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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Best books, 2005: Nonfiction
"Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town" By Nate Blakeslee PublicAffairs Order from Powells.com
In 1999, the sheriff of the tiny west Texas town of Tulia arrested over 40 people, among them a good 20 percent of Tulia's black population. The charges: selling cocaine; the evidence: little more than the spotty testimony of a single undercover officer, Tom Coleman -- a man with a secret history of lying, corruption, paranoia and racism. Most were convicted and sentenced to whopping prison terms (one man got over 300 years) as part of the get-tough policies of America's misbegotten War on Drugs. Blakeslee's book, based on his reporting for the Texas Observer magazine, is a gripping, plain-spoken and meticulous account of the campaign to expose Coleman and free Tulia's unjustly imprisoned citizens. The prejudice and hysteria the incident uncovered is countered by the unlikely band of neighbors who united to set right Coleman's wrongs -- led by an overall-clad white farmer who disconcerted the media by using the N-word while waging his indefatigable and locally unpopular crusade. "It doesn't matter what I call 'em," he said. "What matters is that they didn't get a fair trial."
"Them: A Memoir of Parents" By Francine du Plessix Gray Penguin Press Order from Powells.com
We were as impressed as everyone else by Joan Didion's memoir, "The Year of Magical Thinking," but rather than add our voice to that chorus, we invite you to savor Gray's witty, subtle and sumptuously written account of growing up in the shadow of two remarkable adults. Gray's mother, the elegant Tatiana, was a white Russian imigri who claimed descent from Genghis Kahn, a beauty who was the great, lost love of the Soviet poet Mayakovsky, a fearless protector when the family fled Paris before the advancing Nazis and a celebrated arbiter on all matters stylish in postwar New York. Her suave, dapper stepfather, Alexander Liberman, became the editorial director of the swank Condé Nast publishing empire. Together, they cut glamorous figures, but in private they often failed at parenting's most basic responsibilities. Tatiana asked a relative to tell Francine that her father had been killed in the war, and neither noticed when the little girl stopped eating. Gray's memoir hovers exquisitely between two viewpoints: the adoring but neglected daughter and the skeptical but forgiving adult. Hers is a fabulous tale, but the splendor is really in the telling.
"Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke" By Peter Guralnick Little, Brown Order from Powells.com
Brilliant, charming and defiant, Sam Cooke had a voice that could melt an iceberg and a face that lifted many a good girl's skirt. Guralnick, American popular culture's most passionate, rigorous and eloquent biographer, chronicles Cooke's life and career, from his boyhood as the son of an upright but wandering minister who inculcated his children with an indomitable self-respect, to his years as a star in the 1950s gospel circuit, to his transformation into one of the giants of '60s pop and soul. Cooke's restless, omnivorous mind made him an astute businessman -- he set up his own publishing company and record label -- and gave him an amazingly prescient ear that instantly recognized the coming impact of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Cooke was complicated; his powers of seduction were matched by his ability to walk away from anything or anyone who hampered his ambition, and he had a reckless temper, especially when confronted with the racial arrogance of Southern whites. His untimely death -- in a sordid and confused incident involving a hooker at a motel -- is just one of the many delicate aspects of Cooke's story that Guralnick handles with the grace and consideration that his subject so richly deserves.
"1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" By Charles C. Mann Knopf Order from Powells.com
If, like most people outside the fields of archaeology and anthropology, you're under the impression that before the arrival of Europeans, the Americas were sparsely populated continents inhabited by people who lived in small nomadic communities that barely affected the natural environment, guess again. Mann's account of pre-Colombian life ranges far and wide, from South American cities that were more populous than their European counterparts to North American rivers lined with wall-to-wall agricultural settlements. A series of discoveries have led scientists to conclude that humankind first reached the Americas far earlier than we once thought and that sophisticated civilizations flourished in the South before the Egyptians built the pyramids; some have only recently been discovered using aerial photography and have yet to be excavated. Particularly intriguing is the opportunity to see early contacts from the Indians' perspective; European colonists struck North American natives as stunted, appallingly hairy and disgustingly unwashed. Europe, they reasonably concluded, couldn't be any great shakes if all these people were so keen to leave it. Mann also reveals that behind the "good Indian/bad Indian" stories told by the colonists (remember Thanksgiving's Squanto?) lay individuals scheming to embroil the Europeans in the intricate politic rivalries among Indian nations. To judge from this fascinating survey, the New World is being discovered all over again.
"The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq" By George Packer Farrar, Straus & Giroux Order from Powells.com
In today's inflamed and polarized political atmosphere, it would seem impossible for any journalist to produce a measured, thoughtful and self-examining account of that hottest of buttons, the Iraq war -- but Packer has done just that. A political liberal covering the war for the New Yorker, Packer initially supported the invasion as a way to rid the world of a bloody dictator but later came to view it as a wasted opportunity. Because ideology has played such a decisive role in this war, Packer's book is particularly valuable for its lucid and judicious analysis of the intellectuals and politicians who cobbled together the rationale behind it; there's forest here as well as trees. It was a strange brew of idealism, self-interest and ambition that brought U.S. troops to Iraq's shores in 2003 -- the product of a profound realignment of America's political ecology. But this is not just a wonk's-eye view of the conflict; Packer also reports on the war and occupation as endured by inexperienced soldiers, frustrated reformers, the worried and grieving home front and ordinary Iraqis. Obviously, the full story of the current war cannot yet be told, but anyone looking for a better, deeper, broader understanding of it right now will find it in "The Assassins' Gate."
