Freddie deBoer Gets Ruthless with His Critics 

Freddie deBoer occasionally self-identifies as a Communist. I’m not big on Communism. Nor am I a fan of Communists. And yet deBoer is someone I quote from and link to all the time. That is because he is a very good writer, clear and concise. Most importantly, his thinking is original and independent, which is a rarity today.

In this posting on his website, he talks about how he’s gotten fed up with some of the trolling criticism he gets. And then he does something I’ve seen one or two other smart bloggers do: He establishes a set of rules that subscribers must follow if they don’t want to be banned from participating in his wonderful world of ideas.

I like the specificity of his rules. They are, in and of themselves, great entertainment. And I like even better his tactic for punishing his trolls.

A Purple Place for Dying 

By John D. MacDonald
First published Jan. 1, 1964
240 pages

After several months of serious books about controversial topics, A Purple Place for Dying was a welcome selection for the April meeting of The Mules.

It is not the best Travis McGee I’ve read. (MacDonald wrote 21 of them.) But it is a solidly structured, amusingly characterized, and well-paced detective/mystery by this prolific and accomplished novelist.

The Plot 

McGee is drawn away from his usual haunt (Florida) by a job offer from Mona Yeoman, who suspects that her estranged husband has stolen from her considerable trust fund. But before McGee’s investigation begins, she is murdered before his eyes by an unseen gunman. By the time he summons the police to the scene, her body has disappeared. He then sets out to solve the murder.

What I Liked About It 

It was an easy, enjoyable read, with a plot that kept moving, characters that were colorful, and several satisfying twists and turns. That’s what one expects from a good genre writer, and that’s what MacDonald gives us here. He is also a true craftsman and wordsmith.

Critical Reception 

I couldn’t find any reviews of this particular book by MacDonald. But, more than 35 years since he died (Dec. 28, 1986), the Travis McGee novels are still in print… and his skill as a writer continues to be praised by his peers. A few examples:

* “The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.” (Stephen King)

* “My favorite novelist of all time…. He captured the mood and spirit of his times more accurately, more hauntingly, than any ‘literature’ writer – yet managed always to tell a thunderingly good, intensely suspenseful tale.” (Dean Koontz)

* “Most readers loved MacDonald’s work because he told a rip-roaring yarn. I loved it because he was the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty.” (Carl Hiaasen)

Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations 

By Amy Chua
304 pages
First edition Feb. 20, 2018

This is the second of two Amy Chua books recommended to me by SL. The first, The Triple Package, which I reviewed here, was about why some immigrants to the US do much better than others in terms of income, education, and even health. As I mentioned in that review, I was interested in her argument because it overlaps with my thesis in a book I’m writing (working title Wealth Culture), which is about the cultural characteristics of immigrant groups that always seem to rise to the highest rungs of wealth and education wherever they go.

I like Political Tribes for a different reason: It presents a very convincing explanation for how the US managed to get itself in so many post-war proxy fights around the world, starting with Vietnam and then with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Venezuela.

Chua’s thesis is that the US’s foreign policy has always been focused on political and/or economic ideas such as dictatorships vs. democracies and Communism vs. Capitalism. Those sorts of notions are fodder for academics and politicians, she points out, but they are not the primary forces in how the rest of the world acts and reacts to economic, political, and social changes. Only by understanding the importance that culture plays in other countries can the US develop a foreign policy that works – both for the countries we get involved in and for ourselves.

Critical Reception 

* “Chua sprints through her international material in a little over 100 pages before returning to the United States – which is where she gets stuck in a quagmire of her own making. What started out… as a shrewd assessment of our fractured political situation turns into a muddled argument about what Americans, mainly liberals, need to do next.” (New York Times)

* “Chua is no stranger to controversy, and her latest book is sure to provoke.” (Foreign Affairs)

* “A punchy book that advances a single idea with admirable clarity.” (The Times)

Guns, Germs, and Steel

By Jared Diamond
480 pages
First published March 1997

I meant to read this 26 years ago when it was first recommended to me. (The title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations and maintained dominance.) I bought it. Shelved it. And forgot about it.

It came up on my app as a recommended read, and I’ve been listening to it for about a week. It’s probably a good thing that I waited so long to read it, because my interest in the big questions it raises about the world and its disparate cultures was only casual back then.

Now, I have an insatiable appetite for this kind of book. I’m about halfway through it and have been very happy so far. It’s dense with geological, evolutionary, anthropological, and historical facts leading to an understanding of our world today that, while by no means identical to my own view, is complementary.

Critical Reception 

In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. Many critics noted that the large scope of the work made some oversimplification inevitable while still praising it as a very erudite and generally effective synthesis of multiple different subjects.

* “The great thing about Guns, Germs, and Steel is the detail. Jared Diamond starts with [the] proposition that all humans are born with much the same abilities – then proceeds to argue, through meticulous and logical steps, that the playing field of prehistory was anything but level.” (The Guardian)

* “Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse [its sequel] represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation.” (The New York Times)

* “Artful, informative, and delightful.” (New York Review of Books)

A documentary based on the book, produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005. Click here to watch Part 1.

And for a quick, four-minute cartoon summary of the book, click here.

Alex Berenson on the First Amendment, Part Two

Alex Berenson 

Last week, I gave you a link to Part One of Alex Berenson’s lecture on why he fears for the future of the First Amendment. If you missed it, here it is again.

Now, here is Part Two.

Alex Berenson on Why the First Amendment Matters 

Alex Berenson 

Alex Berenson is not a right-wing radical. He’s not even a card-carrying conservative. He’s a thoughtful and well-educated researcher and writer who has developed a following by challenging large ideas, doctrines, and ideologies by pointing out verifiable facts and using logical reasoning. Here, he summarizes a speech he recently gave on why the rising rejection of the First Amendment is the greatest threat to our democracy and any democracy in the world.

Something Rich and Strange 

By Ron Rash
448 pages
Published Nov. 4, 2014

This is one of two short story collections The Mules read for our February meeting. It was the second book of short stories we read by Ron Rash, who is indisputably one of the finest American short story crafters writing today.

In Something Rich and Strange, he gives us 32 different sorts of stories about different kinds of people, presented in different lengths, tempos, and points of view. The rugged hills and farms and valleys of Appalachia provide a rich and strange background for the rich and strange vignettes of the characters that come to life in each one.

What I Liked About It 

Ron Rash is a specialist in writing short stories, which takes a very different set of skills than writing novels. He is a literary writer, who, like Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner, can not only tell a tense and compelling story but can do so with a mastery of phrasing and diction and dialog that provides its own rewards.

Critical Reception 

* “Ron Rash occupies an odd place in the pantheon of great American writers, and you’d better believe he belongs there… Something Rich and Strange is a major short-story anthology that can introduce new readers to this author’s haunting talents and reaffirm what his established following already knows.” (New York Times)

* “No one writes better about the misunderstood, bedeviled, mule-stubborn inhabitants of Southern Appalachia than Rash… Something Rich and Strange is a bonanza for short-story fans, and another great introduction to Rash for those who haven’t read the originals yet.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

* “The prose in every story is sensual and expressive. [Rash] swings easily between humor and pathos, the mundane and the momentous.” (Chicago Tribune)

Chick Lit: The Introduction of a New Fiction Genre 30 Years Ago

Helen Fielding 

On February 28, 1995, an anonymous column appeared in the British newspaper The Independent, titled “The Diary of Bridget Jones.” The idea for the column came from Charlie Leadbeater, the features editor. According to This Week in Literary History, Leadbeater “had been looking for a writer to capture a certain voice, to speak to the kind of women he saw at work every day. It was his wife who suggested Helen Fielding, who wrote for The Independent on Sunday.”

Fielding was working on what she called “an earnest and frankly unreadable novel about cultural divides in the Caribbean” when she was invited to write the column. “But,” she said, “to write a column, as myself, about single life in London. Much as I needed the money, the idea of writing about myself in that way seemed hopelessly embarrassing and revealing. I offered to write it anonymously, as an exaggerated, comic, fictional character. I assumed no one would read it, and it would be dropped after six weeks for being too silly.”

At first, Fielding didn’t tell anyone at the paper what she was doing. “I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning,” she later wrote. “When we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, ‘It’s by me, meeeee!’ and things snowballed from there.”

The Diary of Bridget Jones became a hugely bestselling novel, an Academy Award-winning movie, and arguably the model for a new genre of fiction that became known as “chick lit.”

If you’d like to know more about this story and the continuing controversy about its standing in the hierarchy of contemporary British literature, here is a link to an essay on the subject.

How Money Walks 

By Alexander Ward
368 pages
Published Feb. 20, 2024

The WSJ recommended The Internationalists last week. I have at least 60 books piled up in various corners of my house and office that I’ve promised myself I would read, but this one intrigued me.

Short of time, I skimmed it. But there were paragraphs and even pages that I put stickies on to get back to when I had time.

One is this observation about Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan:

“During the chaotic scenes that unfolded around Kabul’s airport as Taliban-aligned forces began taking over the capital, White House officials knew the president was making promises he couldn’t keep to get people out of the country.

“Biden told ABC News on Aug. 18, 2021, that he was committed to having troops stay in Afghanistan until every US citizen who wanted to leave could do so.” A senior White House official told Ward at the time: “There’s no one here who thinks we can meet that promise.”

“Ultimately, Biden withdrew the last US troops there two weeks later, but left more than 800 American citizens in Afghanistan. Also left behind: Tens of thousands of Afghans who allied with the US and had been promised refuge in the US. So White House staff knew that Americans and many of our friends would be left behind but nobody felt compelled to blow the whistle? One can only wonder who would hire such people.”

This morning, I found a critique of the book by James Freeman in the WSJ that elaborates on the issue. You can read it here.

1. Night at the Fiestas: Stories 

By Kristin Valdez Quade
304 pages
Originally published March 16, 2015

I don’t remember how this got onto my to-read list. I half-liked the title – a collection of possibly good, possibly literary short stories from south of the border. But titles, as we know, can be misleading. It could be a compilation of socially astute, Oprah-worthy, cliché-ridden accounts of racism and oppression.

It happened that – and, again, I don’t know why – it had been downloaded onto one of the book apps on my iPhone and I was embarking on an hour’s drive. So I began listening to it. And now, having read (listened to) it and thought about it for a week, I feel comfortable recommending it.

What I Like About It 

Kristin Valdez Quade is indeed a literary writer, but in the school of simple sentences and limited flourishes that I prefer, especially when the stories are meant to be experienced (like The Sun Also Rises), not plumbed and researched and then deciphered (like Finnegan’s Wake). So, I like Quade’s style of writing. I also like the amount of detail in her stories that adds depth and dimension to the cultural background in which the stories come alive. And finally, I think she does a very good job with dialogue, which is not easy.

What I Don’t Like (So Much) 

There is a minor current of political correctness that runs through the collection, in terms of who the heroes and villains look like, speak like, and act like. It’s there, and I wish it wasn’t. Because had Quade resisted this superficial commercial temptation, the book would have not only received high marks from me in terms of literary style and horizontality, but better grades on verticality as well.

Critical Reception 

* “[A] sparkling debut collection… features dreamers and schemers whose lives pulsate with wild hopes, hard luck, stunning secrets, and saving grace.” (Elle)

* “Quade demonstrates her command of writing about complex issues of ethnicity and success head-on.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

* “ Fresh, funny…. A gifted storyteller with an eye for quirky, compelling detail.” (Dallas Morning News)

2. Can This Death Row Inmate Bring Down the Death Penalty Itself? 

Death row inmate Richard Glossip in 2014, one year before he was scheduled to die. 

A longtime “passion” of mine is the incarceration of people falsely convicted of crime. The idea itself is scary. But what’s really frightening is that I’ve learned from 20 years of involvement in this issue that proving one’s innocence is not, as one would think, a get-out-of-jail pass. On the contrary, the way the system works in most judicial jurisdictions in the US is that, after it’s been proven (often by DNA evidence plus admissions by the actual culprit) that some poor bastard has been incarcerated for 20 years, the DAs do everything they can to keep him in jail (or on death row) because they don’t want to tarnish their prosecution percentages.

For someone not familiar with the facts, this may seem unbelievable. Here’s a typical example from The Free Press that should upset you.

3. What a World: A Grieving Father Recounts His Son’s Dying Moments

Ken Kesey 

An important feature of American prose style for the last 100 years is restraint. Restraint in action, restraint in diction, and, especially when describing harrowing experiences, restraint in expressing emotion.

“One icy morning in January of 1984,” Sean Usher writes in the Feb. 3 edition of Letters of Note, “as the University of Oregon’s wrestling team headed on a bus to their next tournament in Pullman, WA, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a mountain road and it tumbled through the guardrail and over a 300-foot cliff. Tragically, not all survived.

“One boy, Lorenzo West, was killed on impact; another, 20-year-old Jed Kesey, was left brain dead. He passed away within days.”

The boy was buried at his family’s farm. A few days later, his father, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, wrote to five of his closest friends. Here is the power of restraining emotion.

4. How Much Does It Cost to Retire in the 20 Happiest Cities in the World?

We (The Agora Companies) publish all sorts of things about living and retiring abroad, including International Living, which is the largest circulation magazine of its kind. International Living often covers cost-of-living stories about beachside and or mountain areas as well as tropical paradises and low-cost retirement Edens. But I never saw an essay on this topic. Click here.

1. The Triple Package 

By Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld
352 pages
Originally published Feb. 4, 2014

SL, founder of The Mules (my book club), gave me this book to read. He had recently interviewed Amy Chua on his podcast about multilingualism, and discovered that she has an interest, as I do, in how the beliefs and values of varying cultures can have a huge impact on the successes or failures of its members.

I’m about halfway through The Triple Package but can already recommend it.

In the book, Chua and Rubenfeld (who are husband and wife and professors at Yale Law School) argue that, despite the anti-American vitriol spewing from the teachers and students of America’s best universities these days, the dream of coming to America and becoming successful – in all the most common ways – is still alive and strong.

What I Like About It 

Chua is also the author of a book I read years ago and loved, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, in which she recounts the extremely high expectations she had of her children and the iron-willed way she went about making them successful. Her raw intelligence and willingness to challenge her own beliefs with serious research and undeniable logic… it won me over in that book and again in The Triple Package.

The Triple Package is especially interesting to me because the thesis is remarkably like one I’ve been working on for years. (Working title: “Wealth Culture.”) The idea is that there is an elephant-sized fact that academia refuses to address – which is that the great disparity of outcomes between various ethnic/racial groups that is so often talked about today is not the result of slavery or Jim Crow but of significantly different cultural viewpoints and beliefs that affect every aspect of “success” for those that attempt to pursue The American Dream.

What I Don’t Like So Much 

When my book is finally published, critics will say I got the idea from Ms. Chua.

Critical Reception 

* “Provocative…. If you care at all about the pressures underpinning success and failure, or relish fresh perspectives on how societies really work, you’ll want to read this.” (Sunday Times/UK)

* “A sometimes funny, sometimes academic, and always interesting study of the cultural traits that make some groups outperform others in America.” (National Review Online)

* “[The authors] tiptoe mirthlessly over cultural eggshells yet still manage to stir up controversy.” (The Times/UK)

2. The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty 

By Michael Hall in Texas Monthly
Estimated Read Time: 60 min.

There are hundreds of stories written about wrongly convicted people. Innocent men and women that languished in jail because of bad police work, legal incompetence, or (shockingly commonly) the purposeful withholding of exculpatory evidence.

This is one such story with an interesting twist: In 1990, Estella Ybarra, a juror in a rape case in Texas, was pressured by other members of the jury to send a man to life in prison, despite her near certainty that he was innocent.

Almost three decades later, she decided to right her wrong.

Click here.