It looks like McBride did his interviews for this book about music phenom James Brown in 2012, long before this book was published in 2016. In the ForIt looks like McBride did his interviews for this book about music phenom James Brown in 2012, long before this book was published in 2016. In the Foreword McBride crankily reveals he was being taken to the cleaners in a divorce settlement and he needed to write this book—any book—to bring in a little money.
Any flaws this book contains then become perfectly understandable, and McBride keeps up that level of honesty and casual explanation all the way through. This is no stilted celebrity biography covering well-trod ground. This is down home and personal, comfortable conversations with the men (they were mostly men) and women who knew most about James Brown and his life.
At the end of his story, McBride highlights the 62-year-old grandmother journalist Sue Summer who, writing for the financially strapped Newberry Observer in South Carolina, has kept in the public eye the disgraceful carnage made of James Brown’s $100 million estate. Brown’s will stipulated the bulk of his estate should go to educate poor children in Georgia and South Carolina, the states where he grew up, but within days of his death on Christmas Day in 2006, his family had arrayed a bevy of lawyers to contest the will citing ‘undue influence.’
That ‘influence’ would have been the South Carolina lawyer David Cannon who had been hired by Brown to extricate him from IRS charges of underpayments. Cannon and Buddy Dallas, a Georgia lawyer, were white men who had never worked for a black boss before. They brought Brown back from destitution when his act suffered the toll performers experience when they age, and when the IRS realized they’d been robbed. They set up what they’d thought was an unbreakable trust serving poor children and then suffered personal attacks and rake-backs as the trust was contested.
James Brown played a role in McBride’s youth—in every young black man’s youth, is McBride’s contention—being a role model and human divinity of soul. His concerts and records made a difference in how the world turned. The 1960’s-70’s were the height of his popularity, but he made a mark that lasted to his death, and McBride argues, will long after. “Kill ‘em and leave,” Brown exhorted the younger men he mentored. Don’t hang around after a concert for folks to pick your carcass clean. Make ‘em wait.
McBride spins his story out slowly, the way he collected it, through innumerable interviews with band members and managers, friends, and family. He is conversational and not cruel when he tells us the plain facts of James Brown’s lonely upbringing, early incarceration, exceptional singing talent, and enormous drive. Brown never wanted to be hungry or lonely or dependent ever again, especially to the white man, who he feared.
There was a moment near the end of McBride’s story about Brown that widened out for me into a real down-home truth we all learn eventually: “there’s talent everywhere.”
“I remember having lunch years ago with a legendary record executive in L.A., bending his ear about a great unsigned singer I knew. The guy listened, nodded, yawned, reached for his triple-decker sandwich, and took a bite. ‘Great singers,’ he said between chews, ‘are a dime a dozen.’”
That’s right. That’s right for every field. If they don’t have ‘em, they’ll make ‘em. But more importantly, and listen to this: those executives—they aren’t so special either. They do a job, but somehow we’ve allowed them to capture an unnatural percentage of the take. They have nothing without the talent and the rest of the organization, but you wouldn’t know it talking to them. But there is a truth in that it takes more than talent to be a great star, if that is where you are aiming. It takes more determination than talent.
Brown had determination. He wanted to present his best side to the world, so no one would have cause to put him down. After shows he would sit through 3 hours of treatment under the hair dryer to get his pompadour back in shape…and then he would leave without seeing the fans waiting for him. Kill ‘em and leave.
I loved the way McBride told this story, mixing a little of himself in there. He’d gone to Columbia Journalism School in 1980, so was undoubtedly aware that the reporter should scrupulously keep himself out of the story. But his ease with the scene and his knowledge of the backstory, his understanding of the silences between questions and his sense of the real meaning of James Brown gave us the mystery of the man and a deep sense of his place in pantheon of black culture. I loved hearing the familiar names, Rev Al Sharpton and Michael Jackson among them, and seeing how they fit in this picture.
It’s a comfortable, unstrained telling of a difficult life built on success. Race is everywhere in this book, though it is rarely mentioned. The fact of America’s race situation both made James Brown who he was as a performer, but it constrained him as a human being. McBride gives us that, shows us how that was. A book by McBride is cause for celebration, no matter that the editing was a little off, or he repeated sections. This is a story you won’t want to miss....more
When I began this book I was a little put off by the lack of distance between the journalist and her subjects. It is unusual (but not unheard of) for When I began this book I was a little put off by the lack of distance between the journalist and her subjects. It is unusual (but not unheard of) for a reporter to so obviously take sides in a debate. By the end of the book, however, this lack of distance no longer troubled me. Gessen had no access to Nadya or Maria, two of Pussy Riot’s leading members who had been jailed in early 2012. Gessen was reduced to compiling information about their thinking and living conditions through their lawyers, family, friends, and televised court appearances. Considering the extraordinary nature of Pussy Riot’s protest against the Putin regime in Russia, and their ability to articulate their protests, it is far better we understand in detail as much as we can of these brave and unusual women who are seemingly willing to die for freedom to speak, vote, protest.
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, Maria Alyokhina are three women of Pussy Riot jailed for their role performing punk music in the Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow in February 2012. There were others there that night, but these three formed the core of the group before they were separated in jail. They are speaking out against the abuses in the Putin regime: political, judicial and legislative fraud, corruption, manipulation of public opinion, use of force to regulate social processes. Their “actions” which in the early days were punk songs staged in public spaces, were accompanied by pointed lyrics often spiked with swear words criticizing the powerful. They were, however, as a group extremely articulate and well-spoken, as evidenced by statements made at their trials, some of which are recounted in detail in this book.
Several clips of their “actions” are shown at least in part on YouTube, as are interviews with journalists around the world. It is hard to imagine that these young protesters were very nearly killed in jail, mostly because the conditions were such that they decided hunger strike was the only way to stop the pressure being put on them from prison officials.
Though given two-year sentences in August 2012, Nadya and Maria were released eight months early in December 2013 before the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in January 2014. They decided to work for prisoners’ rights upon their release. A September 2014 Guardian article excerpts the open letter Nadya published from jail that is printed in full in Gessen’s book describing the conditions in the women’s jail at Mordovia, a gulag prison some eleven hours by car southeast of Moscow.
In 2015 Pussy Riot were Grand Marshalls of the Toronto Gay Pride Parade. Nadya’s English is better--she can now curse Putin in English as well as Russian. Her words have had some effect on the citizenry in Russia, though it is said Putin still enjoys the support of the voting public.
This isn't bad, and I'll come back to it. Was surprised Chernow intimated that Hamilton was homosexual. Never heard that before. He had close male friThis isn't bad, and I'll come back to it. Was surprised Chernow intimated that Hamilton was homosexual. Never heard that before. He had close male friends. Chernow says he "loved" them. It isn't fashionable now, but I think it is kind of normal for men to have close male friends. Women do, too. We don't actually have to have sex with them to find them lovable.
The other thing I just learned tonight is that in the Broadway musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda apparently made a bigger piece out of the closeness of Hamilton and his wife Eliza's sister, Angelica. Apparently they were in love as well. Seems to be unlikely that Hamilton was homosexual and in love with his wife's sister, but Chernow churns it up.
I'd like to finish this, and I really want to see the play....more
The work of Chris Abani crosses national boundaries. He calls himself a “global Igbo,” referring to his lineage, and to the fact that he has so many fThe work of Chris Abani crosses national boundaries. He calls himself a “global Igbo,” referring to his lineage, and to the fact that he has so many foreign influences on his experience as a Nigerian. Brought up privileged in an educated middle-class household with a white British mother and an Oxford-educated Igbo father, Abani had access to western music, American novels, Bollywood films, Indian mysticism as a youth. He was a precocious fourth son, starting to write in his early teens.
His face, which he talks about in his memoir, The Face: Cartography of the Void, has a kind of universality so that people often mistake him for Lebanese, Arab, Indian, Dominican, Cuban, Hawaiian, or Maori. When his Korean manicurist in L.A. called his face “comfortable,” Abani writes
"Comfortable face. I liked it. Made me think of a well-worn armchair that I’d like to collapse into after a rough day. A face made for sitting in. Where one could sip a sweet spicy ginger tea and talk about love and books and karaoke. A face worn in by living, worn in by suffering, by pain, by loss, but also by laughter and joy and the gifts of love and friendship, of family, of travel, of generations of DNA blending to make a true mix of human. I think of all the stress and relief of razors scraping hair from my face. Of extreme weather. Of rain. Of sun. I think of all the people who have touched my face, slapped it, punched it, kissed it, washed it, shaved it. All of that human contact must leave some trace, some of the need and anger that motivated that touch. This face is softened by it all. Made supple by all the wonder it has beheld, all the kindness, all the generosity of life. Comfortable face."
It is not just the face of Chris Abani that is comfortable. He makes us comfortable about ourselves, about the world, about our fears and aspirations. Abani’s fiction reveals the insides of characters who are often different in some way, their very differentness expressing their underlying and universal humanity. We are all different from one another. It is our differentness that makes us the same.
At the same time, Abani makes us uncomfortable. In an essay for Witness magazine entitled, “Ethics and Narrative: the Human and Other,” he writes
"In making my art, and sometimes when I teach, I am like a crazed, spirit-filled, snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues, spell-casting, Babylon-chanting-down, new-age, evangelical preacher wildly kicking the crutches away from my characters, forcing them into their pain and potential transformation. Alas, or maybe not, I also kick the crutches away from my readers. And many have fled from the revival tents of my art, screaming in terror."
When we go to dark places in ourselves, Abani suggests, we can come back, better. “When you are at your worst, you can see yourself most clearly.” At your worst, you can see your choices most clearly, and choose goodness, compassion. This is a man who has seen the darkness in humans and who still [mostly] likes us, who can laugh, make jokes, love others deeply. We feel safe with him, and if he can’t save us when something bad happens, at least we shared something real with another for awhile. Abani writes fiction and poetry—how real and important can that be? Quite real enough to reveal both the dark heart and warm center that most humans harbor.
“Language actually makes the world in which we live.”
Language, and literature, at its best, can be transformative. We can create our world anew by what we say, what we think, what we read, what we write. But we therefore have an obligation to use words [and actions] that do not harsh the environment, but gentle it, that explain and improve the world.
Abani is a black man, but his writing has few markers for what passes for “black” in America. In a 2014 interview with Rumpus Magazine Abani tells Rumpus interviewer Peter Orner that having grown up in a black-majority country, he was not defined by his race until he left Nigeria and went to Britain and the United States.
Though he has lived in the United States for some ten years or more, Abani does not write in the style of white or black America, though he clarifies in an NPR interview, “Africa could never have the literature it does without the influence of black Americans.” African literature makes no attempt to fit into the Western canon: African writers are having this conversation over here, and if you want to join in you must make accommodation. Interestingly, Abani finds writing in America freeing, partly because of the language, which is constantly influenced by our immigrant population, and because of the vitality and variety of experience and geography.
Abani’s students, and we readers, often “forget he is black” because he assumes the right to speak with his own voice and deals with universal themes. But Abani observes and occasionally writes of the oppression of black people in this country: "Slavery [in Amerca] is not really over". In this memoir he mentions that when he is stopped while driving, the cops seem surprised and almost “offended by his [British] accent.” He recognizes that as an educated middle-class African, he has a privileged position in American society. “Race in America has more to do with social position than it has to do with biological race.”
Abani now teaches writing at Northwestern University in Chicago. Daria Tunca of the University of Liège in Belgium has compiled a wonderfully complete bibliography of Abani’s work (and short biography) which includes links to interviews, readings, and Abani’s website. I share my favorite links below because I feel his work is essential reading/listening. Somehow the issues we face in the world are pointed to by this big man with the small voice and small toes. And he gives us some answers: You reflect my humanity back at me. Ubuntu.
This is another juvenile/teen title on Angela Merkel but it is unsettling in a number of ways. It gives a glowing report of Merkel: "She has become a This is another juvenile/teen title on Angela Merkel but it is unsettling in a number of ways. It gives a glowing report of Merkel: "She has become a voice of reason and intelligence not seen enough today in world politics. Hers is one of the most remarkable stories among world leaders..." You get the picture. Even if Mills is right, young kids need a more nuanced picture. It is a learning environment after all.
The night before Time magazine put Angela Merkel on their cover as "Woman of the Year" (2015), and as I was thinking to myself that we have precious fThe night before Time magazine put Angela Merkel on their cover as "Woman of the Year" (2015), and as I was thinking to myself that we have precious few leaders to emulate, I thought of Angela Merkel. I realized that I only had general impressions and knew next to nothing about her personally, the governance of modern Germany, her role in the EU, etc. What I could not help but notice was her three-time election to leadership in Germany and how every other country seemed to listen to her.
This is a juvenile title, but it gave me some basic facts that I did not know and it had pictures (!) of Merkel as a young woman. The commentary focused on major milestones in her political career, and I liked very much that the author would make a statement or claim about how Merkel succeeded or failed on a specific issue and then would give the opposing view. For instance, "some people criticized Merkel for..." That's exactly the kind of both sides I needed to help me understand how Merkel is perceived in Europe.
However, this short teen title is simply not detailed enough for my needs. Fortunately I have discovered a New Yorker (Dec 1, 2014) article I missed, so will catch up a little with that. We certainly need someone to be writing something: Angela Merkel: The Authorized Biography by Stefan Kornelius does not have very good reviews on Goodreads, for whatever reason, but may try that....more
When Steinberg first meets Asad, the Somali man whose life Steinberg has chosen to help explain the extreme black-on-black violence South Africa experWhen Steinberg first meets Asad, the Somali man whose life Steinberg has chosen to help explain the extreme black-on-black violence South Africa experienced in 2008, Asad is living in Blikkiesdorp. Blikkiesdorp in English is called Tin Can Town because of its sixteen hundred identical one-room tin living structures laid out in sixteen identical square blocks. It was erected to house families evicted from homes they occupied illegally. Blikkiesdorp is thirty kilometers from Cape Town, separated by an expensive taxi ride.
Asad and his wife and child were placed in Blikkiesdorp in 2010, after living two years in refugee camps to which they fled after the mob violence in 2008. In the process of uncovering Asad’s personal history, Steinberg illuminates for us the roots of Africa’s history of economic migration as well as the means, and its turbulent history of violence and pervasive corruption. We also get flashes of understanding about human nature, mob violence, and the psyche of a Somali man. Steinberg had the instincts to capture this story of one man, the skill to tease out the important strands of his history, and the perseverance to complete this riveting and important work.
At the start of this non-fiction narrative, we see the origins of Asad’s story in Mogadishu, when his mother was shot in the chest as she clutched him, a victim to anti-Daarood violence by Hiwaye meant to unseat the Daarood president, President Mohamed Siad Barre. Asad was eight years old. An aunt and uncle whisked the five children across the city in preparation to fleeing to Kenya—the start of a lifelong journey of displacement. Steinberg thus begins with the history of lineages and clans and by the end of the narrative demonstrates the centrality of clan affiliation in a person’s life.
"That he was an Abdullahi and an AliYusef would disappear from his life for years on end; there are, he would discover, many ways of being Somali other than through one’s clan. And then, without warning, his lineage would burst back into his life and shape his fate. When it did so, he would feel that he had been asleep for years, reeling further and further from himself."
It is distressing, to say the least, to read of Asad’s early years once he is separated from his aunt and uncle in a continuation of the violence. He manages to eke out a living in a parade of cities, gradually becoming a young man on the basis of grit and cunning. He marries, and decides to improve his lot by trying to work in South Africa, where he will discover the hatreds against Somalis is resurgent in the anti-apartheid south. The inequities of life in South Africa among blacks in the new regime led some to strike out at those less numerous and therefore less powerful than themselves. The phenomenon of assigning blame for one’s inability to escape one’s condition is something from which we can all learn.
The mere process of recounting the thought processes of a young, unschooled but hardworking boy in duress tells us something of the conditions in which he operated, as well as how someone makes decisions in an environment of extremely circumscribed horizons: he held a very “now” worldview that held little past and an unknowable future. When he married, at nineteen, Asad's developed his grasp of concept of 'future':
"Something happened when I knew that I was going to have children with Foosiya...For the first time, I saw that my life was a series of decisions. I saw that each decision decided who I was going to be from now on. That is a big realization, brother. I felt dizzy and had to sit down. It is the sort of realization that can make you fall over."
Asad had a strong sense of right and wrong, of decency and fairness, of propriety and one wonders where it came from:
"My first feeling about [South African] blacks was that they have too much sex,” he recalls. "I have now adjusted a little. But back then, what I saw on the streets, to me was illegal, uncultural, a shame to one’s reputation. A man holding a woman who is not his wife, squeezing her bum, putting his hand up her skirt. I could not even look at them, I would look to the side…Even if you consider many different beliefs about the world," he says, "nobody allows that. Christianity, whatever it is nobody’s culture. It is a democracy here. You say nothing. It is how they are. But I tell you, they do not get this from their religion. It is not in their culture either. But they do it. They have lost what their ancestors once knew. Christian, Jewish, doesn’t allow it. Nobody allows it."
One cannot help but wonder if most people, even those who persecuted Asad, would also exhibit such constraints on behaviors if questioned closely enough. Asad and his fellow entrepreneurial Somalis had contempt for South African blacks:
"We think of [South African] black people as teenagers," Asad tells me bluntly. "Their democracy is so new and precious to them, but it confuses them. When it does not bring them what they want, they get violent."
The blacks had reasons for their anger which eventually manifest in violence: much of the profit earned from small business initiatives owned by Somalis and other economic immigrants was thought to be repatriated and thus exported, sucking their communities dry. The reasons for the poverty of their communities undoubtedly had other larger and more pertinent causes, but the economic immigrants were easier targets than a political system or institutionalized societal inequalities. It is startling to discover, in this winding story set on a distant continent, ourselves. Such is Steinberg’s narrative skill: allowing us to see the general in the personal.
Writing a book about the remembered bits of a man’s life is fraught with difficulty, which Steinberg frankly acknowledges at several stages. His struggle alone is enlightening: the questions he puts to Asad are an attempt to help Asad remember how he felt at different stages of his life. Asad kept a Red Book, a kind of occasional diary in his teen years, which he eventually lost in his border-crossings:
"It was a record of the very best and the very worst. Like the day Foosiya agreed to marry me. I wrote down the date, the time. And on days when I had nothing and saw no future, I would write down the date on which I had that thought."
But often Asad simply did not want to divulge the depth of his feeling on a topic. It was too closely held and perhaps too easily misunderstood, but it formed his character. We have to make do with the man himself.
This narrative nonfiction is being released in paperback today by Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House. PRH currently has a 20% off pre-holiday sale (with free shipping!) until the end of the year, so don’t hold back on the opportunity to have a look at a fascinating, detailed, and unusual portrait of a man living on the second-most populous continent on earth. ...more
The title of this book comes from a poem by Taha Muhammed Ali, a Palestinian poet with a style so direct and immediate that the reader grasps that theThe title of this book comes from a poem by Taha Muhammed Ali, a Palestinian poet with a style so direct and immediate that the reader grasps that they are hearing something new and yet undeniably ancient at the same time: a viewpoint that eclipses the worn, the bombed-out, the broken. We are given fragments of, and context to, Taha’s poetry in this work, all showcased by Adina Hoffman’s careful, patient, gentle, and ferociously intelligent excavation and reconstruction of a meaningful life. It is an extraordinary work of witness.
What can poetry do that bombs, bullets, and knives cannot? Adina Hoffman shows us in this biography of Taha, former resident of Saffuriyya, a Palestinian village with a long history of resistance against authority. Saffuriyya was bombed in 1948 by Israeli aircraft, and ever since the mere mention of the town carries the whiff of resistance.
"Even before he could see the village, he has said, the scent of it was overpowering—the thyme and the mint and the lemon trees, the broom and the wheat and the olives. The thorns themselves seemed to smell sweetly there, and though he couldn’t say which perfume belonged to what plant—or explain how he knew the difference between the fragrance of a Nazareth sage bush and a sage bush with its roots in the soil of Saffuriyya—the boy was convinced that he could tell in his nose when he’d crossed the border, and as he made his way toward home through the basatin, as the orchards and vegetable gardens were known, the scents grew stronger and more complicated, more human. The fruit trees were everywhere, and at the Qasral spring he got a clean, cold whiff of the abundant water that made the village lands so rich (and, according to local lore, its people so strong-headed), then, getting closer, the smoky perfume of the cabbage, parsley, cauliflower, scallion, cucumber, and his favorite, mlukhiyyeh, the dark green mallow that his mother would chop fine or spread out to dry and that they would eat as a stew. Thinking of it would make him hungry and eager for the other scents to come: the way the garlic she fried before adding the leaves would blend and merge with the piercing aroma of the basil planted in clay pots before the nearby houses."
Hoffman’s biography of Taha Muhammed Ali is resistance literature also: the quiet, unsensational accretion of fact and personal testimony, newspaper accounts, and the patient unpicking of tangled threads of disputed reports or repressive memory. What Hoffman has done indirectly is raise serious questions about race, identity, and belongingness, about nationality, statehood, and the nature of resistance. She places the poet Taha squarely in the events that influenced his creative consciousness: the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Saffuriyya was always a “turbulent community,” police records filled with mention of locals talking with their fists amongst themselves. Hoffman suggests
"Saffuriyya was, let us say then, a 'village of murderers' in the sense it was a village with murderers in it. Saffuriyya was, however, also a village of tinsmiths—and shoemakers, shepherds, teachers, teething babies, laborers, shopkeepers, new brides, barbers, folk poets, gravediggers, carpenters, landowners, teenaged boys, builders, dyers, musicians, butchers, tailors, traveling salesmen, knife-sharpeners, old women, and a wandering ice-cream vendor who would appear on holidays and sell the children melting half-piaster scoops of their favorite flavor—chocolate, vanilla, or mint. It was a village of brilliant talkers, blubbering idiots, fat grocers, thin imams, of a kind Italian nun named Georgina, a fez-wearing Egyptian male nurse known as Sheikh ‘Umar, and Abu Qasim the peripatetic ritual circumciser, who never went anywhere without his black doctor’s bag and noisy motorcycle."
So you see how Hoffman agrees with the official line and undercuts it in the same breath, how she forces us to acknowledge that we cannot paint a people with a broad brush. When the Israelis came, after they bombed the village in 1948, they found Stone Age olive jugs and oil jars in the ramshackle houses—could this be the same population they believed had no culture? A difference of perception combined with a will of steel might break what bombs cannot, and while many have fallen, the Palestinian consciousness remains.
"That many of the Jewish state’s new and future immigrants had just suffered the torments of the Holocaust at the hands of European Christians did not, to Palestinian minds, explain why they themselves were being asked to forfeit their hold on vast tracts of citrus groves and fields of grain, to give up direct access to the Red Sea and to the port at Jaffa, or to become—as 40 percent of the Palestinians suddenly would—members of a minority in a Jewish state."
Now Saffuriyya is forested and has been designated a National Park in the Israeli state. Displaced Palestinians have never given up agitation to return to those lands, that village. “The most important thing was that there were no leaders, no intellectual leaders to explain what was happening and what we had to do.” This has ever been, to my mind, the “problem of Palestine” but also Israel’s problem. Lack of enlightened leadership is the region’s greatest failing.
Saffuriyya has become a symbol. Hoffman traces the movement of Taha’s family (first to a refugee camp in Lebanon and then back to Nazareth) along with the intellectual development of the boy he was, then the teen, then the adult. Taha’s interest in words that could explain and express his sense of dislocation, dignity, and love of life were what propelled him. “His obscurity won him the freedom to write whatever he pleased.” Hoffman carefully picks apart the relationships and political leanings and urge to create among Taha’s friends and acquaintances, and in the process, we see Palestine, that country with a flag and a people but no land and no rights.
Hoffman herself is an outsider, something she argues is what makes writers able to see the environment they write about. “I think it might actually make me anxious to feel too much of an insider. That's not good for a writer -- and, I might argue, I don't really think it's so good for the Jews.” (interview with Mya Guarnieri @ Bookslut)
When we finally see Taha's poetry reprinted, the effect of it is magnified by the quiet industriousness and skill with which Hoffman prepared us. Hoffman’s work is so hushed and intimate we have the sense that we are sharing a conversation with a deeply humane independent thinker of enormous gifts and fine discrimination. And that is how I view what I have read of her work: that it is a gift to all of us, even those whose policies do not align with her view. Her careful scholarship and unblinking gaze quietly points the way to living well in the world…with others.
The exquisite care Adina Hoffman and her husband, the poet and translator Peter Cole, took in both translating and publishing the work of Palestinian peasant and poet Taha Muhammed Ali, and then in picking apart the knotty strands of his life to show the creation of Taha’s particular genius, is everywhere evident in this unique work of biography.
"Warning"
Lovers of hunting, and beginners seeking your prey: Don't aim your rifles at my happiness, which isn't worth the price of the bullet (you'd waste on it). What seems to you so nimble and fine, like a fawn, and flees every which way, like a partridge, isn't happiness. Trust me: my happiness bears no relation to happiness.
--Taha Muhammed Ali, from Fooling the Killers, (1989)
“The best pimps keep a steel lid on their emotions…”
At a time when white folk are finally hearing what black folk have been telling us for decades, th
“The best pimps keep a steel lid on their emotions…”
At a time when white folk are finally hearing what black folk have been telling us for decades, this biography of pimp-turned-writer Iceberg Slim by Justin Gifford rewards the reader by underlining the major lessons one complicated, flawed, and talented black man learned in his life: that his choices were the constrained by his options. Life on the streets was very hard, but Beck excelled, if only for a time, living a life of glitz and glamour and cruelty.
Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck was a pimp for twenty-five years. He was jailed over and over in his younger years, mostly for trafficking in young women, and in jail he learned much about how to improve his street game. He practiced in jail the rap he’d give to his stable of hookers when he got out again. His introspection and uncommon ability to apply lessons he learned from reading psychology texts gave him an edge on the streets that rocketed him high, only to land him back in prison until he feared he was too old to pimp any longer.
Beck’s street chic and verbal storytelling was so good that he was encouraged to write the stories down, thus beginning his career as author of novels of the street, influencing a generation of black youth, their music, literature, “blaxploitation” movies, style, and attitudes, which, if you have been paying attention in the past thirty years, is not always pleasant to hear.
But the pleasure of this book is reading the ‘how.’ A description of who Iceberg Slim was and what he accomplished does not give a reader the insights this book carries: how life for black people in cities across America was a litany of limited opportunities for meaningful, lucrative work and advancement, how crime and vice became institutionalized as a means to escape poverty, how the lack of access to bank loans for decent housing or small businesses, and discrimination in real estate markets, meant ghettoization in crime-ridden cities. Then those ghetto homes were chosen again and again to be razed when cities needed renovation, roads, upgrading.
Especially thrilling for book critics to read was the beginning of Slim’s writing career: how a small ad in the newspaper looking for “black writers” led to the collaboration of Slim and his then-wife Betty Mae Shaw on acting out, then writing down, vignettes of the street. The novel’s language carries the graphic tenor and tone found among folks in “the game,” and was among the first to use the vernacular to speak directly to the black experience.
Iceberg Slim’s most influential work was Pimp: the Story of My Life, published by Holloway House in 1967.
”He approached writing with the same principle he had used for pimping; both were essentially acts of strategic storytelling. Beck reasoned that the narrative had to be entertaining and fascinating, but it also had to be logical and tightly organized. ‘And, you had to answer, just as you do the whore, all the questions before they are asked. And, you can’t be heavy-handed with it. You have to do it in a casual way. But I didn’t know this was what they call painless exposition that the writing craft speaks about. For every principle I used in Pimp, there is a literary name.’…Beck’s first person confessional followed in a long African American autobiographical tradition, from the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to the recent memoirs of Malcolm X and Claude Brown, in addressing the racial inequalities of American society. Beck narrates in gritty detail his life as a pimp both to warn young blacks about the dangers of a criminal life and to hold American society accountable for producing the pimp in the first place.”
The recently announced 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction went to Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates’ twenty-first century search for his Dream of living peacefully in a quiet, leafy suburb is not so distant from the twentieth century experience of Iceberg Slim:
"Ain’t it a bitch? Ninety-eight percent of the black people back there in Hell will be born and die and never know the joys of this earthly Heaven. There ain’t but two passports the white folks honor. A white skin and a bale of scratch. I sure got to pimp good and cop my scratch passport. Well at least I get a Cinderella crack at Heaven."
Iceberg Slim went on to act out, then write, several other novels of the street, among his most famous Mama Black Widow and Trick Baby, as well as a collection of essays, vignettes and thoughts called The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim, modelled on W.E.B. Dubois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Beck’s books sold millions of copies, though allegedly Holloway House scammed his contract, enriching themselves while shortchanging the author.
Slim liked his life on the streets with black folk, and lived there to the end, receiving gifts from admirers and letters from fans. As he got older, he liked to watch conservative television talk shows "so that he could see what the enemy was thinking." He blamed Reagan and the New Right for subjecting black life to ever more vigilant police and state control. Beck died April 30, 1992 of a heart attack, brought on by complications from liver disease and diabetes.
The author of this biography of Iceberg Slim is Justin Gifford, an Assistant Professor of English at Nevada State University. In the statement on NSU English Department’s page introducing staff, Gifford writes, "I argue that the crime fiction of Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Nathan Heard, Clarence Cooper, and Roland Jefferson provides a privileged window into the social, spatial, and racial cleavages that emerge at the pivotal moment of America's postwar 'urban crisis.'"
Below I attach a longish excerpt from the biography which gives some historical context to Robert Beck’s environment. I do not reproduce the included footnotes, though indicate with an asterisk where additional materials are cited.
"[Beck’s] next destination was Cleveland. Much like Milwaukee, Chicago, and Detroit, Cleveland had developed its own distinctive black community adjacent to downtown. During the first Great Migration, the Cleveland Real Estate Board started the widespread practice of using restrictive housing covenants to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods.* Because of these restrictions, African Americans were crowded into a Black Belt that was located in the city’s Central District. It was bordered on the west by the Cuyahoga River and bordered on the east by Fifty-Fifth Street; Euclid Avenue enclosed it to the north, while Woodland Avenue was the main dividing line to the south. In this small rectangular expanse of the city, African Americans often slept in overcrowded kitchenette apartments,, storefronts, garages, and even train boxcars that were divided up to accommodate multiple families.* As in other Midwest industrial cities, blacks had initially come to Cleveland for the plentiful jobs. In the early twentieth century, it was the fifth largest industrial city in America, producing metals, automobile parts, varnishes, and garments. Black men were for the most part excluded from unionized labor and skilled trades; they were employed as barbers, servants, porters, elevator operators, and laborers on construction projects. They did the rough work in railroad yards, foundries, blast furnaces, and iron works factories. Much of this work was temporary and insecure; black men were often the last to be hired and the first to be fired. Black women were typically employed in household service, laundry work, and occasionally in box-making factories, where noxious fumes and dangerous machines made for unsafe and unpleasant work.*
As a result of these geographical and economic conditions, Cleveland’s Central District developed a thriving vice scene. Brothels, saloons, gambling houses, and speakeasies operated all over the black section. Among city leaders and police, there was an unspoken agreement to allow these vice industries to operate with impunity, as these criminal enterprises reaffirmed racist assumptions about the connection between blacks and immoral behaviors. It was also a way for civil authorities to monitor closely prostitution, gambling, and drinking without allowing them to spill over into “respectable” white neighborhoods.*”
Gifford’s thesis about the early-to mid-twentieth century has echoes today in the twenty-first century, if we would only hear it. ...more
Geraldine Brooks is gifted with the uncanny ability to speak in tongues not her own. David, the second King of Israel, was "the first man in literaturGeraldine Brooks is gifted with the uncanny ability to speak in tongues not her own. David, the second King of Israel, was "the first man in literature whose story is told in detail from early childhood to extreme old age." In this novel, Brooks writes in the voice of prophet Natan who stayed by David’s side through his long life, from the moment Natan exhibited his channeling of a voice not his own--the voice of the source of all things, called ‘the Name.’ This is particularly fitting, since Brooks’ skill in reading the past mirrors Natan’s gift to read the future.
While the Bible is the original source for much of David’s story, Brooks used the works of more lately scholars, e.g., Robert Pinsky’s The Life of David, and David Wolpe’s David: The Divided Heart, to paint a picture of a complex and lavishly gifted man who failed to rein in the passions that all men harbor and to which some fall prey. It is a powerful tale of bravery and woe, justice and corruption.
Through it all, we see the state of Israel taking shape, despite the tendencies of a "strife-prone people quick to fan grievance, to take sides and foment revolt." David lay a calming and just hand on the remains of many a defeated and bereaved enemy, and ruled fairly…until vigilance over his passions waned in the full throat of his power.
If David’s story predates Herodotus by half a century, it is the oldest piece of history ever recorded. Brooks brings back to life the characters and their environment, the violence and the adulation, the resentments and the love with such richness that we can smell zaatar on roasting bread and taste the bite of goat-cheese feta. Brooks’ own perspective is rich with understanding and generosity for both the greatness and the failures of man. David’s last son, Solomon (she calls him Shlomo), upon learning the details of a battle, would say, "there is nothing new under the sun;" all had happened before, if one looked back far enough in time. And so it may be.
This is the tale of how an abused and neglected boy overcame his origins, slay Goliath, and became an uncommon warrior and king. And it is the story of how power will corrupt, lest one guards with unceasing vigilance one’s baser instincts. Brooks points out in her Afterword that the story of David may not be just a parable but must define an actual figure "for no people would invent such a flawed figure for a national hero." David lives in these pages at least.
Many of the false and fanciful notions I had about Janis Joplin were formed after watching Bette Midler’s rendition of her life in the movie, The RoseMany of the false and fanciful notions I had about Janis Joplin were formed after watching Bette Midler’s rendition of her life in the movie, The Rose. In the midst of a large project involving photographs of my family in the 1960s, I came to this book seeking answers to questions that had arisen during my research. It was the lack of mention about the information I sought that brought me greater understanding in the end. Specifically, I wanted to know if Joplin ever recorded the song "The Rose." She didn't write it: it was written by Amanda McBroom in 1977. Joplin died in 1970. So I took the long way 'round to figure this out.
I understand there is to be a feature-length documentary premiering in September 2015 entitled Janis that uses a voice-over by Cat Powers reading letters Janis wrote to friends and family, and concert footage.
Myra Friedman was Joplin’s publicist, and as such was a person that knew her as well as anyone but perhaps did not have the writing skills to handle a significant and enduring biographical record. What I did learn from this was to look for Joplin’s intelligence and her ambition. I already knew about her talent.
Worldwide fame took Joplin for a ride, but at least in the beginning she was complicit in that. She allowed herself to be sucked into the crazy whirlwind that forces a gifted person to the top and then sends other gifted people right behind. Wanting to stay on top is the meat grinder. One has to allow the wind to pass one by or it never ends. It is so physically and psychologically taxing to keep the commitments that are required at the top that drugs and alcohol become a way to both handle the strain and to make it more fun.
Friedman’s lack of polish in presenting her knowledge of Joplin’s life paradoxically gives us insights: we hear the cadence of Joplin’s conversations with others, and can see the types of people she worked and partied with. Not everyone was on the lookout for Joplin’s best interests, and one might make the argument that no one was. Joplin lived as she sung: full out, with everything she had. ...more
Rebecca Mead manages to sort George Eliot’s personal life from her fiction, enlightening us on both:
"[Eliot’s] most straightforwardly autobiographica
Rebecca Mead manages to sort George Eliot’s personal life from her fiction, enlightening us on both:
"[Eliot’s] most straightforwardly autobiographical character is Maggie Tulliver, and as a grown woman Eliot discussed with a friend the ways in which The Mill on the Floss was inspired by her own history. Everything in the novel was softened, she said; her own experience was worse."
This nonfiction is a hybrid of criticism and biography, but I argue it may be best viewed as a series of connected essays. It can’t be strictly chronological but at the end of each chapter Mead leaves us with a large conclusion and insight that would stand alone but only leaves us wishing to know more.
Mead was able to lay out with ravishing clarity the twists and turns of a long-ago life, pair it coherently with the novels that were the result of that life, while at the same time making us interested in the life and work of Mead herself. Many of us have a favorite novel, but perhaps not so many of us revisit it at different stages in our life to see how our perceptions have changed and what it means for our understanding, and for our judgment. One of the loveliest true things Mead shares with us is how her distaste for the "sad, proud, dessicated" Middlemarch character of Casaubon waxed and waned through the decades she revisited the book:
"He is a frail creature tortured by his own insufficiencies…Once Eliot was asked whom she had in mind as the original Casaubon; in response, she silently tapped her own breast. As I read Middlemarch in middle age, [Casaubon’s] failures and fears no longer seem so remote or theoretical to me as they once did, when I was in my Dorothea youth."
Mead begins by telling us she wanted to understand why some people considered it the greatest novel in the English language, but she was also simply captured by its relevance and urgency though written nearly one hundred years before her birth. She wanted to see how Eliot’s life shaped her fiction, and how that fiction might have shaped Mead herself, it being a lens though which she looked at life time and again. What a large task for even an experienced biographer! But Mead was a journalist, and this may have been her salvation: "how to ask questions, how to use my eyes, how to investigate a subject, how to look at something familiar from an unfamiliar angle." Even so, what Mead has done is nearly mystical in its containment and inclusion.
When describing Eliot’s beginning consciousness of an artistic life, Mead tells us Eliot
"greatly admired the novelist George Sand: 'I shall never think of going to her writings as a moral code or text book,' [Eliot] wrote to a friend…'I cannot read six pages of hers without feeling that it is given to her to delineate human passion and its results…that one might live a century with nothing but one’s own dull faculties and not know so much as those six pages will suggest.'"
Yet in the very next paragraph Mead admits she’d never read George Sand. I haven’t either, though I have tried in youth and again lately as an adult…I just couldn’t manage it. The experience reminds me that all of us find our inspiration in such disparate and (can I say?) unlikely places. We are all working within our own limited spheres and with "dull faculties" but it turns out finding inspiration has as much to do with the inspired as it has to do with the object of that inspiration.
Much has always been made of Eliot’s looks and yet she managed to make a life so full of love she wondered if she had enough in her. In middle age (when she was thirty-two), she was pursued by George Henry Lewes, a man married in law only, and moved in with him, adopting his name to fit in better with society. She was brave in spite of social constraints, and had enough fierce intelligence to know that her life was her own to live. "One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy," Eliot wrote to a friend. Her long liaison with George Henry Lewes ended only when he died twenty-four years later. Such boldness and intellectual courage Eliot displayed in her unconventional life.
Eliot, born in 1819, died in 1880, only eight years after finishing the fourth book of Middlemarch. It had been published in eight five-shilling installments from December 1871 to December 1872 and was received with great acclaim among the general populace. The critics were, well, critical. Lewes died in November 1878, and seventeen months later Eliot married John Walter Cross, a man younger by twenty years. Both Lewes and she had known Cross since 1869 and had addressed him as "nephew." She had her reasons, she told a friend, and once again proved her independence of thought and great social courage.
Now for my admission: I have never read Middlemarch, though I think I might try now. I especially liked the final sentence of that novel, which Mead tells us was not always as it appears in the books. It went through drafts until finally Eliot thought she said what she’d intended. Below, it reads to me like a sad but painfully true kind of epitaph:
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been in half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
I listened to the Blackstone Audio of this, very well read by Kate Reading. I filled in parts I remembered with the hardcover, published by Crown....more
George Sand led an unusual life worthy of biography, or of a novel with her as centerpiece. Berg had excellent instincts when she centered in on AurorGeorge Sand led an unusual life worthy of biography, or of a novel with her as centerpiece. Berg had excellent instincts when she centered in on Aurore Dupin, alias George Sand, the 19th century bestselling author living in France.
Sand, half-in half-out of high society, had two children with an older man “she was married off to” and did not love. She met a much younger man and fell in lust. She moved with her lover to Paris where they collaborated on novels while she honed her writing skills as a journalist. She dressed as a man to be allowed to report without incident and found she liked the attire and the feeling of power she got by wearing pants. She fell for a beautiful and fickle actress, Marie Doval, then took a series of male lovers, some of them famous musicians and poets of the time, fitting in visits to her children occasionally.
Sand's many novels sold well, and judging from how many times she is told, in this novel at least, that she is a "genius," she may have come to believe that. In this novel I found her an unsympathetic character, though undoubtedly her selfishness sustained her art. This novel did encourage me to order the André Maurois biography of Sand, called Lelia: The Life of George Sand and Sand's novel also called Lélia, just to see why we still remember her.
Berg might have written a fast-paced, thrilling fiction featuring a cross-dressing bisexual 19th century heroine that would feel completely fresh and welcome today but she hewed so closely to Sand’s style and story that the effort unfortunately died in her hands. As a girl reading the greats from earlier days, I never liked George Sand, but I admit to being curious about her life.
Berg uses as back-and-forth flashback-by-chapter structure which felt jarring at first but became second nature by the middle of the narrative. The distance between Sand's early life and her later life got shorter as the tale progressed, and truthfully I could not see what purpose the to-and-fro'ing served except perhaps Berg thought the latter half of Sand's life was the more interesting and she could force us, through flashbacks, to take our medicine and consider her earlier life. The truth is that neither section of her life had much "life." It all felt well and truly done-before-we-got-there.
I should probably admit at this point that I was thinking George Eliot when I signed up to read this book. ...more
This story is so fantastical I felt I had to suspend disbelief. That so much could happen to one man makes one realize how little most of really live This story is so fantastical I felt I had to suspend disbelief. That so much could happen to one man makes one realize how little most of really live in our lifetimes. Not that we could have managed as well as Louis Zamperini. He was exceptional in so many ways.
Hillenbrand does a marvelous job with the material, interspersing her considerable research into topics that Zamperini, necessarily, knew nothing of. Her handling of the dropping of the atomic bomb and its aftermath was particularly masterful for I felt tremendous sadness and regret when she could have made much of our sympathy for our American soldiers caught in deadly prison camps and exploited beyond endurance.
Mutsuhiro ‘The Bird’ Wantanabe was similarly transfixing. Hillenbrand understood that any great hero needs a worthy opponent and The Bird was all of that. Following Wantanabe’s story after the war was a critical piece of history that brought Hillenbrand’s story to fullness.
That Zamperini could come through so much was testament to the strength of his character. That he could lose his moorings when he returned to the United States was testament to his humanity. Hillenbrand continues to amaze and instruct with the depth of her research and the emotional elasticity of her writing about tenacity and resilience.
This book made me look for books about the WWII Pacific theatre. Last year I'd read Vickie Croke's marvelous work on elephants in Burma just before and during WWII, called Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II. Both these books made me realize that my lack of knowledge was preventing me from being able to enjoy these books with the sense of relish and critical thinking they obviously deserve. These exceptional authors make me feel I must pony up and do the work necessary to be able to highlight their achievement. ...more
We probably should have known better. When something is too good to be true… We were duped, but I feel like we need to take some of the blame. We wantWe probably should have known better. When something is too good to be true… We were duped, but I feel like we need to take some of the blame. We wanted to believe in this level of sports competence…every year…for seven years…by a man who would be considered old in any other sport…and a cancer survivor. Okay, but enough about me.
What surprised me about the information I learned here is Lance’s early home life. His mother never finished high school and was pregnant with Lance at sixteen when her father threw her out. Lance was an exceptional and driven athlete as an early teen, but when he wanted to compete in triathlons with strict age requirements that precluded his participation, his mother modified his birth certificate. So he learned early that the rules did not really apply to him. And that grasping behavior? When enough is never enough? I guess we know where that came from.
I really disliked this book, not only because the writing is more breathless and sensational than it needed to be. The documents collected tell the story of a man who is immensely unappealing and manipulative and the worst sort of role model. We also learn something about the other folks involved in the sport: the teammates, the spouses, the officials, the medical staffs, the press. It was big business, and their business was to sell a product. I may have been a dupe, but I don’t believe for a second all those other folks were.
Even when a former teammate came out with allegations, dates, remembrances of drug doping during races, it was still tricky to prove. One cannot help but feel just a little betrayed by all the folks that agreed to go along with this. They did it because “everyone else did.” Yes, the Tour de France is a hard race. And the world can be a tough place. At least they got to wear spandex in their work rather than body armor.
O’Connell and Albergotti corral a huge amount of material for this exposé. Too much, really. A few less details and a little more reflection would have gone down better with this reader. The authors lacked the necessary narrative to allow us to place Lance’s megalomania in perspective. A character of this dimension is unusual and we the public could use a little help in dealing with the details of someone else's life choices, given his great talents. Is the lesson to strive, but not that much? Is celebrity addicting? Armstrong was not just an ordinary guy with a dirty little secret. This misses the size of his delusion, and ours. Forget Lance for a moment. In a sense, his future has already been written. What are our lessons? Did we do this?
I listened to the Penguin Audio of this book, read by Santino Fontana. Fontana read well, though he is perhaps too gleeful in sections of heart-rending discovery. I supplemented listening with the text by Gotham Books, an appropriately-named publisher for a manuscript depicting characters with such outsized lives. ...more
I don’t recall ever reading anything by Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa before, so I can’t compare this historical novel and thinly-disguised biographI don’t recall ever reading anything by Nobel Prize winner Vargas Llosa before, so I can’t compare this historical novel and thinly-disguised biography to his other work, but the subject--the life of Sir Roger Casement--is one which interests me deeply. Adam Hochschild’s 1998 book of the Congo, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, introduced me to the unforgettable figure of Roger Casement and I see Vargas Llosa was similarly captured. Casement was a man who harbored within him enormous contradictions and who struggled to live a life of meaning. Despite being hung for a traitor, he was a man of honor who stood up for his convictions, and who died for them.
Roger Casement (1864-1916) was born just outside of Dublin, Ireland, in a seaside location given variously as Sandycove or Kingstown. Though baptized as a child, Casement considered himself Protestant most of his life and embraced his Catholicism only shortly before his death. Much of what we know about him comes from his own journals in which he recorded his work, thoughts, travels, and sexual encounters. Vargas Llosa’s first section detailing Casement’s life and work in the Congo tracked so closely with Hochschild’s account that I realized both must have used the same source materials.
It is the second section, called Amazonia, which held my attention most closely. After Casement works with Protestant missionaries and the journalist and human rights activist E.D. Morel in the Congo disclosing the atrocities committed in the push to harvest rubber, he is dispatched by the British government to Peru to do the same there. He was not a well man by this time, for a white man in the tropics often developed debilitating illnesses that recurred with alarming frequency. Returning to the hot, humid environment of the Amazonian jungle caused his health to further fray. A photograph of Casement in Peru takes one aback; in it Casement looks positively skeletal.
[image] Casement (on left) w/ Representative of Peruvian Amazon Company
Vargas Llosa describes Casement’s life in Peru with a verisimilitude and authenticity that makes those passages come alive. Casement had a nasty assignment, travelling to remote and dangerous outposts to conduct interviews and write detailed reports on atrocities. He couldn’t wait to be shot of it. But he persevered until he had enough damning evidence, only to find that the business interests trumped human rights in the Amazon, as they often did in colonial possessions.
Gradually Casement came to realize that freedom is something one must seize for oneself:
"I have reached the absolute conviction that the only way the indigenous people of Putumayo can emerge from the miserable condition to which they have been reduced is by rising up in arms against their masters. It is an illusion devoid of all reality to believe…that this state will change when…there are authorities, judges, police to enforce the laws that have prohibited servitude and slavery in Peru since 1854…In this society the state is an inseparable part of the machinery of exploitation and extermination…If they want to be free they have to conquer their freedom with their arms and their courage…We Irish are like the Huitotos, the Boras, the Andoques, and the Muinanes of Putumayo. Colonized, exploited and condemned to be that way forever if we continue trusting in British laws, institutions, and governments to attain our freedom. They will never give it to us. Why would the Empire that colonized us do that unless it felt an irresistible pressure that obliged it to do so? That pressure can only come from weapons."
Vargas Llosa also captures the beauty and pathos of Casement’s homosexual encounters, for Casement was a gay man in a world constrained by its own harsh and corrupted morality. By the time he lived in Peru, Casement was increasingly indiscreet in his encounters and his recording of them in his journals. Vargas Llosa makes the point that Casement must have keenly felt his solitary, unmarried life. When Casement leaves the Amazon and returns to Europe via New York, he encounters a handsome young Slav, Eivind, for whom he falls heavily, thinking he is finally enjoying a mutual and adult relationship. Eivind will be his undoing, for he sells Casement’s secrets, including his determination to work for Irish independence, to the British.
Casement had been knighted after his work in Africa. When, in a roiled and pre-WWI Europe, he made the decision to go to a militarizing Germany to get aid for Irish rebels, the British felt sufficiently betrayed to try him for treason. While in Germany, Casement apparently considered every possible means to weaken the hold of the British on her colonies wherever they might be, strengthening the case by the prosecution and ensuring he would never be granted clemency. He was hung in 1916, a mere three months after his dawn capture April 21 at McKenna’s Fort in Ireland.
The last section of Vargas Llosa’s novel details the confusion of Casement’s botched return to Ireland and the support for his case, or lack of it, by longtime friends and admirers. Many old friends, including E.D. Morel, considered Casement seriously off base in his collaboration with the German machine against England, and so never responded to his letters. Though his hangman called him "the bravest man it fell to my unhappy lot to execute," even his Irish compatriots could not hail him wholeheartedly as a nationalist because rumors of his homosexuality offended their sense of moral right.
In the Epilogue, Vargas Llosa celebrates the return of Casement to the popular imagination:
"With the revolution in customs, principally in the area of sexuality, in Ireland, the name of Casement gradually, though always with reluctance and prudery, began to clear a path to being accepted for what he was: one of the greatest anticolonial fighters and defenders of human rights and indigenous cultures of his time, and a sacrificed combatant for the emancipation of Ireland. Slowly his compatriots became resigned to accepting that a hero and martyr is not an abstract prototype or a model of perfection but a human being made of contradictions and contrasts, weakness and greatness, since a man, as José Enrique Rodó wrote, ‘is many men,’ which means that angels and demons combine inextricably in his personality."
In 1965, Casement’s bones were repatriated and rest now in Dublin’s Glasnevin cemetery.
This book begins with the assertion of evil. It made me uneasy. I prefer to hear the facts and draw my own conclusions. But I felt far less willing toThis book begins with the assertion of evil. It made me uneasy. I prefer to hear the facts and draw my own conclusions. But I felt far less willing to grant King Leopold’s side another instant of attention after realizing that the facts had been obscured for a century or more by repression of documents relating to the case in Belgian state archives. Better that we finally uncover the ugly truth and take its lesson: unbridled greed may be the ugliest, most unforgivable, most unnecessary sin of all.
How can we not have known this horrible history? It happened only a hundred years ago. Though I am embarrassed I did not know the anguished history and perpetuation of evil in the Congo, I stand in good company. Hochschild tells us of a Belgian diplomat serving in the 1970’s Congo who learned of the atrocities by a chance remark from a chieftain recalling “the first time” of rubber collection. This diplomat-turned-historian, Jules Marchal, spent decades after his retirement from civil service investigating and documenting King Leopold’s personal fiefdom in the Congo and its long list of crimes there at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
What does become amply clear from Hochschild’s account is how it is possible to mount a resistance to a great evil. Resistance requires exceptional people willing to bear witness, but also organization and persistence. Edmund Dene Morel, the shipping clerk who recognized in the 1890’s what was happening in the Congo, immediately called out the injustices he saw there and never hesitated in his mission to publicize it in the years that followed. Fortunately, he was an articulate man with a convincing speaking style and he had enormous drive. He managed to gather like-minded folk to himself to voice a larger protest.
The life of Irishman Roger Casement, the gay man knighted by the Queen for his work as a diplomat and later hanged by Britain as a traitor to the crown for his work as an Irish patriot, stands as an example of the strange dissociation countries in power display when someone challenges their economic and political interests. I fell in love with him a little, Sir Roger Casement, as a man of great courage and vision: he saw what men are and did not despair, though one might say that, in the end, he died of it.
Black Americans who spent their adult lives speaking out against the horror happening in Africa, the Reverend William Henry Sheppard and George Washington Williams, have finally found their way back into history. Many Christian missionaries, though notably, not Catholic missionaries, did their part in publicizing crimes in pursuit of endless demand for rubber.
What I liked most about the book was the way Hochschild brought us past the period of the Congo revelations to the present day, telling us how we could have been ignorant of the time and the period. He followed the lives of Morel and Chapman to their ends, and introduced us to Ambassador Marchal of Belgium. He follows the Congo after Leopold through its Belgian colony status to the demand for self-rule and the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first legally-elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He tells us of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, Congolese President who continued crimes against his country that Leopold had begun, this time with American support.
I began to realize that some of the surviving chiefs of Leopold’s crimes were sometimes collaborators. Their behaviors have been perpetuated over the generations until there is nothing but misery left in that place. Now I understand better how a country so rich in natural resources could be so socially impoverished. The crimes continue to the present. What can be the solution to this kind of moral destitution?
I listened to the Random House Audio of this title, read by Geoffrey Howard. ...more
George Beahm is an unabashed fan of Steve Jobs and has written a previous book called I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words. Beahm takes publically avGeorge Beahm is an unabashed fan of Steve Jobs and has written a previous book called I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words. Beahm takes publically available information and quotes from Jobs and gives them depth and context. It is painstaking work, and Beahm treats Jobs more like an oracle than a man. But the book does what good nonfiction should do: it whets ones appetite for more information.
Just to be clear, we never actually get the text of Jobs’ only graduation address to Stanford University students in 2005, though we get a web link to it. Beahm “builds on what Steve Jobs said in his address and sheds light on its explicit and implicit themes.” He picks out the threads of that short speech and shows us how those themes played out in Jobs’ life. Beahm calls it “Connecting the Dots” as Jobs does in his commencement speech. “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards,” Jobs told his audience in 2005.
Jobs speech was a good one. It told his audience that although he is lauded today as a success, he did experience failure. He tells them if they have something they love to do, failure is just part of the process, and necessary. And he says love is central to the meaning in our lives.
Finally, Jobs tells us Memento mori: Remember that you will die. You don’t have long on earth, so take advantage of your time and don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Be daring.
In the bibliography, Beahm cites Walter Isaacson’s biography called Steve Jobs as the standard against which all other works will be judged. I am most interested to start that as soon as possible. Beahm’s book reminds us that a man of great creativity was once among us, and impels us to glean lessons from his life.
I received an advance of this title from librarything.com in exchange for an honest review. ...more
It is sometimes difficult when writing a review of a memoir or biography to separate the writing from its subject. Isaacson did a good job of handlingIt is sometimes difficult when writing a review of a memoir or biography to separate the writing from its subject. Isaacson did a good job of handling the detritus of a life—there is just so much to examine in the life of Steve Jobs that the biographer must pick out the pieces that seem to make sense of or make sense in a narrative of that life. Isaacson does that. What I found myself missing was the same thing I felt missing in Ben MacIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends which describes the infamous “charm” of Kim Philby: audio/video of the man himself. Fortunately, there are plenty of clips of Jobs online, though what we’d really like to see are unscripted moments rather than product launches.
Isaacson writes that the theme of Jobs’ life was that he always felt “special” or “chosen” and that the normal rules didn’t apply to him. It began, perhaps, when his mother told him he was not adopted because he was abandoned by his birth parents, but because he was chosen by his adopted parents. But he lived his whole life as someone who made his own judgments about the world and its rules. He was not a gentle man, but he had a creativity that he cultivated in himself and others. That was one of his special gifts.
My takeaway has to be that it takes all kinds to build successful products. Obviously a room full of Jobs-like folks wouldn’t work, and Jobs himself admitted that “without Apple and its engineers, I am nothing.” But it also took folks who were willing to work with him on everything else—component deliveries at Apple, music sales for iTunes, filmmaking at Pixar. He was persuasive--the “reality distortion field” was applied to the way he turned one’s head about decisions--and that was another of his special gifts.
A different person could have been successful in the personal computer market, maybe even more successful. Bill Gates was such a person. After all, both Jobs and Gates entered an empty market and made a mark. But that shows may be another great gift of Jobs: to see what was needed. That is something not all of us can do. That takes hutzpa and vision. But Jobs wasn’t universally successful with all his products: think about NeXT, where he gave himself leeway to build a product the way he wanted but which no one else liked enough to buy. But the architecture of the product Jobs built at NeXT was used later when he returned to Apple.
After some practice Jobs got much, much better at launching products that made a lot of sense and that broke open the way we communicate. To do that, he had to attract the right folks to help him, to cooperate, and to lead. That was another great skill: he could lead.
Finally, he had style. I admit to appreciating his concept of wearing a “uniform.” I appreciate his restraint when it came to consumption and money, even food. He could earn endlessly, but he seemed to realize money was not the point, as it appears to be for some folks. The point was to do what you loved, to be in love. Love was the point.
In a perfect world, an eBook would have video clips of the man in action at strategic moments in his life (e.g., the 2007 Walt Mossberg interview of Gates and Jobs and the Stanford 2005 graduation address)…we wouldn’t have to watch a three-hour product launch, but just clips of the highlights. It is difficult to imagine the man without seeing him in action.
Because of Jobs’ central role in the personal computing market, his history could be read as a history of the industry. I found it fascinating. Whether Steve Jobs was a perfect man or a flawed man is not really the point, I think. He was a man, as he liked to point out, at the crossroads of science and art. He changed the way we communicate and at least makes us think about the way we do business. He was after excellence in product design and function, and he hoped to create a great company.
I listened to the audio production of this book produced by Recorded Books for Simon & Schuster Audio, narrated by Dylan Baker. I highly recommend it for everyone’s library. I wonder if we would have been as tolerant of the young Jobs as Atari executives were when he arrived on their doorstep with the announcement that he wouldn’t leave until he was hired. ...more
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