Anti-Recommendations

I am deeply rankled when multiple people recommend a book to me — even highly recommend it — and then I don't like it. Especially if I dislike it pretty intensely. 

This has happened to me twice in the past six months. The two books were This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone (2019) and Severance by Ling Ma (2018).  

For the first, even though I am a long-time science fiction reader who's able to catch on to the arcanities inherent in far-future world-building, I never felt any connection with the characters or interest in the story that the author was trying to create.

In the second (which I just finished today), while it's wrapped in a post-apocalyptic shell, it's really just a little pile of 20-something New York City navel-gazing with a literary sheen. I kept waiting for it to pay off, but it never did. (Most people on GoodReads liked it, but one commenter who did not said it well: "Who knew that a book about a fever outbreak crippling civilization could be SO dull?")

Thank goodness both of these books were short because I ended up feeling as though each was a waste of time.  

Tracking Technology in Fiction

I mentioned a few days ago the need for some escapist reading. I decided to finally dive into the Cork O'Connor books by Saint Paul's William Kent Krueger. If you don't know about them, they revolve around a small-town sheriff (or former sheriff) in a county in far-northern Minnesota. A place where, it seems, lots of people get done in by bad people. 

Unlike many in this area, I've never read a single one of them. 

I'm now four books in to the 20-book series. The first one was published in 1998, and as I was most of the way through the second book (published in 1999), it occurred to me that it presented a fairly painless chance to document technological change. It happened when I noticed the main character using a pay phone.

I will report back on what happens when, and if I can, the effect it has on the plot. As time goes by, will people leave their cell phones at home? Will their batteries conveniently die? I'm sure the books' location near the Boundary Waters will have bad cell service generally, so that will always be available as an excuse, when needed. Will the technology itself become part of the plot in later books?

It may also be a museum of forgotten tech. In the fourth book, for instance (published 2004, but I think occurring in 2000?), there's been a reference to a Palm Pilot.

A Bad Stat, and the Wrong Word

I just finished reading Camille Dungy's 2023 memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden as part of a book group. I recommend it generally.

There was one particular set of facts she relayed late in the book that I didn't know specifically, though it fits with others that are familiar. 

It comes up at a point in late spring or summer of 2020, when Dungy's husband has been on a long bike ride. She tells her friend Tim, who is white, that she tracks her husband's whereabouts with her phone while he's on his rides. 

Their conversation was just a few months after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by white men while jogging in Georgia, and of course, not long after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.

After recounting their conversation, she goes on to write,

A recent national study reveals that Black cyclists are 4.5 times more likely to die in an accident than white cyclists. Law enforcement agents in cities around the country cite Black cyclists at grossly disproportionate rate. Though the population of Tampa, Florida, is only 25 percent Black, Black cyclists accounted for 80 percent of the city's bicycle citations in 2015. In a nine-month span in 2017, Chicago law enforcement agents issue 321 citations to cyclists in Austin, a predominately Black neighborhood, and only 5 in predominately white Lincoln Park (page 235). 

I found a 2022 article about that national study. The higher rate of death for Black cyclists, it turns out, isn't because they ride bikes more than white people. In fact, it's the opposite:

...Black residents logged proportionally fewer miles on foot, bike, or car than most other groups, relative to their share of the population, according to the National Household Travel Survey data from which the stats were sourced.... White cyclists, who are the demographic group most likely to ride exclusively for recreation or sport rather than transportation, logged significantly more miles per capita than cyclists from other demographics...

This 4.5x statistic raises the question that I always ask when things like this arise: when there's clearly either a structural problem at fault (such as the road designs in Black communities vs. white ones) or overt racism of drivers (!)... are those "accidents"? 

Can we stop using that word and start using at least a neutral word instead, like crash? Calling them accidents is adding insult to injury, or in this case, death.

Fear and Fury

When I wrote a few months ago about Heather Thompson's Atlantic article on the Bernie Goetz subway shooting, I didn't realize she had a book coming out on the subject. 

That book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. If you liked her Atlantic article, the book gives a fuller picture of the whole case, and particularly of the cultural and media landscape that surrounded it.

As with the story of the so-called Central Park Five (the Exonerated Five), Thompson's book makes it clear just how much the four young men shot by Goetz in December 1984 were not the perpetrators in this case. 

One of the four, Darrell Cabey, was sitting at a distance from Goetz, who shot at him once, missed, and then moved to stand over him: 

The man stopped just in front of Darrell, looming over him as Darrell said plaintively, "I didn't do nothing!" But it was as if this man couldn't hear him. In a cold, calm tone, the man raised his gun again and said, "You don't look too bad, here's another," before shooting Darrell point-blank (p. 80).

That shooting of Darrell Cabey is a key part of Goetz's legal case, because as a reader can see, there is no self-defense justification for what he did.

There were two facts about Cabey and Goetz that I learned from the earlier pages of the book.

One is the brief story of Cabey's father, Ronald. He was a truck driver who owned his own truck and made enough income to support a family of six, with a mom who stayed home to care for the kids. They lived in Far Rockaway, Queens. 

When Darrell was 7, Ronald was eating supper in a diner while he was on the road. He saw a thief stealing his truck. Ronald jumped on the running board and tried to eject the thief, but was thrown out the door as another car was passing in the driveway. There was a crash and he was killed. Darrell's mom Shirley was 26, with five kids to support somehow. She moved the family to public housing in the Bronx.

What does something like that do to a kid (and his siblings, and his mom)? They all needed therapy they never got.

Bernie Goetz, born in 1947, grew up first in Queens as well, but then in a rural part of Duchess County, New York, along the Hudson River north of the city. His parents were both German immigrants; his father built a successful business, and by all accounts was a domineering jerk at home. 

In 1960, Goetz senior was charged with molesting two 15-year-old boys. It sounds like there was a lot of evidence against him. Goetz senior "required that his children attend every day of his May 1960 trial as a show of support, and this each child was inundated with 'the unpleasant details of the accusations.'" (p. 21) Goetz senior was found guilty of eight counts. During his appeal, Bernie was sent to boarding school in Europe. His father got some of the remaining counts dismissed on technicalities and took a plea on the remaining four, finally receiving only a suspended sentence on one charge (disorderly conduct). 

What does something like that do to a kid, on top of the earlier emotional abuse? It's not an excuse in any way, but Bernie Goetz clearly needed therapy he never got. 

Neither of these family and personal tragedies is the point of Thompson's book, which is very much what its subtitle says. But on a human level, it's hard not to feel empathy, even for Goetz.

Bernie Goetz will be turning 80 next year. He's still a hero to way too many Americans, and served as a model for other killers like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. Maybe if he'd had some therapy, at least it would have been someone else who set off the flame that was waiting to be lit.

Hell Yeah for Automatic Noodle

I got a copy of Annalee Newitz's novella Automatic Noodle not long after it came out late last summer, but then it sat on one of my staggering towers of to-be-read fiction books. I'm not sure why, since I love her Terraformers novel (though I never did post about that).

This week Automatic Noodle was named as a finalist for the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula awards, and since I had just finished the nonfiction book I had been reading, that finally got me to pick it up off its pile of unreads.

It's a breezy, sweet book about food, climate change, robots, and community. Among other things. Its people are making themselves into themselves, so hell yeah for that. 

It's a nice break from heavier science fiction, or any kind of thing that's getting you down. (Even if — spoiler alert — it does take place after a civil war in the U.S.)

Finally Reading

I'm weird about books, I admit it. There are certain authors I've never read, who people who know me would think I would have read. Terry Pratchett, for instance. I've read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, but I've never ready Terry Pratchett. 

It's something about a writer with a large body of work, especially books that are in a series, that puts me off. I'm afraid to get started. (It's not that I never read long series: I have. So there's really no logic to what I'm saying.)

Another example is Minnesota writer William Kent Krueger. Worse yet, he lives nearby, so you'd think I would be interested. His series of novels about a Northern Minnesota sheriff named Cork O'Connor are supposed to be good. But no. I've never delved into them.

Until the other day, when a new bookstore opened in my neighborhood, including a small collection of used books. And there among them was a hard cover copy of Lightning Strike. I knew from something I read a few years ago that it's the prequel to the Cork O'Connor books, taking place during his childhood. 

So I bought it and now I'm reading it. It's good, no big surprise. Uh oh. Now I have to read the rest of them. 

The Emperor's New Clothes

For quite some time — off and on since the Republican Party became the structural support for carrying out any delusion Donald Trump wishes to pretend is reality — I've found myself thinking of the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Emperor's New Clothes." Like many people, I've waited for the moment that will be the equivalent of a little child in the crowd calling out the obvious truth: that our emperor is naked. 

It hasn't happened. 

So instead, I thought I would get my hands on an illustrated copy of the tale to remind myself of how it is told. Looking around online, this 1977 version, retold by Ruth Belov Gross with illustrations by Jack Kent, was most appealing. So I bought a copy:

The thing I had forgotten about the story is that it involves two con men who lie to the king about their ability to make the finest cloth. They say that "everybody knows" about their wondrous cloth, but some people cannot see it, even when they look right at it — because those people are too stupid and bad at their jobs. 

The con men pretend to weave at looms...

...and do a lot of fake sewing of the clothes, all night long.  

Several ministers and finally the emperor himself check out their work as they go along, and though none of these inspectors see any fabric, they each pretend they do. Why? Because they don't want to be thought stupid and bad at their jobs. 

By the time the emperor gets dressed in his new outfit, he appears to be convinced it's real. "My new clothes feel light as a feather," he says. 

As he goes out on procession in front of the people, none of the adults along the parade route say a word about what is — or is not — before their eyes. (The book's text verbally says they are going along with it, but their round eyes in Kent's illustration seem to contradict that.)

Then, on the far right of the illustration, a little child points and says to her mother, "He hasn't got anything on!" 

And suddenly the crowd's consensus shifts:

It's the moment we've all been waiting…and waiting…and waiting for:

Which we in the present day will probably never get — when the emperor realizes he's naked in front of the populace, and he is humiliated, as he should be.

The difference between Andersen's tale and our reality is that the con men in our government are not external actors, fooling the emperor, but the emperor himself and those closest to him. Fooling far too many of our fellow citizens, and fooling or intimidating (or buying off) the Republican Party. 

Plus, Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, among several other mental deficiencies and personality disorders. 

But it's nice to entertain the fantasy for a little while.
 

Scarry's Animals Say Merry Christmas

I'm fairly sure I never heard of Richard Scarry when I was growing up. I'm not sure why, but I never came across his books (which began appearing before I was born) until well after I was an adult and they became the subject of pop culture references. It looks like Busy Town came out in 1976, when I was almost finished with high school, so maybe his books just weren't circulating that much in libraries before that. 

Anyway, I had still never heard of The Animals' Merry Christmas (by Kathryn Jackson, art by Scarry) until yesterday, when one of my relatives shared this on Facebook:

It would be cool to get a copy of this book — from the second year of his book-illustration career — to see how all of the images presage the later appearance of Scarry's work. There are quite a number of versions of it, including at least two different ones from the publication year 1950 that claim to be first editions. It looks like one is a Big Golden Book and one was not, and there might be a Little Golden Book from the same year... it's pretty hard to sort out. 

As you can see in this single example, Scarry's animals already had a lot of personality, while the illustration style was much more complicated than it became.

At Least It Was Short

Sometimes I think I'm not discriminating enough in my reading, especially of fiction. I tend to like most things I read. I can count on one hand — or maybe two — the number of books I've read that I despised, or had to stop reading because I disliked them so intensely. 

Well, it just happened again, and in some ways it makes me feel better. I'm not a patsy for a pretty face, or an award-winner!

This time it was This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I picked it up because the edition I saw was beautiful, and it was the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards for best novella. 

I did finish the story this time, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something in how it would develop. Nope.

I have great patience for science fiction that throws you into the deep end of incomprehensibility. I've been reading the genre since I was 10. Generally, I catch on to the world the author is building at some point and that's all it takes. 

But that never managed to happen for me with this story. Sometimes there were glimpses of it beginning to make sense, but I didn't care enough about the world or universe they were describing to try to figure it out. The writers were so wrapped up in their precious inter-textual cleverness and the epistolary form of the story that there was, as Gertrude Stein said, no there there. 

I'm not a Goodreads member, but I do check it once in a while. This book had the most divergent reviews I think I've ever seen. It has many five-star reviews, but there are also a substantial number of one-star reviews, often with dozens and dozens of comments in agreement. 

The fact that this story won those three awards makes me doubt the judgment of the people who award them.

Copaganda

Not too long ago, I finished reading Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our Media by Alec Karakatsanis. I saw Alec discuss the book at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, and got a signed copy.

It's a short, intense read. I've followed him on social media for a while, so there was a lot that was familiar. Here are some of the things I knew somewhat, or maybe not enough:

• The U.S. confines people at six times "its own historical averages" and five to 10 times the rate of comparable countries. We confine Black people six times as much as South Africa did during Apartheid (p. 6).
• Our incarceration rate decreases U.S. life expectancy rates by two years.
• Copaganda, he says, operates by narrowing the threat and manufacturing a vague state of fear of the other. Narrowing the threat includes this: Police commit 1/3 of stranger homicides, but you don't hear that. Another example: "...federal prosecutors charged 23 people with environmental offenses in 2020, and they charged more than than 23,000 people with drug offenses" p. 20. Wage theft: The total estimated is more "than all other police-reported property crime combined." Tax evasion: 1,672 times the "value of all U.S. robberies combined." The threat of "crime" as reported is small compared to these other things, but we almost never hear about them.
• Daily street crime is always seen as "new" news, but information about prison conditions or bail reform are seen as occasional "reform" stories.
• Selective crime coverage is ramped up before elections (with charts to demonstrate the rate of coverage increasing, while the number of crimes stayed flat) (pp. 27, 28). Or after Eric Adams was elected mayor in New York City, when he wanted coverage of crime. "Public safety 'news' surges when someone wants police-reported crime to be news" (p. 30). 
• He quotes Jacques Ellul on the nature of propaganda: "the curation of true anecdotes leads to false impressions" (p. 53). That phrase, "curation of true anecdotes" will come up again.
  
• The use of moral panics... terms like mugging (which is just a form of robbery) and car jacking were created as part of moral panics. "Professional-class news consumers regularly accuse any skeptic of the moral panic du jour of being an 'elitist' who is 'out of touch' with the most marginalized communities" (p. 56).
• I was shocked, I admit, at the size and growth of the big-city public relations staffs he cites. Chicago PD's PR staff in 2014 was just six (at the time when a cop killed Laquan McDonald). During the time CPD fought to keep the video of his killing out of court, etc., the number increased to 25. By 2023: 48. 2024: 55. In 2020, the LA County Sheriffs had 42 and LAPD had 25, "Some of them made more than $200,000 a year." In 2024, NYPD had 86, twice what it had in 2022. None of these staff numbers include additional consultants, let alone money spent on police swag or events. They use all these resources to create ready-for-TV content that is used to fill air time. It made me wonder how large the PR staffs are for Minneapolis and Saint Paul's departments.

Cash bail
The short section of the book on cash bail and bail reform was a particularly concentrated bit of outrage, and the main reason I wanted to write the book up here.

When you live in the U.S., it just seems normal that people have to "make bail" and that there are bail bondsmen. But this is not normal just about anywhere else in the world, and it wasn't normal in the U.S. until the past 40 years. People are innocent until proven guilty and the fact that those charged with minor crimes, especially, are held because they can't post bail is highly unusual.

In his career, Karakatsanis has been working to change this. Keeping people in jail, pre-trial, is bad for overall safety, but judges are afraid to be the ones to let people out, in case one of theirs is a defendant who does something bad and they (the judge) gets blamed. No one blames them for the people who die or are injured or raped in jail while being detained without bail, though: which is a much more likely outcome.

... if a judge releases a thousand people and they keep their jobs such that their children don't become homeless, no one will tell the public about it on the nightly news. Bad curation of anecdote leads to bad policy (p. 177).

As there was increasing clamor to end cash bail, especially for misdemeanors — after the death of Kalief Browder — Karakatsanis says there was strong pushback from police, prosecutors, and the bail industry. Why? Because prosecutors need detention to coerce guilt please quickly, and the bail industry makes money (obviously).

In Harris County, Texas (Houston), Karakatsanis's organization won a 2017 case that ended cash bail for minor offenses. Convictions (almost all from guilty pleas) dropped by 24,000 per year because "if forced to prove them, police and prosecutors can't" (p. 177). He cites a study on the years of Harris County's experience that found "the decreased number of people jailed resulted in more public safety and huge economic benefits" (p. 177), and that the same was found after similar changes in Los Angeles.

I just have to quote most of the next page:

These are among the most important facts you will ever need if you want to understand the punishment bureaucracy: the U.S. arrests so many people for so many low-level things that it could never provide adequate defense lawyers, investigation services, prosecutors, judges, or jury trials for them all even though the Constitution requires it. The Constitution wasn't designed for mass incarceration. If all people could exercise their constitutional right to a fair trial and a zealous lawyer, the assembly line would grind to a halt....

The crushing volume of cases is what the for-profit bail industry exploits. The industry didn't exist when the Constitution was drafted or in the century that followed it, and before the 1990s, release without requiring cash was more common than release requiring cash. But as court dockets became overwhelming, cash became an efficient point of leverage for bureaucrats to coerce more people to plead guilty quickly. Most of people are released with time served if they plead guilty, and are almost always charged fines and fees that police, prosecutors, and courts then collect as revenue. Thus, the system profits from its own injustice, and tens of millions of poor people are trapped in a cycle of debt collection and jailing for years.

Even on its own terms, this system has nothing to do with "safety" because most people are released immediately if they either pay money, which they don't lose even if they commit a crime, or if they agree to plead guilty and accrue debt. They are typically put on probation for additional fees, and many have their driver's license suspended for unpaid fees, incurring yet more fees. As of this writing, the licenses of 11 million people are suspended solely because of these coerced debts....

Every court to look at the evidence has made an additional empirical finding: ...cash bail does nothing to protect the community or encourage court appearance. In fact, it makes people more likely to commit crime in the future because short periods of detention destabilize people's lives—they lose shelter, jobs, and kids (p. 178–179).

He lists more things that people lose because of jailing without bail, but those three are enough to give you an idea.

When bail reform has been attempted in some places, that "curation of anecdotes" in media he describes has been furious. In New York, for instance, a 2019 reform to release people with misdemeanors was followed by waves of media cherry-picking, which led to the reform being rolled back within a few months in spring 2020.

Another example of media cherry-picking involves the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund created in Minneapolis in 2016 that saw its profile go national after the murder of George Floyd, when the Fund bailed out people arrested during protests. The Fund was heavily assailed because two of the many people they assisted went on to commit a violent crime (which the offenders had no record of when the Fund bailed them out). The Fund has since stopped providing cash bail and switched its focus to policy work to end cash bail entirely.

As Karakatsanis says, there is no consideration of the counterfactual: what about all of the people who were bailed out, or who were released without bail in New York City (or Houston, Los Angeles) and didn't lose their job, or whose families didn't end up homeless. They don't matter.

Only the few examples where a "newsworthy" crime was committed got notice.

Alec Karakatsanis signing books at Moon Palace in Minneapolis.

Mapping Your Childhood Place

I've just picked up my copy of Life After Cars, written by the "War on Cars" podcast hosts. They were also just guests on both the Volts and Why Is This Happening? podcasts, talking about the book.

One of the topics in the book and during the podcast discussions is about how kids who grow up being driven everywhere have no ability to map the place where they live. Sarah Goodyear, one of the "War on Cars" folks, wrote an article about this back in 2012 for Bloomberg News, based on the research of Bruce Appleyard. Among other things, he found that:

Children who had a “windshield perspective” from being driven everywhere weren’t able to accurately draw how the streets in their community connected, whereas children who walked or biked to get around produced detailed and highly accurate maps of their neighborhood street network.

I grew up in the countryside, five miles outside the very small village where I went to school, and two-plus miles from another, even smaller village that was in a different school district. I took the school bus to school, but otherwise was dependent on my mother for car trips to anywhere (or my oldest sister, for one year before she left for college).

I have fine-grained knowledge of the acres around our house because we lived and played outside without supervision. And I have strong roadside-scale memories of my bus route, and the roads I was driven on by car.

But it's true that I never understood the geography of the area I grew up in at all until I started driving myself, and that driving was supervised until I was almost 18 because I waited a long time to get my license.

And even after I was driving on my own there — mostly when home for the summer or breaks during college, or visits later — I still didn't have a sense of east and west, or how my town related to the county, and barely how that related to the larger area of New York state. Honestly, it's only in the last two decades that I realized where my little home village is in relation to the places around it.

My awareness of the space in my home area is completely different from the way I learned the places I moved as an adult (Washington, D.C., the Twin Cities — or even the two smaller cities I lived in as a college student). The way "home" feels in my head is fuzzy and shapeless to this day, even though I've studied maps of it since then and tried to overlay them on my awareness.

Daughter Number Three-Point-One was driven to school (mostly in carpools) until she was in 9th grade. After that point, she made the transition to riding our local bus system, Metro Transit, to school and it was a big win for her both in terms of knowing her city and becoming an independent person. She also walked or rode her bike in our immediate neighborhood in earlier childhood, though she didn't have the all-day, free-ranging outside play that I did, living in the country.

Though I wasn't aware of any of this when she was a child, I hope her experience made a difference in how her place-awareness developed.

These Things Are Not Related

Seen at my favorite bookstore:

These two books were being sold side-by-side. They are not related, nor are the covers made by the same illustrator or designer.  

It's odd that they don't have anything specific in common: the typefaces are very different, and the color schemes. But the overall appearance screams "we are the same" despite those differences. 

The illustration style is, clearly, almost identical: you could just about pick up the man or woman from one cover and drop them onto the other cover in a different pose. And the fragmented patterning in the background is in the same ballpark, each with its bright solid colors. 

The funniest thing is the tiny words "A NOVEL" in the lower right corner of the left book cover. As if we might think it was nonfiction!

Escapism and Not Escapism

I know I've had a lot of posts lately that are angry or may even seem despairing about our current situation. 

Not coincidentally, I've been spending much of my time either gardening (when it's not too hot) and immersing myself in books and media that take place in the 19th and early 20th century... probably as a way to get away from all that.

I didn't do it on purpose, but it began because I started watching The Gilded Age (on HBO), and then it occurred to me that the character of Gladys — who is sent off to marry an English duke in about 1885 — is about the same age as Cora, the American heiress mother character in Downtown Abbey, who married the Earl of Grantham in 1890. 

So then I thought, I'll rewatch the first few episodes of Downton Abbey, what could it hurt? Well, I just finished rewatching all six seasons and the two movies. And the third season of The Gilded Age ended on August 10 as well.

As far as books go, I'm reading The Fair Botanists, which takes place in Edinburgh in 1822. It has enough in common with the social setting of the two television shows that it feels of a piece.

But never fear, there is contrast in my media diet. At almost the same time we've just rewatched all of Andor seasons 1 and 2, then Rogue One. Even if you're not into Star Wars (and I'm really not!), and you haven't seen these, they're worth it as commentary on our current dire predicament.

Unlike the escapism offered by The Gilded Age, Downton Abbey, and The Fair Botanists.

Time to Read Bowling Alone

There was an op-ed in the Star Tribune today about the loneliness epidemic in the U.S. The writer was less alarmist than most, in the sense that he traced it back many decades instead of blaming it on recent factors. Serious but not alarmist, I would say.

One thing he reminded me of is that I've never read Robert Putnam's classic book Bowling Alone (published in 2000), and he provided a neat summary of the main factors Putnam identified as causing the decrease in social connection and networks. As listed in order by the op-ed writer, they are:

• more women going into the workforce
• people moving more
• economic and time pressures
• suburbanization 
• "technology ‘individualizing’ people’s leisure time"

Putnam, he said, put the most emphasis on the last factor, and of course that has only accelerated since he wrote the book. 

I don't know how Putnam wrote about the effect of suburbanization, but I would bet it had to do with the distance of houses from each other, the loss of front porches, and that sort of thing. I wonder how much he talked about the effect of having to drive everywhere to get anywhere or anything, and what is now called motornomativity. Cars are a technology that has literally driven individualization at the same time as media technology.

It's probably time for me to read the book. I thought it was older than it is: it came out not long after I left grad school, when Daughter Number Three-Point-One was pretty young. As we like to say, we were busy then. Less of an excuse now.

Looking for Hautman, Finding Henty

Family reunions often bring me into the middle of Wisconsin, and I like to check out the public library in the nearby towns. Often they're Carnegie buildings.

The one in Mauston (about 20 miles northwest of Wisconsin Dells) is not a Carnegie. It opened in 2000, and from the looks and location of the building, I would say it's on or near the site of the town's former passenger rail station. It's a beautiful building that's being well maintained.

While I was checking out the Young Adult collection to see which Pete Hautman books they had, I noticed a whole row of books by an author I had never heard of: G.A. Henty.

G.A. Henty? Clearly, they're older books from the look of the faded printing and the design, and historical fiction from the titles. Probably an English author. I read the descriptions on the back of a few and got a sense that the stories follow a teen character at some pivotal historic point (a battle or key change in royal or colonial history). 

There was also one book about American history... guess whose point of view it chose:

That was enough to tip me off that this was not a writer like Rosemary Sutcliff we were talking about. Henty's Wikipedia page filled me in.

He lived from about 1830 to 1900, and wrote scads of historical adventure novels for boys. One source on Wikipedia says he was the most popular boys' author of the time. 

Beyond being a supporter of the British empire, he was extremely anti-Black (as shown by extensive evidence in his quotes on his Wikipedia page). It's also seen in his choice to cover the American Civil War by writing about Robert E. Lee's greatness.

Check out the depiction of the Black man on the cover:

And at the book's end, the main character's family's former enslaved people return and continue working for their former owners! This is a quote: they discovered "freedom so suddenly given was a curse rather than a blessing to them." 

The book was originally published in 1890, just after the Dunning School of Civil War "Lost Cause" revisionism had taken hold.

I checked the St. Paul Public Libraries' online catalog and they don't hold any of Henty's books — possibly because of their content, or possibly because no one checked them out and the librarians deaccessioned the books based on lack of use, as they do many other (better!) books.

The scary thing about these out-of-date, racist books is that they are popular withh and overtly promoted to Christian home-schoolers (parents). 

From what I could see around Mauston, there are probably a lot of evangelical Christians. So the presence of the books in the library is most likely not a coincidence.

Stealing Tea

I almost poo-pooed reading Sarah Rose's book For All the Tea in China because I thought I knew the general story of how England sent a man to steal tea from China. As I had heard or read about it, he dressed like he was Chinese but pretended he was from another part of the country where they spoke a different dialect in order to explain his lack of language proficiency.

I'm glad I got past my assumed knowledge and read the borrowed copy someone pressed on me. 

There's so much to it that I didn't know, including that "the man" was Robert Fortune, whose last name is part of the botanical name of any plant whose species is fortunei. Those are generally other plants he brought back on his plant-hunting trips in China: part of his (underpaid) compensation was the right to propagate and sell any plants, other than tea, that he found.

I also didn't realize he did his work on behalf of the British East India Company (of course!), rather than Britain itself, and that the company's desire to steal tea was tied up in its imbalance of trade with China. And opium was a major part of it all, of course. 

Britain/the East India Company grew opium in the Asian subcontinent and more or less forced it onto China so that Britain could buy the huge quantities of tea the British public had come to demand. And China had an agricultural and cultural monopoly on tea, which originated in its cool, misty inland mountains, far from the trading ports British ships were allowed to access.

The book gives great detail of who Fortune was, including the class difference that likely motivated him, and of his travels in China to gather tea plants and seeds, employing various Chinese "coolies" and furthering horticulture with innovations like glass Ward boxes and ways of transporting live seeds by ship. 

It makes for interesting reading, of course, but there are several sections as the book draws to a close that earn its subtitle, "How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History."

It's important to realize that the East India Company wanted to grow tea in the Himalayan mountains of India, thinking that that area's climate and geography were comparable to the part of China where tea is native. Darjeeling will sound familiar because they were correct. The company had had a monopoly on selling tea (among other things) in the West for hundreds of years by the time they sent Fortune to China, but the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution were threatening. 

First came the loss of their monopoly charter in China in 1834, and then the First Opium War (1839–1842), which resulted in a treaty that gave all British traders greater access to Chinese markets. So the East India Company had greatly decreased advantages in the market, and they wanted to change things to give them "home field advantage" in company-controlled India.

While Fortune was successful in stealing tea and the company got the plants going in the Himalayas, things didn't turn out as the company planned.

Some of the things Rose wrote that made me stop and take special note:

Drugs such as opium and tea were the first mass-produced, mass market global commodities; everything and everyone these "stimulants" touched, from the producers to distributors to customers, was altered in their wake. The global drug trade, which England and China were deeply enmeshed, produced new leaders, new governments, new companies, new farming practices, as well as new colonies, new modes of capital accumulation, and new modes of transport and communication (page 177).

Both opium and tea were light products that brought in high prices and took up little room in ships. This comes into play in interesting ways, especially the fact that too many light products required something heavy to also be loaded on the ship to provide ballast. What did the Chinese make that was heavy that could also be sold? Hmm... how about some of that blue and white porcelain? Not only was it heavy, it could make layers of padding between the tea crates and be at the bottom of the hull, since it didn't matter if it got wet. And there was this additional, extra-interesting fact:

Tea's growing consumer base encouraged the development the porcelain industry in Britain... Prior to the eighteenth century, no European factories could make a ceramic teacup capable of holding boiling water.

European clay could not meet the service demands of tea the way Chinese clay could, for in Europe clay lacked the essential ingredient of kaolin (page 232).

Chinese porcelain was fired at a higher temperature than European stoneware. Porcelain was light, sturdy and non-porous, compared to stoneware. The British figured out how to make porcelain around 1750 and used early mechanization to speed the process up. Josiah Wedgewood, I learned, was the grandfather of Charles Darwin.

One of the things the East India Company needed, in addition to tea plants, was knowledge of how to harvest and process tea leaves into particular kinds of tea. Before or while Fortune was in China, they had recruited a set of Chinese men to work in the Himalayas, and at one point decided to split them up singly to different tea plantations, rather than have the all work at the same plantation. The workers were opposed to this, and also tried to organize for higher wages. Eventually, the botanist in charge of the men relents and agrees to higher pay and to keep them at least in pairs. The botanist's boss, however, chastised him for that decision, which Rose describes as:

[he was] displeased with the idea that stealing secrets from a sovereign nation also meant overpaying the Chinese minions who implemented them. In fact, the tea manufacturers' wages were never so high as to be unduly burdensome to the company. The objection to their demand was more a matter of principle in that the Chinese were paid higher-than-market wages, which offended the British sense of fair play (even as the company remained unperturbed by the fact that the British in India were paid substantially better than the Chinese) (page 203).

This attitude is, of course, consistent with the general British disdain for the Chinese as lesser beings.

The last big thing I learned from Rose's telling is what led to the demise of the British East India Company. I think I had heard/read something about this before, but not in such detail and I don't think it was in school.

In the mid-1850s the British army began replacing the single-shot Brown Bess muskets used by its soldiers with Enfield rifles, which were accurate at 10 times the range. However, they needed to be loaded with greased paper cartridges that the soldier had to bite open (hence the term, "bite the bullet) and the cheap grease the British army chose to use was a combination of beef tallow and pork lard.

If you give it half a second you'll realize the problem with asking Indian (Hindu or Muslim) troops to put their mouths on that kind of fat, but the brilliant British leaders who had been working in India for hundreds of years didn't care about it, or didn't realize.

As soldiers were exposed to the new cartridges, rumors began to spread. It was said that the Enfield rifle was part of a mass plan on the part of the company to convert Indian troops to Christianity by rendering them impure, and this forcing them to give up their caste status.... Throughout the winter and spring of 1857 news of the tainted cartridges spread.

On May 9 sepoys of the Third Bengal Light Cavalry flatly refused the order to bring the cartridges to their mouths and load their weapons. The rebels were court-martialed on the spot and sentenced to the unusually severe punishment of ten years' imprisonment under hard labor.... That night several other sepoy regiments...broke ranks and turned on their officers. The sepoys liberated the eighty-five rebels from jail, hailing them as heroes to their race. Then they burned the company's bungalow and offices. Every European was massacred on sight.

The cavalry retreated to Delhi, and for the next six months India would catch fire.

The P53 Enfield Rifle ignited a holocaust of murder, siege, brutality, and repression; women and children, Indian and British, were butchered, cities were sacked, and civilians were murdered by soldiers. The British refer to the summer of 1857 as the Indian Mutiny; Pakistanis and Indians refer to it as the First War for Independence (pages 222–223).

The company lost its charter and was nationalized the following year.

The book is a compact 245 pages, very readable, and in addition to all of this, gives a vision of mid-19th century China. After finishing it, I went back and reread Gene Luen Yang's paired graphic novels Boxers and Saints, about the Boxer Rebellion. My Chinese history is extremely lacking, but there are some things I can do to make up for it.

Surrounded by Books

A friend of a friend who's a studio photographer created this frame made out of books for a short-term project:

My photo doesn't do it justice. When taking a real photo with it, you would go in closer to hide the raw wood, and a person would be in the opening, of course. (But it's kind of cool to pull back the curtain and see what it looks like in reality, too.)

The photographer is planning to take it apart when he's done with it since it's unwieldy and can't be stored the way his usual props and backdrops can. 

I think it's a shame and it seems likely a library would love to have it as a selfie frame. Doesn't that seem like a good possibility?

Flowers from Afar

I recently read Amy Stewart's 2008 book Flower Confidential, about how things work in the commercial cut flower business. I can see why it was a bestseller at the time: Even for people who aren't interested in horticulture, it's full of historical and cultural details that come from many directions, and it's also a business book since flowers are a big business.

One thing I already knew, but which I learned a lot more about, is that most of the cut flowers we have access to through florists in the U.S. come from South America — where Stewart details some of the working conditions — and are flown here on planes daily. I didn't know that most of the harvest comes through Miami.

I'm not surprised that the roses (think of all those Valentine's Day blossoms) are dunked in fungicides right before shipping. So romantic!

A few of the more askew facts I learned from the book:

• Italian immigrants in the U.S. didn't have access to working capital, so they started their own bank, the Bank of Italy. We know it today as Bank of America. (Relevant in the book because Italians were flower-growers, along with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrants.)
• The reason we're told to recut the stems of cut flowers is because the stems constantly attempt to pull water, and if there isn't water, even for a brief time, they pull air... and once they've pulled in air bubbles, the pathway for any future water is blocked. So a fresh cut opens up a new pathway for water to go up the stem.
• Tea roses got that name because they came from China in the same ships that carried tea leaves.  
• There's a humongous wholesale flower market outside Amsterdam, which has to be seen to be believed. Tourists trek through to watch it in operation.
  

And then there's the story of the Star Gazer lily. But I won't steal Amy's thunder on that one.

Independent Bookstore Day

 I didn't set out to go to Independent Bookstore Day, and I wasn't thorough. 

But I happened to be near Against the Current on Grand Avenue in Saint Paul last night and stopped in. I found a first edition of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried for $20, so that was cool.

Then today, after my usual Tesla Takedown morning, I thought I would make my way over to Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction bookstore (still in its "new" location) in Minneapolis.

It was very busy in there. I finally picked up copies of Nnedi Okorafor's new book Death of the Author and Ted Chiang's short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others. I've been meaning to get the Chiang book for years: it contains the story that the movie Arrival is based on. I hate to admit I'm not the biggest fan of short stories generally, but his are indescribably good.

Just around the corner from Uncle Hugo's is the general interest bookstore Moon Palace. They were swamped with customers and had worked with several other booksellers to set up popups outside their store: a book mobile, a comics seller, and a place called The Paperback Exchange. 

The area outside the store was a nice example of an urban shared space, with artwork on the ground in chalk...

And temporary paint...

Lots of people had biked and there were enough places to lock up bikes, too!

That only shows some of the bike parking.

It was a good book diversion from the usual drumbeat of doom.

A Photo of What Was Destroyed

Attentive readers may have noticed that I listed Robert Caro's The Power Broker among the books I was currently reading for most of 2024, and that was true. 

It's about 1,200 pages long, and I read it off and on until I finished it about a month ago. I was keeping ahead of the 99% Invisible podcast, which has been featuring the book periodically to run down the action of a chapter or two, and talk with a guest about the book. It was a great year and I'm glad I read it. I think my earlier encounter with the book — in a college class my freshman year — was only some of the chapters. 

One of those chapters, though, is the one called "One Mile." It tells the story of Moses's decision to build the Cross Bronx Expressway through the East Tremont neighborhood, and particularly to wipe out a series of working class apartment buildings that housed people who had formerly lived on the Lower East Side.

It's a chapter that makes the reader want to cry and scream in frustration, because the people of East Tremont figured out how to fight back, despite having no political know-how or connections. And they should have won, but like everyone who fought Moses until he finally loses power when he was nearing 80… they lost.

Today, Michael Leddy at Orange Crate Art posted a 1939–1941 tax photo of two of the buildings that Robert Moses destroyed, as well as the surrounding area. These are among the 159 buildings Moses destroyed on a whim, which housed 1,530 families. 

All so people in cars could get somewhere faster, in theory…but as soon as anything Moses built was done, it became jammed full and nothing moved, because the iron law of induced demand meant "just one more lane would fix it."

Destroying a community in the city to build the suburbs, while making the city's residents pay for it.