Columbine by Dave Cullen

Columbine by Dave Cullen

On April 21, 1999, I walked past an elementary school playground, on my way from my college campus to a convenience store, and I heard screaming. For a moment, my blood went cold. I ran up to the chain link fence and scanned the blacktop for guns or knives or boys in trench coats. But the screaming was just the screaming of kids who'd been cooped up all afternoon and were thrilled to be running around and playing with their friends. Everyone was happy. Everyone was fine.

It was the day after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold came onto the Columbine High School campus, loaded up with guns and bombs and massacred their classmates. I was a student teacher at a local high school, and suddenly, I was worried about my kids, everybody's kids, in a way I'd never worried before.

Over the next few weeks, I followed the tragedy, and formed certain impressions based on the stories I'd read - troubled, outcast boys; bullied at school; little parental supervision; trench coat mafia; violent video games; popular kids and jocks targeted.

Reading Cullen's book, it's amazing how pervasive the myths about Columbine that circulated in the media following the tragedy were, and how few of them were true. In the years that have passed, more truth has come to light; however, the nation's eye was no longer on Columbine High School, and though the ideas we held about the crime have faded from our memories, they haven't much changed.

Columbine is a meticulously researched, remarkably sensitive book that seeks to create a comprehensive, rational record of the facts. It's not sensational, and there are no photographs, a hallmark of the true crime genre. It's also not an easy thing to read.

The night I began the book, I was grateful for the lack of pictures as I fell asleep. The killers' names swam up into my head, but thankfully, I couldn't conjure their faces, or any other of the images of Columbine, and I didn't want to. The account Cullen pieces together from thousands of pages of official reports and hundreds of interviews and media accounts is disturbing enough.

Cullen responsibly explains many of the stories that evolved around the massacre, and unveils the ways in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fell through the safety nets of school, home, friends, and law enforcement without pointing fingers. He is slightly more damning, if sympathetic, about flaws in the police response to Columbine. After all, students' bodies were left where they fell more than a day after the shootings; Dave Sanders, the only teacher to die in the shootings, might have lived if SWAT teams had acted sooner; the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department hid and destroyed incriminating documents about Eric Harris.

Still, Cullen is hesitant to to assign malicious intent or blame to anyone involved in the response effort, or to families after the fact (the killers' included). Harris and Klebold are a different story, but Cullen also unfolds the dynamics of their personalities and their relationship in a responsible and well-documented fashion. It's almost possible to feel sympathy for Klebold, a suicidally depressed boy, who, had he not come under Harris's influence, might have gone an entirely different way. Harris, on the other hand, is portrayed as a young, but full-blown psychopath, adept at manipulation and bent on mass annihilation.

Columbine skips around in its chronology, never lingering too long on any one part of the shooting, the events that led up to it, or the events that followed, and perhaps that is what made me able to finish it.

When I bought this book, I felt like a sicko, that I'd even read a book about something so awful.

But when I'd finished it, I felt some sense of calm, that a crime I'd had so many false impressions about had been clarified for me, that I now understood both the sickness of the killers, but also, the bravery and struggle of the survivors.

And that's why I would encourage people to read it. Columbine is an example of investigative journalism at its best. It's an effort to make sense of a tragedy, relying upon a foundation of talking to and understanding the people impacted by it. It was a terrible story that needed to be told responsibly and comprehensively out of respect to those who lived through it, and Dave Cullen has done that.

The Best Moment on the 2008 Campaign Trail

There's an interesting round-up on Politico, of scholars, pundits, lobbyists, and heads of think tanks, all recalling the moment in this Presidential campaign that was most memorable for them.

I know mine, no question, and only one other person mentioned it: the beautiful, thoughtful, nuanced speech that Barack Obama gave in the wake of the Reverend Wright "scandal," the best political speech I have heard in my lifetime.

The person who pointed it out, Eric Liu, said of the speech, "Under even ordinary circumstances, to have offered such a transcendent meditation on race and American identity would have been remarkable; to have created it under attack and when his campaign was in grave danger was stunning."

Here's just one of the many best parts of that speech:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time."

News Flash: LAT Readers Deserve Better

When the Los Angeles Times cut its standalone Sunday book review, I was annoyed. When the Business and Real Estate sections were whittled to pale imitations of their former selves, I was confused. When scores of talented staffers and editors were laid off or offered buyouts, forcing the paper to operate on a skeleton crew, I was furious.

And now they've gone and uglied up the layout something fierce, and I've just about given up caring.

Many Angelenos angrier and better-informed than I have voiced their complaints about Sam Zell and his shameful gutting of our city's once-great paper. So never mind about the fact that I now get my book news from blogs, and preferred the New York Times's coverage of the Dodgers' postseason (and never mind that sports columnist Bill Plaschke has decided to "boycott" the World Series for reasons both mysterious and profoundly stupid - whatever).

At the heart of this is that the Los Angeles Times was one of the things that made me excited about moving to the city almost four years ago. I started reading it before the move, right around the time of the paper's Pulitzer-winning coverage about deplorable conditions at King/Drew Hospital.

I read that series and thought, that's good reporting, that's a newspaper I'll be proud to read.

And now, it isn't.

Also, it's really, really thin these days.

Twitchy With Anticipation: Orange County by Gustavo Arellano

Within a matter of days, Gustavo Arellano's new book, Orange County: A Personal History will be on sale, but that's little comfort to me because I want to read it now.

Fortunately, I have been able to tide myself over with the first chapter. Unfortunately, it's so good that it only makes the waiting worse.

Now, in nearly every case, I'm very skeptical of (and not very polite about) anyone under the age of 40 who writes a memoir. But Arellano has my blessing because, based on what I've read about the book, there isn't going to be a lot of navel-gazing in this personal history. It's a history of Arellano's family (who started sneaking across the border to work thankless jobs for meager wages in 1918), and a history of Orange County, a region of the country that will terrify and amaze you, no matter which side of the culture wars you're on.

And if you read Arellano's weekly syndicated column, Ask A Mexican!, then you know he is occasionally crass, frequently hilarious, and nearly always the smartest guy in the room.

Sometimes he writes passages like this one:

There's no real reason why what you just read and anything that follows relating to my personal life should ever have been published (reviewers: there's a pull quote for ustedes if ever there was one!). The immigrant saga, the coming-of-age rebel yell, the portrait of the artist as a young hombre -- the memoir portion of this book uses those clichés of American letters to tell its tale. But the sad beauty of this country is that we forget. We forget that dumb ethnics assimilate, that they share the goals and dreams of any Mayflower descendant. It takes a snot-nosed, presumptuous minority to kick the United States in its amnesiac britches every couple of years -- consider this your ass boot.

And then mixes them with stuff like this:

Meanwhile, American historians have long dismissed [Orange County] as America's fundamentalist wild, reviled as the place that spawned Nixon, ridiculed for the perfection that drew so many to find lives of leisure. We're historical ether -- invisible but dangerous.

And I am so, so, so excited to read more.

Back To Business

Due to the Olympic Games, illness, and a generally scrotty state of mind brought about by the latter, I just haven't felt much like writing book reviews this month. Now that I'm mostly better (kids, don't EVER have an allergic reaction to a drug, because it can take weeks to get over it), I still don't feel much like writing book reviews.

Or at least good book reviews involving sustained, semi-critical thought and analysis. This week is dedicated to catching up, so first up: Nixonland

When I was in junior high, and giddy with my new-found love for Janis Joplin and tie-dyed t-shirts, I asked my mother to tell me what the 60s were like. I expected some tales involving Volkswagen buses and fighting the power, but all she said was, "It was an ugly, ugly time."

At the time, I thought, "Gee, you must have been a total no-fun-having square" (although she did tell me a pretty good story about sneaking into Easy Rider underage). But after reading Nixonland, I now understand that my mother's response to the 1960s is the only appropriate one.

Reading Rick Perlstein's Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America is kind of like taking a nature hike that turns into a forced march. Though it only covers the years between 1965 and 1972 -- starting with the Watts Riot and Johnson's sweeping civil rights and domestic policy legislation, and ending with Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern and the beginnings of the Watergate investigation -- it feels like too much for one book.

Perlstein's a thoughtful and engaging writer, though perhaps a bit too enthusiastic a researcher. The book is at its best when it's focused on the dirty shenanigans of its titular namesake, and it's also very good when discussing the rise of the "Silent Majority" and the nasty backlash of whites nationwide against the civil rights movement.

It's amazing to realize how inaccurate the popular narrative of the civil rights movement is -- you'd think the whole thing ended in 1964, and that segregation and racial discrimination only happened in the South. And by the time Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate," many whites and most of the conservative establishment regarded him as a riot-starter, a Communist, and a terrorist.

Ugly times, indeed.

However, on Vietnam and the anti-war movement, and the political shake-ups during those years, Perlstein's account sometimes gets bogged down by the sheer messiness of everything that transpired.

I haven't even gotten to Nixon himself, but let's just say that this book is directly responsible for two nightmares I had in the past week involving the jowly old crook and his cronies.

And also, I've realized one major difference between the Nixon administration and our current one, which are in all other significant ways, identical. One got caught and was punished. The other got caught and didn't suffer a whit.

So, ugly as that era in American history might have been, they'll always have that on us.

Nixonland is interesting, horrifying, entirely worthy of your time; however, a) Nixon nightmares, b) super depressing, and c) forced march. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Mistakes Were Made: My Bad by Paul Slansky and Arleen Sorkin

My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them by Paul Slansky and Arleen Sorkin

Since it's Olympics time, I've been finding myself very much in need of potato chip books that I can pick up at every commercial break (can someone explain to me why McDonald's is such a big Olympics sponsor - it would seem that they are working at cross-purposes), but then just as quickly toss aside when Nastia takes to the uneven bars.

And for that purpose, My Bad is perfect reading, with chapters compiling the most shameful moments from television, radio, sports, politics, and so forth. Of course, it's rarely the apologies themselves that are notable. These tend to be fairly bland and rehearsed, unless, of course, the penitent in question is clearly not sorry, or unless the person in question is Wade Boggs, who likes to apologize in the third person.

For example, this apology offered by John "Class Act" McCain in 1998 is rather unremarkable: "I made a very unfortunate and insensitive remark. It was the wrong thing to do, and I have no excuse for it."

What prompted it, however, was that McCain said that the reason Chelsea Clinton was "so ugly" was that she was "the child of Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno."

Some chapters get a little repetitive, like the one on sports figures, for example. Apparently, there are three kinds of sporting gaffes: flipping off/physically assaulting your fans and/or opponents, committing a criminal act off the court/field, or saying appalling, racist/sexist things in interviews and then being completely surprised when people are offended.

Still, I had completely forgotten at least half the things that former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott had to apologize for.

Along those lines, what's most entertaining about the book is realizing how quickly most scandals fade from memory as they're replaced by others. Rev. Jesse Jackson's anti-Semitic remarks in the 1980s? Forgot about them. Allegations that Gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger groped a whole bunch of women? Slipped my mind. Howard Stern? Dr. Laura? Actually forgot that they ever existed.

And it's also interesting to see how American ideas have changed in the past 25 years about what constitutes appropriate punishment for the transgressions of public persons. While sleeping with a 17-year-old girl might have necessitated an apology in 1983, it did not necessitate a resignation (see former Rep. Daniel Crane).

But some things never change. There's fairly steady representation through the decades of judges who make comments about the attractiveness of rape victims, journalists and reporters who fake news stories, and talk radio personalities who make Don Imus look like Mother Teresa.

If you need something to keep you entertained during Michael Phelps's 83rd interview, or if those Visa commercials stopped being inspiring and started being annoying by Wednesday, this book is for you.

Weighing In On the Whole New Yorker Thing

Tons and tons of people have had their say about the satirical New Yorker cover, saying that it's racist or offensive, that it fueled popular misconceptions and flat-out untruths about the Obamas, that it didn't succeed as satire for any number of reasons, or that it did succeed as satire, and would everybody just shut up already.

So far, my favorite has been Carolyn Kellogg's post at Jacket Copy about all the fiction writers, poets, and journalists whose work this week will reach a wider audience than it otherwise would have.

As for me, I didn't care for the cover. Is it satire? Sure, mission accomplished, crystal clear. But New Yorker cartoons and covers always strike me as decidedly smug, humorless, unfunny, dull, and most of the time, irrelevant and dated.

Cartoons in the New Yorker are like the jokes your rich, yet progressive Baby Boomer uncle saves up to tell at Thanksgiving dinner, and he thinks he's being so outrageous and such a card, so everyone just has to humor him and chuckle politely because it's Thanksgiving, and it's an institution and no one wants to cause any unpleasantness. So you quietly turn to Dad for Current Affairs, or maybe to Cousin Margot for a little Fiction, but as soon as you do, your uncle is right there interrupting the story with another crummy joke.

Actually, I think the artwork might have worked as the cover of a whole bunch of other publications, but because it was on front of the New Yorker, it just took on some of that publication's smug, humorless, unfunny taint.

For me anyways. I loathe New Yorker cartoons.

Brady says it's because I don't get them. I say, are they not funny because I don't get them, or do I not get them because they're NOT FUNNY?

Context is important to consider, though. If this artwork had appeared on the cover of the National Review or The New American, I imagine the outcry would have had a slightly different flavor.

Or maybe the NYT is onto something when they say that, with the exception of Stephen Colbert, white comedians and political humorists simply haven't figured out how to make Obama funny yet.

Science With a Rock and Roll Heart: The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani

In her exceptionally candid, accessible, and fascinating book, Pisani talks about her work in the field as an epidemiologist, studying patterns of HIV infection in Indonesia, China, East Timor, and the Phillipines, and developing policies to combat it. The book is filled with conversations, both enlightening and troubling, with waria, heroin users, sex workers, and the employees of public health organizations, and ventures into methodone clinics, red light districts, and needle exchange programs.

But despite the diverse range of people and places Pisani comes into contact with, the book's most important idea is a simple one: outside of East and South Africa, most new HIV infections are contracted through the buying and selling of sex, unprotected, unlubricated anal sex, and the sharing of needles; however, most of the billions of dollars that governments and other organizations provide for prevention and treatment do little or nothing to target the groups most at risk.

Because, as Pisani puts it, there are no votes and no political goodwill to be gained by doing nice things for junkies, prostitutes, and gay men.

In the mid-1990s, money for HIV and AIDS research became plentiful, when it was feared that the disease would rampage through the general population (despite the fact that in most of the world, this wasn't the case). However, much of that money came, and continues to come, with strings attached. While Pisani lauds the Bush administration for actually putting the money on the table and persuading other governments to do the same, she is scornful of abstinence-only prevention programs and governments' refusals to fund needle exchange programs. In developing Christian and Muslim countries, it's much more difficult to achieve high levels of consistent condom use among at-risk populations because governments stand in the way.

She is equally frustrated by programs adopted to slow the transmission of HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa that target the disease as a "development problem," focusing on gender inequality and poverty. In truth, she says, HIV in Africa is spread because most people aren't circumcised, older men have sexual relationships with young women, spreading the disease across generations, and people tend to have "nets" of sexual partners, rather than "strings." Many Christian African governments don't want to talk about these sexual behaviors, and other organizations believe these ideas to be racist; however, many programs currently in effect on the continent will do nothing to prevent people from dying of AIDS for the sake of religious and political ideology.

It's tempting to go on about more of Pisani's arguments and observations, but I'll save the rest of those for readers. Instead, I should probably mention Pisani's writing style, which may put off the prudish or those who believe these are issues that should be spoken of with grim faces and finger-wagging. She's frank, foul-mouthed, and sometimes, funny. Also, it's important to remember that Pisani is concerned with public health, which is more concerned with national and global patterns than in individual cases. At times, this may seem impersonal and callous, but Pisani is not. Her in-depth work with at-risk populations and her obvious compassion for the individuals she works with should make that much clear.

Pisani doesn't flinch, doesn't judge, and is passionate about the collection of good, reliable data and the use of HIV/AIDS funding where it will do the most good - she's a scientist with a rock and roll heart.

Half a Review and Some Other Stuff: Who Hates Whom by Bob Harris

I'm feeling sort of obligated to post, on account of it's been nearly a week. And yet.

I have no books to review because I spent the past week re-reading World Without End, that big, fat medieval Ken Follett book, which I checked out from the library because I thought I'd be on jury duty (alas, summoned, but not called to serve).

On a second read, I noticed one annoying little thing. Follett has this habit of describing minor characters with a single distinctive trait (e.g. strapping arms, a rat-like face, a jolly bosom), and then mentioning that trait every single time the character appears in the book. In a 1000-page book, this begins to grate.

I'm currently reading Who Hate Whom: Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, and Various Things Blowing Up: A Woefully Incomplete Guide by Bob Harris, author of a book much-loved on the blog, Prisoner of Trebekistan.

Harris admits from the get-go that this is not the book he intended to write. He'd had something in mind along the lines of odd sports and recreation of the world, but his editor nixed it. Then he casually mentioned how useful he would find a book that explained "which parts of the planet are currently explosive and why," to which his editor said, "That's not a bad idea, actually."

And while the fact that this was not Harris's first choice for a book does come across a bit in the writing, it is proving to be an exceptionally handy little book. Harris is a smart dude, and very good at explaining complex things in succinct, funny, and brain-sticky ways without grossly oversimplifying things (and when he does, he's the first to announce "by the way, I'm grossly oversimplifying things here"... as the title of the book itself might suggest).

Between it and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, I now understand the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan with far more sophistication than what was provided to me by the news I read and watched. And I haven't even gotten to the regions of the world that aren't in the news every day. What's going on in Liberia?

Soon, I will know.

Methadone!

Wire withdrawal, day 2: The shakes aren't so bad, and there's less bugs crawling around under my skin than there were last night, so that's good. On the other hand, I'm still only answering to "Bodie" or maybe "Bunk" and this morning I set up surveillance on one of the cats, whom I suspect is holding.

But what's this? Over at The House Next Door, a list of Wire-related and Wire-esque books for those who, like me, are jonesing something fierce in the wake of our beloved show's cancellation?

Score!

Death of a Prime Minister

An interview with Benazir Bhutto, from the Nov. 2007 issue of Glamour magazine:

"We have to deal with the madrassa system [of fundamentalist Islamic education]. The madrassa is supposed to be a school. But the law of the land does not allow you to teach people to kill others in the name of religion. These schools have become a decoy—they have suicide bombers, they have rocket launchers, they give refuge to militants. These people are teaching hate, and I think that should not be permitted. When I was prime minister the World Trade Center had already been attacked [this was the first attack, in 1993]. So we arrested the mastermind of that attack. We found out his connection to some of the madrassas. Then we started cleaning up the madrassas, and this is what led to the backlash against my government."

thirtysomething

Tonight, Susan Faludi is speaking at the Los Angeles Public Library. And tomorrow, I will officially be in my 30s. These things seem unrelated, but they are not.



Because, you see, when I was about 15, I was the world's biggest fan of the show thirtysomething, and watched all the reruns on Lifetime. I'm not sure why I liked it, as I was certainly not the target audience. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the actress who played Nancy went to high school with my dad. Or maybe it was that everybody on the show seemed so old to me, but it still seemed like they were playing at being grown-up.

Then I turned 17, and picked up a copy of Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, in which thirtysomething does not come off well.

At first, my hackles were up because this was, after all, my very favorite television program. But by the end, I realized, "She's right! They made Melissa all man-crazy and pathetic and Ellyn had to go to a shrink, and everybody hated Susannah because she didn't want to stay home with the baby, and meanwhile, good, perfect Hope was good and perfect because all she did was clean up baby puke and do things for Michael. This show sucks!"

So, thank you, Susan Faludi, for hopefully helping me to be a much better thirtysomething than I might have been otherwise, even if I am skeptical of the premise of your new book.

And another thing about thirtysomething, it does not hold up well. Watch the advertising agency brainstorming scene above, compare it to any episode of Mad Men, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Yes

Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy

Despite its sensationalist title, Murphy's book provides a surprisingly level-headed look at the similarities and differences between the Roman Empire and the United States. More importantly, it is a highly accessible point of entry to those whose knowledge of said Empire is limited to Caligula, Hadrian's Wall, lead poisoning, vomitoriums (a myth!), and gladiators.

Sadly, I am one of those people. I blame my high school teachers, who started every school year with an obligatory week on Native Americans, followed by Jamestown, and petering out around World War II in mid-May. In 11th grade, we made it all the way to Vietnam, and that was pretty cool.

But as much as I enjoyed Are We Rome?, it's possible that I appreciated Murphy's extensive bibliography even more. I know what I'm reading next to fill in the shameful gaps in my education.

More knowledgeable reviews by people with a better classics background than I are available at Salon, The New York Times, and The Atlantic Monthly. Murphy was a managing editor of the Atlantic for many years, but almost more impressive is his 25-year stint as writer of Prince Valiant. How's that for a resume?

Everything's Fine, But It's Not Fine: 1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose (Aug. 2007)

I posted this review during the Blogathon, but since the post was only on top for 30 minutes, and since the book is astonishingly good, very important, and soon to be released, I thought I'd reprint it.

A reporter for the Times-Picayune since 1984, Rose has covered everything from the city's crime to its nightlife, and despite being a Yankee transplant, it's hard to imagine anyone with deeper pride in and love for New Orleans.

In the days immediately following Katrina, Rose and other reporters returned to the city to put out a paper, covering the news from their bicycles. By now, everyone has seen the images from the Lower Ninth Ward and the Superdome, and knows about the colossal, nightmarish tragedy of incompetence that followed on the heels of the storm. But what Rose writes about in his columns is a tragedy of a different sort.

After the Convention Center and the Superdome were evacuated, after the floodwaters subsided, the remaining population of New Orleans set about the task of putting their lives back together. The columns, published between 2005 and 2006, compiled in 1 Dead in Attic describe exactly what that process means, and the toll that it took on those who chose to rebuild in the face of civil unrest, civic inaction, and several kinds of bureaucratic hell. And to read Rose's columns is to watch a witty, intelligent, empathetic man slowly crack up under the burdens of stress, heartbreak, frustration, and loss.

In a straightforward and unapologetic voice, Rose writes about the "thousand yard stare" of survivors, the uncontrollable crying jags. The gamut of ugly, messy human emotion that rears its head after "the Thing" has range as well as teeth, and Rose's stories embody the gratitude, gallows humor, sadness, desperation, pettiness, and rage welling up in himself and those around him. Some of these stories are easier to get through than others.

In "Enough To Feed an Army," Rose describes finding a freezer-full of perfectly intact and gorgeous steaks a week after the storm, which he and friends cook up for the California National Guard to say thank you. It's a sincere, beautiful story, devoid of any schmaltziness. And there are other stories where Rose can't help but wonder at the wonder of it all. To be alive, to have hope, to go to Jazzfest is sometimes enough. Except when it isn't.

Despair peeks around the corners of a seemingly humorous column about going through airport security with a suitcase containing 15 naked Barbie dolls for his daughter while she and the rest of his family stay in Maryland with his parents. Later in the book, as post-traumatic stress and depression set in, Rose's humorous stories become scary-funny.

He accosts a random stranger he catches littering, participates in a passive-aggressive neighborhood refrigerator-dumping war, blacks out while covering a story and spends an afternoon on a sidewalk drifting in and out of consciousness. Rose milks these stories for laughs, and sometimes you catch yourself smiling even as a little voice in the back of your head says, "This isn't funny."

These stories culminate in Rose's widely syndicated essay on his decision to get help for depression, "Hell and Back." It's a remarkable piece of writing, and you can read it here.

The book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the aftermath of the storm, beyond FEMA trailers and the Superdome - the real day-to-day in a post-Katrina New Orleans. Tucked in there as well is a subtle message to the rest of the country about what New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast need today, almost two years after the storm.

In one column, Rose writes, "Tell them that New Orleans is still the best city in America. Tell them to come see for themselves, that we're happy, hopeful, joyful, and celebratory still. Then tell them this: New Orleans is a broken, suffering mess, weakened and scared... Got that? It's simple: Everything is fine here. But it's not fine."

More of Rose's column are available at http://www.nola.com/rose.

If You Read Only One of the Books Reviewed Today, Make it This One

1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose (available August 2007; thanks to Simon & Schuster for sending me a reader's copy)

A reporter for the Times-Picayune since 1984, Rose has covered everything from the city's crime to its nightlife, and despite being a Yankee transplant, it's hard to imagine anyone with deeper pride in and love for New Orleans.

In the days immediately following Katrina, Rose and other reporters returned to the city to put out a paper, covering the news from their bicycles. By now, everyone has seen the images from the Lower Ninth Ward and the Superdome, and knows about the colossal, nightmarish tragedy of incompetence that followed on the heels of the storm. But what Rose writes about in his columns is a tragedy of a different sort.

After the Convention Center and the Superdome were evacuated, after the floodwaters subsided, the remaining population of New Orleans set about the task of putting their lives back together. The columns, published between 2005 and 2006, compiled in 1 Dead in Attic describe exactly what that process means, and the toll that it took on those who chose to rebuild in the face of civil unrest, civic inaction, and several kinds of bureaucratic hell. And to read Rose's columns is to watch a witty, intelligent, empathetic man slowly crack up under the burdens of stress, heartbreak, frustration, and loss.

In a straightforward and unapologetic voice, Rose writes about the "thousand yard stare" of survivors, the uncontrollable crying jags. The gamut of ugly, messy human emotion that rears its head after "the Thing" has range as well as teeth, and Rose's stories embody the gratitude, gallows humor, sadness, desperation, pettiness, and rage welling up in himself and those around him. Some of these stories are easier to get through than others.

In "Enough To Feed an Army," Rose describes finding a freezer-full of perfectly intact and gorgeous steaks a week after the storm, which he and friends cook up for the California National Guard to say thank you. It's a sincere, beautiful story, devoid of any schmaltziness. And there are other stories where Rose can't help but wonder at the wonder of it all. To be alive, to have hope, to go to Jazzfest is sometimes enough. Except when it isn't.

Despair peeks around the corners of a seemingly humorous column about going through airport security with a suitcase containing 15 naked Barbie dolls for his daughter while she and the rest of his family stay in Maryland with his parents. Later in the book, as post-traumatic stress and depression set in, Rose's humorous stories become scary-funny.

He accosts a random stranger he catches littering, participates in a passive-aggressive neighborhood refrigerator-dumping war, blacks out while covering a story and spends an afternoon on a sidewalk drifting in and out of consciousness. Rose milks these stories for laughs, and sometimes you catch yourself smiling even as a little voice in the back of your head says, "This isn't funny."

These stories culminate in Rose's widely syndicated essay on his decision to get help for depression, "Hell and Back." It's a remarkable piece of writing, and you can read it here.

The book is a must-read for those seeking to understand the aftermath of the storm, beyond FEMA trailers and the Superdome - the real day-to-day in a post-Katrina New Orleans. Tucked in there as well is a subtle message to the rest of the country about what New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast need today, almost two years after the storm.

In one column, Rose writes, "Tell them that New Orleans is still the best city in America. Tell them to come see for themselves, that we're happy, hopeful, joyful, and celebratory still. Then tell them this: New Orleans is a broken, suffering mess, weakened and scared... Got that? It's simple: Everything is fine here. But it's not fine."

More of Rose's column are available at http://www.nola.com/rose.

A Thin Line Between Brave and Ludicrous

So, the object of this here blogathon being the raising of money for hurricane-battered libraries, we thought it proper to share our own Katrina story, or more accurately, my folks' Katrina story.

Weird and creepy moment of foresight: A week before the storm formed, my faculty advisor and myself were walking over to grab some coffee, and talk somehow turned to New Orleans, and I said to him, "If you've never been, you really should go soon. It's one of the great cities of the world, but it's due to get hit by a big hurricane one of these days, and the levees aren't in the greatest shape, and given the local terrain, if they ever break it's gonna fill up like a bowl."

So the storm forms and it's on its way.

I call home: "Y'all leavin' or stayin'?"
Home: "We're staying."
Me: "A'ight."

Then the storm gets bigger. My phone rings.

Dad: "Here's the info on our will, and this is what you should do if a tree falls on us."

Mobile, as we all know, got relatively lucky. Dauphin Island, not so much. I found the webcast and watched the Mobile news feed and commenced to pacing back and forth. I called home during the storm and got through.

Dad: (sounds of wind) "Hello?"

I recall stories of my dad spending most of Frederick sitting on the upstairs porch.

Me: "Are you outside?"
Dad: "Yeah. I had to get some important stuff out of the car."
Me: "Don't you think you should be inside?"
Dad: "Ow!"
Me: "What?"
Dad: "Oh, nothing...shingle just hit me in the arm."
Me: "GO BACK INSIDE."

Pacing resumes. The next day I get up, look at the web, and see that Dauphin Island has a new channel through it and several bridges are out, and Mobile has been (relatively speaking) not as bad as it could have been. I call home.

Me: "How's things?"
Dad: "The house is alright, but there's a little roof damage. I'm at the office."
Me: "What are you doing at the office?"
Dad: "Sitting at my desk, looking up at the sky."
Me: "Oh. How's your computer?"
Dad: "Full of water. I just poured it out."

Long story short, we lucked out, the next issue of Mobile Bay Monthly made it to press, and I figured out where I got my sense of gallows humor from.

And, last but not least, special thanks to MBM for their donation to the Blogathon.

What's Up With Morrissey, and Other Burning Cultural Questions

Ask a Mexican by Gustavo Arellano

In 2004, Arellano's editor at the O.C. Weekly suggested he write a column where readers could write in to ask questions about Mexicans. To some, this might seem like a suggestion in questionable taste. Well, welcome to the O.C., bitch. Arellano dubs it "the most Mexican-hating county in the country," and that's not exactly overstatement.

But if the ills of racism can be cured by education and a dialogue to promote understanding, this Mexican was game. As the son of an illegal immigrant and the recipient of a masters degree in Latin American Studies, he had more than a little insight on the subject. Plus, he figured, no one would read it. Arellano penned this for his debut:

Dear Mexican, Why do Mexicans call white people gringos?
Dear Gabacho, Mexicans do not call gringos gringos. Only gringos call gringos gringos. Mexicans call gringos gabachos.

And a star was born.

The column is now the Weekly's most popular feature, and this book collects the most probing questions posed to The Mexican. These come from sensitive liberals, Minutemen-loving xenophobes, and perplexed second-generation Latinos alike, and a good hunk of them are absolutely horrifying.

But for every pinche gabacho asking, Why do Mexicans stand on the side of streets trying to get jobs? Why can't they just get real jobs?, there's a reader desperately trying to understand why Mexican candy is covered in chile, how the Mexican postal system works (answer: it doesn't), or what's up with all the Guatamalan-bashing.

What's most fun about this book is watching Arellano spin the most offensive, empty-headed questions into cultural studies gold in 500 words or less. You'll learn about la raza cosmica, the regional differences in Mexican popular music, and the intricacies of Mexican and U.S. immigration policies.

An added bonus for English speakers: you will learn a lot of good, new swears.
An added bonus for everyone: you will read the sardonically heart-warming story of how porn saved Arellano and his friends from gang life.

To Live Outside the Law, You Must Be Honest

Of the books I read while Mary was out running very long distances, Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time proved to be both a great read and an unexpected case study in - with apologies to Sting and Carl Jung - synchronicity.

Ever pick up a book that perfectly and succintly speaks to a time and place in a way you weren't expecting, elegantly placing the capstone on some seemingly unrelated series of events in a manner that makes them meaningful in a new way?

If you have, then you'll understand why When the Levees Broke + The Wire + my increasing addiction to hardboiled fiction + Los Angeles + Mary's marathoning + Dubya/Hillary = this excellent memoir.

Or maybe you won't. Lemme 'splain real quick, and then I'll get right to the good stuff.

In short, the cumulative failure of our social institutions, political leaders, and public imagination to do anything but natter on in increasingly insular enclaves while New Orleans sinks, the icecaps melt, Iraq crumbles, and the filthy rich do any damn thing they want has had me on a bit of a glum streak for some time now. Britney's in rehab, the wolves are at the door, and the water has hit the top step, so smoke 'em if you got 'em friends, cause the bastards have finally won and we're all one dune buggy from Mad Max out here.

This is, you might guess, no way to live.

So imagine my delight when I read Scoundrel Time, which is a valuable document of one of our past national freakouts that is eerily prescient, from the dirty tricks to the failure of the majority of the intelligentsia to do anything but stand around with their soundbites in the wind.

What happened was this: Hellman was called before the House Committe on UnAmerican Activities and kept her head when all about her were naming names. She politely told them she would answer any question about her own activities they cared to ask. She then added, in the classiest way possible, that when it came to discussing any of her friends they could go to hell.

For this, she lost her house, the blacklist ate her career, her phones were tapped and her passport restricted, she was audited and penalized by the IRS, who also looted her bank account, and she was put under surveillance by the CIA while living as an expatriate.

(Hammett was less polite, and they did the same to him, but they threw him in jail too.)

Lillian Hellman was an amazing woman for many reasons. She was a hell of a writer, for one, and she also put up with Dashiell "TB and a gambling problem is no reason to quit drinking" Hammett.* And if this was just a book about "How I stood up to Joe McCarthy" that would be a fine accomplishment in itself. Her letter to the committee is a model of principled dissent that should be required reading in every political science, political sociology, or ethics class. But where this slim little book becomes a masterpiece is in the way she describes life in the crosshairs where, in her memorable phrase, "Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels."

Nor is this simply a story of the big bad right wing come to blow down the house of the virtuous leftist. As any student of the period knows, most fellow travellers folded like a Vegas cardsharp when push came to shove; Hellman writes of many an ostensible radical whose convictions turned out to be less dear to them than did their swimming pool. She does this for the most part without rancor, forgiving if not forgetting, and she brings the same level of scruitiny to bear on herself and Hammett as well. It is a story that is heartbreaking, chilling, and ultimately inspiring, without being sappy or self-righteous, and it's told by a master essayist whose humility is only exceeded by her insight.

If "speaking truth to power" seems to you to have come to mean "preaching to the pundit choir"...
If you need to be reminded that sometimes basic human decency is more powerful than rhetoric, Senators, and public opinion combined...
And if you think Milan Kundera is brilliant, but sometimes insufferably smug...

...this book is for you.

____________________

* In fact, the only thing of hers I had read prior to this was an essay about her life with Hammett, which moved me to tears. I am now committed to rectifying this glaring oversight.

For Your Post-Election Hangover

Watching the election night results come in used to be like Superbowl Sunday to me. Then I moved to Calfornia, where the propositions are invariably more interesting than the candidates, yet somehow, everybody from the Insurance Commissioner to the Green Party State Assembly candidate seems vaguely awash in corruption or minor sleaze. I remember the days when I could go down to my polling place at the Madison Public Library and vote for Russ Feingold. Those were simpler times.

But for those of you who live in more politically interesting areas than I do, and need another month or so to come down from the effects of that alternately sweet and bitter drug called democracy, here is some reading to round out the end of your year.

I felt no need to reinvent the wheel on political fiction book lists, as there are many fine ones out there on this subject. Here are two of the best:

Nancy Pearl's "The Best in Political Fiction" for NPR
Political Fiction on Overbooked

And some of the most interesting-looking political nonfiction to come out this year:

The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality by Nick Bryant
While something like 17,572 biographies of JFK were published in 2006, this one stands out from the pack by focusing on Kennedy's approach to civil rights, an approach that mainly entailed courting the black vote, then standing idly by.

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg
Between the excerpt from this and that feature on grunge fundamentalists, Salon has been chilling me to the bone of late.

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America by Philip Jenkins
Everybody knows it - the 70s were a dark, ugly time. A look at how the hippies lost their idealism and became neo-cons terrified of everything from Communists to Satanic cults, this book seems wonderfully bleak and interesting.

Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction by David Kuo
Kuo came to work at Bush's controversial Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, convinced he could use his Christian faith to make a difference in how politics was done. This did not turn out to be the case. I saw an interview with Kuo on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and he was so darn sincere both about his belief in God and in the U.S. government that I can't even imagine what must have happened to break him.

Conservatize Me: How I Tried to Become a Righty with the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith, and Beef Jerky by John Moe
Somehow, I doubt this book is anything approaching subtle. Still, its premise has that appealing Morgan Spurlock 30 Days vibe, rather than that annoying Morgan Spurlock Don't Eat This Book vibe.

Things Fall Apart

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley

"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity"
-"The Second Coming" -- W.B. Yeats

As Hurricane Katrina was gathering force in the Gulf Coast at the end of August 2005, my husband and I were glued to the news and worried sick. Worry turned into fear when it hit. Then fear turned into grief when the levees failed and New Orleans flooded.

And then over the next few days, worry, fear, and grief slowly turned into rage.

Watching the news that week, you got the stories, but they were fragmented and filled with confusion and misinformation. Brinkley's book has just enough distance, time-wise, from Hurricane Katrina to put all the facts in order and provide the kind of comprehensive coverage that you couldn't get from even the best news sources in the thick of things.

Unfortunately, it's even worse than you thought. Rapes, sniper fire, cops turned bad, bureaucracy at its inefficient and indifferent worst. There were many heroes to emerge from the storm, and Brinkley really gives them credit where it's due, especially the Coast Guard, the Louisiana Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, and the medical professionals who chose to stay behind with patients too ill to evacuate.

But then there are the villains. What Brinkley really does well is to document their crimes, separating the incompetent from the actively evil. Ole "heck of a job" Brownie may have been Katrina's scapegoat, but he barely holds a candle to the NOPD, Mayor Ray Nagin, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff (perhaps the biggest bad of them all), and the people of Gretna, Louisiana who prevented hurricane survivors from entering their city at gunpoint.

Get ready to scream, and then to sink into a deep, deep depression about the country you live in. That said, if you are an even semi-engaged resident of the United States, you ought to read this book.