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Dream a little dream of her

California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before The Mamas & The Papas by Pénélope Bagieu (First Second, $24.99). 

This graphic biography of one of the most astounding voices in popular music (put Cass Elliot up there next to Karen Carpenter and Dusty Springfield) is deeply humanizing and revealing. 

California Dreamin’ begins when Ellen Cohen from Baltimore heads up to NYC to pursue her dreams as a folksinger. She has the chops, there’s no doubt about that; unfortunately, she wasn’t album cover material. And the times were a-changing, as were the sounds, but ideals of feminine beauty? Still have a ways to go. 

An excellent biography, Pénélope Bagieu’s art provides emotional insight into all the things Cass Elliot thought she was hiding, and that found heartbreaking freedom every time she opened her mouth to sing. 

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Elvis and space spiders, oh, my!

Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar (Little, Brown & Company, $15.99).

A debut novel by Czech-American Jaroslav Kalfar, Spaceman of Bohemia is the sort of novel one might get if Ray Bradbury was edited by Thomas Pynchon and George Carlin. 

Yes, it’s philosophical and political and downright funny, as Jakub Prochazka, the Czech astronaut of the title, is sent to investigate some strange cosmic dust between Earth and Venus. That might seem like a simple enough task, but it turns into an examination of Jakub’s relationship with his Elvis-loving former secret policeman father, as well as his hopes for his marriage. 

There’s also this space spider, which may be an alien (ya think?), or perhaps a figment of Jackub’s always-in-overdrive imagination. 

Spaceman of Bohemian is far less hesitant than many first novels, and like the best science fiction of the last decade, it’s far more literary than the genre might lead one to believe.

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Think about this today. Oh, and READ. THIS. BOOK.

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Crown, $26).

I know that I recommend a ton of books. More than any normal person would read, in fact. But let me be clear: This is the most important book in the last decade. 

Yeah, yeah. But remember, I’m not being paid to say it.

And frankly, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are a bit too middle-of-the-road in their politics for my tastes. But they support every claim they make with clear-cut examples from history and current events. And the things they speculate about? Many have happened in the time between when this book went to press and now.

So, on to the review.

The main claim here is that the United States is not exceptional, and what happens in other democracies can happen here. 

It’s not will it happen. There are specific things we can do to prevent the failure of our democracy--including voting, which I sincerely hope you’ve done today. But it can. We have no magic powers or extra-specialness that makes our constitution unassailable while others fail.

And to prove it, Levitsky and Ziblatt have come up with some specifics about the conditions in which democracy fails. 

Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.

Let’s start with the reality: Hitler won an election,  too. So did Mussolini. And Hugo Chavez, down in Venezuela. Assuming that, because they are elected, our leaders can be trusted with our democracy is a delusion with a very high cost. The reality, they explain, is that most democracies in the post-WWII era have died at the polls. 

The people elected leaders who then proceeded to subvert democracy, often under the guise of “improving” it. Some of these subversions include gerrymandering (to ensure single-party rule, or enough of a majority that other changes can be made at will), court-packing, and, in the absence of the ability to do those things, undermining the integrity of the checks and balance system by claiming corruption.

Sound familiar? Sure, it does.

But Levitsky and Ziblatt make clear that it’s not just one party that does this. For example, FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court--and got slapped down, hard. And while President George W. Bush first began the practice of legislating by executive directive, President Barack Obama continued it; its outrageous expansion under the current administration is just one more step along the road.

See, democracy has foes on both sides of the aisle. When “winning” or getting what one party wants becomes more important than democratic norms and constitutional procedures, democracy is in danger. These norms are, according to the authors, 

     mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one     

     another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians     

     should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. ... The   

     erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and 

     accelerated in the 2000s.

They point specifically to the rise of cable news (specifically, FOXNews) and former Rep. Newt Gingrich’s introduction of party discipline and single-mindedness.

They also point out that the period of collegiality that we now remember fondly was the direct result of Northern politicians turning a blind eye to the use of Jim Crow to enforce white supremacy in the South, and that this decorum was bought at the price of terrible harm to Black Americans. President Lyndon Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act and Nixon’s “Southern strategy” blew this democratic norm apart--and rightly so--but instead of moving forward, we’ve had win-at-any-cost destruction of all the rest of our democratic norms.

We have entered a very dangerous place for democracy: “extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.”

The most dangerous place is when a

     politician 1) rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game, 2)   

     denies the legitimacy of opponents, 3) tolerates or encourages violence, and  

     4) indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including 

     the media.

Remind you of anyone?

The only solution, they argue, are politicians in all parties who are willing to stand up and make common cause against anti-democratic behavior, and they offer plenty of examples from our own history as well as that of other democracies--and former democracies.

Perhaps most terrifying is their use of Brazil as an example of a stable democracy, given that they went to press before the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency. His rhetoric--and his political goals--are much less in line with democratic norms.

Although it is depressing, this book is recommended so highly because it puts current events in context. There is, however, one bit of context missing: Some of the pressures that the American people are experiencing right now are going to get much, much worse as climate change continues to alter the planet. For example, our current angst about refugees and migrants will only grow as those displaced by the effects of climate change seek safety.

And under those pressures, will we find the character to insist upon democracy and its norms? 

All we can do is be informed and take the very first, primal action of democracy: Vote. 

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Kim Stanley Robinson has a new novel coming soon. Nice profile in WIRED.

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In the hospital during the outbreak

Inferno: A Doctor’s Ebola Story by Steven Hatch, M.D. (St. Martin’s Press, $27.99).

Steven Hatch, a doctor and professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, had already in Liberia in 2013, but when the Ebola outbreak began a little over a year later, he felt the pull to return there and help out. After some bureaucratic delays, he did; this book is his report, and it is far less alarmist and far more compassionate than most news reports of the crisis were at the time.

In Inferno, Hatch tells the stories of some of his patients--both those who died and those who survived--but it’s also threaded throughout with a doctor’s perspective on the underlying conditions in the country that allowed the outbreak to become so dangerous. Both political difficulties and public health deficits combined to make Liberia more susceptible to epidemic conditions than some other nations in the region, and Hatch offers his perspective as a health care provider and as a scholar. He’s also very honest about his own struggles to cope under the stress of the situation, which makes for a nuanced and compelling first-person account.

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The state is a powerful machine

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea by Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith (Grove Press, $16).

Bandi, which means “firefly” in Korean, is the pseudonym of a North Korean author, and these stories were smuggled out of that police state in 2013. The origin story of this collection alone would make compelling reading; however, The Accusation is an insider’s look at that opaque society.

Bandi’s characters, from soybean farmer to bureaucrat, are all normal people trapped in an abnormal world, one where a child who cries at the wrong time, failure to place flowers at a memorial for Kim Il Sung, or a failed crop are all enough to bring the apparatus of the state crashing down on one’s head. These political “crimes” may be punishable by anything from a sentence at hard labor to death. 

The real gift for Western readers of these stories is the way that Bandi illuminates that singular moment when the characters realize that it doesn’t matter whether they are guilty or innocent. The state will destroy them anyway. 

Bandi has not been heard from since 2015; it’s possible--nay, likely--that the state has claimed him as well.

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The Fall of Lisa Bellow: A Novel by Susan Perabo (Simon & Schuster, $16).

The typical family thriller these days is about a family who lost a daughter--abducted, dead, gone--with a varying point of view. Sometimes we get the mother’s story; the father’s; a sibling; the detective’s; even, occasionally, the missing girl herself. 

In The Fall of Lisa Bellow, Susan Perabo takes a slightly different tack. Meredith Oliver, an eighth grader, is by chance in a deli when a robbery takes place. So is “mean girl” Lisa Bellow. Lisa is kidnapped; Meredith is left behind. Instead of focusing on Lisa’s family, Perabo’s novel focuses on Meredith’s. We see how a family under stress copes when the absolute worst doesn’t happen--or rather, when it happens to someone else’s family instead of yours. 

The characterizations of Meredith and her mother, Claire, are incredibly well-realized, and this family drama is far more subtle and intriguing than the typical fare. Put it on your list for when you want “brain candy” with some nutrition wrapped inside.

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They’re always changing. We need to do the same

The Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs by Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker (Little, Brown and Company, $28).

Recent news of the outbreak of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), the polio-like disease that has afflicted 127 children in 22 states, should remind us that we’re never safe from infectious disease; in fact, the germs that cause these illnesses are usually evolving much faster than either we or our treatment methods. 

And here’s a basic fact: Any one of us is much, much more likely to die of complications from the flu than as a result of a terrorist attack. While we cower in fear of the catastrophic--Ebola, say, or Zika--the real threat is much closer. 

Michael T. Osterholm is a public health professor at the University of Minnesota; writing with science journalist Mark Olshaker, he’s got a clear description of the rising threat from epidemic disease in The Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs. For the non-specialist, The Deadliest Enemy offers an accessible explanation of why epidemic disease is--thanks to climate change--the greatest danger humanity faces, and Osterholm’s description of the progression and aftermath of a novel influenza outbreak makes clear how he earned the nickname “Bad News Mike.”

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The Post-9/11 generation

Ohio: A Novel by Stephen Markley (Simon & Schuster, $27). 

The kids are most definitely not all right in Stephen Markley’s dark, angry and more than a little depressing novel of the post-9/11 generation in the flyover states.

These are the kids that grew up in the shadow of no towers and came of age in a nation busily fighting two foreign wars: Afghanistan and Iraq. The novel opens in fictional New Canaan, Ohio, in 2007, where local football hero and deceased soldier Rick Brinklan is being honored at a parade that turns into a windy SNAFU. 

This prologue is followed by the stories of a group of friends who watched the towers fall while still in high school and then were forced to confront the realities of the decade after. It’s not pleasant and it’s fairly drug-fueled, but without jobs and purpose, stuck in a never-ending war, there’s not much to feel particularly optimistic about.

While Ohio may provide a realistic look at all the conflicting ideals, hopes and realities that have brought an entire generation to a pretty depressing place, it gets a bit (predictably) preachy in places, as people tend to become mouthpieces for the ideas they present. Nonetheless, the pain is palpable, and that’s what makes this a stunning work. We’ve got an entire generation filled with hopeless, cynical young people. How are we ever going to fix this?

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Man, I love this dude

New York 2140: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit, $17.99).

Every time a massive storm heads up the East Coast, remember that the new normal is going to be different than we imagine. Davis, Calif., novelist Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest, now in paperback, covers this soaked terrain as climate change--which froze Washington, DC in his last trilogy on the topic--now disrupts human culture and forces us to adapt in New York 2140. 

The citizens of the Big Apple have created a high-rise Venice in the aftermath of catastrophic flooding, brought on by equally catastrophic polar ice melt. The plot turns on the sudden disappearance of two coders who were trying to “hack the planet,” but Robinson has threaded throughout the individual stories of human resilience in a novel that’s far less dystopian than might be expected. 

Life will find a way, after all, so we’ll use our resources and adapt. The best insights here--and the most useful for mitigation in the real world--are Robinson’s insights into how climate change and capitalism are intricately meshed.

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Off to a very troubling start

Max by Sarah Cohen-Scali, translated by Penny Hueston (MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group, $21.99).

French novelist Sarah Cohen-Scali goes as deep into Nazism as possible–starting in utero, as a child conceived as part of the Lebensborn program narrates the young adult novel Max. 

Named Konrad–though the nickname Max sticks–and baptized by the Führer himself, the protagonist is a true believer from the first, so much so that’s it is uncomfortable for the informed reader, who knows just how these ideals and ideas ended up. But as he grows up and is further indoctrinated, Max finds nothing to discourage him from the rightness of the Reich–which would make this novel rather chilling propaganda for the neo-Nazis, except for the turn it takes when Max meets a blonde, blue-eyed Polish boy, Lukas, who has a secret. He’s a Jew.

The achingly slow evolution of Max’s moral center offers a new–and thoroughly squirmy–way to understand how reasonable people could do horrible and insane things. While it couldn’t be more timely, without context, older children and teens might not understand just how downright creepy Max is before his awakening. This would be a great addition to the reading list for youths who’ve already devoured such classics as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl or Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, but it probably shouldn’t be the first exposure to literature about the Holocaust and Nazism for young readers.

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Beyond homage

The Night Ocean: A Novel by Paul La Farge (Penguin Press, $17).

The troubled genius of American horror, H. P. Lovecraft, towers over and lurks throughout The Night Ocean, Paul La Farge’s tribute and critique of the father of Cthulu and the other old and terrifying gods.

The novel opens with Charlie Willits, the biracial chronicler of Lovecraft’s (fictional) homosexuality, escaping from a mental hospital--a plot device horror fans will recognize from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. In a layered and multivocal narrative, La Farge’s novel centers Lovecraft’s racism and general weirdness while also covering a century’s worth of science fiction and horror fandom. This is a work of love, admiration and honesty that manages to avoid moralizing even as it embraces morality.

La Farge has accomplished what every fan dreams of: He’s written the problematic master into a story so strange that even he couldn’t have imagined it.

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No nonsense: When climate changes, humans must adapt or die

Climate Change anAd the Health of Nations: Famine, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations by Anthony J. McMichael (Oxford University Press, $39.95).

It’s hard to imagine a book more appropriate to the times than Australian epidemiologist Anthony J. McMichael’s historical view of human adaptation to climate change. That’s because last week’s IPCC report says we’ve got 12 years or less to the point of no return on climate change (see “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040,” NY Times, 7 October 2018).

In Climate Change and the Health of Nations, McMichael doesn’t rely on extrapolations from current data; rather, he takes the very long--about 11,000 years--view.

Even a cursory study of humans’ wealthy agricultural past requires one thing to succeed: a stable climate. Other factors may cause ups and downs in our fortunes, but without a stable climate to allow long-term settlement hiland the ability to feed ourselves, we’re back to the foraging primates we started as--and, without a stable climate, that sort of life is more difficult as well.

McMichael outlines how climate change--both natural and man-made--has affected our societies, starting with its role in the collapse of Mayan civilization and the power of spreading epidemics (bubonic plague) to alter our fortunes. 

It rapidly becomes apparent that deforestation, desertification, change in range for disease-bearing insects and altered climactic zones for agriculture mean big, big issues for a stable and successful human culture. While it’s an academic book, Climate Change and the Health of Nations is accessible for non-specialists and does an excellent job showing how climate change, no matter the cause, impacts human society--and survival.

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Pay attention to the South part

South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion (Knopf, $21).

Joan Didion’s reached that point in life where agents are digging through her filing cabinets, looking for something new to publish. Fortunately, the Sacramento native’s notebooks read like most writers’ polished draft--or so the first of the selections in this slim volume would lead us to believe. 

South and West: From a Notebook are notes that Didion made for two pieces in the ‘70s and never published. The first--and still intriguing, timely, and in some ways prescient--was a trip through the Deep South by car in 1970, and it includes the still-apt observation that “sporting events are the opiate of the people.”

Her observations on race relations remain accurate and surprisingly current, as well as her evocation of the sense of there being one country that lives on multiple planets, at least metaphorically. It surely would not have taken much work to turn this selection into a complete book.

The second piece, notes made for a piece on Patty Hearst’s trial in 1976, are in much rougher shape and have less bearing on Hearst than on Didion’s personal understanding of what it meant to be a Californian. These are ideas that are explored with much more clarity and depth in Where I Was From. And, although this reader longs to see what Didion would have written about the newspaper heiress’s trial, these notes remind us that even a maestro’s notebook is the work of a maestro.

Bonus link: My 2003 interview with Joan Didion for the Sacramento News & Review, “Where She Was From.” 

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Read. Write. Live.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li (Random House Trade Paperbacks, $16).

This first memoir from Yiyun Li, noted fiction writer and UC Davis professor, is multifaceted. Some sections (more like linked essays, really) read like straight-up autobiography, including narrative’s of Li’s time in the People’s Liberation Army; her immigration to the U.S., initially as an immunologist; and her decision to move from science to writing. 

Other sections are very literary, concerned with her influences--authors as diverse as Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Bowen. 

And then there is the deeply personal, as Li delves into her struggles with depression, including thoughts of suicide.

What binds it all together is Li’s delicate, precise language and her unflinching eye for the truth of humanity. The great questions of her life, then, are slowly answered: Read. Write. Live. 

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Trust no one--especially not him

Our Kind of Cruelty: A Novel by Araminta Hall (MCD Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26).

First, a word of warning: If stalking and obsessive, possessive relationships are a trigger for you, don’t read this book.

If, however, a good thriller with an unreliable narrator sounds like a pleasant way to spend a weekend, I can’t recommend Our Kind of Cruelty highly enough. Aramninta Hall’s debut reflects her feminist perspective in the most disturbing way: She gets inside the head of a sociopathic obsessive boyfriend and follows him to the end. 

In other words, there’s more than one way to destroy the one you claim to love.

It’s rare for me to find a book that I just can’t put down. In fact, I generally read more than one book at a time, toggling between two or three over the course of a couple of days. This one was a “read straight through and become so obsessed it goes to the bathroom with you” book, though. 

Mike has had a rough life, and risen above it, thanks to the last set of foster parents he had. When he meets Verity in college, he seems to have found it all: a future that looks bright with a wonderful woman by his side. 

But there’s a dark edge here, and the real question throughout is how involved Verity is, truly, in what happens. That’s the central mystery, and the reader’s conclusion will depend on just how much weight to give Mike’s testimony. He is our narrator, after all, but trusting him? That might be a really big mistake.

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American chorus

Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel by George Saunders (Random House, $17).

Anytime someone asks for a novel rec, I’m giving this one. That’s not because it’s the most recent or even the most absolutely literary, but because it is the most American--and that’s what we need right now.

Simply enough, the novel takes place over the days immediately after the burial of young Willie Lincoln in the deep winter of 1862. It triggered the bout of melancholy that lasted until the president’s death three years later. The graveyard where Willie is interred in a mausoleum (his body was later moved to Illinois) serves as the physical location of the bardo, the intermediary place between life and death.

The various residents of the bardo--save one--are in deep denial about their state. Most of them, detached from time and the flesh, cannot imagine that they will not “recover” and return to the lives they left; as they slowly transform into figures unrecognizable as human, the psychological machinations through which they delude themselves become even more elaborate and they envision moving on as death, rather than what they have already experienced.

Meanwhile, Lincoln has returned to the mausoleum to hold Willie’s body, so deep in his grief that he is nearly mad with it. Some of our “ghosts,” for lack of a better word, see the president’s presence as a chance to escape the bardo.

While we toggle between the voices of a deceased newspaper publisher, a suicide, and a minister, we also get a sense of the United States as a mishmash of histories, ideas, dreams and desires. And no, it’s not fully inclusive--women are minor characters; there are no Native voices; slaves are relegated (with a singular exception) to a nameless ditch.

In other words, it’s the same as it ever was.

But it is also a specific moment in time, one in which Lincoln is confronted with the loss of a beloved son and so understands the deep grief of a nation losing sons on the battlefield daily. It is a moment in which one man’s decision made all the difference--and that is the crux of this novel.

So, no, it’s not perfect. But it is so very American that it is true in every way.