the man better than what he said: a middle-sized, pink-cheeked old guy in a grey suit, speaking with a high, flat Missouri accent. I do recall his confidence, especially when he said he'd been right to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He was a likable man, and he'd fully recovered from his 1940s unpopularity. What we didn't know, and what he may not have known either, was that he had done more than to fight and win the world's only nuclear war. He had been duped into a decision that has shaped the lives of all of us on the planet since 1945, and that has ruined the lives of most of us.