Reediana

Books. Music. Film. Send us your work!

EDITED BY KATIE PELLETIER

Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

When the Lights Go Out: An Examination of Venezuela’s Unraveling

Things Are Never So Bad that They Can’t Get Worse

By William Neuman ’84 How do you turn a failed coup into a successful, de facto dictatorship? For Hugo Chávez, it seemed easy. When the military action to overturn Carlos Andrés Pérez and his elected government failed on February 4, 1992, a 37-year-old Chávez took to the airwaves to surrender. His coherence and confidence made an indelible impression on the many Venezuelans watching the ordeal unfold on their televisions.

For William Neuman, this moment reveals much about the history, present, and future of Venezuela—a country that adulated revolutionary leaders like Chávez. In Things Are Never So Bad that They Can’t Get Worse, Neuman excavates the story of Venezuela, a country that has seen its natural reserves of oil and complex leadership bring both great wealth and epic failures. He focuses on the expected names—Nicolás Maduro and Juan Guaidó appear alongside the “Liberator of Veneuzela” and first president Simón Bolívar and Chávez—but in a surprising and fresh way. In a blend of journalism and history, Neuman interviews ordinary people. Their perspective is what grounds the stories of these almost mythic men. Through the prism of the well-known and the everyday, Neuman elucidates what happened to a country that was once “a land of plenty.” He doesn’t anesthetize the cruelty of the past or present, but portrays the highs and heartbreak of the complicated country with lucid language.

Neuman’s record is incisive rather than expansive: some years are condensed in one paragraph. Other moments, particularly those focused on its leading figures, slow down in fascinating detail. Neuman’s Chávez is hubristic and unwavering, inspiring followers to Chavismo, the “deeply conservative” political philosophy: “He wanted the nation to go backward—back to a golden age when Bolívar and other titans strode the land and Venezuelans were pure of heart . . .” Maduro, the handpicked successor of Chávez, appears as a coarse yet still-savvy younger brother figure. Neuman shares an anecdote when Maduro would send his reports to Chávez and “Chávez would send them back with the spelling and grammatical errors marked in red pen.” These moments of specificity about the people involved make these major players come alive in a sea of political machinations. However, Neuman doesn’t linger long on the men. For a book that includes so much detail, the major players remain a bit elusive.

More idiosyncratic consideration is given to the people of Venezuela, to excellent effect. Neuman clearly spent much time travelling and talking to people in the country. Standouts include the author Luis Britto García, an aging Chavista and intellectual; Hilda Solórzano, who lives in extreme Caracas poverty with pragmatism; and José Chacón, whose bookstore contains only eight books. Neuman allows us to see the store vividly: “It was dim inside Chacon’s shop, not because the power was out but because the bulbs had burned out and not been replaced. Instead of books, the shelves held oversize models of insects made by a local aficionado.” These stories are whirlpools of emotion in the midst of political intricacy, and it is easy to fall into their eddies of human experience. Although Neuman acknowledges the still-present divide between the rich and poor Venezuelans, he rarely tells the story of those not in extreme straits.

A loose organizing theme, one marked in chapter names, is the “blackout.” Neuman writes, “There was only darkness. The headlights of cars slashed white channels through the night . . .” Interspersed throughout the account, these describe the many instances when Venezuela’s electrical grid falters—due to human error, political ineptitude and greed, or something as straightforward as a blown

transformer, an incident which the government blamed on “cyberattacks and electromagnetic pulse attacks and snipers firing on transformers.” The chapters act on the reader perhaps much like the loss of electrical power does on Venezuelans, incessantly reminding us of the failed promise of leadership.

Neuman shows how the events, people, and motivations that take place across decades are firmly connected, and still unfolding. Towards the end, Donald Trump makes an appearance along with Juan Guaidó, both shown to be acting in a rush of odd decisions and brute planning to try to replace Maduro with the opposition leader. As readers know, neither was successful. By the end, when Guaidó’s efforts seem sure to fail, what is left? What remains, Neuman makes clear, is the “glorious green expanse of the elongated Ávila mountain,” and, enveloping that breathtaking landscape, the promise of more trouble. —NORA HICKEY

These stories are whirlpools of emotion in the midst of political intricacy, and it is easy to fall into their eddies of human experience.

Twentieth Century Mouse Genetics: A Historical and Scientific Review

In his latest publication, Bob Erickson ’60 identifies the contributions of historic mouse genetics studies and examines how those discoveries are still shaping medical genetics today. Researchers, students, and clinicians will find fresh inspiration to engage in human genetics research employing mouse models and to translate those findings to clinical practice. Bob draws upon a 50-year career of research in human and murine genetics and patient care at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in this comprehensive volume. (Elsevier, 2022)

Cell Boundaries: How Membranes and Their Proteins Work

Don Engelman ’62

and coauthors delve into the structural and organizational principles underlying cell membranes, in a new textbook. A leader in the field of biophysics for more than 40 years, the Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University builds a robust foundation for understanding the organization of lipids and the folding, assembly, stability, and function of membrane proteins. Asserting that progress toward understanding cell membranes depends strongly upon the concerted use of both biology and physics, this book aims to broaden the knowledge of bioscience students. (Garland Science, 2022)

If You Give a Man a Tesla

Written by Renee Burns Lonner ’64 as a parody of a beloved children’s series, this comedic take on a particular intersection of gender and culture illustrates how “men’s lifelong preoccupation with cars that go vroom is now a fascination with cars that go silent but are genius . . . (like their owners).” Renee is a management consultant for major corporations and a licensed psychotherapist in Los Angeles. (Independently published, 2021) REED COLLEGE MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES

“My work in technology is professionally rewarding but also intellectually one-dimensional. I was hungry for deeper engagement with the broader world of ideas and a guiding structure within which to do so. Participating in the MALS program has given me the opportunity to engage in the free exchange of ideas in a supportive, structured community of like-minded individuals. In my time at Reed I have experienced personal growth and significant scholarly development, and this is due in no small part to the academic excellence and attentiveness of the teaching staff, the dynamic dialectic of the class conference, and the diversity of course work.”

—DEREK FINN MALS ’21

Achieving Success as a 21st Century Manager

A new book by Dean Frost ’77, professor of business administration at Bemidji State University, is about taking personal control of your management career by planning for development opportunities outside of training sessions or university degree programs. This guide includes self-evaluations for cognitive competence, virtual competence, emotional competence, cross-cultural competence, socialization competence, health competence, and competencies in spotting leadership differences and situational recognition. (Business Expert Press, 2021)

Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation, and The Cut of Romanticism

Orrin Wang ’79, a professor in the English department at the University of Maryland, explores how British Romantic literature abuts and is organized around both print and nonprint media. The book explores not only the print, pictorial art, and theatre of early 19th-century Europe but also later technologies such as photography, film, and video. In thinking about the relationship between Romanticism and media, Orrin argues that media studies can benefit from a more robust confrontation with, or recovery of, the arguments of deconstruction. (Fordham University Press, 2022)

Anti-Leftist Politics in Modern World History: Avoiding ‘Socialism’ at All Costs

Liberals, conservatives, extreme nationalists, and others have all come up against oppositional politics for the past 200 years. In his latest book, Philip B. Minehan ’82 traces the patterns of such hostility. A professor of history at California State University Fullerton, he presents examples from Britain, France, Germany, and the United States; the British in India; European fascism, the U.S. and Britain as they operated in China and Indochina; from Kenya, Algeria and Iran; and from Central and South America during the Cold War. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021) Journalist Stephanie Guyer-Stevens ’86 and anthropologist Françoise Pommaret traveled to the Himalayas to meet seven living Bhutanese female shamans and to share their stories, intimately connected with the Buddhist ideas of karma and rebirth. The resulting narrative provides a rare look inside the world of these brave women who continue to impact the spiritual lives of the Bhutanese as mystics, healers, and travelers to the netherworld. (Shambhala, 2021)

Tell the Turning

Artist Lucy

Bellwood ’12

produced some 40-odd inkwash illustrations to accompany poems by Tara Shepersky. “Lucy’s gently exacting studies of flora and fauna, and her comfortably broken-in diorama landscapes, become a space for poet and artist to meet and compare notes as they set off on a quest for the everyday holy, with the independence afforded by true kinship.” (Bored Wolves, 2021) In her new thriller, Alafair Burke ’91 sets up the story of a young woman whose disappearance leaves her best friend reeling and an NYPD homicide detective baffled. Together the women search for the truth beneath long-buried secrets and reveal the power of female friendship along the way. A prolific author of crime mysteries, including The Wife, Alafair draws upon her years as a prosecutor and professor of criminal law at Hofstra to craft page-turning tales that end up on the New York Times bestseller list. (Harper, 2022)

Once We Were Slaves: The Extraordinary Journey of a Multiracial Jewish Family

Prof. Laura Leibman

[English] writes about an obsessive genealogist, and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, in her latest book. Blanche Moses believed her ancestors were Sephardic grandees, yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery, the narrative overturns the reclusive heiress’s assumptions to reveal that two sibling relatives actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of mixed African and Jewish ancestry, and it sheds new light on the fluidity of race—as well as on the role of religion in racial shifts—in the first half of the 19th century. (Oxford University Press, 2021)

The Diaries of Judith Malina, 1958–1971

Prof. Kate Bredeson [theatre] has collected the diaries of Judith Malina—artist, activist, and lifelong diarist— from a seismic period of her life and a formative era for her company, the Living Theatre, in a new book. This latest volume is part of a larger project to gather, edit, and introduce the unpublished diaries of a key figure in late 20th-century theatre. Here Bredeson covers 13 years as Malina records her days, beginning in New York and ending in Ouro Preto, Brazil. Also, she includes a significant critical introduction that situates Malina’s legacy in theatre history, discusses the influence of her theatre, examines the genre of diary keeping, and spotlights Malina’s work as an artist, activist, and diarist. (Routledge, 2022)