Category: Book Report

I bought both of these books in the used bookstore orgy that was the last two weekends, and since they’re similar in nature, I thought I would review them together.

Not only they both humorous books of lists, but both came out in the late 80s and early 90s. The contents of the The Enemies List stem from columns written in 1989 and 1990; the later chapters delve into the early Clinton years (and have this naive optimism that Clinton will be a single term president). The Top Ten lists were compiled when David Letterman followed Johnny Carson, for crying out loud. In addition to being humorous, both of them are time capsules of a sort. Time capsules that indicate, very clearly, some things don’t change, but some things do (sorry–I have to pound that movie out of my brain).

The thrust of The Late Night With David Letterman Book of Top Ten Lists is obvious. The Enemies List compiles a list of people and organizations that P.J. thought should be included when we revived the traditions of Tailgunner Joe. The original essay, from the July 1989 American Spectator, proved popular; readers wrote in with their own suggestions, so the magazine published them and revisted the topic several years running. Hence, much of the book lists people who the magazine or its readers think impair the proper functioning of the nation and who should be hounded.

The same politicians from almost fifteen years ago are the same punchlines in some cases. Al Sharpton, for instance, is a common motif in Letterman’s collection. In O’Rourke’s more serious obra, we see the same names we curse today. Diane Feinstein. John Kerry (who would almost seem to have served in Vietnam longer than in Congress based on the way he talks about it–as though the former determined his behavior and honor more than the latter–it’s almost like M*A*S*H in a way, wot?). Lt. Governor Gray Davis. O’Rourke exempts Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was 14 years ago.

Both books are quick reads (obviously). The Letterman book is much more topical humor, so it’s probably the better of the two for pure humor value. However, the O’Rourke book contains a very good essay, “Why I Am a Conservative in the First Place”, which is worth the price alone (well, it’s worth the four dollars I spent anyway). Unfortunately, O’Rourke’s compiling for most of the book, so the writing is done by American Spectator readers, but those comments or paragraphs that O’Rourke writes demonstrate his wit. It’s not Holidays in Hell or Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut, or Give War a Chance, but I still want to be P.J. O’Rourke when I grow up.

Finally! I review some books I like, even though I don’t necessarily agree with the implications. Cripes, fourteen years. I hate the implication that I have watched that much history as an adult.

So when I was last in Milwaukee, trolling for cheap sci fi to sate my genrelust, I came across a couple of James P. Hogan books: the previously reviewed The Multiplex Man, priced at $5.95, and a softbound Paths to Otherwhere, priced at $2.95. I took them both, obviously, and it was only when I got back to my hotel room and was choosing which to read first that I noticed Paths to Otherwhere had a blank back cover. And the title page said something about the new blockbuster, Paths to Otherwhere, coming out in 1996. Holy carp! I thought to myself. I paid $3 for a James P. Hogan advanced copy! That’s almost as big of a deal as the time I found a May 1984 issue of Gallery there after pawing through Hustler, Penthouse, Playboy, Oui, and Swinging Japanese Schoolgirls for an hour, blushing the whole time undoubtedly (but undeterredly).

So this particular edition was a bargain, but what about the content?

This particular novel takes place in a slightly darker shade of the present, once again where the government and the military nefarious oppressors of common man. Within this dark future-present, a group of scientists discover a way to send their consciousnesses into counterparts in alternate universes. The military wants to use the technology to get an edge over its rivals as the final war for the West is coming. The scientists, on the other hand, want to explore for the mere love of science.

The scientists strike upon a distant universe where WWI ended peaceably in 1916 and it truly was a war to end all wars. As a result, the world is a libertarian paradise with Virginia Posterel-approved aesthetics. But the Powers-That-Be-With-Guns in their universe want to prevent the scientists from escaping to that Otherwhere.

Hey, it’s a decent sci-fi bit. It’s not Inherit the Earth, but it’s okay. The early portions of the book set the foreshadowing for a more climactic and higher-stakes ending than the book offered. At 405 pages, the book’s a bit overlong, too, but it’s readable, and its musings on the possibility of alternate universes and mirror images of people will ensure that my story “Extra Life at $1,000,000”–previously written, I assure you–appears to be a pale copy of this original. Curse you, James P. Hogan!

Recommend it? Sure, especially if you can find a low price version of it somewhere. It’s no longer in print, so eBay and other auction sites, as well as garage sales, might offer it to you cheaply. Worth $2.95 for the collector’s item I got anyway.

This particular book is the source of Noggle’s Spurious Law X: Never buy a fiction book where the author has included an acknowledgements section. Especially if the author thanks the NEA.. Of course, I bought this book through a book club, so I missed would have missed that anyway.

I bought this book based on these factors:

• It’s set in Wisconsin, my home state.
• Its plot involves a young woman coasting through her 23 years of life who must evaluate her life’s direction when her high school and college sweetheart and bethrothed, with whom she’s grown disenchanted but with whom she was coasting toward matrimony anyway, dives from the titular pier and ends up in a coma. Hey, I know what it’s like to re-evaluate your life. I was twentysomething once, and I am about ten years shy of my mid-life crisis.
• I have tinkered with the beginnings of a literary novel with a similar theme and wanted to see what I could steal learn from this book.

So what’s not to like about the book?

1. The author’s not from Wisconsin, nor does the author appreciate Wisconsin. The author lives in Northern California, and hence focuses her coastal lens on the quaint people in the Midwest. The main character talks to another former Wisconsin resident, and she calls them Wisconsonians. Damn it, we’re not Wisconsinians, we’re Wisconsinites. The author also uses the simile bland as Wisconsin. Listen, sister, you don’t do that.

   I’ll admit, I have a chip on my shoulder about the way some coastal types see the rest of the country. If I even catch a slight sniff of superiority from someone who assumes that the relevant country ends at one piedmont or another, I cross my arms and the person’s lost me. Whether it’s an author telling me that life doesn’t begin until you move to New York City or a billionaire venture capitalist saying that offshore developers are as good as the developers in St. Louis–nay, even as good as the developers in SILICON VALLEY, I get the urge to curl the fingers and let fly. Maybe I’m just wound too tight, but I don’t care for the theme.

2. So let’s just elaborate on the plot, shall we? The main character doesn’t deal with the aftermath of the aforementioned dive. She goes mechanically about her life, alienates her friends, and then when the boyfriend wakes up, kinda wanders into a breakup with him. Then, bam!, it’s section two, wherein she drives to New York City and enjoys some liberation from her Midwestern lifestyle, if you can call “sleepwalks through a relationship with a mysterious and uncommunicative man and through an undirected life in New York” liberation. Just when she’s getting into New York, bam!, she returns to Wisconsin and rediscovers friendships she’s let go and whatnot so she can sleepwalk through them, too.

   Suffice to say, I didn’t care much about the main character, nor did I think much of her “decisions.” I thought the mysterious and uncommunicative man bit was cool, until he revealed his secret torment to her when she had returned to Wisconsin. Quite frankly, it was a rather simplistic and unbelievable revelation. I won’t ruin it by divulging it here. At least they shared some rather vivid boom chokka wokka in the book, which helped keep my interest. Smuttier than Valley of the Dolls, believe you me.

3. Come on, the voice of the book, the first person narrator, annoys me. She sleepwalks through the entire thing. Personally, I’ve been told for over a decade that my female characters are lacking, werd, and I swear, if the main character of this bit represents an authentic feminine point-of-view, you can expect strictly male characters in my work from here on out. Genre fiction set on planets where men reproduce through fission, I kid you not.

   The main character’s adrift too much for me to like the book, and I don’t see any change in her. At all. So what’s the point of the book? I mean, sometimes the point is the character learns something, but the main character doesn’t indicate any change, other than she returns home to her “bland” state. Give me a break. The heroine crossing the return threshold? She’s supposed to bring something back, darling.

As you might expect from an NEA-funded book, this is a book of “nice moments.” Some parts of the writing are very vivid. So what? Unless they advance the story, these moments are meaningless filler. The whole book’s meaningless filler, a great big slab of life vignette. Unfortunately, it’s an uninteresting life.

If Ann Packer had confronted me with this sort of thing in a writing workshop, I would have given her the business. Of course, that’s why I was hated in writing workshops, fellows, and why I stood pat with the B.A. in Writing-Intensive English. This book shows why I am going to stick to the genre stuff, too. The reader will get a pretty good idea of the scope and nature of the book by the nature of the problem, whether a murder or an invasion from the hordes beyond the mountains. With literary fiction, too often the point or plot is lost in the “nice little moments.”

Kinda like if a Renoir is lost in the Rossian “happy little trees,” if you catch my drift.

Criminey, you people are going to think I never read anything I like. I admit, I’m on a bad streak here, but I have several hundred tomes on my To Read shelf. Certainly, I’ll like something.

Equal time: Here are some other reviews of the book, including one from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that fawn all over the piece and validate the NEA awards. Go read them if you want to know what paid people think of the book.

Well, I’ve gotten a new membership in the Quality Paperback book club, so I can get cheap, household wall friendly copies of books that I might disagree with, violently.

First on the list: When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden by Bill Maher. Anyone else remember him with Geena Davis in Sara? No? His agent’s undoubtedly relieved.

Something about Maher’s political stands as the leading libertarian dished out by HBO bothers me. Some of his stances seem okay, but every time I would watch Politically Incorrect or Real Time with Bill Maher I am yoked into agreement with him just enough that I suffer a physiological response when he expresses something I heartily dispute. So it was good for me to get my hands on this book so I could isolate exactly where we differ.

Fortunately, I didn’t pick up a heavy tome. This book is a quick collection of musings coupled with posters designed for the War on Terror. One, Bill Maher is for the War on Terror, is for a strong response, and recognizes it’s a clash of civilizations. Not toeing the Libertarian isolationist party line, but that’s ok. I don’t either. The biggest thrust of this book is that we need to stiffen up, stop pretending to have security in our airports, and act like we’re at war. Okay, I dig the whole stop-partying-like-its-1999-already thing.

Maher also hits some of the themes of proper libertarian thought when he wants to legalize drugs, continue with free speech, and that the federak government should focus on its two proper roles, police and defense, but a little less on the policing, thanks.

But Maher jumps the libertarian rails when he invokes Barbie E’s Book of Shadows and raises the whole anti-capitalist raise-the-minimum-wage bit. He wants to cut subsidies (yes!) but dispense more foreign aid because we can (not to further our interests, but because it’s nice), and by “we” he means with your compulsory tax donation, friend. Hey, he gives 50% of his income seven figure income, you give 25% of your lower five, what’s not to like?

Also, amid the rallying cries of “Every citizen a soldier!” and “Vigilence is the eternal price of liberty!” (my interpretations, but his bits are entitled “Make Them Fight All of Us” and “Neighbors Looking Out for Neighbors”, I am not stretching it too much), but he’s in favor of gun control (he thinks Reagan could have rammed it through immediately after the assassination attempt). Every citizen a vigilent soldier with a cell phone to call the authorities! Hardly the militia that the forefathers envisioned which Maher almost wants.

I’d recommend the book when it gets remaindered. It’s got a good crystallization of Maher’s thoughts behind his glib comments (the crystals are 1-2 page miniature essays akin to Dennis Miller’s rants but not as clever and just a little more earnest). It’s also a quick read, being short pieces jammed between the sofa cushions of posters and pages containing quotes from the pieces.

Personally, the book has changed my life. I now remember to turn out the light when I leave a room to stop wasting energy. It’s a small part I can play to making the country more energy efficient and lowering my energy bills a small percentage. I’d forgotten its simple importance. I’ll be adamant about doing it until I forget again next week.

No, I have nothing better to do than to read Russian short novels, which run about 150 pages of translated, well, Russian writing. And I don’t just mean the Russian language.

Notes from the Underground starts out with a 20-30 page commentary on the nature of man, at least as perceived by a Russian narrator, or more to the point, a Dostoyevsky narrator. John Galt’s speech, it ain’t. This particular narrator breaks down the fourth wall, so to speak, and addresses the reader of his notes directly and patiently builds a case that madness really is the only possible way to defend free will. For if scientists can eventually describe the means by which each man and woman will act in his or her own preceived self-interest in each situation, the outcome is always predetermined by the individual, the perceptions, and the situation. So madness would be the only random number generator (my words, not Underground Man’s and not Dostoyevsky’s nor his translator’s).

I can see how this appeals to college students. On the other hand, I am no longer a college student, so I have little time to sit around saying, “Whoa.” Nor am I driven any longer to explain the use of the first part of the novel as a means of discrediting the double-effect narrator who then goes on to rationalize his particular Soren-Loves-Regina, Soren-Spurns-Regina (that’s Kierkegaard, you damn kids!) episode. Fortunately, though, I don’t have to write those sorts of papers any more, and I don’t have to feel guilty for wishing there was just one double homicide with a missing witness that the hero, a down-on-his-luck former police officer turned security guard (with Kirk Guard, maybe) must track down. But I would settle for some narration for crying out loud. Maybe a plot, Fyod?

Part 2, the second movement of the novel, takes us into an example of the narrator’s boorishness. As if the first half of the novel didn’t. The second part has other characters, to whom the narrator can act as a boor, and then the narrator ends up in bed with a prostitute he might love, but to whom he must be a boor and then whom he ultimately rejects so he can pursue his scholarly life, which seems to be perfecting the art of boorishness. Personally, I only made it through the thing because I’d read Crime and Punishment previously, so I wasn’t sure whether this guy would snap and kill his former classmates, his man, or the prostitute. Maybe two of them at once, and then the cobbler on the corner would see it and flee to a retreat on the Caspian Sea….. Never mind.

With this book, I think Dostoyevsky’s making fun of academics, but the ultimate irony is that only academics read this mockery of academics.

I spent over a week trudging through this short novel. I’ve gotten the satisfaction of having read something normal suburban types in middle America don’t read, so I flout the stereotype laid upon us by academics. I wouldn’t recommend it as a read for everyone, though, unless you want to severely put off your friendly informal book club by recommending it and then cribbing some of the lines from this piece (think it over, El Rojo).

As if to rinse my head out of the The McBain Brief, I quickly read Lullaby, the fortieth (!) novel in the 87th Precinct series. Written almost forty years later than some of the short stories in The McBain Brief, Hunter McBain’s proficiency has definitely increased.

As usual, the novel follows the squad of the 87th Precinct in The City. Again, McBain introduces several plotlines into the story, which he might or might not connect later. Carella and Meyer catch a squeal for a double murder–a baby and her babysitter–on New Year’s Eve, or rather, New Year’s Day. Kling prevents a bunch of gangbangers with baseball bats from killing a guy, and the guy’s none-to-happy to have been saved.

I love the 87th Precinct series and McBain’s depictions of The City. Harsh, brutal, and strangely romantic. Of course, I have a City that I love, and I see our love story in McBain’s characterization. This story takes place in a particularly harsh portion of winter, where leaden skies threaten and deliver snow (I miss you, baby).

McBain’s writing style is not only poetic in theme, but in style, too. You have to look for it, which you do if you have an English degree, but check out the line breaking for effect:

Angela Quist was an actress.
Who lived in a loft.
But Angela Quist was in reality a waitress who took an acting course once a week on her day off, and her loft was a twenty-by-twenty
space sectioned off with plasterboard partitions from a dozen similar small spaces on the floor.

Or this:

And suddenly there she was. Standing there. Standing in the door to the room, a knife in her hand.
He had to go for the knife.

Anyone who’s had a poetry class knows repetition and its impact. But most poems don’t have knives, at least not ones printed in anthologies. At poetry slams, the poems have knives and the poets have knives and everyone applauds politely. But I digress.

Much like McBain does, digressions and streams of consciousness that flow around sandbars but back into the general plot. To great effect.

So it’s the fortieth book (and since it’s been fourteen years since publication, many more have come since then). Is it a good place to jump in? Well, if you’ve not dabbled in the 87th Precinct before, perhaps your first should be something earlier (the first three appeared in 1956). McBain’s dilated the time a bit, so the same main characters haven’t aged that much; elapsed time has been maybe a decade. But some of the returning characters are evolving somewhat, so you’ll not know about Bert Kling, who started out a patrolman, and his lifes and loves, or about other characters reminisced. Still, you have to start somewhere, so if you can pick this up in hardback for a buck at a garage sale, do so.

To begin with, I want to admit that I love Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. McBain’s mastered the novel form and can inject his lyrical descriptions of the City, he can explore characters at length (both in one novel and in the series), and can add secondary characters with a few deft brush strokes. He’s the master of the quick read, and contrary to what English Teachers everywhere might think, it’s not that smutty.

However, the short story collection The McBain Brief is not an Ed McBain book. As “Ed McBain” says in the introduction, most of these stories were published under Evan Hunter or his other pseudonyms originally. This means, of course, that the stories will lack the Ed McBain voice, although many of the characteristics are there: The recreated documents, the cops with Italian names, the city (although in the stories, it’s really New York, not New York rotated 90 degrees).

But the flavor of the stories isn’t McBain. Some of them date from the 1950s, when Evan Hunter was first starting his Ed McBain line of books, so the writing and plotting are rudimentary. I wrote stories like some of these back in high school, when I was reading Ed McBain and trying to imitate the police procedural, or at least the police detective, style (and may the Roger Williams/John Regen stories remain buried until my heirs want to exhume them to squeeze an extra book, The Early Noggle, out of my desiccated corpse).

This book’s got:

• “Chalk”, the study of a sudden murder perpetrated by a madman, told in a psychotic flashback. These days, this goes straight to video.
• “Eye Witness”, a short piece that’s obvious from the minute it starts.
• “A Very Merry Christmas”, a brutal, senseless piece about a brutal, senseless murder. Perhaps it’s the point, but the tedium’s not the message, marshal.
• “The Confession”, another obvious bit that mirrors something I wrote twice in high school. I wrote “Vigilante” in English for fun and in Spanish because I needed something to kill (hem) four pages for composition.

However, nestled among the lesser filler material, the book’s got a couple radio-worthy hits:

• “First Offense”, the first story, is a passable study of what they used to call “JD” and what we now would call a super-predator. Nowadays, too, the body count’s higher in the newspapers.
• “Hot Cars”, which struck me as slightly O. Henry-esque, but not quite. A light-hearted little raw deal story for a con man. Maybe not O. Henry. Maybe I am thinking E. Leonard. One of those dudes whose last name is a first name.
• “Hot”, an absolutely Hemingwayesque depiction of life aboard a Navy vessel in Cuba (Gitmo, donchaknow) under a brutal, and quite killable, commanding officer.

So if you’re a McBain or Evan Hunter fan, you might want to pick it up to see how his early writing developed. It’s not a long-term committment; I read it in a couple of hours.

You might want to pick it up out of curiosity for what passed for gritty cop fiction fifty years ago. Criminey, I even read a bunch of Elizabeth Linington for amusement, so Evan knows I am a sucker for them. A story about a mother who killed her baby? Buddy, in the twenty-first century, evil mothers do them five at once. A kid shoots his sibling? Yeah, so? Someone’s into pornos? Man, I get worse than what McBain characterizes in “Still Life” in my Hotmail account every day, and that’s just from my blog fans (Tom Jones gets underwear thrown at him, I get pix of the hot sexy married virgin sorority girls of the world who like to cheat). The crimes depicted in this collection are becoming more quaint every year.

I read James P. Hogan’s Inherit the Stars in high school or early college, and I was easily smitten with his version of speculative science fiction mysteries. So when I hit Downtown Books in Milwaukee last week, I looked for an author with whom I was familiar, and I found James P. Hogan and The Multiplex Man. I started reading it that night, and I have finished it a little more than a week later. The elapsed time counter reflects the nature of the new job and all that rather than the nature of the book.

The Multiplex Man starts out on a good paranoid fiction note: A middle school (well, they call it “junior high” in Minnesota where the novel takes place) teacher Dick Jarrow has a normal day, with a normal visit to his experimental psychotherapist. He, Dick Jarrow, wakes up in a different body in the Atlanta Hyatt some months later and he’s got to figure out what happened. And why the authorities claimed he died.

The world in which this story is set reflects a dystopian future of the United States. It, and its allies, have been yoked by environmentalist concerns into rationing and authoritarianism. On the other hand, the newly-liberated East is known as the “Wild East” because its liberal, laissez-faire policies are not centrally planned. It’s a spooky projection that reflects what conservatives and isolationists fear most, and it’s odd because James P. Hogan published this in 1992. He wrote it before Kyoto and before Kofi.

I loved this book, and would recommend it if you’ve got a couple nights open in your schedule, or if you’ve got a book club with whom you want to discuss materialism and the nature of the human soul as reviewed through the prism of science fiction. Or, even if you don’t have a book club and just want to engage me in a discussion of the same over a couple of yummy Guinness Draughts.

While researching for my last book review, a non-fiction book, I discovered some Amazon retailers were selling (I mean, trying to sell) the fiction book I was reading in tandem with the nonfiction book I reviewed for outlandish sums of money. This fact piqued my interest in the fiction book; also, I discovered it was the beginning of a series. So I paid more attention to it and chewed my way through the first couple of chapters.

Of course, the research reminded me of the subtitle and genre, so I could grasp it’s a mystery in space. A Galactic detective, the series character Claudine St. Cyr, is guarding a planetary monarch from assassins, when suddenly the ship’s in danger of going nova and then the captain and subsequent acting captains start dropping of hearts that are inverted en media chest.

Once I got through those first few chapters, I started recognizing that rabbits were going to come out of hats, caps, sweaters, suit jackets, and many other items of apparel, and a whole pantheon of deus ex maquinas were at work here. Understanding this, I could more easily read the book. It wasn’t as though I missed some information, it’s that it just wasn’t there before it was relevant. Subtle things, like psychokinesis would make a good a murder weapon.

But it’s a quick read, and a junk read, and an interesting time capsule of the female protagonist written by a male author in 1969. Claudine St. Cyr is beautiful, intelligent, dutiful, and somehow every named male character in this book wants to marry her, and most of the major characters propose marriage to her in the 170 pages. But she remains chaste, although tempted to kiss on several occasions. A sixties male character in this situation, say an interstellar Mike Hammer, would have Kirked every carbon-based female (or nongendered) life form, would have shot one or more of them later, and would have set the ship to supernova himself to make a point.

So what’s my point? I will read anything, I think.

Book review number 2, friends, and this one’s another nonfiction title since the only junk fiction I have currently is Deathstar Voyage, a late 1960s piece of science fiction that has nothing to do with Star Wars. So, while hiding from the unattractive storyline in that piece of sci-fi, I read Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang by Tom Dalzell.

Personally, I like a bit of linguistics and loving Norma Loquendi every once in a while. So I delved into this piece, which I picked up in June at Powell’s in Chicago (which explains why the link above goes to Powell’s and not Amazon). Its chapters reflect decades from the 1920s to the 1990s, with some decades (1950s, 1960s) split to reflect different subcultures within those decades, and others (1970s-1980s) lumped into a single chapter. Each chapter begins with a short essay thing that captures the spirit of the times/subculture. After that, you’re treated to a list of words, like a glossary, and a couple of sidebars that collect synonyms for common concepts like “good,” “girlfriend/boyfriend,” “greeting,” and the like. At the end of each chapter, the author provides little article things that evaluate certain archetypal words from the period and trace their lineage. Good structure.

However, it’s obvious that the author slapped together this quick-read, coffee-table-linguistics book. The fact that glossary entries replicate themselves, unself-consciously, from chapter to chapter, as though “gasper” were a new term for a cigarette in the 1940s, when the preceding chapter called it the lingo of the soda jerk.

It was only when I got to the 1980s, my youth, that I realized all was not well. In the chapter that lumps the 1980s along with the 1970s, I spotted several errors:

• “animal” (p 168) attributed to the movie Animal House (1978) when The Muppet Show debuted, and popularized, the term earlier;
• “waldo,” (p 184) defined as “Out of it, as in ‘That new kid in Biology class is totally waldo–clueless to the max.’ Derived from the popular Where’s Waldo picture books of the 1980s….” Pardon me, sir, but Where’s Waldo seems to stem from 1987 whereas I distinctly remember the perjorative term applied to me in 1985 by the punks in middle school. Oh, and Waldo was a character in the video for “Hot for Teacher” from the Van Halen album 1984, which came out strangely enough in 1984;
• “Hasta” explained in a sidebar on p 185 as “from the Spanish ‘hasta luego’ or ‘hasta la vista,’ popularized by the movie The Terminator….” Um, no, “Hasta la vista, baby,” was from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991);
• Misspelling of Eddie Murphy’s name as Eddy Murphy (p 195)

And these represent a sample of the incongruities and typographical mistakes I found in that single chapter.

Suddenly, the author’s research (regurgitation of others’ research+some faulty memories, perhaps) is at odds with known facts and my own memory. Suddenly, I couldn’t trust the author for the era I knew, which means I probably can’t trust him for the eras I don’t. Crap! This book was a waste of time. Sloppy research, fanciful assertions, and typographical errors are intolerable when they directly impact the veracity of the subject matter, which is the usage and spelling of words themselves.

Still, the book might illustrate how words never leave vogue, assuming that some of the words and phrases ascribed to the 1920s were really used then. Based on the fluid, evolutionary nature of slang, I don’t think any one of us would be completely out of touch if we stepped through a time-warp into a previous era, or vice versa.

Since I read a lot and nothing good seems to come of it, I’ve decided to do a bit of brief book reviewing for you, my five Internet readers. I shall incorporate some puppetry for the sixth person who cannot read but logs in for the soothing blue tones.

I have just completed We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism by Clarence E. Walker, a professor at University of California at Davis. It’s a highly academic book, as the 31 pages (out of 164) are end notes, and it’s split into only two chapters: “If Everybody was King, Who Built the Pyramids: Afrocentrism and Black American History” (83 pages) and “‘All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man’ or ‘Not All Knowledge Is Power'” (50 pages). Personally, this limitation (only two chapters) rather makes it difficult to read, since the organization of the material in the macrochapters is not readily apparent (by the subdivision).

Instead, we have super-sized chapters ill-suited for consumption by a McDonald’s audience. The first chapter, “If Everybody was King, Who Built the Pyramids: Afrocentrism and Black American History”, is the pure science of the book. Walker examines certain tenets of Afrocentric thought, such as Egypt (Kemet) as the primary source for most intellectual thought in the ancient world (which the white men of Greece and Rome ripped off) and that Egypt was even a “black” culture. Instead, Walker identifies Afrocentrism as a therapeutic movement that bears little relationship to actual history. Walker also explores how black African-Americans (not redundant) in the United States diverged from Africans by the nature of their passage to this hemisphere and their bondage.

I didn’t trace the quotes nor research from his endnotes, so I cannot comment on the thoughts and arguments to which he is responding, but his historical points and interpretation make sense in themselves.

However, when we get to “‘All God’s Dangers Ain’t a White Man’ or ‘Not All Knowledge Is Power'”, Walker fails to signal for the left turn he makes. Just because Afrocentrism is wrong doesn’t mean that affirmative action should be eliminated, I think he means. He begins the second paragraph of the second chapter (page 85, remember):

A rightward drift in American politics is moving the country toward what I call “free market racism,” the state of American race relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when the ideology of lassez-faire reigned supreme in the realm of economics and race on the national level.

There he lost me. Not in a violent explosion of disbelief, during which I fling the book against the wall and/or stomp on it (this wasn’t Stupid White Men, after all, and it is not a paperback). But by coining a term “free market racism,” Walker provides the good citizens of Oceania academia with a twist of logic.

Racism and affirmative action, the practice this book defends, represent a statist intrusion into thought and practice in one form or another. Free market, on the other hand, represents a rational system of commerce wherein the best value wins. In a free market of ideas, individual performance should prove a better value than racism or affirmative action. Hence, “free market racism” is a paradox, a contradiction, and a big fat hanging straw man that Walker cracks with a full swing.

I was greatly disappointed with the practical application of repudiating Afrocentrism. Quit following a foolish, bankrupt, therapeutic ideology and start supporting affirmative action. Well, the professor does teach at the University of California at Davis. What did I expect?