My Book Pages

Spring 2024 Edition

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

— Groucho Marx

Sanity Clause regulars know how this works: Each season I summarize the best books I’ve read. They are not necessarily new books. They are mostly paperbacks, because I like the feel of them. I tend to buy them at independent bookstores, especially these four, which deserve a shoutout for keeping this bibliophile’s faith and appetite stoked:

—The Brewster Book Store in Brewster, Ma.

—Books and Books in Key West, Fla.

—Daunt’s in Marylebone and Cheapside, London

—Sandoe’s in Chelsea, London

In the event, I spent this spring reading some wonderful, expansive stuff—and, as always, eschewing anything I didn’t consider well-written. Apologies: the links to these books are on Amazon. There’s probably an independent bookstore link but I’ve never used it. (Readers, feel free to clue me in.) So here we go…

These Truths by Jill Lepore. This one-volume history of America is formidable and annoying. Lepore is a terrific writer, as we know from her work at The New Yorker. Sanity Goddess and I loved her novel Blindspot, which she wrote with fellow historian, Jane Kamensky. And her agenda here is admirable: Restitution for the disgraceful lack of attention paid to black and women’s history in other such volumes. The repair is handled well. There is a lot of fascinating stuff—some of it new to me— and creative thinking here. And Lepore really, really tries to be balanced, to see past the institutional myopia inherent in her lofty position at Harvard. She is unfashionably tough on the populist movement of the late 19th century, which was “progressive” but also prohibitively racist and anti-Semitic. Better still, she’s tough on the academic left, especially its tendency toward censorship and identity politics. She gives due respect to Phyllis Schlafly, the arch-antifeminist, who was a very clever advocate; she is fair to the Tea Party movement of the 21st century…but, unfortunately, "balances” that by giving undue attention to the minuscule “Occupy” movement and to Bernie Sanders, who is a mote of dust in the vast panorama of American History.

In any venture of this scope, there will be lapses—and there are several here. Lepore may not be a populist, but she is a progressive and falls prey to some willful liberal blindness, especially when she moves from history to more recent events. She buys the notion that income inequality is an existential problem in post-industrial America. The reality is more complicated. Yes, the rich have gotten to be very, very rich—and yes, they should be taxed more—but most Americans really don’t abhor the rich or consider their wealth much of a problem. That’s a parochial province of the left. The status of the middle class is more murky: yes, wages haven’t kept pace with productivity…but productivity has brought unexpected wonders to the middle class: flat-screen tvs, video games, cell phones and super-sized pickup trucks. Is the middle class worse off than it was 60 years ago? I’m not so sure. Is it waning? In a full-employment economy, where 62% of the population has skin in the stock market? Debatable. And Lepore neglects the fact that a major cause of income inequality has been the collapse of the poor, a phenomenon linked to the fragmentation of the black and, more recently, the white, underclass family. An intergenerational culture of poverty has evolved. It may be that Lepore doesn’t buy the sociopathy predicted by the Moynihan Report in 1965—that’s an argument worth having—but she doesn’t even mention it. Nor does she mention the astonishing explosion of crime that occurred simultaneously and partly as a result of family disintegration. In New York City, for example, armed robbery—which criminologists consider the benchmark offense—doubled and then doubled again in the 1960s alone, and then doubled several more times, which led to the antic prison building of the 1990s. Lepore mentions the disproportionate number of black men imprisoned, but black men commit a disproportionate number of crimes—and often do so as a result of family disintegration, which liberals are loathe to acknowledge. This historic crime spree, ebbing now—and the distortions caused by the left’s identity politics and racial preferences—led to the right-wing reaction we’re currently suffering through. Lepore writes about the backlash in compelling fashion, but doesn’t seem to understand its root causes.

There is something more subtle and troubling about These Truths. George Washington never crosses the Delaware in this book. The Wright Brothers never conquer the air. Thomas Edison is mentioned only in retrospect. Henry Ford is portrayed, accurately, as a mean-spirited capitalist anti-Semite but he was also the genius who brought automobiles to the middle class. The unique American core value, the spirit of adventure and creativity, is not celebrated at all. (David Hackett Fischer wrote a whole book, a wonderful book, about how GWash’s river gambit turned the Revolution to our advantage.) Wildass ingenuity and risk-taking undertaken by a remarkably heterodox population has been our special sauce, the key ingredient to our success—and Lepore has nothing of interest to say about it. That is remarkable. It’s like writing a history of the Roman Empire without mentioning Julius Caesar. Capitalism, in her telling, has been a rather mean-spirited failure, always overreaching and exploitative, inevitably corrupt. And innovation is a dirty word—she literally pits innovation as a concept against progress, a semantic difference that is interesting but doesn’t really stand close inspection. She writes:

[The] century of economic growth that had begun in 1870 had been driven by inventions, from electricity to the automobile, and was not sustainable. After 1970, the pace of innovation slowed and its consequences narrowed.

Except it didn’t. In fact, it accelerated…A fact that Lepore eventually acknowledges—with alarm—when it comes to the Information Age. She’s freaked by the anarchy of the internet (as she should be). But she’s never really acknowledged what that anarchy threatens. It is only on page 730 that she notes, in retrospect, the brilliant international architecture that America created in the 20th century:

Over the course of the 20th century, the United States had assumed an unrivaled position in the world as the defender of liberal states, democratic values and the rule of law. From NATO to NAFTA, relations between states had been regulated by pacts, free trade agreements and restraint.

This ain’t chopped liver, but Lepore has mentioned our genius moments—like the Marshall Plan—only in passing over the previous 700 pages. She has never hauled off and celebrated the United States as the example to the world it has always been—not only as a (flawed) bastion of civility and the rule of law, but as an entrepreneurial powerhouse of creativity. She doesn’t celebrate our ethnic heterodoxy and its impact on American music or film, which exported notions of freedom and decency and possibility to the rest of the world.

She is clearly pessimistic about the future. Me too…but I have a glimmer of hope based on the genius of the American past and the constant striving to rectify our sins, a past that exists only as a reluctant glimmer in this book. The sins are there, but the striving—not so much.

The Age of Grievance by Frank Bruni. Bruni is one of my favorite New York Times writers because he’s fun and sane and ecumenical. This new book drills down on some of Jill Lepore’s concerns, the crypto-fascist insanity of the Trumpers and the self-righteous myopia of the Left. These arguments aren’t uncommon, but Bruni makes it an entertaining ride and a necessary reminder of how selfish and dangerous and whiny American public life has become.

The Naked Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak. This is a strange, haunting little book. Slimak is an archeologist. He has spent his life crawling about Eurasian caves in search of Neanderthal artifacts. He has found many, but not enough. His poetic humility, after a lifetime of bruised knees, is staggering. We simply don’t know very much about why the Neanderthals, our closest human cousins, disappeared. But they did evaporate, in most places, shortly after contact with us, Homo sapiens sapiens. One clue: Slimak has found thousands of Neanderthal tools and weapons, but no two are exactly alike. He considers this an artisanal form of genius. I’m not sure: it may be just a sign of relative stupidity or, more likely, just a different sensibility that we can’t begin to imagine. One thing is very clear about Homo Sap-Sap: We perfected and then replicated tool making and weapon making—and propulsive weapon making, like arrows—in the pre-historic era and we excelled at killing other species. This gave us a comparative advantage…and led to alpha Homo Sap-Saps like Henry Ford.

(I also read Keeping the Faith, a forthcoming account of the Scopes trial by the historian Brenda Wineapple. This is absolutely crucial book for this moment—and I’ll have more to say about it when we get closer to pub date.)

The Stolen Coast by Dwyer Murphy. Well, after all the heavy intellectual lifting described above, I needed a little summer-style reading. Dwyer Murphy is a terrific, fun writer—and a rather unusual one at that. I’ve read two of his books now—the first was An Honest Living—and they have very strange endings. I don’t want to say much more than that, but these are not your usual mysteries: they don’t resolve quite the way you’d expect. The characters and the twists and the dialogue are some of the most creative I’ve encountered (and I love these sorts of books, if done well.) This one had the advantage of taking place close to home on Cape Cod, in Onset, just the other side of the bridge. But this is a very different kettle of Cod than I’ve experienced before.

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. Well, this is personal, so I’ve saved it for last. My son Terry, who quietly writes and sings beautiful songs about enormous things in Austin, Texas, gave it to me. What a gorgeous gift—and a reflection of Terry’s exquisite sensibility. This is the story of a humble life, the life of a barber in a dying town along a river in Kentucky. Jayber Crow is a reader and a listener; he might have been a minister, but that would have involved flaunting himself. He is a man in love. This is a story of unrequited love but requited affection of the deepest kind. It just flows along, like the river. Wendell Berry is a poet—and Terry said, accurately, poets make better prose writers than vice versa. The story is as American as you can get, a rumination on what’s been lost in all the frantic progress of the past 100 years, which is Wendell Berry’s special cause. I’d recommend—perhaps I’d even insist—that you read it in tandem with These Truths, as I did. Taken together, they represented an awful lot of America to assimilate this Spring. But then, there’s never enough America for me.

Pitch

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