History of My Reading: Lucretia Parsnips and The Great Turkey Heist of 1965

Flipping through a complete set of Knox Students for the 1965-66 school year reveals a few trends.  The college--students, faculty and administrators--was highly focused on the college, with the ongoing Faculty Planning Committee and its preliminary reports, and with pages of Letters to the Editor in the regimes of editors Ed Rust and Bill Barnhart.  Vietnam and related issues began to appear with increasing frequency.   Computers were mentioned, including the Computer Science major to be offered the following year.

Michael Chubrich (right) in debate, Judy Dugan moderating, Len Borden taking notes. Gale photo.

Michael Chubrich took over as Student Senate president, promising sweeping changes. Guests on campus included Senator Paul Simon of Illinois, J. Allen Hynek, the UFO advocate; the classic filmmaker Joseph Von Sternberg (The Blue Angel) and poets Mark Van Doren, Robert Bly and James Dickey.

 Knox theatre's mainstage productions were Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (the last ever to be directed by departing professor Kim Chase) and The Mikado. Kevern Cameron directed Waiting for Godot, locating it in a circus. Among the Social Board movies was To Kill A Mockingbird.  A few Cinema Club titles inevitably suggest the college ambience: My Life To Live, The Exterminating Angel, Through A Glass Darkly, La Dolce Vita, The End of Innocence.
Immediately upon my return to Knox in the fall of 1965 for my second year, I was very, very busy.  I was news director of WVKC, the campus radio station, and doing music shows as well, which required selecting music from the station's record library (or bringing my own albums), creating a playlist for the engineer, and using a copy of it for my on-air introductions. I did jazz and folk shows, and filled in occasionally for classical shows--while adopting a slightly different voice suitable for each form (folksy, cool, FM-whispery).

I already had my news voice(s).  As the year wore on and I got more tired and bored, my David Brinkleyisms on the ten o'clock news became more outrageous. I did have one distinction: I was the first DJ in Knox history to legitimately play a rock song.  They had been forbidden, until the station director (Mike Bourgo) bowed to the inevitable.  The first rock song?  "Help!" by the Beatles. (It was at the end of an original radio mystery that Skip Peterson and I wrote.)

My summer conversion to the Beatles was continuing--I was rapidly accumulating Beatles records and other material, as we shall see (read on.)  There was some negative reaction to WVKC's belated rock revolution, however-- from students (including an offended letter to the editor.)

 One more note about WVKC.  In February (1966), the first combat death in Vietnam of a Knox alumnus was recorded: Albert Merriman Smith, class of 1960. He'd also worked at WVKC.  His father (also Albert Merriman Smith, though he'd dropped the "Albert" professionally) was the White House correspondent for United Press International, one of the wire news services we used for our newscasts.

I became an editor of Dialogue, the campus essay and issues magazine, now established in its second year.  I joined the editorial board (with students Kevern Cameron, Steve Goldberg and Dennis Stepanek, and faculty members Douglas Wilson, Gordon Dodds and John Pascucci) and by spring, I was functionally the managing editor, preparing the issue for press.

 I also began writing a column for the Knox Student, called Metaphor.  I started with a piece ostensibly "explicating" the expression "one book man." For a long time I thought I'd embarrassed myself by totally misunderstanding it. In 1965 I thought it meant a dogmatic person who derived their beliefs from the equivalent of one book.  Later it seemed it really meant an author who manages to write or at least publish only one book.  (An example of that would unfortunately be me.)  But it turns out that the original phrase "man of one book" from Thomas Aquinas meant what I thought it meant in 1965.

The only Metaphor column anyone remembers was one I wrote on a particularly frenzied night in November (I think I wrote it at the Toddle House, where I spent many late nights after my midnight radio show) that used a strange punning language to describe the weekend as a society or gossip columnist would--in this case "Lucretia Parsnips" or movie columnist Louella Parsons.  The names in particular drew attention (for example,"kafka livingston" was Kathy Lydigsen, "maybe jefferson" was Mary Jacobson, who returned the favor by dubbing me "big coincidence.")

Afterwards I heard from at least one English faculty member about my "Joycean" language, derived from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.  I smiled and nodded knowingly but in fact I'd never looked at a page of Finnegans Wake.  My model was John Lennon, whose similar punning style was on display in two books, the recently published A Spaniard in the Works and the earlier In His Own Write, which I'd absorbed over the summer.  However, I hastened to acquaint myself with the works of James Joyce outside of A Portrait of the Artist--and he became an obsession for many years.

I have since learned that my experience essentially replicated John Lennon's.  When his first book came out, a critic mentioned its Joycean origins, but Lennon hadn't read Joyce either--though he did after he'd been influenced by him.

 My fellow columnists for the first semester were Kevern  "Casey"Cameron ("The Noisemaker") and Skip Peterson ("The Styleboat Skipper.") Cameron ignited a letters debate between Professors Brady and Doug Wilson, and Skip and I were envious.  But the three of us also collaborated in different combinations (I believe we may have written each other's columns once--I'm pretty sure I wrote a spoof of Cameron's.) I'm sure the three of us once got together to write a combined letter to the editor we thought was hilarious, after which we repaired to the BV for more liquid refreshment, returning to campus arm and arm and singing, a unique experience in my college career.

Unidentified Englishman (probably a duke by now) and me

I was still active in the Knox debate club, and in particular participated in a debate with two touring student debaters from Cambridge University in England.  Judy Dugan and I were each paired with one of these lads, on one side or the other of the topic (as we say in America), or the question (as they say in Brit.)  Judy and I did our standard research and serious preparation on whatever it was.  But the Brits were much looser, employing wit, rhetoric and sometimes fanciful argument.  I eventually got into the spirit with a few ripostes of my own that went over well, so we had a great time.

The Gale photo.  Mark Brooks and Neil Gaston behind me.

But my big public speaking moment that fall was addressing the Student Senate on the issue of how students were selected to participate in the Faculty Planning Committee's work (which is the occasion of my photo on the title page of the 1966 Gale yearbook.)

 I was part of a group that drafted a statement, and I wrote the accompanying speech.  I read it first before at least some members of this group, and specifically included the words "denizens of Olympus" so I could see Mary Jacobson make a face--she disapproved of such rhetoric. I made some changes based on their comments (but I kept "denizens of Olympus" in anyway. It gives me a laugh even now.)  As writing, the speech is pretty good--probably more accomplished than my columns--and clearly modeled on the style of Robert Kennedy.

 So with all of that elevated activity, none of it having anything to do with college sports, no one would suspect me of collaborating in the crime of the year.  But that was a key to our success--we were not the usual suspects.  So after more than five decades, now it can be told: the true story of....

The Great Turkey Heist of 1965

The closest equivalent college campus to Knox is Monmouth College in nearby Monmouth, Illinois.  The annual football game between the two schools is an historic rivalry, and the winner is awarded the bronze statue of a turkey.  Why?  Beats me.

  Anyway, the winning school keeps and displays it until the other school wins it back.  Except...part of the rivalry is finding ways to steal the Turkey in advance of the Big Game.  And this is what a highly unlikely crew did.  Our photos were published in the Knox Student--with our faces obscured.  So--Knox students of a certain age-- prepare to be shocked.

Ed Rust

The mastermind was Ed Rust, editor of the Knox Student.  In a letter to the editor at the end of his tenure I described him: "In conversation he is jittery, his eyes are piercing, his head and shoulders are bent forward, his chin jutted, all giving the impression of disorganized intensity."
 Today I would just recall him as a combination of Robert Kennedy and Dennis the Menace.

 Rust enlisted the unlikeliest of suspects: Jim Bronson (the tall, clean cut, affable photographer and writer for the Student) and the truly shocking one: Ruth Mesing, recently appointed as one of the first student representatives on the Faculty Committee on Student Affairs, along with Bob Misiorowski.  And, for some reason, little old Indie me.  How Ed talked me into it I don't know, but he could be persuasive about his enthusiasms.  (There were others in that photo but I don't recall who they were.)

RFK with Ed Rust reporting

Rust, who had seen entirely too many James Bond movies (Goldfinger was the latest hit in the series), concocted an elaborate plan, a real caper.  He obtained a car somehow (this was when Knox students weren't permitted to have cars on campus, or even to drive one)and sent Bronson and me to the Monmouth student union.

Jim identified himself as a photographer for the Monmouth student newspaper, and I was his assistant.  He sweet talked the union's (adult) manager into allowing him to take a photo of the Bronze Turkey in the display case.

 Only Jim kept getting a reflection from the glass, so he asked the manager to take the Turkey out of the display case.  But we needed still more light--daylight for instance, and so the manager accompanied us as we took it outside.  Just then at that very moment, he got an urgent phone call (Rust? Mesing? calling from a phone booth within sight of us) and had to go back inside.

Bronson was looking into his viewfinder while I held the Turkey.  He motioned me a little farther back.  Then a little farther.  And when he was sure the coast was clear, he waved me away.  We had the Turkey.  It was a heist, though I believe we liked to call it the Great Turkey Coup.

 But it wasn't over.  The Rust caper had a few more twists and turns. We met back at the car and Jim drove off, but he didn't head back to our campus directly.  Part way back to Galesburg he pulled off the road into a secluded area, where, under some trees, there was a second getaway car waiting.  It was a station wagon, the back of which had one of those compartments in the floor for the spare tire.  The Bronze Turkey went in there, with a nice rug atop the compartment.

Ruth Mesing and Miz wait for a Student Affairs meeting to start

Ruth Mesing drove the station wagon, the real getaway car.  I rode to Galesburg with her, while Bronson drove back alone.  So if anyone was looking for two guys riding together, they wouldn't find them.

 Meanwhile Ed Rust distributed fake editions of the Monmouth newspaper on their campus, announcing the theft of the Bronze Turkey, by "townies."

My participation ended there, but the fallout continued.  The next day Monmouth dropped a one page edition of the Knox "Stud" on the campus from an airplane.  Later, five pillowcases of feathers were dropped on the Monmouth campus.  Then Monmouth students tried to raid the Knox campus but one was captured and held overnight in a frat house.  Then Monmouth students did the same to a Knox student.

  The escalation might have continued, but by then it was time for the actual football game.  Which Knox won--the team's only victory of the season.

  The Theatre of Smoking

 I associate two other sets of memories with this school year.  I've previously recounted my New York misadventure with the tape of songs by my hometown folk trio, the Crosscurrents.  But that didn't end the Crosscurrents.  The other two members were high school friends, Clayton and Mike, who attended a college close to home. That fall, Clayton and I decided to write songs together long distance: I would write lyrics, send them to him, and he would write the music.  When I went back, the three of us would work out the song.  We wrote perhaps a half dozen songs that way.

 I vividly remember writing one of the lyrics-perhaps the first--on a yellow pad, in the Knox library.  That's a kind of holy memory.  They were good songs, though the lyrics were a little flawed.  One of them became pretty well known among a small audience.

 The other memory was of how I took up cigarette smoking.  It happened in the Gizmo, where I was entertaining the table with imitations of how various professors smoked.  Teachers smoking, let alone smoking in class, was new in my experience. But these were the '60s, and pretty much everyone smoked, pretty much everywhere (although at Knox, women were not permitted to smoke and walk at the same time.)  I got laughs by holding a cigarette with two fingers in an erect V, very close to the hand, as Mr. Grutzmacher had.  And smoking the cigarette down to the last quarter inch, as Mr. Haring did in my political science class.

The act was such a hit that I repeated it.  After a few times I just kept on smoking the cigarette, and then I started buying them.  I went from Salems to unfiltered Pall Malls in my senior year with lots of stops between.

At some point I discovered the variety of obscure and foreign brands sold in the Knox Bookstore and began trying them all.  I especially got a kick out of the multicolored ones--the actual cigarettes were odd shades of magenta and florescent green and so on.

 In the 70s when I quit (after succumbing to Gauloises and Gitanes) I identified this theatricality as part of what made smoking so habitual and (apart from the physical addiction of tobacco) so hard to kick.  How one held the cigarette, when one breathed in and out in rhythm with smoking, especially while talking; the cigarette as "a baton on the end of your gestures," made cigarettes an integral part of personal style and daily identity.

Speaking of theatrical, one of the actual courses I took this year was modern theatre history with theatre professor William Clark, who persuaded me that if I was going to write plays, I ought to know something about theatre. The text was Mordecai Gorelik's New Theatres For Old.

While I found the class less than mesmerizing  I did get something like a grounding in stagecraft history and theatrical styles.  I read plays and wrote about them.  I particularly enjoyed Ibsen's Ghosts and a little-known Tennessee Williams play, Camino Real.  In later life, when I found myself reviewing and writing about theatre, I maintained the habit of reading the plays I was seeing, and reading as much about them as I could.  This was often more fun and rewarding than seeing the productions.

And speaking of Phil Haring, I took his Modern Political Theory class second semester.  We sat around a large table, and so had plenty of opportunity to observe his smoking.  I remember we read a number of paperbacks, covering political theorists such as Hobbes, John Locke and David Hume, onto more contemporary theories such as applying behavioral psychology in The Behavioral Persuasion in Politics by Heinz Eulau, a taste of things to come.  I wasn't fond of that approach, as I wrote in a pretty good final paper.

I enjoyed instead the observations of Philip Whitaker in his 1964 book we used, that seems to have completely disappeared from the planet since: Political Theory and East African Problems.  His observations on political theory rather than East Africa were on point.  Still, I ended up not being motivated to continue in political science, which I had briefly considered as a possible major.

 In future posts, I plan to discuss the two writing courses I took this second year with Sam Moon, and the two literature courses with William V. Spanos (I never could call him "Bill") and the Whitman/Wallace Stevens seminiar with Douglas Wilson--all of which decided me.  But to end this post, I must recount the continuing influence of the man who wasn't there, the Ghost of Fred Newman.

  The Ghost Who Talks

Fred Newman's absence was a presence when classes resumed in the fall of 1965. Photos of the demonstration in support of him the previous spring appeared in the Knox Student.  The tensions among students, faculty and administration continued, and Newman was evoked in various commentaries.

Meanwhile Newman himself was in New York, teaching at City College (CCNY.)  That fact led a group of students to a further and ongoing protest--the wearing of CCNY sweatshirts.  There actually weren't any, we found, and so we had them created.  They arrived all together, and a fairly large group of us repaired to some off-campus apartment (probably Mike Hamrin's) to claim our blue sweatshirts with the white CCNY letters.  We returned to campus together, and entered the Oak Room together for dinner. The effect was slow to sink in but it remained for awhile, including some bitter criticism in letters to the editor, suggesting traitorous behavior.

 Newman's ghostly presence continued throughout my year, even academically.  It was most pronounced that fall, when I was using his language and accompanying it with his arm and hand gestures, and the way he rolled back on his heels where he stood.  In the Oak Room after dinner once, Wendy Saul commented on this, and added that I not only was beginning to resemble Fred Newman, "some people think you are Fred Newman."

Since childhood I found myself entering the image, so to speak, of figures I admired.  While other boys got themselves Davy Crockett coonskin caps, I felt myself become Davy Crockett, speaking and moving like Fess Parker had in the TV shows and movies, or rather feeling I was.

 I did something similar when I was learning, for example, to play and sing Bob Dylan songs or Beatles songs.  I became them internally, and outwardly imitated their voices and so on.  These were explorations and even ways of learning the songs, so eventually I would integrate their styles in my own way. But Wendy's comment made me realize I had gone too far this time.  The ghost of Fred was taking over.  I had to let it go. Besides, I had just bought my first John Lennon cap.

Still, all that year the influence remained in my classwork.  I took a philosophy of language course first semester (I don't recall the teacher) and a Theory of Controversy course second semester, taught by speech professor Donald Torrence (who was also in charge of debate.)  That practically was another philosophy of language course; I recall we read A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. 

The text for the philosophy course was probably Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, edited by John Canfield and Franklin Donnell.  I remember we spent a lot of time on long excerpts from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.  

My papers for both show a marked preference for books from the Newman course the previous year (notably Quine's Word and Object), and a style of discourse often similar to Newman's "Rules and Games" speech.  Even my final paper in Modern Political Theory began with a Wittgenstein/Newman riff on theory, rules and games, and returned to it later.  Reading that paper now, I have to observe that it actually was apropos, and successfully integrated those ideas for observations which I find valuable in looking at political situations today.

 Fred Newman however was not actually a ghost, and we were in sporadic contact by letter and phone.  Christmas vacation is often the occasion for big academic conferences (which cover for head-hunting and job-hunting for academic positions) and there was to be a philosophy conference in New York. Senior Michael Hamrin, one of Newman's students (who later entered the Stanford graduate program in philosophy, where Fred got his advanced degrees) had a VW bus at home in Joliet, and the plan was for him to stop by in Greensburg and pick me up on the way to Manhattan.  Judy Dugan, who lived in Chicagoland, would meet up with Hamrin for the trip. I was excited, not only about New York and the conference, but about the occasion of my two worlds coming together: two Knox friends (especially Judy) would meet my hometown friends, Mike and Clayton.

 Hamrin and Judy were scheduled to arrive at my family home on Christmas day. But the phone rang early on Christmas with Mike Hamrin on the line, explaining how his VW had been rear-ended on a city street.  He and Judy were uninjured but the VW was damaged to the extent that it wasn't safe to drive.  So they didn't come.  There were several further occasions when my two worlds were supposed to meet and didn't.  When they finally did...well, that's another story, for another time.
 

Fred talked about joining the faculty of Antioch College, a prestigious liberal arts college in Ohio, known for its unconventional academic approach.  I decided to apply for transfer to Antioch, which he encouraged. By spring, he'd been rejected for the job, and I'd been rejected for a scholarship. He wound up at Case Western Reserve, and I remained at Knox.

Fred also spoke about the possibility of a summer job for me, and for getting me a grant for summer school at Harvard.  Neither of these happened either.  (I'd forgotten most of this, but much of it was recorded in my letters home, which my mother saved.) Fred Newman returned corporeally to Knox in the spring, gave a well-attended talk in the Commons Room and a long interview on liberal arts colleges in the Knox Student.

 There were other highlights to my second year.  Stay tuned for posts on Sam Moon, William V. Spanos and Doug Wilson.  Other posts in this series can be found by clicking the History of My Reading or Knox College labels below.

Of Africa
By Wole Soyinka
Yale University Press

Wole Soyinka is a Nobel Prize winning playwright and writer from Nigeria (the first writer of African descent to win the Prize for literature), who has spent  many years in the U.S. and England, often in political exile.  But he has not detached himself from Africa, returning there to teach and be involved when political conditions permitted.  He is well qualified both in knowledge and the ability to communicate to a western audience, still mystified by an entire continent.

This ignorance is mostly self-imposed, arising in part from the resistance to learning the deep history of cultures different enough to question western assumptions, as well as resistance to accepting the later history that implicates the west in exploitation and oppression.  Perhaps most of all, resistance to the consequences of that history.

My first impression of this book was its refreshing eloquence.  Soyinka uses the English language with increasingly rare precision and imagination.  He begins by musing on Africa as a literary concept, in actual literature as well as in common belief and actual practice--for instance, the creation of countries and boundaries that have nothing to do with Africa itself or the differences among its people.  "Africa remains the monumental fiction of European creativity."

Ignorance of the effects of history--of in some ways the lingering continuity--hampers western efforts to understand contemporary Africa.  Soyinka is especially illuminating on specific patterns of the slave trade that continue to shape events, incorrectly understood without this insight.  "It is short-changing the power of history to pretend that the events in the Sudan are not based on a perception that dates back to a relationship rooted in the history of slavery..."

Establishing these perspectives, Soyinka narrates some recent history that takes on different meaning.  Later he discusses the "spirituality of a continent" in illuminating terms, with relevance to existing conflicts.  This section of this book seems highly valuable if not indispensable to understanding the worst conflicts and problems in Africa today.

It is unusual--maybe even disconcerting at times--to read such informed and cogent analysis on important aspects of the real world, couched in glittering prose that sometimes stops the reader in admiration.  He somewhat playfully suggests that suppressing complex truths through political correctness is as distorting as denying them through ideology or dictatorship, capping the discussion with a phrase of brilliant music as well as meaning:   "Shall we appropriate the coy scissors of censorship?"

In words and number of pages this is a relatively brief book.  Yet it is dense with meaning, requiring careful attention from those with little knowledge of Africa--that is, most of us.  It is also a painful subject, and cowardice as well as denial are additional reasons for our willed ignorance.  But for those who appreciate fine writing--who in fact miss it--this book may contain difficult truths that are hard to assimilate, while the reading itself is revelatory.

The Obamas visiting cells for slaves on their recent trip to Africa

America The Possible: Manifesto For A New Economy
 by James Gustave Speth
 Yale University Press

 James Speth is a veteran environmentalist, and this is the latest book by an environmental veteran about how Americans can successfully address a future dominated by climate change. But his subtitle is not deceptive: he identifies the economy as the crucial element.

 The book is divided into four parts: what’s wrong now, a vision for a better future, what changes are required to get there, and how to build a political force to make those changes. The future he’s writing about is not far off— 40 or 50 years. The climate change he’s assuming is caused by the greenhouse gases that have already been spewed into the atmosphere, plus what’s added as we reduce to 40% of 1990 levels at mid-century. If greenhouse pollution is not reduced and acceleration becomes uncontrollable, or there’s unforeseen abrupt climate change, then the farther future looks more like slow motion nuclear war.

 Balancing “realism and hopefulness,” Speth is nevertheless convinced (and he is hardly alone in this) that addressing even the climate change that’s pretty definitely coming will require major political and economic transformation. He identifies precedents and experiments that show promise, but he believes that only an aroused citizenry can create the pressure necessary for fundamental change. (Once called the “ultimate insider,” Speth now returns to Washington as a protestor.)

 The good news is that changes needed to cope with the climate crisis--different economic values, restructured institutions (including corporations), etc.-- are both needed anyway for other reasons (including oil depletion), and are likely to make for a better country and a better world. Such transformations may seem impossible, but they’ve happened before.

 Speth’s prose is lean and non-academic. This book is clearly organized and well sourced. For covering so much ground it is amazingly short: under 200 pages of double-spaced print, with another 36 pages of notes. So apart from coping with possible emotional shock, it is readable and re-readable.

 On first reading, I’d identify two particular virtues. One is a specific point: Speth recognizes that an economically stronger middle class is essential to its ability to cope with what’s coming, including higher prices for just about everything.

 The general virtue is that he shows how interrelated the problems are, and how comprehensive the change must be. He doesn’t dance around this, and his knowledge is itself reassuring. The ideas he discusses aren’t usually original, but how they might work together is what’s important.  Such conundrums as a steady state economy have been studied in more detail than the last time I checked into the subject.  That's another reassurance: a lot of work in each separate area is being done.  It just takes putting them together and acting.   Some of those previous books (Down to the Wire, Eaarth, etc.) also suggested this.  But Speth is perhaps both more concrete and succinct, folding everything into a comprehensive vision.

 But that very level of analysis, as well as the extent of the tasks, can be overwhelming. There is however another new book that mixes the scales of change to provide more to hold onto, as a companion to this wise and motivating vision: Hot by Mark Hertsgaard, which I’ll review next time.

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right
By Thomas Franks
Metropolitan Books

Best known for his book analyzing the paradox of middle class Americans voting against their own interests, What’s the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Franks turns his attention to the recent Tea Party phenomenon, and that monumental paradox of victims of a Wall Street-induced Great Recession rallying for unfettered free enterprise at the precise moment it “has proven itself to be a philosophy of ruination and fraud.”

His answer is unconventional. While other commentators note the Tea Party’s apocalyptic qualities, Franks writes that they’re really utopian, and their utopia is a free enterprise that never was or could be. So facts don’t interfere with their faith in it.

Franks shows how this utopia is based on the idealization of small businesses, which unfortunately has little to do with super-corporate capitalism and international finance. But to adherents, free enterprise failures are due to sinister forces: Big Government and its “crony capitalism” partners, socialism and liberals in general.

This conviction feeds a closed circuit of grievance and self-pity, which Franks say “has become central in the consciousness of the resurgent Right.” Victims of the class warfare conspiracy include the world’s wealthiest capitalists—“the persecution of the Koch Brothers,” who fund right wing causes and candidates with their fossil fuel fortunes. “Pity these billionaires, reader.”

Franks illuminates a related mystery, the phenomenon of Glenn Beck. The first time I saw Beck on TV I knew he was principally an actor, and Franks adds the telling detail that Beck’s hero is actor/director Orson Welles, particularly for his War of the Worlds radio broadcast which panicked listeners who thought the Martian invasion was real. According to Franks, Beck relentlessly cast liberals as the Martians, and Barack Obama as leader of the alien invasion.

To those outside this world, Beck was the most conspicuous example of the hothouse media that these adherents inhabit exclusively (talk radio, FOX News, a world of Internet sites), leading to the self-reinforcing fear expressed in rhetorical extremes that have since become mainstream on the Republican campaign trail.

Besides being entertaining enough to slightly distract from the depressing content, Frank’s overall analysis is nuanced, complex and convincing but still incomplete. He doesn’t fully explain the logical connection between free market utopianism and fundamentalist Christianity. But most importantly, he barely mentions race as a factor—which is especially puzzling to me, since it was by reading earlier Franks that I recognized the suburban euphemisms and undercurrent of dog whistle racism that seems to me to be a very big part of what’s going on now.

Frank faults Democrats for not acting more forcefully and failing to provide a compelling Great Recession explanation, creating a vacuum that the Tea Party filled. His account ends with the infamous debt ceiling fight. Since then the Tea Party has waned, Occupy Wall Street has risen, and a liberated President Obama has a different kind of populist message. Still, this book provides useful explanations for Mitt Romney’s candidacy and Newt Gingrich’s politics of rage and grievance.

Why Marx Was Right
by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press

I suspect no American academic would dare write a book with this title, for fear of losing the comforts of tenure for a cell at Guantanamo. But in the UK at least, the previously influential works of Karl Marx are being reevaluated for contemporary relevance—especially now that capitalism is not proving to be such a utopian success. Prominent among the scholars doing so is Terry Eagleton, who has the additional advantage of not being an economist or political scientist. He teaches literature and cultural theory in England, and would be a delightful writer on any subject. But he’s especially penetrating and persuasive on this one.

Eagleton begins each of his ten chapters with a set of common charges against Marx, and evaluates and largely rebuts them. Did Marx advocate cruel totalitarian regimes? “Maoism and Stalinism were botched, bloody experiments which made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it. But what about capitalism?” Genocides, imperialism, exploitation and slavery also accompany capitalism.

And now “the capitalist way of life is threatening to destroy the planet altogether.” So maybe it’s time to reevaluate Marx, especially since (according to Eagleton) his ideas have been intentionally and successfully distorted. (Eagleton however may not fully appreciate the dour effect of Marx’s own turgid prose and that of many followers.)

Among Eagleton’s contentions are that Marx saw socialism building on capitalism, that he was not wedded to violence as the agent of change, and the point of his emphasis on materialism was that in order to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, people need to have enough to eat. “Only then can we learn to play the banjo, write erotic poetry or paint the front porch.”

Eagleton writes with erudition, clear logic and a Wildean wit. Among his conclusions about Marx: “His ideal was leisure, not labour. If he paid such unflagging attention to the economic, it was in order to diminish its power over humanity. His materialism was fully compatible with deeply held moral and spiritual convictions. He lavished praise on the middle class, and saw socialism as the inheritor of its great legacies of liberty, civil rights and material prosperity. His views on Nature and the environment were for the most part startlingly in advance of his time.”

Like a lot of antiwar and antiracism agitators who were supposed to be getting our orders from Moscow back in the day, I had read very little Marx, and I still haven’t. So I can’t say this book has made me any more Marxist, but I am well on the way to becoming an Eagletonist.

David W. Orr's noble attempt to confront the realities of an age of severe climate consequences is reviewed below.

Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse
By David W. Orr
Oxford University Press. 261 pages.

Because environmental studies professor David Orr’s book is gracefully written, with a lucid and comprehensive vision, it is easy to read. But because of its subject and its messages, it is very difficult to read. For all of those reasons, it is important that everyone reads it, because it is about your future, which is likely to be very different from the present.

Orr begins with a view of the future that close observers of climate change are increasingly coming to, and it’s a real difference from just a few years ago. Despite current denialist noise and other snowjobs, it’s not a question of “if” anymore. It’s how fast, how bad and how long.

For those playing catch-up: Even Al Gore’s expositions of the massive evidence, for example, were accompanied by suggestions on how to “solve” the Climate Crisis. For awhile there was a popular impression that changing light bulbs would do it. Though it’s true that a shocking amount of of carbon could be kept out of the atmosphere with some simple efficiencies, that wasn’t going to change what had already been set in motion. Some experts (like Mark Hertsgaard) cautioned that because of a 30 year or so time lag from cause (greenhouse gas pollution) to effects, the crisis was already underway, and we need to prepare for some consequences.

After more climate data was collected and evaluated, books by respected figures like Martin Rees and James Lovelock in the UK that foresaw more cataclysmic consequences were taken seriously but still seemed extreme. Then came observations of Arctic sea melts in 2007 that were far sooner and far more advanced than climate scientists had predicted. “Instead of the long, slow problem many had imagined climate change to be, we seemed to be staring at a dynamic system bent on flipping into some new state,” writes Bill McKibben. More urgent warnings followed, by the chief U.S. climate scientist, NASA’s James Hansen, among others.

So the dire situation that Orr outlines is becoming more generally accepted: Continued greenhouse gas pollution will result in an unrecognizably hot planet for hundreds of thousands of years, shorn of the life we know. “But a sober reading of the science of climate change indicates something else: we have already set in motion forces and trends that threaten the stability of the biosphere in a few decades and that will persist far longer.”

This is the growing consensus: severe and long-lasting effects are already in the cards. They may well be so overwhelming and persistent that they will absorb most of our attention and resources. Orr discusses some of the variables, and I’ve seen recent comments by climate scientists suggesting a time frame of from ten to thirty years before the cascade of multiple and interacting crises become painfully apparent. Orr writes: “Climate change, like the threat of nuclear annihilation, puts all that humanity has struggled to achieve—our cultures, art, music, literatures, cities, institutions, customs, religions, and history, as well as our posterity—at risk.”

“Climate change, in other words, is not so much a problem to be fixed but rather a steadily worsening condition with which we must contend for a long time.”

Orr looks at issues of governance and attitude as well as more specific ideas for getting through the coming climate collapse, and what elements of human civilization and human beings will help that process, while suggesting that the survival of these qualities—from inventiveness to compassion and community--are reasons for the human adventure to continue. For instance, we will need to understand and put into practice the home truth that the global economy is a subset of the biosphere. In this period of fear, anger and stress, personally and nationally, we will need to learn and employ the skills of peace, or we will lose what chance we have to survive.

“The long emergency ahead will be the ultimate challenge to our political creativity, acumen, skill, wisdom and foresight,” Orr writes. Though he doesn’t dwell on the worst implications—like deaths in the millions or worse—he realizes that such crises in the past led to war, tyrannous gangs, barbarism and the haunting ignorance that characterizes a Dark Age. In a coda, he even suggests the added difficulty of keeping a cool head in a hot world, when the heat itself is bending and breaking the world we assume and depend on.

He titles one late chapter "Hope at the End of Our Tether," which is a pretty direct reference to H.G. Well's last book, Mind At the End of Its Tether, in which he found humanity fated to fail because it was too late to save itself. (The expression, by the way, means to have exhausted one's options, like an animal tethered, unable to go farther than the rope will allow. It goes back to the 16th century, but became an expression with this meaning early in the 19th. Like a lot of cultural metaphors from agriculture, it's pretty much lost its referent, except of course for dog-walkers.) He ends this chapter with this paragraph:

"At the end of our tether we must imagine the unimaginable: a world rid of nuclear weapons and a world powered by sunlight, safe from the possibility of catastrophic climate change. Utopia? Hardly. But those are the only realistic options we have."

That's a powerful, present-tense restatement of how far we've stretched our possibilities. In 1960 and especially in his 1961 Inaugural, President Kennedy noted that humanity now had the power to abolish poverty, and also to abolish human life. Humanity could choose utopia, or it could choose oblivion. But as Buckminster Fuller and others soon suggested, the power of nuclear weapons etc. really meant that either we choose Utopia or we get Oblivion. It's an either/or. Orr stretches the tether even tighter, by noting that resource problems and catastrophes from the Climate Crisis make nuclear war more likely and therefore more dangerous. So we don't have much of a choice--though as Orr notes, even if we save ourselves from our two principal scourges, without losing civilization in the process, we still won't wind up with Utopia, the perfect society. That at least forestalls the objection that he's asking for perfection, which is by definition impossible. He's just saying the just about impossible is just about essential.


“There is no historical precedent, however, for what we must do if we are to endure,” he warns. And though he admits “I know of no purely rational reason for anyone to be optimistic about the human future,” he opts for hope—but of a particular kind: “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying the odds or changing the odds.” He quotes Vaclav Havel’s definition of hope as “an orientation of the heart” and “ability to work for something because it is good.” Orr believes the only thing that will save us is “people behaving heroically.”

Orr begins his book by noting that UK scientist Martin Ree’s 2003 book (Our Final Hour) which suggests that humankind has about a 1 in 2 chance of surviving the 21st century, was almost entirely ignored. Orr’s book has been out since last spring, I believe, and has also been pretty much ignored. In one sense it’s not surprising: even if the science is admitted, the message is so apocalyptic that it cries out for a grief response, starting with denial and anger, and maybe moving up to bargaining (i.e. technological fixes that few believe will change the immediate future, even if they work.) I had a tough time with this book myself, and only copious amounts of high-quality chocolate and some sleepless nights got me as far as this review.

But while this is one of the first books about how to contend with the coming “long emergency,” (and this phrase devised by Jim Kunstler looks like it will stick) it won’t be the last. For instance, Bill McKibben’s new book to be published in April, bears the subtitle: “Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.” Maybe it's groupthink, but I don't think so: these sentiments are becoming pretty common among those closely observing climate and climate science.

If we keep hearing this, and evidence piles up (and we have the wit to understand it--for instance, that the northeastern snows this month support global heating theories, they don't contradict them), sooner or later we’ll move through depression to acceptance, and then maybe we’ll get to work salvaging a civilization. Meanwhile, we ought to be grateful for writers like Orr who are preparing us for this future, as well as the scientists and scholars who are bringing their skills to bear on these topics, regardless of the terrified barbarians at the gates.

And this future doesn’t include continuing global failure to cut greenhouse gases, which makes the farther future even bleaker. “I also write with the assumption that we will succeed in reducing atmospheric CO2 below the level that would cause runaway climate change,” Orr adds, “otherwise, there is no point in writing anything other than an elegy or funeral dirge.”

How hard it is to read and then write these words, because it’s real now: very probably, the world we’ve known is ending, and humanity faces its greatest challenge, including the dual tasks of living in this harsher world while still doing what is necessary not to make things worse. Ending greenhouse gas pollution is still necessary, but it alone is no longer enough. We enter the age of consequences.

My Summer Reading

Summer for me is more a time for writing than reading. Still, so many books, so little time. So far this site has been devoted mostly to formal book reviews but that's meant posts are few and far between. So I'm going to try to add more "notices" of new books I receive, and books that pique my interest based on what other reviewers say about them. And I'm going to experiment with these little reports on what I've been reading, which will include new books and old, and re-readings. This summer's reading so far has been such a mix.

I reviewed (below) the third volume of Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy, Sixty Days and Counting. In June, I went back and re-read all three volumes in order, starting with Forty Signs of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below before re-reading Sixty Days and Counting. When I finished, I had to keep myself from starting them all over again. I loved being in that world. I was especially surprised that I liked the second volume best, at least for the story, since sometimes that's a kind of bridge volume in a trilogy. Then again, wasn't The Empire Strikes Back the best of the Star Wars trilogy of movies?

I'm glad I re-read Sixty Days, too. The first time through I focused on the characters and story. The second time, I found more provocative and useful information and ideas about the climate crisis. If I happen to run into Barack Obama (which is really unlikely, since I live in California) I would recommend reading these books for a good sense of the issues, challenges and possibilities in dealing with the climate crisis.

Science fiction is my preferred genre reading, although selectively: of what I call the science fiction of consciousness. Also last month I read Greg Bear's Moving Mars, an excellent work of sci-fi storytelling. Intelligent about the future, too. His Darwin's Radio is one of the most remarkable s/f novels I've read; a contemporary classic in many ways. And now I'm reading a volume of George Zebrowski's short stories, Swift Thoughts. It doesn't seem to have the story that started me searching out and reading his work, though, which was about Jesus Christ appearing on the Tonight Show. So right there I've named three of my favorite contemporary s/f of consciousness authors: Robinson, Bear and Zebrowski.

I also re-read three classics from the original s/f of consciousness author, H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man, The First Men In the Moon, and In the Days of the Comet. "Invisible" and "Moon" are wittier than I remembered, and "Comet" is mostly a realistic novel about Wells' own youth, kind of transition out of his scientific fantasy phase. It's easy to see why at the time Wells was taken seriously simply as a novelist who happened to write about these unusual subjects, like Joseph Conrad wrote about ships and Africa. He describes the practical difficulties of being invisible--he had to be naked, people who can't see him keep stepping on his feet, etc. (James Whale's movie version follows the story more faithfully than I remembered, though adding the love interest, but his emphasis is more on the adventure of it.) "Moon" offers its social critique, but it's an absorbing story, with enough physical detail to see it. Same goes for "Comet." I enjoyed these.

Before I leave genreland, I should report that several years ago my partner Margaret and I started reading the Harry Potter books aloud to each other. We eventually did it for all 7 volumes, and in between we tried some other books but somehow nothing else took. Then we were alerted to Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (we heard about both series' from different friends in the university drama department.) We finished the third volume in early June. This triology deserves all the praise it's gotten. Some of the writing is so gorgeous I laughed out loud as I read it. We also saw the film made of the first volume, The Golden Compass, and enjoyed that. Why wasn't it more popular? It will be interesting to see if the second two are made into movies as well.

Speaking of drama, I also read plays. Most recently a lesser known one by Noel Coward called Quadrille. Like Wilde and the early Stoppard, Coward is fun to read for the verbal wit. I enjoyed it.

In the department of old books read mostly for pleasure, a library discard of The Living Novel, a series of essays by novelists edited by Granville Hicks and published in 1957. It was in response to the "death of the novel" which preceded the death of the author as a popular topic. The contemporary novelists include some now forgotten, but also Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, Flannery O'Connor and Herbert Gold. It's a fascinating volume. Though the problems faced by novelists and contemporary novels that these essays discuss are still familiar, and arguably are worse, I couldn't help thinking as I read of the novels and novelists that were about to burst on the scene anyway.

The best essays for my interests were by Bellow and Ellison. Bellow's analysis was often astute, and his observations epigrammatic. For instance, "A novel is written by a man who thinks of himself as a novelist. Unless he makes such an assumption about himself he simply can't do it." "By refusing to write about anything with which he is not thoroughly familiar, the American writer confesses the powerlessness of the imagination and accepts its relegation to an inferior place." He suggests the impulse, the questions behind novels and the compulsion to write them: "Why were we born? What are we doing here? Where are we going?"

Ellison's essay is impressively scholarly, especially on the American novel. Since the novel reflects change, "..if the novel had not existed at the time the United States started becoming conscious of itself as a nation...it would have been necessary for Americans to invent it." He also suggests questions that the novel addresses: "What is worth having and what worth holding? Where and in what pattern of conduct does true value, at a given moment, lie?"

Summer is also a time to assuage a guilty conscience and catch up with at least a few books that arrived new and sat patiently waiting past their season. For instance, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal by Rob Reimen (Yale.) I liked the theme, I enjoyed entertaining ideas from Whitman, Thomas Mann and others, and I felt the book's narrative strategy succeeded in terms of keeping you reading, although in the end I'm not sure what the central ideas are. It begins with a personal narrative of a dinner the author had with a daughter of Thomas Mann, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who was his longtime friend, and Joe Goodman, an old friend of hers who also escaped from Germany in 1938. (Oddly they--and Thomas Mann-- came to the U.S. on the same ship without realizing it in advance, the New Amsterdam, which was also the name of the ship my grandfather came over on from Italy in the early 1920s, but it could not have been the same ship, as his was broken up in 1932.)

In New York, Joe was an eccentric composer and Whitman devotee who worked in bookstores. He arrives at the New York restaurant in November 2001 with his Cantata on the theme of the Nobility of the Spirit. Later we learn of intriguing elements of it, but also that he never finished it, and indeed burned all his notes before he died. When Elisabeth tells Reimen of Joe's death, he says that Joe was a great man. Elisabeth disagrees-- he was not truly great because he did not have the endurance to finish his great work. That's an interesting point of view, but then, Thomas Mann was her father. Nevertheless, Joe is a haunting character.

The rest of the book deals with philosophical and political ideas through dramatic dialogues, some among characters in Mann's novels and other works, some imagined or partly imagined among historical characters. The ideas are provocative and the dialogues are absorbing, and I wanted to remain sympathetic to his central championing of nobility of spirit, but Reimen's arguments against intellectual caricature falter when he ignores political and social history in his dogmatic statements about 9-11, and he oversimplifies the concept of utopia only as the absolutely perfect society envisioned by Hitler and Lenin. None of this is disqualifying, but there remains a feeling of dogmatism and yet vagueness, although there are many interesting passages.

Then it seems like the wheels come off in the final dialogue in the book, which to me came off as just inexplicable. Perhaps the Nazi priest's harsh indictment represents all that threatens nobility of spirit today, and the tortured dissident has that spirit. (A bit ironic, given that torture has most recently been inflicted and championed by the government based on the same black and white view as the author.) This last dialogue is also troubling because it's not clear what it is supposed to be--a fictional account of a possible nightmare, or what. That and other aspects of it aren't sourced, and because of it, the general lack of sufficient sourcing calls into question the accuracy of all previous dialogues, including the events in the restaurant. So if it is a work of fiction--postmodern or not--it is often an absorbing read, but possibly a diabolical book.

Naomi Klein

The Shocks That We Are Heir To

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
By Naomi Klein
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt

The connections are daring in journalist Naomi Klein's new book, "The Shock Doctrine," but the result is convincing. With a bold and brilliantly conceived thesis, skillfully and cogently threaded through more than 500 pages of trenchant writing, Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time. And because the pattern she exposes could govern our future as well, "The Shock Doctrine" could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade.

My review continues at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review...

Faith-Based Exploitation

The American Dream and the Gospel of Wealth:
The Fight for a Productive Middle Class Economy
by Norton Garfinkle
Yale University Press

A recent analysis of economic data by the McClatchy newspaper chain found that the number of severely poor Americans--those earning half or less of the income that defines poverty--grew by 26% in just five years, from 2000 to 2005.

This was not an isolated phenomenon. The report stated: "Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries."

Norton Garfinkle provides the recent facts and figures to support his historical arguments in which the American Dream has been pitted against the Gospel of Wealth before, although there's been a mighty effort today to identify the latter with the former.

This book (which Bill Moyers called the most important in years) bears a laudatory blurb from Senator Hillary Clinton, but her current adversary for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois may find in it an outline for his campaign. Since he began his campaign in Springfield, where Abraham Lincoln began his, he would be interested in Garfinkle's contention that it was Lincoln who first and most firmly identified economic opportunity as essential to the American experiment. (And of course, other Democrats--notably John Edwards and Bill Richardson--are also champions of this issue.)

Garfinkle shows that when America embraced the dream of economic opportunity and government's role in ensuring it, the country prospered. And when it fell for the Gospel of Wealth--which these days goes by the names of privatization and supply side economics--the great divide between the very rich and everyone else led to economic and social disaster.

A book for our times, indeed. My only disappointment is that a book published in 2006 doesn't have a word about the Apollo Alliance of labor, government and environmentalists, nor does it deal with the idea of "green collar" jobs, which represent one basis of hope for economic opportunity and a new American Dream for the future.

Democracy In Question

Does American Democracy Still Work?
By Alan Wolfe
Yale University Press

Whose Freedom?
The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea
By George Lakoff
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

If you are left aghast and amazed by politics and government today, these two books are for you. There are plenty of screeds and exposes on the details, but Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe and UC Berkeley professor of linguistics George Lakoff concentrate on the bigger picture of what is happening and why.

This is not your grandfather’s democracy, they say; it’s not even your father’s. Most Americans over 30 -- especially liberals and moderates -- who formed their impressions of political institutions and the political dialogue before, say, 1984, are in for a rude awakening.

Continued at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Econ for the Future 101

'>THE GREAT UNRAVELING by Paul Krugman. W.W. Norton & Co.
'>THE END OF POVERTY by Jeffrey D. Sachs. Penguin Press.

by William S. Kowinski

It's called the dismal science because of all those gray lines of figures, but the name might stick because as a science it has been a dismal failure. Abused by ideologues and self-serving liars, puffed up beyond its accomplishments in academia, with a deserved reputation for predicting the obvious and getting even that wrong, economics has failed its function and its potential. In this, a world predicated on economic relationships. Dismal.

Here are two of the few books that do better. There is no better analyst of the economics of our time, especially those involved in political machinations at the federal and global level, than Paul Krugman of the New York Times. His ongoing analysis of the chicanery and cynical foolishness applied to the Social Security debate in Washington is only his latest invaluable contribution to truth, justice and the American way.

His columns should not be missed, and though this book is a few years old---a long time in political economics---it is still the best analysis of what's going on. The venerable Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., author of POLITICS OF HOPE, calls THE GREAT UNRAVELING "required reading for anyone concerned about the American future."

Concerning the world's future, Jeffrey Sachs in his new book offers convincing proof and a practical plan for addressing and essentially ending poverty in our time. We've known since President Kennedy said so in his Inaugural Address in 1961 that eradicating poverty is within our power. This book, which is both based on information gathered for the UN Millennium Project and is the basis for the 20 year effort inaugurated by that project this year to eliminate poverty, offers the blueprint for actually doing it. At very little cost to the wealthy nations and their citizens.

What little hope there seems to be rests with courageous individuals like Krugman who step up to the possibilities that they've been given, and to organizations like the Millennium Project that operate doggedly, under the media radar, to achieve goals that amount to justifying our claims of humanity. The future depends on them, and individuals and organizations like them in many categories of knowledge and endeavor.

'>THE BOMB: A Life
by Gerard J. DeGroot
Harvard University Press 432 pages, $27.95

by William S. Kowinski

Gerard DeGroot includes a number of eyewitness descriptions of nuclear explosions, which bring the march of names, facts, lies, rationales and theories in this relentless history back to human reality, if only for a moment at a time. The largest hydrogen bomb explosion to that date---twice as large as expected---took place on Bikini Island in 1954. From a U.S. Navy destroyer thirty miles away, Marshall Rosenbluth watched the fireball: "rising and rising, spreading...It looked to me like what you might imagine a diseased brain, or a brain of some mad man would look like...And it just kept getting bigger and bigger..."

DeGroot, Professor of Modern History at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, writes with grace and economy of a 60-year history still unfolding. Besides his admirable summations and deft narratives based on many long-available sources, he was able to add descriptions of the Russian bomb program and other details that have emerged in recent years (some crucial information about nuclear missiles already in Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis was only revealed in the late 1990s.) Although always ready to call a lie a lie (and there were many), and to name insane policies for what they were, he also provides the reader with enough well-organized facts in convincingly developed contexts to allow everyone to form their own impressions.

The pre-history of the bomb is fascinating. In the mid-1930s, few physicists had even thought about an atomic bomb, or if they had, believed one was possible; or if they believed it was theoretically possible, that it could be made a practical reality. But between 1938 and the autumn of 1941, the bomb went from a weird notion to a massive research and development program in the U.S., and lesser but still significant programs in Germany and the USSR. Eventually there was even a small program in Japan.

That Germany didn't develop the bomb is the most resonant story. Most advanced physics was being done in Europe, and most of that in Germany, until 1933, when Hitler directed that non-Aryans be fired from civil service jobs, which included universities and scientific institutes. Eleven physicists who had won or would win Nobel Prizes were dismissed. Around 100 German physicists, most of them Jews, wound up in the U.S. by 1941. They not only provided the scientific talent but a lot of the motivation for the U.S. bomb program.

But even after Hitler had gotten rid of Jewish practitioners of the "Jew science" of physics, it was a German physicist who had the key insight that for the first time revealed that the atomic bomb was possible. But no one listened. In 1934, Ida Noddack suggested that some puzzling results of an experiment conducted by Enrico Fermi in Italy might be explained by nuclear fission. But Noddack was not well-known, and she was a woman. (In '>The Big Bang, Simon Singh reveals many contributions of women in physics and astronomy through the years, though they didn't get much credit.)

It wasn't until 1938 that Fermi himself figured it out, but even then it took another physicist, Leo Szilard, to understand the implications. He knew immediately that the atomic bomb was possible, because he had already read about it, and how it was developed and used in warfare. It was all in a novel by H.G. Wells, written in 1914, including its name: the atomic bomb. Szilard also realized, from his reading of Wells, that if knowledge of fission and the bomb got into the wrong hands, it could mean the end of civilization.

Szilard won the Nobel Prize in 1938, and after picking up the award in Sweden, he and his wife emigrated to America. In addition to his own researches, Szilard was instrumental in first, getting U.S. and British physicists to stop publishing anything about fission, and then getting Albert Einstein to write his famous letter to FDR, and to enlist other influential people in convincing the U.S. government to develop the bomb before Hitler did.

But as DeGroot shows, the letter was so circumspect, and Szilard, Einstein and other physicists so unable to express in plain language the possible implications, that the American government dragged its feet. Hitler had been given such a clear paragraph, and he started the German program. What convinced FDR was not Einstein's letter but a story, a metaphor. Alexander Sachs was an international financier and friend of Einstein, who got the letter to FDR, but in a later meeting with FDR he simply told a story about a young American inventor who went to Napoleon during wartime and offered his invention, which the emperor turned down. The inventor was James Watt, the invention the steam engine. This got Roosevelt's attention.

The story of the bomb is replete with the tricks of fate and power of metaphor, including some forty years later, when Ronald Reagan finally committed to nuclear arms reductions with the Soviets after seeing the TV movie, '>"The Day After," that depicted the impact of a nuclear strike on families in Kansas.

There is no more powerful and defining story of the past 60 years as well as the world we live in as the story of the Bomb. Though the lethal effects of radioactivity were denied for decades, and the extent of cancers and genetic malformations suffered across America as a result of nuclear tests are still obscured, the bomb settled deeply into our national unconscious, and helped define our feelings about our leaders, about science and scientists, and about the future, or lack thereof.

The Bomb has remained in the national unconscious not only because so much about it is impossible for the rational mind to absorb or the psyche to comprehend, but because of the lies and misinformation. In 1971 Richard Nixon prevented crucial information from reaching the Supreme Court so they would not interfere with the largest bomb ever exploded within the U.S. at Amchitka island in Alaska. Radioactive elements from that explosion were still leaking into the Bering Sea by 1996.

In just a few weeks, diplomats from around the world will gather in New York to discuss the nuclear non-proliferation agreements that U.S. policy now endanger. Some observers expect proliferation to grow substantially as a result of this treaty's failure. Perhaps because visible testing ended decades ago, and the Hiroshima photos are in black and white, Americans don't seem to fear nuclear weapons anymore as beyond the pale. Yet one expert estimates the chances of a nuclear weapon exploding in an American city in the present decade at 50%. This book is essential in more than the classroom.

There are also new books on two of the best-known scientists associated with the Bomb. '>EDWARD TELLER: The Real Dr. Strangelove'> by Peter Goodchild (Harvard University Press) is a careful, detailed biography of the most frightening figure of the atomic age, because he was the most successful in convincing important people and a large segment of the public for a very long time that he was brilliant and trustworthy and courageous, when he was paranoid, dishonest and incapable in the extreme. As the chief model for Dr. Strangelove, Teller was a figure of parody, but in an age that produced Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and such lesser- known demonical liars as General Leslie Groves (who ran the U.S. Bomb program for years), he emerges as the era's best argument for the existence of Satan.

I haven't had the opportunity to see '>AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Knopf), but my virtual colleague at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, Elizabeth Svoboda, found that this this 721 page biography of the director of the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos laboratories has much to say about the shifting "uneasy partnership between science and politics in America."

While DeGroot's new book takes a comprehensive view of the Bomb's history, there are many worthy books that examine specific facets. One that I particularly admire is '>NO PLACE TO HIDE '>by David Bradley (University Press of New England, 1984) which combines his eyewitness account of the "Crossroads" atomic bomb tests in 1946---of particular interest to me since I was born on the day of the first explosion---with more recent data on the health effects of these and other tests, contrasting with all the lies told to the American people by Leslie Groves and others. The combination is instructive on many levels.

DeGroot writes about the most significant of the many books, movies and television programs that make up an important part of the Atomic Age history, and there are many other books that deal with just these aspects. I still admire'> NUCLEAR FEAR by Spencer Weart (Harvard, 1988)for its thoroughness and insights, though I don't always agree with his conclusions.

Finally, we must not forget that The Bomb was used as a bomb, and may be again. Therefore, Sven Lindquist's '>A HISTORY OF BOMBING (The New Press) remains essential reading.

This is What's the Matter with Kansas

by William S. Kowinski

'>Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred
by John Lukacs
Yale University Press. 248 pp. $25

Simply in the ideas it addresses and the authority of its arguments, this is a profound and useful book. Historians and other scholars will have to vet its evidence and wrangle over its arguments, but much of it passes the smell test of at least one reader with the same set of questions that pervade one of the more fashionable political books of the year, Thomas Franks' '>What's the Matter With Kansas?

John Lukacs is a historian whose work encompasses politics. He distresses many because his own political ideology can't quite be nailed down. He's blue states on some issues, red states on others, it seems. And his reading of history is his own.

Given the ground it covers and its apparent nature as a summary or a summing up, this is a relatively short book. Despite Lukacs' resulting declaratory, even declamatory tone, or perhaps because of it, he often pulls back suddenly to say, but this isn't the subject of this book, but if it were... That's part of this book's considerable charm, which it needs, considering its subject.

The ideas Lukacs expresses are conclusions he has drawn from his study of history, and we get some fascinating slices of it as he assesses the world since 1870, and especially as he corrects what he considers to be improper use of language, as in throwing the word "Fascist" around too freely (he restricts it to its origins with Mussolini) and misusing the concept of "totalitarian" in respect to the regimes of the most infamous 20th century dictators.

This is meaningful because, Lukacs asserts, such dictatorships, especially Hitler's Germany, were essentially populist regimes, and populism in the modern age is associated with nationalism. So the Nazi Party was what its name said: National Socialism. But especially since all modern governments were and are historically socialist (he argues) in that they provide some social safety net, Hitler's emphasis was on nationalism. It is what links his regime to Stalin's, and in large part now, to ours.

Lukacs contrasts populism with patriotism. The patriot is loyal to the state, but the populist to the nation. The populist is more likely to be racist. "A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe." (But Lukacs, who is so careful about many words, is imprecise in his use of "tribe.")

Why do the people of Kansas vote against their own economic interests? This was the key question of Franks' book, and a great puzzle of Democrats over the 2004 election result. Without specifically addressing that question, Lukacs answers it: "But what governs the world (and especially in the democratic age) is not the accumulation of money, or even of goods, but the accumulation of opinions." This was true in the age of monarchy, and even more true now because "the accumulation of opinions can be manufactured and even falsified through the machinery of publicity, at times even against contrary appearances." So in a way, a new definition of faith-based v. reality-based.

The emphasis on materialism as motivation is a mistake, Lukacs insists. Past a certain point of basic necessities, humans in society are concerned with, for instance, respectability: for the high opinion of others. While material belongings are a part of that, so is belonging to the group in other ways. And historically, Lukacs asserts, the group is ultimately defined as the nation.

While the conventional wisdom would contrast the power of public opinion in democracies with its silent irrelevance in dictatorships, Lukacs, who is known as an expert on Hitler and his era, does not: "...it is the accumulation of opinions that governs the history of states and nations and of democracies as well as dictatorships in the age of popular sovereignty. It is the main ingredient of nationalisms, the cause of wars, and of the majority support of fanatical speakers like Hitler, or of the less enthusiastic but majoritarian support of less than mediocre presidents." (The ending of this sentence was changed from the bound page proofs, where it read: "but still prevalent support of otherwise colorless presidents such as George W. Bush.")

Lukacs traces the rise of nationalism after 1870, and believes that "the masses" are less conscious of class than of nationalism. They fear foreigners and hate those who are insufficiently nationalist within their own country. (Readers right here might keep this in mind as they read the review of Homeland below.)

The "fear" and "hatred" of his subtitle distinguish the left from the right on the political spectrum. Especially at their extremes, the left is motivated by fear (of oppressive capitalists and reactionaries) while the right is motivated by hatred (for enemies of the nation, of the "people," which translates into those who aren't us.)

"But while hatred amounts to a moral weakness," he writes, "it can be, alas, often, and at least in the short run, a source of strength. Whence the advantage of the Right over the Left---especially in the age of democratic populism."

But fear, of course, is not much better. "Fear and hatred are prevalent among us," he concludes, "manifest and evident in the increasing savagery---"savagery is the proper word, not 'violence'---in and around our everyday lives."

If anything makes noise from this book, it is likely to be Lukacs assertion that liberalism is dead, and a Red State sort of populism triumphant. But it is the savagery that he seems to really want us to understand.

However, he sees conflict within this triumph, because there may be division between "two kinds of Right": "between those who believe that America's destiny is to rule the world and others who do not believe that; between those who trust technology and machines and others who trust tradition and the old human decencies...in sum, between those who do not question Progress and others who do."

I don't know that I buy this division in precisely this way, but I see what he's getting at. In the book as a whole, perhaps the most glaring omission for me is a specific discussion of plutocracy and how it might interact with populism, which is a crucial element of today's that remains insufficiently explained in general.

Lukacs view of the masses is not unfamiliar, but his application to the world we know is pertinent and thought-provoking. Against the collective, mechanical, easily manipulated, nationalistic populist mass, he reintroduces other familiar concepts: freedom and the individual. "Freedom means the capacity to know something about oneself, and the consequent practice or at least the desire to live according to limits imposed on oneself rather than by external powers."

Between the lines I have quoted are his arguments as to why this is so difficult in the modern world. Lukacs presents a historical and political argument that reminds me of other themes, other fears, from the 20th century, such as the fears for "mass man" and the "outer-directed" "Organization Man" or even Jung's "extraverted as hell" Americans. To these characterizations he adds pungent illustrations of the role of publicity in government, and the phenomenon of populist religion.

Historians may buzz a bit about Lukacs' assessments: while he finds Marx, Orwell and even Machiavelli wrong or irrelevant, de Tocqueville turns out to be remarkably astute and prescient. But what I suspect is most likely to be missed, and what I found most moving, is his hope for the future. (He even refers to the "historicity of hope.") "It is hate that unites people, whereas love is always individual, rather than collective. To this we may add something that immediately negates whatever moral essence the purposes of class struggles or of racism or of modern nationalism may have: and this is that love is never the love of oneself, it is the love of another. That is the saving grace of mankind."