Book Review: Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Back in April of 2011, we won tickets to see David Sedaris at the Lucas Theater, courtesy of The Book Lady Bookshop here in Savannah.  At the signing table in the lobby, he sat beside a sign prohibiting photographs, which I assumed was for proprietary reasons - after all, public figures own their words and images the way Walmart owns their BlueRay players and Hello Kitty purses.  But in an essay titled "Author, Author," from his latest collection, Sedaris comes clean about the sign:

     Unlike a lot of authors I know, I enjoy my book tours - love them, as a matter of fact.  That said, I'm in a fortunate position, and have been able to eliminate the parts that don't agree with me - the picture-taking, for instance.  People all have cameras on their cell phones now, and, figuring, I guess, that they might as well aim them at something, they'd ask me to stand and pose a good thirty times a night.  This wasn't an inconvenience so much as an embarrassment.  'You can do better than me,' I'd tell them.  And when they insisted they really couldn't, I'd feel even worse.  Thus, at readings, there's now a notice propped atop my book-signing table.  'Sorry,' it announces, 'but we don't allow photos.'  This makes it sound like it's the store's idea, a standard policy, like no eating fudge in the fine-arts section.

Whether or not you accept Sedaris's self-effacing justification is up to you, but I'd tend to doubt that a man whose every book has hit the NYT best seller list and who can pack a house at fifty bucks a head just to hear him talk really struggles with an inferiority complex.  I'd bet he just finds it annoying, as he indicates by calling it an "inconvenience."

However that may be, that ambiguity between the real David Sedaris and the rampantly autobiographical essayist permeates this collection.  In one piece, "Mind the Gap," he takes the issue head on.  Actually, he doesn't.  What he does is parody his own Europhile snobbery, but in a way that seems to validate it.  The running joke Sedaris sets up is his use of British slang while conversing with Americans:

     I said to my father yesterday afternoon, 'Do you fancy my new jumper?'
     When he answered, 'Huh?'  I was like, '"Jumper?" It means "sweater" in England.'
     'Right,' he said, adding that it was ninety-two degrees out and that if I didn't take it off I was guaranteed to get heatstroke or at least a rash, and wasn't that the last thing either of us needed at a time like this?
     'Ninety-two degrees or not, I still think it's the most brilliant jumper I've ever seen,' I told him.

The crux of the joke is Sedaris's wearing of the sweater just for the sake of employing its British name, which left me wondering, at least, Did he really do that? And, if so, did he realize his pretension at the time?  The world will never know, just as we never bridge the gap between the writer's voice and the person behind the pen.  In the meantime, though, as with Twain and Dave Barry and Sarah Vowell, we can enjoy the writing, if not the person.  And no piccys, please, indeed.

Book Review: Reckless: The Political Assault on the American Environment

I will never understand how people can get so riled about politics - excited, knowledgeable, involved, even partisan and opinionated: these can be positive qualities, but angry and irrational, not so.  I'm not talking about those who, say, oppose an unjust war or protest for lower taxes.  Those activities fall under the exercise of first amendment rights which keep our democracy vital.  I'm talking about those who scream (usually online) about Obama being a foreign-born Muslim socialist and such.

So it was refreshing to read Reckless, Bob Deans's level-headed partisan pamphlet.  He writes to criticize Republican congressional actions that erode environmental law, but he does so respectfully and thoughtfully.  The basis of his case, in fact, is the long history of Republican defense of the environment.

"'What is a conservative, after all, but one who conserves,' ....  'And we want to protect and conserve the land on which we live - our countryside, our rivers and mountains, our plains and meadows and forests.  This is our patrimony.  This is what we leave to our children.  And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.'"

What daisy-sniffing, meadow-tripping tree hugger said that?  None other than conservative hero President Ronald Reagan.  But the granddaddy of conservative conservationists, of course, is Teddy Roosevelt, who spoke emphatically of our moral mandate to environmental protection: "'Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.'"

Nowadays, though, Republicans want to declaw and dismantle the EPA, even though, Deans reminds us, "It was Republican President Richard Nixon, after all, who created the Environmental Protection Agency."

Why have Republicans shifted?  Deans quotes the explanation of a Syracuse professor: "'Scientifically, there is no controversy.  Politically, there is a controversy because there are political interest groups making it a controversy. ... It's not about science.  It's about politics.'"

Deans points to the business interests behind the politics, such as mining companies who will profit from the removal of environmental safeguards, but he particularly bemoans the big lie that protective laws are "job killers."  Deans asserts that "There simply isn't any evidence to support the GOP illusion of some vast regulatory regime running roughshod over personal industry and individual rights.  In fact, our country depends on a sound regulatory environment, as every modern economic power does, to function in a stable and predictable way.  Environmental regulations create jobs and provide additional economic benefits worth hundreds of billions of dollars each year, many times their annual compliance cost, while promoting American economic growth and competitiveness."  Deans quotes all the facts and figures to support this assertion, pointing to economic growth resulting from regulation, and statistics proving that industry regulations do not adversely effect job creation.

But "That hasn't kept some companies from claiming that regulations are forcing them to fail," Deans continues, explaining, however, how "It's very seldom true."  Again, Republicans historically have favored government regulation of business for environmental protection: Nixon in 1970 set the policy: "'We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. ... This requires new regulations.'"

And the American public is not behind Republican efforts to weaken these regulations.  While Congress has a ten percent approval rate, "71 percent of Americans believe the EPA should enforce restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution."

Finally, Deans gets to the essential question: "How did the House Republicans move so quickly from their own party's environmental legacy and so far from the traditions of modern conservatism?  The answer, according to political analysts, scholars, and Republicans themselves, is that much of the party has been captured by a virulent combination of tea party anger, corporate cash, and the fears  of the ultra right wing, at a time when the GOP's two-step program for change - reduced public investment and less public oversight of corporate polluters - would do the struggling economy more harm than good."

Deans cites the difference in environmental attitudes amongst Republican factions as evidence of this analysis: for example, 68 percent of tea party Republicans favor cuts in environmental protections, while only 31 percent of "Main Street" Republicans do.  Similarly, corporate influence has shifted Republican policy: "Over just the past five years the [oil and gas] industry has spent $686.6 million pressing its priorities in Washington alone, deploying an army of nearly 800 lobbyists ...."

So what is to be done?  First, we need to dispel the false dichotomy between a vigorous economy and a thriving environment.  As President Obama said, "'I do not buy the notion that we have to make a choice between having clean air and clean water, and growing the economy in a robust way.'"  Deans also criticizes the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that expanded corporate influence in Washington, encouraging campaign finance reform to roll back those gains for lobbyists.  In the end, the government and its power rests in the hands of its people - in our hands - and we must put those hands to work to protect our environment.

Book Review: Nothing Gold Can Stay, stories by Ron Rash

A few stories into this collection of fourteen I found myself asking aloud, "How did I ever miss this guy?"

Rash hasn't exactly been obscure: he's won several prizes over a decade of publishing novels and short stories.  But I hadn't ever come across his work before.  Now I have everything he's written out from the library, stacked beside the couch for a glorious summer author study.

Nothing Gold Can Stay, as the title indicates, bears the heavy theme of decline and death - the cover art,  a bare tree silhouetted grey on black before the moon of the "o" in "nothing" - captures the feel of the book perfectly.  The same tree is featured on the spine, but in gold.

The story "Where the Map Ends" demonstrates the collection's verve.  Two fugitive slaves - one older, one younger - spend the night in the loft of a barn, and wake to find the farmer has discovered them.  Rash frames the tension beautifully:

A cowbell woke them, the animal ambling into the barn, a man in frayed overalls following with a gallon pail.  A scraggly gray beard covered much of his face, some streaks of brown in his lank hair.  He was thin and tall, and his neck and back bowed forward as if from years of ducking.  As the farmer set his stool beside the cow's flank, a gray cat appeared and positioned itself close by.  Milk spurts hissed against the tin.  The fugitives peered through the board gaps.  The youth's stomach growled audibly. ... The farmer did not look up but his shoulders tensed and his free hand clenched the pail tighter.  He quickly left the barn.

The tension releases when the fugitives realize the farmer is not overly fond of their former master and therefore sympathetic to aiding their escape.  But not entirely.  The farmer sees traces of the slave master's red hair in the younger fugitive and directs all his antipathy for the war and wealth at this one, while aiding the older, African-born fugitive in his quest for freedom, leaving the elder slave to decide if he can abandon his youthful charge.

The people in Rash's stories are desperate, trapped by circumstances, and scrambling for release from their trials.  Like the elder fugitive in "Where the Map Ends," they learn that freedom does not come without its burdens.

Book Review: Farewell, Fred Voodoo by Amy Wilentz

Here's how I introduced myself to a class of sixth-graders in Pont Sonde, Haiti: "Him (indicating their teacher), he looks like a teacher.  I look like a tourist.  I know this.  But I, too, am a teacher."

The word I have here translated as "tourist," blan, literally means "white," and hearkens back to the grand blancs who were masters over Haiti's slave plantations in French colonial days.  Today the word means something more along the lines of "foreigner" or "outsider," but skin color does play a role in identifying a blan, though skin color alone (I'm told) does not determine one's status as blan or its opposite, neg.

So we blan constantly seek credibility in Haiti.  I noticed that whenever I tell people about our church visit, I mention the number twenty-eight.  "We've supported this parish in Haiti for over 28 years," I say, to differentiate us - well, myself, really - from the slew of Johnny-come-latelys (including Bill Clinton and several hundred youth groups) who infiltrated the country like a Mongol horde of do-gooder Marines after the January, 2010 earthquake.

And so for Amy Wilentz in her new book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti.  Wilentz repeatedly reminds us that she's been visiting the country for years, met Aristide before he became president, and strides through the refugee camps fearlessly.

Why do we blan so feel a need to establish our credibility, our homeboy street cred, in Haiti?  I suppose it's the same reason we do the same here in the states when encountering another culture.  We feel guilty for the past.  The US's involvement in Haiti, despite many good intentions and much beneficial aid, has been marred by everything from a full-on maritime invasion to presidential depositions to a gutting of the rice market.  We should be proud of our ongoing commitment to help this nation, infamously the poorest in the Western hemisphere, yet we remain ashamed of our country's incessant meddling and politics of greed in the region.

Ultimately, Wilentz's book moves beyond establishing her credibility.  But it still casts a pallor over the work, and we turn the last page sensing that the effort was more about her than her subject.