Current Reads At Year’s End
Generosity: An Enhancement
by Richard Powers
When Chicagoan Russell Stone finds himself teaching a Creative Nonfiction class, he encounters a young Algerian woman with a disturbingly luminous presence. Thassadit Amzwar’s blissful exuberance both entrances and puzzles the melancholic Russell. How can this refugee from perpetual terror be so happy? Won’t someone so open and alive come to serious harm? Wondering how to protect her, Russell researches her war-torn country and skims through popular happiness manuals. Might her condition be hyperthymia? Hypomania? Russell’s amateur inquiries lead him to college counselor Candace Weld, who also falls under Thassa’s spell. Dubbed Miss Generosity by her classmates, Thassa’s joyful personality comes to the attention of the notorious geneticist and advocate for genomic enhancement, Thomas Kurton, whose research leads him to announce the genotype for happiness.
The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
by Jeff Sharlet
The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power — not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a family that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of biblical capitalism, military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family’s current leader, Doug Coe, declares, We work with power where we can, build new power where we can’t.
The Umbrella Academy: Dallas
by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba
The team is despondent following the near apocalypse created by one of their own and the death of their beloved mentor Pogo. So it’s a great time for another catastrophic event to rouse the team into action. Trouble is, each member of the team is distracted by some very real problems of their own. The White Violin is bedridden due to an unfortunate blow to the head. Rumor has lost her voice — the source of her power. Spaceboy has eaten himself into a near-catatonic state, while Number Five dives into some shady dealings at the dog track and The Kraken starts looking at his littlest brother as the key to unraveling a mysterious series of massacres… all leading to a blood-drenched face-off with maniacal assassins, and a plot to kill JFK.
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
by Drew Westen
The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more “dispassionate” notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists—and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on “the issues,” they lose. That’s why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest.
Literate Cities Survey Still Illiterate
KGW News has a short burst on this year’s rankings of literate cities, and it reminds me that I complained two years ago about the survey’s criteria and methodology.
The last two elements on the [Internet Resources] list are “Number of unique visitors per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper” and “Number of webpage views per capita to a city’s internet version newspaper”. (No mention of any other Internet content as a criteria for literacy.)
As any literate Oregonian knows, traffic to OregonLive could hardly be considered a proper gauge of Portland’s literacy. So, we know at least one category in this study has an entirely faulty construction.
It occurs to me this time around that the other flaw in the survey’s criteria is that it is entirely about consumption, leaving aside any consideration of creation. No survey of levels of blogosphere activity. No mention of zine production. Even in the realm of consumption, there’s no discussion of attendance at literary events, be they part of national campaigns (e.g. author’s book tours) or part of the local scene (e.g. storytelling events).
All of this seems to be a rather unfortunately illiterate reading of what it means to be literate, whether as a person or a city.
It doesn’t especially matter to me where Portland ranks on such a list. What matters is that local news departments keep blindly regurgitating a survey on literacy that doesn’t actually represent the literacy of the localities they serve — a “cut and paste” approach to reporting which itself then doesn’t serve a literate understanding of the story on the part of their readers and viewers.
So much illiteracy surrounding an alleged survey of municipal literacy. That few seem to notice the irony arguably might undercut the reported results.
Update: It should be noted that the survey does include magazine and journal publication, and so in one small regard it considers creation in addition to consumption. But the criteria arguably is too limited for it to truly reflect the full level of local literacy.
The Strange And Dangerous Offspring
The Family (Powells)
by Jeff Sharlet
Is fundamentalism too limited a word for such utopian dreams? Lately some scholars prefer maximalism, a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America — from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy — that means a culture remade in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow as he conquers the world in order to conform it to his angry love. These are the days of the sword, literally — wealthy members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to battle standards, a fad inspired by a Christian best seller called Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of Man’s Soul. As jargon, then, maximalism isn’t bad, but I think fundamentalism still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.
I offer these explanations not as excuses for the consequences of American fundamentalism, an expansionist ideology of control better suited to empire than democracy, but to point to the defining tension of a creed that is both fearful and proud even as it proclaims itself joyous and humble. It is a martyr’s faith in the hands of the powerful, its cross planted in the blood-soaked soil of manifest destiny. It is the strange and dangerous offspring of two intensely fertile sets of stories, “America” and “Christianity”.
End of excerpt.
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