Hedonist Jive Book Review #1

HEDONIST JIVE BOOK REVIEW Issue #1

Edited and written by Jay Hinman

I had this idea for a fanzine that would be solely about books that's been internally gestating for the last few years, but I never thought I could/would pull it off. Having published my own underground music print fanzine a couple of times in 2013 and 2014, respectively, I’ve been all too familiar with the time-suck it takes to create and distribute such an endeavor, and more relevant, the financial drain that comes from printing too many unsold magazines for a world increasingly disdainful of the physically printed word.

This is a recurrent theme, as you’ll find, in this first issue of The Hedonist Jive Book Review, though don’t count me among the gripers (see my essay “The Final Word in Defense of E-Readers”). I figure I’ll take this where the people are, and where you are right now is online, what with your tablets and PDF readers and Kindles and whatnot. Not knowing the true audience for a selfpublished fanzine about the written word (for the sort of music I like and write about, it’s clear that it tops out at about 600), it’s best that I assume that it’s either “infinitesimal” or “limitless”, which means that publishing it electronically and giving it away for free is probably my best bet. If you’re reading this on paper, it’s solely because I’ve relented, and found someone willing to print it in a small batch for me at a price that won’t cause me to lose part of my shirt.

Since reading’s a thing I like to do, right up there with aggressively foisting my tastes in books, film or music on as many people as I can, I’d like to welcome you to this little vanity project. It has a real “get” – an interview with the phenomenal short-story writer Jodi Angel, whom I emailed out of the blue about this project and who was exceptionally generous in providing the single best interview on her work I’ve seen her give. Let’s make her famous, OK? I also tackle the three-volume political and social history of 1960-1976 America by Rick Perlstein in this debut issue, as well as about 20-some-odd other books.

The great thing about doing this digitally, as a giveaway, is that I don’t have to worry about page counts, shipping costs, print runs, or, really - even having any readers at all. But hey, if you’re out there – thank you. Give me a holler at thejayhinman@gmail.com, where I’m probably parked at this very moment waiting for your acknowledgement.

Thanks as well to Christine Santos, who made the cover; to Jodi Angel, for validating this idea I had for a digital fanzine by agreeing to be interviewed for it; and to Rebecca and Adam, my wife and son, for knowing that whatever it is I’ve squirreled myself away from them to work on, it’s probably very, very important.

Spring 2015

Nobody is getting on the freeway An interview with Jodi Angel Jodi Angel, over the course of a mere two stellar short story collections, has, in my mind, become the foremost American purveyor of the form. Her 2005 “The History of Vegas” and especially 2013’s “You Only Get Letters From Jail” are rich tapestries of the humanity lying dormant behind teenage deadbeat degeneracy. She writes each story from the first-person perspective of a different confused, drifting and often unusually perceptive late-teenage boy, with the exception of some early stories that did the same from a female perspective. These stories will, in fact, be recognizable to any of you who were yourselves once 16-19 yearold boys. It’s all the more remarkable considering the gender of the author, who grew up in a family of girls, and her unwavering ability to get at the intersection of fear, bravado and shame that lays in the pituitary glands and developing brains of boys at a certain age.

Angel’s stories all take place in the parts of California that no one talks about – the outer reaches of the desert, the Central Valley and the quasi-rural towns of the far North. Here, for a late- teenage boy, cars are one of the only acceptable forms of social currency, and each story often has a lot of talk about 354 dual-cam engines with four on the floor whatsis that I couldn’t even pretend to understand. The adults in these stories are almost universally disappointing; most are lost in alcohol, in Jesus, in grief or in loneliness. Kids mostly sneak around behind their parents’ backs to drink beer, harass girls or go on missions to find anything to relieve the tedium of their surroundings.

I love that her books move well beyond cliché and focus more on the inner monologues of each storyteller than it does his bleak surroundings. It makes the thoughts and feelings of these boys so evocative of confused feelings I myself once had in my own suburban middle class comfort, in a very different part of California.

Boys in these tales will find a dead girl in a creek and not tell anyone about it; choose to willfully ignore the boasts of near- psychopathic men who tell see-through lies about disappeared girls; conflate a recently-viewed horror-porn film with an emergency C-section about to be performed on a freshly-hit deer on the side of the road; and pay penance for running over a cat by having to drink beer with an extremely lonely widow instead of mowing her lawn.

Or, in moments of drug-fueled boredom, put firecrackers

up the asses of cats instead. Her work is excellent across the board. We thought we’d ask her a few questions and give her a chance to explain how she so thoroughly inhabits the lives of her characters, twenty pages at a time.

HJBR: Where did you grow up (I’m looking for the exact Northern California town), and when did you go through adolescence – and stating the obvious, why did this time period of your life become so central to who you became as a writer?

Jodi Angel: I was born in the city of Red Bluff in 1971, and I grew up there until we moved away when I was 16. My mother grew up there; my father grew up there, my uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins. All Red Bluff. It was an anomaly for my family to move away and leave the small town environment that can hold people hostage like a frozen womb. At the time that we moved away, I was devastated. That town was my whole existence—I went to

they know right from wrong, but by distinguishing right from wrong, it removes a lot of potential for a good time. Their friends are driven more by the good time than the right things, and while I try not to illustrate this ideology through peer pressure per se, there is something compelling about looking for the next good thing to do. These characters tend to not be old enough to evaluate morality for more than 3 or 4 seconds, and to be motivated more by the compulsion of doing something fucked up for fun. My characters are all about the impulse of the now—feeling good rather than feeling right.

HJBR: Your stories also have heaps of very disappointing adults. True “role models” for your teenagers are almost non-existent. Where did this sense of being let down by authority figures, parents etc. spring from?

high school with kids that I had gone to kindergarten with, and it was difficult to adjust to change. I don’t think I fully recovered from that move until I was much older.

I guess I romanticize that time period in my life to some extent because I was a kid in the late 70’s and 80’s, and there was a freedom during that time period that we don’t have now, that we don’t allow for our own kids, and I remember what it was like to grow up with the expectation that we could handle ourselves, that we could get into trouble and get out on our own, and we knew every backroad and shortcut through that town.

I like setting my stories in that small town because there is compression in small towns—meaning the environment closes in on you—you want to escape, but you have no place to go. Compression makes for good fiction.

HJBR: When you step into a character in your stories, that character is generally more wise than the people who surround him, but is very often just as fucked-up or vulnerable as his friends. They’re often able to articulate morality better than the burnouts who surround them, but fall into the same traps all the same. Tell us a little bit about how you make peer pressure work in your stories.

Jodi Angel: I think it’s interesting that you see the stories as having peer pressure as an element driving character. I think my narrators try to be good kids and

Jodi Angel: When I was growing up, there were two worlds —the adult world and the kid world. We did our thing, and the adults did theirs. As kids we were essentially taught to be self-reliant, independent, and trustworthy. My mom was a single parent who worked to support us, and we often times did not have any adult supervision when we got home from school, or before we left in the morning. I was the oldest and had to get my sisters out the door on time. I think when I was young, I saw myself more as an adult than as a kid, and I think some of my friends saw themselves that way, too—like we were already old enough to figure our own shit out and didn’t need an adult to break it all down for us. It’s not that I didn’t respect authority figures when I was a kid—I did, and I was a good kid who had all A’s and never got into trouble—but I didn’t NEED them, if that makes sense. I learned at a very young age to get wise. I got wise.

HJBR: In another interview you talked about your characters all being approximately 17 years old, “on the threshold of adulthood and adolescence”? What is it about this age that’s so fascinating, and what was 17 like for you personally?

Jodi Angel: I think 17 is absolutely the golden age. You’re too old to be considered a young teenager, but too young to be tried as an adult…I think 17 is the last year of freedom, before the rules change, before consequences matter.

Think about the songs for 17-year-olds—I mean even Stevie Nicks saw the magic. In “Boogie Nights,” Burt Reynold’s character Jack Horner calls Mark Wahlberg’s character “his 17 year old piece of gold.” For me, I wouldn’t say that 17 was golden, but it became a turning point in my life in terms of dividing me from who I was and making me into who I became as my teenage years dissolved and I entered adulthood. At 16 I was a straight A student and always trying to do the right thing. I was an exchange student to Germany my sophomore year. I won scholarships. I was on track to go to college and be successful. By 17, I was drinking and partying and didn’t give a shit about school anymore. Something changed in me between 16 and 17, and I can’t say that it was for the better.

HJBR: You wrote several female-perspective stories in “The History of Vegas”; the girls in these stories tended to have fairly ambiguous sexuality.

Can you say a little bit about that, and secondly, why did you abandon first-person female writing in your 2nd book?

Jodi Angel: When I was a teenager, I probably had fairly ambiguous sexuality, so I just dumped that onto my female characters to see what they would do. When I was a teenager, I started to come to the devastating conclusion that I was not straight—I was not like my friends, and I didn’t know how to deal with those feelings other than to deny and bury them. It’s sort of a miserable way to live when you’re a teenager— knowing that you’re different and so fundamentally afraid of being judged for it. I had a “secret” girlfriend for a period of time when I was 15, and it was terrible.

TERRIBLE. My grandmother figured out the whole relationship and she lectured my mom about what an unnatural and disgusting person I was, and I was miserable because I couldn’t talk to anyone, I couldn’t explain what I felt, and the only messages I received were that my feelings were wrong and disgusting.

That’s a lot for a teenage girl to carry. I was deeply ashamed of who I was—to the point that the shame was toxic, and it fucked me up for a long time and made me afraid of being judged to the extent that I was willing to be somebody else and deny who I really was. In fact, I was so ashamed that the first thing I did was run out and get married when I was 20 years old so I could prove to everyone that I was normal and okay— nothing wrong here—and that, too, was a terrible decision. I abandoned those female narrators because I didn’t want to hear from them anymore. I’m just not ready to tell their stories.

HJBR: When you compare the unsupervised, bored kids in your stories with the overly-parented, often-coddled children from less-rural, morewealthy areas, what stands out for you? Do you have enough experience with the latter that made you want to capture a very different sort of lateadolescence in your own work?

Jodi Angel: The characters in my stories often have the bar set very low for them. If they can survive and not kill anyone or hurt anyone in the process, then they are ahead of the game. They aren’t expected to go to college or get a career. They have very few expectations placed on them because it takes a certain kind of person to break free from the city limits and escape to more opportunities and mind opening experiences. These kids aren’t those kinds of people.

Imagine if you spent your whole life knowing that your future consists of working at a job that somebody in your family works at, and if you want to go to college, you have a community college up the freeway to the north, and a state college down the freeway to the south. Nobody is getting on the freeway. The kids who

come from the suburbs and the money and the collegeeducated homes get those expectations thrust on them— you will go to college, you will be educated, you will spend your entire childhood working on padding your college apps. These parents see their children as a direct reflection of their own hopes and dreams—I think it’s a normal thing, and I have put those same pressures on my own children.

Those kids with the college expectations are given a very short leash, and their parents like to tug and tug as the high school days slide by. What they end up with are very compliant, well-trained kids who know how to get into college and very little else. My characters are not those people.

HJBR: Your characters have intimate knowledge of and love for car parts, heavy metal bands and animal husbandry that those of us who grew up in suburbs or cities only dimly recognize. I think that’s part of what makes these stories so fascinating for me; it seems like I left these kids behind in the 1970s and 80s, yet your stories, which are all set in the here and now, barely mention Facebook or the internet at all. How intentional is that?

Jodi Angel: I don’t like setting my stories in modern society. Technology brings connectivity, to some extent,

credit on my geometry homework. I took care of myself. I took responsibility for my life. I want my kids to have that kind of trust in their own abilities to control their worlds. I have a very good friend who was raised by a mother who rescued her—and still rescues her every time she has a bad day or life gets complex—and my friend is in her 40s. There is a big difference between needing legitimate support, and needing your mom to pick up the pieces for you. I want my kids to know the difference. I put a lot of value on growing up.

HJBR: Your stories, especially in “The History of Vegas”, actively made me curmudgeonly and angry about alcohol and alcoholics – and I personally enjoy drinking. What’s your informed, experienced, grown-up take on alcohol and its place in life?

and these characters are disconnected—they don’t have access to the world beyond what they have heard or seen, and I think that’s an important element in the stories—the environment is very insular. I think that today’s teenage experience is completely removed from what I grew up with, and it’s not that I don’t think that technology is great and valuable, and if I would have had internet access as a teenager I could have changed the world—but there are so many more pressures and ability to be exposed to things now, and maybe I’m just getting old, but I don’t really understand what it means to be a teenager in today’s world. I think social media has taught society some very bad habits, and I think that teenagers are far more tuned out than they have ever been despite the ability to be completely tuned in to everything—maybe it’s sensory overload. I romanticize the 70s and 80s, and I like to set my stories in 1979 whenever I’m deliberately thinking about time.

Even the stories that take place in the now overlap with the then, and you will never see one of my characters whip out a cell phone. If one of my characters needs to use a phone, there’s a pay phone outside of Winchell’s donuts on the corner of Oak and Main.

HJBR: As a mother yourself, do you look at your characters with any sort of regret – as in, I sure hope my children don’t turn out like this – or do you feel like their experiences of boredom, failure, setbacks and trying to find themselves is ennobling, and part of growing up?

Jodi Angel: Well…of course I don’t want my kids to end up like my fucked up characters, but I want my kids to have the kind of self-reliance that my characters have. When I was growing up, I didn’t hope that my mom would save my ass if I got into trouble.

I hoped that she never found out. I kept my complications and problems off the grid, and I prided myself on being able to solve my own dilemmas and not needing my mom to step in every time somebody was mean to me or the teacher didn’t give me

Jodi Angel: Ahhhhh, alcohol…..Gotta love it. Or not. I have had a close relationship with alcohol since I was 17 years old, and I found out the power to change the way that I felt. I married my first drinking buddy. I romanticized alcohol, used it, abused it, gave it up and came crawling back. I have had a strained relationship with alcohol, and when I was younger, I thought I could justify the drinking and the writing and the tortured artist bullshit, and what I came to realize is that the only torturing that was getting done was pretty much self-inflicted (because of drinking), and writers who drink often times have a very short window of opportunity to get the writing done before the drink takes over—it’s hard to write when the letters bleed together on the screen—and writing already makes me a little bit nutty when I’m on a heater, and drinking only escalates the nuttiness, and it took me awhile but I finally figured out that F. Scott Fitzgerald was at his worst in his drinking when he wasn’t writing, and I’ve heard the same about Faulkner, too, and the drinking becomes sort of a way to deal with the not writing, and it keeps writing at an arm’s length, so it’s all a big Catch 22. I quit drinking over 3 years ago. I didn’t quit because I thought my writing would improve—I quit because I wanted my life to improve, and it did. Some of my best stories have been written in sobriety. The last 2 stories in YOGLFJ were written in the complete clarity of being sober—and I wrote them back-to-back, within two weeks. I am a better writer sober than I ever was drunk.

HJBR: What’s the state of short-story writing, in your opinion, in 2015? Is the form undergoing a renaissance, is it fading, has it already had its golden age…? What expectations does a shortstory author have when she publishes her work, vs. that of a novelist?

Jodi Angel: I think everyone asks about the state of the short story year after year, and the answer never

changes. Ever. Yes, short stories should be the number one form of literature if one were to measure the literary tastes of contemporary readers and the uses of technology, access to information and the reduction of the attention span, but they never become more popular.

They surge in popularity a little bit, and there will always be readers and fans, but the short story will never surpass the popularity of the novel. Short story writers are more like poets. I think it was a huge victory for Alice Munro to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—ostensibly for her short story writing—and it definitely created some new readership for the genre. But I don’t think anything changed for the short story genre—it wasn’t revolutionized. Short story writers learn that we are in it for the art of the craft, for the challenge of creating a complete world and experience in just a handful of pages. We definitely aren’t in it for the money or the fame. Even Dennis Lehane once said in an interview that he learned from Andre Dubus III that short story writers don’t make enough money to warrant changing a story for an editor— Lehane and Dubus don’t edit or change a story—either it gets published as is or they yank the story from the magazine. Why should they change what they aren’t getting paid very much money for? We don’t expect to be household names. We write the stories because we can, and not all writers can, and that’s the greatest thing about the genre. A short story is not simply a novel reduced to 7000 words. You have to be good at the craft to make a short story work.

Jodi Angel: Has it been that long since I wrote that book….? You mean I have to write another one? I am a fast slow writer. I am not a writer who works at a project every day. I’m just not that way. I don’t have a writing schedule. I don’t get up at dawn and make a cup of tea and greet the sprinklers with fresh pages. I write in fits and starts, and usually do an entire story in a sitting, so I write a lot in my head and sit down and knock it out when it’s finished. This is a great process for stories. Right now I have a new story coming out in Tin House magazine in June, and another one in Cutthroat, and one sent off for consideration someplace else, so yeah, I am writing some stories. I have found that my process isn’t so conducive for novels, though. Novels require investment. You have to keep a hand in them all the time—you have to churn and burn with them. I have difficulty making that commitment, and considering that you can’t hold an entire novel in your head as you draft it, I have yet to learn how to use my process to achieve a more developed and longer piece of writing.

That being said, I am writing a novel and have one in process, though it keeps changing and dissolving and reforming. I want to write a novel, and at the same time I keep allowing myself to struggle with the “not knowing how,” and my characters would not be proud of me. I need to handle my shit and write the novel if I want to write it, or stop whining about it and quit if I don’t. My characters wouldn’t tolerate my shit for a minute if we were all hanging out at the park. They’d get really sick of me, really quick, so let me just say this—the novel is about a couple of teenagers who accidentally shoot an Elvis impersonator who took a bag that didn’t belong to him from a couple of guys in Las Vegas, and now the kids have a dead guy and a bag and a couple guys who are on their way from Vegas, looking to clean up the mess.

HJBR: It’s been a couple of years since “You Only Get Letters From Jail”. Are you putting together a new collection now? Can you see yourself writing a novel at any point, or, having done such phenomenal work in short-form writing, do you feel like you’ve found your form and you’re sticking to it? This is where we ask you to give away all the secrets of what you’re That’s my next book. working on.

A House Divided, Still Standing Rick Perlstein’s Twentieth-Century USA

Rick Perlstein (photo by Jim Newberry) When pundits and scholars have written about the forces that came together in 20th-century America to bring “right wing” politics to power, a nexus most commonly defined by the religious/anti-Communist/free-market forces that surrounded Ronald Reagan, these forces are most often described in sinister terms. Racist, reactionary, backward, hateful, and so on – and not always incorrectly, either.

Rick Perlstein, a left-wing historian who’s concocted a mostly phenomenal three-volumes-and-counting series on the rise of the right, comes at the 1960-1976 period a little differently. He places three men at the center of each of his three books - respectively, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – and then uses these men as stalking horses to describe the sociological and political convulsions that the United States experienced in these volatile years. Generally thought of as a time of “liberalism”, Perlstein’s gift is to tear the cloak off of the stories we’ve told ourselves and to show these years as having been anything but. They were among the most consequential years in my nation’s history, years in which the United States was first fracturing and then, after 1972, could truly be said to have been unraveling.

times they cover. The goal is to try and to convince you to spend a solid chunk of your next year trying to conquer them. Perhaps you’ll be able to do so before Perlstein comes out with his next one, which will, now that he’s telegraphed his historical strategy over the course of 2,000+ pages, will clearly be on 1976-1980 (the false promise of Jimmy Carter and the redemptive triumph of Reagan, or something like that).

Back in 2009, when I finally took on Perlstein’s “Before The Storm – Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus”, I’d been wanting to read this 2000 book for a long time. I, quite possibly like you and everyone else reading this, grew up and was fed incessantly on conventional narratives of the 60s, focused squarely on the counterculture, the godlike John F. Kennedy and his brothers, the struggle for Civil Rights and on Vietnam (mostly on the protests). Sure, I knew that Nixon won the presidency in 1968 thanks to the quoteunquote “silent majority”, but relatively unexplained to me was that bizarre 1964 Republican Party nomination of arch-conservative, deeply principled Barry Goldwater (who was buried in a landslide by Democrat Lyndon Perlstein’s books are massive both in word count and in Johnson), as well as the strong undercurrent of right-wing scope, each about 750 pages, and yet none of the three thought during this era manifested in the John Birch works feels unwieldy or overdone. Having just recently Society and in rabid anticommunism in general. finished the third volume in the trilogy, “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan”, I While I’m perhaps exaggerating my own ignorance a bit, thought I’d take you through a walk of each volume and the I will say that some of it was unwound for me when I read

Brian Doherty’s “Radicals for Capitalism” earlier that same year. That particular book focused on the libertarian undercurrent (way undercurrent, let it be said) to conventional liberal Democratic & liberal Republican dominance from the Roosevelt era until Reagan. Doherty’s tome covered more than those exact years, but that particular era was the most fascinating to me, particularly those radicals who tried to hold the line against creeping government intervention in American lives during the decades of the 50s and 60s. It whetted my appetite to say, yep, I’m finally going to tackle that Perlstein book, all 730 pages of it (small type, no less). I was extremely glad I did, as it was ultimately one of the most engrossing books of history that I’d ever read, with a premise – the rise of ideological conservatism as “the unmaking of American consensus” - that very much deserved to be tackled in this form.

Simply put, Barry Goldwater was the first compelling, national-level ideologue of the right. He re-introduced ideology as a driving factor into politics, and while his consistency and stubbornness may have lost him the 1964 election in a landslide, he never truly wavered from his core beliefs in limited government and personal liberty.

Goldwater’s likely one of the very few Republicans of the past 50 years of whom that can be said. He was a cantankerous, reluctant leader, one whom Perlstein showed was essentially pushed into the limelight his entire career. His bold ideas were captivating millions, initially well under the radar, at a time when American government was a squishy blend of mealy-mouthed, consensusoriented economic liberalism and strong but fearful antiCommunism.

“Before The Storm” paints very well the strong antipathy that many Americans had with President Eisenhower during the 1950s, a man with few political convictions who coasted on inarguable likeability and his war hero status.

The American Right boiled up during these years in fascinating and unpredictable ways, leading on one hand to Goldwater’s eventual nomination and actor Ronald Reagan’s conversion to free-market libertarianism-lite, and on the other to the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society, to the rabid pamphleteers and to the campus movement Young Americans For Freedom, whose heyday was in the first half of the 60s. Perlstein captures it all in minute detail, all under a grander thesis that this movement was ultimately just as much a meaningful part of the 1960s social- and political disruptions as those coming from the Left.

There are so many interesting scenes painted in “Before The Storm” that it’s hard to pull out the right ones to do it justice. A few highlights: the death throes of Eastern establishment Republicanism, as embodied by liberals Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge; the craziness surrounding the 1964 Republican National convention, in San Francisco of all places; the way Goldwater’s campaign

manager in the primaries, Clif White, used parliamentary tactics and intense, ahead-of-his-time knowledge of “gaming the system” to win Goldwater delegates; crazed, racist kook George Wallace asking Goldwater if he could run on his ticket as Vice President; and best of all, the cranky, curmudgeonly Goldwater himself, alternating between selfsabotaging shooting from the hip and intense, rousing speeches.

There’s also the backdrop of the Kennedy presidency, and of course, the national trauma of his assassination, which is at times argued here may have been the single biggest blow to Goldwater’s chances in ’64. I’d argue that Lyndon Johnson, a master politician and armtwister in his own right, did just about everything right and had the wind of recent history and a nation’s fear of nuclear annihilation at his back, giving Goldwater’s “free markets and states’ rights” zero chance at all of victory.

I’m chagrined about what has always been the most debatable part of Barry Goldwater’s political career: his stand against the 1964 Civil Rights act on fear that the government was being used for social engineering.

"You cannot pass a law that will make me like you -- or

you like me," Goldwater told one rally. "That is something that can only happen in our hearts." In another he said, "Our aim, as I understand it, is neither to establish a segregated society nor to establish an integrated society," he said. "It is to preserve a free society." Opposition to the Civil Rights Act would be unthinkable now, and only a racist would argue against it – and many of the predictions that Goldwater and other conservatives had for its consequences did not come to pass (their cautions against some of Johnson’s “Great Society” social welfare programs, on the other hand, were dead-on). In the context of the time, though (something Perlstein is excellent at helping readers grasp), one can see at least some of the logic for opposing it, but I still believe it was tinged with a sense of “too much, too soon” and more than a little fear of what would happen in America’s imploding cities if blacks were, with the sweep of a pen, given full and enforceable rights. I think it’s sad that a man of Goldwater’s principled character saw it as a left/right, government/anti-government sort of issue – he might have even won the election if he’d found common cause with the Left on this issue. Of course, he’d probably have completely lost his base as well. I guess he was doomed as a candidate in any case. Never mind.

Great history books not only inform and give you day-today nuance that you’d never get in articles, but they capture the ramifications of an era or a movement that were unseen at the time. I loved “Before The Storm” because Perlstein finally overturned the consensus about

the 1960s, the one told exclusively about the Left or about the best-and-brightest Democratic minds working their way through the muddle of Vietnam and riots in the streets.

This will be the standard works for years to come for people who want to dig deeper, and understand how the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the general spread of conservatism took root during the 20 years previous.

---Of course, there was the interlude of Richard Nixon to contend with. One of my earliest political memories is of something nebulous and complicated that was going on when I was 6 years old called “Watergate”. In August 1974, I remember being shushed as my extended family gathered around a TV in my Aunt Adele’s living room to watch President Richard Nixon give his resignation speech. I had hippie uncles on both sides of my family who made underhanded comments about the President and his lies and his war; I had conservative parents who not only voted for Nixon, but actively worked to re-elect him in 1972. So, though I am barely able to remember it, we were living right smack in the middle of Nixonland, right there in our own family.

I knew I was eventually going to be reading Perlstein’s second volume, “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America”, about the times Nixon presided over & helped to stoke/flame, from the moment this book hit the bestseller lists in 2008. It picks up more or

less where “Before The Storm” left off, after a few chapters about Nixon’s childhood and rise to power: his VicePresidency under Eisenhower, his loss to Kennedy for the presidency in 1960, and his premature exit from politics soon thereafter (the famous “you won’t have Nixon to kick around any longer”). More importantly, these early chapters are not a rote recitation of biography, but set up the dichotomy that Nixon exploited time and again his entire career: the resentment felt by the common, “leftbehind” everyman and everywoman at the gains made by the pointed-headed liberal intellectual types, who brushed away the turmoil of the 60s that was tearing up cities, neighborhoods and families with a condescending sweep of hand (or phrase). The common folk were presciently dubbed The Silent Majority by Nixon and his people, and this phrase captured the mood of the US electorate like no other before or since. I might add that no politician as inherently unlikeable (or as hideously paranoid and selfloathing) as Richard Nixon has done so much with so little since that time as well.

This book is important for the generations of us who came of age after the 1968 and 1972 elections, who have a hard time understanding – what with all we’ve been spoon-fed our entire lives about the glories of 60s protest, the Civil Rights struggle, the liberation of women etc. – how Richard Nixon, of all people, won such convincing elections in those two years. More so than in the Goldwater book, Perlstein tips his political hand pretty clearly in this one. He (mostly) appears to detest Nixon, while at times expressing admiration (of a sort) for his tactics. It mostly comes down to Vietnam, which Perlstein details, atrocity by atrocity, lie by lie, until it’s hard not to get pretty worked up by the whole thing. It’s an equalopportunity sort of takedown of the 1960s' main players.

When the book seems like it’s going to bury Lyndon

Johnson and Richard Nixon for their many cover-ups and mistakes on Vietnam, it shifts focus abruptly, and buries the Tom Haydens, the Black Panthers and the Hubert Humphreys just as effectively. Hypocrisy, grandstanding, and bullying tactics get equal savaging in this book, which makes it exceptionally fun to read – since so many of these people seem like utter cartoons forty years later.

The inner machinations of elections have never been as fascinating as they are here. The American system of government looks like a fragile African military junta as times, when one considers the power wielded by men like Richard M Daley in Chicago, or the ways in which Nixon’s “dirty tricks” committees found quasi-legal methods to undercut their opponents en route to his landslide victory in ’72. I didn’t know much about how or why McGovern was anointed at the savior of the Democratic Party that year, but now I understand how the left-wing half of the electorate felt the burning need to “go for broke” in the wake of a catastrophic Vietnam war. Also, Perlstein does a good job recounting Nixon’s despicable kowtowing to Labor in the name of more votes, which unleashed “wage and price controls” on American business, one of the worst ideas of any era, and one which made the 70s easily the worst decade in recent American economic history.

There is one bit of Perlstein journalistic shorthand that may very well drive one crazy. I’m so used to it now after reading these three giant books that I’ve mostly made my peace with it. Perlstein, whenever he wishes to capture the feverish or crazed mood of America in a given moment in time, recites several paragraphs-long snapshots in time that are supposed to make us feel the rising dread and terror on the back of our necks. Here’s an example of how it works (I’m totally making this one up, but it’s 99% like ones you’ll encounter throughout all three books):

While Nixon continued his law-and-order barnstorming through America’s heartland, America itself was on fire. A riot broke out in Peoria, Illinois when a black man was stopped by a cop. A construction worker in Brooklyn was heard to say, “Let’s shoot all the n*ggers”. Students were burning draft cards in Ohio. In San Francisco, the Weather Underground blew up a storage shed behind a police station. George Wallace was lecturing an audience in Alabama that contained at least 5 known Klansmen. A mysterious 4am fire in Chicago at a Labor Union office. A wildly popular new movie, “Bonnie and Clyde”, glorified murderous bank robbers. Abbie Hoffman, on TV, telling people to kill their parents. Behind the scenes, Richard Nixon was laughing and rubbing his hands together.

Ford in the 1976 Republican primary, and he almost vaulted his conservative revolution to prominence four years ahead of schedule. I personally remember Reagan running – and I absolutely remember the cognitive dissonance of Patty Hearst the bank robber and the two assassination attempts on President Ford’s life, all in the space of three weeks – yet I’d thought Ford’s eventual victory in that primary had been a fait accompli, and that Reagan had probably bowed out in the early rounds of state primaries. Not so. The election for who would face Jimmy Carter in November ’76 came down to conventionfloor shenanigans so intense that, going into the convention in Kansas City that summer, both Ford and Reagan has reasonable claims to the most number of delegates and therefore to the nomination. Does Perlstein That sort of thing. OK, that’s my parody version, but when turn this procedural chicanery into gripping high drama? you read these books you’ll see what I mean. Of course he does.

“Nixonland” is a total plunge into the American mindset of 1964-1972, and I won’t look at that time the same way In my house we had a Ford partisan (mom) and Reagan again after the experience. It’s that good, and that all- lover (dad). Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia encompassing. Perlstein has the gift of being able to make with the shit-eating grin, was persona non grata. What the seemingly mundane pace-quickening, and despite my Perlstein does so well is illustrate the mental rugkidding above, does a great job capturing real snippets sweeping that was done by the electorate once Richard from the American zeitgeist to capture the mood. The Nixon was forced off the stage. Americans mostly United States has never been torn asunder the way it was subscribed to three camps. One was that America had during those tumultuous years, and never has it had a been so damaged by Watergate, Vietnam, Nixon and politician so good at exploiting the divisions for his own Republicans that only a pious, smiling Democrat could advantage. When Nixon is finally brought down, at the end lead us to salvation. These were the Jimmy Carter people, – as you knew he would be – the curtain abruptly closes and we all know that they eventually won in ’76, in part without a whole lot of detail on Watergate and the because their man was so much more conservative than resignation, which, at the time left me wondering what the liberal Democrats who’d been ascendant in the 1960s.

Perlstein’s next move might be.

Another camp believed a Republican version of this – that ---Nixon was an aberration, a crook, but a man who had the “The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise right politics overall. Therefore, the country just needed a of Reagan” arrived just in time for 2014 holiday gift-giving “good man” in the White House instead of a boat-rocking season for middle-age fogeys like me, but I headed that off Democrat or, god forbid, a conservative fire-breather like at the pass and immediately went out and bought it myself. that actor Ronald Reagan out in California. These were The surprise centerpiece of the book, which ends its the Ford people. Finally, the forces that had propelled chronology in 1976, is Ronald Reagan – a man who did not Barry Goldwater to his 1964 nomination, which then become president until four years later. The era generally added elements of “the Silent Majority” in 1968 and 1972, covered here is merely three years long, 1973-1976, a were themselves joined by a re-engaged portion of the quasi-confusing era that saw a president impeached, a electorate who’d mostly sat out elections to date: the war end (with a tail-between-the-legs loss for the United religious evangelicals, commonly known in subsequent States) and a caretaker-like stewardship of the years as “the religious right”. These were the Reagan Presidency for two years by unelected moderate people, and in 1976, they almost had their turn.

Republican Gerald R. Ford. This era coincided with many of my own memories and first impressions of American Now, Perlstein strikes a bit of a bum chord with me in his government. Perlstein again absolutely nails the portrayal of Reagan, the man. I certainly don’t disagree dissolution of American consensus in the wake of the with him that Reagan was an “actor”, forever burnishing 1960s, and how emboldened people of all political stripes his reputation by his gift of gab, aw-shucks faux humility were to speak their minds and to even foment revolution and monstrous ambition. Yet Perlstein goes further than if they thought it would help them achieve their ends, be it this, often portraying Reagan as an inveterate liar and a Communist revolution or a constitutional amendment to scoundrel, and as a man who was every bit as duplicitous end abortion/”baby killing”. and phony as Nixon. I heartily disagree. Politics aside, So why does “The Invisible Bridge” star as its tone- Reagan was a man who had true, linear and wellsetter one Ronald Reagan? Well, I barely remembered it, articulated ideological convictions, and the gift of being but Reagan came ridiculously close to actually beating able to win over virtually anyone not automatically

predisposed to loathing him. I don’t believe his conservatism was fake, half-formed nor ultimately illsuited to the uncertain times in which he campaigned and governed, and neither does history. The 1980s he presided over were notable for their steadiness and lack of inner domestic turmoil. I’ll also state, as many have before me, that his conservative ideas stand in stark contrast to how he actually governed. Ideology has a way of being severely blunted when governing a fractured nation of 300 million inhabitants. It could be that Perlstein is a lot like my grandmother, whose moderate Democrat politics were severely altered by her antipathy for Richard Nixon and the trauma he caused the nation, and who could never stomach the cocky, self-assured way that Reagan brought the Republicans screaming back to power only a few years after Watergate. Her hatred of Reagan was absolute, and it made for some fantastic family dinner conversation with my dad back in the 80s.

I’ve left out much of “The Invisible Bridge”’s first half, which actually does a remarkable job detailing the chaos of Nixon’s snow job around Watergate. This was a gripping period for the country, and even I remember some of the paranoia that appeared in its wake – the weird “Predictions ‘74” books that were available at our local grocery store; the cynically nihilistic “Wacky Packages” stickers that mocked the icons of American capitalism; the Moonies who used to knock on our door, and the Hare Krishnas; and the national Bicentennial in 1976, which somehow calmed the nation off of its ledge and, Perlstein implies, that likely gave Ford his opportunity to ultimately win the 1976 Republican primary.

Of the three books, it’s difficult to pick win, place and

show. Despite any of my expressed misgivings, they are all crucial to a sociological understanding of these times.

It’s hard to imagine reading one without reading them all, and preferably doing so in order. Rick Perlstein has his style, and it’s a style that can be silly at times, but one that is by and large immensely captivating and readable.

Having a conservative write the history of 1960-1976 would almost certainly result in a false story of triumphalism, and would likely gloss over the idiocies of Nixon. Having an intellectual, wholly skeptical liberal do so instead ensures equal-opportunity condescension. It’s not as if Perlstein spends time in these books revering, say, Lyndon Johnson, Edward Muskie or Frank Church.

In 2015 we’ve long passed the apotheosis of conservative thought, and the men and sometimes women who pass as conservatives today are generally a sorry lot. There’s a likely a great Perlstein-like book to be written in due time about Barack Obama’s eight years as president, but as a conservative “foil”, there’s really not much exciting that can be written about John McCain, Mitt Romney and certainly not about Sarah Palin nor Ted Cruz, who may excite the media with their inanity-spewing ridiculousness, but only in the context of our present short sound-bite, celebrity-obsessed, internet-driven culture.

It’s funny now to think about Goldwater, Nixon and Reagan as “giants”, but in their way, they absolutely were.

It took a great historian like Rick Perlstein to bring their flawed characters and the insane times in which they campaigned to life in such vivid, overwhelmingly dramatic form.

THE FINAL WORD IN DEFENSE OF E-READERS Now, let’s be clear about something. I myself love vinyl records, film screened in theaters and books made of paper and binding. My tendencies toward collecting and owning things make it so that I exalt the true collector, the people who stuff their houses with ridiculously extensive physical collections of books, records or DVDs. For every e-book I buy, I buy two physical books, and then frantically find bins or shelves in my small San Francisco house in which to store them. Given unlimited space, though, and I’d still be an unabashed fan of electronic books.

Let me tell you why.

Joe Queenan spends an inordinate amount of time in “One For The Books”, his love letter to reading (reviewed elsewhere in this issue), complaining about the laziness and inferiority of those who choose to do some or all of their reading on electronic readers. He’ll dust off some tale from his time spent in the trenches with physical books, perhaps some rediscovered old book with long-forgotten notes scribbled in the margins, and conclude, “You can’t do that on a Kindle”. This trope continues over hundreds of pages. Something serendipitous or magical happens that proves that it can only happen with a physical book, and ergo, “You can’t do that on a Kindle”, and all is settled.

Well, I for one say it’s absolutely not settled.

I’ve watched the e-book take it on the chin frequently from cultural commentators over the last few years, and it all strikes me as so much reactionary mewling. Film goes to video, and then moves to digital and then to streaming. Music goes from vinyl to digital to streaming. We collectively gnash our teeth and fret at what’s been lost, proclaiming the end of art as we know it, but it turns out that it’s really only the totemistic habits of an earlier age that are being lost. Film and music – as movies and sounds - still survive and thrive, with their evolution in many ways enhanced by the new mechanisms of their delivery. The beloved window dressing of that delivery, be it the arthouse theater or the twelve inches of cover art that house the record, is confused with the actual art that’s being delighted over. That art’s ability to transcend and delight changes not one bit in the conversion to 1s and 0s, except in the minds of those who confuse packaging with product.

The overwhelming tip-top reason for worldwide collective joy at our electronic book age is immediacy. I can, and very often do, read a review of some obscure author’s first book, and then have that selfsame book in my “hands” within 90 seconds.

How many of you read that Jodi Angel interview earlier in the magazine, and thought “Hmm, now where the hell am I going to find those books…??”.

You know where. Like over half the populace, you’re either ordering the physical version on Amazon or you’re downloading it to your Kobo, your Kindle, your Nook. I applaud the rest of you with the selfrestraint to undertake a search of your local bookstores for such a work of art, those of you who compile a “wish list” of books to track down and so on. You keep the bookstores that I very much love and spend an inordinate amount of time browsing in alive.

You know who else helps keeps those bookstore alive? People with e-readers. Or, more specifically, people with Kobo e-readers. See, there’s a way to forego your physical book cake and still eat it anyway. Kobo started a program with independent booksellers around the USA and Canada to provide a generous portion of each e-book they sell back to the individual store, provided that, one, the consumer designates their favorite store on their website, and two, that the retailer sells Kobo ereaders. Everybody wins. Green Apple Books in San Francisco makes a few dollars every time I download a book from Kobo, and they didn’t have to do a whole lot more than carve out a tiny corner of the store for the Kobo display. No knock on Kindle, but I’ll gladly pay the extra $1-2 for a Kobo download over that which Amazon charges if it means I can still spend hours on a Sunday browsing and buying at Green Apple. Keep in mind too that if you don’t like the Kobo’s design – which, truth be told, I kinda don’t – you can easily read your books on their welldesigned app on any other tablet, mini-tablet or smartphone instead.

One outstanding benefit that’s come with the availability of the e-book is the end of the hardcover. Let’s face it: outside of collectors and those who use their bookshelves as home décor/bragging pieces, who ever bought a hardcover because they preferred its size and heft over that of a paperback? The vision-challenged elderly, perhaps. At $25 or more for a new release, the hardcover’s primacy forced many a weary sigh from the non-financially replete: “I guess I’ll just wait til it’s in paperback….”. Oh sure, there’s the library, but what if you don’t want to wait on a list while three other slobs with food on their fingers get through it first? E-readers. New releases – the good ones - are now as low as $9-10 the moment they roll off the “presses”, meaning that the rich man and the moderately poor man can now be united in their seconds-long pursuit of the latest Scott Turow or Anne Packer. Another chink in the façade of a stratified capitalistic society. What would Vladimir Lenin say?

You can do that on a Kindle.

Let’s conclude with the real beef that many e-reader holdouts have, and that’s the dominion and lordship of Amazon.com over the electronic book market. I understand and appreciate this line of thinking. I’ve shown that there are alternatives, and good ones at that. A rich and bounteous life of e-reading can be achieved without once setting a digital footprint on their site. That said, if there were no alternative but to accept Amazon and its bazillions of low-priced e-books, amazing and everimproving software and its still-generous cut for authors, would I still read ‘em? Absolutely. The pie for books has now been cut larger that ever before. The electronic “impulse buy” – the one you often regret ten seconds after making it – is helping the book industry achieve some of its best years ever: right here, right now. Authors whose books could never have been found by their intended readers can now achieve perfect and immediate The portability on these things is pretty nice, to state the symmetry with those readers, by virtue of a good review, obvious. I’ll frequently pile up five or six new books on my an online recommendation or even a “you might also like” e-reader and, when leaving on a vacation or a work trip, on Amazon’s or an independent bookstore’s website. take only that e-reader. If I’m between books, I’ll leave it to whimsy and mood to decide what to read next, saving Perversely, e-readers have even helped bookstores up myself both from hefty carry-on luggage and the horror of their games as well. I’ve recently visited new or having brought what turned out to be a bad book. That reimagined stores that have absurdly great selections of Black Flag biography or the one about the Soviet small-press paperbacks, limited editions, used treasures prisoners in the gulag? I don’t know, what about a few grouped by obscure themes and other curios, stores that chapters from that sex-packed experimental French novel might have otherwise tried to be all things to many people, that NY Times reviewer was mooing about last week? No, and therefore found themselves out of business (as so Joe Queenan, you can’t do that with a physical book. Nor many mediocre stores did in the wake of Amazon’s precan you read in the dark when your wife or children are Kindle first wave). trying to sleep beside you, cursed, non-functioning “itty bitty book light” notwithstanding. Nor can you effectively There’s no denying the unflickering romance many of us hide the cover of something you’d rather not have the have, and will always have, with physical books. To public see while you’re reading it, for those of us stoically pretend that they’re the one true path of the “real” embarrassed by either our outré or mainstream tastes. literary aesthete is sheer and utter poppycock.

BOOK REVIEWS. STEVE ALMOND – “Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto” Who doesn’t love a good screed?

This one, against the National Football League and all the concussed baggage that comes with it, wasn’t even one that I was even preternaturally sympathetic to.

Like Almond, I come from a childhood in which the NFL played a big part. My dad and I had season tickets to the San Francisco 49ers during their Super Bowl-winning years of the 1980s and early 90s, and eight times a year (more if they made the playoffs, which they usually did), we’d eagerly drive up to Candlestick Park to watch the grand spectacle unfold, in grunting camaraderie with the many yahoos in the seats surrounding us.

As I hit my twenties, however, my sports enthusiasms increasingly returned to my first passion, baseball. By the 2000s I couldn’t even name-check any more than 3 or 4 active NFLers, usually quarterbacks whose universal designation as “household names” meant they’d even be recognized in my household. Super Bowls were usually spent furtively escaping invitations to parties that my wife and I were generally not invited to anyway. By the time Almond’s book arrived, I’d already been awash in enough loathing for the bacchanalian collective American orgy devoted to football amid the damning research on concussions that I was ready for some validation, as well as some good rhetoric to help sharpen my own mental blades.

I therefore devoted a couple of nights to letting Almond’s well-considered rants demolish any shreds of lingering football sympathy left in my psyche.

Almond starts, unlike me, from the perspective of the true fan – which, as the title makes clear, he still is. A childhood spent in bloody combat with two brothers helped Almond see how football easily slipped into a masculine part of his own psyche that welcomed and encouraged the violence inherent in the sport. He doesn’t discount the balletic choreography of the sport as he begins to unwind his screed against it; even today he’s fighting with himself to forgive the sport for its many transgressions against modernity, transgressions that include racism, greed, violence and homophobia – all of which I fully agree with.

The better angles of our nature have never been more in retreat than when watching and celebrating professional football in America as we do today.

Let’s take racism, as that was the most eye-opening for me of Almond’s chapters. Is the NFL truly racist? Perhaps not

as conventionally defined, when we glance at a sport that’s now making its 70% African-American participants financially rich (if also brain health-poor). Yet, as he says, “What does it mean for millions of white Americans that watching young African-Americans in tight pants engage in mock combat has become our most profitable form of entertainment? What does it mean that football fever tends to run so hot in those states where slavery was legal and Jim Crow dies hardest? Does it relieve the racial guilt of white Americans to lavish so much money and adulation on a few African-American men? Is it oblique form of financial restitution?” It’s sobering stuff, even if you ignore the impact of long-term concussive contact, the crass commercialism inherent in every corner of the sport, and how football has so severely distorted how we look at American colleges and their purpose.

Almond covers these topics well, too, building to a crescendo of indictment that’s anything but subtle once unleashed. If you’re open enough to his arguments to pick the book up in the first place, it’s hard not to come away even more convinced that football is a net loser for society, once its overall balance sheet is tallied. His remedy is a full boycott, and to encourage fellow travelers to extend his line of questioning to those not quite ready to question what football in America has become in 2015. I found it to be a pretty powerful clarion call, and am hereby raising my hand in support.

CHRISTIAN CARYL – “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century” Historical inflection points only appear in historical rear-view mirrors, so while you might think you're currently living through the most boring year on record, you really never know, do you? 1979 certainly seemed like a nadir at the time, especially in the United States. I remember the term "malaise" being thrown around, and recall that the chances of then-President Carter being elected for a second term being about nil. (Note: he wasn't). The US may have been a glum global actor at the time, but was still an international prime mover, in the throes of the Cold War and learning to deal with international shame and humiliation vis-a-vis the taking of American hostages by Iranian students. Elsewhere, important inflections were proliferating in 1979 that profoundly impact the world we live in today – sometimes almost by chance, as it turns out. Christian Caryl's

admirable book does some strong historical much the USSR was swayed by public opinion and reconstruction that helps us to see this pivotal year in pressure from the west (to say nothing of loathing from context by grabbing hold and wrestling to the ground five people in its eastern bloc). key storylines.

Finally, when we take stock of our world in 2015 – a First is the aforementioned rise of what we now call Islamic Communist-free, market-centric world, one that happens fundamentalism in Iran. After decades of kleptocrats and to be riven with tremendous upheaval in the Islamic world, dictatorial quasi-democracies, the middle eastern there's one other huge transformation that started in 1979, religious world of Islamic belief was beaten down and left and that's the modernization of China under Deng for permanently battered, while religion itself was still a Xiaoping. I thought this would be my least favorite and the driving force in middle eastern families and communities. least convincing of the 5 stories, and as it turns out it was Most pundits and observers of global events had little by far the most interesting, relevant and impactful upon inkling of the holy groundswell that was taking place in Iran the largest number of people. Caryl essentially tells the (and to a lesser extent, in other Islamic countries like story of China from World War II through Mao's famines, Egypt) in the mid-1970s. Caryl describes the rule of the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four and Mao's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, and how he death. The huge vacuum upon his passing was filled by and other 50s, 60s and 70s leaders in the Islamic world Deng, a small, unassuming man who nonetheless had saw themselves as near-secular modernizers of Islam, in some pretty radical ideas about how to merge Chinese the vein of Turkey's Kemal Atatürk. This is an engrossing Communism with western capitalism. The wholesale story, told over multiple brisk chapters, since we all know transformation of China's south, and later the entire what happened in 1979 to turn that completely on its head: country, began on his watch and due to his initiative. It the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in Paris, the lifted millions out of poverty and what was effectively people's revolution, the immense groundswell of indentured servitude, and gave rise to the fastest path to suppressed, messianic Islamic religious fervor, and the broad societal wealth ever seen in any nation. He may storming of the US embassy and the taking of the have still been a brutal, people-suppressing Commie thug American hostages as retaliation for years of propping up on many levels, but his impact on his people's and the the Shah. The world is still living today with a radicalized, world's well-being was enormous. religious, theocratic Iran and all the challenges this presents to the West and to secular peoples within the In my country, Jimmy Carter bided his time before he was booted out of office, encouraged us to turn the heat down Middle East. and wear sweaters, and we watched disco die its final Similarly and somewhat in parallel, the Soviet invasion of horrible and deserved death. Nice to have a relatively Afghanistan awakened the self-determination and mellow year while much of the rest of the planet was religious fervor of non-Communists and fundamentalists knocking the trajectory of history off its axis. there, and the backlash to this blip on the Cold War radar helped to hasten not only the fall of the Soviet system but MEGHAN DAUM – “The Unspeakable” the rise of the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and the islamic This collection of personal essays jihadi movement. Yes, it happened in 1979. On the other went up on the NY Times’ Best of side of the world, both literally and metaphorically, 2014 list, and I liked their review of Margaret Thatcher was leading her own revolution in the it so much I bought it the same UK, turning aside decades of liberal labor-pandering and day, then powered my way sclerotic public services with a conservative, free-market through it that same week. I ideology that had never truly been tested in actual suppose I’d probably read governance before. 1979 was the year that Maggie truly Daum’s work elsewhere – she’s consolidated her hold on power in England, and over the an LA Times columnist whose course of the next decade helped to remake that country work has appeared in the sorts of while proving that there were viable alternatives to social online and offline social/ democratic rule in Europe and elsewhere. confessional/political/wonky The year also saw the selection of a Catholic pope from Poland, and in it a direct challenge to the Soviet Union's crushing vice-grip hold on Eastern Europe's hearts and minds. Pope John Paul II traveled in 1979 to his native country, and set up an abstract ideological power struggle between freedom and tyranny that resonated for millions around the world. The book has a great chapter about how the trip was almost blocked entirely by Moscow, and their lack of success in doing so said a great deal about just how

forums I tend to haunt – but I truly wasn’t cognizant of her before this excellent book. “The Unspeakable” covers a great deal of ground under the guise of linking together disparate topics which are themselves, perhaps, unspeakable – or at least that’s a convenient hook that happens to instantly sell books to people like me.

Every piece in this was written expressly for the book, so outside of the love letter she pens to Joni Mitchell, each essay is an interlocked piece of a greater whole. Daum’s

a very personal writer who “puts herself out there”, as it were, tackling everything from her own ambivalence about her mother’s death at the start of the book to her own neardeath from a bacterial infection at the book’s end. There are loose threads that she gently pulls through each essay.

One key thread is her decision to not bear children, and the simultaneous joys and pains that decision has brought. My favorite essay in the book, “Difference Maker”, concerns how she countered that void with volunteer work as a Big Sister and a court-appointed advocate in the broken Los Angeles foster care system. Her insights into the immutable circumstances that surround some of our most shattered young people are pretty heartbreaking, and Daum serves this up with a huge dose of humble pie about her own do-gooder naiveté as well, which is part of the reason she’s so enjoyable to read.

Another piece that’s stayed with me in the months since I read this book is “Invisible City”. Here Daum recounts how she stumbled into a friendship/mentorship with her heroine Nora Ephron, and was then invited to a lunch party at her house with only A-list royalty like Nicole Kidman, Larry David and Steve Martin as fellow guests. Aside from Kidman, these LA central casting snob-denizens completely and willfully ignore her, and Daum serves up her own twisted-knife agony in moment-by-moment detail, which includes a horrific game of charades that only deepens her psychic pain. The experience is cathartic in some respects, and helps her to find her own relative peace of mind in Los Angeles, knowing both her own limits and also whom she wants to surround herself with. Me, I just hate LA just a little bit more now.

Because she’s a Los Angeles-based woman writing deeply personal essays that sometimes verge on the surreal, Daum’s already been compared to Joan Didion in more than one review I’ve read. They’re not even remotely close in style or impact. Didion’s prose is blunt-force and artful, usually to a fault. When I read “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and “The White Album” years ago, I spent just as much time being frustrated as I did amazed. Daum doesn’t mince many words about herself nor anyone else, and one can imagine bridges being gently burned throughout her relationships. Her writing is much more clear, more witty and far less flashy, and if forced to choose, right now, based on “The Unspeakable” and despite the false equivalence between these two very different writers, I’m going to go with Meghan Daum.

KIM FOWLEY – “Lord of Garbage” Producer, svengali and Los Angeles rocknroll gadfly Kim Fowley was such a deranged and purportedly "colorful" cult figure before his death in early 2015 that I heeded the promotional buzz around his autobiography and succumbed to purchase. Fowley, did in fact, steal the show in the 2003 Rodney Bigenheimer documentary "The Mayor of the Sunset Strip" through "look at ME" force of

personality, and his own solo albums and general unhinged persona long made me think he'd probably be a ripe target for documentation, even if most of his own music and productions don't do a blamed thing for me. He was on his deathbed as he wrote this, poor fella, dealing with bladder cancer and slipping in and out of terminal diagnoses. The plan was that this book, "Lord of Garbage", was be only the first of three autobiographical volumes, if he could just stave off the reaper and finish them all in time. I wished him luck, but I won't be reading the next two, even if he got them completed before his death.

"Lord of Garbage" fouls up a sure thing right off the bat, and I really should have seen it coming. Turns out Fowley's blustering, posturing, overblown personality is exactly what gets thrown down on the page as well.

Rather than a collection of war stories, one has to not only get knee-deep in excruciatingly poor sentence construction but in out-and-out fabrications as well.

These render everything in the book highly suspect.

Fowley's creative imagination knows few limits. He claims to remember his birth; he attributes sober, wildly precocious decision-making and verbal skills to himself during his diaper years; and puts a surreal conversational gloss on his entire tragic childhood that's so patently and obviously untrue that I had a difficult time keeping myself from getting angry. I imagine that the cracked, blowhard persona that makes me laugh when I saw it on film would have probably made me want to flee the room if I ever found myself in actual mano-a-mano with the guy – such is the hostility that his phony and unfunny story engendered in me.

The ham-handed goofball poetry that intersperses each story on every third or fourth page doesn't do him any favors, either. Funny that Kicks Books, his publisher, didn't deign to mention that part in their glory-filled promotional blurbs on the book. I haven't been so let down by an anticipated book since the release of the DSM-IV. DAVID GOLDBATT – “The Game of Our Lives: The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain” Well, we don’t call it soccer in our house any longer.

That’s part and parcel of having spent Summer 2014 (and every minute of World Cup 2014) living in Norway, and thereby watching my son transform from a 10-year-

old Lego fanatic to an 11-year-old European football maniac, one who makes lists, talks stats and obsessively collects cards, much as his father did in the 1970s. That was baseball in my case – and though I’ve greatly enjoyed the sport of soccer as a viewer (never a participant) since even those days (NASL!), it’s only these past couple of years, with the sport beaming into my living room from Manchester and Birmingham and the London suburbs every Saturday, that I’ve actually developed anything approaching to a real fighting interest in what goes on each week. Since there’s an even more rabid fanboy parked under my roof as well, I decided to limn my understanding of the sports with a little socio-politicocultural context, and try and figure out how the Brits see the game up close where I only see it from across the proverbial pond.

gathering every Saturday to watch “their boys” represent their locality. He spends much time detailing what’s been gained, what’s been lost, and what was never even true about that picture of pre-1980s football in any case.

Racism gets its own chapter, and what a sorry tale that is.

As a lot of writers do when writing about race, Goldblatt cherry-picks the horrible incidents that stand out, as opposed to the times when racism wasn’t present, and calls it emblematic of its age. I’m not saying I disagree, and I wasn’t present in 1960s England in any case, yet the picture his prose conjured was that of a white England that really, really struggled with the presence of black players on the pitch until the last two decades. I’m not entirely convinced that the swath he paints doesn’t conceal a little more nuance in the story.

It’s not all muckraking to be sure, but that’s generally what I came with in any case. England’s – and to a lesser extent, Scotland’s and Wales’ – national identities are tied up with this sport, and therefore an egghead-ish book that examines both the underbelly of the sport and what it says about the nation is probably quite overdue. It’s readable, interesting throughout and, even if not totally intended, a great way to put facets of the game like England’s 1966 World Cup victory and the promotion/ relegation system into your mental storage for the next time you need to pull them out at the water cooler. That is, if we still had water coolers, and if the people who casually stood around them actually cared about esoterica like this the way you and I do.

David Goldblatt’s book came out at the tail end of 2014, and arrives in time for a lot of newfound soccer/football hounds to dig a little deeper than club names and tournament arcana. “The Game of Our Lives” is effectively a map of football in England since the formation of the Premier League in 1992, yet not really in the sense of players, win/ loss records and the sort of low-denominator sports banter found on UK talk radio and in the English tabloids. Rather, it tracks how the growth of football in England into the multibillion-dollar global marketing behemoth it is today KIM GORDON – “Is It My Body? Selected Texts” mirrors the societal and political changes within England It's hard to find much fault with during that same period, and what laid the groundwork for Saint Kim, a renaissance things to happen as they did. woman who's been a constant Beyond this, it’s also a chance for Goldblatt to slaughter, name by name, as many of his pet peeves as he can possibly stuff into one book. Crooked owners, horrible stadium giveaways, alcoholic players, racist chanters, a hideously sexist infrastructure that underlies the game – it’s all voiced and given name here, and there’s no chance of walking away feeling like the triumph of English football is complete or even worth celebrating. Goldblatt’s best chapter takes the reader into each county of England, where he then devotes paragraphs to each region and the longtime clubs there. If you’d like to, say, learn a bit about Bournemouth or Sheffield Wednesday without having to spend all of your time wading through Liverpool and Manchester United, you’ll love this section as I did.

Granted, it’s a cheeky sort of laundry list of misdeeds, mistakes, corruption and failure, but it’s probably much closer to the reality as experienced by local fans than it is to what normally gets printed elsewhere.

in my underground music and culture-obsessed life for over thirty years during her time with Sonic Youth, multiple side bands and a wide variety of fashion, art, filmmaking and other endeavors. Everyone loves Kim, right? But hey, can she sling together a group of sentences in an edifying and entertaining manner? I wasn't actually sure, so I bought this German-pressed collection of some of her writings from the 1980s up to just a year or two ago in hopes of finding out. She's got an autobiography due out soon as well, so I reckoned I'd get a jump on that by poring through the tour diaries, art theorizing, semiotics and cultural criticisms that are speckled throughout this small volume.

Let it be said that while Ms. Gordon loses no overall Goldblatt continuously contrasts the game as it is played cultural luster from this collection of her writings, I and watched now with the quasi-romantic view of men wouldn't recommend that you actually spend any more

than a few minutes browsing it in a bookstore. Actually reading it? It's not easy, let me tell ya. See, Kim Gordon comes from the art world. She often, but not always, writes like people from the art world - insular, impenetrable, overblown and for fellow travelers only. She doesn't come off as pompous, not really; she merely confirms what a blowhard world that of high art and even mid-brow art is. So you might see it as guilt by association; I instead choose to see her mimicry of the art/academic written aesthetic something that just comes with the territory when you're jawboning to a closed circle. Heaven forbid that someone try and penetrate the purple prose of the elite. Why even bother talking down to those who'd deign to try?

That said, I liked her piece on Raymond Pettibon, as well as a 1985 Artforum piece in which she works over Southern California hardcore punk like a real pro. There's a late 80s Sonic Youth tour diary as well, and then a series of pieces and interviews that over-intellectualizes that which should be relatively straightforward: Glenn Branca, Harry Crews and Mike Kelley, for instance. I assure you, I'm no philistine, but I'm easily fed up with the needlessly pompous and/or "transgressive", and this book gets me no closer to resolving my antipathy to that world. Here's hoping her next book, an autobiography, is more in keeping with the as-yetuntoppled mental altar I've built for her.

KIM GORDON – “Girl In A Band” As I write this, the autobiography hinted at in the previous review is #8 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and is being read by everyone from my ne’erdo-well rocknroll friends to the NPR-and-anorak set to, well, a hell of a lot of other people. Never would have considered the possibility of that during the years in which I saw Sonic Youth every time they came through town, sometimes multiple times in multiple towns during the same year. They’d have had to sell out and “break big” for any of them to have a bestseller – and Kim Gordon? The quiet, aloof one who rarely said much in the interviews, and when she did, seemed embarrassed she’d just said it? I’m glad she found her voice in written form, as her memoir/ autobiography’s a fun and illuminating run through sixty years of trying to reconcile the push and pull of domesticity and the making of art, even when it’s just for art’s sake.

“Girl in a Band”, while not the 10,000-foot first-person view of Kim Gordon’s life that some have pegged it as, doesn’t get too deep in the weeds about anything, except a lingering and deservedly lasting hostility toward husband and bandmate’s Thurston Moore’s disillusion of their dual partnership by ditching Gordon for a younger woman.

Chapters on this both open and close the book, and in between it’s a chronological life story. Kim Gordon grew up in the sun-kissed Southern California of the 50s and 60s, the one that started to turn sour with the arrival of drugs, hippies and Manson girls. She does nothing to burst this stereotype; rather, she lived it, both through a schizophrenic brother whom she idolized but who verbally belittled her, and through her own late 60s/early 70s teenage years growing up fairly free and interested in art, music and a little drug action of her own. Much of this section is “know thyself” stuff; she freely admits that the shy and aloof personality we later saw (and kinda loved) in Sonic Youth was borne of this period and a crushing insecurity on her own ability to contribute to the artistic world that was beginning to captivate her.

I’ll spare you a detailed recounting of her New York years; joining the band; finding her voice etc., except to say that if you’re looking for a “rock autobiography”, this isn’t it. Sonic Youth are a backdrop for more personal anecdotes and feelings about her place in that milieu.

Occasionally it spills over into the unnecessarily gossipy, perhaps as a means of giving the people what they want. For instance, I think it would have been more true and honest if she’d written about, say, her friendship with her Free Kitten bandmate Julia Cafritz, whom she worked with for many years and with whom she shared many “punk rock mom” experiences, than about her brief friendship with Kurt Cobain. Yet even I’ll admit that just about anything written about the train wreck that is Courtney Love is worth reading. Love spent a chunk of the 90s bad-mouthing Kim Gordon (and virtually every other threatening woman in underground rock), and Gordon gets to give her own take on Love here. Guess which side’s more credible?

I found her chapters about having a daughter and trying to provide a layer of normal Western Massachusetts domesticity for her family in the 90s and 00s to be the most interesting part of the book, and I honestly wish she’d dug a little deeper here (or that her editor had allowed her to). She sheds some true light on the difficulty of being in the public eye, while also being frustrated with the mundanity of pushing her daughter in a swing and hanging at the playground with the other yokels. There were many, myself included, that were profoundly bummed when her marriage to Thurston Moore ended. There was something to be said for a set of high-IQ rocknroll parents with a well-adjusted child and a long-lasting romantic and musical partnership, and as many said, if they were fallible, then who are we? “Girl in a Band” takes a good chunk of the gloss off on this silly and useless fable and establishes Kim Gordon as “one of us”, albeit one who’s made a preposterously interesting life her herself by her own pluck, guile and talent.

DAVID GRUBBS - “Records Ruin The Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording” It was an inescapable premise for me and my interests in the collision between music creation and music consumption: How has the experience of experimental music listening changed, especially to music from the 1960s, since digital technology has afforded its lengthy pieces a consumption experience not granted to it in the LP-only days? Grubbs threads a lot of thought and quite a bit of history into multiple stabs at this question, with John Cage (a famously biting critic of recorded music, as opposed to live performance, and who claimed to never own any records), AMM and Henry Flynt at the center of some of the answers.

begun trawling the interweb archives to pinpoint the Great and True History of the Experimental Pioneers.

The book looks at how the 45-minute LP was insufficient to the task of documenting the ephemeral and ever-changing feel of outré music’s leading 60s practitioners, not merely because of its two-sided limitations, but because the LP’s snapshot nature was so insufficient at conveying the music’s improvisational, moment-in-time shape-shifting.

There was a bit of pomposity afoot for sure – records are what rock musicians make – but I guess you can see their iconoclastic point. What Grubbs is even more interested in, however, is how this reluctance is now flipped on its axis by the liberational smorgasbord of the internet, where archives like UbuWeb and DRAM have many thousands of taped, one-off performances by all manner of heretoforeundocumented sound practitioners from the 1960s and beyond. We’ve moved dramatically from an era of recorded scarcity, in which deeply experimental music’s canonical improvisational moments were more read about and talked about than actually heard, and where one or two LPs that did happen to squirt out (say, AMM’s AMMmusic) contained music no more or less “representative” than the performances that either preceded or followed it.

Roland Nair is our ostensible “hero”. He’s a Dane sent as a spy in the employ of NATO to Sierra Leone to check up on one Michael Adriko, a man with whom he has a long history of rogue ops for what we presume have been both good guys and bad guys. Adriko’s gone off the reservation somewhat – no, that’s actually a huge understatement – and has taken a clueless American beauty named Davidia to Africa to wed him in his native jungle village. NATO wants Nair to keep close tabs on him, a task that falls apart very quickly when Adriko charms Nair into a get-rich-now scheme involving nuclear material, coaxed under the influence of buckets and buckets of alcohol and drugs. Nair’s a drunken, tormented, philosophical buffoon who cheats on his girlfriend (also a NATO or CIA spy?) the moment he’s away from her, and Michael’s an erstwhile liar, scammer and criminal who’s slowly losing his marbles.

Now, Grubbs rightly maintains, it’s far easier to get a bead on just what these weird tape collectives and underground spaces were truly up to just by clicking around for a few days; he also fears drowning in a hard drive bursting with all of this this newfound knowledge, to say nothing of the many thousands of hours more to be heard (or not) via streams. He writes cleanly and mostly unlike the Duke University academic he is, and humanizes the whole process right up front by documenting his own collector/ accumulator/experiential journey into these worlds from 1980s hardcore punk/indie rock beginnings. (Readers may remember Mr. Grubbs from their own once-fandom of his rock bands Squirrel Bait and Bastro; I certainly do). I liked that he conceived this fairly off-center topic out of whole cloth and owned it so meticulously; it’s an enlightened, chin-stroking sort of read, even if, like me, you haven’t yet

DENIS JOHNSON – “The Laughing Monsters” In my house, a new Johnson on the shelves means a new book to devour as quickly as possible.

So it was with his latest (2014) foray into the nihilistic heart of man, “The Laughing Monsters”, in which alcohol-soused, wouldbe mercenaries and scammers take the ancient “journey into darkest Africa” trope and give it a wild, 21st-century ride. It moves quickly, like a thriller and an ugly farce combined, and dares you to try and find even a modicum of empathy for the two brutes at the center of the action. Johnson doesn’t make it particularly easy.

This debasement all fits in with the harrowing craziness around them. The Africa of “The Laughing Monsters” is one of machete-wielding thugs, eager prostitutes, braincrushing heat and lots of booze. Johnson’s always made the surrealism of his locales a major part of his writing, and he has lots to work with in the Congo and the other fluid borders that Nair, Adriko and Davidia traverse. They run up against other intelligence agents in their travels, most notably some crooked Mossad agents, and these scenes are mined for all the tension the reader can bear.

As Nair easily falls from his task, he shows himself to be a pretty conniving sort himself, and the one who may actually be pulling all of the strings in his own unraveling.

If I tell you that this is not a major work of Johnson’s like “Already Dead” or “Jesus’ Son”, it’s certainly not an admonition to skip it. I love getting wrapped around this man’s singular, warped vision of humanity and how we debase ourselves, and “The Laughing Monsters” holds up quite solidly with the rest of his deranged oeuvre.

TONY JUDT – “The Memory Chalet” I think my all-time favorite work of history – and granted, I haven’t read all of ‘em – is Tony Judt’s “Postwar”, a sprawling, encyclopedic overview of post1945 European recrimination, privation and reemergence that is enlightening, humane and superbly written. Two further historical/essayistic works of Judt’s are also among my favorites: his 2012 collaboration with Timothy Snyder, “Thinking The Twentieth Century”, and Judt’s own jeremiad “Ill Fares The Land” from 2010. Both were composed, like “The Memory Chalet”, after Judt had been diagnosed with ALS and could only dictate his thoughts to others, as his ability to handle both computer and pen had by then began to fail.

I credit Judt with a number of small victories against my hidebound, instinctively libertarian/American mind: he’s helped me to see all political decisions in moral terms, as opposed to economic or merely political ones, and to not reflexively elevate the private solution over the public good.

Considering how far I’ve had to travel to get there, seriously, that’s a pretty ringing endorsement of his written skills of persuasion.

Therefore, I’m inclined to return to the Judt well again and again, and I’m never disappointed when I do. Alas, he passed away from ALS in 2010, which means there’s only so much Judt left to read. While I certainly wouldn’t start here if you’ve been intrigued by what you’ve read of Judt here or elsewhere, “The Memory Chalet” has much to recommend it. It’s a slim-volume selection of remembrances of his youth and his adult life, grouped according to theme, and all dictated to assistants in his dying days. He was trapped in his wheelchair for years essentially unable to do much of anything except to use his first-rate, steel trap of a mind to compose, edit and re-edit these memories into essay form, and it’s pretty astonishing that they come off in full as if he’d labored by computer and spellchecker to produce them.

The subject matter can be as arcane or as universal as Judt wishes. We’re treated to a happy chapter on his father’s predilection for automobiles back when the early 1960s postwar flourishing of Britain afforded new luxuries, as well as a self-mocking chapter on the Jewish Judt’s nerdy “Zionist” period, when he ran off to join a kibbutz in Israel, only partially as a means to get with liberated, politically leftwing Jewish chicks. His recollections of traveling to Switzerland as a youth, which give the book its title and theme, are the only time he really drips with sentimentality – and come on, anyone’s entitled to some syrup in their final days. Judt’s politics, honed over a life of first-hand observation, obsessive questioning and no small amount

of personal evolution, re those of the left, but not hard-left identity politics loaded with –isms, which he’s railed about elsewhere and rails about here. It’s pretty refreshing to see a self-styled socialist who so thoroughly loathes what was done globally in socialism’s name throughout the 20th century, and who then aggressively moved to criticize the self-centered victims that surrounded him in his academic life as a professor in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. He’s both intellectually honest and curmudgeonly; a true lefty I can get down with.

As Judt neared the end of his life, his centered his ire on the twin architects of the Iraq war, which he considered the abomination of the 21st century: George W. Bush and Tony Blair. He spares them no mercy, just as he hated what he believes Thatcher did to his native England in the 1980s. I could quibble and argue and nitpick the inconsistencies in some of his logic and thinking to death – and I did, in my head – yet you always come out of a Judt rant a little more engaged with his position on things than you did going in. I try not to get too overly deweyeyed about our inevitable shufflings off of this mortal coil, but Tony Judt is one man who passed before his work with us was done, making it all the more urgent that we try and come to terms with the visionary and uncompromising historical and argumentative work that he was able to leave behind.

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD – “My Struggle, Book Two” When I last left off with the roundly and deservedly celebrated Mr. Knausgaard as he documented his existential struggles with himself, his life and with the world around him, I was picking my jaw up off the floor. I was also attempting to grapple with why the 600page memoir/autobiography/ exegesis I'd just finished – the first of six such 600-page books in a series – was so phenomenally thrilling to read. Not much time was squandered before I leapt into Book Two. While I'll admit to a nearly imperceptible (and somewhat unexplainable) drop-off in my engagement with this one (I went from rabid and frothing page addiction to merely rabid page addiction), I'll also recommend "My Struggle, Book Two" unequivocally and with much gusto. Knausgaard is actually redefining literary form and function in the course of the "My Stuggle" ("Min Kamp" in his native Norwegian) series, and while I really haven't read everything yet, I've certainly never read anything like this before.

If the first book was his plunge into a life defined, in no small measure, by his overbearing father, and that

father's death, "My Struggle, Book Two" attempts to pick apart in detail things that are much closer to the here and now. Chief among these are what it's like to be a father of three in an egalitarian, liberal Scandinavian country (Sweden) in which the individual ego is sublimated and the collective good is celebrated in ways both good and ugly.

Knausgaard is not one for having his individuality sublimated, let me tell ya. He's very honest - painfully honest at times - about how important his personal "freedom" is, and he defines that freedom as his love of being alone and able to do nothing but write, or read, or shop for and hoard many dozens of books. This sense of self, as you might imagine, rubs up against his reality as a parent, partner and professional author quite often. While he's got some very close and highly intelligent friends with whom he treasures his time, such as fellow Norwegian-inStockholm Geir, Knausgaard finds the mechanisms of daily family life both dreary and depressing while they also fill him with deep, emotional love – especially for his vulnerable children. He grapples with guilt, pride and shame throughout the book.

His relationship with his second wife, Linda – the mother of Vanya, Heidi and John, their children – is as complex, emotionally difficult and emotionally rewarding as any marriage can be. Theirs in particular seems to have been forged with a mutual understanding of each other's deficiencies. Knaussgard relates a horrible tale of cutting up his face at a writer's retreat when he was a young man because he thought he'd been rejected by Linda, whom he'd fallen head over heels for. Linda, before they reconnected years later and started dating, tried to kill herself. These are people whofeel, and it seems as though there's a reinforcement mechanism in place that ensures that neither of them disappears too far down the mental rabbit hole. Having children – which was clearly Linda's raison d'être and Karl Ove's ambivalent concession – has helped to cement their bond while also preventing them from deepening it due to the daily grind of child-rearing.

There's an especially funny scene in which Knausgaard takes his toddler daughter to an emasculating "baby singalong" class. He's profoundly shameful at his stereotypical "stay-at-home dad" status, and mentally lashes out at the other dumpy dads who arrive at the class, makes fun of their clothes and (lack of) hair, lusts after the beautiful 20something Swede who leads the class, then tries to rationalize and explain his many feelings to himself and the reader. Knausgaard is either working this stuff out in real time on the page, or writes so well that it only seems like he is.

Some readers may find some of his esoteric intellectual diversions – which interrupt the narrative frequently yet always elegantly – jarring and impenetrable. Certainly I haven't heard of any of the Scandinavian writers whom he dissects from time to time, but this is his world, not mine.

Knausgaard will jump off into several pages of exploration of Dante or Dostoyevsky before returning to diapers; he'll

also meditate for pages on nature and its awesomeness.

Norway and Sweden, where I've spent considerable time, will do that to a person. He also has much to say about family, a big theme in Book One. In this edition he discovers that his (much loved and admired) mother-inlaw is furtively drinking alcohol while taking care of their young daughter, and has to confront her on it; he also struggles with managing his wife's relationship with his own mother as well as where an introverted, admittedly self-centered man such as himself places family obligations in relation to personal desires.

Lots to chew on, as before. Knausgaard has done something remarkable in drawing so many readers into his insular, multi-book world, and of course it'll only be a matter of weeks before I start in on "My Struggle, Book Three". There are three more to follow that one, not translated into English yet. Heldigvis, jeg snakker litt norsk.

BRENDAN I. KOERNER – “The Skies Belong To Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking” Any consciousness I had of the daily world of grown-up news starting flickering on around 1974 or so, right when “the golden age of hijacking” was winding down. I do remember the term skyjacking, which is something that I associated with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and something I also assumed before reading this book occurred perhaps 10, 15 times in total during the 1960s and 1970s. Uh, no. Airplane hijackings were so common during the years 1968-1973 that the rate was actually nearly one per week, with many days having two hijacked planes in the air anywhere in the world at the same given time. This statistic, and the sociological conditions that underpinned it, helps one remember the bizarre, dissociative unraveling of identity that was occurring in America and throughout the western world at that time. Political radicals were upending long-established norms, and America’s wayward children – epitomized by this book’s Cathy Kerkow – were giving a big middle finger to their parents, their government and sometimes to sanity itself, and were hijacking planes in search of notoriety, meaning, or a new life somewhere else in the world. This thrilling work of pop nonfiction tells their story.

“The Skies Belong To Us” takes a literary device that’s been well-trod since Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” (and which was undoubtedly employed somewhere else before that) – that of telling a story at the macro level one chapter, then contrasting it with the

same tale told at the micro or individual level the next – and JIMI KRITZLER: “Noise in My Head: Voices From The mines it quite effectively. On one hand Koerner writes what Ugly Australian Underground” I assume is the first and likely the forever-definitive history Made my way through this of the 60s-70s skyjacking epidemic. He does so from an recent book on subAmerican perspective, touching only briefly on those PLO underground Australian plane commandeerings and instead focusing on the rocknroll by Jimi Kritzler disaffected youth who were routinely getting onto planes recently, and it was like with guns, fake guns, bombs and fake bombs, and asking sifting through a stack of to be taken to Havana. Some were left-wing political fanzines on a hungover radicals bent on achieving new levels of radicalness by Sunday afternoon. I barely getting down with Fidel Castro in Cuba. What was both know the bands covered, comic and tragic was how Castro, after a short period of but that’s also true of most of welcoming these new arrivals to his shores as a way to the ephemeral and shortthumb his nose at his Capitalist enemies, began jailing the lived combos covered in the hijackers or otherwise treating them poorly, and later fanzines of yore. Kritzler’s started refusing to let hijacked planes even land in Havana. aim here is to take a snapshot in time, the time being roughly now (or at least 1-2 years ago), of the more Many other hijackers were instead mentally ill, or bored, or brutish and punk/skronk/thug and/or experimental rock otherwise exceptionally square pegs in the few round holes bands down under, with a few pop practitioners included that remained in the tattering American mosaic. You won’t simply because Kritzler either likes or knows them. believe what airport security was like in those days; apparently anyone could walk into an airport, stride up to The formula is repetitive but comfortable. Intro, interview, the gate, step onto the stairs leading up to the plane with finished. “Noises In My Head” does this upwards of their carry-on luggage, and hand a ticket to the smiling twentysomething times, to bands both known (Eddy stewardess in the minidress as they stepped onto the Current Suppression Ring, Total Control), unknown to plane. No screening of any kind. If your duffle bag had 3 me (most of ‘em) and loved (again, by me: The Garbage rifles in it, well, that was your business. When the and The Flowers, Fabulous Diamonds). Here’s what I skyjacking “craze” started, and when copycats turned it into learned: drugs are freely available and consumed in an epidemic, the airlines’ response was not to demand rocknroll circles in Australia, and just as when I was in my greater security – that would be “too costly” for them – it was 20s, talked about in far greater proportion to how to do whatever the hijacker wanted (fly to 5 cities decided interesting they actually are to the reader. Drugs drugs on a whim; go to Havana; go to Algiers), and fight any and drugs, overdoses, mental illness, fallen comrades (to all security regulations, even if it meant they were losing drugs), etc. Seems as though drug celebrations didn’t planes to the Cubans every month. cease in underground Aussie rocknroll the moment Nick This crazy interlude in American history is drawn in finer detail in the chapters that focus on just one hijacking, a 1972 flight out of San Diego that was commandeered by Roger Holder, a black Vietnam vet who’d been dishonorably discharged and who harbored notparticularly-deeply-held delusions of left-wing revolution, and his gullible white party-girl girlfriend, Cathy Kerkow.

Their bumbling and at turns funny and sad story is one of slouching to Gomorrah, or in their case, Algiers, and a life spent hiding in various parts of the world from extradition back to the United States. They got away with their caper, dreamt up in a haze of paranoid fantasy, anger and marijuana smoke, and at the predictable cost (in Holder’s case) of any real closure or happiness. I’ll let you read the book to get the lowdown on Kerkow’s story. “The Skies Belong To Us” was a smack-on-the-head obvious choice for a fantastic story long overdue for the telling, and’ll leave you utterly amazed at the chaos we had to evolve from to arrive at our 21st century airline security state.

Cave left the island.

All funnin’ aside, I learned that Kritzler’s got a good ear to the ground in his homeland, and is definitely one of those man-about-town gadflys who seemingly knows everyone & is excellent at connecting the dots between bands, scenes and sub-genres. He writes well and with passion. There are a few grunters in this book whom I’ll need to follow up on. Hey, he missed just about every favorite rock band I personally have down there, from Constant Mongrel to King Tears Mortuary to The Clits, but that’s why it’s his fanzine-cum-book, not mine. It’s a hefty tome, skimmable when it needs to be but also full of good musical ore to be mined. The folks who live and breathe in these Melbourne-, Sydney-, Brisbane-, etc.based scenes will have something very well-crafted to show their progeny somewhere down the genetic line.

www.hedonistjivebookreview.com

KEVIN MYERS – “Watching The Door: Drinking Up, Getting Down and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast” Violent sectarian war between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland was totally baffling to me as a kid.

I grew up as IRA and UDA partisans were blowing each other and everyone around them to bits in Northern Ireland, and, not knowing the ancient and impenetrable hatreds that self-perpetuated and multiplied over the centuries, it struck this American as colossally stupid. Two sets of Jesuslovers killing each other ad nauseum and to no real end! Turns out that having these hatreds play themselves out in violent fashion right before your very eyes is no more illuminating, as journalist Kevin Myers’ outstanding memoir from these times, "Watching The Door - Drinking Up, Getting Down and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast", makes abundantly clear.

one that lost half of its value very quickly after it became identified as being in a bomb- and killing-ridden section of town.

That was the thing that I learned from this book - just how hideously bad this war was. I knew there were senseless IRA incidents, but I didn't know just how many people were murdered in places like Belfast and Londonderry and Armaugh during the 1970s, and just how often they were murdered simply for walking down the street or for purportedly talking to the wrong person. Myers gives them all their names, names that otherwise would be forgotten to most historians, and does his best at each turn to humanize the needlessly dead and the impact of their deaths upon their families. At least he does this with the innocents; he also eviscerates the guilty and their stupidities with much wit and mocking, and in retrospect suffers absolutely none of the many appalling fools he comes across. My favorite part was when he described the Irish dockworkers who were upset that a Japanese company had bought a port from an Irish company, particularly one who dismissed the entire transaction with, "Fuck the Japanese. Them's all Chinamen anyway".

Yes, in many ways it's a growing-up story. We all have youths typically more colorful than our truly adult years, some of us more than others. Certainly Myers "grew up" fairly dramatically, formed by the searing traumas of his 20s. I was in Rome in 2011 on vacation, which is where and when I actually read this book, and ran into some late-fifties Irish women in the Catacombs on a tour & asked one where she was from. "Belfast", she told me, less than 24 hours after I'd finished the book, which chronicled what was no doubt the horrific backdrop of her youth as well. Naturally I had to burble and sputter about this great book I'd read, and she proceeded to lay out the miseries that she, and what turned out to be her accompanying sister and cousin, had witnessed. A husband blown up here, a cousin shot there; a house His memoir is absolutely riveting. Myers lived a reckless firebombed next door here, a killing in front of their house existence, the sort of hard living that war correspondents there. through the years have worn on their sleeves with pride. He was an early 20s young male interested primarily in women Then I told her that the writer's name was Kevin Myers. and drink, and secondly and I think halfheartedly, in the "Aye, Kevin Myers, oh boy, that's too bad, he's a rightvogue Leftist politics that at that time very much identified wing nutter, he is". I learned that evening with some themselves with the IRA cause. But mostly women, drink internet research that Myers, now a regular columnist for the Irish Independent, is indeed a bit more conservative and excitement of all stripes. than he was in his youth. Aren't we all, right? (Actually not Myers' abundant self-effacing humor and sense of pacing me – I’ve bucked the trend and am tilting leftward quite really make this book. Quickly, after some harrowing and aggressively in my middle age). I read some of his up-close views of death, including a British solider shot and columns, and they have all of the opinionated, humorous killed in front of him, he has the pulse-quickening and learned bluster of this book - and then I liked him realization that he actually likes this line of work, and he even more. Put it this way - if you appreciated Christopher retroactively documents the follies and heedlessness of his Hitchens, who was the man who steered me to this book youth - untold amounts of drink, nameless sex with via a shout-out in his "Hitch-22", you'll love this similar nameless girls, and a sickening amount of death, all rolled Left-to-Right conversion story, which takes place in a up into one big imperial pint glass of recklessness. Myers backdrop considerably more dangerous & maddening was barely even working, truth be told, and could have than anything even the well-traveled Hitchens easily left Belfast at any time. Yet he bought a house, albeit experienced in his own memoir.

Sure, the Catholics of the time would tell you they had proximate cause - the presence of British troops in Northern Ireland - as would the Protestant defenders of the status quo, especially once the bombs really started exploding in the early 1970s. Myers, an Irishman brought up in England, came "back" to Belfast in 1971 as an exceptionally low-paid newspaper and magazine writer to document what he and just about everyone else thought would be a short set of over-and-done skirmishes. Yet Myers ended up becoming such a part of The Troubles themselves that he met everyone, drank with everyone, was threatened with death by just about everyone, and was one man among few who got this close and actually escaped with his life.

LUDMILLA PETRUSHEVSKAYA – “There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family” Sub-heading: "Three novellas about family", and that's precisely what we get from Russia's foremost modern chronicler of the burdensome human condition. These are stories that were suppressed by Soviet and post-Soviet authorities in their time, presumably for being too "real", as they contain zero explicit antigovernment samizdat. I loved the other Petrushevskaya collection I read last year, "There Once Lived A Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, And He Hanged Himself", and this one's nearly in that league, albeit in overall abbreviated form, making for an exceptionally quick read. It's really just one long short story called "The Time Is Night", along with two short stories - each a haunting overview of a middle-aged Russian woman in a degraded and pitiful state. I certainly mean pitiful as in "have pity", which you will need to find plenty of in exploring the harrowing inner lives of women struggling with familial, state and communal oppression. Yet Petrushevskaya's also a wonderful black humorist, and she limns her litanies of domestic horrors with absurdities that, if they don't make one laugh out loud, at least lessen the crushing existential burden somewhat.

"The Time Is Night" is truly the centerpiece of this one, and is by far the best of the three stories. A 50-year-old wouldbe poet, Anna, recounts in "writings that were left behind" how she tried to keep life from unraveling while trying to care for her grandchild, whom her daughter Alena had abandoned at her doorstep while being herself abandoned by two husbands. Her son also comes and goes into her life after getting out of prison, all the while pursued by thugs who are looking to administer some serious post-lockup beatdowns for god knows what. Anna moves from soaring, poetic calls to her higher nature to the day-to-day mundane and drab realities of Russian life, with a dying mother, a bare refrigerator and not a whole lot of money. She's an invisible woman - a common complaint of the middle-aged in any society - but even more acute in a society teeming with alcoholic, misogynist men and chronically unemployed children who hate you.

Petrushevskaya gets her digs into societal absurdities where she can, such as when Anna picks up some journalistic work for an acquaintance: "I urgently covered her back when she needed a piece on the bicentennial of the Minsk Tractor Plant" (a plant, which, suffice to say, had not been in existence for 200 years). Anna, who barely has anything to cling to in life, suffers a series of emotional

indignities that culminate with the removal of even the last bits of joy in her fragile life. There's a lot of societal guilt-by-association implied by these tales. It's clear that Petrushevskaya was chafing in a big way, and still is, even after the glorious transition from Communism to Putinism.

The other two stories are good, but are slightly lesser works. The best of the two is "Among Friends", which details the incestuous inner workings of an adopted "family" of sorts, a collection of codependent adults who get together once a week to drink and talk. These apartment gatherings were as close to "civil society" as individuals within the Soviet Union ever came, but when our narrator finds circumstances spinning out of control and that threaten to ruin the life of her son, she engages in an absurd bit of violent self-sacrifice that, through this catalog of emotional horrors, Petrushevskaya almost makes sound banal, normal and wise. I don’t think I’ll ever be a lonely and overburdened middle-aged Russian woman, but I've got a pretty decent sense of what it might be like to be one via this author's unsettling and highly textured writing.

JOE QUEENAN – “One For The Books” I thought Queenan was strictly a mocking mirthmaker, a Philadelphia mock-blowhard who wrote pithy pieces and books about some of America’s cultural foibles, in the way he memorably did in the breezy “Red Lobster, White Trash, & the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America” way back in 1998. I greatly enjoyed that one, and even went to see him read from it at the time. I guess there’s a little more depth to the guy than I thought after reading this meditation of his on a life spent reading.

Queenan tears through some 100-200 books per year, most of which are works of fiction. Said works are usually those sitting on a more exalted literary perch than, say, those sitting in Oprah’s Book Club, or even in this fanzine. That’s about a book every two days, in case you’re trying to figure out if it’s possible. Sure it is. Time to get going.

“One For The Books” takes numerous angles to get at what it means to plunge into a life spent reading books.

He’s often got as many as 15 books going at one time (even I’m not that scattered) and reads pretty much anywhere and everywhere he can. He was somewhat driven to a life with his nose in books by an alcoholic father who nonetheless also escaped into reading as a means of escaping familial commitments. Queenan was captivated at an early age by the classics in way that pre-

internet often were, yet rather than abandon them as he grew into adolescence and older, he used them as entrée into foreign literature in translation, entire catalogs of modern authors and even, recently, into Scandinavian crime fiction, which he spends a tiny chunk of the book actually apologizing for.

Castel is a lonely misanthrope, who, like the narrator in “Notes From Underground”, seems to undermine any chance he might have at love by insecurely haranguing the object of his affections, then flying off the handle and into a panic when her actions don’t conform to his desires.

It’s a darkly comic story, made all the better by the reader’s realization of just what a horrible boob Castel is, even while he’s still himself coming to grips with his own limitations. Oh, and you can read it in about three hours – and even less if you’ve been to the Evelyn Wood School of Reading Dynamics.

His humorous, cantankerous side finds many targets, including exalted books like Middlemarch and Ulysses that he’s admittedly unlikely to ever read. Queenan mocks those who buy secondhand books, people who consume books on e-readers (see my piece on this elsewhere in the issue), people who join book clubs, people who “rent” JON SAVAGE & STUART BAKER, editors – “PUNK books from libraries rather than own them, and especially, 45: The Singles Cover Art Of Punk, 1976-1980” those who give books to others, saying, “you’ve got to read One sometimes forgets to this”. On this last point, he gives voice to a persistent peeve disassociate some of the of mine. I’m sorry, but I only have x years left on this planet, fantastic artwork that has and I won’t read a book I’m not already jazzed about simply graced record sleeves because a nice person asked me to try it. Not only does it through the ages with the displace some book I’d rather be reading, it tempers the actual music that it houses. If I review I’m now obligated to give to the friend or see a sleeve out of the context acquaintance, forcing me to hold back my true thoughts in of the record – say, in a gallery favor of a milquetoast endorsement. Queenan gets it. or in a book like this one, it’s often the only time that I’ll It’s not a “braggy” book, but I can’t help but be envious at actually consider its art on its some level. The guy’s also written books about film own merits. Otherwise, I’m too fanaticism and sports fanaticism, and jeez, if only I didn’t internally busy rendering critical judgment on the music; have a quote-unquote real job, I’d love to join him at the it’s why, for instance, I’ve never really noticed some of the cinema and the ballpark with three books in my satchel and snazzy-looking 45rpm sleeves of The Clash, since I’ve compare notes. At no point does he come off as anything long loathed most of that band’s music. but genuine in his love for the written word; you couldn’t talk about literature at the level Queenan does unless you were “Punk 45” triggers both art lust and record lust in equal truly marinating in it for most of a life. There are many doses. Since it’s a near-coffee table-sized compendium “books about books” to choose from on the shelves. This is of the 45rpm sleeves from the first four years of a more hard-boiled, realist, biting example, without the “punk” (with some pre-’76 sleeves from the MC5, NY annoyingly dreamy elegies so typical of the genre.

Dolls, Flamin’ Groovies etc. thrown in as a means to provide visual reference for the evolution of the music), it ERNESTO SABATO – “The Tunnel” can also serve as a rough education on how the music A terrific novella from a much- grew and exploded as well. This is filtered through British celebrated Argentinian writer editors Savage and Baker’s own UK-borne/bred who, as I understand it, garnered sensibilities, of course, so things that loom large in the a great deal of his international retelling of punk rock in the UK like “pub rock” and Stiff regard from this 1948 book. It’s Records mean very little on other continents. The editors quite a Dostoyevskian tale, told go to great lengths to include other “markets”, however, in first-person “Notes From and some of the most rip-snorting American, Australian, Underground” style by an Swiss etc. punk rock records of all time are on full display embittered (and now in this book, right next to their usually underwhelming UK imprisoned) egotist who gains a counterparts. dawning awareness of the limits of his own character in the There’s not much to it. It’s an art book. A giant, life-size course of his storytelling. It (i.e. 7”) reproduction of a given sleeve is on each page, concerns Juan Pablo Castel, who recounts in confused, along with band line-up information, recording/ stop-start and often contradictory detail how he came to production info, and sometimes some bare commentary murder Maria, whom he fell instantly in love with when she on the record from Savage or Baker. Sleeves are, we lingered on a small (but to Castel, extremely important) presume, chosen for either their artistic merit, historical detail in one of his paintings at an art opening. value, musical chops or maybe just to make collector

scum drool. I personally started buying punk and post-punk singles around 1981, and therefore have seen many/most of these sitting on racks and in bins when they were new(ish). Of course I neglected to buy nearly all of them, being a dumb kid as I was. Peppered in between the pages are short interviews with record label heads like Dave Brown from Dangerhouse, artists like Savage Pencil, and a few musicians. Of the latter, I have to hand it to the interviewers for hanging in there with horrible, recalcitrant egotists the likes of David Thomas (Pere Ubu) and Glen Branca (Theoretical Girls, The Static). Even in their old age these guys are total ball-breakers, and therefore my estimation of them as individuals has been further reduced accordingly.

conversational rhythm that didn't strike me as particularly "real" - a cardinal sin when trying to convey the desperate humanity lurking below the surface in our fellow citizens.

At times Wilson descends into "hick" dialect and storytelling mannerisms, which is all well and good, considering his subject matter, but it sometimes seems so ham-handed it makes me want to fly up to Invermere and see if the "puck sluts" and working stiffs of the town could truly actually converse in this manner.

No question that Wilson's got some fine chops - I certainly didn't make it as far as I did in the book just to prove a point. He unwraps these seemingly tough men quite well at times, without having to take them through a crucible of pain or through major life events in order for us to get to some deeper sense of their missed opportunities and regrets. There are also some well-scripted portraits of dead-end towns, where everything fun more or less ends on high school graduation day, and adulthood comes crashing into full force as inelegantly as you can imagine, with quick divorces, unloved children and abandoned jobs in its wake. I see a few things to recommend in bits and spurts - just not in book length, I'm afraid.

Things level off in 1980, and by this time, we’re looking at Echo and The Bunnymen & Human League sleeves, as well as other delights from the new wave era. It closes out with an interview with Peter Saville, lead designer at Factory Records - appropriately enough, as he’s probably most closely associated with the “art” of sleeve design as anyone in the underground/near-underground around this time. By this point your eBay activity’s been at its highest level in years and you’re considering a reverse mortgage to afford all these 45s, and then Savage & Baker end the book with dozens more mini-pics of all the killer sleeves they JAMES WOLCOTT – “Lucking Out: My Life Getting couldn’t fit in the main pages. The book’s a nice dopamine Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York” rush, and something I’ll look forward to breaking out every When I read this, I had a few years. choice between reading the then-new Richard Hell D.W. WILSON – “Once You Break A Knuckle – Stories” memoir, about his days as a I found my way through about punk and a hedonistic poet three quarters of the stories in in late 70s New York, and D.W. Wilson's 2014 collection James Wolcott's very similar "Once You Break A Knuckle" memoir, which is itself before concluding that I pretty similar in many regards to much had the rough, blue-collar Patti Smith's essential feel of working-class Western memoir "Just Kids”. In fact, Canada nailed, and called it a there are at least two other rueful day. I'd been on a pretty semi-recent memoirs of that good hot streak reading and wild NYC era of bankruptcy, enjoying unfamiliar authors who innovative rock music, serial tackled similar terrain of the lost, murderers who learn to kill from their dogs, and the confused and the foregone, freewheeling, drug-fueled culture. There's even a fun all living in misbegotten places book I read several years ago called "Ladies and far from our urban centers. Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning”, which juxtaposes the Daniel Woodrell's "The Outlaw Album" was a good one world-beating New York Yankees baseball teams of the mining this field for psychological pathos; even better was late 70s with the swirl of craziness happening in their city.

Jodi Angel's amazing "You Only Get Letters From Jail". It's certainly a fertile time to mine, and those writers still Wilson's characters, all male and generally of good heart if standing and with a story to tell are responding. Anyway, not sound mind, work the construction sites and police I decided to pass on Hell's book – I was afraid from the forces of the Kootenay Valley in British Columbia, rubbing blurbs and reviews I've read that it was going to be up often against the darker side of humanity: meth addicts, godawful – and concentrated on James Wolcott's hockey-crazed dolts and troublesome and feisty women in "Lucking Out” instead. many flavors. It had a lot to speak for it, including the NY Now I couldn't have told you who Wolcott was before Times review that made me buy it in the first place. reading the book, only that I knew his name, but it's clear now that I've read his rock music and film reviews for That said, I found it to be overwritten, with too many many years in The Village Voice and elsewhere. He's a flourished crammed into paragraphs, and a certain grating

journalist who happened to surreptitiously fall into the beats he wanted to cover, even before he knew he wanted to cover them, and "Lucking Out" is essentially that story, as well as the story of certain strata and subcultures in 70s New York. Wolcott has a lot going for him, and I'll cut to the quick and say I enthusiastically recommend the book if you're interested in the subject matter, which I'll get to. He's excellent at turning a phrase, finding the right adjective, and making his prose jump off the page in ways that can be funny, cutting and frequently self-deprecating. I truly admire the guy's ability to stay sober in 1970s New York; in fact, if this had been a down-and-out junkie or alcoholic tale, I don't think I would have read it – but Wolcott kept his hands pretty clean; or as the title puts it, "semi-dirty”.

Arriving in NYC in 1972 at Age 19, with no money and little more than the potential of working at The Village Voice based on a reference from Norman Mailer (!!), Wolcott actually started living his dream through a series of fortune accidents and his own pluck. Even when the newspaper was bought by a tony Manhattanite crowd who owned NEW YORK magazine – and totally alienated the hippie-era socialist gate crashers who toiled at The Voice – it ended up being the best thing that even happened to Wolcott, and he got to cover aspects of city life right when things started to get both messy and extremely interesting. He went to a Patti Smith show, was blown away, wrote about it, befriended her, and actually helped her star ascend rather quickly. She in turn introduced him to Television, and once he cottoned to them, he was a CBGBs regular. There's an entire chapter on the punk era, with short sections on The Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti, Television, Lester Bangs and others. Wolcott was a level-headed, unalcoholic presence within their scene, and he documented it well both in the Voice and in this book.

show porn. He first "infiltrated" the dirty theaters on assignment, and ended up liking the sleaze and the thrills he got from it that he just kept on showing up. He also went on assignment and covered the hardcore, pre-AIDS gay S&M subculture, though without the same level of participation and fascination. There are some great characters, too – Uncle Floyd, Robin Byrd and Al Goldstein – but before he gets too confessional, Wolcott shifts gears and tells the story of how he became a ballet aesthete right around the same time.

He became quickly transfixed by NYC Ballet and the world surrounding it, and the porn chapter also miraculously turns into the highbrow dance chapter, and it captures two sides of New York's unique culture very well. That, and lots of journalistic shop talk and name-dropping, most of which isn't too dreadful. In many ways, it's a journalism insider book, but with enough grit and true tales of a lost era that it's something to definitely spend a couple of days with if you get the chance.

The Hedonist Jive Book Review is a (for now) digital-only book fanzine written and edited by Jay Hinman in San Francisco, CA. Learn more about what we’re up to at www.hedonistjivebookreview.com.

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There's a slightly less compelling chapter on Wolcott's Hemorrhage music fanzine – which personal friendship with Pauline Kael; I guess it's annoying because he's nothing but rapturously worshipful of her, and also contain a bunch of book reviews he documents his part in her entourage during some of her much like the ones you see here – come peak years reviewing film at The New Yorker. They check out dynamitehemorrhage.com. frequently went to seminal pictures together and drank afterward, with Wolcott always ordered a Coke. He See you again later in 2015. acknowledges some of her foibles and quirks, but it's clear that Kael was/is almost a mythical mother figure for him, and perhaps the most important relationship he's ever had before or since, family and several spouses included. Let's be clear – I too love Pauline Kael, her writing at least, and I totally get it, but the chapter on her is a little clumsy and lacks clarity; I guess I'd just prefer that he summed up in simple English why he even chose to make tales of their friendship one of the most significant chapters – there are only 5 – in the book, rather than just rattling off anecdotes about Pauline and all the great things she said.

One chapter that is revealing, though, is Wolcott's admission of his addiction to 1970s-era, 42nd-street peep

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