Tag Archives: non-fiction

2020: Reviewing a Year in Reviews

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2021.

In a year like no other in living memory, many of us turned to the comfort that books can offer when the world is too much. Unlike many of my friends and social network connections, I continued to go into an office every workday throughout the year, so I never found myself with the kind of enforced leisure time that so many encountered during 2020, but I still found myself burrowed in books—either reading them or listening to them—whenever possible, and I will own up to using them as an escape mechanism. Most I read to review, either in my bimonthly column for Late Last Night Books or for my regular reviewing gig for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

In the hotly contested election year that was, my reviewing skewed heavily political, starting with Unmaking the Presidency, which was released on the first day of the January 2020 impeachment trial—and before virtually any of us had heard of the other issue that would consume our year, namely covid—and ending with What Were We Thinking, my review of which came out on election day. For the Independent’s “Best Book I Read in 2020,” I made a hard choice and said mine was OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say?, “because America needs to re-learn its civics, and this is a great place to start.”

In a bit of serendipity, I read three books in row that fit neatly together in a feminist trio of echoed themes: Recollections of My Non-Existence, Too Much, and Why Fish Don’t Exist. In other parallels, The Doctor of Aleppo reminded me of earlier Elliot Ackerman novels, while Ackerman’s latest novel, Red Dress in Black and White, had stunningly eerie parallels to the moment into which it was released, at the start of this summer’s protests for racial justice.

So not even the fiction I read this year was exactly escapist. Let us hope that 2021 doesn’t need as much of an escape, that we can emerge from our protective crouch and rejoin the world around us as vaccines take hold and help us to beat back the darkness. And, as this column is posted on Inauguration Day, I also send out thanks for a speedy return to empathy, understanding, and competence. And may your 2021 reading bring you joy just for itself, just as it should be.

Books I read to review, with links to the reviews:

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era, Carlos Lozada

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

The Boy in the Field, Margot Livesey

OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? A Non-Boring Guide to How Our Democracy is Supposed to Work, Ben Sheehan

It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, Stuart Stevens

Nothing is Wrong and Here is Why: Essays, Alexandra Petri

Humankind: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman

Red Dress in Black and White: A Novel, Elliot Ackerman

Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, Valerie Trouet

Galileo and the Science Deniers, Mario Livio

Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller

Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, Rachel Vorona Cote

Recollections of My Non-Existence, Rebecca Solnit

Little Constructions: A Novel, Anna Burns

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

Coventry: Essays, Rachel Cusk

Ordinary Girls: A Memoir, Jaquira Diaz

The Doctor of Aleppo, Dan Mayland

The Ghost in the House, Sara O’Leary

Known By Heart, Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Books reviewed together in my column Brief but Indelible

Midnight at the Organporium, Tara Campbell
How to Sit, Tyrese Coleman

Books Reviewed together in my column 2020 Summer & Fall Reading Round-up

Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency, Bea Koch
The Brief and True Report of Temperance Flowerdew, Denise Heinze
When We Were Young and Brave, Hazel Gaynor
Blacktop Wasteland, S. A. Cosby
The Vultures, Mark Hannon
They’re Gone, E. A. Barres

Books I read to prepare for my interview with Louis Bayard at the virtual 2020 Gaithersburg Book Festival:

Courting Mr. Lincoln
Roosevelt’s Beast
Lucky Strikes
Mr. Timothy

Books I read or listened to for sheer pleasure:

Salt the Snow, Carrie Callaghan
The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown
Milkman, Anna Burns
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel

Books I read and chose not to review:

Butch Cassidy, Charles Leerhsen
A Woman Alone, Nina Laurin

Books still in progress at the end of the year:

Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow
Blood Dark Track: A Family History, Joseph O’Neill
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Book Review: What Were We Thinking

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on Election Day, November 3, 2020.

What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era

Carlos Lozada

Simon & Schuster

272 pp.

In July 2015, early in Donald Trump’s campaign for president, Carlos Lozada — himself early in his role as nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post — proposed a project in which he would “binge-read a selection of the candidate’s books published since the 1980s.” (Apparently, 12 books bear the president’s name as author. Who knew?)

As it turned out, Lozada has ended up reading around 150 books written about Trump and the Trump era, which he notes is “just a fraction of the Trump canon.”

The resulting collection of critiques forms What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era. Since so many of these books were banged out quickly in order to capture the immediate zeitgeist — and to cash in on the outrage felt by the portion of the population that would actually read books — Lozada notes that a good percentage of them lack solid analysis or a longer view of the lasting effects on our American experiment.

Of the various categories, he notes, “The resistance lit can be among the least inspiring subgenres of this era.” Still, he has found a number of books to have gained a bit of gravitas as time goes on, and to have proven worthy of further thought and consideration. In fact, “The most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.”

Lozada’s focus in pulling this book together is to “preserve a snapshot of how we grappled with the Trump era in real time. I want to remember what I thought about it, too.” So the title isn’t a form of asking, “How stupid could we be?” Instead, the author is genuinely trying to capture what we, collectively, were thinking as these events unfolded over four years.

He uses his chapters to organize books by theme, such as “Heartlandia” (a romp through earnest and lengthy dissections of “the Trump voter,” native to “Trump country” — wherein a single Trump voter, Ed Harry, is featured in three books), “True Enough,” and “Russian Lit.”

In the chapters, Lozada weaves together discussions of the books grouped under that particular heading, comparing and contrasting, playing them off each other, or seeing how they coalesce to form a larger argument. Most helpfully, at the end of each chapter, he lists the bibliography of all the titles he’s been discussing.

That Lozada is an immigrant adds an extra dimension to his critique of these Trump-era works. He describes himself as having “the zeal of a new American” and notes:

“The 2016 presidential election was my first as a U.S. citizen and voter, and Trump’s rise in national politics has coincided almost exactly with my time as a book critic. The demands of both literature and citizenship will forever shape the way I view this presidency.”

Fans of Lozada’s critiques in the Post can look forward to a longform version of his cogent, thoughtful, and comfortably familiar tone, as though he is exploring his thoughts on these books over a leisurely lunch with friends. He doesn’t give a pass to lazy, self-indulgent writing or poorly supported arguments from either side of the partisan divide. Authors need to bring their A-game for their efforts to get Lozada’s approving nod.

One that does is Yuval Levin’s A Time to Build, which Lozada calls “that rare work of the Trump era — the book I didn’t realize I was hoping to read.” Levin argues that we should be rebuilding institutions for the value of the normative behavior they impose on their members.

That might seem a counterintuitively restrictive argument, but the overarching question Levin feels those members should ask is, “Given my role here, how should I act?” It’s a question we might beg our attorney general or senate majority leader to ask himself, as much as we would the president.

Another book Lozada points to is A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy by Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, whose antidote to what ails us is similar to Levin’s: Get back to the basics of how our public processes are supposed to work:

“This is the Trump presidency as a teachable moment for a democracy that has forgotten its civics lessons or, remembering them still, has decided they don’t matter.”

In “The Conservative Pivot,” Lozada voices my exact thoughts in considering the flood of books from Never Trumpers. He notes that “it took the nomination, election, and presidency of Donald Trump” for them to “think to interrogate the conservative dogma they’d long defended. Only with Trump did they begin to reconsider their roles in feeding a frenzied base.”

Indeed, I have often imagined that if we had dodged the Trump bullet in 2016 and were currently in election season for Hillary Clinton’s second term — an alternate reality in which we would now be down to six SCOTUS justices given Mitch McConnell’s pledge never to bring a Clinton nominee to a vote, and faced with a U.S. covid-19 death toll of, say, 3,000 — these same folks would still be employing the scorched-earth tactics against Democrats they’ve used for years and telling themselves it’s for the greater good.

I’ve read only a tiny minority of the books Lozada cites, including two I reviewed for the Independent: Katy Tur’s Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History and Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes’ Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office. The latter finds its way into Lozada’s epilogue, in which he lists the dozen books he finds most illuminating of their subject, the “works that have best helped me make sense if this time, the ones I suspect I’ll revisit long after the Trump era has become a subject for works of history.”

Here’s hoping that period starts at 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2021.

Book Review: Enemy of the People

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 21 September 2018.

Book Title: Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy

Recently, I had occasion to use a quote from Washington Post executive Editor Marty Baron: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.” He uttered those words last October while he and Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, were at the National Press Club filming an edition of “The Kalb Report” with the host, veteran journalist and author Marvin Kalb.

The topic under discussion was freedom of the press, and Baron was responding to the idea that his newspaper is “at war” with the current administration. While Baron, famously unflappable, appeared almost sanguine about the state of U.S. journalism in the face of endless presidential vitriol, his interviewer, Kalb, was not. In fact, he was clearly alarmed.

That sense of alarm comes through palpably and unapologetically in Kalb’sEnemy of the People: Trumps’s War on the Press, the New McCarthyism, and the Threat to American Democracy. The author makes this clear right up front, answering in the affirmative to his own question, “could I, after all these years, drop my usual dedication to objective journalism and, for probably the first time in my professional life, tell the public what I truly felt about Trump and his approach to the press?”

In fact, he does not confine his opinion to that singular element, as evidenced by such passages as this one: “The partisan split, which had divided American politics for decades, only widened further as Trump and his troops stormed into Washington, taking the nation and the world hostage to his chaotic, authoritarian style of leadership.” When it comes to throwing off journalistic objectivity for the first time in a 60-year career, Kalb has decided to go all in.

Arguably, if any living journalist deserves to do so, it’s Kalb, who interrupted work on his three-part memoir to produce this slender volume. Old enough to have met Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow during the brief post-Stalin “thaw” of 1956, when Kalb was a young translator at the U.S. Embassy, he has witnessed and reported on enough modern history to have earned the opportunity to offer his unvarnished perspective.

In a stunning bit of timing, Kalb had already decided to offer his opinions on the president and the press in a speech he was to give at the Cosmos Club on February 16, 2017. That was the same day Trump tweeted that the press “is the enemy of the American People.” For Kalb, those words, “enemy of the people,” favored by dictators throughout world history, served as his red line. He rewrote the opening of his speech, and the battle was joined.

It’s worth noting that Kalb was a target of the last U.S. president who had an especially ugly relationship with the press: Richard Nixon. Nixon had Kalb’s phone wiretapped and his office ransacked, and yet Kalb feels strongly that there is something more dangerous about this administration even than that one.

Another crucial entry in Kalb’s bona fides is his distinction as being the last of the journalists recruited by Edward R. Murrow — “Murrow’s Boys” — to join CBS News. The bulk of this book focuses on the parallels between junior Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy and Donald J. Trump, and examines the determined reporting led by Murrow and his team to shine a scalding light on McCarthy’s anti-Communist rampage, which eventually led to the senator’s downfall.

Beyond sharing the no-holds-barred lawyer Roy Cohn, McCarthy and Trump share any number of other unsavory traits and abetting environmental factors, including a legislative branch that has misplaced its spine. Both men use the press to their advantage, lie egregiously, and play to the darkest impulses of their listeners. Both are wildly popular with their followers, seemingly untouchably so.

It’s as though Cohn is describing his later client when he spoke of McCarthy as being “impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse…He would neglect to do important homework…He was selling the story of America’s peril.”

The parallels are useful, but they only go so far. Murrow had a long-standing relationship of trust with the American people, having brought the Blitz alive for them — almost single-handedly creating on-location radio and later television reporting as he did so — and then giving them on-the-ground reporting during World War II. And he kept his powder dry until he felt his team was fully prepared to make the case against McCarthy and his tactics.

And though McCarthy hitched his fortunes to the hottest topic of the time to ride to prominence, he was in the end a one-trick pony. This allowed Murrow and others the relative luxury of having a single area on which to focus audience attention. In contrast, the current president has journalists playing daily — even hourly — Whack-a-Mole, where the shifting, unending outrages lead to a sort of numb exhaustion.

It’s been a long time since America has had an Ed Murrow or a Walter Cronkite to speak to the entire nation from a place of trust. If McCarthy’s moment had come in an age of social media and 24-hour cable news playing to splintered, partisan audiences — well, that would be what we have now, the raging demagogue, but this time with no trusted Murrow-like newsman to bring him to heel.

The other unfortunate parallel between McCarthy and Trump is that both are exceedingly good at selling newspapers and driving up TV news ratings. Kalb quotes political reporter Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune saying, “McCarthy was a dream story. I wasn’t off page one for four years.”

In Kalb’s discussion with Baron and Baquet, both guests acknowledged their respective papers’ return to solid financial ground after a number of rocky years; neither one addressed the role that Trump’s virtual ownership of the news cycle may have played in the health of the papers’ balance sheets. Could Trump be right that the media needs him as much as he needs them?

Kalb has written this book as something of a journalists’ call to arms, reminding them that determined reporters can and do make a difference in rooting out and spotlighting corruption, and in holding our leaders accountable to the people they represent. On August 15, 300 newspapers nationwide published editorials to push back against this idea that the news media is the enemy of the people, rather than being one of the pillars of democracy.

Which brings me back to why I was using Marty Baron’s quote. It was for a poster I carried at a march, in memory of my oldest friend and long-time newsman, John McNamara, one of the five people killed at the Capital Gazette for the sole reason that he worked for the newspaper. So it’s not a big stretch for me to agree with Kalb’s final sentences: “And, so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the ‘enemy of the people’ is not the press. It is you.”

Requiem

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This column originally appeared in Jenny’s “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on July 5, 2018.

I have no memory of a time when I didn’t know John McNamara. I was eighteen months old to his two and half years when my family moved into our little Cape Cod whose backyard touched catty-corner with his. He and his siblings went to Catholic school while my brother and I went to the public school across the street, but we spent virtually every day of our summers together as we grew up.

In about 1971, which would make me nine and John ten, a handful of us — including my brother Chris, John’s brother Tom, and our friend Thomas — decided to put out a newspaper. Hanging out on our screened porch, we wrote copy by hand and typed it up on an old manual typewriter; copies were made using carbon paper. We put out a few issues by the end of the summer. So John started in journalism even earlier than you may have heard.

Of John, I can truly say that we have been lifelong friends.

(The photo above shows him at an early 90s Halloween party dressed as Fred Flintstone, something for his young colleagues he would term an OCR: “obscure cultural reference.”)

He and his wife, Andrea, celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary in May, and I don’t know another two people who are a better match for each other. As Andrea recently said, their biggest argument was about which of them was the luckier to have the other. He was set to celebrate his 57th birthday at the end of this month.

Though John was unabashedly a sports guy, I can’t think of a single subject we ever talked about on which he didn’t have an informed perspective. He was a citizen of the world: knowledgeable, engaged, intellectually curious.

The last time I talked to him — Saturday, a week ago practically to the minute as I write this, at my nephew’s engagement party — we were discussing the upcoming Tuesday primaries and the endorsements his paper’s editorial staff had made. I live in Anne Arundel County, and the Annapolis paper that John wrote for, the Capital Gazette, addressed local races and candidates that matter to me.

In attempting to hold up my end of the democratic bargain of being part of an informed citizenry, I fully appreciate how lucky I am to still have a functioning local newspaper that actually covers those races.

The last time I talked to John was also five days before he and four of his colleagues were shot to death while simply trying to do their job to get that daily local paper out.

In the scant 48 hours since we learned the worst, when I manage to drag myself away from obsessively searching for and reading or watching everything I can find that mentions John, I wonder at how he and his colleagues arrived — through these most horrific circumstances — at the confluence of so many of the hot-button issues of our current moment in the American story.

I will set aside for this moment the hottest of the hot-button issues — gun violence, the one category in which the United States can claim unrivaled, zero-competition primacy — though I have always wondered at the insistence we have on calling each new mass shooting a “tragedy,” when the correct word is “massacre.”

I will even leave aside the president’s savagery of the mainstream news media, and the increasing threats of physical violence that many journalists report receiving, though I will point you to Katy Tur’s descriptions in her book Unbelieveable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History of the then-candidate whipping his crowds into “cheering about the idea of killing journalists,” a la Vladimir Putin.

Instead, in tribute to John, my focus is on the crucial, unique role that local newspapers play in maintaining our democratic process.

In his latest book, Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News, Bob Schieffer notes in alarm the dwindling number of small city papers, the ones we have traditionally counted on to keep an eye on our state and local elected officials. Perhaps even more concerning are the papers being bought up by wealthy patrons with the intent of driving a specific agenda on and off the editorial page.

It seems less and less that all politics is local, when the politics coming out of the White House and Congress consumes so much of our limited attention span, and as it becomes increasingly difficult for well-intentioned citizens to find non-partisan, fact-based information about the entire slate of candidates we vote for.

And yet, it’s our local officials who typically have the greatest immediate impact on our daily lives, from choices on local policing tactics to the manner in which to enforce federal statutes. We need local papers for their ability to focus our attention on our immediate communities, on which the rest of our world is built.

I joked with John that I subscribed to the Capital primarily to do my part to keep him employed. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a joke. In the 20 years I’ve lived in Anne Arundel County, I’ve watched in alarm as the paper continues to shrink in every figurative and literal way; it’s even printed on smaller sheets of newsprint now.

Through John, I heard the blow-by-blow of the paper’s acquisition by the larger but also struggling Baltimore Sun, and winced at the realization that the acquiring newsroom now got first dibs on the plum assignments, including the sports desk. Still, on his new beat, John continued to tell human stories, as he always had, elegantly and eloquently.

One was of a Crownsville man who, after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, crushed his assault rifles with heavy construction equipment and posted the ceremony on YouTube. Another recent story remembered the crowds that gathered in Bowie and elsewhere in Maryland 50 years ago to witness Robert Kennedy’s funeral train as it traveled from New York to Washington, DC.

But John also did his share of reporting on the local political races, his final printed story being on the projected outcome of the Prince George’s County Executive race.

For those of you who have been following the story out of Annapolis of five people who died because they worked for a newspaper, and want to know what you can do to help, here is my best advice on how to honor these people:

Subscribe to the local paper closest to you. Call them on it — in something better than four-letter words — if you find opinion leeching into their news stories, but support them in getting it right.
Do your very best to be an informed, involved, engaged citizen. It is not an easy task, but make a concerted attempt to understand who is running for which offices — county council, sheriff, board of education, judiciary — and what positions they hold on the issues they will be involved in and that you care most about.
Vote. In a democracy, choosing not to vote is never the right choice.

I will always remember John in his element, telling a story with that twinkle in his eyes, gesticulating with an open hand or a pointing finger to further the tale, getting his whole body into the telling of it. As many of his friends have noted, we could count on his dry, observant wit to cut to the heart of any issue with surgical precision. He always made me laugh.

I leave you with this thought, which comes directly from John. In one of his last Facebook posts, on June 10th, he offered this:

To anyone reading this: I cannot urge you strongly enough to see the two documentaries now out featuring Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Mr. Rogers. Seeing these two films will do you some serious good. Both are marvelous and moving. And, in these troubled times, when the forces of darkness seem to have gained the upper hand, it’s nice to be reminded that there is still justice and kindness in the world. You can thank me later…

John, I thank you now, later, and always. Godspeed.

(Read more of John’s most recent stories here. And find out more about the fund has been set up to help the victims’ families here.)

Book Review: Laughing Shall I Die

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 20 June 2018.

Here are two take-aways from Tom Shippey’s latest book: One, “Viking” was a job description, not a racial or ethnic designation; and two, a quality demanded of those Vikings was a finely honed, mordant sense of humor that perhaps we modern nine-to-five cubicle-dwellers would find difficult to understand.

That sense of humor includes composing, on the spot, even as the composer is being bitten to death by a pit-full of adders, a beautiful song that will be handed down through the ages. The song concludes with the line, “Laughing shall I die,” primarily because the dying Viking knows his sons are coming to wreak vengeance on the king who put him in the pit and will subject said king to a longer, slower, far grislier demise.

It’s pretty funny, apparently, if you’re a Viking.

For the rest of us, it’s funny because the death song’s composer is named Ragnar Hairy-breeches, and one of his avenging sons is named Ivar the Boneless. It turns out, though, that while Ragnar may be mostly the stuff of myth and legend, Ivar is not only an historical figure, he is a significant one.

As for the “Boneless” part, no one is quite sure of the nickname’s origin, but one theory is that he was being compared to a serpent — which to the Vikings meant a dragon — so it’s actually a compliment.

The author’s stated purpose in this book is to explore what gave Vikings their edge, when they had fewer people and resources than most of the populations they came up against, as they swept across Britain and mainland Europe into Russia and the Middle East over a distinct 300-year period. He argues that their edge was “the Viking mindset. To put it bluntly, it’s a kind of death cult.” Their disdain of death made them hard to beat on and off the field of battle.

Shippey also notes that his book is meant for “the reading public.” What’s interesting, then, is that Shippey appears to be using his general lay reader — who should be forgiven for not being up on the latest battles within the learned academia of Viking lore — to engage in an argument with scholars on the other side of the divide (one of whom is his former tutor).

The effect is a bit like stopping by a friend’s house and finding yourself used as a go-between in an argument you’ve blundered into (“Could you tell him that?” “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe she should know…”), when you all you wanted was some wine.

To summarize his side of the spat, Shippey believes that modern academia finds its delicate sensibilities affronted by the less culturally refined aspects of the marauding Vikings, and has worked to ignore, bowdlerize, explain away, and generally discount what it sees as a cartoon version of the Viking ethos. These academics compare Viking legend with the overblown mythology of America’s Wild West. Shippey works to dismantle that view.

To do so, he draws heavily upon the great sagas, from which we derive much of our knowledge of the ancient Norse traditions, culture, and religion. Many of those sagas are thought to be far older than the Viking period itself, which is dated to 793, the point at which the outside world became aware of the pillaging Norseman — vikingr, or marauder.

Before written language, the sagas and traditions of eddic and skaldic poetry provided exceptionally well-developed oral histories of Scandinavia, embellished, of course, with many supernatural elements. Eventually, those oral histories were written down by Icelanders and then rediscovered by the outside world at the end of the Middle Ages.

In Viking lore, great deaths are assessed based on how stoic the victim is and what laconic wit he shows as he goes down. One Bui the Broad, having had his lower jaw hacked off, is recorded for posterity as having said (hmm — that seems like a bit of a trick), “The Danish women in Bornholm won’t think it so pleasant to kiss me now.”

The first part of Laughing surveys four sets of characters and their stories to give us an up-close feeling for the well-known Viking heroes of the old sagas. Chapter five, for example, is called “Egil the Ugly and King Blood-axe: Poetry and the Psychopath.”

Part II gives a geographical view of the vast reach of Viking hegemony. Here is where the legends begin to morph into historical reality, and we start to grasp the enormity of Scandinavian influence on the British Isles, the Continent, Russia, and even the Middle East.

Among Shippey’s insights are that Vikings made more successful inroads in England than in Ireland because England had an established bureaucratic infrastructure. There, the Vikings simply eliminated a handful of rulers and stepped into the open slots. Ireland was too chaotic to deal with in a similar fashion; there was no operation to take over.

Part III describes in detail a few of the great sagas, such as Njal’s Saga, to highlight particular aspects of the Viking mindset. The problem is that setting the context requires a long lead-in, which — much like having to explain a joke — drains the energy from the stories.

And therein lies the larger problem: This material begs for a narrative-nonfiction approach, to get blood pumping through the descriptions and perhaps engage the readers’ imaginations more successfully.

Though Shippey tries to keep things jaunty with some of his descriptions, many details are too pedantically academic; it feels as though he’s still playing to his old tutor. As it is, Shippey may simply inspire his readers to binge-watch “The Vikings” (both the TV series and movie) so they can see what they’ve been missing.

Book Review: The Restless Wave

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on June 7, 2018.

Staring down one’s mortality has a way of sharpening focus. We’ve all heard stories recounting deathbed reassessments of choices made, of stinging regrets, and of the urgency to make amends while there’s still time.

And though it’s true that John McCain produced this book under the ticking clock of a brain cancer diagnosis, the reader senses it’s not significantly different than if he’d written it in the pink of health.

McCain fully owns both his failures and his successes, makes no excuses, and begs no forgiveness. He uses this book to record his version of crucial events of the last 20 or so years, but also, as he says, “I want to talk to my fellow Americans a little more if I may.”

It’s worth considering what he has to say. He may side-step some issues, and no one writes a memoir to make themselves look bad, but it’s hard to argue that he is not sincerely considering what’s in the best interests of Americans as citizens of the world.

This is the seventh book that McCain has co-authored with his longtime assistant, Mark Salter, which is perhaps how they were able to pull it together so quickly. While they spend time dissecting McCain’s defeat in the 2008 presidential race — explaining how he was argued out of choosing his good friend Joe Lieberman as his running mate, while never once impugning Sarah Palin — most of the book focuses on the U.S. involvement in the various conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; foreign relations with the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping; and the urgent need to focus on human rights both worldwide and at home.

As chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain travels widely and frequently. He tries to make all trips bipartisan and uses the time and forced closeness to build personal relationships across the aisle. He makes the effort to see for himself the conditions on the ground in places both widely known and obscure so that he can speak from a more deeply informed position.

He’s unafraid to remind foreign officials where their countries are falling short, particularly on human rights and political freedom, whether or not we consider those countries important to U.S. interests. It is rarely difficult to understand where McCain stands on any subject.

Consider, for example, the subject of torture — or, because no euphemism is oblique enough that we can’t make it more so by creating an acronym for it, EIT (enhanced interrogation techniques). Beyond his own personal experiences informing his feelings on the matter, anyone wondering about his unwillingness to support Gina Haspel’s nomination for CIA director because of her involvement in the EIT program, and her approval to destroy recorded evidence of EIT use, simply needs to read chapter three, “About Us.”

Easily the most chilling image in the book describes the torture of Fatima Belhaj, wife of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a man who found himself on the wrong side of the U.S.’ short-lived reconciliation with Muammar Qaddafi:

“[CIA interrogators] had taken a photograph of her in the interrogation room at the black site in Bangkok. She was seated in a chair, Americans surrounding her, duct tape wrapped around the lower half of her face, her wrists bound, and completely naked. She was six months pregnant at the time.”

McCain’s fight against the use of torture and for the release of an unclassified report concerning the U.S.’ use of EIT is based on the concept that we are supposed to be better than this. “What makes us exceptional?…Our founding ideals and our fidelity to them at home and in our conduct in the world makes us exceptional…This was never about [terror suspects]. It was about us.”

At one point, he notes that his treatment from his captors in Hanoi was, in comparison, more humane than the perversions exhibited by American guards at Abu Ghraib.

All of this may seem odd coming from a reliable hawk, but McCain has a fully nuanced, well-sourced view of the proper application of force. He walks his readers through his thinking on all of the conflicts in which we’ve been involved (or failed to be involved) since the early 1990s.

He calls out what he sees as the significant foreign policy failures of the Obama Administration, most notably Syria, but allows that multiple administrations are responsible for the unchallenged rise of Vladimir Putin into the pantheon of the world’s great tyrants.

For those who may be wondering, The Restless Wave contains any number of thoughts on the wrong-headedness of the current administration. McCain worries that we are now actively working to abdicate our role in the world order we worked hard to create after World War II, and notes that our allies are increasingly learning to work around us or entirely without us, which should cause us concern.

There are a number of issues where McCain remains silent. While he goes into some detail to explain his thinking on the most recent healthcare vote — observers outside the Senate saw his thumbs-down gesture as more dramatic than it actually was — he remains silent on his vote with the entirety of the Senate Republican bloc on a tax plan that is widely understood to add $1 trillion to the national debt. That’s the agenda item I’d really like to hear his thinking on.

My respect for McCain was cemented when he pointedly refused to demonize his political opponent, Barack Obama, in the 2008 presidential race. As improbable as it may have been then, that sort of restraint seems positively quaint these days.

That McCain’s name continues to be invoked in the president’s ongoing campaign-style rallies as a sure way to prompt the boisterous crowds to boo is one of the more gob-smacking features of this most unpredictable of administrations. One longs to ask, “To what possible purpose?” but none of the likely answers are reassuring.

Professional politicians like John McCain are in increasingly short supply, and we are worse off because of it. We need people who grasp what “proper order” is and why it’s important, and are willing to explore good-faith bipartisan approaches to solving complex issues. We need members of Congress who understand that principled compromise is the way to get the people’s work done.

I miss him already.

Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

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This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on May 20, 2018.

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling. At Gaithersburg, it’s entirely possible for a book lover to chat with an author they’ve admired for years as they both stroll the grounds and take in all the activity.

Participating in the Festival

This year, I was at the festival for more than just simple enjoyment. I’m a board member of the non-profit Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB), which is a sponsor of the festival, so I helped to staff our booth to get the word out about our review site.

Even better, though, I had the pleasure of being on two panels. The first was with Elliot Ackerman, whose second book Dark at the Crossing was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award, and which I had the pleasure of reviewing for WIRoB. Elliot is a journalist, a White House Fellow, and a Marine, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His first two novels take place in and around both of those wars, as well as in the conflict in Syria. His intimate and empathetic stories recognize the shared humanity of all concerned, including those that he once fought against. One point that Elliot made was that we are running out of Afghanis who remember life in peacetime, before the Russian invasion, so that we now have generations for whom war, rather than peace, is the natural state of being.

Shifting gears completely, I moderated a panel called “Drugs, Relationships, and Power,” with two wonderfully talented authors, Kelly J. Ford and Eryk Pruitt. Both of their novels share settings in the South, and both have had their work called “Southern Gothic”.

Kelly’s debut novel, Cottonmouths, centers on a young gay woman who has washed out of college and is forced to return to her parents and their small Arkansas town to pick up the pieces. But she is also drawn back into the orbit of her old unrequited love, Jody, who happens to be running a meth lab on her property.

For Eryk, What WE Reckon is his third novel, and involves the pitched power battle between two fully co-dependent forces, Jack and Summer. The two start out the story with different identities, which they shed like snakeskins, and a kilo of coke in a hollowed-out King James Bible. They are both losing a grip on reality at the same time that they are growing rather tired of each other.

The conversation ranged over issues of identity and the pressure to conform, the sense that even the most seemingly irredeemable characters have redeeming qualities, and the idea that the opioid scourge ravages rural areas in different ways than in urban environments.

Reconnecting with Old Friends, Making New Ones

One of the great pleasures of Gaithersburg for me is knowing that I’ll see a bunch of old and new book-loving friends. I remembered to bring my copy of Leslie Pietrzyk’s acclaimed new novel, Silver Girl, for her to sign for me while we chatted about the challenges of complex plot development. Melissa Scholes Young had already signed my copy of her much-discussed debut, Flood, but she and I were together in the Politics & Prose book tent. And it’s always a pleasure to have a chance to reconnect with Richard Peabody, who continues to be a driving force behind so much of DC’s writing culture.

I’m also a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of the Historical Novel Society, and, because so many of us were going to be there already, we decided to hold our bimonthly meeting right after members Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie finished a panel on their latest book, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. (And even after all that planning, I got pulled away and wasn’t able to catch up with the group!)

There were so many exceptional panels and speakers, and I know lots of folks like me were running back and forth between tents to try to catch as many as possible. Bethanne Patrick chatted with one of my all-time favorite authors, Alice McDermott, about her latest book, The Ninth Hour, which I also reviewed for WIRoB. In the Michener Pavilion, C-Span Book TV captured all the panels presented there, including Eugene Meyer (Five for Freedom) and Paula Whitacre (A Civil Life in Uncivil Times) discussing their historical renderings of forgotten figures of resistance with moderator Will Pittman.

I couldn’t drop in on Madeline Miller, since her end-of-day panel was the same time as mine. Author of the acclaimed Song of Achilles, Madeline’s latest novel, Circe, is winning rave reviews from all over, including Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s recent review in WIRoB. But I did get the opportunity to have her sign my copy of Circe and chat with her and Jud Ashman, the festival’s founder and now mayor of Gaithersburg, as the 2018 event wound down around us. (I also got to sign a copy of my novel while standing in Madeline’s line. Photographer Bruce Guthrie offered his back as a flat surface, while others snapped photos. I can’t wait to see those pictures!)

As an extra bonus, many of the huge staff of volunteers participated in an after-party at Greene Growlers, where author E.A. Aymar hosted an episode of “Noir at the Bar”, with a number of festival authors reading from their gritty works. Participants included Con Lehane (Murder in the Manuscript Room), Alma Katsu (The Hunger), Alan Orloff (contributor to The Night of the Flood), Shawn Reilly Simmons (Murder on the Rocks), Aymar (editor and contributor to The Night of the Flood), Owen Laukkanen (Gale Force) and my personal favorites and new-found, book-loving friends, Kelly Ford and Eryk Pruitt.

Save the date for the 10^th annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 18, 2019. I’ll see you there!

Book Review: Votes for Women! American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on April 17, 2018.

As we prepare for the 2020 celebration of the 100th anniversary of U.S. women receiving federal voting rights, books recounting the suffragists’ long fight are starting to roll out. Winifred Conkling’s contribution, written for young adults, is an excellent history for all readers, detailing the long, tangled, and sometimes violent path to the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Conkling takes a straightforward approach to relating the history of the movement and the women who drove it, many whose names we know, from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Susan B. Anthony to Alice Paul, and a number whose fame (or notoriety) has not lasted as long, like Victoria Claflin Woodhull and Carrie Chapman Catt.

The narrative starts with Elizabeth Cady learning that, in her world of early-19th-century Upstate New York, even the most determined girl could not make a contribution equal to a boy, laws and culture being what they were.

However, she was allowed to attend Troy Female Seminary, which offered a curriculum competitive with those offered to men, and she had the benefit of spending summers with her rich and progressive cousin, Gerrit Smith, who gave her freedom to exercise her forward-thinking ideas.

In part, the push for women’s rights was driven by the abolitionist movement, since women wishing to speak in public against slavery were accused of being “unwomanly and unchristian,” because, at the time, it was considered unseemly for women to speak in public.

The movement was also tied to the temperance movement, widely seen as a women’s issue because of the damage men’s excessive drinking caused to families. Without the vote, women had no formal way to press for change.

Newly married Elizabeth Cady Stanton met abolitionist Quaker Lucretia Mott in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention — which, ironically, would not allow women to be delegates. By the end of the event, the pair had made plans to hold their own convention to “form a society to advocate the rights of women,” according to Stanton.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 is widely seen as the start of a formal movement focused on women’s rights. Even there, the idea of suffrage was considered outrageous, and Mott shied away from making it a point of discussion.

Since no nation yet recognized women’s right to vote, she feared it would make the women look ridiculous. It appears to be Frederick Douglass’ impromptu speech to the gathering of more than 300 women that allowed the resolution for suffrage to pass.

Susan B. Anthony, a temperance champion, had no interest in women’s rights until she was repeatedly told that, as one, she could not speak at temperance conventions. She and Stanton met in 1851and immediately formed a bond that lasted 50 years.

During the Civil War, women’s suffrage took a back seat to the cause of ending slavery, and it was generally seen to be risking both issues to pair them together. The 13th Amendment ended slavery, and the 14th guaranteed citizenship and civil rights to male former slaves. The dual causes of emancipation and women’s suffrage, which had often supported each other, were now bitterly at odds.

When the issue of the 15th Amendment arose, guaranteeing voting rights regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude — with no mention of gender since it was already in the previous amendment — Stanton and Anthony campaigned against it, Stanton sometimes using racist arguments.

The episode drove a wedge into the unity of the suffrage movement, as did free-love advocate Victoria Claflin Woodhull, whose scandals in the name of suffrage cost the movement significant support and set its efforts back years.

As the century turned and both Stanton and Anthony passed the reins to the next generation, the wind was out of the movement, and it lagged until 1910. Carrie Chapman Catt took over as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, but it was Stanton’s daughter Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, along with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns — all strongly influenced by the militant tactics of the British women’s movement — who get the most credit for reinvigorating the U.S. efforts.

Paul’s huge march in Washington, DC, in 1913, and the melee that it caused, engendered widespread attention. (Oddly, the author states that only spectators were hurt in the semi-riot, when it seems well-documented that many marchers were taken to local hospitals.)

Paul and Catt’s approaches to winning suffrage were often at loggerheads, especially when Paul’s “Silent Sentinels” began to picket the White House — the first group ever to do so — and later to get arrested. The women’s infamous mistreatment in prison was yet another rallying cry that brought people to the movement.

The “Susan B. Anthony Amendment,” the 19th, was passed in the U.S. House and Senate in May and June 1919, respectively, and was finally ratified in a nail-biter vote in Tennessee in August 1920. Catt, supportive of President Woodrow Wilson and seen as the moderate voice for suffrage, was invited to the White House for congratulations, while Paul, the impatient, rude agitator, was snubbed.

Given the current political engagement of teens embodied in the #NeverAgain movement, perhaps the most useful lesson for this book’s target audience is the unflagging determination with which two generations of women pressed what often seemed like a hopeless cause.

Winning a pitched political fight is rarely brief or straightforward, but the victory — almost always — goes to the side that refuses to give up.

Book Review: Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review on March 14, 2018.

Steven Pinker wants us to stop being so pessimistic.

While it’s true that we are besieged every day by voices trumpeting the many ways things are bad and getting worse, Pinker makes a compelling case for why we need to adopt a more constructive outlook.

First, to believe that things are worse than ever is objectively wrong; second, by over-focusing on the negative, we waste energy that should be invested in solving fixable problems; third, in buying into the downward-spiral narrative, we reinforce it.

Case in point: the election of a president whose toxic brand of populism harks back to a golden age that never was. This book serves to disabuse us of mistaken nostalgia and point us all in a forward-looking direction.

Pinker is a cognitive psychologist, linguist, Harvard professor, and the author of a host of books on language, culture, and humanity. He brings us Enlightenment Now as a follow-up to his controversial 2012 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

In that work, Pinker argues that human life held little value throughout the ages, and that the dramatic deepening in our understanding of human dignity can be traced back to the Enlightenment.

The author discovered the extent to which people refuse to believe the “good news,” no matter how tall the pile of objective evidence (oh, the quirky charms of human nature). Enlightenment Now takes another run at the argument and is organized into three sections: “Enlightenment,” “Progress,” and “Reason, Science, and Humanism.”

“Progress” consumes the lion’s share of the book, with chapters devoted to topics such as health, inequality, the environment, peace, terrorism, democracy, quality of life, and existential threats.

Each chapter is an enthralling read on its own. Throughout, Pinker presents quantifiable specifics — with tables and graphs — to underpin his arguments on the substantive, measurable, global progress we’ve made in all these areas, many of which presented problems once thought to be intractable.

In the chapter on health, for instance, Pinker lists the estimated number of lives cumulatively saved by the discovery of blood types (1 billion); the chlorination of water (177 million); and the successful campaign to eradicate smallpox (131 million).

Pinker quotes Richard Carter to remind us of 1955, when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was declared safe: “People observed moments of silence, rang bells, honked horns, blew factory whistles, fired salutes…”

Our success in making infant and childhood death a rarity in the U.S. has led us to a place where people who’ve never experienced the horror of an epidemic dismiss the value of immunization and, in fact, make vaccines the villain.

It’s this general lack of perspective — we didn’t live through it; therefore, we can’t know how bad it was — that Pinker attempts to remedy. He’s fighting against the concept that, to be taken seriously, both people and institutions (like the news media) must focus on all that’s wrong. To highlight the many ways that things continue to improve is to be dismissed as a Pollyanna.

Pinker acknowledges there are true existential threats to our wellbeing: Climate change tops the list. The crisis seems to defy solution because of its enormity and complexity, coupled with the ticking clock of a fast-approaching tipping point.

It’s a huge problem, yes, but a solvable one, according to the author, if we agree to bring our collective ingenuity to bear. That willingness may have slipped forever out of reach, though, when climate change became a partisan issue.

For those who imagine Pinker as a liberal elitist, some of his positions may seem surprising. He is a fan of intensive industrial agriculture, arguing that density is far more productive and less wasteful of land and resources than small, organic farms. In the climate-and-energy debate, he is a proponent of nuclear power and of fracking.

He holds in contempt “the environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called ‘their customary indifference to starvation,’” who cause significant harm, primarily to developing countries, with their vilification of genetically modified foods. Humans have been developing GMOs (both accidentally and on purpose) for thousands of years.

Yet when discussing existential threats, the author reaches a bit, and his willingness to let technology solve our problems tends to skip past the Law of Unintended Consequences. Personally, I don’t need to be convinced of the improbability of an apocalyptic robot war, but I’m interested to hear Pinker’s thoughts on the more pedestrian threat of technology companies’ increasing control over information flow, which continues to ratchet up even as we experience the damage it causes.

Enlightenment Now might generally be preaching to the converted, but its thought-provoking and wide-ranging analysis of the state of Enlightenment-era ideas and values might spur some of the converted to greater engagement in problem-solving.

I can’t help feeling, however, that Pinker continues to be flummoxed that his rational arguments don’t carry the day, ignoring or discounting the streak of irrationality embedded in human nature. He seems nonplussed, for example, that even the most coldly rational people have trouble dismissing the existence of a higher power.

It’s not surprising. No matter that humanity and its attendant self-awareness is the random and improbable outcome of a long evolutionary trail, or that each of us is simply one of 108 billion creatures to be born human to date. Each of us still harbors that innate longing to know it is we who are special.

Another Busy Book Season

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Hope you’ll join me for one or all of these upcoming events:

MWA Howard County: “You Only Debut Once: What Every Author Needs to Know Ahead of Publication”, Thursday, March 15th, 7-9 p.m. at the Owen Brown Community Center, 6800 Cradle Rock Way, Columbia, MD 21045-4809. Join me at this free event as I share some of what I learned before and after the release of my novel in 2015. Learn how to make the most of the publication calendar, and be prepared to make the very most of your launch, because yu only get one chance to have a first release.

Maryland Writers’ Association 2018 Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, March 23rd & 24th at the BWI Airport Marriott. I’ll be presenting a two-part talk called “Publishers, Publicists, and a Reading Public” just before and just after lunch. That second part better be pretty scintillating. I’ll be discussing the importance of knowing your publication goals, the pros and cons of small press publishing, and what to expect in working with a publicist.

2018 Washington Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, May 4th & 5th at the College Park Marriott Conference Center (Friday from 6-8:30 pm and Saturday 8-5). I’m chairing this conference, which is one reason I’d love to see everyone there, but I’m also moderating a panel on debut authors across genres–including biography, memoir/journalism, novel, and short stories–and publication paths.