Best Books of the Year

It's time to name the best books of the year so naturally, serious people are asking, what will Buce name as the best books of the year?

Happy to oblige, at least with a shortlist of five.  But first, some groundwork.  One, I can kick out a lot of  (seemingly) not-very-good books because I just didn't finish them.  I'm sure I cost myself something that way, but I've finally  come to terms with the fact that it's not a moral judgment on me if I simply cast the book aside.  I do, however, stick to some books that drive me nuts, where the driving-me-nuts factor is aggravated by the intuition that they nonetheless seem to have something to offer.  See, e.g., this one.  I'm also setting aside narrative accounts of the financial crisis.  I think I've read about 40 of those so far since aught-eight and I'm not at all sure it is anything to be proud of.   At this point, they are too easy: they overlap and they tend to blur.  I suspect I have already forgotten the particular identities of several.  I'm also setting aside  David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 years, because I still can't make up my mind whether it is a really original piece of work or an overrated con job--maybe in ten years it will be easier to judge (but not for me, heh).  More perversely, I'm setting aside Daniel  Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, as just too popular: among other things, it is the only book read this year by both Mr. and Mrs. Buce.  And I guess Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise:  it's too soon (I read it just a couple of weeks ago), and much as I liked it, still it might turn out to be a flash in the pan.

With some hesitancy, then, I open the envelope and find that the first nominee is Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites.  This too is a choice I might regret once the hype wears off but it does seem to be one of the rare left-critique books of contemporary society that really seems to have something new to say, something eyond the usual talking points.  Second, Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower:  a wonderful biography by almost any measure, with a personal resonance for me because it parallels so much of my own life, but also fascinating study in the nature--the mystery--of leadership--what works and what doesn't, and how do you know?   Third, I'll have to make room for The Emperor of All Maladies  Siddartha Mukherjee's great history of cancer.  It sprawls, and a fair amount of it is a bit beyond me but it is at least a tour de force and probably bears intrinsic merit to match.  The experience was matched, I think, by the fact that at more or less the same time I was listening to Frank Snowden's marvellous lecture course on epidemics, from Yale.  That's another one, FWIW, on which Mr. and Mrs. Buce agree: we'd both rank it as the best audio/video learning we did all year.  

Number four is a tougher sell: Kent Flannery and  Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality.  I've inflicted it on at least two friends who seem to wonder why the hell I bothered.  I can take their point: it is sprawling; it is diffuse, and the authors are maddeningly unwilling to draw conclusions or even to offer summaries.  I suspect their response would be: look, what we have shown is that the world is a complicated place and evolves in mysterious ways.  We've shown it to you in all its richness and diversity and we don't apologie for not trying to trick it up with facile soundbytes.

Which leaves room for one more, and I'm going to go with  The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner's unmatchable history of Bell Labs.  Like the Ike biography, it is fascinating for its intrinsic merits but also as a vehicle for further thought: what kind of society, what kind of leadership does it take to produce so successful an institution--or must we write it all off to good luck?

 Perhaps gratuitously, I'll note at least one big book that I did not read last year.  That would be  Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power  the umpteenth installment of Robert Caro's biography of the great drawler.   Johnson certainly deserves the full treatment and I guess nobody can fault Caro's diligence in research.  I read some of Caro's earlier Johnson stuff, but I kind of got off the train with Caro's account of the infamous 1948 primary.  I don't doubt, as Caro argues, that Johnson probably stole that election; I just can't come to terms with Caro's efforts to sanctify his opponent, Coke Stevenson. By everything I've ever heard  or read, Texas politics was a nest of scoundrels in those days and Stevenson was no better than par for the course.  I mention Caro now, however, partly to remind myself that there is one Caro book I really do want to go back and read: The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, which I've heard described as one of the best studies of public administration ever written, right up there with James Q. Wilson's   Bureaucracy.

And here's a book I did not read and probably should: Katherine Boo's, Beyond the Beautiful Forever.  That one might be Mrs. Buce's favorite of the year, and from all I hear, it deserves every bit of the credit she gives it. 

And one final item.  Oddly enough, the book that I may have given most thought to over the past few months is Timothy Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.  I say "oddly" because I don't think I realized how impressed I was with it at the time I read it: I liked it but since then it has been coming back and back. Might be partly because it dovetails so well with Gertner's Bell Labs book of which I wrote above.  But in fact, I didn't read Wu this year: I finished it back in the fall of 2011.  As time passes, it really looks like a keeper..

Caro on Valenti on the Best Historians

I heard Robert Caro, the biographer of Lyndon Johnson, talking to Brian Lamb on C-span and bosting (sic?) about how Johnson's minion Jack Valenti had ranked him with "the best historiaans" whom he identified as Macaulay and Gibbon.

Caro seemed pleased. This doesn't work for me in so many ways. One, Valenti is surely major-league suckup by any standard and I can't believe anything he'd say by way of a compliment. Two, I doubt very much that he ever read a history book of any sort, and that would include the six he is said to have written.

But three--Gibbon and Macaulay? Okay, I suppose Gibbon is likely to show up on a lot of lists, and he is a kind of a presence, but I think he is vastly overrated, probably most by people who haven't read him--or who haven't read enough him to realize how tedious and predictable that trademark Gibbonian style can become. But Macaulay was nothing more than a popularizer--the kind of guy whose name you would bandy about (especially) if you didn't know the name of any other historian.

So, who would you pick as the two greatest historians? This kind of contest is always a mug's game. Still, I think I'd have to start with Thucydides. I'd skip over Livy (the Roman Macaulay?). If I had to limit myself to a big British narrative history, I'd surely take Hume over Gibbon. But I am not sure I should be so restricted. What of the great 19th Century Germans, who more or less invented history--of whom, I admit, not knowing a word of German, I have not read a word. Well okay, how about Burkhardt--Swiss, and readily available in translation? What about Michelet, the French Macaulay?

I seem to be getting bogged down here. The point is that after Thucydides, there doesn't seem to be a clear second choice, or 20 second choices, and nobody for third. I suppose if you want to get serious about this, you'd probably have to go all the way to the 20th Century and pick Marc Bloch or Fernand Braudel. I doubt that those names would be on Valenti's smooth tongue. Heck, what about skipping the whole lot and just settling for Robert Caro? I think he'd be pleased.

Update: Damn, I forgot Tacitus, who might just be second behind Thucydides. Shamefaced thanks to Carlton for the reminder.

Liveblogging Caro on Moses: the Long Slog

I'm still trudging through Robert A. Caro's biography of Robert Moses and I'm willing to sign on to the view that it is a monument--though like so many monuments, sometimes stunning and soporific.  It gets particularly heavy as we move through the early Post-World-War-II years though this is more the fault of the subject than the author.  Reading about the 20s and 30s, we could admire Moses' energy and his determination and for the most part we can see him on the side of the angels --who could not love Jones Beach?

But Moses comes out of the war years armed and invulnerable, with the means empowered and disposed to mow down anyone who stands in his way--sometimes because it serves his purposes to do so, sometimes for the sheer hell of it,    In the implementation of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, he destroys a functioning lower-middle-class neighborhood for no visible reason except personal pique.  In the fight over Title One housing, he disrupts whole swaths of the most vulnerable because it just wasn't all that hard.

'One thing that becomes clear over time is that, whatever may have been the case earlier, by the 50s Moses has come to harbor a settled contempt for The Little People--the great unwashed and even the moderately well-washed, so long as they weren't scrubbing down with imported designer soap.  Many times it is indifference or pique but eventually you come to realize that he positively wants to make life difficult for what he sees as the underclass, so as to make life more attractive for what he sees as the Better Sort.  Indeed, the very concept of "better sort" gets more and more evanescent as the book nears its end, to the point where sometimes you suspect it is a class that it includes no one but the New York Times grandee, Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger.

Moses died in 1981 although I suppose it is natural to say that he will be with us through next ice age via has (over time, increasingly private) vision of what a great city should look like. He did suffer some highly public defeats in his late years and  I admit my own memory is faulty here: the way I remembered it, his comeuppance came in his highly public faceoff with Jane Jacobs over his plan to run an expressway through Washington Square (gasp!).  Caro shows me that the story is far more complicated: before Jacobs, there was a another public confrontation (over a plan to put a parking lot in Central Park) and a lot of high-quality critical journalism.  But I suspect the only real defeat he suffered his death at the age of 92.

Caro doesn't spell it out but I think it is possible to see the Moses story as part of a larger tectonic shift in American politics.  I still haven't sorted it out in my own mind, partly because I haven't finished the book and partly because I'm just confused.  Maybe later, or maybe not st all.

Liveblogging Caro on Moses: The Bully Pulpit

Still galumphing away on Robert A. Caro's big biography of Robert Moses, here's something new to me, though not, I suppose, to many others.  That is: I'm just noticing the obvious parallels between Moses and Caro's other great subject, Lyndon Johnson.  This is easy, isn't it: lust for power, check; titanic energy, check; endless capacity for controlling even the smallest detail.

And each,  in so many ways, the boss from hell.  A self-absorbed bully and slave-driver, relentless in squeezing the last drop of effort out of the best of men (and women).  

But--you will say of either--his charges loved him.  He brought out the best in them and he moved them to heights they wouldn't have achieved without him.  To some extent, yes (perhaps especially Moses).  But there is a flip side here, a trait held in common by all the underlings, perhaps indispensable for such a life.  And that is a knack for subservience.  Plenty of people, whatever the potential rewards, simply wouldn't let themselves be sucked into the vortex of such egomania.

Which set me to wondering: how many others are there of this same style; how many more potential subjects for Caro biographies?  Oddly enough, I can't think of that many.   Others political leaders have their vices--power corrupts, and all that.  There are surely other instances of petulant bullying.  But the laser-like focus on driving the underlings until they drop: oddly, it doesn't seem all that common.  Kennedy? Clinton?   Carter?   HW? Not really.  Young W may have called his most indispensable fixer "turd blossom," but that's more in the nature of locker-room swagger.  Roosevelt and Reagan both seem to have ruled through a kind of steely indifference glossed over as charm.  

I know what you're thinking: Nixon, or perhaps Kissinger/Nixon.   Again, I don't think the model fits.  Nixon may have been an awful human being but his modus vivendi seems to have been to hunker down in the pillbox with a small circle of yes-men.  And Kissinger--I don't know, perhaps he was a stern taskmaster, but ironically, his principal vice appears to have been courtiership, i.e., a kind of bullying in reverse.

Caro on Al Smith and the Other Guy

I've selected Robert A. Caro's  bio of Robert Moses* as my  audio gym read and from the size of the thing, it looks like it ought to last me well into the spring.  So far I'm lovin' it and I admit I was dazzled by his prose poem on the youth of Al Smith (I remember reading another wonderful account of Smith's beginnings some years ago, perhaps in William V. Shannon's The American Irish).  But I wonder: I was saying the other day that I was offput by Caro's over-the-top sanctificaton of the infamous Coke Stevenson.  Could it be that I know less about Smith and are thus more credulous?   This doesn't seem right, actually, although I can't think of a better reason.

*Titled "The Power Broker," and  may I add this to my list of grotesquely inappropriate titles?  It's ludicrous to call Moses a more broker; he was a source of power who exercised it with manic energy, gleefully and incessantly.  Had Moses heard that anyone had called him a mere broker, he likely would have  incinerated the culprit's home, made off with his women, and exiled his children wailing to the poorhouse.

Old Roads

Seems like everywhere I turn these days, I see roads.  Not in character for me: I ride on 'em, of course, but the bump of automotive transport in my skull is almost   a depression, and the quantum of prior knowledge on the topic would not be enough to fill a modest storm drain.

But I did just lately get around to reading Robert Caro's biography Robert Moses.  I was looking for the power, the politics, the intrigue and lord knows I got plenty of that.  But Moses' story begins with the Long Island parks and parkways; it finally runs aground on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, with lots of twists and turns and straightaways in between.

Having finished Caro, I was provoked to inquire what and how much influence Moses had on the building of the Interstate Highway system.  So I moved on to The Big Roads by Earl Swift.  It's a worthwhile read though not nearly as rich in detail as Caro.  Perhaps the best thing about it is an undocumented extra: his account of the prehistory of the Interstates, in the first great spasm of road building in the 20s.  I learned inter alia of what you might also call a proto-social-media phenom: the network of auto enthusiasts who self-organized to promote early avatars of what ultimately emerged as the interstate system. I even got introduced to something called the "National Old Trails Road Association," whose name pretty well defines its identity.

From Swift I  moved on to David McCullough's biography of Harry S Truman, and dam if I'm not embroiled in the road story all over again.  By McCullough's telling, Truman gained his first round of notoriety as that rarest of phenoms, an honest  man in politics--all the more astonishing, the instrument of a big-city machine who nonetheless undertook to spend the public's dollar in the public interest.

And his passion was roads.  He loved to drive himself, and engaged in long "research" trips whose nominal purpose was to study construction methods and finance, but whose real intent, I suspect, may have been to give Harry time behind the wheel.   And--wait, here's Harry, still a county judge in Missouri, as president of that selfsame National Old Trails Association, unknown to me until just a couple of days ago.    Does it still exist, I wonder?  Wiki is unavailing, but my experience is that outfits like this almost never disappear altogether.

There's more to this story that I'd like to know--in particular, more about the role of the Interstates in destroying great cities (I don't think Harry can be blamed for that).  For the moment though--I was driving up the Sacramento Valley last night, on the back roads that lead through what is still mostly farm country.  Every inch of it paved and graded and drained, in a way we have just come to take for granted.  It amused me to reflect that exactly none of these amenities would have existed 100 years ago.

 

Angela Gheorghiu: Two for the Price of One

We’d never heard Angela Gheorghiu live before (though we’d listened to her impressive Traviata and other stuff on DVD) so we were happy to grab a chance to see her at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in Los Angeles Saturday night. It was well worth the effort, but in an unexpected—and, one might say, a peculiarly LA--sort of way.

Gheorghiu’s strong suit is her tone—a gift from providence that connects instantly with almost anybody, like Bix Beiderbeck on the cornet. She’s an indifferent actress. So a concert recital, where she can pick and choose her material, is a sensible choice.

On the whole, it worked, but the odd part is that she ended up giving two concerts instead of one. The first was a straightforward concert recital of opera standards chosen, presumably, because they let her look good. The second was a string of five (count ‘em) encores, which morphed into a faux Hollywood Bowl show, under roof.

The first, concert, recital, was straightforward. Gheorghiu was at her best in Pucinni’s “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta” (from Rondine) and “In quelle trine morbide” (from Manon Lescaut), with honorable mention to “Pace, pace, mio dio” (from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino). She was okay in “Un bel di vedremo,” the crowd-pleaser from Pucinni’s Madama Butterfly—she sang it nicely, but she was too forceful, not winsome enough in the person of Cio-Cio-San. She had the same problem with the “Habañera,” from Carmen: good singing, but she just wasn’t able to deliver the sense of sauciness and danger that every listener expects (but it was the first time I ever saw a concert soprano waggle her bottom at the audience). She also tackled some Gounod and some Massenet, but I don’t know how she did with it, of which see more infra.

LA audiences are a soft touch: they thought all this was wonderful. They were even more swept away by the “second concert,” the five encores, headlining “I could have danced all night” (from My Fair Lady) and “Granada” (from bullfight central).

The audience loved the down-market stuff, and pretty clearly, so did Gheorghiu: she danced, the bumped, she ground, she flirted—flirted so much with the conductor that he must have wondered whether he would get to go home with her (a man always wonders if he is going to get lucky on a date; a woman always knows). Yet remarkably, she really wasn’t very good at it: her “danced all night” was formless and inspid; “Granada” put her into a state of open warfare against the castanets. Perhaps luckily for everyone, she ended with “Oh mio babbino caro,” (from Pucinni’s Gianni Schicchi)—a number that she could handle, and that has come to signify opera just as much as “Greensleeves” has come to signify the Renaissance.

Fn on the LA opera orchestra: a disappointment. Eugene Kohn is said to be a great conductor of singers. Possibly, but he doesn’t seem to be able to keep 50-60 instrumentalists in ensemble. Made it particularly disappointing when they played so loudly as to drown out pretty much the first half of the concert.

Opera: The Met's HD Turandot

I don't think I ever really got Turandot until today. I had seen it only once before, and that under inauspicious conditions. It was a David Hockney production at San Francisco, with some sort of bleachers/platform built up at the back of the stage. I was way back in the balcony and most of the performance took place way up in those bleachers, so I went through most of the evening seeing the cast only from the waist down. There's a frisson of postmodern hip there, but I can tell you it is distracting.

Having seen today's Met production, I have two words: Zeffer Elli. Everything about this libretto and score is over the top, and you have to have the world's most excessive stager to get away with it. There will never be a Turandot set in a darkened basement or a steam laundry, or if there is, I will stay as far as I can away from it. To do this kind of absurdity with a straight face, there is no one but the Z-ster (not even Hockney? I think not, but then maybe I am not qualified to judge).

The opera itself is kind of a dog's breakfast of materials and styles, based on a Persian story westernized by Schiller and laced with what Puccini seems to have thought was Chinese music. There are indeed some interesting and unfamiliar sounds here, although I suppose you could say the same thing for Hoagy Carmichael's Hong Kong Blues:

It's a story of a very unfortunate Memphis man
Who got 'rrested down in old Hong Kong.
He had 20-year privilege taken away from him
When he kicked old Buddha's go-ong.

An even closer comparison might by Gilbert & Sullivan's Mikado, which probably owes at least as much to Japan as Turandot does to China. Now that I think of it, the comparison is not at all frivolous: both stories turn on a poisonous brew of lust and cruelty that would be horrifying if not laced out in the gauze of exoticism. And Turandot herself probably owes more than Puccini would want to acknowledge to Gilbert's Katisha (I suppose it is pushing things to say that Puccini's Ping, Pang and Pong echo Gilbert's Three Little Maids from School).

But accepting this frontal assault on disbelief it is actually a pretty good show--which is I suppose the least I can say for the opera that brings us the one song that says "opera" in every coffee shop, bookstore or romantic movie comedy--that is, Nessun Dorma (the only competitor is another Puccini--O Mio Babino Caro from Gianni Schicchi). Today's Met performance was well sung all around, although I'd give the rosette to Marina Poplavskaya as Liù--the voice is peachy cream although if you listen, you can pick up just a hint of an underlying abrasiveness that makes you recognize tht Poloavskaya the singer isn't nearly as docile as Liù the character.

And that, of course, brings you back to the ineradicable problem with Turandot. I mean really--in the long annals of operatic absurdity, this one really takes the biscuit. No matter how strong the performance, you can't help but find yourself thinking that if Liù had only stabbed that idiot princeling instead of herself, then Turandot would have made her queen consort.