Books: Five Books, Five Minutes

We hadn't planned to do another "Five Books, Five Minutes" so soon. But as Ty says, "Better to keep them off balance and guessing when this feature will appear." But Betty told Ty she was reading Sara Paretsky's Blacklist and he picked up the book Monday. Dona saw it and noted that she read it (it's out in paperback -- obviously, if Dona's read it) and C.I. had read it as well.
So it just seemed karma was calling us.

Participating are The Third Estate Sunday Review crew proper -- Ava, Dona, Ty, Jess and Jim -- as well as Betty of Thomas Friedman is a Great Man, Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude and C.I. of The Common Ills.

Jim picked out War and the American Presidency, or as Jess likes to think of it, the reason he can no longer be made fun of for picking a bad book last time. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote War and the American Presidency.

We're split down the middle on this book. Jim, C.I., Betty, Ty enjoyed it while Jess, Dona, Ava and Rebecca loathed it.

Jim: This is a strong book that uses history as a backdrop to explore where we are now.

Jess: No, it's a slight history book that alludes to the current occupation from time to time to justify the book being published.

Betty: I think it's a book that makes you think about things. You find yourself thinking about more than what's on the page and that's because he's talking about our founding and our ethics then compared to now.

Rebecca: If you have to justify the book based on how it made you think about what's not on the page, I'd say that's an indication that the book is slight, like Jess said, to the point of almost not there.

Dona yawns and says she doesn't even feel the book is worth discussing.

So use the above to determine if you think you'd be interested in it or not. Here's an excerpt from page 99:

Since FDR's day, a fundamental transformation in the political environment has futher undermined the shaky structure of American politics. Two electronic devices -- television and computerized polling -- have had a devastating impact on the party system. The old system had three tiers: the politician at one end; the voter at the other; the party in between. The party's function was to negotiate between the politician and the voter, interpreting each to the other and providing the links that held the political process together.
The electronic revolution has substantially abolished this mediatorial role. Television presents politicians directly to voters, who judge candidates far more on what the box shows them than on what the party organization tells them. Computerized polls present voters directly to politicians, who judge the electorate far more on what the polls show them than on what the party organization tells them. The political party is left to wither on the vine.

Jim's having a heart attack over the excerpt that Jess selected to encapsulate the book.

Jim: That makes it sound like Schlesinger is playing gatekeeper.

C.I.: I think he is. I still enjoyed the book for other reasons.

Next up, we have Sara Paretsky's Blacklist. This was loved by all. This is a V.I. Warshawski mystery novel. V.I. Warshawski is a private detective and in this book she's struggling with a number of issues besides her case. Among the issues inflating the complications are the USA Patriot Act. So you know we were loving that.

Betty: I found it scary. I started it Sunday afternoon while the sun was out and was chugging along happy with the book and thinking it was really involving. I got in a couple of hours reading because my father had taken the kids to the park. After they got back and we had dinner and they were playing nice, probably because they were tired from the park, I picked it back up. It was dark outside by then, and maybe that was part of it, but my oldest came over to ask me something and I almost jumped out of the chair. It was scary and hard to put down. I really enjoyed it.

From page 309, here's an excerpt:

I left the church feeling tense and jumpy. My conversation with Benji had confirmed my assumption that he'd seen Marc's killer. And he'd managed to explain why he was afraid to report what he'd seen. I couldn't exactly blame him; the law had shot Catherine Bayard in their eagerness to kill him. Why should he trust that I could keep them from executing him if he came forward to testify?
If I could figure out a way to get the Justice Department off his back, maybe Benji would give me the information in exchange, but I didn't have clever ideas about much of anything right now.
My day didn't unfold in a way that made me any happier. Back in my apartment, I found a message from Bryant Vishnikov. He'd phoned only a few minutes after I left. Hoping that meant he had hot information, I dropped my coat and purse on the floor and returned his call at once. He interrupted an autopsy to talk to me.

Ty picked John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.

Ty: I loved this book.

C.I.: I know nothing about the workings of what I read, but it was an involving book. I can't vouch for its technical accuracy, but it was involving.

Dona: I kept thinking I was watching a VH1 Where Are They Now? special. It split apart too often to play "check in." I like a more linear story than what was offered.

Excerpt from page 105:

Since Earnest liked talking to people face-to-face, he decided to create a program that put a human name on each computer user, and he added a bit of information that would make it possible to determine if a particular user was sitting in front of his terminal. He called his command "finger." A little while later, he added the capability to creat a "Plan" file, which would make it possible for people to explain their absences or give instructions about being reached at odd hours. The program was an instant hit and quickly propagated from Digital Equipment Corporation computers to Unix machines throughout the growing ARPAnet world.
Even more popular was a program called NS (for news service), which was written by a young SAIL system programmer named Martin Frost. NS was the first computer-network news service, made possible by loading newswires from the Associated Press and The New York Times into the SAIL computer. Using NS, it was possible to watch the wires directly or to find stories based on a keyword search and even to create filters that would save copies of stories on particular subjects. Indeed, the case can be made that NS was the world's first search engine, arriving decades ahead of Web-based services like Alta Vista and Google. Word of the wonderful online newspaper soon spread, and before long an elite undergound emerged to take advantage of NS from all over the country.

Dona didn't like the book and bailed after forty or so pages. Ty was luke warm on it. The rest of us (Jim, Jess, Ava, C.I., Betty and Rebecca) endorse it. ("As a good read, I don't know anything about the subject so I can't vouch for it being technically correct," C.I. insists.)

Next up we have C.I.'s pick, Elizabeth Drew's Fear and Loathing In George W. Bush's Washington. This brief book is a collection of writings that Drew did for The New York Review of Books. (Russell Baker writes the introduction to the book.) At sixty-eight pages, this book packs a lot of information. We all enjoyed it and, quite honestly, were surprised it would have as much information and as many observations in it as it did.

Here's an excerpt from pages 25 and 26:

[Richard] Perle's career has been an astonishing one. Though he has held only one government position -- that of an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration -- he has had tremendous influence over the administration's Iraq policy. He openly advocated the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime shortly after he left the Pentagon in 1987. In the 1970s, while working on [Scoop] Jackson's Senate staff, he opposed detente, helped to stop ratification of the SALT II arms control agreement, and aided Jackson in getting through Congress the Jackson-Vanik law, which cut off trade with the Soviet Union if it continued to bar the emigration of Jews. During the Reagan administration, when he was assistant secretary of defense for policy, Perle became famous for opposing arms control agreements and acquired the nickname "The Prince of Darkness." Working with a small group of journalists who circulate his views, he's been known to savage someone he opposed on big issues. He makes his influence felt through frequent television appearances, through his network of allies in the bureaucracy, and through his strategy out an extreme position and trying to make the ground shift in his direction -- which it often has. He is a strong advocate of the views of right-wing Israeli leaders, and serves on the board of the company that owns the pro-Likud Jerusalem Post. When he's not working with his clients, who include defense contractors, he is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. From this position Perle invites people to an annual conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado, cosponsored by AEI and former president Gerald Ford, and he has several times invited Ahmed Chalabi as his guest there. At the conferences, Chalabi was able to meet Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.

Again, this is a book we all enjoyed.

Our fifth and final book was another one that we can all recommend, Thai Jones' A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience. This was Jess' pick because his parents had sent him the book and he meant to read it all semester but never found time.

Dona: I couldn't put this book down.

Jim: But it's not linear.

Dona: It's covering various generations and when it shifts time periods, there's still a naturalness about it. John Markoff's book had jerky transitions that never really flowed.

Ava picked this of her favorite of the five books.

From page 250, here's an excerpt:

Annie stood behind a velvet-draped dais table at the University of Illinois in Chicago on the evening of January 30 and watched as the huge room filled to capacity and beyond. At her back hung a painted mural, reading: "Los Tiempos Dificiles Son Tiempos De Lucha," -- hard times are fighting times. So many people had come that the opening session of the Hard Times Conference was delayed to allow the overflow crowd to head to cafeterias where the proceedings were broadcast on closed-circuit TVs. Ten times as many people showed up for this than had participated in the previous mass event Jeff had organized, the Days of Rage.
"We have to develop a program for the working class as a whole in this period to fight the depression," Jennifer Dohrn, Bernadine's younger sister, told an audience that included attorney William Kunstler, who had defended members of the Chicago Eight, and Iberia Hampton, whose son Fred had been murdered by police in this same city during 1969, as well as representatives from the United Black Workers, Welfare Mothers for Justice, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the Republic of New Afrika, the American Indian Movement, and the Gray Panthers. Annie had emptied her Rolodex and called in her favors. She brought Chavy with her, of course, as well as SNCC leader Ella Baker and Thelma Hamilton, an activist for community control in New York City public schools. Jeff and Eleanor flew to Chicago too. They could not attend the sessions in person, but the conference was broadcast live on Pacifica radio. They checked into a motel room and Jeff waited anxiously for reports, a director watching his play from the wings.
So, for our "Five Books, Five Minutes" we'd recommend three titles strongly. If, for instance, our comments on War and the American Presidency made you think you might be interested, pick that up.

Corbin in Mississippi e-mailed to tell us that he picked up Ed Broth's Stories From a Moron: Real Stories Rejected by Real Magazines and enjoyed in spite of our evaluation. We think that's great. Both that he utilized his library and that he found a book he enjoyed. The links provided for each book will take you to summaries and other reviews at Powell's Books. However, Elizabeth Drew's Fear and Loathing in George W. Bush's Washington is put out by The New York Review of Books. When dealing with a smaller press like that, or Seven Stories Press, we prefer to link to them. You will find a summary of Drew's book via the link.