Bobby

Awhile back, I read a fascinating account of how, on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, riots broke out in virtually every US city. Every city except for Indianapolis. That night, in front of a crowd that was largely black - and extremely pissed off - Robert Kennedy gave an impromptu speech that calmed the crowd and helped lock him in the country's imagination forever.

As the train carrying Kennedy's remains traveled across the country, two million people lined the tracks to say goodbye. The last time something like that happened, the train was carrying Lincoln's body.

Thurston Clarke's The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America attempts to explain who Kennedy was in the light of his brief presidential campaign - and how it had such a powerful influence over the United States.

One of the sadder aspects of the book is the specter of death looming over the campaign. Everyone - Kennedy included - expected a hail of bullets at any moment:

"Yes, of course he has the stuff to go all the way," John Lindsay replied. "But he's not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it. Just as sure as we're sitting here is somebody going to shoot him. He's out there now waiting for him . . . And please God, I don't think we'll have a country after it."

Despite the premonitions and the pall hanging over the campaign, it pressed on, through Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon and California. At campaign stops, Kennedy defied all logic - and advice - and repeatedly told off his audiences. '"To the club members-big, heavy men, most of them well-fleshed and still occupied in shoveling in their lunch - the Senator from New York spoke of children starving, of 'American children, starving in America.' It was reverse demagoguery - he was telling them precisely the opposite of what they wanted to hear,"' wrote Tom Congdon, Jr. of the Saturday Evening Post.

Despite this - crowds were drawn to Kennedy, and Clarke does a fine job evoking the carnival atmosphere at many campaign stops, along with the crowds surging ahead, desperate to see or touch him before he left.

Clarke doesn't waste any time with speculation - something a lot of people might have done. He has no idea what a second Kennedy administration would have been like. Instead, he focuses on what it was that drew people to him - his humanity and sincerity. In an era where politicians talk down to crowds and pander to their worst instincts, Robert Kennedy spoke to their intelligence and better impulses, and he paid the ultimate price for it.

I read a lot of nonfiction - histories and the like, but I can say that so far this year, it's the best history book I've read.

Born To Kill

Shortly before US troops swarmed into Iraq, the Pentagon embedded Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright with the First Recon Marines, one of the units spearheading the invasion. Originally, Wright was not supposed to accompany the unit into combat, but after making arrangements with their commanding officer (he had to leave his satellite phone behind), he joined the Second Platoon on their run through Iraq.

After a brief round of hazing, the men in the unit began accepting and opening up to Wright, and what resulted was a series of stories in Rolling Stone, a book, Generation Kill, and ultimately, the miniseries currently airing on HBO. Since I'm not a big Rolling Stone fan and I don't get HBO, I settled in with the book recently.

Wright sums up his title early in the book:

They are the first generation of young Americans since Vietnam to be sent into open-ended conflict. Yet if the dominant mythology that war turns on a generation's loss of innocence - young men reared on Davy Crockett waking up to their government's deceits while fighting in Southeast Asian jungles; the nation falling from the grace of Camelot to the shame of Watergate - these young men entered Iraq predisposed toward the idea that the Big Lie is as central to American governance as taxation. This is, after all, the generation that first learned of the significance of the presidency not through an inspiring speech at the Berlin Wall but through a national obsession with semen stains and a White House blow job.

What can you say about a generation that was raised on the scandal du jour, gangsta rap, and Grand Theft Auto? Are they as noble as their grandfathers, charging headlong into combat against the Nazis and Japanese? In their own way, yes, and they're just as human as anyone who has put on the uniform and fought - and killed - for their country. Wright did a fine job showing both the best and the worst of this humanity in action.

Wright spends much of his time with Sergeant Brad Colbert - the Iceman, a "stone cold killer" known for his complete calm in combat who commands one of the Platoon's lead humvees. As the missions progress and they push deeper into Iraq, Colbert frequently hands out food and water to the displaced civilians; he also orders his men to dispose of undetonated artillery in the streets of Baghdad. Many of the Marines are like this - highly trained, dedicated and ruthless in combat, but also deeply concerned about their comrades and the pain and suffering they see during the invasion.

I give Wright a lot of credit for not simply showing the good sides of these soldiers -they're profane, sometimes racist, sometimes ignorant and frequently ineptly led, but they always accomplish their missions and actively try to keep from harming people caught in the crossfire. The men frequently complain about their commanding officers, orders and lot in life.

While I found this candor refreshing and eminently creditable, there was some fallout - many men did not receive promotions and Wright has come under fire for his portrayal of some of the officers. However, if you're looking for an insight into the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a look into the terror of modern combat, Generation Kill is a great place to start.

Old Tyme Religion

Much as I try to tune it out, the "culture wars" keep creeping into my consciousness from time to time. And frankly, I find most of them to be utter bullshit.

Take the separation of church and state. Basically, there's a custody battle going on over the founding fathers, and just what their intentions were as they framed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Were they god-fearing Christians, hoping to settle a new Christian nation, and achieve the ideal City on a Hill, or were they ardent rationalists or deists?

Steven Waldman attempts to answer these questions in Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, which he largely does.

I think it's very easy to view historical figures as static portraits on a canvas. They don't move, they don't change, and they always remain the same, so it becomes very easy to not look at the founding fathers as actual people, with the same strengths and weaknesses. Take Thomas Jefferson, someone the right wing loves to take out of context. Jefferson believed in Jesus - but as a philosopher. He utterly rejected the divinity of Christ. In his spare time, Jefferson wrote his own version of the Bible, one that contained no references to the supernatural: no miracles, no healing, only Jesus teaching his followers. In fact, Jefferson had little use for organized religion.

Madison actually wanted even more separation between church and state, but political realities and necessities forced him to compromise. Washington frequently used religion to rally his troops, but he rarely attended church himself (as did most citizens in the early years of the nation).

Waldman does a fine job researching the views of several founders, and he comes to the conclusion that the truth lies somewhere in between the two sides of today. While some founders weren't comfortable with the idea of state-supported religion, others saw little or no problem with it. However, Madison and Jefferson were firmly in support of a strict separation between the two.

While the book is a little dry and academic at times, it is still an interesting topic and well worth the time.

77 (out of 100).

Little Girl Lost

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are private detectives living in Boston. In Gone Baby Gone, they're hired by a desperate aunt and uncle to locate their missing niece. Hindering them is a strangely disinterested mother, a resentful police force and the nagging question of whether Amanda MacReady is really better off with her own mother in the first place?

I read this book before I saw the movie, and found both to be well worth the time. Dennis Lehanne clearly loves the view of Boston from the bottom, and like all successful series (Gone Baby Gone is the fourth in a series of five novels) he creates a memorable cast of characters to populate his version of the city.

If you're a fan of The Wire (which Lehanne wrote several episodes) or crime noir stories, or even the movie, you won't be disappointed by the book.

Unfocused

The first chapter of David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter is completely compelling and totally absorbing. Unfortunately, the other 620 pages fail to live up to the promise of the first few.

The Coldest Winter purports to be a history of the Korean War, a story ranging from the lowly privates who fought the battles to the heads of state who sent their young men to fight for a country that no one was particularly interested in.

After spending time with the soldiers who initially fought the Chinese at Unsan, Halberstam goes on to describe the various players involved in this drama - Kim Il Sung, Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Chang Kai Shek, Douglas MacArthur, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman. The combined miscalculations, fears and egos of these men lead to five years of war in a country that none of the principal fighters really wanted to fight over.

China wanted to strike at the United States in defiance of its support for Taiwan. Douglas MacArthur wanted to leave the world stage as a great general, Joseph Stalin wanted China and the United States at each other's throats, and Harry Truman had a powerful China lobby and resurging Republican minority at home to contend with.

Needless to say, that's a hell of a lot to cram into a book, and Halberstam does it, but I don't think he did it particularly well. He goes into great details outlining the causes of the war and its early days, but he completely glosses over the last two years of the war. He goes into some detail on some of the battles and completely glosses over others - I would have liked to read how the First Marine Division held off six Chinese divisions while escaping the Chosin Reservoir, but all we get is "it was a magnificent battle." I'll bet it was.

Overall, I would say if you're looking to learn more about Korea, this is a good place to start. I plan to spend a little more time reading about it in the near future, but hopefully, I'll find something with a little more focus.

Statistical Madness

It's that magical time of year when young men's thoughts turn to baseball. Yes, the season's only two weeks old and I've probably watched about 30 hours of it. Over the years, I've developed something of a routine for the season --- follow it fanatically for about three weeks, let it fade into the background until July, then pick it up again for the playoffs.

You would think that given my love for the game, I would also be a fantasy baseball fanatic. But I'm not. About six years ago, I joined my last fantasy league. I spent hours poring over scouting reports and publications, I tinkered with budgeting scenarios left and right, and spent every morning studying box scores with talmudic intensity.

Needless to say, I had my ass handed to me.

But I noticed something else - while willing my players to succeed, I'd manage to completely lose any joy I took out of the game. After that season, I hung up my box scores and scouting publications.

This is the central lesson of Fantasyland: A Season on Baseball's Lunatic Fringe. Sam Walker, baseball columnist for the Wall Street Journal, entered Tout Wars, the nation's premier fantasy league in 2004. He thought his insider's knowledge of the teams, players and managers, combined with some statistical analysis, he'd blow away the sabremeticians and (big-time) rotogeeks in the competition.

What followed was a descent into madness. Walker ended up spending close to $50,000, lost track of friends and family, had severe stress-induced back spasms, and finished close to the bottom of the pack. And he chronicles every step of the journey.

If you've ever fanatically followed a sport (or are a fantasy geek), this book is a must-read. Take, for example, Walker's and his statistician, Sig's, statistical breakdowns on the personal lives of players:

The results, unscientific as they may be, are nonetheless fascinating. Marriage has no impact on performance. Players who double their salaries play only slightly better the following season. Those who are arrested for drugs, guns, or lewd conduct show no appreciable change, but anyone who commits assault sees a performance dip. Having a first or second child isn't significant, but 80 percent of the players who had a third child saw their statistics decline more than a player of similar age. As for the impact of religion, Sig's analysis yielded a troubling conclusion: "Turning to God," he says, "costs you 2.5 runs a season."

As the season wears on, Walker's team falls further out of contention. He debates whether he should trade David Ortiz for Jose Guillen. After deciding to pull the trigger on the trade, Ortiz goes on a rampage (this was 2004, the year the Red Sox humiliated the Cards in the World Series) and Guillen gets benched for the last week of the season after throwing a temper tantrum against manager Mike Scioscia. Walker's (and his teammates') reaction shows just how far they'd fallen.

In the end, Walker returns to society, and he still continues to play Tout Wars today, just not with the same religious zeal. If you enjoy learning about a slightly lunatic fringe of the baseball world, this book is well worth your time.

Hoodwinked

A little aside here - I read this about a month ago, and I had to return it to the library; however, I also lost my notes, so this isn't one of my finer reviews . . . it's coming straight from (my somewhat poor) memory. With work and the wedding plans coming along, I've fallen behind in this little project - I have three more books to write about in addition to this one.

I'm not an economist; hell, I can barely figure out that whole checkbook thing. However, it's always seemed to me that something was off with how our government spends our money, and how the party of fiscal responsibility was acting like anything but.

Enter Jonathan Chait's The Big Con: How Washington got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.

Chait tells a rather eye-opening tale, of how of the three big supply-side economics proponents, only one had a background in economics - and he was run out of the Nixon administration on a rail after grossly overestimating the GDP, to his boss's chagrin. However suspect their economic theories may have been, members of the Republican party began to see this as a nice way to start picking up votes.

A book like this could easily become a liberal rant against the modern conservative movement, but Chait doesn't really fall in this trap; he's well-read and well-researched, and he writes the book with a nice bit of bemused exasperation throughout.

Chait could have also filled this book with endless tables and charts, but it doesn't drag down into an Economics 101 lesson; it's more a long look at recent history and how we got where we are today. I enjoyed reading this, although I found myself rolling my eyes at the leaps of logic the supply-siders take to justify their theory with a near-religious fervor.

Taking Things Too Far

After hearing many proclamations of The Kite Runner's greatness, I thought I would give it a chance, and while I wasn't disappointed, I also can't help but wonder who runs the hype machine and how they decide what gets pumped out of it.

The basic story is that Amir, the main character, must return to Afghanistan 20 years after he and his father fled the violence engulfing the country in the wake of the Soviet invasion. Amir's best friend (and servant), Hasaan desperately needs his assistance, and Amir needs to forgive himself for his betrayal of Hasaan years before he fled to America.

Hosseini paints a vivid picture of Afghanistan - from the idyllic days preceding the end of the monarchy to the nightmare of the Taliban; it's clear that he dearly loves his home, and suffers for the excesses of the Taliban. He creates an almost too-perfect character in Hasaan, who sacrifices and pays a heavy price for his loving heart and nobility (it was like he took the character of Jim from Huckleberry Finn and tried to REALLY make him suffer). The characters are engaging and it's hard to put this book down, but it seems like Hosseini became so wrapped up in suffering and redemption that he couldn't resist adding just one more twist to the entire story.

Having said that, I did enjoy reading this far more than other products of the hype machine (I'm looking at you, DaVinci Code). The Kite Runner, while in my opinion, a little flawed, alternates between gripping, horrifying and heart-wearming, which is a great trick. I'll definitely pick up Hosseini's next novel sometime soon.

International Man of Mystery

What do we really know of William Shakespeare? He (probably) wrote several plays that are widely heralded as classics. He borrowed ideas liberally from many sources. While he was reasonably well-off, he was never as famous as one would think, given the amount of accolades and attention sent his way.

Bill Bryson tries to answer these questions in Shakespeare - The World as Stage, a brief look at the life (and times) of William Shakespeare.

This is a short book, which is appropriate, considering the rather large number of primary historical sources available to today's historians. Considering the place Shakespeare's work holds in modern literature, one could find this rather surprising; however, the years and shoddy record keeping of the time have made Shakespeare more a mystery than the world's most famous playwright.

I'm a big fan of Bryson's work - he has a humorous, light writing style, and his research is always first rate. It's the little facts and the side characters that bring Bryson's works to life. For example, there are only six examples of Shakespeare's signature remaining in the world today . . . and none of them are spelled the same way. Charles and Hulda Wallace, a Nebraska couple, found many examples of Shakespeare in the public record early in the 20th century; they probably would have found more, except that Charles became increasingly paranoid and was let go by the University of Nebraska, where he was a professor. Don't feel bad for Wallace though - his follow-up career was looking at land and determining if it contained oil. He sunk most of his remaining money in 160 acres in Texas - that happened to be one of the richest oil finds in history. Wallace, among others are some of the major players in Shakespeare scholarship.

In addition to the eccentric side characters, Bryson spends time acknowledging the debt we owe Shakespeare today:

"Among the first words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would we be without them? He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had though of before - unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English."

Suffice to say, I enjoyed this book a lot. It's a nice, simple introduction to the life of a man who helped shape literature and language today.

Gangs of Chicago

On a fall day in 1989, Sudhir Venkatesh, a Master's sociology student at the University of Chicago, wandered into nearby housing projects, something he was explicitly warned against. Venkatesh was armed only with his wits and an old sociology survey, asking questions such as "What does it feel like to be black and poor?"

Fortunately, Venkatesh is nearly fearless and he's equally curious, because he came away from that night having met JT, a leader of the Black Kings, one of the biggest gangs in Chicago. He chronicled this story in Gang Leader for a Day, in which he described the five years he spent with JT and others in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago.

This was an amazing book; Venkatesh, in addition to being fearless, curious and somewhat naive, is also one hell of a writer, and the final product is easy to read and well worth the time.

As he spent more time in the housing projects learning more about the inner workings of the gang, he also learned how the people living there deal with the presence of poverty and the crack-dealing gangs. He never glorified there life; in fact, Venkatesh was frequently uncomfortable around JT when he enforced his rules through violence or when he discussed aspects of the drug trade, and as he gained the trust of the residents, he lost the trust of the police assigned to the projects.

In the end, Gang Leader for A Day is a fascinating look at inner-city poverty, and how the residents, gangs, and others live and work together in a fragile, somewhat uneasy alliance.

Looking Back

A few weeks ago, someone asked me just how much I read. I couldn't answer. I probably read 25-30 books last year, but I honestly can't say for certain. So my plan is to write a paragraph or two about everything I read this year and see just how far I get. I already posted one review, and here's the second.

I'm shamefully ignorant of Missouri and St. Louis history. I know quite a bit about US and world history, but Missouri & St. Louis? Little, if any. This is not something I'm proud of. St. Louis has a long and distinguished history as French and Spanish traders settled a small outpost just below the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

Which led me to A History of Missouri: 1673 to 1820 by William E. Parrish. It's the first in a series regarding the region's history. I found this to be fairly interesting, especially in the early settlement period, where names such as the Chouteau, Christy, and Rosati frequently came up.

I'm not going to call this a particularly engrossing book, however. Parrish's writing style is very dry and factual. There's not a lot of side stories or deep looks into the characters of the early settlers of the region, but that's not the purpose of the book or the series. As a survey of Missouri history, it was very informative and a quick 200 pages, which made it nice to read as I recovered from the flu last week.

I'll probably pick up the next book in the series sometime this spring, but I have plenty to occupy my time between now and then.

Life and Liberty

A while back I heard an interview with Andrew Napolitano, a judicial analyst with Fox News. His most recent book, A Nation of Sheep, discusses government excesses in a post-911 world. I poked around the library, but was unable to find that book. I wound up reading Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws, his earlier book.

Napolitano's basic argument is that the US government willingly and happily breaks laws every day in order to enforce them. The book is full of examples ranging from simple criminal cases to post-911 abuses, including the questionable incarcerations of Jose Padilla and Yasir Hamdi. Napolitano's basic theme is that government is not your friend.

This book is an eye-opener, and it's disturbing to see just how bad thing could be even before September 11. Unfortunately, it seemed like Napolitano went out of his way to personally bash Bill Clinton and Janet Reno several times; no surprise given his background and current affiliations.

Still, partisan sniping aside, this is a worthwhile book to read, if for no other reason to see that our government, like any other man-made institution, is just as fallible as any other, and requires supervision and vigilance lest it run amok.