Reagan Duck Moonshining
Rawhide Down by Del Quentin Wilber
Chasing the White Dog by Max Watman
I was raised in a house in which my mom threatened my dad with divorce if he didn't vote for Mondale in '84 (we're Minnesotan–mom's reasoning was the guy had to win his own state). I also came of age during the governorship of Jesse Ventura, and I was, like lots of us, devastated by Wellstone's death in 2002. All of this is simply to say that, though I'm political, I'm from Minnesota, and I'm as liberal as they come, and I'm as frustrated as anybody by the almost comic adoration for Reagan that's become the norm in the last 10 or so years from both sides of the aisle.
However, my take on Reagan has been shifted by Del Quentin Wilber's fantastic Rawhide Down, the sort of historical book which a) all but demands to be read in one afternoon (both for how engaging it is and how compellingly Wilber writes) and b) will absolutely shock readers—the world 30 years ago is entirely different from the world we presently occupy, not least because of security measures taken for the sake of our presidents.
Like most folks, I read the first bits of Rawhide Down in Vanity Fair, and let me just say this: the book's a thousand times more interesting and engaging than the excerpt was, and the excerpt was phenomenal. I can't sing high enough praises for this book, honestly: regardless of where your politics lie, this is a book that'll knock you glad on your ass and leave you gasping—at how narrowly disaster was averted, at the to-the-bones decency of people you may've until now suspected to not have much decency, at what happened how 30 years ago in front of a hotel. You'll likely see this book everywhere: I'd encourage you to believe there's a good reason for that—you should read it and find out and agree.
Remember that Harper's article from like three years ago? About the big plastic deadzone in the Pacific, north of Hawaii, that Texas-size mass of debris? It wasn't just a regular article but one of those Harper's folio pieces? (coincidentally, that article was just referenced like today by n+1) This is the book that came from it.
Honestly: if you're not reading Hohn, you're an idiot. Hohn's who to read if you like Bryson, Wallace, McPhee, any of the great nonfiction folks. There's facts galore in this, and the facts themselves are great and fascinating, but far more compelling is how many of them Hohn gathers and stuffs into one place, and the effect such an infoload causes on the reader. Here's what I mean: the book's essentially about a shipping container of rubber ducks which went overboard in the Pacific—that's its starting point. Yet through that single object and event, Hohn travels the world, examines environmental effects, considers the facts of consumption and disposability, the lastingness of things, etc. It's a whallop of a book, over and over—best not to miss it.
Max Watman's Chasing the White Dog seemed, to me, inauspicious for a bit: I was worried, after having read a few books recently which essentially tease the reader about focusing on a single object or pursuit when, in fact, the books are simply considerations-of-self on the part of the authors, that this'd be another book like those.
Oh my lord was I wrong. I mean it: I picked this book up with suspicion and caution, but I was so deep in so fast I didn't notice the pages going by. Is part of my enjoyment of the book a matter of me caring more about moonshine than about, say, a baseball team, or a store in NYC? Sure. But also, Watman emphatically cares, page after page, about his subject: moonshine, the culture (both real and created) which surroundings home distillery (the first 30 pages are fantastic just for the deflation they provide of the creaky old back-porch old-boy clubbiness one might [rightly] imagine is a central component of 'shining), what it means to try to make one's own liquor. It's just rivetingly great: please don't be the idiot I was. Please don't approach this book with anything but the most fervent excitement and gratitude.
