Book Reviews

“I’m not going to insult you by feeding you aphorisms about omelets and broken eggs… you signed up for this job. You thought, as much as I did, that what we were doing was world-changing. That’s what you wanted, remember? Do you think the world changes by being asked politely? Or do you think there has to be risk?” She took a deep breath. All the emotions I normally watched her puree into professionalism were churning on her face. “I came here,” she said, “because you—because—I thought you would understand. Don’t you? Being the experiment.”

                                       From The Ministry of Time

“What you doin’ out here?” (Huck) asked.

“Furst off, I’m freezin’,” I said. “What you be doin’ on dis ilan? And why you got blood all ova ya?” 

“I kilt myself,” the boy said.

I looked him over. “You din’t do a good job.”

‘Well, Miss Watson, that damn judge and Pap think I’m dead and that’s all that matters. They think I was murdered.”

“Why dey think dat?” I asked.

“I kilt a pig and spread his blood all around Pap’s cabin. I made a mess like there had been a fight in there.”

In my head I was doing the math. Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away. Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?”

                                                from James

There are poems I repeat to myself, almost like a hum, or a prayer, or a spell. I’ve said them so often they trip off my tongue. It feels like they’ve gone into my body. I know some people who learn many poems off by heart, and I keep trying to start up that habit again. I haven’t yet been successful. So I return to the ones I’ve been repeating for years, again, and again, and again. They’re comforts, a little bit of home carried in sound.

from Poetry Unbound

At a certain point in most long-term relationships, it’s expected that public displays of affection will be supplanted by public displays of annoyance. After six or more years, affection in public takes on the flavor of protesting too much and reeks of the uniquely sad kindness an unfaithful spouse showers on the person he’s betraying.

from You Only Call When You’re in Trouble

Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism. Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago (in The Origins of Totalitarianism). When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness…They revert to tribe. Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism…is connection based on mutual hatred. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on a common foe…Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.

        from The Second Mountain

What Washington deemed an awful crisis, Alexander Hamilton accounted an opportunity. Some of the difference was temperamental. Washington preferred calm, while Hamilton thrived on uproar, to the extent of creating his own when circumstances didn’t provide enough. But some reflected the different arcs of their careers. Washington expected that his days of great accomplishment were over; he currently enjoyed all the esteem his ego desired. Hamilton’s career had hardly started, his egotism was far from sated, and every crack in the status quo afforded an avenue he might exploit to advance himself.

            from Founding Partisans

The summer before his graduate program started, Dave landed a decent-paying job at a Portland, Oregon, branch of the Pioneer Trail Bank chain. And there, at a college pal’s wedding, he met the sexy, hard-partying Irish American Moira O’Reilly. A loyal product of parochial schools, Moira was thrilled by the long-haired liberal priests of the era who held that while birth control is a mortal sin, the “rhythm method” was not a sin if confession absolved the rhythmic sinners.

                       from Sun House

This is who we are: the richest country on earth, with more poverty than any other advanced democracy. If America’s poor founded a country, that country would have a bigger population than Australia or Venezuela. Almost one in nine Americans—including one in eight children—live in poverty…Our gross domestic product is larger than the combined economies of Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France and Italy. America’s poverty is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.

from Poverty, By America

“Nothing was more frequent than to bury eight or ten men from each ship every morning,” Millecamp wrote in his journal. Altogether, nearly 300 of the Centurion’s some 500 men were eventually listed as “DD”—Discharged Dead. Of the roughly 400 people on the Gloucester who had departed from England, three quarters were reported to have been buried at sea…Byron tried to offer his deceased companions a proper sea burial, but there were so many corpses, and so few hands to assist, that the bodies often had to be heaved overboard unceremoniously.

from The Wager

Signs of trouble appeared well before the stock market crash in October, 1929. Two years earlier a sharp drop in construction nationwide had rocked the lumber industry. Unsold inventory crowded the docks […] Most people clung to the single-minded belief that—despite resolutely insisting it was no mere Company Town—in the end the Company could and would support them. It was a dangerous co-dependence. Besides acting as employer and financier, the company was expected to be chief educator, city manager, church and community organizer, all-purpose supplier and savior. Until it wasn’t.

fromEmpire of Trees