August 2025 in Books: What I've Been Reading

In the quest to find books from the Democratic Republic of the Congo for my reading journey around the world, I stumbled across The Laughing Cry by Henri Lopes, translated into English by Gerald Moore. The author was born in Kinshasa but ended up living in the Republic of the Congo, so the book might not count for my project.

It's a relevant, skeptical look – written in a post-modern, self-reflexive style narrated by a fictional maitre-d'-turned-butler at the dictator's palace ... but the butler's narrative is interrupted by the dictator's musings, as well as a former high-level government secretary's feedback on the butlers fictional script – at postcolonial African government leaders.

The archvillain of the novel is perhaps the dictator, Bwakamabé Na Sakkadé. He deposes the last leader, Polépolé. Afterward he wallows in the luxuries of an (arguably unearned) leadership role in a manner like that of the current US president, although it's clear that in comparison to the rich history of authoritarianism the Trump administration is still leaving unexplored a time-honoured spectrum of possible gruesome excesses.

I say that 'perhaps the dictator' is the arch villain, because the self-aggrandizing Sakkadé seems a foolish figure as much as a villainous one. Besides it is not clear that there is a hero. The whole cast of characters, including the philandering narrator, French diplomats, and the young intellectual dissidents who are clear-eyed about the regime but less clear-eyed about the alternatives, is morally ambiguous.

Front cover of The Laughing Cry (1982)
From the English edition's publisher: Readers International

As Lopes was writing in the early 1980s, the diplomatic challenges of heads of state are those of the late Cold War: the dictator and his opposition appeal alternately to their former Western colonizers (the "Uncles"), or to the Soviet Union. Flashbacks scattered amongst the plot and character intrigues recall French colonial history, in particular. For example, Algeria's war of independence is not long past. The dictator is of the generation that fought for France in World War II, and the war in then-French Indochina.

Lopes himself was Prime Minister of then-Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s. So the milieu he is picking apart in The Laughing Cry (in the original French: Le Pleurer-Rire) is, surprisingly, the milieu in which he once played the leading role.

The Laughing Cry is thematically similar to NoViolet Bulawayo's Glory – which is still on my currently-reading list.

A Memoir of Two Presidential Offices, and More

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s was published this year by the American presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was already a familiar name, and nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award in the Memoir genre.

Doris Kearns Goodwin at a BooksExpo in 2018
Photograph attributed to Rhododendrites
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

It is a memoir of a kind I've never read before:

In the house where the Goodwins — now in their 70s and 80s — are living in Concord, Massachusetts, they were storing boxes of documents from Richard Goodwin's (the husband's) career in the 1960s. (Doris Kearns Goodwin explored documents of her own life as well, explained during the earlier chapters of the book.)

The Goodwins open the boxes and explore these, often reading documents out loud to each other, as a special book project.

The historian interweaves, into the history, their affectionate banter, reminiscences, and years-long debates over the respective and competing virtues of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as the couple's nostalgia for the 1960s. (She does have a partial eye, and you can make up your own mind how many of her defenses of Johnson, for example, make sense.)

But Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin have a far from ordinary perspective on federal politics in the 1960s:

Richard Goodwin was a junior speechwriter for John F. Kennedy under Ted Sorensen, later a self-appointed Latin America expert. Then, after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote speeches and led messaging amongst other projects for Johnson's Great Society.

Finally, he tried to help Robert F. Kennedy and, at other times, Eugene McCarthy, win the presidency — helping both of them for the sake of thwarting the Vietnam War, but also helping Robert F. Kennedy due to their personal friendship.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was a White House fellow during Johnson's presidency, and later helped write his autobiography; she also writes about experiencing the 60s as a socially conscious Ivy League college student.

Bryan Cranston reads letters her husband wrote in his young years, and the Kennedys and Johnson speak in historical excerpts, in the audio recording. Although the audiobook was over 14 hours long, it did not feel that way: Doris Kearns Goodwin's narration, as well as the special additions, were engrossing.

The ending is extremely touching.

*

Ideal accompaniment: videos from the LBJ Presidential Library's account on YouTube, e.g. archived live-streamed videos from the 2014 Civil Rights Summit.

***

Cover of Becoming,
via Wikipedia

Another recently finished memoir:

Becoming (2018), by former First Lady Michelle Obama, has been reviewed often elsewhere.

It's enough to say that the accolades for her memoir about her childhood, Ivy League education, professional career, marriage, and life as the First Lady are justified.

It is comforting, as President Joe Biden's presidency nears its close and the next administration approaches, to see life in the White House from the perspective of a human, idealistic, thoughtful tenant.

***

Lastly, I have begun Jonathan Blitzer's far-ranging book on the history and polemics of migration at the US-Mexico border: Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (2024). It was recommended by Barack Obama in summer, then nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award.

The American journalist's epic work is not always easy to read, because of its subject matter. It describes, for example, arbitrary killings and torture in El Salvador, from the 1930s to the present.

The Life of President Carter, Take Two

One of NPR's best books of 2020 was an exhaustive (800+ pages in paper, 30+ hours in audiobook) biography of President Jimmy Carter: His Very Best, by Jonathan Alter. Although it is rooted in portraits of rural Georgia during the Great Depression, when the president was still very small, and passes through the wartime 1940s and the halls of the naval academy in Annapolis, it always checks in again with contemporaneity.

His Very Best has ambiguities practically on every page. It makes clear that Carter was not always mild-mannered, not always the greatest husband to Rosalynn (pronounced 'ROE-za-linn'), a tough parent, a skeptic where he is now a kind of non-conformist Baptist, a future humanitarian who did not air his own liberalism on race at a time where the backlash to the civil rights movement made it uncomfortable, a political strategist despite his unworldly(ish) principles. Also: Depending on where you sit on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you may or may not see a contradiction (seemingly the author does) between the peace-brokering he did between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s, and his views on the Palestinian cause nowadays.

Every president proves as best he can that he is a man of the people, while running for office. Jimmy Carter himself may have overstated the deprivation of his childhood circumstances during political campaigning — sure, his family did not have running water for a while, but during the Depression they were rather well off compared to their indigent neighbours. In one passage the author, Jonathan Alter, also writes with painful directness about the way Carter's family economically exploited their Black neighbours even while the family was also at times more tolerant and more deeply helpful than their other White neighbours. — But Carter also seems a much more handy, self-made figure than his presidential peers. The author argues that he is an autodidactic renaissance man.

The truth, as one of Oscar Wilde's characters phrased it, is rarely pure and never simple.

The author — who states that the biography is unauthorized and does write a few very unflattering assessments, but also spoke with his subject for the sake of the book — tries to enhance Jimmy Carter's image, even without resorting to Carter's famously helpful post-presidential career. (Well into his 90s, he has still been on the ground with Habitat for Humanity, helping build houses for those who need them, for example.) 

Alter wants to show that what passed for weak policy in the 1970s is often common sense today: emblematic, the solar panels that the President installed on the roof of the White House. And the author does have a good case: another example is Carter's opposition to the death penalty, something that is now gaining wide currency amongst top Democratic Party leaders. Maybe Carter has been the first 21st century president.

I think the biography is in its approach also very much a reflection of 21st century thinking: we no longer need to pretend that large social struggles were won through immaculate saviour figures, nor is it useful or fair to pretend this. We do not need to write hagiographies of a Martin Luther King, Jr., as a saintly figure who glided through life enfolded by the aura of moral White approval, to appreciate his impact for the better on the course of history. Instead, we can look to the behaviours of all people who did not step into the light of the many others who came together to lead change, the people who would talk with a Menachem Begin and an Anwar al-Sadat — and help them be guided by their own thoughts and feelings toward some course of action that may make the world a slightly better place to live in. The future of civil rights and human rights may well lie (perhaps it has always done so) in a democracy of goodwill.

Around the World in 32 Countries: South Africa

"Typically, hair gets done on weekends (Hillbrow, 2010)"
Two women in the Hillbrow neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Attributed to Guinivere Pedro, c. 2015
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Official languages:

• English (first language of 9.6%)
• isiZulu (22.7%)
• isiXhosa (16%)
• Afrikaans (13.5%)
• Sepedi
• Setswana
• Sesotho
• Xitsonga
• siSwati (Swazi)
• Tshivenda
• isiNdebele

Modern-day state formation year: 1994 (democratization)

"Dune Strandveld growing on dunes
in Blaauwberg Nature Reserve. Cape Town."
Photograph taken ca. 2010, attributed to Abu Shawka
via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Capital city: Pretoria (executive), Bloemfontein (judicial), Cape Town (legislative)

Surface area: 1,221,037 km² (larger than Ethiopia and smaller than Mali or Angola)

Currency: South African rand

Driving side: left

Main trading partners: Germany, the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom and Spain

Crops: Sugarcane, maize, grapes, oranges, potatoes, wheat, soy

Mining: Amongst top 10 worldwide producers of platinum, chromium, manganese, titanium, vanadium, iron ore

Sources:

South Africa [Wikipedia]
List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia]
Economy of South Africa [Wikipedia]

***

While the history of South Africa stretches back thousands of years, I concentrated in my reading of South African books on the period from 1900 to the present.

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela is a classic that requires little introduction. I am still reading Volume I. He portrays his childhood in a chief's extended family and household in the 1910s and 20s, then his education in colonial British institutions, reaching the apex of his university studies at Fort Hare. Then the life he'd envisioned takes another swing into the unknown as he runs away from his guardian, a short job at a mining complex abruptly breaks off, and he grows into work at a lawyer's office in Johannesburg. There he meets anti-apartheid activists, including Communists, and no longer just attempting to fit into the socioeconomic reality of South Africa as it approaches the Malan years where apartheid became solidified into its extremist nadir, he begins to become political. Altogether he takes pains when setting forth his own life's story to portray the different groups and milieus in South African society, to depict a bonded rather than isolated nation.

Because Albert Luthuli's life ended in the late 1960s, long before the defeat of apartheid, and he was more religious, his book Let My People Go offers the most insight into specific topics: Christianity in South Africa, attempts to bring about reconciliation between groups in the country (South African civilians who were facing apartheid in different parts of the land, urban or rural; the different White political groups and administrators; the interracial 'Coloured' population and population of Indian extraction; Communists and Anglicans and Catholics; racist White individuals and policemen and less racist White individuals and policemen), the creeping influence of apartheid on Luthuli's home ground of education, and initiatives to organize passive resistance on a large scale, in the mid-20th century.

Maloti-Drakensberg Park (Lesotho, South Africa)
by Véronique Dauge, c. 2005
via Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of UNESCO
CC-BY-SA 3.0 license

Apartheid, the volume of anti-apartheid essays edited by the exiled writer Alex La Guma to help concert international pressure to undermine the apartheid government, offers a broader spectrum view of all of South African history up to the early 1970s, when it was published abroad in Britain. It establishes a factual basis earlier in the book of the gradual introduction of racist government policy whether English or Afrikaner, details apartheid's impact in the fields of education, land ownership, military spending and even sports, and winds up with perspectives of the future that admit in some cases that violence and/or Communism may be the answer.

While the essays aren't always thrilling to read, and the earnest interspersed poetry often feels like the offcuts of better work, it remains informative even after 40 years of events have piled on top of the ones in the book. It's also interesting to me even in that bygone era of the Vietnam War, other after-effects of colonial rule, Cold War coups and invasions, etc., South African government policy internationally still had the power to shock.

"City Deep container terminal Johannesburg 2014"
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 license

Turning to fiction: Lauren Beukes's novel Zoo City, set in her birth city of Johannesburg and published in 2010, gives a fantasy view of present-day South Africa. Her heroine is a young Black woman who had intended to become a journalist but had become sidetracked by the violent death of her brother, drug abuse, and a prison term, into petty crime. Even strangers recognize that she has been in trouble with laws written or unwritten, due to the presence of a large sloth by her side. This particular one appeared after the brother's death and it is linked to her by magic: a pet with a mind of his own, her external conscience, and her partner.

Crime and socioeconomic inequality in fictional Johannesburg are the focus of the novel. But, although this is by no means central, Beukes also mentions how the city (fictionalized in the book, but mirroring in some respects the 'true' South Africa) has paradoxically been a haven of sorts for refugees from violence, specifically wars in the northern African continent. 

To quote Wikipedia:

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2008 reported over 200,000 refugees applied for asylum in South Africa, almost four times as many as the year before. These people were mainly from Zimbabwe, though many also come from Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. Competition over jobs, business opportunities, public services and housing has led to tension between refugees and host communities.

The author also spent time studying in New York City. Her depiction of urban crime seems like it can be applied beyond Johannesburg, perhaps as a result of that, even if it's true that in smaller cities like Berlin I do expect violent crime but not regular shootouts. What I did find refreshing is that, although for example the imaginary musical scene in her book is influenced by American pop culture, she helps make pretty clear through her descriptions that the world doesn't revolve around the US or Europe (as I'm sometimes tempted to think from my German-Canadian perspective). Most of the preoccupations, entertainment and future of South Africa are driven from within.

Beukes's writing style in Zoo City is prone to clichés and the narrator indulges in libertarian-esque cynicism that I unkindly found performative. First-person, present-tense narration is not everyone's favourite quirk, either, even if it is fashionable. But her strong characterization, scene-setting and writerly intensity made me forget and overlook these aspects, and the novel was compelling to read to the end.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

It is only 16 days until 2020 is over and my chance to read the 25 books I promised to read for Goodreads has passed. But in the meantime I am still 'cramming in' more books. Aside from listening to Alien Oceans to the very end, I also finished listening to the audiobook recording of Brian Stelter's Hoax.

***

Trembling on the verge of the passing of the Trump presidency as we are, any non-fiction book centred on the 45th President runs the risk of anachronism. But I think that Hoax bypasses the risk.

Brian Stelter begins with the President but ends up largely discussing Fox News, and the President is only an especially noisy watcher.

"Rupert Murdoch - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2007."
Copyright World Economic Forum (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

It makes sense anyway that the book's focus would be on television rather than governance: Stelter once ran the website TVNewser and now commentates the American press on CNN's show Reliable Sources. He is a media reporter through and through, and says of himself that he has tracked Fox News for 16 years.

But also, to borrow a phrase from the comedian Stephen Colbert and his former show Colbert Report, often American politics are more 'Videri quam esse' — seeming than being.

The 45th President took this motto more to heart than most: he was, as others have said, a television president.

He set aside 'executive time' in which he watched Fox and Friends and other political television when he should have been doing presidential tasks. If people wanted to influence him or to be hired by him, they would angle to appear on Fox rather than meet him in person. Long before he ran for office, he would feed stories to journalists and be credited as a 'source close to Trump.' He was altogether obsessed with ratings and with fans, rather than with sound policy and consensus. Stelter doesn't mention it directly as far as I recall; but it was quite sick that Trump reportedly used to track how popular his coronavirus briefings were, as if they were a television soap opera. ("Trump, Citing TV Ratings, Says Daily Coronavirus Briefings Will Resume" [New York Magazine])

It appeared that he had never grown out of his reality show, The Apprentice.

And, of course, the real estate magnate-turned-politician also took to heart the idea of 'seeming rather than being' when he fudged 'facts.'

Stelter recapitulates more trivial controversies that showed Trump's mendacious tendencies, like the 'crowd size' debate at the presidential inauguration in 2017.

But the main controversy that clearly weighs most on Stelter's mind is the Administration's and Fox's poor approach to the coronavirus pandemic. Even as the first doses of a vaccine are being distributed there, beginning yesterday, it is worth keeping in mind that as of December 13th, 2020, the US suffered 16,062,299 confirmed cases, with 297,818 residents dying with Covid-19, according to Wikipedia.

Solito/Solita: Escape and Fetters Across the Border

In June I am going to be burrowing through a heap of 'To-Be-Read' books that have gathered online and 'in real life.'

~~~

But Solito/Solita, the anthology of stories of asylum seekers (and a few economic migrants) from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, is already read. I stopped between stories because I needed to rest. Parental abuse, knife crime, blackmail, robbery of migrants at gunpoint, and so on and so forth, are not light subjects.

I think there is little redemption in the book. The exception is, of course, that a few interviewees reach a point where they are happy where they are in their lives. For a few it is already a relief not always to fear being gunned down by a gang.

It is true that, after their country of birth is far behind, a few people who tell their stories in the book may have found better conditions: an apartment of their own, college tuition, etc. But I think the book illuminates in likewise absurdist ways the social, moral and political vacuum in the country to which they have fled.

*

"U.S. Customs and Border Protection provide assistance
to unaccompanied alien children
after they have crossed the border into the United States.
Seen here is a Rio Grande River rescue." (2014)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]

Note: It needs to be considered that this photo comes from a government source.
Also: It may not have been the photographer's intention
that this photo be used for a skeptical article.

The interactions with Border Patrol recorded in the book
run the spectrum of positive to negative.
License: Public domain

*

In their annotations, the editors don't 'grind axes' against any political party; or at least they don't appear to grind axes. It is emphatically stated that the Obama administration was more damaging than the Clinton, Reagan, or G.W. Bush administrations, to the welfare of Latino-Americans who were residing in the USA but were 'undocumented.'

"A Border Patrol Riverine Unit conducts patrols in an Air and Marine Safe-Boat
in South Texas along the Rio Grande river.
They rescue a child who is stranded on the river bank of the Rio Grande." (2013)
[U.S. Customs and Border Protection, via Wikimedia Commons]
See notes above

(PRESIDENT Trump, however, published the infamous order that let authorities take children, and babies, away from parents who were believed to be 'illegally' stepping across the border. Whereas law that President Obama passed near the end of his administration was milder: e.g. the DACA order permitted foreign citizens who had been brought into the US as children to legally reside there, and legally work.)

***

— On a personal note: The book describes many acts and institutions of charity, which are all (at times almost literally) life-giving oases in deserts of indifference and brutality. But I wish that societies as a whole were more focused on achieving human justice and respecting basic human rights, less eager to trust to impulses of benevolence. —

January 2020 in Books: What (I'll) Be Reading

Although I've seen that there are of course interesting new releases, I am going to read 'old' books this January.

One of these new releases is, All the Days Past, All the Days to Come, by Mildred D. Taylor, whose book The Well (about children in the face of racial prejudice) I found excellent.

As the Guardian's books preview of 2020 noted, Anne Brontë's 200th birthday was on January 17th. I'm ambivalent about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, so if anything I'd reread Agnes Grey. Featuring a heroine who leaves home to teach due to her family's financial position, it helps sap all of the illusions that one had about governess work after reading Jane Eyre.

Charlotte did try to adjust expectations in Shirley, but Charlotte's melodramatic vein weakens the effect of her warnings; you don't — or at least I don't — expect to find 'tiger-like' James Helstones pouncing on governesses regularly. To leap to another book, Mrs. Norris, the aunt of the heroine in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is so villainous in an unspectacular, quotidian, realistic way that she makes you shudder; I'd say that the families with which Anne's character, Agnes, stays, impress you in that way as well.

***

At the beginning of the year I started with an anthology of news analysis and opinion columns from the Manchester Guardian that was published at the end of 2017: The Bedside Guardian 2017.

It was about Brexit, too, of course; the anthology was compiled the year after the hapless referendum. (The opinion columnists' wide-eyed enthusiasm about the Labour Party's chances of fixing things under Jeremy Corbyn was painful to read, although natural because of how badly the 2017 election went for Theresa May, considering what's happened with the most recent election.)

A few writers argue that Britain's socioeconomic fabric is deteriorating rapidly, apart from thriving hotspots like parts of London.

I guess that right-wing newspapers publish viewpoints that the European Union is to blame for this. But the Guardian's analysts tend to argue that British austerity measures, the 'bedroom tax' which has made living in council housing in Britain an even greater burden, financial exploitation by under-regulated industries (e.g. payday loans), and council taxes that are too low to pay for adequate community services, play a greater role.

*

A deeper look at Britain's economic woes is Mike Carter's book All Together Now?, which the Guardian's books arm also published in 2017. (I received it free of charge as a reward for being a member; and read it in December.)

In 2016 Carter travelled on foot between Liverpool and London, 'reliving' a labour rights march that his father took in the early 1980s. He explains his fraught relationship with his father, meets strangers and pre-arranged interviewees as he goes, records the battered socioeconomic order in the towns and cities through which he walks, and analyzes the causes.

December 2019 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

Aside from James Baldwin's Another Country, I began reading Edward Snowden's book Permanent Record, a present from my godfather, and published earlier this year.

It is written in a philosophical vein at the beginning and perhaps two thirds of the way into the book, when Snowden writes his meditations on privacy and the American Constitution and the role of whistleblowers, etc. I take a little longer to disentangle the phrase, but usually I welcome it. There's also a clear-eyed assessment or two of the Bush era that is refreshing to read in retrospect.

It is as edifying as it is dumbfounding to read a person my age making so much effort to think of things and take responsibility for ethical dilemmas in his work. I don't think it's easy to look beyond one's tasks and beyond the context of one's workplace and end-of-month paycheque.

As Snowden's computer-obsessed childhood and teenagerhood in the 80s and 90s, his family, his rather abstracted approach to coping with the demands of school, and his flight from community college into a technological career, unfold earlier in the book, my amazement is hardly lessened. I'm not a libertarian nor was I ever a fan of a badly-defined 'War on Terror.' It's also true that I'm not prone to 'gaming the system,' preferring to negotiate the school and work world according to the rules. But the lack of that shared experience didn't weaken the feeling that he is like most of the people I know, for example me, who grew up in the 1980s and 90s and had some exposure to technology. So it is astonishing that he did strike out on his own path.

Whether I'm over-inclined to praise the book or not, I liked how the 'secondary characters' are sketched — whether by Snowden himself, at the prompting of his editor, or through the pen of a ghostwriter. Snowden's father, for example, or his then-girlfriend, now-wife; a handful of details about his wife already suggests people whom I've known, and I can imagine a personality half-way between reality and analogical figures. Snowden mentioned in his introduction that he tried to respect the privacy of the people around him while writing, but the portraiture has not become too vague.

I hadn't heard before, likely due to ignorance, that the Arab Spring had been an indirect factor in Snowden's decision to publish details of the mass surveillance programme. The extent to which private companies have been running American foreign and domestic security — this is one of Snowden's complaints — was also unknown.

In a way the book helps reduce the guilt I've tended to feel toward Edward Snowden. After all, he went through a great moral conflict, when the public for whom he did it — at least I speak for myself — trots along in ignorance. Even his photographic portrait on the book cover looks faintly martyred in expression, and it's no wonder. The book does help bring closer to the reader the aspects that bothered him of the American intelligence community's mass surveillance programmes, in a way that the press articles might not have, so one feels less ill-informed.

As for his elucidation of the techniques of the modern American intelligence community, I am not certain whether I am comfortable 'spying' on the CIA and the NSA and defence contractors as the public may do while reading Snowden's book — sometimes it feels as if he has shrunken the reader to the size of a mouse and taken us along in his pocket into the buildings at Fort Meade, a top-secret facility in Hawaii, etc., where he worked. He makes it pretty clear that the people who work in these buildings are individuals with their own quirks, needs, strengths and weaknesses. Even if Permanent Record feels like a rare opportunity to examine the people who examine us, and it is kind of gripping, and Snowden makes pretty clear that security and the protection of secrets can be incredibly lax within the agencies, I also feel ashamed about my snooping instinct.

Anyway, not having finished the book yet, this is only a half-informed review. As for the technological details, I cannot tell whether a reader who knows something about hacking or system administration or other things will find their curiosity appeased, or be disappointed that it has been reduced to a more lay-reader-friendly version.

*

Besides, I've been making progress in the physics textbook about particle detectors: Teilchen-Detektoren by Otto Claus Allkofer, from the 1970s or 80s.

I couldn't tell you the difference between a fog chamber, a spark chamber, and a scintillation detector easily, or specify which detects neutrons, muons or electrons.

But it is thrilling enough to imagine that if I had a physics background, the prose and structure are straightforward and well-reflected enough that maybe — just maybe — it would be a pretty helpful reference work.

And I'm also wondering if this is relevant to my father's work.

*

Lastly, I have begun reading an e-book version of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, hoping that this will help me begin to read up on computer science for my own career.

In Brief: Aldous Huxley on the Uninformed Citizenry

From a foreword that Aldous Huxley wrote to A Brave New World, years after the book was first published in 1932:

"Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr Churchill calls an 'iron curtain' between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals."

Enemy Books: Her Father's Daughter

Part of a series: "I thought it would be nice to begin featuring books which I cannot stand for whichever reason. (...) But the main point of an Enemy Books series is to invite readers to leave a comment to describe the beauties which they find in the work. (Even if the Enemy Book blog post in question is months old.)" — "suggestions for a next enemy book" are also welcome. But while the idea is generally for kinder readers to point out the good sides of the book in the comments beneath, perhaps that is not possible this time! Edit: What is the most awful book you have encountered?

This time the 'enemy book' is not a notably familiar one, but Her Father's Daughter (by Gene Stratton-Porter) is sensationally awful and bears the distinction of instantly coming to mind when I think about the worst book I have ever read.

Its young heroes cast in an early gung-ho, conventional Hardy Boys/Bobbsey Twins tradition, its plot outrageous, its events absurd, the most distinctively horrid element in it is still its author's hatred of the Japanese.

Set in California, it is about a fatherless young American woman, Linda Strong, who realizes that there is Something Wrong about a Japanese pupil in her friend Donald Whiting's high school senior class. The classmate is, in fact, a middle-aged man pretending to be an 18-year-old so that he may spy on his country of residence. I was going to write more about her racial theory but it's so upsetting that I'd rather not. Aside from these semipolitical threads in her work, the author's ideas on human psychology and nouveau riches and other phenomena are generally strange, so there is a great deal of bemusement to go around.

***

Completeness of Ordeal: Could not finish, at first. But I skimmed through all of it for this post, and it's corking reading if done ironically.
Birthdate of Enmity: ca. 2008.
Likelihood That Enmity Is Justified: on sociopolitical grounds, 100%

***

Evidence, Pro-Enmity:

[Linda:] "There is nothing in California I am afraid of except a Jap, and I am afraid of them, not potentially, not on account of what all of us know they are planning in the backs of their heads for the future, but right here and now, personally and physically. Don't antagonize Oka Sayye. Don't be too precipitate about what you're trying to do. Try to make it appear that you're developing ideas for the interest and edification of the whole class. Don't incur his personal enmity. Use tact."

[Donald:] "You think I am afraid of that little jiu-jitsu?" he scoffed. "I can lick him with one hand."

*

The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub

This blog is, evidently, verging on becoming a David Foster Wallace tribute site. But, though that is hardly the intention, there is one last article that is clamouring to be discussed, because it is so beautifully à propos to current events. Besides, I have looked down upon contemporary prose for much of my life, and DFW (as he is commonly abbreviated) is the only writer of it whose approach and mentality I enthusiastically like. Ergo, he is a prime topic for a day devoted to contemporary[/premodern] literature.

In 2000, Rolling Stone magazine dispatched this journalist-who-is-not-a-journalist to cover John McCain's campaign against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. (DFW had an often funny, self-deprecating fixation on his lack of credentials, which is extraneous because he fulfilled the role of a journalist as journalists rarely do.) His observations, published in an article entitled "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub," are as relevant today as they were when they were written. [N.B.: I am summarizing it based on my memory and notes from Sept. 17th.]

Fittingly for Rolling Stone, the article is counter-culture. DFW rides along in the press bus that trails McCain's bus (nicknamed the Straight Talk Express), together with the Twelve Monkeys, fellow lesser journalists, and technical support. By "twelve monkeys" he means the humourless, impeccably dressed snobs who represent what has become known as the media élite. (In the case of this article, it is worthwhile to consult the footnotes during or before the article itself, because they gloss the jargon.) Even in those halcyon days, the Monkeys display the precise lack of critical thinking that characterizes their coverage of the Bush administration for the following four to seven years. It brings to mind Senator Joe Biden's pithy expression in the recent vice-presidential debate: "Past is prologue." The way of life on the press bus is not ideal either. The journalists are malnourished and grumpy and sleep-deprived, and going to the toilet is no pleasure if the door flies open whenever its occupant is knocked against the control button by the motion of the vehicle. Frankly, I read such elucidations on the trials of the itinerant hack with a commingled sense of eager curiosity and Schadenfreude.

In a very American touch of class rebellion, DFW often shoots the breeze with the tech support people, who plausibly possess a sharper insight into the political process. At one point their discussion fascinatingly turns to negative campaigning. The idea is that such campaigning is convenient for whichever candidate is chosen by the party establishment: an ugly tone in the election discourages voters from participating in the process, so that it is mostly only diehard party members who turn up at the ballot-boxes and accordingly vote for the party favourite. As for the candidate who is marginalized by the machinery at the outset, he is put in a difficult position, even though polls and anecdotal evidence prove that negative campaigning is greatly unpopular. If he does not respond decisively to negative ads, etc., he looks weak. (This, of course, is widely identified as a central reason why John Kerry lost the election in 2004. The "Swiftboat Veterans for 'Truth'" [extra set of quotation marks mine] campaign was low, but it apparently had to be dignified with an answer.) If he responds too aggressively, it is scored against him.

A helpful series of clarifications, aside from those on shady campaign financing practices, is presented at the beginning, after he poses the question, "Why should we vote?" It concerns John McCain's imprisonment during the Vietnam War. This tale has become so familiar, though more as a vague concept than as a detailed account, that it is easy to ignore or disparage. (It may be awful of me, but I don't believe the official version of events 100%, either.) But the story, as recounted sympathetically by Wallace, is horrifying. McCain is shot down and lands in a pond, severely injured. He is pulled out and beaten by an angry crowd and thrown into prison. There he is given the opportunity to be sent home immediately because his father is an important military figure, but he refuses the opportunity so that he doesn't jump ahead in the order of prisoners to be released. So he spends the next four or five years in a box under terrible conditions.

DFW employs this portion of biography as evidence that a handful of politicians do mean what they say, and when they speak of working on behalf of their country, they have actually done so. There are politicians, too, who are substance as well as style, or, as he might put it, not only "salesmen" but also statesmen. Unfortunately McCain, arguably, has stopped measuring up to either ideal. So it would have been particularly interesting to know how he would have reinterpreted his findings to fit the changed conditions eight years later.

Lastly, to return to the question, "Why vote?", the point of the article is that there is a point to exercising one's electoral rights, if only for this reason:

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

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"The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub," Rolling Stone (April 13th, 2000)