→ April 19, 2021
→ By

A Promised Land.

I usually don’t read political autobiographies, because I feel reasonably sure that I’m going to get more self-serving renditions of history than true eludication or, dare we expect so much, real candor from the authors. I’m just not that interested in hearing the stories from people who have much to gain or lose from the way in which those stories are told.

So when my daughter bought me Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, the first part of his memoirs from his time as President, I was more than a little skeptical that I’d enjoy or appreciate it. I admire President Obama, and believe his tenure was more successful than his critics on the right or the far left want you to believe, and that Republican obstructionism was the major reason why he didn’t accomplish more – but I also see many missteps and lost opportunities, as well as policies that just defy reason (the use and frequency of drone strikes in the Middle East, especially Yemen) or that took too long for him to embrace (marriage equality). I was unsure in 2016 and 2017 how much blame to lay at the Obama Administration’s feet for failing to anticipate the rise of Trump and white nationalism, going back to his handling of the birther hoax. And I didn’t want to read 700-plus pages of rationalization or revisionism.

That’s not what A Promised Land is, though. I’m sure there is some inexactness in the retelling of certain stories – I find it hard to believe he’d have all of those quotes written down or memorized, especially with some going back twenty-odd years – and it’s impossible to know what details he chose to omit from the book. But it feels thorough, in detail and in intent, as Obama does acknowledge multiple mistakes in policy and in his management of the executive branch, and if the book has a major flaw it’s that thoroughness – he recounts so many conversations and trips in so much detail that the book drags, and I can’t believe this is only half of the intended volume.

A Promised Land takes us from Obama’s youth through the military operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, so it’s more than a memoir of his time in the White House, or even in politics, and if you’re curious about the development of his character – or, as I was, how someone from a rather unlikely background rose so quickly from a state legislative position to the White House – that is the book’s true throughline. We learn far more about Barack Obama the person here than about, say, how certain decisions came to pass. That may seem a strange comment on a book of this length (and small font), but there’s a distinction between giving us every detail of a meeting, such as every word spoken or gesture made, and giving context and nuance to the scene. This book is a depiction rather than an explanation. So many of the compromises of Obama’s first term, large or small, are attributed to political expediency, often to the argument that it was “do this or the deal doesn’t get done.” Yes, that is how our unwieldy system of government works, but A Promised Land doesn’t connect enough of the dots here.

So much of the part of the book that covers his first two years in office is really a lengthy indictment of the existence of the United States Senate, which gives so much power to legislators who represent wildly unequal numbers of constituents. The camera needs to pan back and show the whole scene, and then Obama could, at least, argue that the system prevents those within it from enacting real, progressive change, even if a majority of Americans support it. The section on the fight over the Affordable Care Act, which is at least the most important event within the book and gets substantial coverage, shows how the sausage is made but never really concludes that the process means the sausage is hazardous to your health.

There is some self-serving messaging here, some rationalization that, as President, he had no choice but to do this or that, to leave troops in Iraq or Afghanistan longer than he’d promised, to check which way the wind was blowing before supporting marriage equality, and so on. A lot of the text around his first year in office amounts to “we inherited a colossal mess,” and that’s probably true, and more instructive now than it was a year ago, as President Biden appears to have inherited an even bigger mess. But doesn’t every President who replaces a predecessor of the other party feel, on some level, that he inherited a mess? Even though the transition of power from President George W. Bush to President Obama was smooth, and Bush deserves some plaudits for how open and cordial he and his staff were to their successors, in the end, you’re restaffing a giant monolith that moves at the pace of a glacier and trying to make quick course corrections that might run to 180 degrees. Did you succeed in spite of those limitations, and if not, what did you learn that you might tell the next guy (well, the guy after the next guy)?

Obama is witty, and he’s a gifted storyteller – his prose isn’t quick, but it’s evocative of image and place, and he captures many of the personalities around him well enough to help distinguish the many people around him in his office. He’s just wordy – his prose is, in fact, too prolix – although I imagine his editors might have been reluctant to ask him to cut back, because, hey, he’s Barack Obama. If there’s an abridged version, as much as I’m loath to recommend those, it might be better for readers who just want to know what happened and how. As for the why, and what we can learn from it, perhaps that’ll come in the second book.

Next up: I just finished Gilbert King’s Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction.

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→ March 31, 2020
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The Souvenir.

Joanna Hogg’s autobiographical coming-of-age drama The Souvenir made a slew of best-of-2019 lists, taking the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and winning Sight and Sound‘s poll for the best film of 2019. My friend Tim Grierson has been a big advocate of the film, ranking it 7th among films of last year, and of director Joanna Hogg, which was really enough to get me to watch it. It is a very British movie, understated and often ponderous, but it’s bolstered by two very strong performances by the leads and the resolution gives a real catharsis to everything the film has asked you to endure up to that point. (It’s streaming now on Amazon Prime.)

Honor Swinton-Byrne plays Julie, a 24-year-old would-be filmmaker, in film school at the moment, who meets a Foreign Office staffer in his mid-30s named Anthony (Tom Burke) and almost falls into a desultory affair with him, despite his secretive nature and tendency to subtly put her down. It seems like he’s gaslighting her from the start, but it becomes more evident when he starts to borrow money from her – despite him having a job that often sends him abroad, while she’s a poor student – and eventually she learns via a friend of his (Richard Ayaode) that he’s hiding a heroin habit. She’s too enamored of him to leave, however, despite his increasing duplicity, and the relationship begins to consume her as Anthony’s situation gets worse.

This is a very slow burn until the last quarter of the film; there are no screaming fights, no violence, just a few verbal confrontations where Julie ends up apologizing even though Anthony is clearly in the wrong. It’s painful to watch her abase herself for a man who has never shown himself to be worth this kind of devotion; I’m not even clear what his redeeming qualities are supposed to be, as he’s not charming, good-looking, or kind. What finally pushes her to the breaking point is several steps beyond what a rational person would need to say ‘enough,’ but that’s the emotional center of the film – just how far Julie has fallen into this trap, and how easily it happened to her. There have been many entries in the “young woman falls for a feckless, manipulative, older man” genre, but this one, based on Hogg’s own life in film school in the late ’70s, feels extremely realistic because it doesn’t have the Big Moments and never comes across like a film trying to make you feel something specific.

Swinton-Byrne is very convincing as Julie, imbuing the character with naïveté rather than just innocence, and making it a bit more plausible that she’d fall under Anthony’s spell because she seems so lonely in the early scenes – and thus more appreciative of someone, especially an older man, giving her attention. Burke does what he is supposed to be doing with Anthony, although the attraction of such a mopey, vaguely derisive man is beyond me; he does carry himself with an air of sophistication that might explain it, although perhaps it’s just the upper-class English accent that got me. Ayaode is only in one scene, but he grabs the whole thing from the two leads and utterly owns that entire conversation – sitting next to his real-life wife, Lydia Fox, as they talk – while not just delivering a key piece of information to Julie, but doing so with a unique affectation that totally commands your attention. Swinton-Byrne’s mother, Tilda Swinton, appears in the film as Julie’s mother, although her character is something of a cipher and she has little to do until the last few scenes.

The Souvenir is quite good, but also so slow and quiet in parts that it feels almost expressly anti-commercial: The audience for this sort of movie is very small, a set that probably comprises fans of art house films, Anglophiles, and not a whole lot more. I liked it, but I can’t say I enjoyed it, between the pace and the horror of watching Julie so unaware that Anthony is taking advantage of her. It’s a film to be appreciated, rather than one that seeks to entertain.

—

I’ve seen 31 movies from 2019 so far, and I have three more I’d really like to see before closing the book on the year, so to speak, all of them foreign-language films. Two are streaming now on Hulu, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Monos, while the third will stream on Amazon Prime in about two weeks, the Oscar-nominated Les Misérables. (Amazon also will premiere the Brazilian submission to the 92nd Oscars, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, this Friday). I’ll probably watch the first in the next few days, and then I’ll rank the movies I’ve seen from 2019, but if you have suggestions I’m all ears.

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→ August 10, 2017
→ By

Lab Girl.

Botanist Hope Jahren’s memoir Lab Girl, winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for the best autobiographical work of 2016, is a wildly compelling, inspiring read, the story of a woman who has fought mental illness, institutional sexism, and the indifference of a country that would rather fund wars than basic science to become a successful researcher and professor. It’s full of observations on the lives of plants, processes largely beneath our awareness because plants aren’t sentient or, in most cases, particularly mobile. But more than anything else, Lab Girl is the story of Jahren’s unusual, decades-long friendship with a lab partner and co-conspirator named Bill, who threatens to overtake Jahren in her own life story.

Jahren grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota where most of the local economy revolved around the town’s hog slaughterhouse, the lone daughter of a scientist father and frustrated-scientist mother, and was drawn to science from an early age. She chronicles her meandering path to her current post at the University of Hawai’i by way of undergraduate work at the University of Minnesota (where she also worked in the hospital’s pharmacy, filling bags and running them to patient rooms) and graduate work at Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins.

The heart of Jahren’s story, however, is this quixotic relationship she has with the itinerant Bill, whom she first encounters while they work at a research lab in California and then takes with her to Atlanta, Baltimore, and now Honolulu. Bill appears only in anecdotes and his dialogue revolves largely around a certain Anglo-Saxon gerund, but he comes across as a character right out of Inherent Vice – witty, gifted, cutting, loyal, poorly dressed, and a stoner. Jahren has some career ambition, driven in part by the sexism she meets at every stop – some overt, most just subtle enough to not get every one of those assholes hauled in front of HR – but also by lessons of her childhood. Bill, on the other hand, wants to be in the lab. He wants to work in the lab, yes, but also to inhabit the lab, which he actually does at a few points over the course of their shared history. His limited personal needs become fodder for inadvertent humor, such as the time he cuts most of his shaggy hair off … and stores it in the trunk of a nearby tree so he can go visit it. Every time Bill shows up on the page, the book goes from good to great.

Jahren manages to wrest the spotlight back from Bill a few times, especially in her descriptions of her bipolar disorder, which she depicts as occasionally useful for her work but also disastrous for her life and a major problem for the first 26 weeks of her one pregnancy. (I didn’t get the sense she intends for there to be a second.) Bipolar disorder, often misnamed as manic-depressive disorder, is still a widely misunderstood mental illness, even as we creep toward greater societal acceptance of the most common diseases like depression, anxiety, and panic disorder. Jahren’s story doesn’t revolved around her illness, but it is a shining example of how much someone can achieve in spite of that obstacle.

Lab Girl won as an autobiography, and it is much more that than it is a science book. Jahren explains her love of plants (and soil – you can’t separate the two) with concise lessons on topics like leaf structure, plant sex (fertilization), or how plants survive in the desert. She also takes us to some widely varying settings and depicts them with evocative, bright language, from the greenery of Ireland to the barren terrain of a nearly plantless Arctic island north of Nunavut. As someone who reads and enjoys popular science books, I was hoping for a bit more of this, and given the book’s length (under 300 pages), there was certainly room for that. For one important example, Jahren talks at length about the scarcity of funds for basic science research like hers – research that won’t help us in war or directly lead to a cure or a product – but climate change gets the drive-by treatment in the last two chapters. In an era when one of our two political parties has embraced climate change denial, and has recruited swaths of the religious right to join them in this delusion, we need more voices like Jahren to speak out about the truth.

I sell, share, or donate a lot of the books I acquire, because if I stored them all, I’d need a second room just to shelve them. (Also, books are heavy, and I’ve made two cross-country moves in the last seven years.) I’m going to keep Lab Girl for a few years; my daughter is eleven and enjoys science, so once she’s ready for the book’s vocabulary, she’ll devour it.

Next up: Fritz Lieber’s Hugo-winning novel The Wanderer, which is just $3.82 for the Kindle.

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→ March 12, 2013
→ By

Blood, Bones & Butter.

A little admin stuff first – my new weekly podcast for ESPN, Behind the Dish, debuted today, featuring an interview with Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and a conversation with fellow writer Joe Sheehan. I appreciate the support of all of you who listened to Baseball Today and mourned its end, so I hope you’ll tune in to the new show. It should be up on iTunes today (there’s a technical problem on their end, I’m told). Spread the word.

Also, I have new posts for Insiders on Jeff Samardzija, David Holmberg, and other Cubs and Dbacks and on Yordano Ventura, Brandon Belt, Tyler Skaggs, and more.

–

Gabrielle Hamilton is a self-taught and, in her words, “reluctant,” chef who achieved great acclaim for her tiny New York restaurant Prune and the honest, rustic fare she has served there for the past fourteen years, eventually winning the James Beard Award as NYC’s best chef in 2001. Her brilliantly written memoir, Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, is a masterpiece of the memoir genre, a perfect emulsion of food writing and autobiography that will make your mouth water with descriptions of food yet never shies away from critical introspection.

One central thread, Hamilton’s own relationship with food and, by extension, how much that relationship tied to her relationships with friends and family, runs through the entire book, but rather than giving a single story, Hamilton splits her memoir into a sort of triptych: one section on her childhood and adolescence, one on her stop-and-go path into a career in food (with a detour to Michigan for a master’s in creative writing), and one on her unfulfilling marriage to an Italian doctor, Michele. Food is everywhere in the book, yet the book isn’t about food. It is about Hamilton’s peculiar life, with her passion for cooking a recurring character in every episode.

Hamilton’s path to culinary stardom was accidental, but also extremely odd, not something you’d ever recommend to a would-be chef. Her offbeat family imploded when her French-born mother suddenly demanded a divorce from Gabrielle’s set-designer/artist father, ushering in a period when Gabrielle was largely left without parental supervision, a tragicomic setup that led her both into the kind of libertine behavior you’d expect from a 13-year-old without adults around and into a lifetime of extreme self-reliance. She began working in restaurants and bars, as a dishwasher or a server, and eventually working insane hours for catering outfits in New York, learning how to cook as she went rather than at culinary school. Her disdain for fussy, pretentious food gives her an opportunity for some hilarious rants; her own culinary ethos is about as far from a “chef’s tasting menu” as you can get. Instead, she waxes more romantic when describing an Italian sandwich she purchased at a pork shop in Brooklyn (unnamed, sadly) or the fresh seasonal vegetables she finds during annual visits to her mother-in-law in Rome and Puglia. Even in the final section, which details her latent disaffection with her marriage, one that wasn’t founded on love and never grew into anything more than friendly co-parenting, Hamilton still uses food as the foundation for the exploration of her own emotions.

While Hamilton infuses nearly every page with her passion for food, it’s her clear yet highly evocative writing style that sets Blood, Bones & Butter apart. She can express so much in just a few sentences, as in this passage, describing the scene at a coffee place in Grand Central Station:

I hate hating women but double-skim half-decaf vanilla latte embarrasses me. I ordered a plain filtered coffee, as if I were apologizing on behalf of my gender, and when I dug through my heavy purse to pay for it I discovered in my bag a diaper, a resealable jar of apricot puree, and one of Marco’s socks, which had somehow in the general loss of boundary and private real estate that is Motherhood, made its way in there.

That second sentence there is a thing of beauty, its odd punctuation contributing to its sense of barely contained chaos, all while we get Hamilton’s scorn for overly prissy fake coffee drinks and her exasperation at the loss of self that comes with the addition of one or more kids. When Hamilton describes her experiences in catering kitchens, or takes you through Michele’s family estate in Italy, or talks about the large family meals that bookend the story – the giant lamb roasts her father organized when she was a kid, and the family meal with her now ex-in-laws that appears in the epilogue-cum-“reader’s guide” – you can hear the sizzle of the meat as it cooks. If she’s as good of a chef as she is of a writer, Prune must be amazing.

One stray thought on the book: in a passage about women’s roles and struggles in a professional kitchen, Hamilton offers this thought:

If anything, I have come to love the men who also feel that the kitchen is abetter place when women are allowed to work in it, the men who feel that if any part of society is abused, that it demeans the rest of society.

Emphasis mine there, because that summarizes quite nicely why I will block people on Twitter who use the r-word, or a gay-bashing epithet like the word for a bundle of sticks, and it explains why I find team nicknames like Indians or Braves or that odious one that plays football in Washington so offensive. Intent to demean is not required for something to demean. Simply creating a division that sets one part of the population as “other” is demeaning. We do not name sports teams after Italians or Jews or African-Americans, after lesbians or Sikhs or the disabled, yet we think nothing of naming sports teams after Native Americans, or using words that are obvious proxies for them. (Would you see the implicit racism in a sports team called the Atlanta Slaves?) Hamilton’s praise for men who want women in their kitchens and treated as equals says much about her character, and what kind of co-worker and boss she must be, especially in an industry that often adulates alpha males with domineering personalities.

Next up: Lev Grossman’s The Magician King, the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians, which I reviewed that August.

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→ April 14, 2012
→ By

Imperfect.

I assume Jim Abbott’s story is pretty well-known: Born with a malformed right hand, Abbott became a successful multi-sport high school athlete, pitched at the University of Michigan, and spent 10 years in the big leagues, pitching for the Angels, White Sox, Brewers, and Yankees, throwing a no-hitter for that last club that happens to be the only professional no-hitter I have ever attended in person. In his new memoir, Imperfect: An Improbable Life, written with Yahoo!’s Tim Brown, Abbott talks about his own personal struggles with creating an identity for himself independent of his disability, of the challenges of growing up with a visible difference, and of the opportunities his success gave him to reach and sometimes inspire children growing up with similar physical issues.

The book separates Abbott’s life and career into two separate tracks. The main track begins with Abbott’s parents meeting, dating, and finding themselves about to become teenaged parents, and then facing the reality of Abbott’s condition, yet, after an adjustment period, deciding not to let the disability become an excuse for him or for them. The sections dealing with Abbott’s childhood tell seemingly tangential anecdotes that turn out to be important in his professional career as he tries to deal with the sudden fame and just as sudden decline all within the first five or six years after college. The second track pulls Abbott’s no-hitter out of the main story and gives it its own narrative, one that I enjoyed reading because of my personal connection to that game but that only gave occasional glimpses into the mind of a pitcher as he’s throwing the game. (I’d love for any pitcher to sit down after a no-hitter – and after the ensuing celebration – and write down everything he remembers thinking or doing during that game. Abbott’s retelling here has some of that, but much of it reads like a man remembering a game he pitched almost twenty years ago, not the more precise in-the-moment recollections we’d get if it was something he’d written the day after the game occurred.)

Those two interesting stories are intertwined in an obvious and ultimately unsuccessful gimmick to try to create some parallels between them, which only serves to distract the reader from both of the narratives without adding anything to the overall story. Abbott’s no-hitter started slowly, picked up speed in the middle innings, and then reached a crescendo in the ninth inning. His career arc looked nothing like that, and ended first with a whimper, a brief comeback, and then a final great good-night. It’s awkward to read about a no-hitter in nine brief chapters separated by longer discursions dating back as much as twenty years – and it’s just as awkward to read about Abbott’s career and have the no-hitter omitted entirely. It reads to me as if the no-hitter was this book’s equivalent of Oakland’s twenty-game winning streak in the movie version of Moneyball: Someone decided that the film needed a Big Triumph, regardless of that event’s place in the greater narrative. Imperfect wouldn’t have been perfect with a more conventional structure, but it would have read better.

I also struggled with the book’s occasional lapses into purple prose; Abbott’s voice (which I’m assuming is what we’re getting for most of the first-person narratives) is clear and simple, so when he refers to a taxi as a “metered ride” or says he didn’t have the “temerity” to ask teammates why he’d been given a certain nickname, it’s like having someone crank up the volume in the middle of a song. (“Temerity” is a great word, but you can’t just drop it into a passage where it’s the two-dollar word in a paragraph of dimes.) Abbott also defines his performance primarily by his won-lost records, occasionally mentioning ERAs, which makes him a product of his time; if you’ve watched any baseball over the first ten days of this season, you already know how foolish using a pitcher’s won-lost record to measure his performance is, and the book would be stronger with anything more advanced in their stead.

Where the book really sings is in the passages about people who helped Abbott on his way up or the kids he helped once he’d gotten there. Tim Mead, the longtime PR man for the Angels, might want to get a lawyer and sue Abbott, because the book makes Mead out to be an absolutely wonderful human being. Abbott mentions the first scout to really believe in him (Don Welke, now with Texas), the teacher who taught him a trick that allowed him to tie his own shoes, the coaches and teammates who became his support network, and the late sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman, who comes through on the page exactly as I knew him from our two or three encounters in Toronto. Abbott’s recounting of his time on the Olympic team that won the gold medal in Seoul in 1988 is another highlight. And the section describing the kids and parents who would line up by the dozens across the country just to meet him so they could see that, yes, there’s someone else who looks like them, someone who made it all the way to the major leagues … well, it might get a little dusty in your living room when you get to that part.

Abbott’s early life and pro career didn’t fit the typical mold for Hollywood sports movies, but there’s plenty there for his story to stand on its own without structural gimmickry to make it seem more dramatic. I was always a Jim Abbott fan – if you liked baseball at the time and didn’t root for him, you probably weren’t human – and enjoyed reading about his experiences, but the story’s packaging took something away from what he had to say.

Next up: Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum.

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