Short reviews of books I’ve read recently.

“The Mind of Oswald: Accused Assassin of President John F. Kennedy,” by Diane Holloway, Ph.D., Trafford Publishing, 2000, 316 pages.

Diabolical, delusional and ambitious, Lee Harvey Oswald was a sociopath with an above-average intelligence and a yen for fame. Oswald couldn’t slow down enough to learn how to spell, but he read voraciously and wrote frequent letters, at one point starting a book about life in the Soviet Union. His letters reveal Oswald not as a fall guy nut-job, but a focused lunatic very capable of dangerous acts. Convinced the Soviet Union was paradise, Oswald defected to Russia only to sour quickly when he learned he would have to work there. Oswald was bizarre enough to attract FBI attention on his return to the U.S., but seemingly too weird to be considered a threat. What comes through Oswald’s writing is his ability to blithely deceive and use friends and family members for the slightest advantage. What haunts is that Oswald’s Russian wife and others knew he was volatile but took no action to slow him down, virtually the same circumstances of every mass shooting in the past 30 years. We are no closer to being able to stop crazy men with guns than we were in 1963. So much for progress on gun control.

“Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,” by Steven Kinzer, Henry Holt & Company, 2006, 322 pages.

Beginning as soon as it was able, the United States used military might to forcibly depose the governments of 14 sovereign nations. With a keen eye for detail and irony, Kinzer condenses this shameful history, demonstrating that U.S. presidents learned nothing from previous debacles. With the exceptions of Hawaii and Grenada, U.S. intervention destabilized nations, causing continued strife and misery that turned entire regions of the world against us. Remarkably, U.S. imperialism progressed from assisting and plotting coups to outright invasion. Kinzer asserts that like other nations throughout history, the United States was unable to resist the use of force to gain corporate profits, favor, markets or some other short-term gain. He suggests that American imperialism was odious compared even to the brutal military empires of European nations that at least made attempts at bringing “civilization” to conquered nations. “Americans never developed either the imperial impulse or the attention span that allowed that allowed the Spanish, British, and others to seize foreign lands and run them for decades or centuries.” Instead, America the gunslinger shot up the place and rode off into the sunset, oblivious to the catastrophic aftermath. Required reading for those who don’t consider our nation an empire.

“Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown, Washington Square Press, 1971, 418 pages.

Characterization of the U.S. treatment of American Indians as a deliberate genocide owe their origin and documentation to writers like Brown, a career librarian who used Native sources to tell the true story of how the West was won, most prominently by deceiving, slaughtering, or literally starving indigenous people, including women and children of the most pacifist tribes. Compounding the tragedy were the futile efforts of some sympathetic Indian agents, Army officers and other federal officials who tried to stop the crimes but couldn’t turn the combined forces of greed and notions of white supremacy. Published in 1971, Brown’s landmark book touched a nerve in Americans exposed to the Black civil rights and American Indian rights movements and starting to question yet another U.S. invasion, this one in distant Vietnam. Translated into 17 languages, the book remained in print for more than 40 years, upending Hollywood’s treatment of the red man and underscoring the African proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” The Indians found their historian in Brown, and the history of the American West changed accordingly.

“Down and Out in Paris and London,” by George Orwell, Delhi Open Books, 2020, 228 pages.

One Reagan-era trope that helped divide middle-class whites from working-class Blacks and thus the Democratic Party held that poor people choose their lot; they are lazy and live like kings off welfare. The trick worked because many middle-class whites who had worked their way up (thanks in part to social welfare programs, including the whites-only G.I. Bill) didn’t know any blacks. Orwell here introduces us to the wonderful world of poverty he experienced as a struggling writer in the 1920s: the vermin-filled apartments, the petty thievery, the lies, boredom and the keeping-up of appearances. Mostly, the poor are the rich in different circumstances, Orwell discovered. “Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?” he writes. An educated person may not even like his wealthy friends but will still ally with them over poor hordes. “It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.”

“If We Can Keep It: How the Republic Collapsed and How It Might Be Saved,” by Michael Tomasky, W.W. Norton and Co., 244 pages.

Tomasky provides a crash history lesson to demonstrate we wrongly believe dysfunction and incivility to be recent afflictions of our national body politic; except for about 30 years of relative cooperation after World War II, it’s been the norm. He also explains that much of our federal government structure – including political representation by individuals instead of by parties – is an improvisation and the exception, not the rule, for governing democracies. He points out that our bicameral legislative branch, with a separate Senate and House of Representatives, amounted to the “Great Compromise.” No one much liked it when it was approved in 1787 only on a 5-4 vote. Tomasky’s 14-point solution to the nation’s polarization and dysfunction ranges from ending political gerrymandering, abolishing the Electoral College and implementing ranked-choice voting to requiring national service of young people and vastly expanding civics education. In so many words, Tomasky argues that United States amounts to an experiment in rights, freedoms, and governance that it is not holy writ, and that without continuing to experiment and change, our nation is bound to atrophy and collapse like other nations and empires that came before it.

“Bob Bartlett of Alaska: A Life in Politics,” by Claus-M. Naske, University of Alaska Press, 1979, 247 pages.

Before Big Oil turned Alaska politics from blue to red, two legendary Democrats, Earnest Gruening and Bob Bartlett, represented the Last Frontier in the U.S. Senate. Both newspaper reporters by trade, they championed statehood, fisheries and other Alaska causes and opposed the Vietnam War. But their alliance was only political. A Harvard medical school graduate, Gruening was a New York-born Jew and intellectual, a brilliant, impulsive and flamboyant contrarian who lived by his wits. Bartlett was a Fairbanks gold miner who never finished college. Observant and quiet, he chain-smoked, problem-drank and overworked, keeping his head down and playing by the rules, particularly during the 14 years he served as Alaska’s non-voting territorial delegate in Congress. Naske spends a portion of his book painting Bartlett as a more doubting, reserved and calculating foil to Gruening while documenting his individual accomplishments in fisheries protection, radiation safety and mental health care. Ironic nuggets in the biography include that Alaska Republicans claimed statehood would cost too much in taxes, while GOP statehood opponents in the Lower 48 argued the territory lacked resources to support itself. Much – but not all – has changed in Alaska since Bartlett died in 1968.

“Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse,” by Joe Eszterhas, Random House, 1973, 211 pages.

For many people in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hippies represented a monstrous threat to the nation. Their hair, their clothes, their ideas and particularly their resistance to Vietnam and to their parents’ expectations amounted to a full-scale attack on American values by the nation’s largest population group – young people. Distilled into tiny, violence-prone, Harrisonville, Missouri (population 4,700), the combustible culture war exploded in a massacre on the town square after a group of long-haired, pot-smoking, cussing Vietnam vets started gathering on the courthouse lawn, agitating nearby store owners. Hippie leader Charlie Simpson, a local boy, gunned down two cops and a pedestrian before turning his M-1 rifle on himself. Eszterhas documents Simpson’s unraveling and the failure of town leaders and its young people to bridge a widening generation gap before or even after the shooting. He captures the spite felt by both sides as tensions came to a boil and each reached for violence to settle the matter. Published 50 years ago, Harrisonville’s “Hippie War” eerily foreshadows the wave of mass shootings that today plague our nation and the profound alienation that triggers them.

“Homage to Catalonia,” George Orwell, Harcourt, Inc., 1952, 232 pages.

Orwell’s book on the Spanish Civil War has been hailed as one of the best accounts of that confusing, passionate, murderous conflict. Orwell went to Spain to fight against fascism and for “common decency,” only to discover his cause trapped between two Goliaths, neither of which supported revolution: The Nazi-backed fascist Franco and a Russia-backed Communist Party afraid that a successful war would lead to bourgeois democracy. Orwell called it as he saw it as a Republican Army soldier, journalist and committed Socialist, even taking a bullet through the neck. The book’s best passages document the revolutionary spirit among Spaniards and the International Brigades at the war’s outset and Orwell’s hair-raising escape after the tide shifted, when foreign volunteers like him were being hunted and jailed. His affection for the people comes through in his prognostication that perhaps fascism would be diluted by the easy-going Spanish temperament. Orwell recounts his apartment being searched by Spanish Communist soldiers who tore it apart by bits but left the bed – occupied by his wife – untouched, as a reflection of the decency of its countrymen.

“A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia,” Blaine Harden, W.W. Norton & Co., 1996, 245 pages.

The Columbia River once produced the continent’s biggest runs of wild salmon, with an estimated 30 million mature salmon and steelhead returning per day during spawning, a fortune in wild, natural food. Unfortunately, only Indian tribes ate much salmon at the time. As a result, 19 major hydroelectric dams were strung along this 1,200-mile watershed to provide cheap electricity, to create 600,000 acres of farmland in desert country, and to build a commercial inland waterway to Idaho. Harden, who grew up amid this gargantuan science project, tells the story of these monuments to hubris, including that farms subsidized by the dams are only marginally profitable, even with government-provided water and electric. Ironically, the Columbia’s wildest section today wraps through the contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation, where according to one government water expert, “every chemical know to man” was used. The only unknown is how much and when those contaminants start seeping into the Columbia. Shamefully, the federal government intentionally pumped radiation into the air at Hanford in the early 1950s, 700 times greater than the amount leaked by the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Read this book to appreciate how badly well-meaning experts can screw up the environment.

“The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President,” by Vincent Bugliosi, Nation Books, 2001, 166 pages.

When citizens became outraged by Donald Trump’s recorded attempts to strong-arm a presidential victory from clear defeat in 2020, Vincent Bugliosi was surely among those who remembered GOP skullduggery surrounding the presidential election 20 years earlier: The U.S. Supreme Court’s unprecedented and indefensible intrusion into a Florida election, an action that handed George Bush the presidency. Bugliosi, the prosecutor who convicted Charles Manson, dismantles the high court’s prevailing arguments, citing a laundry list of contortions and irregularities it employed to stop a legally mandated recount in Florida. Minor ones included Bush’s lack of standing to even bring his fateful lawsuit and constitutional direction that gives the U.S. Congress, not courts, final authority over disputed national elections. Gore was hampered by a weak lawyer, confusing press coverage and bloviations about a “national crisis” if the recount were allowed. But the crime, in Bugliosi’s view, was a 50-page decision that not only stipulated that it could never be used as precedent, was too appalling for the prevailing five Supreme Court justices to dignify with their signatures. The court committed no crime “only because no Congress ever dreamed on enacting a statute making it a crime to steal a presidential election,” Bugliosi wrote.

“It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump,” by Stuart Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, 202 pages.

National political consultant Stuart Stevens spent decades getting Republicans elected. Donald Trump’s election broke his loyalty to the GOP and compelled him to come clean. He asserts that Trump is not an anomaly but the logical extension of veiled race-baiting he and others employed for 40 years to win elections. Ronald Reagan told the bogus story of a wealthy “welfare queen” in Chicago. George H. Bush invoked Willie Horton as a black bogeyman. GOP candidates used the phrase “working class” as code to appeal to poor, racist whites. Even after losing the popular vote for president numerous times, Republicans ignored their own internal memos advising that the path to victory in a multi-racial country was color-blindness. The only strategy remaining was to energize racist whites and work to stifle the black vote. Stevens details other GOP tricks – deficit rhetoric, tax cut propaganda, government shutdowns, elimination of the fairness doctrine – to demonstrate that over time, the party whittled down its values to just one thing: Winning elections. “A political party without a higher purpose,” he writes, “is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate… So it is with today’s Republican Party. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.”

“My Waterfront,” by Glen Carter, Seagull Books, 1977, 279 pages.

Glen Carter made the most of a golden era of newspapering, when good reporters could make good pay writing good stories. Three times a week for a decade, starting in 1969, Carter chronicled the waterfront in a column for the Seattle Times, haunting docks, boat houses and shipyards, talking with skippers and carpenters and admirals and crazy dreamers who wandered the seas in all manner of craft. He presumably paid little attention to dock politics, focusing instead on maritime adventures and adventurers with a child’s zeal and a reporter’s eye for detail. We should be grateful. Telling tales ranging from those of Alaska’s last doryboat fishermen to young women underwater welders, Carter’s writing captures voices of maritime Americana that may have been lost but for his reporting. A Navy veteran fascinated by all things nautical, Carter takes readers on bite-sized voyages of discovery, including his own sailing trips and a wintertime one to Southeast Alaska aboard a tugboat hauling freight. He sometimes rings macho, but that’s forgivable considering when and what he wrote. His tightly written and rich accounts leave a reader feeling poorer that newspapers no longer publish such writing.

“Trillin on Texas,” by Calvin Trillin, University of Texas Press, 2011, 182 pages.

It’s a shame Alaskans are so quick to put down cute little Texas. The two states have so much in common – a foreboding climate, outlandish characters, corrupt politicians, legends, wanna-be legends and the “ol” industry – that they’re practically related. This collection of 18 previously published essays delivers the tangy flavor of the Lone Star State by recounting the stories of gun-toting rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who apparently disguised his suicide as a murder; Beaumont Martin, an immigration attorney who wore only short-sleeved jumpsuits, and Lee Otis Johnson, a black activist sentenced to 30 years in jail for giving away a single marijuana cigarette. Other subjects are cowboy boots, barbecue and racism in cheerleading, Ross Perot, Molly Ivins and John Bloom, the newspaper reporter whose joyously bigoted syndicated movie reviews under the pen name Joe Bob Briggs insulted readers nationwide. Trillin’s flat and dry delivery matches the place he writes about. The book leaves an Alaska reader wondering that maybe Texans and Alaskans attempt to lead oversized lives to escape being dwarfed by the enormity of landscapes and myths that surround them.

“Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?” by Marion Meade, Penguin Books, 1987, 414 pages.

Insecure, alcoholic, suicidal, cruel and often broke, Dorothy Parker won fame, invitations to her era’s grandest parties, and the patronage of wealthy admirers for her brilliant, lightning, acid wit. Parker knew just what to say and when to say it. She harpooned everything, including herself. “It serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard,” she said of one of her straying lovers. She also embraced social justice causes, faced down the Red Scare and left her estate to the NAACP. The reading public never lost its appetite for her witticisms, scathing reviews of books and plays and wickedly funny short poems. Some of her off-the-cuff remarks she never wrote. She blurted them out at the Algonquin Round Table and reporter friends posted them in the news columns. Parker was too snarky for some but the vulnerability evident in her writing and her personal struggles elicited support from friends and fans that perhaps kept her alive longer than she would have lasted otherwise. Booze and drugs claimed many Algonquins very young. That her writing helped launch The New Yorker was appropriate, as Parker is today venerated as the ultimate New Yorker, chic, smart, hip, funny, current and biting.

 “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America,” by Colin Woodard, Penguin Books, 2011, 322 pages.

A political state is defined by geographic boundaries, but a nation is defined by its culture. In contrast to most foreign nations dominated by a single, national culture, the United States is comprised of 10 distinct, regional cultures – with origins centuries old – which explain much of our nation’s divided and divisive internal politics. They also explain “swing states” like Pennsylvania and Ohio, where differing cultural regions collide and overlap, oblivious to state borders. Woodard convincingly backs up this thesis by retelling American history through the prism of these divergent cultures, always conflicting, sometimes warring. The Civil War was a battle between the Yankeedom of New England Puritan reformers and Deep South aristocrats believing that slavery only reflected their divine right to rule. Other regional cultures like The Midlands, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, New Amsterdam and El Norte were compelled to choose sides. Woodard’s observations include that while people move around the nation, cultures generally stay put, and newcomers adopt the cultural norms and thinking of their new homes. He also posits that while the conservative Deep South pulls U.S. politics to the right, the opposite happens just north of us, where the liberal New France makes Canada lean left. Fascinating.

“The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington,” by Joanna Moorhead, Virago Press, 2017, 281 pages.

Leonora Carrington was born beautiful, rich, smart, and driven. She abandoned her family’s wealth in order to live the way she wanted – wholly free of the rules that others tried to place on her. She was utterly insular and willful. The enormous risks she took paid off monetarily only at the end of her life, when her art was recognized as brilliant and coveted by collectors worldwide. But that was also Leonora’s own doing. Like all true masters, Carrington had no time for critics, shunned the spotlight and kept focused on her work because it was solely who she was. That she also fled the Nazis, wrote great novels, raised two sons, lived in numerous countries and fraternized with some of the greatest artists and photographers of the 20th century seem like only footnotes – next to her art – in this sweeping tale of her life. When it came to her art and her life’s choices, Carrington didn’t give a damn what anyone thought. Buy this book for the pig-tailed young artist in your life and give it to her when she’s ready for it. It can lead only to good things.

“How the CIA Killed Che: The Murder of a Revolutionary,” by Michael Ratner and Michael Steven Smith, Skyhorse Publishing, 2016, 199 pages.

Human rights attorneys Ratner and Smith use more than 100 pages of declassified government documents to definitively show that the U.S. is guilty of Guevara’s murder, save for pulling the trigger of the gun that killed the revolutionary two days after his capture by CIA-led forces. The crime followed a familiar pattern: Tracking Guevara, the CIA suggested a military mission to Bolivian president Rene Barrientos, one using U.S. training, expertise and agents. Barrientos subsequently asked the U.S. State Department for such a mission, creating the appearance that Bolivia was initiating and carrying out the mission. Besides U.S. equipment, pay and training for mercenaries who went after Guevara – including anti-Castro Cubans – Ratner and Smith argue that the presence of two CIA agents in the band who captured the wounded Guevara indicates that the revolutionary’s murder came either by U.S. order or with U.S. consent: If the U.S. wanted Guevara alive, he wouldn’t have been executed in a tiny schoolhouse in the Bolivian outback. Besides Cuba and Bolivia, the U.S. “sponsored, instructed and funded death squad regimes throughout the hemisphere, in Chile, Argentina, Uraguay, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras,” the book asserts.

“Wild Bill: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter,” by Tom Clavin, St. Martin’s Press, 2019, 294 pages.

James Butler Hickock, a gambler, scout and sometimes lawman, shot with remarkable accuracy. Ambidexterity made him a double threat. Wide at the shoulder and narrow at the hip, Hickock cut an imposing figure, accentuated by long, flowing red hair, buckskins, and a wide-brimmed hat. Outlaws feared him and wannabes, including General George Custer, copied his signature look. Laconic and gentlemanly, Hickock bathed daily, showed kindness to strangers, and even loaned money to destitute gambler Jack McCall the day before McCall shot Hickock, execution-style, from behind. At age 39, Hickock died in 1876 in Deadwood, S.D., holding black aces and eights, cards that thereafter became poker’s “dead man’s hand.” Peppered with asides about Hickock’s contemporaries, Clavin’s biography hints at the psyche of a man who survived on wits, ability and a supernatural belief in himself then slowly descended into a melancholy fatalism due to diminishing eyesight, his accidental shooting of a friend, and a haunting premonition of his death. Ironically, Hickock died shortly after his first marriage, apparently ready to settle down. His death – six weeks after Custer’s during the nation’s centennial celebration – marked the beginning of the end of the Wild West era.

“The Nazis Next Door: How America Became A Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,” by Eric Lichtblau, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, 232 pages.

In the aftermath of World War II, with Hitler’s “liberated” concentration camps still full of Jews and other “displaced persons” no nation wanted, thousands of former Nazis slipped into the United States, hundreds with U.S. assistance. “Operation Paperclip,” the secret adoption of 1,000 or more Nazi rocket scientists, including NASA legend Wernher von Braun, is now well known. Others, recruited as spies for the U.S. solely on anti-Communist statements, were later shielded from deportation actions brought by the U.S. Department of Justice by the CIA, FBI and State Department. Lichtblau, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, documents this odious chapter of history, including the heroics of Brooklyn Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman. Holtzman closed a critical loophole (for 30 years, U.S. immigration law didn’t prohibit Nazis entry to the U.S.) and inspired a wing of the Justice department dedicated to locating and deporting Nazi financiers, camp guards, and other murderers and their minions living peaceful lives here. Inevitably, Republicans led a backlash against the government’s Nazi hunters, effectively pleading that Nazi murders were bygones. President Reagan notably laid a wreath at the graves of S.S. members at Bitburg, Germany, equating the worst of the Nazis to Holocaust survivors.

“The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” by Vincent Bugliosi, Vanguard Press, 2008, 249 pages.

A person who conspires to set into motion actions that lead to the deaths of others is guilty of murder, as Charles Manson and others have learned the hard way. Bugliosi, the prosecutor who convicted Manson, argues that George W. Bush’s launch of the Iraq War – our nation’s first war of aggression – qualifies him to be tried for murder of 100,000 Iraqis and 4,000 U.S. soldiers in any U.S. court. Bugliosi slow-walks readers through his devastating case, fact by fact, demonstrating the Bush knew Iraq didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction, wasn’t responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, and posed no threat to the United States. What’s more, after months of ignoring months of warnings about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda from his own intelligence agencies, Bush was lionized for attacking a nation that had nothing to do with Sept. 11 while bin Laden walked free. It’s comforting but dangerous to believe President Trump is an aberration and that without him, our nation goes back to normal. Bugliosi’s book is a stark reminder that Trump is the logical conclusion of years of misrule by rich, lazy Republican frat boys unfit for the White House.

“Home Country,” by Ernie Pyle, William Sloan Associates, Inc., 1935, 468 pages.

Before becoming famous as a World War II combat correspondent, Pyle traveled the country for five years, capturing common and exotic places and people, including the leper colony at Molokai and his family’s homestead in Dana, Indiana, in a voice that was more molasses than honey. “The dog was part collie and part just dog. She was about six months old, brownish black and as friendly as a politician,” Pyle writes of his mother’s new pet. He details poverty in the South, interviews Klondike Kate in the Yukon, and takes a ride in a glass-bottom boat in Florida, all the while making keen observations and outrageous judgments. “Most Eskimos are bow-legged…This is caused, maybe, by being carried piggyback when they’re babies,” he writes. Not unlike fellow newspaper columnist and contemporary Will Rogers, Pyle’s buoyant and self-effacing prose proved a tonic to Americans reeling from the era’s tragedies, including the Great Depression and Dust Bowl. Pyle describes his birthplace: “Three miles south is the house in which E. Pyle, Indiana’s great skunk-trapper, jelly-eater, horse-hater and snake-afraider-of, was born.” It’s corny stuff but soothing again in our own, troubled era.

“What Happened in Craig: Alaska’s Worst Unsolved Mass Murder,” by Leland E. Hale, Epicenter Press, 2018, 222 pages.

Huge flows of cash, cocaine and low-life carpetbaggers made the early 1980s a heady time in Alaska. That was the backdrop of the Investor murders, the state’s most heinous, unsolved crime. Someone gunned down eight people aboard a fishing boat tied up in Craig on a September night in 1982 and got away with it. Seattle writer Leland Hale writes a workmanlike account of the crime and the two ensuing trials of John Kenneth Peel, a former Investor crew member charged with the murders. Fortified by a dogged defense attorney, Peel walked. To her credit, state prosecutor Mary Anne Henry said the case proved that the system worked: She simply didn’t have evidence enough to prove Peel guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Published in 2018, Hale’s book doesn’t cover any new ground. A visit to Craig and interviews with the principal players 35 years later would have added a nice touch, but the book still delivers a haunting, unspoken message: In the far reaches of rural Alaska, a person can get away with murder, even many of them. Great reading for a cold, rainy fall night in Southeast Alaska.

“Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties,” by Marion Meade, Harcourt Books, 2004, 291 pages.

In an earlier, more literary America, scribes reaped the rewards of celebrity reserved today for pop stars, including stratospheric paychecks, invitations to the best parties and exemptions from most all the rules. In the 1920s, women writers moved into the vanguard, with an influence far exceeding their numbers and wholly justified by their talents. Inspired by post-war rebellion and the suffrage movement and electrified by city life, jazz, and years of spiraling wealth, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald and Edna Ferber wrote and lived as they liked, often with a wicked disregard for consequences. They used alcohol, drugs and men freely while a fascinated public lapped up stories of their lifestyles along with their witty rejoinders. Meade captures the freewheeling zeal of the flapper-era writers, while painting their husbands, lovers and male counterparts as dull escorts in comparison. Perhaps they were. The stock market crash of 1929 ended the girl party, but Meade’s account of the century’s first truly “liberated” women makes the fizzling out a disappointment, not a comeuppance. Readers are left wondering how it happened, and why a larger women’s movement didn’t blossom for another 40 years.

“Nothing Can Go Wrong,” by John D. MacDonald and Captain John H. Kilpack, Fawcett Crest, 1981, 394 pages.

Aboard the 365-passenger Mariposa for an 11-week world cruise in 1977, mystery novelist MacDonald gives an inside view of cruising before it was mass-marketed and sanitized, when only the wealthy took cruises, apparently for that reason. Passengers played bridge and shuffleboard, held talent shows and cocktail parties, and politicked for seats at the captain’s table. With piles of money and rivers of liquor smoothing any problems, crew members served exploding birthday cakes and romanced passengers. On-board parties stopped only for brief, port-side jaunts to shop for pricey trinkets. But it was all coming to an end. MacDonald’s was the last long cruise by an American passenger ship, as Congress spent millions to keep afloat a U.S. industry torpedoed by cheap, Third World-labor aboard foreign-flagged ships. The Mariposa lost an anchor and its rudder on the voyage, but sailed on, its owners breaking safety protocols to squeeze every last dime from the operation. MacDonald’s keen eye, combined with asides from Mariposa captain Kilpack, paint a portrait of a cruising culture that was more personal, lively and debauched than anything offered on today’s mega-ships. Remember Thurston Howell III? This was the cruise he really went on.

“Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War,” by James Risen, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014, 273 pages.

New York Times investigative reporter Risen details the staggering waste of money and abuse of power that came with the so-called War on Terror, including $12 billion in  $100 bills shipped to Iraq “with virtually no supervision or safeguards.” Some $2 billion was stolen outright and may be in a bunker in Lebanon. At least two U.S. soldiers came home with enough of the loot to open several accounts just below the $10,000 cash deposit limit. When George W. Bush abandoned the Geneva Conventions and started torturing captive Iraqi soldiers, the American Psychological Association and others throughout the military and civil service – who understood torture was a proven failure for obtaining intelligence – kept their mouths shut. Why? Because they were beholden to the government for jobs, promotions or contracts. Risen’s book also reports the massive failure of even Congress to stop the illegal wiretapping of U.S. residents, leaving Edward Snowden little choice but to blow the whistle and run. Democrats who think their party would act more nobly should remember that president Barack Obama swept the Abu Ghraib torture scandal under the rug and chose to continue the federal government’s investigation into Risen for his sources. Risen provides a good flushing of war profiteering’s sewage.

“Alaska: A Bicentennial History,” by William R. Hunt, W.W. Norton and Company, 1976, 191pages.

When University of Alaska history professor Hunt penned this brief history for a series on U.S. states for the nation’s bicentennial, Alaska was busy building the trans-Alaska pipeline, on the verge of its greatest boom. Hunt understood that riches wouldn’t fundamentally change the place, and the Great Land would remain a mad scramble of schemes by schemers and of dreams by dreamers, unburdened by restraint or reality.  So it’s well that he spends half the book on earlier Alaska empires of furs, gold, timber and fish. Even ice was shipped out of Alaska for profit. To visitors and even some residents, Alaska remains a frontier cartoon, a natural wonder immune to the forces that steer the fate of every other colonial outpost. Forty-four years after Hunt’s book, Alaskans are paying the price for their embrace of that myth. But not to worry. The state is still populated by adventurers here to “praise God and make money,” and most will retire to somewhere else. Those who stay will be tested to prove the validity of another myth, that of Alaskan exceptionalism, and of hardy pioneers triumphing over long odds.

“Champagne: How the World’s Most Glamorous Wine Triumphed Over War and Hard Times,” by Don and Petie Kladstrup, William and Morrow, 2005, 260 pages.

For more than 1,500 years, the world’s most famous grapes grew in soil stained by some of the bloodiest battles of European conquest. With strife as their story’s backdrop, the authors write an elegant biography of champagne, the wine of “love and gaiety” touted as the only beverage that leaves a woman more beautiful after drinking it. Is it any wonder some growers ventured at night into No Man’s Land during World War I to harvest grapes? Among the gems the book recounts is a battle scene when invading Germans – being routed by the French – are found strewn in trenches not dead but drunk on fizz pilfered from local cellars. Surprises include that Dom Perignon, the monk who mastered fine wines by not pressing too hard on his grapes, considered effervescence a defect and toiled a lifetime trying to eliminate it. Also, women played a vital part in creating the modern drink. Madame Louise Pommery made the first “dry” bubbly, and Madame Clicquot, after becoming a “veuve” or widow, turned around her dead husband’s winery by  producing the first clear sparkling wine, free of sediment. Claude Moet’s genius was marketing the fizzy drink, particularly to women, including Marie Antoinette.

“Into the Wild,” by Jon Krakauer, Anchor Books, 1996, 203 pages.

Krakauer’s account of Chris McCandless’s doomed odyssey held no interest for me until a recent visit to friends in Healy, Alaska. From their house, the last one on Stampede Road, they minister to misguided and unprepared pilgrims from around the world bound for “The Magic Bus” that McCandless died in. Why the fascination? Krakauer’s account certainly doesn’t explain the deification of McCandless. It does not – as many Alaskans wrongly maintain – glorify him. Krakauer instead attempts to explain why McCandless was driven to the bus, and how he died there. It’s a gripping account that gets at what inspires so many young men and women to test themselves against the wilderness. As Krakauer explains, McCandless comes from a long line of seekers who make their way North to tussle against the elements, some of whom die in the process. It’s revealing that Alaskans don’t express the same contempt for Alaskan kids who perish foolishly in the outdoors. There are plenty of those. For young adventurers out to conquer the globe, this book offers at least one important lesson: Learn how to swim, for crying out loud. The world is three-quarters water.

“Blood and Champagne: The Life and Times of Robert Capa,” by Alex Kershaw, Thomas Dunne Books, 2002, 255 pages.

Twentieth-century journalism and mortal combat merged in the person of Robert Capa, the photographer whose daring put a human face on the carnage of industrial warfare. Behind Capa’s extraordinary photos from the front lines lies his own fateful story, one told well by Kershaw. A Hungarian Jew born Andre Friedmann, Capa joined the Communist cause against Franco while casting himself as an American adventurer and bon vivant. His exploits landed him in the company of Eisenhower and Hemingway, and in the beds of the world’s most glamorous women, including movie bombshell Ingrid Bergman. Itinerant from childhood, Capa earned and gambled away a fortune while inspiring a generation of great photographers and co-founding Magnum, the groundbreaking photo agency that first gave shooters control of their work. Like many war-time legends including his longtime friend Ernie Pyle, Capa worked with a dedication that was also his death warrant. At age 40 he became the first photo correspondent killed in Vietnam. Kershaw’s biography shows that by then, years of documenting death, suffering and injustice had left Capa very much numb to the world, robbing him of faith in the future and resigning him to only the basest of pleasures.

“How Can I Keep from Singing: The Ballad of Pete Seeger,” by David King Dunaway, Villard Books, 2008, 428 pages.

Progressives talented enough, who work hard enough and live long enough earn the “icon” title and grudging acceptance. When folk singer, musicologist and activist Pete Seeger died at age 94 in 2014, he was hailed by national TV networks as a conscience of America. Seeger overpaid for his tributes, including blacklisting and a jail sentence for facing down Joe McCarthy’s odious House Un-American Committee, plus decades of boycotts, physical threats and intimidation for singing for peace, civil rights and environmentalism. A writer and singer of songs that became popular hits, Seeger donated much of his life to helping others but was hounded for a brief and youthful dalliance with Soviet Communism. When rejected both by the black rights movement (for being too white) and by young radicals (for being too straight), Seeger launched an effort to clean up the polluted Hudson River that dismayed his proletariat base for relying on donations from wealthy patrons. Like all the greats, Seeger stood alone and blazed his own trail. As so often happens, Seeger’s accomplishments were fully recognized only at his life’s end. Dunaway tells Seeger’s story with balance, not adulation, including how much of his legend Seeger owed to his wife, Toshi.

“Why the Dutch are Different: Into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands,” by Ben Coates, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2015, 291 pages.

Among the most tolerant and progressive of the world’s advanced nations, the Netherlands also punches far above its weight in productivity.  The Dutch shucked Catholicism early and went on in the 1600s to rule the seas and thus the Western world. Per capita, they still make Germans look like slackers. This “tiny superpower,” as author Coates describes his adopted nation, literally raised an empire from a swamp and claims credit for the DVD, dialysis machine, tape recorder, CD, pendulum clock, microscope, telescope and the energy-saving lightbulb. “A living nation builds its own future,” the Dutch wrote on the engineering marvel that protects them from the North Sea. The Dutch are clever and pragmatic because geography and geopolitics forced them to be, and the Nazi occupation of World War II made them militantly tolerant of others, Coates writes. Immigration, particularly by fundamentalist Muslims, is now straining the Dutch identity and the invasion of organized crime is challenging laissez-faire attitudes toward sex and drugs. Despite this,  the nation remains a model for the world of a nation of people “forever working together to find a sensible solution,” Coates writes. What’s not to like about a nation whose problems include bicycle congestion?

“Way Down Yonder in the Indian Nation: Writings from America’s Heartland,” Michael Wallis, St. Martin’s Press, 1993, 252 pages.

To Wallis, Oklahoma is America in a nutshell, and an argument can be made. The state was home to national icons Woody Guthrie and Will Rogers and to legends Mickey Mantle and Pretty Boy Floyd. Stolen twice from Native Americans, it staged two remarkable chapters of 20^th century history: The Dust Bowl and Route 66. In these 16 essays, his “favorite spoonfulls” of the place, Wallis introduces us to TV cowboys and Indian activists, ranchers, bull-riders, and a football great turned philosopher. On the Mother Road he wanders from Norma’s Café in Sapulpa to downtown Tulsa, which ranks with Miami and New York City for Art Deco architecture. In Oklahoma, Wallis writes, “There are still people who consider time important. They take time to chat with a trucker or waitress. Take time to watch a hawk sail across the summer sky. Take time to pull off the road for a skinny-dip in a shady creek.” No one would claim Oklahoma as a vacation destination, but in an era of overrun “best places,” there’s an appeal to dusty, forgotten spots on the map. Wallis makes his state out to be like a trip to the attic, endlessly interesting without glitz.

“The Fifty Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion,” compiled by Andy Borowitz, Library of America, 2011, 438 pages.

Do you remember National Lampoon’s “Vacation” and Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noire radio routine? Both were rip-offs of funnier short stories written by John Hughes and S.J. Perelman, respectively, and included here. Because so much contemporary humor is visual and there’s still no such thing as a new joke, funny is the hardest thing to write. Borowitz has mined that thin vein well, gleaning classics from the likes of Hunter Thompson, Woody Allen, Nora Ephron and O. Henry. As humor is subjective, a few of the 50 pieces fell flat, or perhaps I didn’t get their jokes. Tops was “If Not an Apology, at Least a ‘My Bad,’” Larry Wilmore’s suggestions for how a U.S. president might atone for black slavery in a way that might satisfy everyone. A very funny look at language and contrition. This book would be worth picking up if only for the subversive pleasure of laughing out loud, in public, at the printed page. But it’s much better than that.

“Locked in the Cabinet,” by Robert B. Reich, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 338 pages.

Progressives wondering why Barack Obama didn’t save the country should look 16 years earlier, to the presidency of Bill Clinton. Ostensibly, Clinton was dealt a much better hand than Obama, including great personal charisma, a Democratic Congress and a collapsed Soviet Union. Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor, explains why the administration failed during its first term, including Clinton’s insecurities, scorched-earth tactics by the opposition, and the fact that Democratic congressmen – following the decline of unions and their fund-raising muscle – were financially indebted to the same corporate powers that controlled Republicans. Clinton threw marshmallows at GOP flamethrowers, capitulating on NAFTA and welfare reform while frittering away his political capital on reducing a federal deficit created by his Republican predecessors. Had he instead doubled down on Democratic themes like unionism, job-training programs and corporate responsibility, he could have rallied the left and won re-election, Reich argues, albeit by a smaller margin. For a second term, Clinton cashed in the interests of the poor and working class, assuring him a longer entry in the history books but costing the Democratic Party credibility. The mistake came full circle in 2016, when Rustbelt voters that Clinton abandoned put Donald Trump in the White House.

“Holyland USA: A Catholic Ride Through America’s Evangelical Landscape,” by Peter Feuerherd,  Crossword Publishing, 2006, 186 pages.

After the 2004 presidential election that credited George W. Bush’s re-election to support from evangelicals, Catholic journalist Feuerherd surveyed the evangelical movement and its growing ties to – and recruitment of – conservative Catholics. Welcoming, modern church services, strict, literal interpretations of the Scriptures, and emphasis on personal conversion made evangelism attractive to Catholics reared in a more nuanced, traditional and intellectually rigorous church, he found. Fifteen years after it was published, this book taps into a trend whose appeal non-believers should understand, as evangelical numbers and power are growing while attendance at traditional churches declines. Nine out of 10 new churches going up are evangelical, and evangelicals control two-thirds of the federal government – Congress and the presidency – and “are working on the third, the judiciary,” he wrote. If you were raised religious and no longer attend church (Catholics make up 25 percent of the nation’s population, but only 6 percent of church-goers) or if you view evangelism as McDonald’s food for the soul, Feuerherd at least provides some thoughtful responses to the question so many of us others find both demeaning and obnoxious: “Have you been saved?”

“King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon,” by David Montgomery, Westview Press, 2003, 249 pages.

Alaskans who assume their wild fish runs are permanent should read Montgomery’s account of salmon runs disappearing from Europe, Great Britain, and much of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Published years before Alaska’s chinook crash, the book lays out the usual suspects that decimated runs worldwide: overharvest, hatcheries, fresh-water habitat degradation and hydroelectric dams. As long ago as 500 years, rivers were channelized, damned, polluted or overfished often with full knowledge of the disastrous consequences for salmon. The Magna Carta, forced on England’s King John by unruly barons in 1215, included a call to dismantle the king’s salmon weirs to ensure broad public use and benefit, one of book’s few accounts of successful conservation. But it didn’t last. Accounts of the last Thames River salmon include that King George IV bought it for several guineas per pound around 1830. Once so common it sustained Europe’s poor, the king of fish had become the fish of kings, Montgomery writes. “Both science and past experience show that restoring salmon runs will require reshaping our relationship to the landscape, guided by the humility to admit that we do not know how to manufacture, let alone manage, a natural ecosystem.”

“A Nation of Sheep,” by William J. Lederer, Norton, 1961, 144 pages.  

 We believe we learn by our mistakes. One of history’s bitter ironies is that nations and leaders make mistakes even in the face of information and examples showing such action would be folly. In 1961, career naval officer and writer Lederer detailed the bungling of U.S. policy in Laos, Thailand, Taiwan and Korea, detailing treachery and double-dealing by our nominal allies in those countries, incompetence by the U.S. Foreign Service, sloth by the media, and apathy by the U.S. electorate. Lederer’s writing on Asia was enough to ensure Peace Corps volunteers received language training previous to arriving at distant nations, but not enough to slow the Vietnam quagmire. Lederer was a plain-language writer who wrestled with questions about the responsibilities of citizens and leaders in the American empire, including whether the government is responsible for keeping the public informed. He understood that no nation could withstand rot from within. Presciently, he wrote that citizens too lazy or apathetic to engage in politics don’t deserve a democracy and won’t enjoy it for long. Foreshadowing the rise of a presidential autocrat, he wrote, “Do you prefer to be a citizen of a spineless nation which – eventually – may have a Khrushchev as president?”

“Reporter: A Memoir,” by Seymour Hersh, Alfred A. Knopf, 2018, 336 pages.

The reporter who exposed Vietnam’s My Lai massacre, the U.S. biological weapons program, JFK’s recklessness and Henry Kissinger’s double-dealing has a story to tell, and it’s a good one. Hersh dug so deeply into the bowels of government that even the New York Times could stomach it only for so long. Hersh is the consummate reporter. Following I.F. Stone’s maxim that “all governments lie,” he challenged and debunked official accounts the old-fashioned way: Reading documents, cultivating sources and staying on the story. Like Stone, Hersh earned many of his scoops as a free-lancer. (His My Lai scoop was first distributed by Dispatch News Service, a small, anti-war news outlet.) Journalism junkies will eat up Hersh’s accounts of hanging up on New York Times chief Abe Rosenthal, and a few years later, phoning Rosenthal at his girlfriend’s apartment at 3 a.m. and cajoling him to add another page to the paper to fit in his 5,000-word expose on the CIA’s domestic spying program. Hersh skewers sacred cows across the political spectrum, exposing the vanity and deceit implicit in politics. The book’s subtext is that Hersh is a pain in the ass; that, of course, is what makes him a great reporter.

“I Heard You Paint Houses,” by Charles Brandt, Steerforth Press, 2106, 366 pages.

Brandt, a prosecutor and author, details a plausible solution to the Jimmy Hoffa murder mystery, based on decades of research and years spent cultivating Frank Sheeran, Hoffa’s apparent executioner, as his primary source. Like the Kennedys, Hoffa unwisely challenged the mob at the peak of its power and assassination expertise. Sheeran, a  war criminal in the Army who went pro on returning home, provided Brandt an almost sympathetic perspective, including asides where Sheeran expresses remorse for failed family relationships and for killing Hoffa, a man he loved and admired. The book is rich with details for history buffs,  including such gems as Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo’s attendance at Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night, the Teamsters’ role in the 1972  upset election of U.S. Senator Joe Biden (by blocking the delivery of newspapers that would have boosted Biden’s opponent), and cash payoffs Hoffa made to Nixon attorney general John Mitchell, seeking a presidential pardon. It includes considerable circumstantial evidence that the Mafia also killed JFK. The motive: Shutting down U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s prosecution of the mob. It was the Mafia’s only choice, as whacking RFK only would have added family vengeance to an already mighty presidential hammer.

“The Last Gangster,” by George Anastasia, Regan Books, 2004, 305 pages.  

If you’re depressed about the state of the nation, consider the plight of the Mafia. Once an efficient, nationwide underground economy, it’s now largely in shambles, the victim of some of the same forces that wrecked the nation: Unchecked greed, narcissism, and sloth. That’s Anastasia’s thesis and he builds his case using the Philadelphia branch as Exhibit A. By the end of the century, the Philly mob was run by incompetent braggarts, obsessed by image, lousy at making money and proficient only at homicide.  The most telling scene comes when “Big” Ron Previte, a mobster-turned-informant, shares dinner with FBI agents assigned to protect him in 2001. The agents took Previte to a Top Round restaurant, where after dinner, they started haggling over who would pay the tip. Disgusted, Previte leaves federal protection, deciding he’d rather risk becoming a corpse than hang with stuffed shirts. In fact, that’s the decision all mobsters make, to bet it all on a longshot for a life of money, power, women and fancy meals. Previte was a successful, discreet, hard-working crook, Anastasia reports. Many of his mob associates were wannabes who watched too many “Godfather” movies and took away the wrong lessons.

“Born to Run,” by Bruce Springsteen, Simon and Schuster, 2016, 510 pages.

The leader of the world’s hardest-working bar band confesses in his autobiography: His famous, three-plus-hour concerts are as much about relieving his depression as obliging his fans. The Boss has some stuff to work out, and it turns out, he’s still working on it. There’s enough here to appeal both to music lovers and Bruceophiles. His musical masterpiece, “Born to Run,” took six months to write. He learned to dance early, in order to meet girls. He’s still awed that people are in awe of him. Amid details about East Street Band history, his demons, failures, and long struggle to earn the acceptance of his alcoholic father, Springsteen tries to define the ether produced at his live shows. “People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n ’roll and rock ’n’ roll bands.” That’s an explanation, not philosophy. Springsteen only aspires to get you out on the dance floor. You do the rest.

“The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,” by Martin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer, Little Brown and Co., 450 pages, 1975.

A pack of wolves, the Mafia is sometimes glamorized as an honorable, passionate family but with homicidal spats. The brilliant and ambitious Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano envisioned himself a kind of Ray Kroc of the Cosa Nostra, bringing professionalism to the outfit, stemming bloodshed and eschewing tawdry rackets like prostitution and heroin. It wasn’t to be. Luciano learned what he should have known: Easy money generates insanity, particularly among thieves. Lucky enjoyed his dream momentarily, when he and pals Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello and Joe Adonis became heroes to a nation gone sour on the Prohibition, amicably sharing turf and huge piles of cash. But repeal moved the mob back outside the mainstream and successive generations of politicos alternately used, then attacked, Mafiosi to further their careers. Even FDR. Said Luciano: “What (Roosevelt) did was legal. But the pattern of it was exactly the same; we was both shitass double-crossers, no matter how you look at it.” Credit Luciano with integrating the mob. (Lansky and Siegel were Jews.) Lansky’s legacy is every lottery and every backwoods, sheet-metal Indian casino you’re likely to see with a full parking lot on a sunny summer day: He grasped legal gambling’s titanic payoff.

“Red: The History of the Redhead,” by Jacky Colliss Harvey, Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, 2015, 218 pages.

Harvey posits that stereotypes about redheads (men as barbarians or nerds, and women as witches or sexpots) are on the wane now that a crimson mane is all the rage. But her book’s more interesting passages plumb redhead science, including that: they make up 2 percent of the world’s population (13 percent in Scotland; 10 percent in Ireland) compared to about 11 percent that’s left-handed; they make the healthiest mothers in cold, dark climates because pale skin absorbs relatively more Vitamin D; and they have their own pheromonal scent. “So if your red hair comes with that pale skin, one of the messages your pheromones will certainly be carrying will be a message of health, and of an immune system boosted with resilience,” Harvey writes. But it’s not all roses. Redheads also feel pain more acutely than others, requiring more anesthesia during surgeries, and they’re also more susceptible to melanoma, Parkinson’s disease and endometriosis. So if you’ve drawn the redhead marker (MC1R) in life’s genetic poker game, you’ve been dealt a wild card, not a royal flush. On the other hand, navigating all the adulation or abuse heaped on readheads may leave one with more personality than the average blonde or brunette.

“The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon and the Election of 1960,” by Gary A. Donaldson, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007, 162 pages.

If you think presidential campaigns are too long, too much a beauty show and too influenced by money, blame JFK. In 1960, Kennedy stood presidential politics on its head, using his good looks, his father’s fortune and carefully-scripted images instead of traditional party politics to secure the Democratic Party nomination and ultimately, to beat Nixon. Donaldson omits most of JFK’s most unseemly and reckless deeds, like paying off West Virginia ward bosses to win the state’s crucial primary, and sticks to an aerial view of the campaign (though he does report Kennedy’s early support for and friendship with red-baiter Joe McCarthy). His account details how Nixon, the election’s early favorite, botched nearly every campaign decision and was hamstrung both by his own personality and tepid support from Eisenhower, the universally loved Republican incumbent. With Kennedy today so widely venerated, it’s helpful to remember that he was elected by a tiny margin, against a comparatively weak opponent who 14 years later became the national pariah.

“Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt,” by Chris Hedges, Nation Books, 2015, 225 pages.

When money is king, the kings take over. That’s what has happened in the United States since the late 1970s. Our corporate kings now own (or control, if you like) our Congress, presidency, judiciary and media. Greed has become our dominant religion.  Hedges, Jimmy Carter and others describe our national leadership as an oligarchy, akin to the Soviet Union. Wresting democracy back from the barons before our civil rights are repealed is the challenge Hedges outlines. Bernie Sanders won’t save us. Neither will the 310 million firearms in private ownership. Hedges interviews rebels and seers, on the street and in prison. He points to America’s successful prophets, including Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King, Jr., as prototypes for the leadership needed to rescue our faltering empire. But even for those who might inherit that mantle, the prognosis isn’t good, Hedges notes, citing MLK’s prediction of  his own assassination. The prescription,  he says, is a “sublime madness,” based not on optimism but on hope. “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism,” he says, quoting Czech leader Vaclev Havel. “It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

“The Quaker Colonies,” by Sydney G. Fisher, Yale University Press, 1919, 229 pages.

It’s reassuring to remember that U.S. history is punctuated by enlightened moments, like William Penn’s “Holy Experiment.” Because of its inland location, Pennsylvania was the last colony to become established, but it soon led the others in religious liberty, opposition to slavery and just treatment of Natives, while limiting capital punishment, creating a progressive penal system and introducing an amendable constitution to the New World. For its achievements, Fisher credits Penn, a remarkable personality who was alternately a preacher, soldier, heretic, pauper, prince and inmate. Penn also was lucky enough to be given – in payment for a royal debt owed his father – “the most magnificent domain of mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, fertile soil, coal, petroleum and iron that was ever given to a single proprietor.” By its economic success, Penn’s colony proved that neither a dominant religion nor its attendant persecution of others was necessary for prosperity. His death in 1718 left a legacy of science, education, trade, and tolerance that became hallmarks of the nation launched 58 years later in his City of Brotherly Love. Fisher also traces the Quaker colonies of New Jersey and Delaware, and the waves of immigrants whose industry and culture shaped the region.

“A Colony in a Nation,” by Chris Hayes, W.W. Norton & Company, 2017, 220 pages.

Hayes argues that “law and order” amount to two systems of policing in the United States: a system of laws that protects the property and rights of dominant whites, and a system of order dictated by police for everyone else. White fear and our Puritan heritage ensure that Wall Street criminals won’t be prosecuted and that the poor and dark-skinned will be eternally suspect and vigilantly prosecuted. Hayes uses examples from the riots in Ferguson, Missouri to the founding-father rumrunners of colonial America. He dissects notions like “community policing” and “broken-windows policing” to demonstrate that approaches to law enforcement nationwide are more about making whites feel safe than they are about addressing crime or rehabilitating criminals. “Protection” is the myth of policing, used liberally by police to protect their jobs and budgets. Alaska State Troopers recently replaced their patrol cars insignia and motto, “Loyalty, Integrity, Courage,” with a menacing bear logo and the words, “Guardians of the 49^th.”  To their credit, former troopers took offense, including one who said Alaskans are the state’s guardians; police are the peace-keepers. The book’s larger point is, if indeed we need police protection, who must we be protected from, and why?

“House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power,” by James Carroll, Houghton Mifflin, 2006, 512 pages.

One maxim holds that political power is like whiskey, best sipped in small amounts. Carroll might describe military power as crack cocaine, immediately addictive and irreversibly self-destructive. Carroll, a Pentagon brat (his Air Force general dad was first chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency) chronicles the rise of the military as a leading force in U.S. politics, despite the warnings of Eisenhower and others who foresaw the rise of a war-driven empire. “The Niagara current toward war, in these later years, has been picking up steam,” Carroll writes, leading to the illegal invasion of Iraq, America’s first “preemptive” war. From the militarization of the national mall in Washington to the acceptance of civilian casualties during aerial bombardments, Carroll shows that we have so “normalized” war that we no longer recognize its stain on us. For remedies, the book offers glimpses of lost opportunities – the Reagan-Gorbachev disarmament effort and soaring speeches by Martin Luther King and JFK. More hope might be found in the book’s voluminous notes, including unflattering details of our military intoxication. As Richard Nixon withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam in 1972, he escalated the bombing of North Vietnam civilians, muttering on tape, “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.”

“Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class,” Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Simon and Schuster, 2010, 306 pages.

As worrisome as is our current president, college professors Hacker and Pierson argue that the enduring threat to our nation is the hijacking of Congress by the very wealthy for the very wealthy.  Their hold was powerful enough to limit Barack Obama’s reform legislation even in the wake of abuses that led to Wall Street’s 2007 meltdown.  The authors track the infection to the late 1970s, when national business groups started eclipsing unions in their power to influence legislators. They report that the “American Dream” is now more attainable in Australia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany, Spain, France and Canada than it is in the United States.  Their solution: An organized, sustained reform effort to repair our political processes and restore balanced representation.  Trade unions once did such work, but are now too small an army, so Hacker and Pierson endorse the Internet as organizing tool.  “Political reformers will need to mobilize for the long haul,” they write. “The politics of renewal cannot become deeply grounded without mass engagement as well as elite leadership. And as hard as it may be to direct public attention and enthusiasm toward procedural and institutional reforms, fixing the playing field of American politics remains the essential task.”

“On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Timothy Snyder, Tim Duggan Books, 2017, 126 pages.

Historian Snyder gets down to the nitty in this extended essay written to remind us that democracies like ours have failed and collapsed into tyrannies in modern times, and that our nation is not immune to that fate. Fortunately, he offers 20 strategies for confronting tyrants, each a chapter of advice based on examples from recent history, ranging from “defend institutions” and “do not obey in advance,” to “be a patriot” and “be wary of paramilitaries.” Snyder cautions his audience not to believe either that everything is right with our nation or that all is inevitably wrong or unfixable, as both perspectives lead to dead-ends. He ends the book with the ominous suggestion that we’ve raised a generation largely ignorant of world history, stopping short of the popular cliché that they are “doomed to repeat it,” but inferring that nonetheless. If there is still such a thing as required reading in our public schools, this should be high on the list.

“Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World,” Mark Kurlansky, Penguin Books, 1997, 294 pages.

Alaskans rightly regard their legendary wild salmon runs as one of the world’s great food sources so it’s instructive to remember that other mighty stocks like the Atlantic cod, once every bit as prodigious as Pacific salmon, nearly vanished. Kurlansky’s classic hits close to home in 2018, a tale with different players but villains familiar to Alaskans, including greed, hubris and mismanagement. Cod caught off the East Coast once fed much of Europe and powered the economies of New England and Canada. By the mid-1990s, only a personal use “food fishery” remained. Parallels to our salmon crisis abound: Cod grew smaller, matured faster, reproduced sooner. Cod farms were attempted, politicians interfered, marine mammals and foreign fleets were blamed, and fish previously considered “trash” were re-branded to keep fishermen fishing (dog fish became “cape shark” before their numbers also were diminished.) In one haunting reference, Kurlansky quotes a federal scientist as saying there is only one known calculation: “When you get to zero (fish), it will produce zero,” adding, “How much above zero still produces zero is not known.” Alaskans witnessing the fall of king salmon might wonder how close we are to learning the answer to the latter.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon,” Crystal Zevon, Harper, 2007, 452 pages.

Give this book to your teen-age daughter who dreams of romance with rock stars. She’ll be scared straight. Zevon was, by any definition, a social monster: alcoholic, insecure, obsessive-compulsive, abusive, egomaniacal, irresponsible, violent, and sex-crazed. It’s a tough read, especially for those of us who treasure Zevon’s music and his insights into the dark side of American culture and politics. The book is a compilation of diary entries and accounts of the Excitable Boy by former lovers, bandmates, friends, collaborators and family members (including Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bob Thornton and Carl Hiassen) creating a gut-shot of brutally honest reporting. That they all hung on with him leaves a reader wondering that Zevon’s spectacular aura must somehow have outshined even the giant mountain of his depravity. Or maybe it’s just that we’ll forgive our muses anything. If nothing else, it’s proof that we are prone to create and worship idols and disregard even the prominent wreckage they leave in their wakes. There’s little doubt that Zevon was a musical genius and savant. What the book delivers is an eye-opening view of what else comes in the brilliance package. An H.L. Mencken quote comes to mind: “The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

“True World War I Stories,” Constable and Robinson, Ltd, 2009, 441 pages.

I once asked a veteran who was on the periphery of the Pearl Harbor attack what it was like. He was stationed at Schofield Barracks, an Army base about 10 miles from Pearl Harbor that was strafed during the attack. “It was great,” he said. “The Jap machine guns opened up a Quonset hut that was full of Coca-Cola. We drank Cokes all day.” It’s a true cliché that war is both more horrific and more mundane than its myths. On the 100th anniversary of “The Great War,” it’s fitting to read this ranging compilation of soldiers’ accounts. They remind us that the horrors of that war were forgotten only insomuch as being so quickly overshadowed by the atrocities of World War II. Bombings along the trenches went on so long that soldiers sometimes were killed by the bones of corpses that became projectiles under the bombardment. They also drowned in mud or died with no apparent wounds from the concussive force of bombs that, when landing nearby, can immediately destroy a person’s insides. Soldiers in the trenches who witnessed such horrors came to hope for a relatively painless death delivered by the clean shot of a bullet. It was that bad.

“Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta,” by Gore Vidal, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002, 197 pages.

In this collection of previously published essays, Vidal assails myths at the heart of the American Empire, including Pearl Harbor (FDR provoked it with an ultimatum to Japan) and Hiroshima (the Japanese Emperor was pleading for peace with the Allies days before Truman ordered the bombing). Vidal sees 1945-1950 as America’s golden moment, before it transformed into a National Security State and global bully. The book is chock full of tidbits left out of high school history books, including that Eisenhower opposed dropping the bomb (a weapon, Ike said, “whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save lives”) and that lesser minds trashed Jefferson’s original Declaration of Independence. (Jefferson’s original did not reference a creator who bestowed rights – his version suggests that natural rights are awarded by virtue of birth – and wrote that “all men are created equal and independent.”) More than a decade before the fact, Vidal foresees the rise of a Trump-like demagogue and zeroes in on the failure of the progressive agenda: Right wingers know what they want, namely money, while liberals “do not understand their interests.”

“The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress,” by Chris Hedges, Truthdig LLC, 2012, 374 pages.

Hedges is a very smart journalist with a very dire message: It’s too late to save the United States through traditional politics. Corporations own and direct our world and human survival depends on attacking and dismantling the corporate state. Hedges can be moralizer, but he’s no crank. An award-winning New York Times correspondent and graduate of Yale Divinity School, he writes essays drawn from his work covering wars around the globe and a sweeping understanding of Western history. He excoriates the media for their lack of interest in distinguishing between news and truth – “They deserve to be hated” – and lands the book’s final punch on bureaucrats of all kinds: “There are cold and disconnected… They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey… They assure themselves of their own goodness with their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia.” Like bad-tasting medicine, this stuff is tough to swallow in anything but small doses. Tougher yet is the nettlesome thought that Hedges’ bleak view of our nation’s fate may be spot on.

“The Betrayal of the American Dream,” Donald Barlett and James Steele, Public Affairs, 2013, 290 pages.

Being right is little consolation if no one listens. That’s how Barlett and Steele must feel. Their first two books that exposed the dismantling of the middle class (“America: What Went Wrong,” in 1992 and “America: Who Stole the Dream” in 1996) were pooh-poohed during the roaring 90s, too complicated and factual for Americans getting drunk on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” With “Betrayal,” the nation’s most decorated reporting team is finally recognized for its contributions, including lessons we learned too late: How our elected leaders effectively conspired with the wealthy to sell out working Americans. For the quick view, read only 11 pages detailing the history of Vice-Grips, a brilliant and ubiquitous American tool once firmly planted in the heartland, now manufactured only in China. If you want to know where your job went, where your pension went, or where your health care went, Barlett and Steele can show you precisely. They also offer some advice for restoring the American Dream, including of all things, enforcing the law. “Unless we do that, the story still playing out today across the United States will be repeated in some fashion when Wall Street cooks up its next great scheme.”