I joke sometimes that my new life goal is to become a shut-in. I’m not serious. Entirely. But when I read about the controversies surrounding solitary confinement, I can’t help thinking that if my cell included a good reading light and an endless supply of books, it might not be that bad.
I am an introvert. Politics was a strange career choice; writing is the perfect one. And I believe it is time for my people to rise up, come out of our closets (literally) and speak up for ourselves. Loud and proud. I imagine a mass rally of introverts in which we all come together and avoid conversation.
Eric Tadsen
Speaking up for the soft-spoken is what Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking is about. It’s a particularly interesting topic in an era when uber extrovert Donald Trump is giving the other side a particularly bad name.
Still, as much as I was interested in the subject, Quiet doesn’t make my list of books I’d recommend. A lot of books like it don’t make the cut because they seem to me like topics with enough juice for a good long article in The New Yorker, but not enough for an entire book. Cain seems to be padding her work by doing things like describing the surroundings of people she interviewed. I was enthralled by the first few chapters and then started to lose interest as she seemed to reach harder and harder to make a word count set by her publisher. Get the free sample on your e-reader. It’s all you need.
The best books leave you feeling like they ended too soon, before you had every question answered. They leave you wanting to read more. So, here are nine books I recommend reading from cover to cover.
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books, 2014)
Death and taxes may be the only two certainties in life, but we tend to acknowledge the latter, if grudgingly, while we live mostly in denial of the former. Physician Atul Gawande leads us on several journeys toward the end of life — including that of his own physician-father — and it’s not pretty. He explains how our refusal to confront the odds of beating usually terminal diseases like cancer can lead to horrible and expensively long, slow declines toward the inevitable. He explains how his own profession is wholly unequipped to even talk about, much less actually manage, the end of life.
This may be the most important book of the year as baby boomers start to come to grips with our own mortality. Are we going to bankrupt the system by clinging to every last moment no matter how low its quality for us and those we love, or are we going to find better, happier, healthier and less taxing ways to go out? This book will help you sort out and think through what you want from life and from death.
Being Nixon: A Man Divided
Evan Thomas (Random House, 2015)
This year we could better understand not only what it’s like to be mortal but also what it must have been like to be Richard Nixon. Sometimes even paranoids are right that there are people who are out to get them. Evan Thomas’ biography of the only American president to resign is more kind and more balanced than most takes on Tricky Dick. Thomas is unsparing in his reporting on Nixon’s vast dark side, but he tries to understand and explain how that darkness developed. Nixon nurtured a deep-seated feeling of resentment toward East Coast political elites who sought out his every failing while ignoring the transgressions of those in their own circle.
The biggest example is the 1960 presidential election, which was undeniably stolen by the Kennedys. Urged by some of his partisans to carry the fight to the courts, Nixon instead fell on his sword for the good of the country. Yet, JFK is a martyred hero while Nixon is a reviled criminal for covering up what was, in fact, a two-bit burglary. That doesn’t excuse Nixon’s crimes, but it does add an important layer of understanding to one of the nation’s most potent political figures. The story resonates today because it is a broader resentment of affluent liberal elites, especially in the media, that is driving the 2016 Republican nominating process.
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945
Nicholas Stargardt (Basic Books, 2015)
Having reason to resent elites is not the same as having justification for genocide. Another sobering yet topical book, The German War, tells the story of World War II from both the perspective of the German homefront and the German soldier. Historian Nicholas Stargardt uses diaries, personal correspondence back home from soldiers behind the front lines and interviews with a few remaining survivors to tell the story. What’s chilling about it is how German attitudes of the time are echoed in the fascist rhetoric of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Much of this book is hard to read because of its depiction of cruelty on a scale that is almost beyond comprehension. It’s the smaller stories that struck me harder. Like the young woman in Berlin who in 1942 gives up her seat on a trolley to an older Jewish woman with swollen feet. Stargardt reports that just a year earlier this kind of small act of kindness would have gone unnoticed. But by 1942 common German attitudes had so hardened that both the elderly Jewish woman and the kind young woman were hounded off the tram.
This book is important because it puts to rest any remaining vestiges of the idea that the Holocaust was all about one evil man or even one political party. The seeds of genocide were in the German soil, and the Nazis just made them grow. Like Philip Roth’s revisionist novel, The Plot Against America, Stargardt’s work brings to mind how contaminated any nation’s soil — even ours — can really be.
All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid
Matt Bai (Vintage, 2015)
One of the best political reporters of our time, Matt Bai, covers an important moment in the history of journalism. The 1988 presidential campaign of liberal U.S. Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado marked a dramatic time when journalism changed from a cozy insider, but somewhat serious and dignified, business to tabloid sensationalism.
Hart was among the smartest and most serious men ever to run for president. He could “see around corners,” as Bai describes him, understanding, for example, long before anyone else, the nature of conflict moving from wars against states to complicated fights against diverse and shifting groups of stateless terrorists. Hart was brought down by an affair that might never have even been consummated.
Bai’s book hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves possibly because he’s committed good journalism. He leaves the reader wondering if it was entirely unfair or wrong for Hart to be brought down by the scandal even while he clearly lays out the decline in journalistic standards that was behind the story. Was it better for the press to look the other way when it came to the personal foibles of our national leaders, and put the focus on substantive policy matters, or does character matter more than policy white papers? And was this a question of character that had anything to do with doing the job of president, or was it just a prurient story that sold some newspapers? A book that more forcefully came down on one side or the other probably would have sold better, but good journalists explore issues and respect their readers enough to let them come to their own conclusions.
Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story
David Maraniss (Simon & Schuster, 2015)
Another great journalist has written a powerful book about America’s most down and out city. David Maraniss and his wife spend their summers in a little house off of Monroe Street, where he does some of his writing. An editor for the Washington Post, Maraniss has written deeply insightful biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi and Roberto Clemente.
In this book he employs a technique he used to great effect in They Marched Into Sunlight, his book about Vietnam and the anti-war protests. Maraniss has figured out how to make a massive topic like Vietnam or Detroit digestible by reducing the story to one manageable period. In Once in a Great City he reports on a brief period in the early 1960s when it seemed Detroit was at the top of its game. The auto industry was humming, the Motown recording empire was on the rise, both John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. tried out themes in speeches there that would resonate down through history. And yet the stage had already been set for Detroit’s decline. Only a few years later both JFK and King were dead, the American auto industry was losing market share to better-positioned foreign car manufacturers, and the city exploded in riots over its unresolved racial tensions. Even the glory days of Motown became tarnished by jealousy and greed.
It takes a master storyteller to know when to stop writing. We know what came next. Maraniss gives us that poignant moment just before darkness fell.
Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football
Gilbert Gaul (Viking, 2015)
While UW-Madison athletics is barely mentioned in this book, it’s important to our city because college sports mean so much to our economy and culture. And, argues journalist Gilbert Gaul, big-time college sports is a rapidly changing industry with an uncertain future. The reason is money, especially in the 60 or so schools in the biggest five football conferences, of which the Big Ten is one.
There’s so much money in the most successful programs that athletic directors and head coaches are not only much better paid than the college presidents they report to, but they have far more political clout. For example, in 2012 alone, the University of Texas football program brought in $103 million to the university, most of which went back into the athletic program. The University of Texas spends about $261,000 on facilities, coaches and tutors for each of its football players, compared to just $21,000 for the average student. Football also supports the other non-revenue-producing sports, but Gaul reports that schools like Yale, which made a conscious decision not to try to compete in high-stakes college football, actually have more student-athletes overall than Texas and its powerhouse peers do.
Gaul’s meticulously researched book raises important and fundamental questions about the relationship of football programs to the schools whose logos and colors they play under and about the nature of what it means to be a “student-athlete” in an environment awash in so much money. What’s going on in the business of big-time college sports is as interesting as what’s going on on the field, if not more so. This is a story that cries out for more coverage in our local press. A college sports business beat would be just the thing.
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
Joseph Ellis (Knopf, 2015)
This is the fascinating story of the period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution during which, Joseph Ellis argues, four men made a country out of a quarreling, short-sighted, deadbeat group of colonies intent on remaining virtually separate countries. Those four are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison (the man for whom this very city is named). Ellis argues that they were master politicians, inventing reasons to call a constitutional convention, manipulating the agenda and the debate, and then conning the states into ratifying it. He contends that the story of how America came to be is not about a grassroots revolution but about a handful of very canny politicians who worked at cross-purposes to popular sentiment, which was definitely against any kind of national government.
Ellis is saying that these four men put a wonderful thing over on us. They created a national government, which was very much against the purposes of the revolution. He doesn’t say, but he could have, that today’s tea party is appropriately named because, like the tea partiers in Boston Harbor, these folks don’t just want freedom from foreign rule, they are against any national government whatsoever. The struggle to create and keep a real nation continues down to this very day, and this quartet would have nothing in common with modern-day tea partiers.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Erik Larson (Crown Publishers, 2015)
My last two books are stories of misery that are just for fun. I can find no particular relevance for today from them, but they’re both great adventure stories. The first is Dead Wake, the story of the Lusitania, the luxury liner whose sinking helped precipitate America’s entry into World War I. Erik Larson, author of the wonderful Devil in the White City, uses the same technique from that book, splicing together seemingly unrelated stories that all weave together eventually.
Larson documents life aboard the passenger liner as carefully as the classic story of the sinking of the Titanic in A Night to Remember. You can almost smell the diesel fuel as he chronicles the routines of the U-boat that hunted for targets in the North Sea until it stumbled on the Lusitania. Those subject to claustrophobia should avoid these chapters. Winston Churchill even makes an appearance, plotting in a secret room perhaps to set up the ship for its demise as a way of coaxing America into the war. These pages turn themselves.
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette
Hampton Sides (Anchor, 2015)
If the recent cold snap has you down, here’s a way to remember what it’s like to be really, really cold. Hampton Sides’ book chronicles the preparations and voyage of the USS Jeannette. That good ship and its crew set out to find the North Pole or, more accurately, the theoretical Polar Sea, in 1879.
The first part of Sides’ book covers preparations for the voyage: the ambitious newspaper publisher who financed the expedition, the eccentric professor with his theories about a warm open sea at the North Pole, the captain of the ship, an earnest and capable man. The second half tells the story of what happened when the Jeannette became encased in ice. I won’t ruin the story for you, but it’s well worth taking the adventure. I promise that for those of you who enjoy polar vortexes, this story will keep you cold at night.
