March 11-17, 2004

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BQ Shorts:NONFICTION

The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy

By David Barsamian South End Press, 120 pp., $16

Arundhati Roy is not perfect. If one follows her words closely, from interview to interview, what appear to be moments of spontaneous insight turn out to be, in fact, platitudes, repeated a bit too often and a bit too smugly. She speaks and writes about her interior mental processes a little too much, like a recovering drunk or a therapy junkie. And perhaps most damagingly, in her occasional digressions into "four legs good, two legs bad" posturing, she sounds rather like a West Philly anarchist.

Perfect? No. But she is easily the greatest living popular (as opposed to academic) critic of neoliberalism and U.S. unilateralism. She does it with simplicity -- via emotional appeal to the most basic human needs, desires and fears. She does it with subtlety -- managing not to scare holy hell out of rich white folks. (Hugo Chavez, are you listening?) And most important, she does it with the sublime prose and complex, layered metaphors that marked her Booker Prize-winning 1997 novel, The God of Small Things.

The interviewer, David Barsamian, as with his previous interview subjects (Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and the criminally overlooked Eqbal Ahmad), opts to keep it conversational. His best questions are those designed specifically to draw out Roy's dizzyingly diverse knowledge of everything from dams to subsistence agriculture to nuclear weapons testing.

This polymathy is something to behold, as is Roy's ability, like Orwell before her, to never flinch from difficult truths: In one especially involved interview, "Privatization and Polarization," she dares to speak the unspeakable (and therefore invaluable) truth: that the shift toward unilateralism in American policy following September 2001 would have played out similarly with a Democrat in the White House. Only the verbiage would have been less mangled, not the bodies.--Joel Tannenbaum

My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson -- His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous

By Susan Cheever Simon & Schuster, 306 pp., $24

Bill Wilson was an alcoholic. But unlike most people who drink too much, Wilson, better known as Bill W., was fingertip-close to some of the greatest minds of the 20th century, along with being one himself. He turned down a job working with his hero Thomas Edison, loathing the idea of commuting to New Jersey, and he helped create the practice of market research for financial institutions long before it was standard. He was a stock-market wizard, but wound up drinking most of his earnings away. It's hard to decide what's more fascinating: the story of the man and his accomplishments, or learning why he chose to let his ideas go in favor of the bottle. The fact that he developed Alcoholics Anonymous makes perfect sense of the madness that was his life. It is now his legacy.

Though Wilson had written his autobiography, author Susan Cheever's book is a welcome addition to the shelf. Instead of feeling like some book sent out to soak up the available market share (if even a portion of the millions of people in AA buy the book, cha-ching!), it reads wonderfully. It focuses more on the remarkable accomplishments of the man and less on the drunken disappointments. Many of the book's metaphors seem tailor-made for a novel, not a bio. Case in point: Wilson's long-suffering but completely devoted wife, Lois, loses her amethyst wedding ring after a fight. Years later, she has the ring re-made and learns the Greek myth about amethyst: A woman was drenched in wine by an angry Bacchus, and turned to purple stone.

Cheever perfectly provides those "boing" moments of clarity that are far easier to notice in literature than in life. AA requires members to admit that their lives have become unmanageable and to do a relentless self-inventory. Wilson was brilliant, yet sneaky. He drank because he was anxious, he drank to calm himself down. He often promised to stop, but couldn't. Most drunks never do. AA's recovery rate is better than any other traditional or medical cures for alcoholism. Wilson's contribution -- the program -- can't be overlooked.--Alex Richmond

Expecting to Fly: A Sixties Reckoning

By Martha Tod Dudman Simon & Schuster, 243 pp., $23

Martha Tod Dudman was 15 years old in 1968. As an adult, at the start of her memoir detailing adolescence at such a volatile time, she commands the reader "to remember what it was like when we were fifteen," then has no trouble doing it herself. With her task stated plain, she delves immediately into her life then, describing in dreamy vignettes her Washington, D.C., upbringing -- struggles with boys, politics, parents and, eventually, drugs. We follow Dudman through her years at an all-girls school, into various crushes and relationships and, finally, to college at Antioch. Expecting to Fly is a standard memoir, with its twists: Girl comes of age in a time when sexuality is too open and sex too expected for an embarrassed teen ("I was for Free Love. I must be. It had the word free in it like civil rights and the Republicans were against it, so I must be for it, but what exactly did it entail?"); girl decides who she wants to be during a summer in New York working on the Eugene McCarthy campaign, but is restless when she returns home to D.C. (" the East Coast, where we darker ones lived all bunched up with our problems and our worries and our thinking thinking thinking. I couldn't ever just be"); girl goes to college, eats lots of acid, sleeps around, freaks out. Ultimately, the difference between Dudman's sweetly astute tale and any other is her ability to put herself in perspective without preaching, and to do so in a lyrical and funny way, really delighting in the language of both then and now.--Nancy Armstrong

Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal

By David France Broadway Books, 656 pp., $26.95

As the scandal surrounding sex abuse by priests in the Roman Catholic Church returns to the front pages with just-released results of a national diocesan survey, and as pundits search for appropriate metaphors -- is this the Church's Watergate? Its Vietnam? Its 9/11? -- Newsweek reporter David France has written a straightforward, outstanding history of the scandal.

Built upon court documents and more than 100 interviews, Our Fathers presents a Church obsessed with shuffling abusers from one parish to another and making a dubious distinction between "pedophile" priests who molest children and "ephebophiles" who molest teens. In the thousands of court documents and Church correspondence that France summarizes there's no evidence the Church personally apologized to any victims.

By the time the Boston Globe examined the Boston Archdiocese's negligence in 2002, victims finally challenged the Church's indifference. France recounts a remarkable series of confrontations between a group of adult abuse survivors and Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston. "I didn't come to meet the cardinal," one survivor snaps. "You want me to meet the cardinal and kiss your ring? Okay, but I'm here to meet Bernie Law. Take off the mask." And if many of the molested children never recovered, their parents' suffering was often greater: One mother in the 1970s became so stressed out at the news that a priest molested her son that "she suffered a massive stroke that would freeze the right side of her body and close one of her eyes," France recounts. "She was thirty-seven years old."

Alternating between official chronology and individual anecdotes, Our Fathers structurally resembles Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On. France reaches a conclusion similar to Shilts': Bureaucracy and a general unwillingness to deal honestly with sexual issues combined to create an unprecedented tragedy.--Andrew Milner

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

By Brian Greene Knopf, 569 pp., $28.95

Brian Greene has done some pretty impressive things in his life. He finished Harvard in the top five of his class and went as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, where he earned his Ph.D; he currently works as a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. These accomplishments, however, pale in comparison to what Greene managed to do in 1999: put a physics book on The New York Times' best-seller list.

That book, The Elegant Universe, explained string theory by telling a compelling story of breakthroughs, setbacks, insights and impasses. It also established Greene as a likely successor to physicists turned authors such as Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking. These writers tried to make difficult topics such as astrophysics, quantum mechanics and relativity accessible to a wide audience. They, like Greene, found that there are a lot of folks without advanced degrees in physics or mathematics who want to know how things work.

In his new book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Greene tackles time, space and modern cosmology, providing a thorough snapshot of current theories, recent experiments and unsolved issues. It doesn't have the strong narrative arc of The Elegant Universe, so it isn't nearly the page-turner that its predecessor was. It is, however, a great read. Masterful metaphors help readers understand how space can bend, how dimensions can curl in ways that make them imperceptible to us, and how strangely things behave at subatomic levels.

There is an element of trust involved in Greene's endeavor. A reader must believe him when he says that a theory works or doesn't work because the proofs are exceedingly difficult. Luckily for Greene, and for his readers, The Fabric of the Cosmos is so engaging, so charming, that most readers will gladly lend Greene the trust he needs.--Matthew Hotz

Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture 1970-1979

By Tim Lawrence Duke University Press, 498 pp., $23.95

Disco has been subjected to more bipolar permutations than any other pop music genre. Beginning with its urban underground rise at the dawn of the 1970s, its 4/4 syncopated trajectory goes something like this: from the defining cultural phenomenon of the decade (with a malevolent backlash by said decade’s end) to a flourishing retro revival throughout the 1990s, to its current incarnation as a hallowed pop movement with an illustrious legacy. Londoner Tim Lawrence never took in a Bette Midler set at the Continental Baths or assisted Tom Moulton with his novel compilation of a 45-minute, nonstop-music mix tape, but you’d swear he did based on the sprawling and truly resonant documentation in Love Saves the Day. Lawrence has accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of cuing up every famed and arcane component of disco’s ethos and executing a narrative possessed by a seamless grace that’s comparable to the work of the legendary DJs who are duly chronicled.

Forging a timeline from David Mancuso’s surreptitious, freewheeling house parties at the Loft to the ballyhooed extravagance of Studio 54, the book flickers with a strobe-lit series of mesmerizing tangents: a history lesson on vogueing, how renowned DJ Francis Grasso broke ground at the Sanctuary in 1970 by mixing Led Zeppelin’s "Whole Lotta Love" with Chicago’s "I’m a Man," etc. If there is one flaw with Lawrence’s encyclopedic analysis, it’s his tendency to veer off into self-indulgent wordplay ("Mancuso’s guests were trancegressors who tripped out to music") and downright vacuous commentary ("New York disco ended in an o because it was Italian Americano"), conjuring up memories of Eric Idle’s smarmy narrator in The Rutles. Forgivable sins, though, since he has authored a most significant examination of this watershed period within our pop-cult heritage.--Frank Halperin

Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization

By Richard Manning North Point Press, 232 pp., $24

Setting out to prove that agriculture has wreaked havoc on society, all societies, throughout time, is an ambitious task, and author Richard Manning occasionally runs roughshod through global history in Against the Grain. Defining agriculture as "the accumulation of wealth," more than the growing of food, Manning argues that it has been the cause of class warfare, famine, poverty, epidemics like smallpox, environmental degradation and governmental corruption, and that’s not even counting the health problems caused by processed foods. Drawing from archaeology and food history, Manning discusses the role of farming in ancient societies, but he really hits his stride when he examines modern history, how "efficient" industrial techniques have caused the greatest devastation to people, lands and economies. Exhibit A is Archer Daniels Midland, the nation’s largest buyer of grain, which turns surplus corn and wheat into the sugar syrups that sweeten our beloved Big Gulp sodas and practically every other processed food on the market. Convicted of international price-fixing, ADM uses its enormous political influence to ensure that there is a government-subsidized surplus of American corn that it can buy cheaply, effectively putting grain farmers in developing countries out of business.

Though he occasionally veers into self-congratulatory defense of his lifestyle (he hunts, and advocates that more people get in touch with their senses and eschew industrially produced foods), Manning’s first-person narratives are entertaining. Even better are the interviews with farmers, corporate CEOs and progressive activists such as Alice Waters that place this sweeping polemic in a manageable, more convincing context.--Elisa Ludwig

American Rebels

Edited by Jack Newfield The Nation Books, 384 pp., $16.95

For veteran New York newspaper reporter Jack Newfield, America is defined more by its protesters and contrarians than by any officially sanctioned heroes.

The author of biographies of RFK and Rudy Giuliani commissioned this collection of tributes to exemplars of "populist patriotism" by predominantly left-of-center writers, including Nat Hentoff, Pete Hamill and Joe Conason. American Rebels is an effective introduction to a menagerie of rabble-rousers, from antipoverty chronicler Michael Harrington to birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger to soul maven Curtis Mayfield. Area native sons Noam Chomsky ("one of the great dissenting voices of our time") and radical journalist I.F. Stone ("an event-making man") are profiled by Jay Parini and Victor Navasky, respectively.

American Rebels is at its best when the writers draw historical parallels between their subjects and contemporary figures. Budd Schulberg pens one of the book's most eloquent essays, on heavyweight champion/World War II hero Joe Louis: "[F]or all their exploits, Emmitt Smith, Tiger Woods and Barry Bonds aren't going to be buried at Arlington. And there's a very good reason why Joe Louis is there. He taught white America a lesson they would never forget. He taught black America, so long denied its sense of dignity, that hope was on its way." And Robert W. Snyder writes that John Steinbeck's best work "echoes through his successors in American culture. You can read it in [Studs] Terkel's oral histories and in Barbara Ehrenreich's reports on working life " and in the Springsteen album The Ghost of Tom Joad, with its stories about immigrants from Vietnam and Mexico straining for the American dream."

One caveat: In Stan Isaacs’ essay on maverick baseball owner Bill Veeck, he asserts, "During World War II, Veeck tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and stock them with Negro players for the 1944 season, but was foiled by baseball officials." Veeck made this claim in his best-selling autobiography, but baseball historians David Jordan, Larry Gerlach and John Rossi conclusively debunked the story in a 1998 essay.--A.M.

Swerve: Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl

By Aisha Tyler Dutton, 237 pp., $21.95

Guys like Aisha Tyler. That’s her getting down with Kanye West in Twista’s "Slow Jamz" video. Making Maxim’s and Esquire’s "Girls Who Don’t Have Cooties" lists. Being wooed by Ross and Joey on Friends. (And then dumping them.) So Swerve -- Tyler’s collection of essays on double standards, dating tactics and "The Sociopolitical Implications of Personal Grooming or The Bikini Wax as Postmodern Political Statement" -- could have been subversive stuff, classified information smuggled from behind enemy lines. Instead, it’s like Jane without the pictures.

Tyler’s tone is that of the big sister who’s successful in life (she played a recurring character on Friends!) and love (married for 10 years!) and wants to share her secrets with those who haven’t figured it all out yet. But it seems like she’s really writing to please the guy who sneaks a peek at what his girlfriend’s reading to see what a cool chick like Aisha Tyler has to say about men. Only, it comes off as a woman’s idea of what a man would want a woman to tell other women about men.

When she gets off the self-help tip, Tyler is a decent writer with decent ideas that have been expressed by only several thousand people with shorter lead times. Gays aren’t undermining the institution of marriage, she ventures. TV dating shows are. Does anyone who knows how to read disagree with her? Couldn’t she have made that point when she hosted The 5th Wheel?

To her credit, Tyler’s aware of her faults. "At several points in the book, I may repeat or contradict myself," she warns in the introduction. "You’ll get over it eventually. It’s not a mathematical proof." Thus, she implores readers, again and again, to be themselves. Be natural. "Do you." Just don’t be too skinny. Know how to cook. Paint those toenails. And for God’s sake, girl, keep your eyebrows, legs and bikini line waxed!

Subversive? Maybe. But who’s getting played?--M.J. Fine