Katherine Addison's Blog, page 10

Review: DiAngelo, White Fragility (2018)

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about why white people, as an aggregate, are so bad at talking about race. The answer, which I think DiAngelo (a white woman) proves very handily, is that it is so greatly to our advantage to shut down discussions of race that we have a whole laundry list of strategies (from defensiveness to anger to tears to the utterly nonsensical claim of "reverse racism") that we aren't even consciously aware of to get us out of admitting that racism (a) exists and (b) works exclusively in OUR favor. This is an excellent book for forcing white people to THINK about their reactions, and hopefully to change them.



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Review: Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (1998)

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the story of James Murray and W. C. Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary. It's well-written and engaging, although it felt a little facile at times, and the story is fascinating, both the story of the OED itself and the story of W. C. Minor, who was an American doctor who served with the Union in the Civil War and then began, possibly as a result, to go mad. He traveled to England, where his paranoia caused him to shoot and kill an innocent man. He was sent to Broadmoor, where he was made comfortable and allowed to have his books and where somehow he heard about the mammoth undertaking that was the Oxford English Dictionary and instantly desired to be a part of it. The acres of time he had on his hands (plus his already extant fascination with books of the 17th century) made him a peculiarly useful volunteer for the OED, and he was one of their top contributors for 20 years. (It took 70 for the OED to be even provisionally finished.) At the end of his life, he was allowed to return to America, but remained hospitalized as what we would now call a paranoid schizophrenic until he died in 1920.



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Review: Woodward & Bernstein, All the President's Men

All the President's Men by Carl Bernstein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading this book in 2020 is a really horrifying experience, because everything Nixon and his goon squad were trying to do in the late 60s/early 70s is exactly what the ENTIRE GOP is trying to do now. "At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law." In the 1970s, the Republican Party stood up to Nixon when the truth started coming out and said, no, this is unacceptable. In 2020, they collude with Trump. It's like someone looked at Watergate and said, "The only thing wrong here is that you didn't try hard enough." Trump's BEEN CAUGHT, even, and the GOP closed ranks around him, and everything about 2020 is horrifying, but this makes it worse, because the things that looked horrifying in 1974 (coincidentally, the year I was born) look so goddamn TAME now.

Ahem.

Anyway.

This is Woodward and Bernstein's account of how they broke the Watergate story, piece by corrupt and malignant piece. It's well-enough written, even if it's very odd watching them talk about themselves in the third-person, and it is still an exciting story. There is something very satisfying about watching people who think they're above the law being brought to justice, even if Nixon himself slid away under that presidential pardon which he should NOT have gotten. Nobody can be above the law, or the law makes no sense. (There's this big problem in American history---and not exclusively American history, but let's stick with the U.S. for now---where the forces of good actually triumph over evil ... and then fall all over themselves to "put the past behind us" and return to "normal" as quickly as possible, because there are "good people on both sides." And so the forces of evil have taken a staggering blow, but are given the chance to reset and regroup and just keep going. It's what happened in 1865 and it's what happened in 1974, and I am so goddamn tired of seeing forgiveness granted to people who have not earned it and major faultlines in American discourse simply papered over and left alone to ferment in the dark so that they can come back stronger than ever.)

Sorry, this is making me very polemical, and I'm mixing my metaphors something fierce.

The book is also interesting for its snapshot of how Washington, D.C., journalism was conducted in 1972-4. I'm going to guess it looks pretty different now. (Another thing we can thank Nixon for: the delegitimazation of the news media. Does anyone even talk about "the free press" anymore?) D.C. is very much a boys' club, where everybody on both sides of the press/politician line knows each other and talks to each other and has lunch with each other. (There is one woman in power in this book, the owner of the Washington Post. All the other women are wives and secretaries. People of color are also mostly invisible.) Everybody knows everybody else, and one of the things you can seen Nixon destroying is that understanding that all three sides (Democrats, Republicans, and the press) are doing their jobs and all three sides can be counted on to play by a set of unspoken ethical rules. (Nixon laughs and runs the rules through the shredder.) I'm not a fan of the boys' club approach, but I did like the feeling that everybody involved was being professional, and that being professional involved NOT using every dirty trick you could think of to get ahead. (Which is not to say that politics pre-Nixon was some sort of utopia, just that there was something there for him to destroy---as everyone's sincerely horrified reaction to the truth about Watergate shows.)

So mostly this book left me really sad that everything accomplished by the Watergate proceedings just got walked back, and that now the way Nixon was playing the game has become accepted practice for the GOP, and there's no longer any kind of moral consensus across party lines that some things are actually beyond the pale. (Like Trump's entire political career.)

There's a pendulum of corruption and reform in American politics. We've been swinging toward corruption for an awfully long time now, and I pray that 2020 is the year we start to swing back.



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Review: Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995)

The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France by Robert Darnton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As you can kind of tell by the title, this is an academic book, recommended to me to a friend because one of the things going on in my current ms is, yes, the manufacture and sale of pornography. (I don't know how I got there, either.) This is a very good academic book, less about pornography per se than about how books on the forbidden list (which includes pornography, philosophy, and libelous (and frequently pornographic) biographies of Louis XV and his mistresses and ministers) circulated in France in the 1780s. One of the things that I found most fascinating was the way that pornography, philosophy, and libel/biography all swirled together into almost the same genre (the code for them was livres philosophiques), and I loved reading about the book publishers and booksellers colluding to get around the state censorship, not in any We are striking a blow for freedom! way, but just in that simple There is a market for these books! way.

Darnton shies away from coming to any conclusions about the relationship of these forbidden books to the Revolution, and while partly I agree with him that we cannot reconstruct the experience of reading in the 1780s well enough to know, I also feel that it left the book flapping feebly a bit at the end, which is a pity, because the earlier parts were so good.



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Review: Mellnick, Creepy Crawling (2018)

This is an excellent book of cultural analysis of Charles Manson and the Manson family, both in and of themselves and in the artistic work they have inspired. Melnick is very smart about things like the way the Manson "girls" are constructed, both the way they constructed themselves and the way they were constructed socially at the time and since then. Also, although he doesn't use the word "over-determined," he helped clarify for me that what Sanders and others are trying to do against Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter reading: not to propose a different motive, but to say that there were MULTIPLE motives. Melnick even points out that the various people who went out to commit murder may have had different ideas about what they were doing and why they were doing it. PART of it is Helter Skelter (why else would Patricia Krenwinkel write THAT, misspelled as "Healter Skelter," in blood on the LaBiancas' fridge?), part of it is to make the Hinman murder look like part of a series, so that Bobby Beausoleil could not be convicted (which, along with being a really BAD idea, was also a really stupid one, as events showed), and I'm gonna go ahead and say that part of it was that Charles Manson wanted some rich people to die as payback for the way Terry Melcher and Dennis Wilson had seemed to welcome him in and then just as quickly welcomed him back out.

For me, Melnick was strongest and most useful when talking about the 1960s (the way Manson camouflaged himself as what the 60s meant by a "freak" and the ways that turned out to be like an alligator camouflaging itself as a floating log) and early 1970s (the performance of Vincent Bugliosi as "Vincent Bugliosi"), but I appreciate the way he followed the trail up to basically the publication of his book. There is a lot of Manson art out there, some of it the deliberate epater la bourgeoisie stuff that avant gardians like to do, some of it novels that engage with Manson in different ways (Emma Cline's The Girls, Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice, Madison Smartt Bell's The Color of Night ), hip hop sampling, John Waters' sculpture, Punisher comic books ... Melnick pursues his target through a kaleidoscope of American culture, and is smart and fun to read while he does it.

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Review: Sanders, The Family, rev. ed. (2020)

The Family by Ed Sanders

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So this book is kind of weird. Which makes sense, since it's about the Manson Family, but it's also weird in other ways. The first part of the book (more than half) is a colloquially written history of the Family, up to and including the Tate-LaBianca murders, and is very good. Better than Bugliosi, who really doesn't WANT to try to understand the Family. But when it gets to the trials, Sanders himself becomes a person in the book instead of just a narrative voice, and I found that I didn't like him very much. He name-drops. He reminds you constantly of his counter-culture credentials, just how hip and happening a dude he is. And while I'm perfectly willing to be interested in an author's encounters with their subject, this was more a memoir of Sanders' experience of covering the Manson-Van Houten-Atkins-Krenwinkel trial, including all kinds of tangents, with which I became especially impatient when he got off onto the pornography tapes (of famous people) that may or may not have been in the Cielo Drive house the night Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent were killed. Sanders turns into a conspiracy theory chaser---he never actually finds a single tape, only talks to people who have talked to people who claim to have seen them. The only time he gets as close as talking to someone who claims to have actually seen the tapes themselves those persons (a.) are talking about tapes of the Manson Family, not the star-studded pornography (the various tapes tend to get conflated in Sanders' account), (b.) are woefully unreliable and untrustworthy and (c.) never produce the goods. I found it both not quite believable and a powerful waste of time. I was quite surprised when Sanders did not buy into the conspiracy theory that says the Family killed Ronald Hughes (van Houten's attorney), but he is sure---and convincing---that Hughes' death was an awful accident.

So this is an uneven book. (He also scorns Bugliosi's Helter Skelter theory without ever actually finding something to put in its place, only rumors and conspiracies.) When it's good, it's excellent; I do feel like I have a much better idea of how the Family happened. When it's bad, it's pedestrian and annoying.



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Review: Catton, Gettysburg (1963)

The Battle of Gettysburg by Bruce Catton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


[library]
Does exactly what it promises on the tin.

This is a short book, and very tightly focused: a little bit of lead up, the three days of Gettysburg, and a little bit of aftermath. Catton is one of the great historians of the American Civil War, so the explanation is very clear and the prose is top-notch. I never quite got the who's who sorted out, but that's my problem as much as his.



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Cover art!

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Virtual event: Tubby & Coo's

I'm doing a virtual event tonight at 6 CDT at Tubby and Coo's Mid-City Book Shop. Here's the link.

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The Big Idea

Guest post over on John Scalzi's blog.

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