The Headboard Reviews - 2009

Empire of Liberty
Gordon S. Wood

The United States these days doesn't particularly like being described as an empire, though this has always been in its DNA. "Empire of liberty" has a nicer ring to it (sort of like "soft power"), but this glosses over what was a conscious emulation of Rome. The rhetoric, as always in the early days of the Republic, could be deceiving; how intentionally is still an open question. In this excellent survey of the years 1789-1815, Gordon S. Wood revisits the gap that quickly developed between the ideals of the Revolutionary generation and the reality of nascent empire - describing how the country was transformed by a political experiment that, whatever its successes, led to results that were not at all what the Founders would have foretold, or even found desirable. 

Case Closed
Gerald Posner

Two things fascinate me about Lee Harvey Oswald. In the first place, how did this penniless, friendless, totally unaccomplished loser manage to lead such an eventful, not to say consequential, life? The second thing is how much we know about him: the result of the full power of the media (television, film, and publishing), the state (two separate commissions), and individual obsession (even before the rise of the internet) being thrown at dissecting one person's life down to the tiniest detail. Evidence even exists for what buses Oswald took on what trips, what seats he sat in, and who he talked to! You feel a kind of dizzy awe. Though not the last word on the subject (that word will never be written), Posner's book does provide an excellent overview of what has become a needlessly complex bit of history.

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World 1940-1941
Ian Kershaw

In hindsight, history tends to take on an air of tectonic inevitability. What happened is always what had to happen. Nevertheless, at least at the level of political chronicle, one can focus in on moments when key decisions have been made that have influenced the course of history. Ian Kershaw looks at ten such moments from the Second World War in this book, analyzing to what extent they made a difference and to what extent they were true decisions at all, as opposed to the simple workings out of the logic of established ideologies. Given the militaristic fantasies of Germany, Japan and Italy - fantasies largely bred of envy at the position of Britain and the United States as imperial hegemons - conflict was inevitable. Such decisions as were made, no matter how strategically stupid or ill-advised (Mussolini's invasion of Greece tops the list here) derived ineluctably from bedrock premises. Still, it is interesting to observe history's actors playing their different parts, for good and ill, on such a massive stage.

The Price of a Bargain
Gordon Laird

In the same spirit as books like Jeff Rubin's Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller and Ellen Ruppel Shell's Cheap, Calgary-based author Gordon Laird analyses the coming twilight of our post-industrial, "bargaineered," consumer economy in the face of scarce resources, environmental degradation, the credit crunch, and worsening labour conditions. Befitting a book on the "death of globalization," Laird travels far afield to places like Las Vegas, Tibet, and the Canadian arctic, to get a firsthand look at how our system of international trade and transportation is in danger of coming undone and how our bargain culture may soon be faced with sticker shock when it runs up against the true costs of things.

American Tabloid
James Ellroy

"I love this fucking life of ours," one aging gangsters says to another in American Tabloid. "It is never fucking boring." Indeed it is not. Ellroy's "telegraphic style" - foregrounding action, dialogue, and immediate perceptions - pounds out an alternative American mythology with "reckless verisimilitude" - one populated by tough guys, hot babes, and an A-list of the rich and powerful (names like Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Kennedys). No more history than a tabloid is news, it does noir in Technicolor and presents an American chronicle with all the dull stuff left out. A comic book that doesn't attempt depth of character, or indeed depth of any kind, it nevertheless shows what can still be done with that old warhorse the historical novel.

No Impact Man
Colin Beavan

Feeling that the health of the planet is in grave danger, and that a life spent producing waste is a wasted life, Manhattanite Colin Beavan spent 2007 trying to reduce his negative environmental impact to as near zero as possible. Steps taken include producing no garbage (he doesn't even use toilet paper), not burning any fossil fuels (he only travels as far as he can bike), eating locally, using almost no electricity, and volunteering to clean up and restore the natural environment. The results have to be qualified by the fact that Beavan never gets outside the larger, wasteful, economy and culture - and is thus always still a part of the problem - but he does describe practical steps that can be taken to change one's life, and the good reasons for trying to do so.

Lost to the West
Lars Bronworth

Though its title suggests a pointed account of the Byzantine Empire as a lost and forgotten civilization that nevertheless "rescued" the West, this isn't the way it plays. Lars Brownworth's book is, instead, a very fast, breezily written overview of the Byzantine Empire's thousand-plus year history, with an emphasis on the rise and fall of prominent ruling dynasties. Cultural and religious matters receive short shrift, and the Muslim hordes are just that - the sinister other that Byzantium rescued the West from. Not for advanced students of the period, but a good general introduction to all of the important names, dates, and monuments.

The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch

This early example of the American jeremiad returns us to 1979, the "me decade," and a time when Freud was taken seriously as having something to say about human psychology. Lasch's psychoanalysis of the culture, putting an entire zeitgeist on the couch and asking it how it feels about its mother (answer: not good) has dated badly, and is unsupported by any real evidence, but nevertheless makes a handful of interesting general points, some of which have gained in salience over the past thirty years. One of those books you certainly don't want to read all of, but should be familiar with nevertheless.

Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century
A. C. Grayling

British philosopher A. C. Grayling has prepared a "personal dictionary of ideas" that he thinks will be important to understanding our world in the coming century, covering topics political, religious, scientific, and cultural. Representative of the wave of "new [post-9/11] atheism," Grayling "does not hold any brief for religion in general," and so proceeds to kick it as often as he can (with "Religion" itself being the longest entry in the book). But at least, unlike many of the subjects surveyed, religion is something he knows a bit about. Neither informative or comprehensive enough to be a true reference in the age of Wikipedia (there is, for example, no mention of global warming or climate change), nor opinionated and original enough to be a collection of essays, the book falls into a gap of inutility.

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
Tony Judt

Postwar is certainly an informative, bordering on comprehensive and essential, survey of its subject, but the writing finally isn't strong enough to sustain a work of such length. A useful companion to Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, it never achieves the same easy grace of expression and compression. Judt's major themes - Europe's diminishment on the global stage, the evolution of a "European model" of state politics, the ethnic homogenization (and looming de-homogenization) of its populations - could have been made more forcefully with less detail and opinionizing, including the repetitive animus toward the French and even more repetitive straining to enshrine the Holocaust as the major generative fact of postwar Europe.

A Death in Belmont
Sebastian Junger

"The predatory serial murder that lacks a component of sex - or more specifically, sexual sadism - has not yet been 
committed." Nonsense. What about the DC snipers, or Harold Shipman? This isn't even good journalism. Sebastian Junger's foray into true crime has a personal connection - when the murder in Belmont took place, Albert "The Boston Strangler" DeSalvo was working as a handyman fixing up the Junger family home - but not much else going for it. The courtroom coverage is as dull as usual (the availability of full trial transcripts has, I think, been the ruin of many a true crime book), and the question of the killer's identity is finally left up for grabs, leaving the reader with a "just suppose" story. After giving the language a metaphor for all seasons in The Perfect Storm, it's starting to seem as though Junger has shot his bolt.

Dr. No
Ian Fleming

It's never advisable to return to the books of your youth. I read all of the Bond series as a child and thought them wonderful stuff. The experience of dipping into them again lo these many years later has been depressing. Like so much iconic literature - from Dracula and Frankenstein to Harry Potter - the writing itself is terrible. In this book we even have bad guys - the villainous "Chigroes" - who go "Tee-hee!" And who is James Bond, anyway? (Sean Connery, by the way, doesn't count as an answer.) Has any fictional character of similar stature ever been such a total cipher? At least in this book the generic supporting cast of Bond Villain (Dr. No) and Bond Girl (Honeychild Ryder) are above average. But like so much iconic literature - from Dracula and Frankenstein to Harry Potter - the movie is better.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
Charles P. Pierce

The problem, as Charles Pierce sees it, "is not that America has dumbed itself down" (though he obviously thinks it has), but that stupidity has become a dominant economic and political force in the land, riding roughshod over the spirit of the Enlightenment as represented by the book's presiding founding father, James Madison. Truth has come to be measured by how many units it can move, how loudly it is broadcast, and how fanatically it is believed. The great American crank, a figure Pierce admires, has been superseded by the more commercially-oriented charlatan, defined as a "crank who's sold out" and gone mainstream. The argument is a familiar one, and engages all the usual suspects (evolution-denying fundamentalists, talk-radio hosts, conspiracy theorists, global-warming skeptics, etc.) without saying much that's new. 

This Way Out
Carmine Starnino

Carmine Starnino trains his eye on the here and now in this collection of poems, and finds in the sights, sounds and smells of a vacation in Rome as well as his home and native Montreal visions of the strangest things. The quotidian cracks open and is transformed - a butcher at his hack work develops into a portrait of the artist, and a woman four months pregnant gives birth to a memory of old men slumped on park benches, their rhyming shapes closing life's parentheses. The few poems that don't work tilt with rhetorical overload, but for the most part great conclusions are kept at bay and the poems "stick with small answers" rendered in finely measured lines that make careful use of sound effects and intervals of freighted silence. 

Cell
Stephen King

Stephen King's fifty-somethingth book starts off with a bang: A Romero-esque zombie apocalypse that has squads of the bloodthirsty living dead squeaking and gibbering in the streets. These zombies, however, are not your regular undead but rather human hard-drives wiped clean by a wireless power surge. Forced to reboot, we soon discover that underneath our civilized software we still have some instinctual programming for (oddly asexual) crazy violence. How this all works and what it all means is anyone's guess. In any event, by the time the phone crazies start levitating we seem to have flown past Freud into the supernatural. A disappointment even for King fans, especially as his more familiar elements (plucky, threatened kids, anyone?) are starting to get more than a little stale.

Stephen Leacock
Margaret MacMillan

Margaret MacMillan's biography of Stephen Leacock is a brief and affectionately gentle account of the life of a man whose own most popular work was typified by those same qualities. Most writers do not lead particularly interesting lives and Leacock was no exception. MacMillan wisely avoids personal details (not very telling in this case anyway) and structures the book around introductions to different aspects of Leacock's writing and thought: as a humourist, an academic, and a public intellectual. Dismissive of his conservative and conventional take on economics, history, and politics, MacMillan makes the case for why Leacock's fiction still matters today.

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History
Peter Heather

While loving Gibbon this side idolatry, I will concede that some of the conclusions he reaches about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire are not fully supported by the latest scholarship and archeological evidence (though on the whole I think he has aged rather well). In this lively and thoroughly up-to-date narrative account of the collapse of the western Roman Empire Peter Heather sees a coherent process of imperial disintegration consistently, if sometimes only indirectly, related to the sudden rise and even faster decline of the Huns. Perhaps not an entirely "new" account - still the triumph of barbarism, this time without the aid of religion - but an excellent synthesis that provides quite a bit of fresh insight.

The Drowning Pool
Ross MacDonald

Was MacDonald only Chandler's epigone? The writing has less flash than the master's, and it's hard just what to make of Lew Archer. Almost asexual ("I'm a very low-pressure type myself") but a stud when it's required; formidably erudite (he likens a broken gambler in Vegas to the young Dostoevsky) and yet taking pains to conceal it (he later feigns ignorance of Proust). Seeing a distorted image of himself in a mirror he describes a "shadow figure without a life of his own who peered . . . through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world." Which is trite noir self-portraiture, but the most we get. In this, the second Archer novel, the standard MacDonald plot involving a tortured family history isn't very convincing, and elements borrowed from Chandler, like the sinister medical clinic, sometimes collapse into parody. But the build-up is still a lot of fun.

Dance of the Suitors
J. M. Villaverde

Something about J. M. Villaverde's excellent debut collection of stories calls to mind Duchamp's Large Glass, with its diagram of cracked desire representing a voyeurized female cloistered above an anonymous, mechanical circle jerk. In a similar way, the characters in Villaverde's fiction, including a young "Harry" James on an ironic quest to lose his virginity in Europe and a pair of seniors finding different varieties of love in Acapulco, are less into sex than seduction, the eternal dance of Duchamp's suitors that ends the title story and has the dancers "moving their limbs like machines winding down." The art is in the deadpan and earnest voice Villaverde demonstrates such fine control over, seeming always to be straining for an even more perfect rendering of something the dancers are drawn to but which remains out of their reach. 

Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power
Ross King

The track record of the recent spate of short books on big topics (Penguin's Brief Lives and its home and native cousin 
Extraordinary Canadians, the Books that Changed the World and Big Ideas series) has not been very impressive. I've sampled quite a few and found none of them essential reading. Ross King's Machiavelli bio, part of the new Eminent Lives series, is better than average, boiling an eventful and complex life down into a brief narrative that also provides a helpful précis of the career diplomat's literary output and political philosophy. And I'm not sure we need any more than that. 

The Uses and Abuses of History
Margaret MacMillan

The use and abuse of history is a topic so generic you'll find the same title appearing three times among the short list of books Margaret MacMillan suggests for further reading on the subject. MacMillan's version, originally delivered as a series of public lectures, is geared toward a general audience and doesn't advance any new or interesting arguments. Each chapter circles around issues relating to how history has been put to political use. There are recurrent themes, like the need for elites to claim the moral high ground by portraying themselves as victims of historical injustice (an old song: the inheritors of the Roman empire were all, like the Romans, descendants of Troy) but one is left feeling that MacMillan doesn't have any particular point to make. 

The Beats: A Graphic History
Text by Harvey Pekar et al., art by Ed Piskor et al.

A fresh take on literary history is offered up by Harvey (American Splendor) Pekar in this collection of what are primarily capsule biographies of the major writers of the Beat generation. The first half of the book, consisting of long chapters on Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, is by far the best. Later appreciations take the form of perfunctory biographical sketches and brief considerations of Beat topics like jazz, art, and San Francisco's City Lights bookstore. The most interesting of these is a chapter on women and the Beats, "Beatnik Chicks," by Joyce Brabner (art by Summer McClinton). Although brevity frequently shortchanges the subject, the graphic approach generally works well, with the more spirited artwork adding both perspective and insight.

The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today
Andrew J. Cherlin

Using historical analysis and data from international survey results, sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin tries in this book to answer the question why in the United States "people partner, unpartner, and repartner faster than do people in any other Western nation." Central to his study is the contradiction between the values of the traditional family unit, with its emphasis on fixed social roles and the raising of children, and the importance individualism places on personal growth and fulfillment in marriage. Expressive individualism and personal choice are today firmly in the ascendant, with women in particular riding a wave propelled by social change (more education and better jobs making them more independent) and technology (the pill for birth control). And so while marriage remains as important as ever, its meaning has changed. We're never going back to the 1950s again. And that's a good thing.

The Invention of Air
Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson's intellectual biography of all-around Enlightenment Man Joseph Priestly briefly touches on the high- and lowlights of Priestly's career without getting bogged down in the details. The approach is multidisciplinary, taking a "long zoom" look at Priestly's ideas - scientific, religious, and political - and showing how they relate to the broader social and historical currents of various cultural ecosystems, from the fauna of the carboniferous age to the recent U.S. presidential race. In particular, Johnson is less interested in the what as the how and the why behind the great revolutions in thought that Priestly had a knack for finding himself at the center of.

In Praise of Barbarians
Mike Davis

Those of us who thought the last international socialist died on the battlefields of the First World War can take heart in this collection of essays by Mike Davis, a social critic with a strong sense of that bygone tradition. As with most timely commentary, hindsight reveals a mix of the prescient (a 2005 essay on "Riotous Real Estate" suggests that the American economy has been "surfing a tsunami and a towering cliff looms ahead") and the blinkered (Hillary Clinton is given the nod as the 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, with Barack Obama said to be unlikely to survive the primaries). In general the longer pieces are the best, especially the detailed rebuttal of some of the points raised by Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? Less valuable are the analogies between the American and Roman empires, and the brief appreciations of important figures in the American labour movement.

Cold-Cocked: On Hockey
Lorna Jackson

Cold-Cocked is a bit of a grab-bag of a book: a fan's notes following the fortunes of the Vancouver Canucks (the author lives on Vancouver Island), an essay on sports, gender, and the media, a family history, and a menopause memoir. Though not consistently "on" hockey, hockey is the stable reference point around which everything else coheres as bodies and relationships fall apart. Sharply observed and honest to the point of being alienating at times, Jackson's book is a revealing personal odyssey as well as a valuable addition to the literature of our national game.

The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
Ian Mortimer

As the title indicates, this new biography of Edward III casts the life of the man who ruled medieval England from 1327 to 1377 in a positive light. Bucking a modern tradition that has tended to dismiss Edward as a warmonger, Mortimer highlights his triumphs in establishing a strong, popular monarchy, bringing domestic peace, and prosecuting successful foreign wars. Perhaps the biggest twist is the author's argument, made here and in a previous book, that Edward's father (Edward II) didn't die when he is widely supposed to have, but lived in hiding for another fourteen years. Whatever one thinks of that idea, Edward's story is well told and densely documented, presenting a portrait of the man and his age with a minimum of professional stuffiness. 

To Live
Yu Hua

The troubled history of China in the twentieth century - including a civil war and the Communist Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution - plays almost unnoticed in the background of this compressed epic telling the story of the peasant Fugui's "ordinary life." In a wonderful set piece recalling Tolstoy and Crane a battle that Fugui survives becomes a masterpiece of minimalism and limited point of view, removing any hint of a big picture. The revolutions that matter are, instead, the traditional round of births, marriages, and deaths, all set against the regular harvesting of crops. The whole thing could have been The Good Earth revisited, and it can't escape the comparison (at least for those of us who have actually read Pearl Buck), but realism and parable go well together, and Fugui's grim chronicle has its own rigorous style and economy. 

New York Stories: Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine
Ed. by Steve Fishman, John Homans, and Adam Moss

New York City is not a microcosm, and this anthology from "the magazine that is the city that is the world," or, in Tom Wolfe's no less biased opinion "the hottest magazine in America in the second half of the twentieth century," proves it. However, if you're looking for fascinating portraits in wealth, celebrity, and power with just a touch of seediness and sleaze, you won't want to miss it. From radical chic and the brat pack to female chauvinists and wiseguys, nearly every story is a winner, combining fresh, first-person ("new") journalism with sharp insight into the cultural, political and sexual spirit of the age.

Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case
A. M. Rosenthal

The 1964 murder of Catherine "Kitty" Genovese (author A. M. Rosenthal thought using the nickname "impudently familiar," and so didn't) was transformed almost immediately into a parable of modern urban life, in large part due to some sensationalist and sloppy initial reporting. In fact, there were probably only a handful of witnesses at most, and perhaps only a couple of those who displayed truly culpable behaviour. In this contemporary account, however, the emphasis is on the bigger picture anyway, with Rosenthal attempting to place the events in a larger moral context - a "broader truth and deeper understanding." It is this questioning that makes the case still relevant, even if the facts of the story have been largely turned into the stuff of legend.

Spade & Archer
Joe Gores

This prequel to Dashiell Hammett's classic 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon reintroduces us to such familiar figures from the original as detective Sam Spade, his secretary Effie Perine (fresh out of the St. Francis Technical School for Girls), his partner Miles Archer, and Miles's horny wife Iva. The book consists of three novellas set in 1920s San Francisco and linked by the machinations of a sinister master villain. Unfortunately none of the colourful eccentrics of the original (Casper Gutman, Joel Cairo, Brigid O'Shaughnessy) are around to liven things up, Spade himself is a humourless tough-guy know-it-all, and the larger narrative arc is a standard revenge story, predictably resolved. Noir should be more fun than this.

Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom
Tom Holland

Tom Holland, who wrote a very good book on the fall of the Roman Republic (Rubicon) and a not-so-good one on the Persian wars (Persian Fire) swings and misses in this breezy account of the rise of Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries. The canvas stretches from Iceland to Byzantium, but without any clear focus or coherent story to tell. None of the historical figures are fleshed out and the writing style seems the product of extreme haste, stuffed with overwrought scenery and repetitive rhetorical emphases. Finally, the argument for the importance of the period is never convincingly demonstrated, with the millennium itself, like our own Y2K, turning out to be a damp squib. An easy read, but rice cake for fans of popular history.

Fruit
Brian Francis

Growing up gay can't be easy, but growing up gay and obese - and in Sarnia of all places! - is hardly an experience for the faint of heart. In Peter Paddington, however, Brian Francis has created a hero capable of not only surviving the challenge, but, With the aid of family, friends, and imaginary lovers, navigating the treacherous waters of adolescence in style. Undeniably funny, even laugh-out-loud in a couple of places, what is most impressive is Francis's gift for observing quiet, understated details that manage to express the things we're saying when we're not really saying them. The time (1980s) and the place (suburbia) are also nicely captured. Indeed sometimes painfully so, for anyone who was there.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Walter Benjamin

And what of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction? Is there any aura, that semi-religious sense of being in contact with the unique and the remote, shining from a computer screen? If cultic value has vanished and technologies of reproduction and dissemination have effectively reduced display value to nil, does the work of art (debased in today's vocabulary to "content") have any value left beyond providing distraction for the masses? "All persons today can stake a claim to being filmed." And they stake it on their blogs and webcams. In doing so have people lost their personal aura as individual human beings, becoming simply more content or (what's worse) mere statistics? Benjamin's essay, obscure and I think dated in many ways, does raise some interesting questions about how far we've traveled down the long slide. 

The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer, a new verse translation by Burton Raffel

While some may question the necessity of a modern verse translation of the Canterbury Tales, given that Chaucer's Middle English isn't that hard to work through for anyone inclined to make the attempt, veteran poet and translator Burton Raffel has at least gone and done a decent job of it. In general his version is both responsible and fluid, and even offers a less painful alternative to the original in a couple of instances (like the Parson's interminable tale). Purists, however, will note many places where there has been no improvement in sound or sense, and cringe at new pilgrims like "the Pardon-Peddler" and "the Cleric-Magician's Servant."

The Class Project: How to Kill a Mother
Bob Mitchell

In The Class Project Toronto Star crime reporter Bob Mitchell tells the story of Mississauga's infamous "bathtub girls," the pair of teenage sisters who drowned their alcoholic mother in her bath in 2003. Both were convicted of first degree murder and sentenced as youths. Unable to reveal the identities of the girls, Mitchell nevertheless manages to fully document the case by lifting wholesale from transcripts of online chats, police surveillance tapes, and sentencing reports. In fact, there is a bit too much of this and the book could have used more editing. Such a use of sources does, however, occasionally provide the unmediated directness of an oral history.

A. D. 381
Charles Freeman

With the the explosion of books detailing how seemingly innocuous events and inventions "changed the world," one may be forgiven for not immediately knowing what it was that happened in 381 A.D. that was "one of the most important moments in the history of European thought." What happened was the Roman emperor Theodosius I issued an edict declaring the orthodox position on the Trinity, after the Nicene Creed, and making all other beliefs - Christian and pagan - heretical. Thus ended a tradition of religious tolerance and lively philosophical debate, with an authoritarianism based on irrational principles taking its place. The argument is a more specific example of the process Freeman outlined in his previous book, The Closing of the Western Mind, and is quite engagingly and for the most part convincingly presented.

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
Francisco Goldman

Author Francisco Goldman leads the reader through a dark labyrinth indeed in this account of the investigation into the 
murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City in 1998. As things turn out, we never learn who killed the bishop. The leading suspects, after a series of trials, were only convicted of having been somehow involved. Such murkiness is endemic to Goldman's Guatemala, an almost unimaginably violent, corrupt, paranoid country that "skipped the twentieth century" and whose national character was shaped by "cruelty and isolation." Though sometimes - perhaps unavoidably - hard to follow, the puzzle-without-a-solution quality of the narrative and the frequent dips into absurdist black humour combine to create a compelling postmodern whodunit that engages in provocative ways with our familiar (twentieth-century) label of true crime.

Hitler's Private Library
Timothy W. Ryback

The starting point for this latest attempt at understanding Adolf Hitler is a playful comment by Walter Benjamin to the effect that a book collection actually contains and preserves the personality of the collector. And so, using his researches into the surviving collections of Hitler's personal libraries, Timothy Ryback provides a biography in books. Unfortunately, the absence of any significant marginalia makes it hard to draw meaningful conclusions. In addition, the idea that these books shaped Hitler's life is misleading. By the time he started collecting books, Hitler's "reading" (he tended to skim) only complemented or filled out a mental framework already set in place. 

Deviant
Harold Schechter

The true story of Ed Gein is of some interest, seeing as how the "original Psycho" has since become the stuff of modern myth, urban legend, and Hollywood. The real Eddie Gein (rhymes with "fiend") was not, at least as far as we know, a cannibal or taxidermist. Nor were his credentials strong as a necrophile (he had a fetish for some body parts, but didn't attempt sex with corpses because of the smell) or serial killer (he was mainly a grave robber, and only killed twice). None of this, however, stopped him from almost immediately becoming America's "seminal psychotic." Arrested in 1957, Bloch's novel appeared in 1959, and Hitchcock's film a year later. After that it was away to the bloody races. Schechter's book works Gein's case history into a tight, dramatic narrative - but in the end nothing in the text is quite as eerie or revealing as the photos juxtaposing the chaotic squalor of the rustic ghoul's kitchen with the frozen gloom of his mother's room, long sealed off from the rest of the house.

Uproar
Jack MacLeod

The nearly 25 years between John Updike's Eastwick books was an impressive hiatus, but the wait for a sequel to Jack MacLeod's 1979 Zinger and Me has been even longer. In Uproar the irrepressible Francis Z. Springer (Zinger to his friends) arrives at Chiliast University (that is, the University of Toronto) to launch a writing career, argue over the intellectual legacy of Marshall McLuhan, and help his old friend J. T. get his groove back after a rough divorce. The Old Boys Club combats political correctness, corporate publishing, and other follies of modern life in this spirited, though sometimes a bit obvious, satire.

The Great Crash 1929
John Kenneth Galbraith

In the 1997 Introduction to this classic work, first published in 1955, the author gives as one reason for its durability the 
way it keeps getting revived whenever "another speculative episode - another bubble or the ensuing misfortune - has stirred interest in the history of this, the great modern case of boom and collapse." It's an angle that worked for me. What also works is Galbraith's sly demythologizing of capitalism's captains (I particularly like his account of the "no business" meeting), and his inimitably cool style. In our own time the moral of the story has only grown in resonance: "Long-run salvation by men of business has never been highly regarded if it means disturbance of orderly life and convenience in the present." One should never discount the influence of comfort on inertia.