Tis the Season

It occurred to me over the Thanksgiving weekend that after three years of paid participation in the holiday retail experience, this year I am free to don my civilian garb and stroll blithely past the giftwrap lined trenches in which I used to toil. I have to admit before I started working in a bookstore I never gave much thought to what the month of December means to America's retail army. But then, on December 1st, 2001, I was hired as holiday help. I hadn't been at my new gig for longer than a few hours when I was informed that, since there was no time to train me on cash register, phones or anything else really, I would be "designated giftwrapper." This came as quite a shock. Up until that point, every single gift I had ever purchased had been wrapped by my mother, sisters, or girlfriend. If none of them were available, I would simply present the gift to its recipient in the shopping bag that it came in. That December, though, I put in many hours at the "wrapping station," struggling with fists full of Scotch tape and wrapping paper as disapproving customers peered over my shoulders.

For many stores, and, it seemed, my independent bookstore in particular, the holiday gift-buying season is vital. Between success and failure lie two dozen days in December. There was a lot of pressure, but it was fun, too. With double the staff and quadruple the customers, the crush of human generosity was heartening.

But the holidays bring out a certain amount of desperation, too. Every year, I fielded scores of questions that were variations of this one: "My dad's a lawyer. Do you have any books about lawyers?" Or worse: "What do you think I should get my mom?" As I got good at it, I could watch the blind panic fade from their eyes, reassured that the book that I had just slid into their hands might do the trick. As Christmas neared, the real tough cases came out. The frantic parents emptyhanded on the way to the houses of their grown children, or the daughter who decides at the last minute that she'll get a gift for her step-mother after all, if only just to make her feel guilty. Saddest of all were the drunks on holiday-inspired benders who might stumble in a day or two before Christmas, forgetting why they were there but pulled by some ingrained impulse to try to buy something for someone.

I'll just be a regular shopper this year, but miss I'll the frenzied energy of working at the bookstore, and for many Decembers to come, I suspect that the peaceful snowfall of whatever northern clime I inhabit will remind me of December drama at a bookstore nestled in the palm trees of Los Angeles.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Monday Linkday

My mom pointed out this article in the Washington Post about a bookstore in Baltimore that primarily gives away books rather than selling them. It's called the Book Thing:

"That's the whole thing with the Book Thing," Wattenberg says. "All I am is a middleman. The people have books.... They give them to me, they're happy to have a place to see them go somewhere, and the people that get the books are happy to get the books."

Also, file under conspicuous consumption: Anyone looking for an extravagant gift for the film buff in their life should look no further.

Spotted on the el: The Travels of Marco Polo... sure the red line doesn't go all the way to China, but we can dream.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

An Emerging Best of List

When I posted the CS Monitor "best of" list the other day, I mentioned how it seemed that this year there weren't many young, exciting writers grabbing headlines from the established old guard. Dan Wickett, proprietor of The Emerging Writers Network left a comment recommending several young writers who deserve to be on some of these "best of" lists. He also sent me an email with even more titles. They seem like a good bunch of books to explore, so I thought I'd reprint them here:

Dog on the Cross by Aaron Gwyn - excellent short story collection from Algonquin. He's currently finishing up debut novel about a tattoo removal artist.

Another Perfect Catastrophe - Brad Barkley - another excellent short story collection, his second to go with two novels.

The Book of Ralph (excerpt) - John McNally - a very good novel. When Mitch Albom was choosing a book for The Today Show book club, he announced this was a close second (He chose Andrew Sean Greer's novel).

Under Cottonwoods (excerpt) by Stephen Grace - an excellent debut novel put out by Lyons Press.

Poe & Fanny (FAQs) by John May - another Algonquin effort - May's debut about the year that Poe wrote "The Raven." Excellent.

D.B. (excerpt) by Elwood Reid - his third novel, but he's still under 40 years old.

Prisoners of War (excerpt) by Steve Yarbrough. An author who should be considered one of the old guard - he writes rings around most of them. His other two novels and three short story collections were excellent but this was really top notch.

Plain Heathen Mischief (excerpt) by Martin Clark. This southern judge pens his second exciting literary thriller of sorts.

American Desert by Percival Everett. With only his 15th novel (to go with two short story collections and the other novel he co-wrote and published this year and a children's storybook) Everett finally seems to be garnering both critical notice, and getting more than one copy of his latest book to be carried by the Detroit area Borders and Barnes and Nobles.

Welcome to the Fallen Paradise by Dayne Sherman. Published towards the end of the year by MacAdam/Cage. His debut - reminiscent of the novels of Tom Franklin or William Gay.

About Grace (excerpt) by Anthony Doerr. The debut novel by the author of The Shell Collector, which won about every literary award it was up for two years ago and is still spawning O'Henry Award winners.

The Green Age Of Asher Witherow by M. Allen Cunningham. This 26 year old's debut began its life as the number one choice of Booksense 76. Not bad. It was deserved.

Animal Crackers (excerpt) by Hannah Tinti - This short story collection by the editor of One Story won well deserved rave reviews in many, many papers. She's also sold her debut novel to be published some time in the next year or so.

Non-Fiction:

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. The advance news on this was so high that they ran out of galleys. It's received nothing but rave reviews since. As well as Flynn writes poetry, this memoir might just top it.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Classic Shorts by Andrew Saikali

The recent news, here in Canada, of our great lady of letters, Alice Munro, taking the Giller prize for Runaway (excerpt), her latest collection of short fiction, gives us a chance to praise that wonderful literary form - the short story - and the authors who have practiced it with precision, humanity, and wit.

Collected volumes of short fiction often provided me with an easy approach to the many writers who would become my favourites. Tight, economical writing, a whole world painted with just a few deft strokes - and I was hooked.

And so it was that Welcome to the Monkey House became the book of my formative college years. In short order, I would devour all of Kurt Vonnegut's marvelous works, but I still hold dear this short story collection. Even now, years later, the thought of "Harrison Bergeron" makes me simultaneously laugh and shudder at the alternate universe he inhabits - a world in which all citizens are subjected to absurd physical and mental "handicapping," a leveling-out process that results in a form of institutionalized mediocrity. Sameness.

For Ernest Hemingway, clarity and precision were his stock in trade, and nowhere is this more resonant than in In Our Time, a collection of early shorts. Hemingway can present Nick Adams to us and reveal more of his world in 5 pages than many writers would dare to in 500. "The Battler" stands out - a tale of young Nick's encounter with a disfigured and psychologically damaged prizefighter while riding the rails. Equally powerful are the numerous vignettes that Hemingway intersperses between the stories, many of them harrowing slices of war.

Hemingway's contemporary, F. Scott Fitzgerald, gives us Jazz Age Stories. It's within these pages that you can experience the remarkable "Diamond As Big As The Ritz", an astonishing tale of money, power, fear (of losing it) and the complete moral bankruptcy that ensues. This is an unparalleled story of illusion and disillusion. It creeps up on you and will echo for years and years.

While The Catcher in the Rye has become such an iconic cultural phenomenon, its often forgotten that J.D. Salinger wrote anything else. Unless of course you've read Franny and Zooey, or Raise High the Roof Beam. Or my personal choice, the collection Nine Stories. Then you never forget. This is dysfunction grounded in reality, not simply splayed out for shock value or a quick laugh. I recommend you revisit the extended Glass family in the deceptively simmering "A Perfect Day For Bananafish."

In recent years, I've come to regard Anton Chekhov as the master of the form. Any collection will do. Try Lady With Lapdog and Other Stories. I challenge you to find an unnecessary or misplaced word. Simple, perfect writing. These selections just scratch the surface, and of course there's no shortage of good contemporary short fiction. But it serves us well to be reminded from time to time of "the greats" - not as an untouchable force that stomps on any newcomers, but rather as artistic touchstones that let you approach, and that remind you of first principles. These masters have given us a vital part of our literary canon.

Also recommended: The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde, James Joyce's (surprisingly readable) Dubliners, and Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver

- C. Max Magee @ 4:50 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Welcome Wagon

It's Thanksgiving and we are expecting many guests, so don't expect much blogging. There will be some more "best of the year" type posts as the lists are published in various places. I'm thinking about compiling a master list to see which books appear on the most lists as I did last year... we'll see. In the meantime, some of you may recall my invitation a few weeks back to anyone who would like to contribute to The Millions. And now I am able to happily introduce our first regular guest contributor.

Andrew Saikali is an editor in the Globe and Mail newsroom in Toronto and a long-time reader of The Millions. When not listening to Bob Dylan or The Walkmen, he can be found reading.

Welcome, Andrew! Stay tuned for his first post, arriving shortly. There are a few other folks in the pipeline right now (you know who you are). And if anyone else would like to contribute to The Millions, drop me line.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Best of 2004 Begins

Among the first to announce their lists of best books of the year is the CS Monitor, which delivers a solid but unsurprising batch of books. Here's fiction and here's nonfiction. Am I just out of the loop or was this year's crop generally lacking in books by exciting, young authors? Was 2004 the year of the old reliable?

- C. Max Magee @ 7:43 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Books as objects

I've really been enjoying Scott Esposito's blog Conversational Reading lately. Recently he's put up a couple of posts that speak to how our love for books goes beyond just the words themselves. But before I get to his posts I had a few thoughts about this as well. One of the reasons the we love books as objects, I think, is because they are all so different from one another in appearance. Whenever a new book comes out, part of the anticipation comes from wanting to see what the book will look like. One of my typical diversions when I worked at the bookstore was to read the "briefly noted" reviews in the New Yorker and then go find the books reviewed, just to see what they looked like. On other occasions my fellow booksellers and I would stand in front of the fiction display table and discuss which book looked the best, rather than which book would be the best to read. Mrs. Millions, who occasionally makes books, got me into the habit of peeking under the dustjackets of hardcover books to see what they look like underneath, and ever since I have been fascinated by the little details -- usually stylized monograms -- in the canvas hardcovers that most folks never see. There is a reason why we display our books on open shelves. They are a treat for the eye. Which brings me back to Conversational Reading, where Scott posted some images from the amazing experiment at Adobe Bookshop in San Francisco where they rearranged all their books by color. (here's some more photos). We also treat our books differently than we treat other objects. After a while each book carries with it two stories, the one printed on its pages and the one about the journey the book has taken before it gets to you sometimes through many hands and emblazoned with many jottings and markings. In another post Esposito writes about marking books up as he reads them. He mentions that second hand bookstores often turn these marked up books away, but I, for one, happen to love finding the mysterious notes of a book's former owners.

On a related note, in keeping with the stories as fetish objects theme, I came upon an interesting project via Pia Z. Ehrhardt's blog today. It's called The World's Smallest Magazine. You send them a book of stamps, and they send you a postcard with a 250 word story on it every month.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

My review of The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen

I'm a big fan of narrative-style history books, and it's always fun to see a heavily researched piece of history that floats along like a novel. The problem with Erik Larsen's The Devil in the White City is that it fails, at times, to feel like a strong account of historical events. The book follows two and a half storylines that intertwine, if only geographically, but never intersect. The backdrop is the World's Fair held in Chicago in 1893, a now forgotten event that transfixed the world at the time. Daniel Burnham is the renowned architect of the Fair, beset by meddlers and bureaucrats; H. H. Holmes, whose torturous schemes are at times hard to fathom in their cruelty, is a serial killer who haunts Chicago during the Fair; and Patrick Prendergast, to whom the book only gives over two dozen or so pages, is an increasingly delusional man whose obsession with Chicago's showy political scene leads to tragedy. The plotlines in the book are fascinating, both because Larson lends them a cinematic flair and because there is a continual sense of wonder that history has managed to forget such vibrant characters. Despite, or perhaps because of, Larsen's ability to craft such a readable story, the book does inspire some raised eyebrows at times. A scan through the notes at the end of the book reveals the times when Larsen speculates about his characters in the absence of hard facts. While I don't necessarily disagree with this practice, these moments in the book tend to feel transparent. Likewise, the structure of the book is a bit flimsy as the three characters within share little but being in the same city during the same period of time, and the strenuous effort put forth by Larsen to connect these three characters tends to detract from the stories themselves, as each character is certainly worthy of his own book (even the poor, bewildered Prendergast). Despite these flaws, the book was still a delight to read, especially on my daily rides on Chicago's elevated trains which still snake through the city as they did when the World's Fair was held here in 1893.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:20 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

And the winners are...

The winners of the 2004 National Book Awards have been announced:

• Fiction: The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck (excerpt)
• Non-fiction: Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle (excerpt)
• Young People's Literature: Godless by Pete Hautman (excerpt)
• Poetry: Door In The Mountain: New And Collected Poems, 1965-2003 by Jean Valentine (poems)

- C. Max Magee @ 10:26 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Moldy Links

The book bloggers are all waiting for the announcement of the National Book Award winner, and I, too, have to wonder what will happen once we know the recipient of the award in the fiction category. These women have gotten a lot of grief from folks who think they shouldn't be there. What I'm wondering is will the NY Times and all the rest end their crusade and graciously accept the winner, or will the winner, whoever she may be, have to bear more criticism on her own. We shall see. In the meantime I have dug up some old links that are, unlike all this NBA stuff, not very timely, but they are good, so I wanted to share them with you:

• First, take a look at Jonathan Yardley's fantastic discussion of the American novels that are, to his mind, the best of the last 125 years. He calls it "State of the Art."
• The discussion among my fellow book bloggers about the Paris Reviews magnificent decision to put all of their interviews online has got me thinking about the recently departed George Plimpton, which is why I was happy to find this wonderful interview that he conducted with Truman Capote about In Cold Blood
• Finally, there are two types of people in this world... well, not really, but in this post from earlier this year, Michael at 2Blowhards explains the difference between movie people and book people and a lively discussion follows.

Well, that's enough from the old bookmarks file. Expect more timely news sometime soon.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:35 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Blind No More

If you spend much time reading the various book blogs, you probably came across this National Book Award blind item at Beatrice. I did and I couldn't stop wondering who this slighted author was. Speculation abounded at Tingle Alley, and I was stumped, too. But after stumbling upon a clue in the comments of a post at Mad Max Perkins, I did some snooping around, and I can now reveal that the slighted author is Jim Shepard. His books, Project X and Love and Hydrogen, were not submitted for consideration for the NBA because, according to Beatrice.com, his publisher did not follow the proper procedures. Now, I'm not so sure that either of Shepard's books would have made the cut. But you never know. And you also have to wonder if everyone would be making such a big fuss if one of our women from New York were a man from Massachusetts.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Plagiarism: maybe not so bad?

Malcolm Gladwell argues that perhaps we are too extreme when it comes to policing plagiarism. In an article in this week's New Yorker (link expires), Gladwell tells the very personal story of a profile that he wrote being plagiarized by Bryony Lavery in writing her Tony-nominated play Frozen. The experience led Gladwell to wonder if plagiarism, far from being the literary equivalent of a capital crime, is actually a necessary ingredient in many a creative endeavor. Gladwell, by the way, has new book coming out in a couple of months, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, excerpts of which you can read here.

On a similarly counterintuitive note, The Economist has decided that our obsession with intellectual property is misguided (link expires), and, in fact, "in America, many experts believe that dubious patents abound, such as the notorious one for a 'sealed crustless sandwich.'"

Speaking of sandwiches, In an interview with Wired, Jeff Tweedy of the band Wilco continues with the intellectual property theme by declaring that "Music is not a loaf of bread."

- C. Max Magee @ 9:27 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Book from the Underground

I haven't mentioned any art or photography books on The Millions in a while, but the other day a book caught my eye that I thought was worth mentioning. New York Underground: The Anatomy Of A City by Julia Solis is a collection of photographs taken in the myriad of passageways and tunnels that make up New York's unnamed subterranean sister city. You can have a look at some of the pictures here. If you're still interested after looking at those, snoop around Dark Passages, where you'll find lots more photos of New York's creepy, forgotten places.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:27 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Brave Historians

To continue from yesterday's post about Iris Chang, I mentioned that she was among the brave historians who choose to study some of the most horrible and painful periods in human history. There are many others like her, and though these books are not a pleasure to read, the knowledge that they impart is a valuable reminder of, as I said yesterday, what we are capable of. So, because I've been thinking about this, I've compiled an informal list of brave history books. I'm sure there are many others that I don't have here, so feel free to add your suggestion in the comments field.

• Gulag by Anne Applebaum (excerpt) -- the Soviet forced labor system that underpinned Communism
• We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (excerpt) -- "An anatomy of the war in Rwanda, a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath."
• Maus by Art Spiegelman -- Spiegelman's unique and emotional look at how the Holocaust shaped his family history.
• "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (excerpt) -- "A character-driven study of some of the darkest moments in our national history, when America failed to prevent or stop 20th-century campaigns to exterminate Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, and Rwandans."
• Shah of Shahs, The Emperor, and Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski (excerpt from Imperium) -- Each book describes how a sick government can destroy its people.
• Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami (excerpt) -- A bizarre cult poisons innocent commuters on the Tokyo subway.
• Hiroshima by John Hersey -- We ended the war, but at what cost?

- C. Max Magee @ 8:20 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sad News: Iris Chang

I met Iris Chang about a year and a half ago. She was passing through Los Angeles, and she stopped at the bookstore where I used to work to sign some copies of her book, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. The book hadn't rewritten history and showered her with critical acclaim like The Rape of Nanking. But this time her book tour had taken her to Chinese-American cultural centers, which she seemed to appreciate. She was talkative in a quiet sort of way and lingered for a long time talking to the staff and browsing the shelves.

The news that she committed suicide is a shock. As are the suggestions that she was driven to this by looking too long and too hard into the parts of human history that rest of the world works so hard to forget. We need historians and authors like Chang to remind us of what we are capable of. (More on Chang from the SF Chronicle.)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:38 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 31st in a Series (Who is Wells Tower?)

Lou writes in trying to track down some info on a young writer:

What can you tell me about the writer Wells Tower? I've only seen three published works by him, but his writing is quite amazing. His piece in the newest Pushcart Prize was brilliant.

I hadn't heard of Wells Tower before Lou wrote in with this question, but after doing a little research, and reading some of his work, I would definitely say that Tower is a writer to keep an eye on. When his first published story appeared in the Paris Review in 2001, Tower was in the MFA program at Columbia according to Maud Newton's interview with the executive editor of the Review, Brigid Hughes. Since then he has continued to do well. His Pushcart prizewinning story "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned" appears in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and he has a story in McSweeney's 14. He has also written some substantial non-fiction for the Washington Post Magazine, including a great article called The Deep End -- "At 13, George Romero is beginning to navigate a world of romance, danger and possibility. The Wheaton-Glenmont Pool is a good place to start." And another called Rhyme & Reason -- "Can a rapper whose street cred is complicated by a college degree become the next big thing in hip-hop?" The only other thing I was able to dig up on Tower is that he was once in a band called Hellbender. If Mr. Tower ever happens upon this blog, I hope he will email me so we can find out what he's up to. Thanks for the question, Lou! Keep them coming everybody!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:41 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Monday Linkday

I've mentioned here before that I'm currently getting my masters in new media journalism in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. As such, expect to see the occasional post on the topic from here on out. To that end, I want to mention Dan Gillmor's book We the Media. Gillmor is well-known for his blog which is, broadly speaking, about the blogging phenomenon itself. The book takes on the question of where blogs fit into the panoply of the media. It's worth a look for anyone who's wondered if these here blogs are good for anything beyond killing time in their cubicles. Best of all, the entire book is available for free at the publisher's website.

That's enough new media for now. In other news Michael Chabon's new Sherlock Holmes tale, The Final Solution: A Story Of Detection, is out tomorrow. We'll see what the reviews bring, but in the meantime, take a look at this excerpt.

Finally, have a look at this: A Colorado man is compiling "The Great Library Card Collection."

- C. Max Magee @ 5:53 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Brits are Just Outrageous

Some bloggers mentioned Penguin UK's "goodbooking" campaign last spring when it was first announced, but now that it's been up and running for a while, I wanted to revisit it. Oh... my... God. Apparently it's not possible to get people interested in reading unless you provide them with a Maxim magazine-style melange of bold graphic design, a dumbed-down system for rating books, and busty models handing out cheques for a thousand pounds. Somehow the idea that an unsuspecting guy will be presented a large sum of money this month by a hired model for reading Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? doesn't quite compute. Setting aside the models for a moment, have a look at the bizarre rating system that they have concocted to get people interested in reading their books. So, if I'm reading this right, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood delivers three doses of death, two of crime, and one each of fast cars, greed, and politics. But don't worry everybody, this isn't just a ridiculous marketing ploy, it has been scientifically proven that "women are attracted to men who read books." (P.S. it's ok if you're gay.)

Oh, those crazy Brits... anyway, on to more serious matters. Earlier this week, several book bloggers (myself included) posted about books that could help people digest/deal with/move on from Tuesday's election. Now, an Ask Metafilter thread, inspired by book bloggers, asks, "Can books make a difference?"

Speaking of important books, here's a batch of lists that cover some different takes on what makes up the canon of great literature.

I suppose everyone has noticed the new look for The Millions. Pretty snazzy, eh?

- C. Max Magee @ 11:36 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Noted News Items

Paul Auster is still getting mileage out of a short story that appeared in the New York Times on Christmas day 1990. "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story" was subsequently released as a limited edition book illustrated by Brian Cronin. The story became the inspiration for the films Smoke and Blue in the Face. Now, Henry Holt is releasing another edition of the story. This time the book is illustrated by an Argentinean artist named, cryptically, ISOL. Here's the story if you want to read it.

The London Review of Books is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, the Guardian sits down with LRB editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers.

The CS Monitor continues to provide its capsule reviews of the National Book Award nominees. Here are the reviews for the young adult category.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:18 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Nation Divided

There is a sort of raw bitterness gripping the country these days. People in the red states and the blue states are feeling fear and rancor, and it is directed at each other, not terrorists. From every radio, television, and newspaper, we are hearing that we live in a nation divided. It is true, the citizens of this country occupy a wide and diverse range of viewpoints on many subjects. And we each huddle around one party or the other, one candidate or the other, and the distance between the two camps can seem vast. A sampling of the headlines: "Bush vows to unite a divided nation" says the Chicago Tribune. "Very close vote shows U.S. still deeply divided" says the San Francisco Chronicle. "A deepening divide between red and blue" says the CS Monitor. There are hundreds more. So this might be a good time to look back at some other times when our nation has been divided, just for the sake of perspective. And, of course, there are some great books that can help us do this.

The Civil War: A nation doesn't get much more divided than this. Forget red map, blue map; this was grey map, blue map, brother against brother. For four years the nation was torn asunder. 560,000 dead. It becomes hard to declare that our nation is divided when you remember the Civil War. You can read about the period of time when the country was at its most divided in The Civil War, 3-Volume Box Set, an iconic history by Shelby Foote. Or if you prefer a one volume treatment, you can try James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, another fantastic book. These are, of course, just two selections among hundreds on the topic.

Civil rights: These days we've got battling bumper stickers and arguments about torn up lawn signs. People are declaring that they will move to Canada, while others say good riddance, but it wasn't long ago that this nation was divided over Civil Rights and desegregation. Brave souls fought against voter intimidation and school segregation and faced the seething anger of those who used firehoses, police dogs, and even murder to maintain the status quo. The pundits will tell you now that we are a nation deeply, perhaps irreparably, divided, but how divided can we be compared to our struggles against segregation and Jim Crow? There is much to read on the topic, but the articles contained in the Library of America's collection Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963 provide a glimpse of the Civil Rights movement as it was happening (don't forget the second volume, 1963 to 1973, when you finish the first). Another (again, out of many) worth reading is Diane McWhorter's Pulitzer winner from 2002, Carry Me Home : Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (excerpt).

McCarthyism and the Red Scare: Do you regret anything you did in college? Did you used to be a member of another political party? In the 1950s you could have been dragged in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and made to explain yourself. Those labeled "Reds" faced blacklists and public derision. The nation for a time was divided between McCarthy's supporters and those they sought to label as communists. People may accuse the recent campaigns of similar fearmongering, but our country is not so divided that House Committees are wrongfully accusing private citizens of treasonous acts. There are many books that cover the historical details, but I've always found Arthur Miller's parable of McCarthyism, The Crucible to be much more powerful. One of my favorite films is also a parable of these troubled times. Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront

So there are just three examples of exactly how divided this country can get. I don't think the red-staters and blue-staters will be getting together for a picnic any time soon, but things aren't going to get as bad as these examples from American history. We live in times that are difficult and uncertain, but after witnessing the self-pity and rending of garments that have resulted from this campaign and the election that followed, I thought it best to try to put things in perspective. It made me feel better, how about you?

Update: Some of my fellow bloggers are also turning to books to get them past their post-election malaise. Have a look at this excellent post at Conversational Reading. Bookninja, meanwhile, gives us a more foreboding reading list.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:45 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Monday Linkday

Don't bother looking for that book you need, a robot will do it for you. Will browsing disappear as robots take over libraries?

Mad Max Perkins, "currently a senior executive for a major New York publisher," has entered the world of blogs. Who is this masked man?

Moleskine, maker of the world's greatest notebooks, has added the Story Board Notebook to its ever expanding line of notebook products. "Advertising creatives, graphic designers, filmmakers, and cartoonists" rejoice!

I enjoyed reading an excerpt of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta. A good pick for anyone with an interest in the subcontinent.

- C. Max Magee @ 5:25 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post