SubscribeThe Braindead Megaphone
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The Braindead Megaphone
by George Saunders - Publisher: Riverhead
- Year: 2007
- Pages: 272
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- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №50
Let me preface this review by saying that despite his ostensible fame—Genius Grant and all that—I’d never heard of George Saunders (or at least not insofar as I remembered him the next day). Taking as gospel his skill as a writer of fiction, his political savvy, poetic sensibility, &c., we must invariably turn to this, his first attempt at a collection of essays.
I am not impressed.
Don’t get me wrong: I agree with Saunders’ premises: the title essay is about how cultural discourse has become so watered down and irrelevant that making political or social choices is like choosing Pepsi as opposed to Coke. The rest of the essays are similarly charged, usually pretty left-leaning. Regardless, he makes good points; especially interesting is his trip to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which is genuinely interesting travel/political writing.
But here’s my issue with Saunders, especially considering all the plaudits he has for his political sensibility and his nuanced craft: he’s not a very good nonfiction writer. His serious essays are generally teases, scraping the first few feet of a very deep issue, hinting at its subtext without ever really plumbing its depths. I invariably compare any essayist to David Foster Wallace, who manages to take any issue and run it through a gauntlet to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible. I kept waiting for Saunders to start making better points, but it never came—only reiterations of the problem’s description, like that hack Seinfeld. “And what’s the deal with political discourse?”
Saunder’s satire is unbearably heavy-handed. It’s like somebody making a bad joke and then elbowing you conspicuously and saying “Get it? Eh? Eh?” Where’s the subtlety? If I want obvious political jokes, I’ll watch Real Time With Bill Maher, who’s much funnier.
One of these days, I’ll need to give Saunder’s fiction a try: it’s very possible I’ll be blown away by his talent. But I would advise him to stick to fiction, because honestly his essays just aren’t any good. Not recommended.
When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden
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When You Ride Alone, You Ride With Bin Laden
by Bill Maher - Publisher: Phoenix Books
- Year: 2003
- Pages: 132
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- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №42
In the sort-of wake of September 11th, when the hurt was still fresh and before our incursion into Iraq had turned the ‘War on Terror’ into a Benny Hill sketch with Ak-47s, Bill Maher, still stinging from being booted from ABC (a move which, admittedly, should be irksome to anyone who cares remotely about free speech), penned this screed against lazy patriots (i.e., the kind who are willing to stick 10 flags on their SUV, but not willing to drive the SUV any less).
I like Bill Maher, but I’m sometimes irritated by his tendency to deliver his pop-wisdom one-liners with a gravitas usually reserved for Stone Phillips. It comes off as spurious and condescending. The damnedest part is that Maher makes good points; really good points, even if I don’t agree with all of them. But this is hardly a good format for it: a short throwaway book that mixes in jokes at inopportune times. Maher doesn’t have the “I’m kidding, but not really” sort of schtick down like, say, Al Franken does.
In 2007, after Dubya has publicly decried—though not acted upon—the US’s dependence on foreign oil, the idea seems, like soooo 5 minutes ago. When Maher wrote this in 2003, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, our dependence upon oil from the Middle East was an integral part of the problem, it was still a somewhat fresh idea. He comments upon, and I distinctly remember this being so, the fact that the American sense of entitlement is so great that being asked to give up anything, be it oil or otherwise, is tantamount to treason. “If I don’t drive this Hummer to work, then the terrorists win!”
There is one way in which this book is now dated, I feel, and that is Maher’s emphasis on nation security. He more or less states, clearly, that the role of the government is to ensure nation security, no matter what the cost. With all the shit that’s gone on in the last four years, I’m almost positive he’s not saying that now. Something I think he’s probably still lobbying for are intelligent profiling of suspects (which I agree with, though I think he’s too glib with the arguments against).
But the crux of the book, in a very general way, is that the war we’re fighting now is very different from the ones that our grandparents fought: Maher’s clever alteration of WWII-era propaganda posters (e.g. “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler”) underscores the notion of personal sacrifice that emboldened “the greatest generation” but by stark contrast, seems almost anathema today. “Conservation is for pussy-footing lib’ruls: real Americans guzzle gas and eat McDonald’s 3 times a week, the way God intended!” It’s all good and fine to say that we support the troops, but all we’re really doing is either calling for them to come home, or saying in no uncertain terms that calling for them to come home is the same as calling for them to lose.
It seems a shame that this book is as short and insubstantial as it is, and that it got so little attention, because it has a lot to say. But, I’m afraid, it is also extremely dated, a mere four years after its initial publications. That’s the world of politics for you.
The Buried Book
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The Buried Book
by David Damrosch - Publisher: Henry Holt & Co.
- Year: 2007
- Pages: 336
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- №25
I’m far from being a historical scholar; I’ve only read Gilgamesh once, and that was years ago. In fact, my interest in history lies more in the development of Northern and Western Europe (linguistics, primarily). Still and all, when I read the premise of this book, I was compelled to give it a try. There are, I imagine, a lot of interesting things that can be said about the discovery, translation, and impact of one of the oldest narratives that we know of.
With some regret, though, I must admit that Damrosch’s book left me cold. Ostensibly about the tale of Gilgamesh itself, the book actually makes very little mention of Gilgamesh, beginning with a broad overview of its rediscovery by British and French archaeologists excavating at Ninevah, but the entire middle of a book is a rambling hash of biographies of important figures like George Smith. These people are undoubtedly critical in the rediscovery of the tablets upon which Gilgamesh was written, but I don’t care about their time spent as ambassadors in Abyssinia. If The Buried Book had managed to accomplish it’s stated goal, I would not be so perturbed by the excess of this tangential trivia, but it seems like Damrosch spent much more time with silly speculation about the state of mind of Assyrian kings and much less time bothering to draw connections between the meaning of this historical epic.
One fact which I did find fascinating was that Gilgamesh, insofar as it contains references to a great “Deluge” which destroyed most of the earth, was thought to be a confirmation of the story of Genesis and the great flood which Noah survived. There are other biblical references in the book, too. When it was first discovered, and when the cuneiform was finally deciphered, the impetus to prove the Bible correct was responsible for much of the initial funding to continue excavations in what is now Iraq. This stuff is food for thought, but there was sadly very little of it.
Writing a conversational sort of book about a “dry” subject takes not just impeccable research, but a lot of stylistic flair. I always point to Bill Byron as someone who gets this sort of thing right: there is a target mix of tabloid and textbook. I appreciate Damrosch’s work on this book, but he needs to brush up on his skills a bit before I’d bother to read anything else by him.
Hanging Babylon: Functionalist policy and the war in Iraq
Alternatively, read the PDF format
Several weeks ago, the War in Iraq entered its fourth year—despite the official “end of major combat” that the codpiece-sporting President announced mere months after it began—and the steady sectarian violence pursuant to the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party shows no encouraging signs of abatement. It has been a busy four years, with opponents of the war criticizing its planners for the endless stream of seemingly empty motivations, the President and his closest associates maintaining the need to finish stabilizing the region, regardless of cost, and a growing swell of political moderates noting the sour taste that the whole affair has left in their mouths. To a reader in 2007, it seems silly—almost masochistic—to read accounts like Anne Garrels’ Naked in Baghdad: the book chronicles the NPR correspondent’s time in Iraq from just before to less than a month after the United States’ invasion, and its message seems congruent with the cries that have been heard since 2003, the truth falling somewhere in between the most stringent rhetoric from either ideological side. This is old news—no pun intended.
Garrels’ fragmented narrative does not coalesce into an overarching parable about preemptive war or the human cost of conflict, nor does it fall prey to maudlin sympathies. The most important “string”—to borrow one of Garrels’ own metaphors—to be found in the story of Iraq’s fall is the similarities to the ailing Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not only is Russian language and influence pervasive in the Middle East—Garrels notes this, citing the Soviet Union’s own intrusions into the region during the 20th century—but the parallels between Saddam Hussein and some of the former U.S.S.R.’s less illustrious leaders, and between the two countries’ essential dissolution into chaos and mob rule during regime change, is a pressing allusion.
Love, Poverty, and War
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Love, Poverty, and War
by Christopher Hitchens - Publisher: Nation Books
- Year: 2003
- Pages: 475
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- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №22
Anyone who’s frequented my blog to any significant degree knows that I am (mostly) a fan of Christopher Hitchens. I find him an excellent journalist, as well as a man of scruples, a great lover/scholar of literature, an iconoclast of the highest order, and an all-around interesting writer. Most importantly, he neither requests nor offers any alliances except to the principles he holds dear: liberty, civil liberty, intellectual vigor, and the rooting out of corruption.
Of late, you might know Hitchens for his unapologetic support of the invasion of Iraq. He’s been a talking head on a variety of networks—FNC included—to proffer his justifications for the war. But Hitchens has been around a long time: you might recall his screed against Mother Teresa, his contempt for Bill Clinton, or his struggle to oust and prosecute Henry Kissinger for war crimes (all three of this subjects have been tackled in books by Hitchens). He’s written in a variety of contexts—more than I ever realized—and this collection of essays seeks to offer a decent cross section of that canon.
The book, as the title might indicate, is divided into three sections.
- Love • This section consists mostly of Hitchens’ passions—that is, reviews of famous literature or books or history. It begins with a lengthy essay about Winston Churchill (through the lens of several biographies and books and history) written for Atlantic Monthly. It continues along that vein, jumping from introductions of Huxley’s Brave New World to contextual criticism of Rudyard Kipling, to reviews of other literary criticism. It spans a wide gamut, but it’s a side of Hitchens that is rarely seen except to owners of nth-anniversary reprints of select novels or subscribers to Atlantic Monthly or a ragtag collection of literary journals. It’s not the best lit-crit I’ve ever read, but it’s still damned interesting.
- Americana • As a postscript to the “Love” section is a series of articles dealing specifically with American culture. One long essay, I believe for Harper’s, recalls Hitchens’ journey across historic Route 66 in a Corvette, and reminds me more of Bill Bryon’s The Lost Continent than anything by Hitchens.
- Poverty • This section is a catch-all for any of Hitchens’ polemics that aren’t Iraq-related. A screed against Mother Teresa, for instance, as well as an extraordinarily poignant piece about an execution he witnessed in Missouri (and of course capital punishment in general). These are some of his most reflective pieces, even if they contain at points a fair amount of ire. Remember that Hitchens isn’t one to pull any punches.
- War • “War” is, as one might imagine, predicated entirely upon the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it is further bifurcated into a “Before September” section, which consists largely of early-90s pieces about the first Gulf War—and a notable argument about Montenegro during the conflict in Yugoslavia—, and an “After September,” which chronicles some of Hitchens more immediate responses to the attack, more measured pieces months later advocating military responses, and finally a few articles dealing with the invasion of Iraq.
I’m sorry to say that the final essay, for all its merits, strikes me as a somewhat jingoistic, “Iraq: A Country on the Move!” sort of fluff piece. It’s a soft end, I think, and not one that holds up well several years later, when prospects aren’t as bright and sunny as Hitchens makes them out to be. Still and all, one has to respect Hitchens’ clarity of argument—I find that my own opinions have been tempered somewhat by his writing—and the nuance and skill with which he approaches his subject. Love, Poverty, and War is a mere sampling of Hitchens’ incredible archives, but it’s the sort of compilation I’ve been looking for, since I’m not a regular reader of anything but his Slate articles. If you’re a Hitchens fan, or just want to see what he has to say, give this one a chance.
What is the What
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What is the What
by Dave Eggers - Publisher: McSweeney's
- Year: 2006
- Pages: 475
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- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №19
My introduction to Dave Eggers was his startling semiautobiographical A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a stupendous and rather abstruse bit of metafiction. I must say that I was a little surprised to see Eggers tackle a subject like the Sudanese civil war–not that I doubt his multiculturalism or his sensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate, but I was always under the impression that Eggers’ forte was firmly in the school of Euro-American esotery.
It is difficult enough to raise awareness about the conflict in Sudan (Darfur, specifically) today, but even fewer people know that today’s problems actually follow the violent, protracted civil war that raged in the late 80s and early 90s in Sudan. I won’t bore you with the specifics: look it up if you’re curious–better yet, read this book. Eggers’ What is the What is based on the real-life struggles of Valentino Achak Deng, an honest-to-goodness Sudanese refugee who is friends with the author. I should stress, as the author does, that What is the What is fiction: a novel built upon a framework of stories told to Eggers by the real Deng over a period of years. this makes the book straddle an odd sort of state between fiction and nonfiction–Eggers exploits this to weave a tale that is patently not postmodernism or metafiction, but a sort of plaintive mourning for the sorry state of Sudan and the plight of Sudanese refugees in America. The frame narrative–Valentino in present-day Atlanta–acts as a sort of ironic foil for the main character’s flashbacks that detail everything from the burning of his village to the mass exodus of Dinka children, to his time in a refugee camp, to his resettlement in America. I say ironic because Eggers insists on drawing parallels between the sort of injustices a Sudanese refugee faces in an unforgiving American city: he has a job, attends school, and has experienced much generosity, but the book opens with his being held hostage in an apartment while two African Americans loot his belongings. Later, at the hospital, he waits for aid, feeling overlooked and abused. The paralles are subtle, but Eggers is too careful a writer for it to be coincidence.
What I think is most impressive about this book is the difficulty in writing–as a hyperliterate white author–in the voice of a Sudanese refugee over a number of years, and moreover doing it with a fealty to the personality and understanding of the character. Having thought a lot lately about narrative voice and the assumptions of authorial narration, I noticed this in particular, because Eggers’ narration isn’t overly complex (ok, he slips sometimes, but not severely), as it shouldn’t be from the perspective of a young, uneducated Sudanese boy or an older and wiser but still naïve Sudanese man, yet he wields the relatively simple syntax and language that flexes its inherent power to move and affect the reader. It’s an impressive feat, truly.
I’m glad to see issues like this being brought up in “hip” fiction like this. It’s not an authority on the history of the Sudan, but it’s a powerful glimpse into the personal horrors of genocide and the opportunity for regrowth and regeneration.
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