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Book 266: The Fly Trap

 

“People sometimes call me for help in investigating the possibilities. I am a biologist, after all. Their projects are often said to have an environmental dimension—the infallible key to getting grants—so I’m considered a good person to talk to. When we were new out here, I used to say that I was a writer, but all the women on the island felt so sorry for my wife that I started insisting I was a biologist instead. What else could I do? And if you’re a biologist on an island widely known for its rich biosphere, you have to put up with a lot of phone calls from morons. They always seem to assume that I’m a moron myself.”

Dates read: October 3-6, 2018

Rating: 7/10

For my dad, it’s lizards. For my mom, hearts. For me, my book stockpiling has reached critical mass. Most of us collect something. And the rest of you can Marie Kondo your lives as many times as you like, you’ll never convince me that the reason so many of us have so much stuff isn’t that there’s a primal human urge to gather. For most of us, it’s just a side habit. But depending on your line of work, it can literally be your actual job!

If I had to come up with an insect that people collect, I’d get to butterflies, and maybe moths and dragonflies, before running out of ideas. Those are the good ones, right? But Fredrik Sjoberg catches and studies nothing so glamorous. Rather, near his home on a tiny Swedish island, he collects hoverflies. In case you, like me, have no idea what those are, they’re large flies that look like bees. In The Fly Trap, he ruminates on a life devoted to an obscure bug, as well as the story of the man, Rene Malaise, who invented the fly trap with which he does most of his work.

Like me when this was announced as a selection for my book club, you might be extremely skeptical about the idea of a book about a guy who collects flies. I was very sure it would be either weird or boring or both. Surprise! It’s delightful! Funny and smart! It feels like having a conversation with the slightly odd but very charming person sitting next to you on an airplane…there’s a circuitousness to the narrative, with Sjoberg starting on one subject but getting sidetracked into another, but it’s carried off with humor and verve. The way the narrative thread keeps looping also ensures that the pace is lively and it doesn’t get bogged down anywhere.

There’s also, as you realize when you get to the end, surprisingly little about Sjoberg himself. There’s a remove to it that feels Scandinavian, very pleasant but ultimately very firmly impersonal. There’s a lot about the nature of being a collector, pleasure of focusing your attention on one little small facet of the world and working inside that little niche, the thrills of finding something rare in your chosen field, the loneliness that can come from essentially solitary pursuits. It’s thought-provoking in its own way, not in the heavy way that the term is usually used. This is a lightweight little snack of a book, enjoyable but not especially memorable in any way, and I would recommend it. Hey, at least now I know what a hoverfly is!

One year ago, I was reading: Queen of Scots

Two years ago, I was reading: The Winter of the Witch

Three years ago, I was reading: Ghost Wars

Four years ago, I was reading: American Heiress

Five years ago, I was reading: Mr. Splitfoot

Book 254: The Informant

“Shepard turned to Weatherall, shaking his head. They had heard enough to know this tape was fabulous. Their witness—this lying, manipulative man who had just failed a polygraph exam—was in the middle of a massive criminal conspiracy.”

Dates read: August 9-16, 2018

Rating: 5/10

Well, this is embarassing. Though I have no recollection of deleting the post I wrote for this book after reading it (I usually write my review within a few weeks of reading the book), it seems as though it has vanished. Maybe it was me, maybe it was a Blogger issue, but it is gone and the reality is that my memory of reading this book over two years ago is…not especially detailed. Therefore, this is likely going to be the shortest, least in-depth review I will ever post here, because I am not going to go back and re-read it so I can re-write the post.

The Informant, written by Kurt Eichenwald, is a true story that you would swear was a farce if you didn’t know otherwise. Mark Whitacre was an executive for Archer Daniels Midland, a large agri-business company. For years, ADM had been working with their so-called competitors to fix the price of food additive lysine, which Whitacre confesses to the FBI. He then goes undercover to tape meetings at which this price-fixing continues to happen, repeatedly almost managing to get himself caught but capturing hundreds of conversations for his government handlers. As the case is moving towards trial, a complication emerges: Whitacre has embezzled several million dollars from ADM, in part because he actually got suckered into one of those Nigerian advance-fee scams. After years of working to help the feds build a case against ADM, the bipolar Whitacre turns against the FBI during manic episodes, claiming that they have tampered with evidence. His behavior related to these claims invalidates his plea deal with the government, and he is charged along with the rest of his colleagues in the underlying price-fixing scandal, eventually being convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. 

What I remember most about the book is its length, over 600 pages of often dense prose. The underlying crime is a very complicated white-collar conspiracy, and while Eichenwald did a decent job of trying to make it straightforward, my overwhelming recollection is that it frequently dragged. Whitacre himself is presented as a complex person: being a whistleblower/informant is a very stressful, pressure-filled situation, and combined with his untreated mental illness, he often behaves erratically. He is very sympathetic in some aspects, much less so in others. I feel like I remember that this was one of those books where the author was under the impression that his own reporting of the story was of particular interest to those reading it, which tends to be a pet peeve for me in non-fiction. It was often a struggle to read, and I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience of doing so, so I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to others.

One year ago, I was reading: The Overstory

Two years ago, I was reading: The Library Book

Three years ago, I was reading: The Royals

Four years ago, I was reading: The Mothers

Book 248: My Own Words

“The institution we serve is ever so much more important than the particular individuals who compose the Court’s bench at any given time. And our job—the job of judging in a U.S. federal court generally—is, in my view, the best work a U.S. lawyer could wish for. We serve no client, our commission is to do what is right—what the law requires and what is just.”

Dates read: July 11-17, 2018

Rating: 7/10

Growing up, my role model (and let’s be honest, idol) was Sandra Day O’Connor. I wanted to be a lawyer and judge, and the first woman on the Supreme Court was the greatest person I could imagine. As I got older and better able to understand legal writing, she become a justice whose opinions I always appreciated reading, because in her fondness for balancing tests (while tricky to consistently administer) she seemed to always remember that while The Law is a mighty and important thing, it applies to actual people with actual lives and that is not less important than one’s judicial philosophy. She remains someone who I profoundly admire, along with the other women who’ve been appointed to the highest court in the land: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and everyone’s favorite pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In the past several years, she’s had books written about her, a documentary and a biopic hit theaters, and been made into an action figure (which I have on my desk as I type). She’s become almost more of an idea than a person, which made My Own Words, a collection of her writings/speeches, organized with her co-writers Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, all the more relevant to read. There is an actual woman beneath the mythologizing, and that woman is whip-smart and has a lot of important things to say that can’t be slapped on a photo and turned into a meme. Not that I have any beef with that picture of her that says “all them fives need to listen when a ten is talking” in the Beyonce font, but in a world where complex thought is increasingly rare, we owe it to one of our best thinkers to really listen to what she has to say.

The book’s collection of her writings has examples all the way from pre-teen editorials submitted to the school paper to oral announcements of Supreme Court dissents. That she is a serious, thoughtful person is obvious even in the early writings, and examples of her work as she pushed for gender equity at the ACLU and then was elevated to the federal bench demonstrate her prodigious intellect and ability to distill arguments to their essence. But it’s not all ponderous and serious. There’s a written version of remarks about the role of lawyers in opera and an excerpt from the comic opera that was written about Justices Scalia and Ginsburg’s close personal friendship, which included trips to the opera, despite the gulf between their views on the law. There are a few pieces that were written/delivered by Gibsburg’s beloved husband Marty, whose wit made me giggle in few places.

The co-authors are apparently working on an authorized full biography of Justice Ginsburg, and the way they’ve worked with the material they have here gives me high hopes that it’ll be excellent. It can be challenging to edit down legal writing into something that can be understood by an audience not trained to read it, but between what’s clearly Ginsburg’s own facility with language and careful tweaks, the material will definitely require attention but isn’t difficult to understand. That it’s just relatively short vignettes may disappoint some who are looking for something more like a traditional biography, though there is interstitial writing to fill in the gaps and provide context. You do definitely get a sense of who she is through reading it, though. I’d highly recommend this for anyone who’s interested in the law, as well as any RBG enthusiasts.

One year ago, I was reading: Death Prefers Blondes

Two years ago, I was reading: Oryx and Crake

Three years ago, I was reading: The Idiot

Four years ago, I was reading: Inamorata

Book 247: The Looming Tower

“On the existential plane, Bin Laden was marginalized, out of play, but inside the chrysalis of myth that he had spun about himself he was becoming a representative of all persecuted and humiliated Muslims. His life and the symbols in which he cloaked himself powerfully embodied the pervasive sense of dispossession that characterized the modern Muslim world. In his own miserable exile, he absorbed the misery of his fellow believers; his loss entitled him to speak for theirs; his vengeance would sanctify their suffering. The remedy he proposed was to declare war on the United States.”

Dates read: July 5-11, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: Pulitzer Prize, The New York Times bestseller

I’m naturally a high-strung person. Always have been. I’m the type who gets up out of bed to double check if I can’t remember locking the door. Every once in a while, I have to remind myself with statistics that what’s most likely to harm me are things I do constantly: get in the car and drive, cross the street on my way in to work, exist in a world filled with carcinogens. I’m not the only one, either. I think a lot of us are more frightened by the kinds of things that make newspaper headlines than the ones that are much more likely to be lethal. It’s unlikely we’ll get caught in a deadly tornado or raging wildfire. It’s also vanishingly unlikely we’d ever find ourselves the victim of a terror attack.

And yet, ever since September 11th, that fear has loomed large in the American cultural imagination. It happened once, and it could happen again. But how exactly did it come to happen? That is the question Lawrence Wright seeks to answer in The Looming Tower, in which he traces the development of radical Islam and the life of Osama bin Laden, through the rise of al-Queda and the intelligence community turf wars that handicapped the country’s ability to understand and prepare for the threat. It’s a story that begins with seeds planted by a few in Egypt that grows to expand to Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the United States. It’s a story about people, about men whose understandings of the world are on a collision course. It’s a story about near-misses and mistakes that ends in tragedy.

I was a little hesitant when I picked this up…I’d read Ghost Wars about six months before and was worried that this would largely be a rehash of things I’d recently read. But that concern turned out to be unfounded. While there’s certainly overlap, that book was focused heavily on Afghanistan, and the CIA’s involvement in that country’s recent history. This book is really about al-Queda and how it’s leaders, Osama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri, came to join together and carry out attacks against the West from their position in Afghanistan. If you’re interested in this general subject area and think you might want to read one of these two books, I’d suggest The Looming Tower (or at least reading it first).

While there is no denying the incredible research and level of detail in Ghost Wars, the end result is a book that tends toward the dense. Having read it once, I’m sure it would take me at least another few passes through it to really feel like everything was sinking it. The Looming Tower doesn’t bring that level of specificity, but it’s not really trying to either. That’s not to insinuate that it’s not deeply rooted in fact and without a breadth of source material. The references section is extensive. But what The Looming Tower does well is actually stringing that all together into a cohesive narrative. Depending on the author’s skill level (and, to be honest, intended audience), non-fiction can struggle with storytelling and a tendency toward dryness. But this is where Wright shines. Despite working with names, places, and concepts that are largely only vaguely familiar to a Western readership, he never lets the pace get bogged down in information dumps. Like the events it recounts, it keeps on moving forward to what we know is coming.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. There’s an emphasis on counter-terrorism expert John O’Neill (who died helping evacuate others on 9/11), especially his personal life, that doesn’t quite fit in with the overall flow of the book that I think should have gotten trimmed. And, having read Ghost Wars, I thought the situation in Afghanistan and the relationship of al-Queda and the Taliban was simplified too far. I think the book could have added about 50 pages and given everything a bit more depth and shading and been stronger for it. But for a primer on the situation in the Middle East and inside the federal bureaucracy that culminated in September 11th, written for a wide audience, I think this a very good book indeed. I highly recommend it!

One year ago, I was reading: The Forgotten Sister

Two years ago, I was reading: Life After Life

Three years ago, I was reading: Stoner

Four years ago, I was reading: Lights Out In The Reptile House

Book 245: Perfect Murder, Perfect Town

“When the detectives began working the Ramsey case, they said to each other that they wouldn’t settle for anything less than the death penalty. After the CBI’s tests determined that what they had thought was semen was in fact blood, the detectives said they would accept nothing less than a conviction on a murder charge. A few months later, they would have settled for a felony conviction. By the time they met with the FBI at Quantico in September 1997, they would have considered an indictment a victory. When Eller was replaced, handcuffing would have felt like a triumph. After a solid year of working the case, they prayed for the chance at a second interview with the Ramseys. Now, eighteen months in, they were happy to have the opportunity to present the case to the DA.”

Dates read: June 25- July 2, 2018

Rating: 7/10

When I was a kid, I was on the swim team. I grew up on the lake, learned how to swim early, and just loved the water…I spent basically all summer splashing around either at home or at day camp. I am without much in the way of athletic gifts (read: I am slow and clumsy), but I was a reasonably competent swimmer, so my mom signed me up for the swim team. There was some contention about it my freshman year of high school: I was no longer interested in the kind of practice required for high school swimmers, so I wanted to drop out. I was mediocre at best, so no one would have missed me. But my mom, remembering her own mother’s decision to force her off the swim team she loved, refused to let me leave before the end of the season. I swore I’d never swim another lap if she persisted. She did, and I haven’t swam one since.

What I’m going for here, beyond an example of my supreme stubbornness, is that many parents direct their kids toward activities that they themselves enjoyed growing up. My father-in-law was a long-time runner and track coach. My husband ran track throughout high school into college (and liked it!). And when Patsy Ramsey had a beautiful little daughter, she put her in pageants, which she’d participated in and enjoyed growing up. While it seems very unlikely at this point that the pageants had anything to do with JonBenet’s death, at the time it lead to a lot of suspicion. Lawrence Schiller recounts these rumors, as well as quite a lot of actual facts, in Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, his book on the still-unsolved murder of the little beauty queen. Sourced from what seems to have been exhaustive research and interviews with as many of the players as possible, it recounts how the case developed (and developed issues) right from the moment the cops were called to report a kidnapping until the case was finally submitted to the grand jury.

What actually happened as a result of that grand jury (an indictment was issued against John and Patsy Ramsey, but the prosecutor refused to sign it) isn’t covered, and that is of course the most interesting part. Who did it? Someone did. The book steadfastly refuses to answer the question, though. Schiller clearly is trying to stay neutral as much as possible, presenting the police department’s firm belief that the parents were getting away with murder with just as much credibility as the prosecutor’s office investigator’s belief that it was an intruder. The answer is, of course, that we will almost certainly never know. JonBenet is dead. Patsy Ramsey, too, has passed away in the years since. John is still around, but unless he or whoever else might be responsible issues a deathbed confession, this case will remain forever open.

Schiller spends a lot of time on context to really develop a comprehensive picture of what was happening at the time in the world in which the Ramseys lived. The City of Boulder, its tightly controlled development and the resulting high price of real estate creating a little enclave, the rareness with which the police department had to investigate serious crimes, the charging philosophy of the District Attorney…all are relevant to what happened, or didn’t happen. It’s obvious that there were serious complications even from the start, with friends at the Ramseys having arrived at their home even before the police, with John apparently shutting the open basement window, with his discovery of his daughter’s body and race with her upstairs. All of that destroyed valuable evidence, evidence that could have solved the crime maybe. Was clumsiness and shock at the root of the Ramseys’ behavior? Or criminality?

We’re presented with evidence both ways. At some points, reading this book, I was sure they’d done it, but at others sure they wouldn’t have. I kept having to remind myself that I know full well, as a former attorney, that the parents absolutely did the smart thing by getting lawyers hired so soon and refusing to cooperate with the police. If I have one piece of free legal advice I ever give, it’s that you should never ever talk to the police without counsel present. I would have done the same thing in their place. But it’s so hard to reconcile this understanding with the gut assumption that refusing to talk to cops about the death of your daughter “isn’t what an innocent person would do”. It’s easy to say they should have cooperated, but until you’ve been in their place and figured out that you’re likely the number one suspect in a murder, it’s hard to say what you would have done differently with their resources. To get back to the book, it’s well-researched and well-developed. I could have done with less about the tabloid reporter, who Schiller clearly found interesting but I did not. It doesn’t have much of a narrative flow, it’s more a work of reporting than of story-telling, but it’s organized and clear. I would definitely recommend it to those curious about the crime!

One year ago, I was reading: Marie Antoinette

Two years ago, I was reading: Less

Three years ago, I was reading: Party Monster

Four years ago, I was reading: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Book 236: How To Love Wine

“It bears repeating: The primary purpose of wine is to provide pleasure and refreshments. It can do much more than that, but it should never do less.”

Dates read: May 23-27, 2018

Rating: 5/10

Like many college students, when it was time to do some underage drinking, I usually went with either whatever cheap beer the party was handing out, or just went for the liquor drinks. But I started to get into wine when I went to Italy for the first time, and by the time I got to law school I was a wine drinker. There’s something about being in your early 20s that makes wine really appealing…it feels like a step up in adulting from taking shots or beer pong. Even if it’s the cheap stuff from the bottom shelf of the supermarket.

Even if you enjoy drinking wine, though, there’s a feeling of uncertainty, a compulsive need to clarify that you’re not really a “wine person”. A “wine person” can stick their nose into a glass and identify smells like pepper and starfruit, or take a sip and taste dried leather or mushroom. Eric Asimov’s How To Love Wine seeks to push back against that perception. As the Chief Wine Critic of the New York Times, Asimov uses his book to try to de-mystify and remove barriers to the enjoyment of wine by advocating a simple, straightforward message: the best way to enjoy wine is with good food and good friends.

In fact, this message is so simple and straightforward that the book ultimately feels padded. Even as he takes on various aspects of the wine-industrial complex, like tasting notes that seem to pride themselves on evoking obscure flavors usually based on just a few sips of the wine in question, often influenced by the tasting of several other wines at the same time, he returns again and again to his central thesis: the way to love wine is to drink it with people you love while sharing a meal. There are certain basic characteristics like acidity and tannins that, if you’re willing to experiment and try a bunch of varieties, you’ll eventually be able to pick up on, and the only ones that matter are the ones you discover for yourself actually impact your enjoyment of the wine in question. People often feel like they “have to” like wines with high scores from magazines and insiders, that if that wine doesn’t work for them that they’re the ones who are wrong, but not everyone likes the same flavors. Feeling this kind of pressure, to like the types of wines that are in fashion at any given moment, to like highly-rated wines, is one of the reasons people are afraid to really embrace wine.

There’s a reason that Asimov has spent much of his career writing for one of the foremost newspapers in the country: he’s a talented writer. That the book doesn’t feel painfully repetitive (though the padding is impossible to miss) is a testament to his skills. He really loves the way drinking wine feels, and his enthusiasm about trying to make it easier for everyone to have that same kind of enjoyment is contagious. I’ve mostly become a craft beer drinker these days, but by the time I ended this book I found myself wanting to pop open a bottle of red and make some pasta and hang out eating and drinking with my husband…which was exactly the intention of the book. If you’re curious about wine but have found yourself frightened off by snooty wine culture, this is a solid book to read. If you’re not really that into it, though, it’s skippable.

One year ago, I was reading: Good Riddance (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Boy, Snow, Bird

Three years ago, I was reading: In the Skin of a Lion

Four years ago, I was reading: Spinster

Book 234: The Heart of Everything That Is


“The more circumspect Red Cloud also recognized that the white man’s war had finally arrived on his doorstep, first from the east following the troubles in Minnesota, and now from the south. There was nowhere to run. Nor, he reasoned, should his people have to run. It was time, once and for all, to fight the mighty United States and expel the Americans from the High Plains. He had long planned how to do this. The only question had been when. Sand Creek had answered that: Now.” 

Dates read: May 16-21, 2018

Rating: 6/10

At some point, it seems, most American kids end up playing “cowboys and Indians” (I know, I know, problematic). And at least when I was growing up, it seemed like you got more takers for the former than the latter. Everyone knew the Indians were going to lose. That’s how history worked, after all. It’s not just in the United States. The history of the world is rife with examples of indigenous people being treated like garbage by dominant cultures: the Maori in Australia, the Ainu in Japan, the Sami in Scandinavia…it’s a sadly familiar story.

As hard as the Native Americans fought to retain their land against white settlers, their military victories were few and far between. Most of us have at least vaguely heard of Custer’s Last Stand, but before that, a battle in Wyoming called Fetterman’s Fight led to the deaths of 81 soldiers of the US Army and the (temporary) withdrawal of troops from Indian territory. Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s The Heart of Everything That Is takes a deep dive the battle, from its roots in the inter-tribal warfare among the Plains Indians to the rise of Red Cloud as a leader among the Lakota to his (ultimately short-lived) martial triumph. It has significant biographical detail about Red Cloud, but it’s not trying to be a comprehensive look at him in particular. Rather, it uses Fetterman’s Fight as a microcosm of the greater struggle of the Plains and Western tribes against the changes to their lifestyles wrought by white Americans driving further and further west.

Drury and Clavin strive to present a straightforward, unvarnished look at their subjects and push back against the idea that before protracted contact with whites, Native Americans lived as idyllic pacifists. Tribes had allies and enemies and some of them were very comfortable inflicting brutal violence against the latter. Red Cloud was brought up among his mother’s people, the Oglala Lakota, one of the more aggressive branches of the greater Lakota nation, and was groomed for leadership by his mother’s uncle. As he grew up, his people were pushed farther and farther from their traditional territory and he fought against enemy tribes in his youth, gaining renown, before turning his attention to the threats posed by the continually promise-breaking whites.

After a series of skirmishes, things came to a head at Fort Phil Kearney. It was a perfect storm: angry at yet another incursion into their land, the Lakota were able to ally with other tribes. The leadership at the fort was both arrogant and foolhardy. Red Cloud was a smarter tactician than his opponents. And the United States was forced to retreat, to abandon its forts. But it lasted less than a decade. The book covers the immediate aftermath of the battle, but only touches on the long run: Red Cloud, taking a trip to Washington, DC, realized the scale of the threat to his people and the ultimate hopelessness of continuing the fight, and led those that would follow him onto the reservation.

Pretty much any book about Native American history is inevitably compared to Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee simply because of that book’s prominence. And I’d say this book is an excellent companion. It doesn’t have, and honestly doesn’t try for, the scope of Bury of My Heart, which covers more tribes over a longer time period. Instead, it takes a little known episode (I’d never heard of the Fetterman Fight) and explains it, placing its people and events into a larger context. And the book succeeds at this task, developing not only Red Cloud and to a lesser extent, his young protege Crazy Horse, as compelling and sympathetic characters, but also presenting the life of the Army fort, populated not just with soldiers but with families. No one is a cardboard cutout villain.

That being said, this book does occasionally get a little dry. I know some people are fascinated with military history and can happily read about tactics and battles for hours, but I am not one of those people. I find it deeply boring to read about attack techniques, and so I did experience waning interest when I think I was supposed to be the most engaged, during the climactic battle itself. I also found myself wanting more of the aftermath, more of Red Cloud’s long life after this particular point. Overall, though, it’s an interesting look at a part of history that’s not well-understood by most potential readers, and I’d definitely recommend it as a way of broadening one’s knowledge base about the formation of the United States as we know it today.

One year ago, I was reading: Midnight’s Children (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Landline

Three years ago, I was reading: Migraine

Four years ago, I was reading: Devil in the White City

Book 231: On Trails

“When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as a collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage.”

Dates read: May 3-7, 2018

Rating: 3/10

There’s an outdoorsy, hiking culture in the West that’s unlike anything I ever knew growing up in southeast Michigan. People camped (which I quickly discovered was Not For Me) occasionally, but generally spending time outside consisted of making friends with someone who had a lake house and then going out on the boat. The only time I’d ever hiked was on trips to the Upper Peninsula to visit family, and that was under duress. But on the other side of the country, spending time in the wilderness is treated with a kind of reverence. I have to confess I remain unconverted…I’m not deeply opposed to getting out there for a few hours, but left to my own devices I’d rather stay home and read.

Even out here, though, there are casual weekend-type hikers and then there are the truly insane, the kind who do things like hike the entire Pacific Coast Trail, or its east coast counterpart, the Appalachian Trail. Robert Moor is one of the latter kind of people, and his experience “through-hiking” (start point to end point, not just doing the odd segment here or there) the Appalachian Trail inspired him to write On Trails. In it, he examines not only the trail he hiked (his experiences with it form a significant part of the book), but trails and paths the world over. Human trails, yes, but also ant trails, sheep trails, elephant trails, the entire idea behind trails and paths and what they signify.

Moor is committed to offering a broad perspective on trails and trail-making, and while his efforts to get across the long, long history of this behavior among living organisms (he recounts a trip to Canada where he goes to talk to scientists conducting research into the very first fossil evidence of trails among very small organisms) is laudable, this book as a whole is just terribly organized. If Moore doesn’t have ADD, he does a very good impression of someone who has it. He’s jumping all over the place constantly, from his through-hike to micro-organisms to ants to sheep now back to ants and then elephants you guys! Now some Native American trails and then back to another subject and everything is touched on briefly instead of explored in depth, and all of this together just drove me batty trying to get into it.

And the parts based around the Appalachian Trail and Moor’s hike of it? Could not have been less interested. Navel-gazing outdoors-y memoirs do less than nothing for me. Congratulations, you undertook a challenging experience that you knew full well would be challenging going in and learned and grew and that’s great for you, I wish you the best in your future endeavors, but I really don’t care. I already didn’t especially enjoy the book, but then we came to the Epilogue and holy smokes you guys, this sent me into an almost burning rage. Moor chronicles time spent hiking with a guy called “Nimblewill Norman”, apparently something of a legend among serious hikers, who basically just abandoned everyone in his life and decided to be constantly hiking and has been doing so for years. While Moor doesn’t present him in an entirely positive light, he gives him and what he represents (the kind of people who get all Holden Caulfield about how society is “fake” and they just need to be free from outside expectations at the monetary and emotional expense of everyone who’s invested their time and energy into them) a kind of respect that it absolutely does not deserve. I hated Norman so much. And Moor also takes the opportunity in this section to repeat many of the often shallow and trite observations he made about paths and trails over the course of the book and getting all of that together completely destroyed any regard I might have had for it.

Now for a caveat: this was a book club selection, and I was essentially alone in that I did not like it. Most of the other members of the group at least liked it, and a couple of them outright loved it. It seemed like most of the rest of the group had a connection to hiking experiences and perhaps this is the source of some of the disconnect between book and reader on my part. As always, my impressions are my own and what I bring to and take away from the book might be extremely different than anyone else. That being said, I hated this and would heartily recommend avoiding it at all costs.

One year ago, I was reading: First (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Book of Unknown Americans

Three years ago, I was reading: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Four years ago, I was reading: Chasing the Sun

Book 230: Game of Crowns

“In the game of chess, no piece is more useful than the queen. It can move vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, and-like all the pieces on the board- its sole purpose is to protect the king. And, in some cases, the future king.”

Dates read: May 1-3, 2018

Rating: 4/10

One of the first pop-culture events I have a very specific, clear memory of is the death of Princess Diana when I was 11. I remember stuff before that, of course (I have a very clear memory of the latchkey staff rolling TVs into the room for the OJ verdict, for instance) but Di’s death was the first time I had a real sense of the context of what I was seeing and hearing. I remember my mother’s genuine sadness, though her usual response to news about foreign royalty was to wonder why anyone would care. She also did not subscribe to the idea of the television being left on as background noise (a mindset I’ve inherited, much to my husband’s chagrin), so the fact that it wasn’t snapped off but was allowed to continue to play marked the significance of the thing.

Getting disproportionately emotionally invested in the death of a divorced British mother of two made us not at all unique. The whole world lost it a little for a minute there. Diana’s life and death continues to resonate around the British Royal Family, and it is through this prism that Christopher Andersen presents her mother-in-law, romantic rival, and would-have-been daughter-in-law in his book, Game of Crowns. Queen Elizabeth II, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge are all women who either are or could be queens of England, and all of them are touched by the legacy of the People’s Princess.

So it makes sense, in a way, that Andersen spends so much time talking about the ill-fated marriage between Charles and Diana. At least one third of the book is devoted to the story of their courtship, their terrible marriage, and their contentious divorce. On the other hand, though, the “War of the Waleses” is an already extensively documented phenomenon. There’s no real new reporting here: they barely knew each other when they got married, they both cheated (though Diana at least went into her marriage without an active side piece), they both orchestrated media to lash out against the other, and they were both active, engaged parents. Her death and the near-constitutional crisis that the response to it engendered had a real impact on the monarchy. And his reporting of William and Kate’s courtship isn’t really much better, in terms of doing more than just summarizing already-available information: lingerie on the catwalk, the break-up, the make-up, the wedding.

What is new is gossip, nearly all of it negative, about Charles and Camilla, with special venom reserved for the latter. He begins the book with a lengthy “what could happen” riff about the ascension of Charles to the throne when his mother dies, predicting that his vanity and hubris will lead to the abolition of the monarchy. While Diana’s leaks to the press are treated a part of her savvy media strategy, leaks from Charles and/or Camilla are portrayed as sneaky, underhanded, and devious. Camilla is depicted as scheming and manipulative, and set against Kate, who’s given a Diana-esque sheen of being both glamorous and naturally gifted at connection with strangers (without any actual supporting evidence). I checked out of the book entirely when Andersen breathlessly related that Camilla had “leaked” information about Kate’s low tally of “engagements”, the kind of meet-and-greets and ribbon-cuttings that make up royal work. The reality is that the Royal Family publishes engagements in the easily-publicly-accessible Court Circular, and a year-end tally is common practice for journalists covering the royal beat. Camilla wouldn’t have had to leak anything to anyone to “shame” Kate for lackluster numbers because that information would have been published anyways! A failure to understand something as basic as this shows the whole book to be without rooting in fact. It’s basically a very long, poorly fact-checked People article and I don’t recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: The Lowland (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Kingmaker’s Daughter

Three years ago, I was reading: The Leavers

Four years ago, I was reading: The Crack in Space

Book 226: Chosen Country

“But his abiding concern was with the same thing preoccupying the townspeople at the meeting in Burns, a desperate and totally genuine love for an idea of a communally minded and free-living western way of life that corporate agriculture and federal regulations were supposedly squeezing out of existence. I don’t think you have to idealize this sort of thing, support the Bundys, or believe in a glossy magical cowboy past to take this kind of love seriously.”

Dates read: April 17-20, 2018

Rating: 4/10

I never thought about public lands before I moved to the West. Michigan has some National Forest land, a National Lakeshore. But I’d never even heard of the Bureau of Land Management, and wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it did before I moved to Nevada and starting working in politics. I guess I would have figured most states were like Michigan, if I’d bothered to think about it at all. Turns out that the federal government owns and administrates upwards of 80% of the land in Nevada! In the West, I think one of the only things as controversial as water rights is the issue of federal ownership of land.

The first controversy over federal land I followed after I moved to Nevada was the Bunkerville situation, orchestrated by a Clark County rancher, Cliven Bundy, and his sons Ammon and Ryan. Not too long after that incident, Ammon and Ryan led the takeover of Malhuer National Wildlife Refuge. It’s still mind-boggling to me that a group of armed men occupied federal government property and this was only sometimes referred to as terrorism and only ended in one death. I try to imagine what might have happened had those men not been white and it doesn’t seem likely that a protracted stand-off would end with no loss of life beyond one man who tried to break a roadblock. Reporter James Pogue was in and around the Refuge during its occupation, and turned his experience with it into a book: Chosen Country.

Pogue half-heartedly tries to tie the Malhuer episode to the greater scope of the dying out of the “traditional” ranching culture of the West and the long-standing libertarian streak of the people here, their sense of independence and alienation from a bureaucracy so far away. I say half-heartedly not because the connection is tenuous, but because it’s poorly explored. There’s a rich history here, but Pogue only glances over it, completely leaving out incidents like Ruby Ridge (which aren’t tied into the lands dispute, but definitely inform the prickly relationship between people who live in the rural areas and the federal government), so that he can spend more time talking about the relationships he built with the men who occupied the refuge and the things he did with them. In this choice, I really feel like he fails his readers, who I imagine are mostly picking up this book out of curiosity about the larger movement and Malhuer’s place within it.

Pogue also stumbles in his organization of the book. Perhaps if I’d been reading a hard copy rather than an e-book, it might have been easier to flip back and forth and have a better sense of who he was talking about when, but Pogue tends to introduce a person (and there’s a fairly large cast of them) and then go on to never again place them in context. For some of the more prominent people, like the Bundy brothers and LaVoy Finecum (who was ultimately killed), that’s probably not necessary, but I kept forgetting who everyone was and their relationships (if any) to each other. He also jumbles his timelines quite a bit between Malhuer, Bunkerville, and a smaller incident he highlights involving a dispute over a mining claim. He’s constantly ping-ponging back and forth in time and place without re-orienting his reader and it’s confusing.

I know that’s a lot of negativity, but I didn’t hate the book. I mostly was disappointed in it…Pogue is talented at his work and paints a captivating portrait of Ammon Bundy in particular, as well as Finecum. His reporting for Vice about these events is very worth reading, and I can understand why he was able to pitch a book on the strength of it. I don’t regret having read it, but I wish it had undergone more vigorous editing and done a better job of illuminating the environment in which the takeover took place. Instead we get stories about how Pogue understands why people value public lands so much after he takes a bunch of drugs while he camps in BLM land. Instead of reading this book, I’d recommend finding his original articles, which cover much the same territory without feeling like a padded-out term paper.

One year ago, I was reading: The Rules of Attraction (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Of Human Bondage

Three years ago, I was reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

Four years ago, I was reading: Sex with Kings

Book 225: Sex At Dawn


 
“The anachronistic presumption that women have always bartered their sexual favors to individual men in return for help with child care, food, protection, and the rest of it collapses upon contact with the many societies where women feel no need to negotiate such deals. Rather than a plausible explanation for how we got to be the way we are, the standard narrative is exposed as contemporary moralistic bias packaged to look like science and then projected upon the distant screen of prehistory, rationalizing the present while obscuring the past.” 

Dates read: April 14-17, 2018

Rating: 6/10

The general proposition that men and women think different ways, and value different things, seems undeniable. Men have more testosterone in their system, and women have more estrogen, and both biochemicals have impacts on our nervous systems. But is it as easy as the old cliche about how men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Do all men really just want to get out there and propagate their genes, while all women want to hunker down and raise their children? I think most of us would say of course not, that’s a reductive and stereotyped way to think about human behavior, but it’s hard to get out of our minds anyways.

In the field of evolutionary psychology, there’s a basic proposition that seems to be taken as a fundamental tenet. In any male-female pair bond, the two halves have diametrically opposed interests. Men, in an effort to spread their DNA as widely as possible, are interested in multiple casual affairs, and are most threatened by physical infidelity, because it might mean they are duped into spending their resources on what are actually the offspring of other men. Women, on the other hand, have to invest heavily in each of their children because the energy-intensive gestation and feeding of infants falls to them. They want relationships that last so that they’re able to ensure the best environment for their kids, and are most threatened by emotional infidelity, because it might lure away their partner for good. In Sex at Dawn, Christopher Ryan and his co-author, Cacilda Jetha, critically examine these ideas by looking at the behavior of our nearest animal relatives to come to an entirely different conclusion.

The way Ryan and Jetha see it, humans are naturally polyamorous and best served in a group where sex is exchanged frequently and without possession or jealousy. They make the point that while researchers searching for the roots of human behavior often compare humans to chimpanzees because of the closeness of the genetic relationship, we’re equally as closely related to bonobos, who have much different social structures. They look to these and other members of the ape family as they compare and contrast things like vaginal position, common copulatory positions, size and shape of the male reproductive organs, and female vocalizations during intercourse (and more) in an effort to determine how human sexuality has actually evolved over time and what it means for society today.

This book was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I thought they made some good arguments, but the language often got a little jokey informal trying-to-be-cool. Either you’re trying to make a serious argument or you’re trying to write a book aiming at a pretty low common denominator to get more sales, and this seemed like it was trying to be both. It’s possible to write about important concepts in an accessible way, I just wrote about how well Silent Spring did that exact thing, but this doesn’t hit the mark. I also thought they came off a little one-sided in their highlighting of the few examples of cultures that don’t subscribe to the monogamous or polygamous models, portraying them as nearly utopian. The reality is that for most people in most cultures in modern history, marriages are between one man and one woman with the expectation of exclusivity. That hasn’t always worked well in practice, but it’s likely that even members of cultures that don’t follow the mainstream experience unhappiness and strife in their personal relationships. More frustratingly, they don’t really present a solution beyond “burn it all down and start over”. It’s an interesting look at the other side of evolutionary psychology, if you enjoy that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t recommend it widely or whole-heartedly.

One year ago, I was reading: Inside Edge (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Three years ago, I was reading: Chemistry

Four years ago, I was reading: Private Citizens

Book 224: The Color Of Water

“The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It’s what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable. Mommy kept us at a frantic living pace that left no time for the problem.”

Dates read: April 11-14, 2018

Rating: 8/10

When we’re little, parents are like gods. Their word is law. They take care of us, make sure we are clean and fed and loved. They have the magic to heal the ouchies. But eventually we find out that they’re just people, after all. They have flaws, and scars, and demons of their own, and sometimes even when they do their best it doesn’t work out. Realizing the humanity of your parents is a little bit scary and a little bit comforting.

When he was young, James McBride’s mother, Ruth, wouldn’t talk about her own life. He knew there was something different about her, but when he tried to figure out why he was the only black kid he knew with a white mom, she would brush him off by telling him she was light-skinned. Eventually, though, she relented and told him her story, of how a little girl born Jewish in Poland, the daughter of a rabbi, came to marry a black man, have eight kids, become a widow, marry another black man, have four more kids, and then become a widow again, leaving her with twelve children, all of whom graduated from college despite the family’s poverty. McBride sets her story against his own recollections of his childhood in his memoir, The Color of Water.

They’re both extraordinary stories: Ruth’s for its sheer improbability, and James’s for being the kind that you’d think would end up one way that actually ends another. James’ story has plenty of struggle and heartbreak, but Ruth’s is just heartbreaking. Everytime you think it can’t get much worse for her, there’s another twist and worse it gets. And somehow it ends well, with Ruth being the last in her family to finally get the chance to go to college and graduate and James as an acclaimed writer. It’s a testament to resilience, of refusing to let your lowest moments define and drown you, of defying the voices that would dismiss you and discount your worth.

But it’s also just very good writing. McBride’s juxtaposition of his experience of his childhood against his mother’s early life is balanced, neither story feels as though it is given the short shrift in favor of the other. He renders his mother’s story in what feels like essentially her own words, not flinching from the difficult parts, of which there are many. Much of this is heavy stuff (interested potential readers should know there’s sexual abuse, abortion, death, and racism herein), but while he doesn’t sugar-coat it, neither does he dwell on it in the way that books about hard lives sometimes do. Ruth is a woman who came through a lot of terrible things and carved out happiness for herself in a world that did not want to give her any. And though he was raised with much more love and care than his mother was, McBride’s own upbringing was still challenging and he managed to come through it, too.

Memoir can be a hit-and-miss category, for me. Not everyone’s life story is all that dynamic or engaging for anyone outside of it, and even if it is, so much depends on the skill of the telling of it. But when executed well, as this is, it can be an enlightening window into a realm of experience outside of our own. I don’t necessarily know that this is a book for every reader…there’s a lot of darkness here, and while it does end well, there’s not necessarily a sense of triumph and uplift to counterbalance it. For me, this is part of why this book works, because it doesn’t seek to lionize its subjects or turn itself into a paint-by-numbers tale of conquering adversity, but for other readers that might be hard to deal with. But I do think it’s a book that should be read, and I do recommend it, so if what I’ve written here intrigues you, definitely pick it up!

One year ago, I was reading: The Club (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Court Justice

Three years ago, I was reading: City of Thieves

Four years ago, I was reading: Sex with the Queen

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