One woman's 20th century

Personal History - Katharine Graham (Vintage Books, 1998)

If some scholar from the far off future wanted a single source for understanding 20th century America, he or she could do far worse than Graham's memoir. Born in 1917 and writing on the cusp of her 80th birthday, Graham was a player - or next to the players - in many of the most dramatic moments of the century. Daughter of two luminaries, wife to a man who took to advising Kennedy & Johnson as a side gig, publisher of The Washington Post during Watergate.... the list goes on and on.

This thing is a brick, and chock full of detail. She begins with her parents' histories, and how they met. She both does and doesn't hold back - there is plenty Graham leaves off the page, but she is also pretty direct about the failings of those around her. For instance, I found myself wondering if the reader will end up believing that her relationship with her mother was actually more fraught than it really was. And I saw complaints on Goodreads about all the name dropping. And yes, the names are really EVERYWHERE. You do occasionally wonder if there were ever moments in her life without other famous people around. And this sometimes seems to hide how much she doesn't tell. There is lots of "and we spent many dinners/vacations/whatevers quite pleasantly together," and plenty of pointing out rumors of her romances with various beaux. I have to believe that some of the rumors here and there may have been founded, although she doesn't say much. But the line "and I can attest to his virility," tossed off about some luminary, left me almost desperate to find out more.

There's plenty about life in the Washington elite, and about being a young wife during World War II. And about her mother's, father's, and husband's various political activities. In all honesty, up almost to the point of her husband's death, the "Kay Graham" character in the memoir has little agency. I can't tell whether this was truly the case, or whether it's how she perceived her own life, but it does mean that the book picks up quite a bit of speed after the mid-1960s.

For one thing, there's Watergate. Information about the newspaper - how it was acquired, what the business was like, how it grew, etc. - is all throughout the book, but once she takes over, you get all of the excitement of politicians' hostility to Post coverage and how that culminated in Watergate. And then the chapter on Watergate ends and you immediately move into a huge labor crisis. I didn't find Graham a wholly reliable narrator on this matter, but her treatment of it was fascinating.

Historians of feminism could find much to consider in this memoir too. Graham broke glass ceilings, but consciously reflects back upon what it meant to be a woman throughout the decades, and ways in which it changed over time. She speaks for a specific race and class, but it's enlightening all the same.

Reading this was an undertaking, and I'm sincerely glad to have it behind me. But it was a fascinating read, and I'm looking forward to trying to find the book the right new home.

Irish Times

No News at Throat Lake - Lawrence Donegan (Pocket Books, 2000)


So let's say you play bass guitar in a rock/pop band in the 1980s. But what you really dreamed of doing was writing for the Guardian. So when the band fizzles out, you do that. But then somehow you decide what you really want to do is live in a the boonies of County Donegal. If this is you, you'd be Donegan.

Despite leaving his old world behind him for a ramshackle home in an Irish cottage, he doesn't leave behind journalism, and ends up writing for the local Tirconaill Tribune. This memoir, then, is a combination of Donegan's attempts to adjust to a new pace of life, the stories that come his way thanks to this quirky newspaper, and his immersion in the world of Gaelic football.

It's light and amusing, and strangely dated feeling. The year he spent in Ireland is circa 1998, and I guess it's just hitting me now what a long time ago that really was. I wouldn't mind going back in time, and to a picturesque locale like Creeslough. Anyone with a time machine?

Serendipity, finally

Not quite ready for the real post, but I've been excited about mentioning this for two weeks now...

A few years ago, I was walking around West LA listening to the NYT Book Review podcast where one of the reviewers mentioned a book that she just absolutely fell in love with. I forget the context, but whatever she said made me want to read it. So when I got home, I wrote the following in my "books to read" list: "An Uncommon Kindness - Muriel T..." But when I went to find this book at the library, it didn't seem to exist. I'd try again now and then when I noticed it, but really, I kinda figured it was a lost cause. Why, oh why, did I not actually listen to the podcast again right when I got home so I'd get the author right?

But then, a couple weeks ago, I was at the library, list in hand, looking to see what was in stock. (Not much.) I went to find The Flying Troutmans, even though from what I could remember hearing about it, I wasn't sure it was the book I wanted to read right then. But it wasn't on the shelf anyway. But sitting right where said book was supposed to be: A Complicated Kindness, by Miriam Toews. Erin to self: Wait a second.... [jaw dropping]

So there it was. Uncommon and Complicated: got that wrong. Muriel & Miriam: really? Toews though? That's clearly forgivable. (Why I know and like the name Toews right now, btw. Chicago's my ideal hope for the Stanley Cup this year, and I like their players w/o knowing really anything about them except that they are mostly young and all signed to looooooooong contracts.)

Anyway, so I found the book. By accident. Yays.

I read newspapers & stuff...

A couple book-y articles that have caught my eye in the last couple days...

I didn't even notice the title of "Hero librarians save my babies" ("Librarians saved my babies" in the print edition) until I finished reading it. This says something about how little I notice headlines when I am charging my way through the paper. Anyway, it's a cute essay about how the characters in a novelist's work are like children that you send off into the world, and that reviews and fan mail and sightings of your book on store shelves are the ways in which you hear that your little ones are all right and making their way out there. And that when you hear your book has been remaindered... well, that's bad news for your characters. Except...

The horror of the "R" letter is mitigated by only one thought: Your babies are safe at the library! Were it not for libraries, there would be no safe harbor for characters and stories, nowhere for them to wait out disasters and economic storms. And were it not for librarians, there would be no one to introduce your characters to new children as the older ones grow up and move on.

And for this, I want to thank librarians, for the work they do and for the many, many lives they save.

So, there it is. Good job, libraries.

And then courtesy of John Dickerson's Twitter feed, I get to find out this morning about a woman who is reading a book a day for a year. (This was impressive enough back in 2007 when my friend Siel did so for a month.) So, Nina Sankovitch, I envy you. I want to do this. And then have a blog about it. Except I wouldn't want to give up the things that the NYT article says she has: The New Yorker, coffee with friends. And what I definitely would miss is getting to take time off after reading a book that really moves you. Or getting to stop and wait at least a day before you finish, because you want to prolong the experience of being inside the book's world.

Oh, and I imagine we'll see Sankovitch's book at some point in the next couple years? And finally, while I have read excerpts and stories from several more of the books, of the 349 books she has read thus far, I have read a whopping total of 7. Seems like I need to get busy...

Welcome to America, Comrade

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist - Peter Carlson
New York: Public Affairs, 2009

Nikita Sergeyevich makes me strangely emotional. His embarrassing blustery buffoonery, his role in the Thaw and the Cuban Missile Crisis, his eventual downfall. (Soviet leaders in general bring out this reaction in me. Which is strange because most of them don't deserve my pity, and I am sure they wouldn't want it.) I don't know what it is, but for years I've found him utterly compelling. And tragic. And hilarious.

Anyway, so the point is that I was excited when I heard about Carlson's book. He's a former Washington Post reporter, and came across the story of Khrushchev's 1959 trip to America when he was working at People magazine in the 1980s. So while the book came out for the 50th anniversary of the trip, it was over 20 years in the making. And, Carlson relies on one of my favorite historical sources: press accounts. I was planning on building a career as a historian on the legs of the popular media, after all.

But I am digressing again. The book is fun. At least, it's fun for someone like me, who knows and likes Soviet history, and probably knows the 1950s USSR better than the USA of the same period. But I bet it'll be fun for you as well. It really is what the title suggests: a Cold War comic interlude. In a world that was likely far more dangerous than I am willing to imagine. As a historian at heart, I would have liked to have seen more rigorous scholarship, but then it wouldn't have been the same book, and the audience would have shrunk to essentially nil.

I've packed up all my Russia books in preparation for my move, but I am tempted to pull out the Khrushchev stuff now. Maybe when I'm unpacking... :)

My favorite line of the book was buried about 3/4 of the way through the book. Discussing Khrushchev's trip, and commentators' reactions to it as it finally came to a close, Carlson writes, "The trip was, if nothing else, a victory for nuance." Would that we have more of those.

hilarity, delayed

I am still chuckling to myself about what is probably the funniest thing I've seen in the paper in ages...

Sunday reads - with lots of links

Every Sunday, the newspaper takes up much of my day. I have to sort it, and then read through it, spending more time with certain sections than others. For some reason, I save the Opinion/Book Review until the end. This doesn't really make sense, b/c by then I am tired of reading the paper, but yet I haven't seen fit to change my ways.

So today, I took that section out for coffee and discovered a few happy coincidences:

Professor Gordon Wood thinks about history. I don't usually have regrets about leaving academia, but articles on the state of academic history always leave me with a little longing. Reviewer and historian Douglas Brinkley (best known to me for his appearance in Spike Lee's masterful "When the Levees Broke") briefly explains the predominance of social history in the academy, and apparently neither Wood nor Brinkley like it too much, b/c it gets rid of the storytelling aspect of history and turns off the masses. (I don't really understand this sentiment - b/c can't it be both more interested in race, gender, and class and tell a good story????) Anyway, there is a nice little summation of Wood making perhaps a similar argument:

the incendiary warfare between the popularizers and academics must stop. Whether it's a bestselling Albert Einstein biography published by Simon & Schuster or an esoteric university press case study on the Watts riots using deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and structuralist Michel Foucault as gurus, the historian's mission should be the same: to communicate the past to everyday people. To Wood, an audience is essential if historians are going to influence the consciousness of our times. "We Americans have such a thin and meager sense of history that we cannot get too much of it," he writes. "What we need more than anything is a deeper and fuller sense of the historical process, a sense of where we have come from and how we have become what we are."

Well, amen, I guess.
Ben Ehrenreich talks about more books about the Odyssey. He's a good one to write this review, b/c he wrote this really wacky book loosely based on the Odyssey as well. This is a good reminder that maybe I should read the original one of these days (like apparently we should have in 10th grade).

A guy my parents knew when I was little is in the Opinion section. I love brushes with fame. And editorials in the paper are among my favorite kinds. Okay, so this guy Jess Winfield was one of the founders of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, an oddly important part of my youth. (Their Hamlet - hey Mom, did Jess play Hamlet? Or no, he was Ophelia, right? - is almost key to an understanding of who I have grown up to be. Here's a video of it - but it's really not the same as seeing it outdoors sitting on hay bales with the original cast.) But I digress, b/c this article is about how Shakespeare would view the presidential candidates, and in what ways they do or do not resemble characters from the Bard's histories and tragedies. Really good stuff.

Tessa Hadley is interviewed on the NYTimes Book Review podcast. Um, technically this has nothing to do with reading the paper, but I was listening on the way home from the coffeeshop and grocery store, so am lumping it in. She is awesome. I like her bunches.

Today in Google Reader

Google Reader is one of my new best friends. I love it. It makes keeping up with websites that I forget to visit regularly sooooo much easier. Except when I don't get to it for a few days and have a zillion unread stories to try to sort through.

Anyway, here's what I discovered along with my morning chai:

Ian McEwan and some other authors I don't really know were shortlisted for this year's Booker. I'm still waiting to get to read last year's winner, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.

Starbucks has come to Russia. (And looks awesome in Cyrillic - check the pic) And drinks there are expensive! Also of note: "Moscow has one coffeehouse for every 3,187 people. New York has one for every 365 people, and Paris one for every 126." I wonder what the stats are for LA...

Ending Library Week with some stories on libraries

Libraries got some play in the front section of today's LA Times.

On page A17, "Chicago State's brave new library" made news with a series of crates and robotic bins instead of old-fashioned stacks. Users request a book online, and the appropriate bin is delivered to the librarian, who can quickly grab the right book. Elapsed time: 3 minutes. (This is impressive, seeing as how the Library of Congress used a similar system, and my waiting times were usually closer to an hour.)

Library and Information Sciences Dean Lawrence McCrank (McCrank?!) extols the new technology:

"We discovered that the average student took 30 minutes to find a book. Books would be misplaced or not filed correctly," McCrank said. "That's a lot of time that cuts into how long students can spend analyzing the material, focusing on work, or continuing to find even more research on a particular subject."

But I am sympathetic to critics "who note that these storage systems eliminate the tradition of students accidentally discovering new and sometimes better material while roaming through the stacks." And while that didn't happen to me that often, I did enjoy roaming down halls and coming across bizarre titles on the way to my book.

And on the other side of the page, not only is NYU getting my friend Jen this fall, but the university's Tamiment Library has recently received the US Communist Party archives. The process of cataloging all these goodies may take up to five years. (The print edition has some pictures that aren't online, of rallies and posters.)

And one more article for today: the New York Times discovers fair trade in their midst. And I discovered that I apparently have hipster cred. Or, as they put it:

Fair trade, like more familiar labels such as organic, cruelty-free and sustainable, is another in a series of ethical claims to appear on products — a kind of hipster seal of approval. The fair trade ethic is spreading eastward from the West Coast, where it has been promoted by well-financed activist campaigns and where progressive politics are more intertwined with youth culture.

This was a little bit of a surprise to me, b/c while plenty of cool kids do the fair trade thing, most of Fair Trade LA's members got involved through religious groups who focused on social justice. Upon a second reading, I'm feeling more generous, but on the first pass the article seemed pretty patronizing. But then again, it was in Fashion & Style.