Citizen Reader

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Sports

Two categories left in our exploration of Time magazine's 100 Best Nonfiction Titles list: today Sports, next time, War. YAY!*

So here's what Time had to say about the Sports category:

Ball Four, by Jim Bouton
The Sweet Science, by A.J. Liebling

Well, this is another category where Time didn't wear itself out suggesting titles. I've not read either of them, although I do like Liebling and the Ball Four book, first published in 1970 as an "inside story" about baseball, sounds pretty interesting. As long as they were going to have a sports category, I'm surprised they only listed two books, but hey, to each their own. It's a bit tricky to list what I think are the best Sports books--I already mentioned at least one in the Biography section (Pistol, by Mark Kriegel).

Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand. Yes, I know pretty much everyone has read this book already. But it's that rarest of rare nonfiction books: one that lives up to the hype. Anyone who likes a good underdog story will enjoy Hillenbrand's historical narrative about Seabiscuit, the little knobby-kneed horse that could.

The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw, by Michael Sokolove. A heartbreaking book about baseball players who make it, against all odds, to the big leagues, and then still suffer from things like drug addiction and not knowing how to handle success and money.

Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry. A particularly timely read, in light of the Penn State scandal; this is an eye-opening read about exactly how much violence and criminality people are willing to allow in their college sports program culture (warning: it's a lot, including rape, savage beatings, and shootings). The authors, journalists both, focus primarily on the University of Washington football team.

I thought about listing The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis, but I think Michael Sokolove's book covers much the same ground (impoverished youth making it through sports--spoiler alert: Darryl Strawberry's life story and struggles with drug addiction will make you cry) without as much sentimentality, and is a superior read, although I do feel The Blind Side is a very good book.

*Not yay, war; yay, we're almost done. Although I may still do a couple of lists of Investigative, Travel, and True Crime: three huge categories Time ignored, for whatever reason. I guess I can see leaving out Investigative and True Crime, but Travel? Come on.

Trash to treasure.

Maureen Stanton's Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America is just the sort of nonfiction I enjoy. It's on a subject I find interesting (antiques), although I would never go searching for or browse the shelves on that subject. It's investigative--Stanton spent years getting to know an antiques dealer named Curt Avery, even helping him set up his booth and sell (as well as watching him buy) at numerous antique shows. It's an interesting little book.

Avery's been a dealer for thirty years (he started before he was a teenager), and Stanton describes his struggle to make it out of the middle leagues of dealers and join the big players at the most prestigious sales. What's truly humbling about this narrative is how good Avery is at his work--how much he knows about both history and the objects he buys and sells--and how hard it still is for him to make a living. (His wife works a job that covers their health insurance--of course; the only way anyone can make it America, make sure at least one spouse has a job with insurance benefits). The book is both an interesting treatise on buying and selling, and a good character profile of a dealer who seems both honest and principled (two characteristics which also often seem to conspire to keep him from getting rich).

Jessa Crispin at Bookslut didn't seem to like the book much, and I'm not sure why. We found it quite a good read around here (Mr. CR read the whole thing too, and wanted to talk about it--a very rare confluence of events for Mr. CR and nonfiction). I do think at least part of the appeal of the story was watching someone do what they love, even if wasn't lucrative:

"Once, I asked Curt Avery if, after nearly twenty years, he was still having fun selling antiques. 'It seems like you are,' I said. After a long pause, he replied, 'Jeepers. It's a hard question because it's yes and no. Part of the reason I do this is because I love the stuff.' He paused. "There are days when everything is for sale, and the next day you want to jump off a bridge, but I can't imagine getting out of it. I'm too obsessed with it, to be honest with you.'" (p. 269.)

Know anyone who compulsively watches Antiques Roadshow? They might enjoy this book.

The road to hell as paved with good intentions.

I really struggled with what to title today's post. "What a fucking waste"? "War is just so completely stupid"? "Finally a war book that points out the military shit is largely beside the point"? Read Peter Van Buren's spectacularly depressing memoir We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, and you'll see why it would have made me think all of those things.

Van Buren was a State Department worker who was sent to Iraq to head up an ePRT--an "embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team." He lived there for a year, and details, in short chapters that can be read whenever you have a spare few minutes, a multitude of the stupid things he saw while there. He hits all the high points of our illustrious American liberation in Iraq: how we knocked out sewage and water treatment and electricity plants without ever building them up again; how we dropped our little Green Zone headquarters right on top of Saddam's old headquarters, nicely illustrating the whole ordeal was just a regime change, and not for the better ("Conveniently for Iraqis, the overlords might have changed but the address had not. The place you went to visit political prisoners who opposed Saddam was still the place you went to look for relatives who opposed the Americans"--p. 155); how we spent millions and billions of dollars on less than nothing, with State Dept. and military types alone handing it out willy-nilly, with no research or follow-up, simply to meet their own made-up objectives. Christ. Consider:

"Kids were always hanging around everywhere; few attended school in rural areas, and those who did went only half days because boys and girls were not allowed to go to class together as they had been under the mostly secular Saddam regime. The new Islamic Iraq we midwifed in 2003 couldn't afford to double the number of schools, so it was girls in the mornings and boys in the afternoons." (p. 83.)

That bit annoyed me but it was actually pretty innocuous; there are much more damning chapters about agriculture specialists who didn't know anything about agriculture, military types who were looking for any kind of activity that included women so they could just throw money at it and hit their "making the lives of women better" objectives, and constant, constant waste. It's an eye-opening read, if you can stand it.

100 Best-ish Nonfiction Titles: Food and Health, Part 2.

No fooling around; Health titles today (we covered Food earlier in the week). If you'll remember, here's what Time magazine had to say:

And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, by Dr. Benjamin Spock
The Joy of Sex, by Dr. Alex Comfort
The Kinsey Reports, by Alfred Kinsey
 Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective

Of those, I've only read the Shilts book, which I remember as being very interesting and well worth a read. I still think most of this list is weak, and would serve more as a "well-known reference book" list more so than a list of the "best nonfiction." Why not just throw the Merck Manual or the Physicians' Desk Reference or the DSM-IV on the list and be done with it? Here are the books I'd suggest instead:

Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, by Amy Bloom. A slim little book, packed with empathetic and fascinating stories about gender. Really. It's way more fascinating than it sounds and will blow your mind regarding the number of children born with some kind of genital, well, abnormalities isn't quite the word of I'm looking for, but issues.

Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You, by Jerome Groopman. If you're going to read a how-to book, read a good general one about understanding your own attitudes about and approaches to medicine and health care.

The Hot Zone, Richard Preston. It reads more like a thriller, but Preston's fast-paced story about the Ebola virus is both informative and scary as hell.

How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, by Sherwin Nuland. He of one of my other favorite medical books, The Doctor's Plague, explains exactly how we die and the human body breaks down. Nuland himself is a doctor and makes the details, if not more palatable, at least understandable.

Nobody's Home: Candid Reflections of a Nursing Home Aide, by Thomas Edward Gass. I've been meaning to re-read this one because it stands out in my memory more than any book about nursing homes should. I think I appreciated it because it was a thoughtful read by someone actually doing the work of caring for old people. (Narratives by honest-to-goodness workers are kind of tough to find.) None of us want to die young, so let's face it, old-age care is something we have to think about.

I know I'm missing a ton of titles; I've read a surprising amount of really good health-care narratives (Pushed, about childbirth, and Normal at Any Cost, about giving growth hormones to short kids, also come to mind, but there isn't enough room on our list here for them.) What Health titles would you suggest?

Even the word "mooncup" makes me shudder.

I honestly don't know why I read the entire book The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, by Mark Boyle.

This entire "living frugal/living without money" genre is one that I never particularly enjoy, but yet I can't stop reading them anyway. I think subconsciously I'm looking for money-saving tips that don't have anything to do with extreme couponing. I already try to spend as little money as possible (I spent the entire summer babying my one pair of shorts along, sometimes hand-washing them, so they didn't develop big holes and I could make them last through the summer), but I do not like couponing.

Unfortunately this book was an extreme version of its kind. Boyle spent a year living in the UK with absolutely no money--living in a trailer, creating his own power/electricity, using a woodstove, biking or hitching anywhere he needed to go, and doing everything he could to get the word out about moneyless living. I guess it wasn't a boring read--I did make it through the whole thing--but I can't say I really enjoyed it. There's a lot of this sort of thing:

"...if I wanted bread, I was going to have to come up with a new solution. And I did. I decided that although I loved bread, it would have to be a treat. Instead, I would sprout the grains. This means sprinkling a layer of rye grains along a couple of stacked, perforated trays and rinsing them with water twice a day until they sprout. This only takes five minutes and so is much less effort, for more nutritional gain, than making bread. Although not quite so pleasing to taste and smell!" (p. 28.)

Oh brother. It's all I can do to get through the day even when I just buy my bread like a sucker.* Experiments like this are just too extreme for me, I'll admit it. But I have to give the guy credit for trying something a little different with his life, and for writing the book about it.

*I also wouldn't be much good as a moneyless woman. Here's what Boyle has to say on certain, ahem, feminine needs: "For coping with periods without money, there is an obvious solution that even I know about: a mooncup. This is a rubber cup, which the user inserts in her vagina to collect the menstrual flow. It's held in place over the cervix by suction." (p. 180.) At the risk of sounding twelve, I've got only two words in response to that idea: icky poo.

Your daily Langewiesche.

I continue to be unsettled in my nonfiction reading, and reading in general. For some reason I am just a bit tired lately--which means I've been reading things like Agatha Christie books. Nothing really to blog about there.

So it's mainly an update today. I did finish William Langewiesche's The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, and liked it even more as I went on. The last segment in the book, on the shipbreaking industry in India (literally: they run old ships aground and then people tear them apart, manually, for the scrap steel), is nothing short of fantastic. What I really like about Langewiesche is how he doesn't really insert himself in the story, but you do get a feeling for how fascinated he is by his subjects. I envy that, kind of. Imagine being engrossed in something and being able to investigate and write about it for your job. Imagine being able to write this kind of prose:

"I went down to the ship when I could, past the ground crews who by now had grown used to my presence. At the torn bow, I climbed through the broken bilge into the huge forward cargo hold, now open to the sky. The ship was mine to wander--up precarious ladders to the main deck high above, through passageways and equipment rooms where the peeling paint and rusted steel gave evidence of the years of wandering and hard use, and ultimately of neglect. Nonetheless, I felt a sort of awe, and was never in a hurry to leave...

The workers did not seem to mind my presence, or even to wonder about it. They appeared sometimes like ghosts, moving fast and in file without speaking. They were very dirty. They were very poor. But they lacked the look of death that I had seen on the men in the Bhavnagar rerolling mill. They were purposeful. Toward the stern, where sunlight streamed through rough-cut ventilation holes and struck the oil-blackened walls, the towering engine room had the Gothic beauty of a cathedral--a monument to the forces of a new world." (pp. 238-239.)

Fantastic.

Forget about audiobooks for the time being.

I have less time for reading these days, which is good and bad. It's good because I'm busier doing other things I want to be doing (watching CRjr eat, for example, continues to be a joy) and don't want to be doing (good lord, I could mop the floor under CRjr's highchair every day and my floor would still be sticky). I can't complain about any of that.* It's bad because, well, I miss reading.

So lately I thought maybe I would get some books on audiobook, and that way I could listen to some nonfiction while I did other tasks like cleaning and cooking and even playing with CRjr. This plan, however, is failing spectacularly, for a variety of reasons.

The first book I tried was Ian Frazier's Travels in Siberia, which got great reviews. I listened to about three CDs of this one, and the book did seem interesting, but Frazier himself read it, and that was a huge mistake. His voice is okay, but he's got that over-enunciation thing that people who are not natural performers have. (Maybe natural performers have that problem too, if they're not very practiced in reading for recording.) And the subject's just not interesting enough to me to keep on keeping on. The only time I really perked up was when Frazier described meeting an American journalist in Russia who couldn't believe that Frazier was in love with the place--the journalist complained about nothing in Russia working, and he did so using a lot of "fuck"s. Now, I know that Matt Taibbi spent many years in Russia working as a journalist, and I know he loves to swear, so now I'm dying to know if that was Matt Taibbi. How can I find that out, short of emailing either author?

The other book I tried was Chris Hedges's Death of the Liberal Class, which I really wanted to read. Unfortunately, I started listening to it while I was trying to sort hand-me-down clothes from my sisters' kids for CRjr**, and while CRjr was playing in the room. And here's something I'm learning about parenting: even if you take what you think is going to be a braindead job like marking and sorting clothes, it takes just enough of your brain to make it impossible to focus on a book on tape. So I couldn't focus on the Hedges book, and it will have to go back too.

So we're back to listening to music CDs. CRjr seems relieved, particularly when I play Dan Wilson. He loves Dan Wilson.

*Okay, maybe I can complain about the cleaning. I HATE cleaning. And as a person with a high filth tolerance, it's sometimes more work to convince myself of the value of cleaning than it is to actually clean.

**Which I really appreciate, as the only thing I hate more than cleaning is shopping.

A long-awaited pleasure.

If you've read this blog for a while, or if you know me as a reader, you know that I have a little thing for author William Langewiesche.

It doesn't hurt that he's gorgeous. But mainly I love his writing. His writing to me is like the best fall day: Crisp, sharply detailed, and able to pack a lot in a small package (much like fall days are shorter than summer ones). Every time a new book of his comes out, I rush to read it, and I always learn something new. But here's a little secret: there are two books of his I haven't read: Inside the Sky, and The Outlaw Sea. I've been holding them in reserve, for a time when I really needed a "go-to" nonfiction title. This week, when I have been feeling uninspired by all other titles, I have been slowly making my way through The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, savoring each chapter like one of those last, bright, lingering fall days before the snow flies.

In The Outlaw Sea Langewiesche describes the rule of law (or lack thereof) on the world's oceans. As per usual, he makes highly technical and possibly quite boring material come alive, and he describes ships and ocean navigation in such a way that even I, a dolt in all things technical and mechanical, understandable:

"Aboard the Kristal most of the repairs consisted of chipping with hammers and chisels at heavy rust that had spread like a cancer under the paint, across the main deck and through the hull. There have been reports, difficult to substantiate but entirely plausible, that considerable and illicit welding was also being performed, and that as a result, one of the cargo tanks could not be used--a restriction that may have caused the crew to load the molasses improperly, placing severe strains on the ship's structure. It seems unlikely that this could have occurred without at least the tacit approval of the ship's management company. Be that as it may, the crew certainly knew about the Kristal's precarious condition and were glad for their jobs nonetheless." (p. 10.)

It gets a lot more technical than that, particularly when he describes the sinking, in 1994, of a passenger ferry ship, the Estonia, in the Baltic Sea. (A tragedy, and its investigation, that makes up a good chunk of the narrative.) But he's packed a lot in that paragraph, and he's made it easy to read. The whole book has been like that so far.

I'm not done with it, because I'm reading it slowly to savor. Wonderful. A tragic book but a good one to sink my teeth into as we enter beautiful, cool, and over all-too-quickly fall.

Basement Reading: Robert Sullivan

If you'll recall, I had very unstructured plans for my summer reading. I wanted to read a few books from off the bookshelves in my own basement (consisting of a mix of already-read favorites and TBR classics and reference works), and I wanted to partake in a few challenges.

So here it is, the day after Labor Day, and I didn't do one post all summer about my "Basement Reading." Typical.* Although I did fulfill my duty of participating in a challenge in July, when I took part in Thomas's very enjoyable International Anita Brookner Day challenge, and I had a really good time with that. I want to read more Brookner someday.

So it turned out I only re-read one book from my basement this summer, and it barely counts because it's barely 150 pages long--Robert Sullivan's tiny little book titled How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad. Back in the day when I was first falling in love with nonfiction (my eyes met the pages of Matthew Hart's nonfiction science title Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession across a crowded library...the book wooed me shamelessly, with smooth prose and new facts and the irresistible sensation that I was learning something at the same time I was wasting time reading...ooh! The rush of a new relationship), one of the first books that blew my reading mind was Robert Sullivan's Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. It sounds ucky but it's not, it's fascinating. I wrote a review of it for Bookslut, which they were kind enough to publish, and then I rushed off to read some other Robert Sullivan titles, and developed a huge crush on him. I developed such a crush that I actually wanted to help support him monetarily, even in a tiny way, so I bought a copy of one of his books new (which I almost never do, as I am cheap). That book was titled, ironically enough, How Not to Get Rich.

Now, trust me, I do not need a book on that subject. I have been getting not rich for more than a third of a century now and I am GOOD at it. I am the idiot who tips my change AND a dollar bill when I buy a plain coffee at the coffee shop. But in the throes of my Sullivan Crush I didn't need a reason to buy his (then) newest book. When I got it, I read it and enjoyed it, and it ended up on my basement bookshelves, which sounds sad, but is actually where I keep most of my most treasured books (we have, luckily, a quite clean and dry basement). But I don't know if I enjoyed it as much on that initial read as I enjoyed it this time. Probably because in the interim I have had a few more years in which not to get rich.

The whole volume, if you can't tell from the title, is a cheeky little spoof of advice books, many of which cover financial topics. In addition to being funny, and charming, it rings with truth (as all the best truly humorous writing does). Consider the text in the chapter headed "How to Spend the Bulk of Your Leisure Time If You Are Not Going to Get Rich, Probably Ever":

"You read. You read for pleasure. Not constantly; you want to see your friends and get outside once in a while and so on, but you want to do a lot of reading. Perhaps it sounds too simple, but reading is an important strategy in the pursuit of a lifestyle that is, monetarily speaking, not that well-off."

Ha. Sound familiar, anyone? But what I really like about this title is how it admits, basically, that the average person (and the below-average, and the above-average) is not going to get rich in their lifetime, regardless of what sort of American dream, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps bullshit we've all been taught since elementary school. It admits that, but yet it's not depressing. You actually finish this book feeling pretty good about not being rich. You feel dumb because you're not as funny and as good a writer as Robert Sullivan is, but you feel better about not being rich. That's worthwhile.

*Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes: How do you make God laugh? Make a plan.

Rainbow Pie, part 2.

So, with all the caveats out of the way, why did I find Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir so fascinating?

Well, first, because Bageant describes a world so like my own. His first chapters describe his youth growing up near his extended family and their farm in Virginia, and how his grandparents ("Pap" and "Maw") were very can-do people. I too grew up on a farm and know people who knew how to do things (and regularly did them) like raising one's own animals, hunting, butchering, raising gardens, canning food, and fixing and maintaining all the farm machinery.* So a lot of that--the missing it and not missing it, which Bageant displays, I can relate to.**

But I also like Bageant because he takes me out of my comfort area. I'm a Northern girl, and there are often things about the American South (culture, history, how anyone can stand the climate) that I don't understand. Bageant makes that world more clear for me. And he does it as a person whose ideology I respond to almost as instinctively as I often respond to Wendell Berry's.

On politics: "Today he [a Republican neighbor] would be even rarer, because he was a Republican with the common wisdom to understanding something that no Republican has ever grasped since: he realized that any wealth he might acquire in life was due not only to his own efforts, but also to the efforts of all other men combined--men who built the roads that hauled his merchandise; men who laid rail track, grew crops, drilled wells, and undertook all the other earthly labors that make society possible." (p. 52.)

On what to do now: "Ok. I'll say it so you won't have to. There ain't no goin' backwards. We certainly can't all take up horse farming or go to sowing lespedeza hay and oats. Of course not.

But the underlying theme here is loss, and that loss poses some big questions. It is at all possible to regain a meaningful, positive, and satisfying expression of character while working in such a monolithic, non-human scale of 'production'? Anybody else feel like America is just one big workhouse, with time off to shit, shower, and shop? Or is it just me?" (p. 69.)

On community: "A community with no memory of its dead is no real community, because it has no human connectivity grounded in time--just interaction. It's merely a location populated by disassociated beings. A community's inherited memory from its dead provides its spiritual and moral animation, its posterity. This is because we are humans, not aggregations of marketing or employment demographics, and are more than just a bunch of people who happen to be in the same place at the same time." (p. 111.)

I could go on and on. But I really just think you should read it. I really do. Even with its many issues. (I think Bageant should have included more family stories and a bit less class warfare discussion; some of it's uncomfortable; he concludes without providing much in the way of suggestions for change; etc.) Read it and feel free to complain to me about any of those issues, but also tell me what you THOUGHT about it. I want to know.

NOTE: Re-reading these reviews I notice I've done a terrible job of explaining why I both loved this book (and Bageant) and am conflicted about it. If you just watch this brief video of him talking (please note it's not really suitable for work), I think you'll see his anger and understand my conflict. My question after that is, how, Joe? How do you try to educate and help people? People who may or may not want education and help?

*I don't know how to do any of these things, although if forced, I could maybe plant, maintain, and harvest a garden. But it would be a half-assed garden and would mostly be eaten by bugs and bunnies, and if I had to work in it when it was much warmer than 70 degrees out I would be swearing a lot.

**These were also not people who believed in government "handouts." "Pap may have been a Democrat, but he felt free to cuss either party and its candidates with equal fervor, if he was in the mood. He didn't like Coolidge, and, though he voted for FDR twice, he was leery of parts of Roosevelt's New Deal. Particularly Social Security. He could not grasp how a man could get money in the mail at the end of the month if he had not worked during the month...After he died, a shoebox of uncashed Social Security checks was found under his bed." (pp. 35-36.) That is SO something my grandpa might have done.

Oh, Joe Bageant, I miss you.

The other memoir that blew me away this past month, along with Patti Smith's spectacular Just Kids, was Joe Bageant's Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. I have, count them, no fewer than seven bookmarks stuck in this one, waiting to remind me of some of the most interesting bits.

I spoke about Bageant a while back, when he died at the untimely age of 64. He was the author of the nonfiction title Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, in which he explored the issues of what he calls the "white underclass," and, more broadly, class issues in America in general.

This book is more a mix of personal memoir and an extended (and sometimes very angry) diatribe about class issues in this country, particularly as they apply to poor white people. Bageant should know--he grew up in a working class family that became steadily a poor working class family due to lack of jobs, health issues, and other setbacks. One cannot read Bageant without being constantly aware of the conflict in his life: this is a man who loved his grandparents' home farm, who believes people should know something about how to fix and make things in their lives, and yet also left his home region for work, travel, and, as he did from little on, to read and learn.*

The difficult fact of the matter is that I think everyone should read this book, and any book group worth their salt should discuss it. But I honestly don't know if I can tell you to do that. For one thing, there is a part early on about Bageant's Uncle Nelson, born with birth defects that affected his development and left him (as Bageant describes) childlike his entire life, that is difficult to read and accept. (I'm not going to tell you what it is because if you DO choose to read this book, I think you have to read it in context.) Secondly, Bageant does sometimes use the "n" word (in regards to race), although he only uses it when discussing its use in his surroundings while he was growing up. Personally I feel the word here is not abused, and that we're really never going to get anywhere talking about race issues until people can be honest about where and how such words are or were used--but that is a personal feeling and I know that many people can't abide the word in print AT ALL. If you're one of these people, this is not the book for you.

There: I got the tough bits out of the way first. More on what I found interesting in a future post.

*As I type this I realize how sad it is that those things are often felt in "conflict." Why isn't it possible to stay where you grew up, know how do do some work with your hands, read a bit, and still be able to make a living?

Can you spot the psychopaths among us?

As previously noted, I've been having a couple of good nonfiction weeks. I've had particular good luck with getting new books by authors I've enjoyed before.

Jon Ronson is one of my very favorite investigative writers (and a Brit to boot). Although the movie version of The Men Who Stare at Goats was awful, just awful (even with Ewan McGregor in it, and you'd better believe it hurts me to say that), Ronson's book, on which the movie was based, was weird, spectacular, and surprisingly dark underneath all its absurdity.*

So when I saw that he was coming out with a book titled The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, I knew I would have to read it. The premise is simple: How can you tell when someone is a psychopath?

Ronson became interested in the subject in a roundabout sort of way: he was contacted by a scientist who (along with other scientists) was the target of some sort of hoax. When Ronson set out to investigate the hoax (which is just the sort of weird thing Ronson seems to happily get involved in, as a matter of course), he concluded it was perpetrated by someone with pscyhopathic tendencies. His very next step is to fall in with some Scientologists,** who lead him to a man in a mental hospital in Great Britain who swears he only acted crazy to get out of prison time, but now the psychiatrists have him pegged as a psychopath and won't let him out.

Confused? Don't be. It all makes sense, in a stranged sort of way, and before you know it, you're along with Ronson on a journey exploring what it means to be a psychopath, how psychopaths are identified, how they've been "treated" through the years, and whether or not most successful CEOs are, in fact, psychopaths. I enjoyed the whole thing, very much. Primarily just because I enjoy Jon Ronson. Consider his early ramble through the DSM-IV-TR (the diagnostic textbook/manual in which mental disorders are described):

"'I could really be on to something,' I thought. 'It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it.'

I closed the manual.

'I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders,' I thought. I opened the manual again.

And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones." (p. 34.)

Tee hee. It's another good book from Ronson, ridiculous but with an undercurrent of the deadly serious and darkly disturbing.

*I don't believe I've read his first book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, or else I've forgotten it. I'll have to get that one soon.

**Evidently Scientologists do not believe in psychiatry, which is (again, in a roundabout way) how Ronson ended up talking with them.

Retail (non)therapy.

So what's the subject I'm strangely fascinated by?

It's retail. Or, as a close second, food service. I will read anything about the retail environment, even fiction, which is how I found myself with Caitlin Kelly's journalistic memoir titled Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail.

Since the majority of my working life has been spent in jobs where I waited on people, I'm always fascinated to read other people's takes on that subject, and about the service environment in general. One of my favorite nonfiction reads is Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping--Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer, and Beyond, which is a fascinating exploration of how people shop (I read the previous edition, so I may have to check this one out again). In Kelly's book, her take on shopping is a bit more personal: she spent more than two years working in a North Face store.

In a way, this is one of those "year in the life" books; Kelly took the retail job purely to supplement her journalism income and worked only two shifts a week (eventually downsizing to one shift). That's part of the problem here. Normally I enjoy these types of books, regardless of whether they're memoirs or investigative titles (this one is a mix of both), but this one feels phoned in. And I'm sorry, but if your entire service experience is comprised of two shifts (and then one) per week for a couple of years, you have not been a true service worker. Work a few service jobs at the same time, which is invariably what you have to do to make any money, and then come back and talk to me.

Kelly's day job is as a journalist, and she freely admits she got the job just to help supplement her paycheck and to get out of the apartment a couple of times a week. All I can say is: ho-hum. I was no huge fan of Barbara Ehrenreich's similar (but full-time, and more muckraking) title Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, but at least Babs gave it more of a college try than this author.*

The writing wasn't terrible, but a lot of times I felt I wasn't getting the whole story. This is the story she tells of how she was hired: "The money, of course, was sobering, stunningly low. It was less than I had earned as a teenage lifeguard in the 1970s--$9 an hour for part-timers, $11 for full-time, with no commission or bonus, but with a healthy discout on company products. And I would have to pay $8 just to park in the mall's lot for my shift--in effect losing the first hour of my labor. I asked for $11 an hour, working two days a week, Tuesdays from one to nine p.m. and Wednesdays during the day..." (pp. 16-17).

Huh? Never have I worked a service job where I didn't just take the pay they were offering. Are you telling me I could have asked for more? Does that work? Well, we'll never know, because Kelly never finished that story, so I never learned how her boss responded to that request. She also periodically alludes to challenging customers, but she never really describes any of her encounters with either scary or demeaning members of the public (and trust me, there's plenty of them around).

So yes, due to its subject matter, I read the whole thing. But did I enjoy it? Not really.

*By the way, a REALLY good title of this type ("I worked a shitty job to see what it was like") is Gabriel Thompson's Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do.

Matt Taibbi Week: Day 5

Well, I certainly hope you've enjoyed Matt Taibbi Week. Today, just a quick rundown of his books and his author bio for you. Do give him a try sometime. I know he gave me a lot to smile about this week.*

Taibbi's first book is titled The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia (co-authored with Mark Ames), and is about his years spent in Russia, much of it editing an independent periodical called eXile. This is the only book of his I haven't read.

Then there's Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season, a campaign diary of sorts from the 2004 election.

Next, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire, another collection of political and cultural essays.

In 2008 he published The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, about his experiments going undercover in various religious and political subcultures. Promoting this book is when he did the great Daily Show segment about casting out the demon of anal fissures. (I liked this book a lot too.)

And then there was 2010's Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, one of my favorite books of the year and a truly depressing read. You should still read it, though.

Now check out one of the guy's author bios. I'm sorry, you've just got to like a guy with a bio like this (although this is an early one, and some info is outdated): "Matt Taibbi is a columnist for New York Press and a contributing editor to Rolling Stone. He worked for ten years as a journalist in Russia, where he edited the satirical magazine The eXile. He has also played baseball for the Red Army and professional basketball in Mongolia."

Come on. Professional basketball in Mongolia? I love this guy.

*A friend of mine once opined that she saw him speak at some sort of program and she was disturbed by how chipper he was. As in, how can a guy who knows all this and writes such seemingly cynical things about politics, culture, and finance possibly be chipper? Well, that just made me like him better. (I think he recently got married too, and if that's making him chipper, well, that's just too cute for words.) That reminds me of when Stephen Colbert was interviewing the great William Langewiesche about his book The Atomic Bazaar, and Colbert asked him how he could sleep (knowing what he knows about the inevitability of everyone, even nations that aren't the U.S.--gasp--getting nuclear weapons). Langewiesche didn't bat an eyelash as he answered, "I sleep very well." I don't know why I find that comforting but I do.

Matt Taibbi Week: Day 4

For the last few weeks, I've had the good fortune to actually get back to doing some reading. Mr. CR is aces about looking after CRjr, so lately I've grabbed a few minutes when they're having quality pop-and-son time to read a bit. Imagine my disappointment when I kept reading things that were okay, but weren't exactly had to put down, either. Until I got Matt Taibbi's Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

This book is another collection of political essays, with a few others on such topics as Hurricane Katrina (the essay on that subject is UNBELIEVABLE) and the teaching of intelligent design in schools thrown in for good measure. Published in 2007, it's amazing how long ago some of these stories seem. Jack Abramoff? Does anyone even remember Jack Abramoff? (We should--man, that guy pulled a lot of shit.) And yet, the more things change, the more they stay the same:

"Both sides were right, obviously, which made for the usual perfect comedy of American politics: two entrenched camps determined not to communicate, but still engaged in an extravagantly violent public waste of time and money, with no resolution visible, or even imaginable." (p. 92.)

Sounds like a paragraph about the current debt ceiling fight, doesn't it? It's actually about the 2005 legal case Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District et al. and the teaching of intelligent design.

And, anybody miss George W. Bush? This is how Taibbi sums up Bush's 2005 tour to announce victory in Iraq:

"God bless George Bush. The Middle East is in flames and how does he answer the call? He rolls up to the side entrance of a four-star Washington hotel, slips unobserved into a select gathering of the richest fatheads in his dad's Rolodex, spends a few tortured minutes exposing his half-assed policies like a campus flasher, and then ducks back into his rabbit hole while he waits for his next speech to be written by paid liars. If that isn't leadership, what is?" (p. 108.)

I enjoyed his previous book about the 2004 election cycle, Spanking the Donkey, but I think I liked this one even better. And I haven't even told you yet about his masterful essays explaining how Congress (doesn't) work and every idea you have about how bills and amendments get passed is laughably wrong--those are titled "Four Amendments and a Funeral" and "The Worst Congress Ever" and you just plain simply have to read them for yourselves.

Matt Taibbi Week: Day 3, or Happy Birthday, Thomas Friedman, you pig.

Today, a word about who might enjoy reading Matt Taibbi's books.

Taibbi is a political and cultural reporter who is not shy about sharing his opinions. But the great thing about Matt Taibbi is not so much that he shares his actual political opinions; rather, it is that he is not afraid to say opinionated things about all political candidates and many other figures in the news, including head finance honchos and other people in power (as well as his fellow journalists). This makes him, in my mind, one of the few actually "objective" reporters out there. I don't actually know who Matt Taibbi would vote for, or if he even votes, although he did seem rather fond of Dennis Kucinich in his book Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season. A few guidelines, then, for offering Matt Taibbi in reader's advisory situations, or when recommending books to friends:

1. Do not give him to true believer Republicans. That's not going to work.

2. Do not give him to true believer Democrats. That's not going to work either, although he probably does hew more closely in personal politics to what would be Democratic principles, if Democrats had any principles.

3. Do not give him to readers who can't stand swearing. This is the man who called Alan Greenspan a "one in a billion asshole," after all.

4. Do give him to people who have voted for candidates like Kucinich, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, etc. Any candidate who the media brands as someone who doesn't stand a chance, in short.

5. Do give him to fans of Hunter S. Thompson (Taibbi also makes reference to his own personal drug use, which I don't particularly need but for which I don't particularly blame him). Readers who enjoy Joe Bageant may like him as well.

6. Do give him to readers who enjoy learning about the media; Taibbi always gives great behind-the-scenes information about how journalism really works (or doesn't).

7. Do give him to any readers who are tired of the political choices in America, and who need a laugh. Give him to anyone who might agree with this statement of his, made in Spanking the Donkey: "I believe America's greatest problem is its incivility, its intolerance to new ideas, its remorseless hatred of weakness and failure, and the willingness of its individual citizens to submerge their individual cowardice within the vicious commerce-driven standards of our national self-image." (p. 144.)

7. Last but not least, do not give him to fans of Thomas Friedman. Taibbi is not a fan. And I'm particularly happy to post those links today, on Thomas Friedman's birthday. Happy Birthday, and many more to you, Thomas Friedman!

So there you have it, with only one short birthday wishes digression, a handy-dandy guide to Reader's Advisory involving Matt Taibbi.

Matt Taibbi Week: Day 2

A long time ago, after he did a hilarious interview on The Daily Show to promote it, I read Matt Taibbi's book The Great Derangement, and enjoyed it very much. He also blew me away last year with his title Griftopia, which was the first book I read that really helped me understand the financial events of the last few years. So last week when I wanted to read some more of his books, I picked up Smells like Dead Elephants and Spanking the Donkey: Dispatches from the Dumb Season from the library.

Today's quote comes from Spanking the Donkey, a compilation of some of his journalism pieces published during the years 2003 to 2004 (in Rolling Stone, The Nation, and New York Press, among others). This is not my favorite book of Taibbi's, but the following quote IS one of my favorite paragraphs of his of all time:

"As it stands, the Republicans are tougher than the Democrats because they will not hesitate to bomb the hell out of anyone, provided that the target cannot meaningfully fight back. But here's the thing: the Republicans are not interested in ruling other countries, any more than they are interested in ruling the United States. All they really want to do is make money. They only use military force insofar as it is necessary to (a) extract another country's resources, and (b) ensure that these countries become and remain markets for American products. Beyond those parameters, they're amazingly squeamish about using the military." (p. 135.)

I hear ringing. I think it's the ring of truth.

Now, a word to the wise: just because that paragraph admirably sums up the Republicans, don't assume that Taibbi agrees with the Democrats either. More tomorrow on who might enjoy reading Matt Taibbi, and more on this book later in the week.

Matt Taibbi Week: Day 1

I have been having a cranky summer.

There is no good reason for this. My life is better than I deserve and than I have any right to expect. But still, I seem to be having more and longer periods of funk. A lot of this is personal and a lot of it is my own laziness, but some of it also comes from listening to NPR while CRjr and I eat our meals. I try not to pay any attention to politics anymore, but the more I hear things like the Republicans sticking to their line on not raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, in order to "encourage the economy" (yeah right), the more I want to puke. And here's something else I know: the Democrats are no better. I always feel toward the Democrats the way Everybody Loves Raymond's Debra often felt about her husband Ray: "Idiots."

And then, like a sparkling little beam of sunshine, into my funk came Matt Taibbi.

For weeks I've been reading nonfiction that didn't particularly set my world on fire. I've been reading a lot of okay books, but I keep finding myself about 100 to 200 pages in and not particularly needing to finish the book. This is not a good sign. So, because I knew I liked Matt Taibbi, I requested some of his earlier books from the library to (hopefully) give myself a reading treat. It worked! I've been reading Taibbi all week and let me just say, I LOVE the guy. I want Matt Taibbi to run for president, except Matt Taibbi would be too smart to run for president.

So all this week, you're just going to have to bear with me as I share some of my favorite Taibbi quotes. In the meantime, make sure you're reading his blog, too.

Wow, I forgot dating was THIS bad.

I'm a total sucker for investigative/"year in the life" books. Even when I don't particularly enjoy them, I almost always feel compelled to finish them. This was the case, this past weekend, with Rachel Machacek's The Science of Single: One Woman's Grand Experiment in Modern Dating, Creating Chemistry, and Finding Love.

Machacek, who lives in Washington DC and works for a trade magazine, decided that she would undertake a year's worth of power dating--leaving no stone unturned* in her search for "the one." During her quest she enrolled in online dating services, attended singles events and mixers, paid dating services**, committed to dating in other cities, read a pile of dating advice books, and hired dating coaches.

I'll let you read it and find out if she finds her "One," but let me just say this: if the guys she dates are representative, wow, it's a scary dating world out there. Although I wasn't crazy about the author as a character (she did seem a little picky, I'll admit it, and her insistence on immediate and overpowering chemistry was a bit off-putting after a while), she did make me laugh a few times. Consider:

 "He's a good kisser, but the chemistry has waned at exactly the same rate that my buzz has worn off. It's gone by the time he goes for the boob grab, awkwardly reaching under my seat belt that's still fastened. There's a time and place for boob grabbing, and when you are thirty-five years old, you should know when and where that is." (p. 38.)

Ha. (Funny sad.) Although I can't find the page right now, later on she decides that guys should really be taught the aforementioned proper place and time in health class, as they are all helpless at mastering a properly timed boob grab. I totally agree.

I'm sitting here trying to think of some pithy way to sum this one up, but nothing's really coming to me. It's that kind of read--okay but not really anything to write home (or on one's blog) about.

*It seems like this literally sometimes, as many of the guys she dates seem to have slithered out from under a primordial rock somewhere.

**She paid one company, It's Just Lunch, $1300 for fourteen date match-ups. Holy cow. I need to get into the dating advice business.

Pity the girls.

I didn't particularly care what sex CRjr turned out to be, but after reading Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, I'm just as glad he's a boy.

Not that there's anything all that shocking in this volume. Orenstein, the mother of a daughter and the author of other books on girls and culture, set out to explore some of the cultural forces working on girls today. Throughout her book she covers the Disney princesses (as a money-making juggernaut), Miley Cyrus, the nonsensical forces that coerce girls into wanting to be older younger and then stay younger older (good luck with that), "grrl power" in the 90s, tiny tot beauty pageants, and "mean girls" on Facebook and other social media.

Sound a bit disjointed? Well, it is--which is my sole criticism of the book. It seems a little scattershot, but I think that's because this is a topic that's near to Orenstein's heart. I get the feeling she's trying to work out how to raise her own daughter amid all these cultural forces, and that's distracting her a bit from constructing a more linear narrative here. But it's still an interesting book, and the overall picture reflects something my sister's always quoting from someone: you may try to do things differently, but by and large you end up raising your kids like your neighbors do, just because that's the everyday milieu you're all in together. Sigh.

 

What I particularly like about Orenstein is that she does some research, asks some questions, and still puts her own personal stamp on the material. Consider this, from her conclusion:

"Meanwhile, the notion that we parents are sold, that our children are 'growing up faster' than previous generations, that they are more mature and sophisticated in their tastes, more savvy in their consumption, and there is nothing we can (or need) do about it is--what is the technical term again?--oh yes: a load of crap. Today's three-year-olds are no better than their predecessors at recognizing when their desires are manipulated by grown-ups. Today's six-year-olds don't get the subtext of their sexy pirate costumes. Today's eight-year-olds don't understand that ads are designed to sell them something. And today's fourteen-year-olds are still desperate for approval from their friends--all 622 [on Facebook] of them." (p. 183.)

That pretty much sums it up, I think. If you've got girls, or you're interested in parenting culture in general, I'd give this one a read.