.Express Reviews

Book briefs for the month of February

THE BUSH DYSLEXICON:Observations on a National Disorder

By Mark Crispin Miller

W. W. Norton (2001), $24.95

If this book were a bumper sticker it would read, “My child is an honor student at Such-and-Such School — and George W. Bush is a big dummy!”

Sure, W. is hardly the sharpest knife in Barbara’s drawer, and even granting his newfound “stature” as Defender of the West he’s still a piss-poor Charlemagne (who actually was illiterate). With such a target — blithely brainless, proof positive of affirmative action for dim-witted rich kids, exhibiting behavior that sent others into Chapter 11 and jail — one hungrily anticipates one of those fish/barrel situations.

Instead comes a prolonged shriek of meritocratic agony. Anyone familiar with Miller’s acerbic writing on television and TV (as professor of “media ecology” at NYU, he insists on the distinction) will first of all notice a certain stylistic slippage. Losing his McLuhanite cool, fuming and sputtering, using stuffy phrases like “low-brow antics,” he comes off as an unintended caricature of the sneering liberal academic — one who seems embarrassed, no less, on behalf of Yale! Maybe a good tactic careerwise, but nothing that should concern us groundlings.

Al Gore’s another stumbling block. Miller is still pissed off about Florida (and why not?) but is repeatedly forced to acknowledge that the “opponents” were mostly battling for turf on “the usual foot-wide consensus.” If Miller isn’t saying that Bush/Gore’s mutually agreed-upon platform merely needed a more articulate champion, what is he saying? Hard to make out anything over the impotent stamping of feet, the ineffectual grinding of teeth.

Miller is excellent on W.’s made-for-TV ethereality, good at analyzing the free pass given Bush by an ass-kissing horse-race-mesmerized punditocracy, dead wrong in seeming to think Clinton faced “near-impeachment” (he was impeached) for a “private episode” (it’s the perjury, stupid). But if we’re talking fish, W. is Miller’s One That Got Away. As professors have long written in the margins of student papers, “Not good enough. Try again.”
–David Hill

Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class
By Thaddeus Russell

Alfred A. Knopf (2001), $26

As a kid, I once saw some writing on a wall alleging that someone whose name I’ve since forgotten was a “friend of Teamsters, gangsters, and racketeers.” Made perfect sense to me — and I was from a union family. As Thaddeus Russell’s crisp, readable Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class recounts, that was a time when US Senate hearings had made International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) president Hoffa “widely viewed as one of the most dangerous men in America.”

Some said that Hoffa’s original Detroit union was known to seek recognition by blowing up a company’s trucks. And inter-union rivalry in Detroit grew so intense that all 3,000 employees of a Chrysler plant once walked out to protest the firing of sixteen fellow United Auto Workers (UAW) for overturning a delivery truck driven by a Teamster.

Russell feels labor historians have slighted the import of the Teamsters in the labor upsurge of the 1930s and ’40s because they would rather tell what they regard as the more inspiring stories of the IBT’s leftish rival unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and he is particularly disdainful of UAW president Walter Reuther’s sentiment that “[I]f the labor movement is not an instrument of social change, it is nothing.” Russell argues a “market theory” of union-building — growth “was caused not by ‘the industrial democracy’ they [the labor historians] endorse but by the compelling power of competition both within the IBT and from rival unions.” And it is true that unions have steadily declined as a percentage of the American workforce ever since the CIO’s 1955 merger with the older American Federation of Labor.

But, just as the market is silent on matters of ethics, so is Russell. He believes that the Detroit Hoffa-era Teamsters’ freedom from radical influences makes them “an organic product of the American working class.” In this dimension, Russell calls to mind another contemporary of Hoffa’s — Alfred E. Newman: When it comes to anything other than wages, hours, and working conditions, Russell has written something of a “What me worry?” labor history. Still, it’s a good, solid analysis that Russell has written.
–Tom Gallagher

Carter Beats the Devil

By Glen David Gold

Hyperion (2001), $24.95

It is a remarkable feat for an author to write about magic so that the reader is not only marveling at stunts but enthralled by the writing. Gold has accomplished this crowd-pleasing combination in his irresistible first novel, Carter Beats the Devil. Set in the Bay Area of the 1920s, the novel treats us to, among other things, the spectacle of Carter, the great magician, walking his lion baby around Lake Merritt; a speakeasy in San Francisco nicknamed “the nose” because of its location right under police headquarters; and vivid glimpses of the Orpheum and Curran theaters in their heyday.

The book opens with President Harding’s mysterious death immediately following his attendance at a San Francisco performance of Carter the Great. Right away we are given a dose of Gold’s delightful prose: “Carter, who frequently had to size a man up in an instant, saw something more dismal. He remembered an unfortunate creature he’d seen in New Zealand: a parrot that had evolved with no natural enemies. Happy, colorful, it had lost the ability to fly and instead walked on the ground, fat and waddling slowly, with no sense that anyone could mean it ill.”

Carter becomes a suspect and flees the country, a subplot that keeps tickling our interest while obsessing a certain Agent Griffin until the mystery is resolved in the final pages. But the novel’s such an embarrassment of riches that the plot’s almost beside the point. There is the spirited rivalry between the magicians of the day — Houdini, Kellar, Thurston, and an evil foil named Mysterioso. There is Carter’s lonely childhood where the love of magic took root. There are pirates and brushes with death at sea, romantic tragedies, flesh-eating lapdogs, the birth of television, escapes from sealed containers in the Port of Oakland, a complex millionaire who helps abandoned pregnant women, a blind heroine, greed, revenge, lust, and — most of all — magic. This is a big, meticulously researched book, and the scenes in which Carter is onstage are written with such authority that one almost imagines Gold has time-tripped and is watching Carter prep for his show backstage. A magician never gives away his secrets, but somehow Gold has created a work that embodies Carter’s ultimate conviction, his belief that “wonder was life.”
–Jill Koeningsdorf

Crowded Land of Liberty: Solving America’s Immigration Crisis
By Dirk Chase Eldridge

Bridge Works (2001), $22.95

Five to eleven million illegal aliens reside in the United States. One million legal immigrants alone emigrate to this country each year. Meanwhile, the average birthrate for immigrant women in the US is 3-4.6 children. Feeling claustrophobic?

Clearly, immigration has Malthusian implications for the United States. How are we to reasonably absorb such numbers of people? This is the driving question behind Dirk Eldridge’s common-sense examination of America’s loophole-ridden immigration policy. Eldridge avoids sounding mean-spirited, racist, or isolationist in arguing that America requires an immediate reduction in immigration. He claims simply that we haven’t the resources or the room. American law allows illegal immigrants public education, Supplemental Security Income, welfare benefits, and access to public infrastructure. Such benefits, he points out, are paid for by legal residents, while large numbers of illegal immigrants contribute to the population explosion, depress wages, encourage other illegal immigrants, and mock the efforts of legal immigrants. Moreover, the United States is alone among first-world nations in doing little to restrict or discourage immigration. Few countries automatically offer citizenship or public benefits to those born on native soil, not to mention pass laws that legalize illegal immigrants. Eldridge suggests that the United States institute a ten-year near-moratorium on immigration to absorb and acculturate current immigrants, while reevaluating its policies.

While most Americans would agree with Eldridge (particularly now, with the prospect that some immigrants are potential terrorists), Eldridge sidesteps any thoughtful examination of the arguments for immigration. Historically, immigration to the US has never been a pretty business. Past waves of immigrants swarmed into big city ghettos, encouraged other immigrants, contributed to depressed wages, and used public benefits. Yet, but for them, most of us wouldn’t be here today. What would the price of California produce and other goods and services be without illegal immigration? Eldridge doesn’t give equal weight to such issues, which makes a careful reader suspect she is getting only half the story.

Nevertheless, Eldridge’s book is timely, given the present economic downturn and President Bush’s recent advocacy of legalizing illegal aliens. It has the added virtue of offering hard, well-researched facts about immigration such that a reader, whether advocate or dissenter, leaves the book better informed than before.
–Nora Ostrofe

Ethnic Style: History & Fashion
By Berenice Geoffroy-Schneiter

Translated from French by Deke Dusinberre

Assouline (2001), $45

We have a tradition in my family, from my father’s Celtic side, of tattooing ourselves so that our family members can recognize us in the afterlife. While we’re certainly not alone in this tradition, few people outside of cultural anthropology departments know about such ritual use for tattoos, much less other body modifications such as binding, scaring, branding, stretching, body painting, and the ritual use of clothing. Though popularized in the last decade — it is not uncommon to see a tattooed secretary or a pierced professional — body modifications have made their way to the mainstream with few knowing the sources from which the modifications derived.

Bernice Geoffroy-Schneiter is one such person who does. With an art history and archaeology background, she compares and contrasts today’s Western wardrobe with indigenous styles from around the world including our own Native America. Quite the accomplished scholar on the subject, she gives a brief history of the most commonly known body modifications like tattooing, scarification, and body painting as well as lesser known practices such as skull molding and Chinese foot binding.

While mostly a photo book filled with fascinating prints and pictures of indigenous peoples, past and present, the text offers reverent accounts of the different practices. Thankfully free of cultural ethnocentrism, the author’s unbiased approach is welcome. She even points out how some of today’s top designers have raided traditional garments and finery for their lines of clothing and jewelry. All in all, a fascinating look at how the past influences the present.
–Angelique Gibbons

Rooms are Never Finished

by Agha Shahid Ali

W. W. Norton & Company (2001), $22.00

Are you carrying anything that could be dangerous to other passengers?

O just my heart first terrorist.


(“Barcelona Airport”)

Rooms Are Never Finished is almost too relevant to life after September 11, although Agha Shahid Ali died before he could read recent reports of landmines pocking the borders of India and Pakistan as they contend for his native Kashmir. The fact is, current events are not just media events; they are part of history, and they inform personal lives, including their intimate details. This understanding underlies Ali’s extended elegy to his mother, who in 1997 died of cancer in America and was then transported back to her beloved Kashmir. In a preface to the introductory poem, “Lenox Hill,” he writes: “Kashmir, it is feared, may be the flashpoint of a nuclear war.” This epic, however, is primarily concerned with the existence and inevitable disappearance of the Beloved, in whatever guise, under whatever political regime, and however “natural” the cause.

Ali’s formal pyrotechnics complement his grief, which runs somewhat to excess, especially in repeating forms such as terza rima and ghazals. Prose poems facilitate the narration of more literal history. Within this taut, flexible structure, Ali intertwines the stories of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam with his mother’s own history, thereby revealing a macrocosm of human suffering. He was undoubtedly aware that the Latin root of “passion” is “suffering,” as in that of Christ. In this spirit, he asks: “But for me, I who of passion/always make a holocaust, will there be a summer of peace?” A later poem in the same sequence metamorphoses this line, as he describes the arrival of his mother’s remains in “Sringar Airport”: “Even they are here speechless, weeping, /those who of passion/never made a holocaust.”

Also included are translations, including “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,” by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. (Palestine itself might be considered his lost Beloved.) Rooms Are Never Finished is a dense, sometimes claustrophobic narrative of grief transformed by historical knowledge and art to a work that at times provokes awe.
— Alexandra Yurkovsky

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