Non-fiction
“One Woman’s Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story,”
By Janis Karpinski with Steven Strasser (2005, Hyperion, $24.95 hardback, 242 pages.)
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If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to achieve all you ever hoped, then to have it all ruined before your eyes, this book can fill you in.
Janis Karpinski is the ill-starred (ahem) general of the 800th Military Police Brigade, of whom a few soldiers apparently cooperated in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
This past Thursday, Karpinski spoke of these and other events at an event arranged by the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.
Leading up to the Abu Ghraib scandal, she had a remarkable military career, of which her book supplies a comprehensive precis.
In 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, at the age of seven, she decided she wanted to be a soldier — after finding World War II mementos of her father in the attic of her Rahway, N.J., home.
“I put the the had on my little blonde head and stood up straight, feeling as tall and proud as my father had in the flush of victory after a great European war,” she writes. (P. 1)
Little did that child know how hard it would be for her to achieve anything like the military accomplishments she envisioned.
“The Secret History of the American Empire: The Truth About Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and How to Change the World,” by John Perkins(2007, Penguin Group, 365 pages, paperback, $15)
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If you had a hard time relating to Michelle Obama’s modesty with regard to American accomplishments, this book may surprise you.
In this tome, you get a crystal-clear peek at how rapaciously U.S. corporations have exploited and abused peoples and resources on every continent of the planet — except Antarctica and Europe.
Here’s a story told to Perkins by someone claiming to be “jackal” (a CIA-sponsored mercenary) named “Brett”:
“I walked into El Presidente’s office two days after he was elected and congratulated him.
“He sat behind that big desk grinning at me like the Cheshire Cat.
“I stuck my left hand into my jacket pocket and said, ‘Mr. President, in here I got a couple hundred million dollars for you and your family, if you play the game — you know, be kind to my friends who run the oil companies, treat your Uncle Sam good.’ Then I stepped closer, reached my right hand into the other pocket, bent down next to his face, and whispered,’ In here I got a gun and a bullet with your name on it — in case you decide to keep your campaign promises.’
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“The Great Derangement:
A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, & Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire,”By Matt Taibbi(Spiegel & Grau, New York, $24, hardback, 270 pages)
This book has some real gems of insight — wisdom, even.
Check this one out, for example:
“When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that’s when the real weirdness begins.” (P.132)
Unfortunately, such valid points are scattered thinly — and with considerably more verbiage — through 270 pages of smarmy, self-righteous, arrogance trying to masquerade as humor.
Don’t get me wrong, I did laugh at some of this.
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Say the name Rick Bragg around journalists and you will receive either a wide grin or an earful of criticism, both of which might be warranted. I don’t want to turn this blog into a Poynter debate, but I think even Bragg’s harshest critics will admit he can string words together in ways that make you ache.
And I’m not talking about the sadness in many of his stories, I’m talking purely about the prose. I’m talking about the way reading “The Great Gatsby” makes you ache with the beauty of its language. Reading Rick’s stories sends a chill across your spine because the words are so seamlessly stacked against one another, with the tone of your gregarious uncle telling you all the family secrets.
You can cuss me for waiting almost two weeks to post this, but I’m new to this whole video thing and had to get some help putting it in a format that I could post. You can read Cindy Wolff’s review of Bragg’s newest book, “The Prince of Frogtown,” here. It’s essentially about Bragg’s search for redeeming stories about his father, whom he wrote extensively about in “All Over but the Shoutin’,” and about his own struggle with fatherhood after marrying a woman three years ago who already had kids of her own.
In this clip of his visit at Davis-Kidd, Bragg talks about getting his mother to say nice things about his father for the first time. I was a little emotional after, because it was a week before Father’s Day and a day before my own father’s birthday. I took a colleague from my day job whose son is coming down from Philadelphia this week, and he called me after and thanked me for bringing him along.
Here is the video. Comment, criticize, discuss.
Former Commercial Appeal columnist, Rheta Grimsley Johnson, greeted a receptive standing-room-only crowd last night at the opening of the Memphis Public Library’s Adult Summer Reading program. Admirers packed the largest meeting room at the Central Library and waited patiently in line to have Rheta inscribe copies of her new book “Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana.” (NewSouth Books: $23.95)
She seemed glad to be back in Memphis, opening her comments with the quote: “It’s nice to be remembered in a place you can’t forget.”
Rheta began working for The Commercial Appeal in 1980 at its Greenville, Miss., bureau. She started writing a column for The Commercial Appeal in 1982 and left for The Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1994. Upon her departure, she commented: “”I think when you start recognizing the names on the angry letters, maybe you’ve been there too long. I’ve had a real good run in Memphis. I enjoyed it. I just wanted to try something different.”
She explained that she went into journalism because she thought it was a profession that would never require her to speak in public or wear panty hose. Unfortunately, she said, only one of those things was true.
However much she might despise speaking in public, she’s good at it, and the room rang with laughter as she recounted entertaining tales of her adventures in journalism. Read the rest of this entry »
”The Age of American Unreason”By Susan Jacoby
2008, Pantheon, $26
Hardback, 356 pages
My first encounter with the term “intellectual history” came within the past three years.
I was searching through the online faculty directories at area universities, trying to determine the specialties of various history professors, so I could get their expert opinions on a wide array of current events and places — from Appalachian poverty to Zambian politics, as it were.
I looked at Rhodes College’s Web page for Prof. Lynn Zastoupil. Under “Areas of Expertise,” it listed “European Intellectual History.”
“Cool,” I thought. “That would be a fun area to work in. Imagine researching, writing and teaching that all day.”
I have an uncanny ability to find the least remunerative fields fascinating and fun. The newspaper business, for example.
A century ago, I’d have been jumping into the buggy whip and horse-drawn wagon business with a great deal of enthusiasm.
So, Susan Jacoby’s latest book provides an unwelcome, sobering two-by-four upside the head for anyone who might think that the life of the mind is something the American public is ready to embrace on a large scale — after seven years under a president who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”
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Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Bragg will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 387 Perkins Road Ext., at 1 p.m. Saturday to sign copies and discuss his new book, ”The Prince of Frogtown.”
Some books take a while to get into. I keep reading hoping things will pick up, an author thickens a plot, strengthens a character – anything to woo me into giving up my precious free time to read. Alas, some suitors sit on my nightstand, unrequited, unread.
But not Pulitzer Prize writer Rick Bragg. Whenever I see his name, whether it is a newspaper article or a book, I know I’m in until the end. Maybe it’s because he’s a Southerner that his words glide so easily across my eyes. He vacuums a scene and brings it alive with metaphor and description that never causes the reader to stumble over something that feels contrived.
Most people barely have a life interesting enough to fill one book. Bragg’s filled three. His first was “All Over but the Shoutin’,” about his mother and his newspaper career, followed by “Ava’s Man.” The latest, “The Prince of Frogtown,” is probably the most difficult to read and I suspect the hardest to write. It’s about two fathers: the cruel, pathetic alcoholic Bragg grew up with, and the one Bragg becomes to his stepson, a boy who never knew hunger, poverty or cruelty. Bragg met his wife and married her while he lived in Memphis.
The book teems with tiny details that make even a poor, gritty existence seem magical.
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America”By Chris HedgesCopyright 2006Free Press
Paperback, $14
274 pages
The sentence that’s key to understanding this Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter’s book appears on the last page of the new paperback edition, which is actually part of an interview of the author that appeared Jan. 8, 2007, in Salon.com:
“I don’t know how much it’s apparent, but it’s an angry book.”
That it is.
But it’s not particularly informative about the link between the Christian Right and the “fascist shift” described in Naomi Wolf’s “The End of America” (see my review here).
The vast majority of Hedges’ book describes the various ways in which pillars of the Christian Right condemn the left, the independent woman, the homosexual, the Muslim — and exploit the poor, the female, the old and the non-white.
In this, Hedges is, ahem, preaching to the choir, I think.
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I can’t remember what led me to “Here if You Need Me” by Kate Braestrup. It was a review somewhere. I’m always looking for things beyond The New York Times to find good books. I wasn’t a huge “Marley and Me” fan and that book stayed on the list forever.
But some publication told me this was a good book. Another annoying thing is when what the critic writes is off the mark. Stephen King’s Entertainment Weekly review of “The Ruins” by Scott Smith, for example. The story was a bunch of vines and there were no heroes. No big kick-butt scene at the end.
But I stray. “Here if you Need Me” is one of the first chaplains ever appointed to the Maine Warden Service. Stop yawning! Her writing is like a warm blanket that you nestle in on a cold day with a hot cup of cocoa. It’s the person whose touch you want to feel when you’re in pain. It’s a book that holds your hand.
And that’s what she does. Her job is to be there for the parents whose child is lost in the woods, for the people searching for the child, for the people who find the child.
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