Spin Sisters

How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness --- and Liberalism --- to the Women of America
Myrna Blyth
Nonfiction, Media

There are a number of people who will be put off by the insertion of the word "liberalism" in the title of this book. There are also a number of people who become more interested in the contents of such a book because of what such a word implies.

Such is the power of language.

Blyth's book deals primarily with the insular nature of the world of women's magazines, and how the cycle of reinforcement means that those within that world never truly realize that there are other opinions out there. This is the kind of insularity that leads to comments about the author being invited to a party 'in spite of' the fact that she has occasionally voted for a Republican; this is also the sort of world that led to the infamous comment "I don't know how Nixon won; nobody I know voted for him," after Nixon won 49 states.

Far more important than the political leanings, however, is the drive to be first and most, which has led to extremely fuzzy journalism and an excess of "the fear factor", as Blyth puts it. In order to keep their readers hooked, a columnist can take an isolated incident or scary anecdote and telegraph it into a story about how "it could happen to you." For an example, take the story of those people who blamed vaccination for causing their children's autism. Any decent science major or statistician can tell you that correlation does not equal causation, and recent studies have shown no links between the two, but not before a large anti-vaccine movement got underway. (I think they need to do a "fear factor story" on The Tragedy of the Commons: How Someone Else's Decisions Can Affect Your Child's Health.)

More to the point, in a society where women are freer, healthier, and have more opportunities and free time than any previous generation, these stories are designed to keep women stressed and guilty - not through any ulterior motive to keep women unhappy, mind you, but through the ulterior motive of getting women's attention in a field supersaturated with similar stories. And the reason that they don't do stories in an area that is new and different is twofold: these are the stories that they are interested in, so they can't imagine being interested in something different, and tried and true is the working formula that they don't dare to change.

The book is written in an open style, with endnotes rather than footnotes so as not to break up the flow. Each chapter leads into the next with a little teaser - no doubt learned by the author as she worked for and managed various magazines. There will invariably be a bit of idealogical breakdown between who will read and who won't read this book, but if you are interested in the way that women's magazines present material, and the reasons why, for example, the race to stickdom for models is taking place in their pages, you might give it a try.

Even if you disagree with her, Blyth raises some interesting points.

****/*****

The Age of Gold

The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream
H.W. Brands
Nonfiction, History

Any California schoolchild learns about the Gold Rush in class. Marshall finds gold in the American River in Coloma at the mill he is building for Sutter, Sam Brannan publicizes the claim, and thousands of would-be millionaires make the journey to the fledgling state.

But there are a lot of things that grade school skips over. The Gold Rush not only affected California; it affected the rest of the U.S. and the world. The rush to make California a state delayed and amplified the Civil War; the hope of suddenly striking it rich superceded the dream of one day owning a farm. The gold injected into the economy fueled America's growth into an economic superpower, a title it has not relinquished in the more than a century since.

This eminently readable history from H.W. Brands goes into great detail about many things that the simplified history skips over, not the least of which is the international component of the Gold Rush. (One Australian argonaut, Edward Hargraves, spent several years in California, and eventually realized that the terrain of the gold fields was identical to some he'd grown up in. He announced to everyone that he was going to find gold in Australia, was laughed at, and was, in fact, successful in finding gold and starting Australia's Gold Rush.) The international argonauts had to not only deal with the difficulties of finding gold, but the unfettered racism of the time.

California's rise to statehood took place in a very short period of time, and the mechanisms were not in place to deal with that. So the Californians created their own constitution - an anti-slavery one - that led to impassioned debate in Congress, deepening divisions that eventually led to the fracturing of the Whig party and the rise of the anti-slavery Republican party.

Any mildly interested student of history will recognize many of the names that pepper this narrative, from the somewhat wild explorer John Frémont, who became the first Republican presidential candidate (Abraham Lincoln was the second), to Mariano Vallejo (whose city still lies at the place of its founding), to William Sherman, who is not referred to by his full name - William Tecumseh Sherman - until the middle of the narrative, to Sam Clemens, more commonly known as Mark Twain, to Leland Stanford and George Hearst (father of William Randolph), names that would acquire significance in the decades following the rush.

Similarly, several places gain resonance as a result of the Gold Rush. A group of emigrants who swung too far south named Death Valley, the lowest place in the U.S. Another exploration almost reached the Grand Canyon but turned around because of a local's description of the hazards of trying to follow the river. Donner Pass had already earned its name and fateful history, yet thousands still used that route. And in the years immediately following, that distance became shorter and shorter as first stagecoaches and then trains crossed the deserts.

This is a history book for those who find history boring. The book itself, while rather daunting, is broken into accessible chunks, and adequately makes its argument that the California Gold Rush changed everything.

*****/*****

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman

Adventures of a Curious Character
Richard Feynman
Memoir

This book consists of a number of talks, both in public and in private, given by the physicist Feynman. As such, it tends to jump around in time, but it retains a more complete sense of theme than if this had been written down in chronological format. The various chapters deal with his love of solving problems and for getting into trouble - usually because he wasn't content to accept conventional wisdom.

There was his time at Los Alamos, working on the atom bomb while his wife was dying of tuberculosis, where they passed letters back and forth with an eye toward delilberately annoying the censors. There were his safecracking efforts at the same time as he tried to show how ineffectual security at the plant truly was. There was the time he was an exchange professor down in Brazil, and how he determined that there was no real learning going on at the university, only rote memorization. (And because he wasn't afraid to stand up and say so, he might very well have effected a change in the whole system!) There were his adventures in bars, samba bands, and fraternities, and his meetings with prominent physicists and even the 'down side to the Nobel prize.'

You don't need to know anything about physics to appreciate this book. You only need to have the love of a great story, and the knowledge that a smart mouth can get you into (and out of) all manner of trouble.

Go buy it already!

*****/*****

On the Way Home

The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Memoir, Children's

Unlike her Little House on the Prairie books, On the Way Home is a copy of the diary that Laura Ingalls Wilder kept during their journey from the Dakota Territory to Missouri. There is a short frame provided by her daughter, Rose, but other than that this is unedited. It is interesting for two reasons: Laura was a farmer's daughter, and this shows in her extensive descriptions of the crops she sees along the way, and there are some delightfully snarky comments here and there. ("There were a number of children and pigs. One could scarcely tell them apart.")

Rose Wilder Lane's comments at the beginning and the end provide some much-needed context for the diary. There had been drought on the prairies for seven years. There were "panics" - what we would call recessions and depressions, complete with bank failures that happened in the days before federally guaranteed funds. There were mobs of people commandeering railroad cars, with the result that railroad shipping and traveling were unpredictable. And lots of people were scrambling to move somewhere - anywhere - where they could make a living.

When they lost the farm, Laura sewed to make money, and Almanzo took odd jobs. When they got a hundred dollars together, they hid the bill in Laura's writing desk and took the wagon to Missouri. (During the trip, the bill slipped into a crack, which is an incident Rose records because Laura hated to think of the terror they felt when they couldn't find it.) Laura's observations are more in the line of primary source documents than a story, but it is worth a look if you are interested in the time period or in Laura's life after the Little House books.

***/*****

The Custom of the Sea

A Shocking True Tale of Shipwreck, Murder, and the Last Taboo
Neil Hanson
Nonfiction, History, Nautical

In 1884, yacht captain Tom Dudley was hired to sail a newly-purchased (but not new) yacht from England to Australia. His route was planned to travel to the west of Africa, round the cape, and sail east to Australia. But he, and the three crew he had hired for the journey, never made it that far. A nasty tropical storm and freak waves sank the yacht and the four endured three weeks in an open rowboat without provisions. Then the "custom of the sea" was invoked.

You're familiar with this custom. It is prevalent enough that, even today, it can be used in a Far Side cartoon and be understood. (Apparently Mr. Larson is vigilant about protecting his copyright; therefore I'll just have to remind you that it involves a groups of sailors - and a dog - looking over at the guy who drew the short straw.) It is, simply, this: When at sea, and for survival, groups can choose by lots who is to die to provide the others with nourishment so that some may survive.

Richard Parker, the seventeen-year-old cabin boy, had been drinking seawater and was delerious and near death. The captain proposed that they kill him - rather than wait for him to die - so that his blood would not congeal, as thirst was their main enemy. They did kill the young man, and survived a few days more until they were picked up. Tom Dudley did not deny his actions and reported them truthfully, knowing that he had done what was then accepted to be right. He was unaware, however, that Britain was looking for a case by which they could rule the custom of the sea illegal.

There are a number of interesting points in this book, not the least of which is that Richard Parker's elder brother, who loved him dearly, held the captain blameless for what had occurred. Likewise, most of the folk of the coastal towns considered Dudley a sort of hero for managing to survive - they blamed him only for not holding to the custom of drawing lots. However, the climate of the English courts was different; they felt that it would be better for the men to "cast the bodies into the ocean, lest they be tempted" - in other words, to die before becoming cannibals. And as you can guess, the courts held the power, and in a series of somewhat irregular trials found Dudley (and one - but not both - of his remaining crew) guilty of murder.

The subject matter is fascinating, and the author does it justice. Dudley comes across as not only reasonable, but kind - which portrait is in keeping with the contemporary material available about his personality. Because of his attitude, the point of the story is more forcefully driven home; who is not to say that, in similar circumstances, they would not behave in a similar fashion? And Dudley gets the last word when he states that the verdict would not stop the custom of the sea but only put an end to the honest reporting of its practice... because there have been instances since of people long adrift who may have had cannibalism as their only means of survival. But they aren't telling.

****.5/*****

Something From the Oven

Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America
Laura Shapiro
Nonfiction, Food Writing

If one were to believe the ad copy and the magazine articles from the 50s - not to mention The Gallery of Regrettable Food - American housewives were embracing the new (and improved!) prepackaged foods, turning to TV dinners, using cake mixes at unprecedented rates, and generally celebrating their release from the kitchen.

Well, not exactly. The average American housewife actually considered those women who used these shortcuts to be cheats, not to mention unthrifty and foolish. (Hmm. I just baked some brownies from - horrors! - a mix. Boy, they smell good.) The main reason for this is that prepackaged foods have come a long way from their humble beginnings, and sometimes they still taste metallic. Moreover, there was an overt sense that "women's dishes" were those horrible things of gelatin and whipped cream, or that tuna/mushroom soup/potato chip casserole (which I grew up with, BTW), while the serious cooking was left to men... but American palates had been raised on the bland and the processed and didn't know how to get better.

Shapiro gives an overview of everything - the early adopters of prepackaged foods, and their detractors, the icons that came into their own, and the people who pulled us out of the malaise, particularly Julia Child, a woman who didn't know how to cook but had a husband who loved good food, and so learned the process with a dedication that enabled her to teach others for decades. The whole book is full of good information and gives many reasons why, despite everything, people love to cook more than ever.

***.5/*****

The Devil Himself

The Mutiny of 1800
Dudley Pope
Nonfiction, History, Nautical

This history describes the mutiny that took the Danae, an English ship that had formerly been a French ship, but which had been captured and reconfigured, then crewed by men who were mostly "pressed" - that is to say, forcibly removed from shore or from merchant ships. Five of the primary movers in the mutiny had been grabbed from a French merchantman, but claimed to be American, though later evidence suggests that they may have been more in sympathy with the French than the English.

Certainly, the mutiny took place off the French coast and the mutineers delivered the ship into a French port, and greeted the boats in French. But then, as this book makes clear, "American" was almost a term of convenience at the time; as the country had only been around for a short while, and there were no birth certificates, it was virtually impossible to tell a Brit from an American.

The mutiny itself has none of the fire you would tend to think of in conjunction with the word "mutiny"; the mutineers, through a combination of planning and good luck, were able to take the ship without loss of life. Even the aftermath seems almost polite; the captain is swapped for French prisoners of war, there is a court martial (basically an inquest), some mutineers are caught and hanged, and the captain is assigned to the tropics where he catches a disease and dies. Nothing is lingered over and little seems to set this apart from other nautical books.

I'd say that if you are fond of the Master and Commander series, the Horatio Hornblower series, or Pope's own Ramage novels, you will probably be interested in this. However, as a reader who is not particularly interested in naval procedure, and as someone who wants to know why anyone would think that "larboard foretopmast studding sail boom" is immediately obvious as to its intent and purpose, I have to say that I found this book pretty dull.

**/*****

The Two-Income Trap

Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke
Elizabeth Warren, Amelia Warren Tyagi
Nonfiction, Sociology

Face it. When you hear the title of this book, your immediate impulse is probably one of two things: 1) You think that the reason for rising bankruptcy is that most people are going into huge credit-card debt because of luxuries, and/or 2) The authors of this book are going to advocate that one parent gives up an income to stay home with the kids - probably the mother.

But you'd be wrong on both counts. Warren and Tyagi have spent the last decade or two looking at bankruptcy statistics and, more importantly, doing in-depth interviews with bankruptcy filers, and they've come up with a surprising conclusion: Middle-class families are filing bankruptcy because they've spent all their funds on necessities, not luxuries. The deadly math behind this is simple. If something is a luxury, such as CDs or theater tickets, when bad things happen they can be dropped from the budget immediately. If it is a necessity, such as a mortgage or car payment, it comes back month after month without a letup, and the back payments accumulate as well.

And here is where the "two-income trap" of the title comes into play, because two incomes added together is not equivalent to one larger income. When there is one income, and something happens to the income provider such as injury or layoffs, the second wage earner of the household can step up to the plate while the first recovers. But if both wage earners are already earning wages, there is little the second member can do. So if both incomes are dedicated to necessities already, there is little to be cut from the budget.

Furthermore, the authors provide figures that show that a modern two-income couple has less discretionary income as a percentage than their single-income counterparts from thirty years ago. The fact that most couples nowadays have two wage earners has driven the middle class into the Red Queen's race, running furiously to stay in the same place. This is also shown in seemingly unrelated items such as housing cost - because there is a perception that schools are failing, the cost of homes in the districts of "good" schools is skyrocketing badly, so that the same floorplan in houses a few blocks apart can be priced in widely different ranges. A couple may feel pressured into an outrageous mortgage because the alternative is abandoning their kids to a substandard school.

The authors are careful to point out that these couples are not trying to "keep up with the Joneses." Most of the needs of these bankrupt couples are ones we can identify with: the need to provide for your child, the need for reliable transportation, the need to keep a clean, safe place to live. Too many couples, however, don't know that two incomes are not the same as one, and fall into the trap. One little setback is all it takes.

The solution, for the most part, is fairly simple: one income is all that should be dedicated to necessities, including bills, mortgage, and food. The second income in a relationship is the discretionary one, used for saving, or even frivolities - because frivolities, you remember, can be ruthlessly cut when the need arises. Thus the couple can escape the trap.

*****/*****

The Working Poor

Invisible in America
David K. Shipler
Nonfiction, Sociology

Shipler's book is a portrait of those folks who, for whatever reason, are working but still cannot be called anything but 'poor.' They live paycheck to paycheck, run out of food, live in bad housing or none at all, live without health or dental care, and generally live a life that we think that working should help them transcend. But there the similarities end.

Shipler documents a myriad of reasons for this borderline lifestyle. Many of his subjects blame themselves for bad choices, and their histories agree with their claims; some consider themselves unable to succeed because they have never known what success is like. Some of the people are poor due to misfortune, and some due to fiscal practices that have counselors shaking their heads. One subject chose poverty over never seeing her kids (as she would have had to work almost continuously); her involvement in their lives is vindicated by their studies at top-of-the-line colleges. Others don't know how to interact with their kids at all, and abuse is rampant.

The chapters are documentaries of various lives and show how the problem of poverty - not only fiscal, but emotional, mental, and spiritual - is not easily soluable due to its complexity. There is a noted lack of partisan sniping in the main book, something for which I am grateful, and the little that is present in the introduction and conclusion seems to be from the need to try and come up with some answer, though the book itself states that an answer is not that easy. One can sympathize with the author, though, because poverty is something we'd rather do without.

****.5/*****

Krakatoa

The Day the World Exploded
Simon Winchester
Non-fiction, Earth Science

I have to admit it. I'm a big geek when it comes to disasters. I love National Geographic specials on earthquakes, floods, and tornados, and if I got the Discovery Channel you can bet that I would be watching that too. So a book on one of the largest volcanic explosions in the history of mankind is right up my alley. (In contrast, Mt. St. Helens' explosion a little over two decades ago barely registers on the scale, and Mt. Mazama - the caldera of which forms Crater Lake in Oregon - is considered pretty decent, but not quite as big.)

So Winchester's book is the ideal non-fiction reading for my tastes. The book details the events leading up to the explosion of the island known as the forested paradise of Krakatau (he explains how the likely misspelling of the word led to the infamy of the incorrect Krakatoa), including the political climate of the Dutch colony at the time. While this may make readers impatient for the explosion and immediate aftermath, Winchester's timeline allows the reader to better understand the social aftermath of the destruction, and the consequences that have carried on through until today.

The explosion was, by any standards, horrifying in its death toll; the tsunami caused by the collapse of the smoking island had bodies washing ashore thousands of miles away. The sound from the explosion was heard almost three thousand miles away, making it the loudest unaided sound ever heard. (For comparison, this would be the same as if someone in Washington, D.C., had heard the explosion of Mt. St. Helens - a sound that people were surprised to have heard two or three hundred miles from its source.) And the plume from the volcano induced a drop in global temperature that persisted for two years.

But more than anything else, the fifth biggest explosion in global history (that we can measure from geological studies) gains its infamy from the technology that had only been introduced: the telegraph. News of the explosion and its aftermath traveled around the globe while those effects were still being felt. Another new technology, the barograph (an ancestor of the seismograph), introduced for the first time the ability to track seismic events from other parts of the world, and the pattern of such effects.

And most of all, the author is quick to point out, one must remember this: a still-active Krakatoa is growing, and may one day explode again.

*****/*****

The Island at the Center of the World

The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America
Russell Shorto
Non-fiction, American History

The prologue to this book states that most Americans think of the early Dutch colony of Manhattan as less than a footnote, a collection of unmotivated layabouts who did little or nothing until the English took them over. (I would argue that most Americans think little of pre-Revolutionary history at all, with the Pilgrims, Jamestown, and the Salem witch-trials alone rising out of the fog of ignorance.) This view is commonplace for two reasons: the English of the seventeenth century were largely at war with the Dutch, and would not like to give props of any kind to a defeated enemy, and the grand majority of records surrounding the Dutch colony were either lost (thrown out, in one famous instance of house-cleaning) or languished untranslated.

The lack of records has only recently been addressed, with one man, Charles Gehring, spending the last thirty years translating a huge number of records that have somehow managed to largely survive fires, mold, bad storage, and moves between continents. (One can only hope that someone is making facsimilies as well; two previous partial translations perished to fire, though one was so bad that its loss is probably a mercy.) It is on these records that Shorto bases his narrative and shows that, far from being a wasted effort, the Dutch colony laid foundations for much of what this country has become, including its religious tolerance, its upwardly mobile character, and its district attorneys.

Shorto traces the history of the colony from its discovery by Dutch-hired English explorer Hudson, to its settlement by the West India company (responsible for the historian-reviled housecleaning mentioned above), to the mismanagement by various company officials (and the development of the idea of an independent government because of them), to the final surrender to the English - by the will of the people, and contrary to the will of its governor. (The colony would go on to change hands again a number of times, something glossed over in standard histories.) The book touches on the few bits of history that somehow survived, including the infamous purchase of Manhattan for "twenty-four dollars' worth of household goods," a nineteenth-century historian's attempt to translated the amount into modern terms. (Two things are pointed out about that: the first is that the value of sixty guilders is much higher in today's terms, and the second that the Indians didn't just pack up and move away after the sale, but hung around, hunted, fished, farmed, and expected further presents and entertainment for up to fifty people at a time for decades after. As the author points out, the Indians of the area were not poor, simple, savages, but were a lot sharper than many histories give them credit for.)

Shorto makes a persuasive argument using material that has been largely unavailable before now. And as he points out, since its discovery, possession of Manhattan has been critical in world affairs. It was true in the seventeenth century, and it is true today.

****/*****

(Please note that this book will not be published until mid-March.)

Devil In the White City

Murder, Madness and Mayhem at the Fair that Changed America
by Erik Larson
Non-fiction, American history

The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 is not something that your typical 21st-century reader cares much about, or is even aware existed. However, the legacy of that fair is still with us today, from the carnival legacy (the midway, the Ferris wheel (the original of which was a behemoth, with cars that held 50 people at a time), and the exotica such as belly dance) to the Neoclassical revival (from an arbitrary decision to paint everything white to stop arguments about the colors) to the simple everyday things (such as zippers, AC current, and Shredded Wheat.) Larson's book gives a thorough breakdown of the process of acquiring and implementing the World's Fair in an incredibly short span of time, and the difficulties that had to be overcome in order to have not only a world-class fair, but to make such a fair better than all the previous ones and prove to the world that America was not longer a cultural backwater.

The designers had to overcome incredible difficulties, not limited to the architectural difficulties of building on Chicago's unstable ground. Committees did what committees do, which is take valuable time to come to decisions, labor strikes and lack of funds threatened the project, and critical people dropped dead or fell ill. And yet the overall effect came through, and the Fair came to be known as the White City, a vision of what the future could be.

Enter the Devil. Of course, nobody knew him at the time; the charming young doctor who called himself H.H. Holmes was personable and extremely convincing. He managed to build a city-block sized hotel almost entirely on credit, and directed its construction in such a manner that nobody truly knew what its purpose was.

It was only after the Fair when its use became clear. The hotel was a chamber of horrors, and dozens if not hundreds of women had met their deaths within its walls. H.H. Holmes was what would later be called a serial killer, and he used his charm to lure girls to lodge with him-- specifically, girls who had left their rural homes for the first time in their lives to come to Chicago's White City. Larson's account of Holmes is interwoven with the difficulties of the Fair, and the two stories drive home the fact that sometimes, decisions have unexpected consequences.

****.5/*****

More about the Chicago World's Fair
More about H.H. Holmes