NBCC Reads, Fall 2008: Long Tail #5

Time for another Long Tail post from the most recent NBCC Reads. This time around, we've got suggestions from blogger Mark Sarvas (whose first novel, Harry, Revised, was published earlier this year) and Janice Harayda, a novelist, former NBCC board member, and the the proprietor of One Minute Book Reviews.

Mark Sarvas: The book most relevant to the election never once mentions the words "Obama" or "McCain." But Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal is about what happens when the high ideals of culture are degraded; when "elite" is turned into an epithet; when ignorance is celebrated and high ideals are mocked. This slim volume is the most effective rejoinder to the Palin candidacy I've seen anywhere.

Janice Harayda: By coincidence, just before I got the message about NBCC Reads, I had posted two quatrains I like from a poem called "knowledge" by Tadeusz Różewicz (published in New Poems and translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston). This poem is about the shifts in the dance between certainty and doubt that occur as we get older, not as we get closer to election day (though, of course, we're all getting older in the next couple of weeks, too). But the shifts between what Różewicz calls "cogito" and "dubito"--and vice versa--may define the election if, as seems likely, the independent voters are pivotal.

NBCC Reads, Fall 2008: Long Tail #4

Yes, folks, it's yet another Long Tail entry from the latest round of NBCC Reads. This time, we've got a twofer from Brooke Allen, a widely published critic and the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. She chose the following two titles as a partial skeleton key to American political life:

Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill) by David Cay Johnston. This is a very detailed and comprehensible explanation of how the supposed "deregulation" initiated by Reagan enabled lobbyists, politicians and corporations to rig "free enterprise" in their favor. Johnston gives many examples of taxpayer subsidies that basically exempt many businesses from competition and give their executives free rides. This is a very, very important book that shows how our economy really works behind the scenes, and reveals unsavory truths about how our hard-earned tax dollars are spent.

What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, ed. Andras Szanto, with an introduction by Orville Schell. This book came about when a group of Journalism School deans came together to try to understand why the press has failed America so badly over the course of the last decade. Looking back at George Orwell's classic essay, "Politics and the English Language," they reflected on what has changed since Orwell wrote and what has not. In twenty-first century America we are subjected to an Orwellian level of propaganda even in our mainstream press, which manipulated by spin-doctors who use new discoveries about how the human brain works. What Orwell Didn't Know contains essays by journalists like Nicholas Lemann, cognitive scientists like George Lakoff, journalism professors like Orville Schell, and many other experts on the subject. Very enlightening for anyone seeking to understand contemporary media.

NBCC Reads, Fall 2008: Long Tail #3

Now that we've all emerged from a tryptophan-induced stupor, it's time to resume the Long Tail entries from the latest round of NBCC Reads. This time around, we've got suggestions from Alex Ross, who won the NBCC Award for The Rest Is Noise, and Roxana Robinson, the author most recently of Cost, as well as Georgia O'Keefe: A Life.

Alex Ross: This summer I re-read most of Joan Didion's nonfiction, in the handsome Everyman's Library edition, We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live. From the beginning, observing the rise of Ronald Reagan as a national phenomenon, Didion seemed to have an eerily focused view of where American political culture was headed. She had--and has--an uncanny ability to analyze the surface trickery that goes into the creation of what she calls "political fictions," yet she retains a profound, almost prophetic awareness of ominous historical movements underfoot. Her dissection of George W. Bush's phrase "compassionate conservatism" is a case in point. Almost nothing in this collection shows its age; indeed, Didion's writing has become ever more acutely relevant with the passage of time, as the same crimes and mistakes are committed year after year, decade after decade, in an impenetrable haze of forgetting. In "Salvador," published in 1983, Didion writes: "The American policy in El Salvador seemed based on auto-suggestion, a dreamwork devised to obscure any intelligence that might trouble the dreamer." The ambiguity of the word "intelligence" in that sentence is total and has yet to be resolved.

Roxana Robinson: I nominate the Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels, by John Updike. For me, these books reveal the deepest heartland of America. This is a flawed, limited, provincial place, full of all the messy stuff that humans have to offer: vitality and tenderness, greatness of spirit and nobility of intention, straight meanness, pure selfishness and dumb ignorance. It's the place where our political instincts--idealism and self-interest, greed and pragmatism, fear and misguidedness, hope and altruism--are made manifest. It's the place where we all actually live.

Updike's elegant prose beautifully articulates Rabbit's small-town world in all its quotidian splendor, and the writer's magisterial intelligence provides a radiant illumination of this world. The books offer a deep and compassionate rendering of the twentieth-century community that includes us all.