Forgive my temporary amnesia but I cannot recall what caused the heightened awareness of Latin American literature resulting in the so-called Latin American Boom of the ’60s and ’70s (both the rubric and the fact attached to it)—the conventional wisdom holding that it was the confluence of the emergence of a group of young writers and their publication by Europe’s literary presses. Looking back, I find it hard to believe Latin American literature(s) weren’t being regularly refreshed by young talent and that it took European acknowledgment to validate it. In any case, the cause of this (my) contemplation in the rearview mirror has to do with my burgeoning awareness of some recent wonderful fiction by South American writers. Call it a boom, call it a new wave, call it the next big thing, call it an alert insight by a vigilant enthusiast—here they are:

The mini, posthumous renaissance of Chilean Roberto Bolaño is a natural result of New Directions and FSG (re)publishing his works. It’s not often that “exciting” is used to describe a writer, but that adjective (and many enthusiastic others) fits Roberto Bolaño. The most recent book published, The Skating Rink (New Directions, translated by Chris Andrews), takes place in a Spanish seaside town on the Costa Brava and revolves around a beautiful figure-skating champion, Nuria Martí, and the havoc that follows when an admiring civil servant builds her a skating rink with public funds. Crimes take place, investigation seems in order, odd characters appear. Bolaño seems to be having fun and so should the reader.

Argentine writer Cesar Aira’s (How I Became a Nun) Ghosts (New Directions, translated by Chris Andrews) tells the story of a migrant Chilean family squatting in an unfinished Buenos Aires apartment house. The family’s patriarch, Raul Viñas, hosts a New Year’s Eve party in which the ghosts that inhabit the building become visible to his wife and daughter. La Patri, the daughter, becomes involved with the ghosts, putting her at great risk—the entire story spinning out as an allegory of class consciousness.

The regime of Alberto Fujimori in ’90s Peru has been exposed to have been brutal and corrupt (Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto was set in one of the more memorable episodes of the time). Peruvian novelist Santiago Roncagliolo’s first novel Red April (Pantheon, translated by Edith Grossman) is set in rural Peru, where a minor bureaucrat, Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar, presses for an official investigation regarding the discovery of a charred corpse. This sheds skeptical attention on the party line that the Shining Path revolutionaries were no longer in play. Saldívar’s naivete leads to his reassignment, where he stumbles (given his clumsiness, “stumble” is exactly the correct verb) onto more corruption. Along with the protagonist’s idiosyncrasies, which add depth to this crime story, Roncagliolo vividly portrays life under a repressive government.

Given the dramatic history of Colombia in the latter part of the 20th century, the civil unrest known as La Violencia and then the emergence of the drug cartels, I did not expect that Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Informers (Riverhead, translated by Anne McLean) would involve the slightly more distant past of WWII and home-grown Nazi sympathizers and the case of a father and son’s relationship to a Jewish emigre family fleeing the Reich in 1938. The father, a famous scholar, has refused to discuss the past even as the son writes a book about their friend Sara Guterman of that emigre family. The elder Gabriel Santoro’s declining health moves him to disturbing revelations that end up with his being denounced on national television. All of which showcase the moral ambiguities and ethical dilemmas facing the younger Santoro as he processes his father’s past and his own complicated present.

Mexican Mario Bellatin’s short allegory Beauty Salon (City Lights, translated by Kurt Hollander) is set in a salon that has been transformed into an ad-hoc hospice for the victims of an unnamed lethal plague (AIDS). Managed by a former stylist, “The Terminal” has been adapted to meet the needs of its occupants—though he does keep exotic fish as well—and as he becomes symptomatic, he notices an angelfish with a growing fungal infection that kills the other fish. Hmm, what could that represent?

The Halfway House (New Directions, translated by Anna Kushner and José Manuel Prieto) by Guillermo Rosales, a Cuban-American writer who destroyed most of his work before he committed suicide in 1993, tells of a Miami home for the mentally ill that reverberates as a latter-day One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Rosales was early diagnosed as a schizophrenic and Manuel Prieto’s preface sympathetically lays out Rosales’s fascinating personal story, putting, The Halfway House in heart-wrenching focus.

Chilean Alejandro Zambra’s novella Bonsai (Melville House, translated by Carolina De Robertis) is less than a hundred pages, and charts the ebb and flow of Julio and Emilia’s relationship—whose narrative arc somehow parallels the care and nurturing of a bonsai (tree).

Born in Uruguay and well traveled, De Robertis offers up The Invisible Mountain (Knopf), an ambitious debut novel that begins on the first day of the 20th century in a small town in Uruguay and follows the lives of three woman—Pajarita, Eva, and Salomé—through to the cataclysmic ’60s, also assembling an album of snapshots of Uruguay’s history.

Though not a work of fiction, I would be remiss if I didn’t note Harper’s magazine book guy Benjamin Moser’s universally praised Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press). Lispector (Near to the Wild at Heart, The Passion According to G.H), who died in 1977, was born in the Ukraine in 1920 and immigrated to Brazil and was immensely popular there and in the rest of the Southern Hemisphere and is credited as the author of, according to Moser, “perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century.” Moser writes of his fascination:

Outside Latin America, I found to my dismay very few people knew her, and I long wondered why. Was it because she wrote in Portuguese, a language whose literary productions were so invisible outside its own territory that it was once nicknamed “the tomb of thought”? Was it because nobody expects the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka to be a part-time beauty columnist whose Chanel suits and wraparound sunglasses made her look more like a Rio socialite than a mystic genius?

…Guillermo Arriaga, a famous Mexican novelist and screenwriter, said that you can’t read Clarice Lispector without falling in love with her.

And that is exactly what I hoped I could make happen by writing “Why This World”: to get more people, not just the literati, but everyone who cares about art and literature, to fall in love with her.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 28, 2009

Having recently noted Rebecca Solnit’s encouraging study of community responses to disasters (like Hurricane Katrina), I also availed myself of an opportunity to chat with Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), whose new book, Strength in What Remains (Random House), vividly and honestly chronicles the truly extraordinary ordeal of Deogratias, a medical student who escapes the horrors of his homeland of Burundi and lands in New York City with $200, knowing no English and knowing no one.

Through the kindness of an assortment of strangers, he leaves his sleeping place in Central Park and matriculates at Columbia University and then Harvard’s School of Public Health and becomes a United States citizen. And founds Village Health Works, an organization based on the principles he learned at Dr. Paul Farmer’s Partners in Health.

Given a prevailing miasma of cynicism, stories like Deo’s—and indeed the considerable aid directed to Farmer’s efforts—are a glimmer of rebuttal to the notion that people are rotten and selfish and, as Thomas Hobbes intoned, that the normal state of nature was “the war of all against all,” thus leading to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In On Kindness (FSG), psychiatrist Adam Phillips (Side Effects) and historian Barbara Taylor (Eve and the New Jerusalem) argue that kindness has become imperiled: “This is a historical story—about how and why people have been talked out of their kindness—but also a psychological one, a story about how vulnerability becomes traumatic to people.”

Quoting On the Genealogy of Morality by Nietzsche, who “regarded the inexorable progress of the morality of compassion which afflicted even the philosophers with its illness, as the most sinister symptom of the most sinister development of our European culture,” the authors of this slender tome assert that the morality of compassion has not made progress, and has indeed shied away from its shrewdest insights—and that this is the truly sinister symptom of modern life. Amen. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 6, 2009

If there is a blacker mark of shame on the history of American governance (the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans notwithstanding), I am open to considering it. (Local so-called riots—Tulsa, Rosewood—don’t qualify as they did not have federal government complicity.) The fact that all of America witnessed the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the debacle of the aftermath seems not to have registered in the public consciousness. The recent anniversary reminds me that there are some useful, impressive books on the tragedy of New Orleans. In addition to Tom Piazza’s excellent novel City of Refuge (which we regularly tout here at TMN), Piazza in a matter of a few months published Why New Orleans Matters (Harper), a compelling broadside arguing for the irreplaceable import of New Orleans and worrying about emotional climate in the Crescent City: “That spirit is in terrible jeopardy right now. If it dies, something precious and profound will go out of the world forever.”

Cartoonist/illustrator Josh Neufeld chose to portray seven stories of multitudes in the pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina chaos in the graphic novel A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon) and encapsulates the astonishing range of despair and glory that is to be found there. Neufeld observes:

The stories of the seven people in A.D. are quite particular and highly personal, but my hope is that they provide a window for readers who aren’t Katrina survivors into a world that few of us understand, but that we’ll be trying to make sense of for a long time to come. I also hope that readers will understand what it means that Denise, Leo, Michelle, Abbas, Darnell, Kwame, and Brobson are still rebuilding their lives and that the city they love has a long way to go, too.

Founder of QbaDisc records, music historian, and musician Ned Sublette—whose “Cowboy Rumba” is one of my favorite records (imagine a meringue version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky”)—was in New Orleans for Tulane University in 2004 and 2005, and as he writes, “We couldn’t know we were scrutinizing, day by day, the last year the city would be whole.” With The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans (Lawrence Hill), Sublette has created an aromatic bouillabaisse of history, personal testimony, memoir, analysis, and anecdote about what must be the most interesting city in the continental United States.

Amanda Boyden’s Babylon Rolling (Pantheon) is set in New Orleans in the pre-Katrina summer of 2004, and puts the five diverse voices of neighbors on an uptown street at play against each other (the Mays of Minnesota, the Guptas of India, the elderly Browns, a teenager recently off juvenile incarceration, and Philomenia Beauregard de Bruges). Of the novel author Kate Christensen opines:

Boyden has a chameleon-like ability to inhabit any persona, of any race or age, so fully and seamlessly it’s hard to remember that these people are invented rather than real. Pre-Katrina New Orleans leaps to life on every page, a beautiful, seamy, fragile city on the brink of chaos and ruin.

For his album The City That Care Forgot (429 Records), Mac Rebenak, aka Dr. John, adopts the name first coined in New Orleans city guide from the Federal Writers’ Project—though no explanation for that title exists—for his homage to his native city and the destruction and tragedy wrought by Katrina and parties known and unknown. Eric Clapton sits in. Audio here and here. The good doctor is angry and he is sad. Which is the way it is.

When Spike Lee went to New Orleans to film his documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, he encountered Phyllis Montana-Leblanc. He writes in the foreword to her book, Not Just the Levees Broke: My Story During and After Hurricane Katrina (Atria):

A documentary is only as good as its subjects For Levees we had an abundance of heroic and eloquent individuals—black, white Hispanic, male, female, young, old—who shared themselves with the world. As we made more trips down to New Orleans it became apparent to me that Phyllis had emerged as the dominant voice in the piece.

On our final trip we filmed Phyllis in her F.E.M.A. trailer where she gave me a big surprise. She asked if you could read on camera a poem she had written the night before. To be honest I have never been a fan of poetry and was not expecting much. But being cordial I said go ahead and read it. We rolled the camera and in painful and truthful words she summed up the entire four-hour documentary. Silently I thought, “Thank God. Now we have an ending.”

By the way, as Michael Grunwald wrote in the August 13, 2007, issue of Time, “The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster.” —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 24, 2009

By now if you have any interest in American history or Abraham Lincoln, you are aware that 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, and naturally there is a gush of books adding to the already voluminous Lincoln bibliography. I have already dealt with a few of these tomes earlier, knowing an update would be useful as the year wore on. Rather than wading through more Lincoln titles, I am inclined to focus on the long and the short of recent Lincoln scholarship.

Princeton mentor emeritus James M. McPherson offers a paradigm of concision with his Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press), a 96-page introductory essay with a well-annotated bibliography for the benefit of the curious and the diligent. Historian Michael Burlingame (The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln) has reportedly been working on this two-volume, 2,024-page magnum opus, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (Johns Hopkins University Press), for years, using field notes of previous scholarship, neglected newspapers, and mountain ranges of archival material.

Christopher Hitchens writes of this impressive work, “No review could do complete justice to the magnificent two-volume biography that has been so well-wrought by Michael Burlingame,” but it didn’t stop him from trying; Hitchens goes on:

“But one way of paying tribute to it is to say that it introduces the elusive idea of destiny from the very start, and one means of illustrating this is to show how the earlier chapters continually prefigure, or body forth, the more momentous events that are to be dealt with in the later ones.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 22, 2009

Naturally, my recent roundup of books on Cuba missed a couple of important contributions to that magical island nation’s bibliography. Alongside Ned Sublette’s seminal Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Cuban saxophonist-turned-historian Leonardo Acosta’s Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba (Smithsonian Books) is a fundamental (not to mention the first) history, which among other things traces the evolution of Latin or Afro-Cuban jazz through the inspiration of players like Machito, Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, and Chano Pozo. One alert reader reminded me of British historian Richard Gott’s (Guerrilla Movements in Latin America) update on Cuban history, Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press), with a chapter on Cuba during the post-Soviet “Special Period.”

The University of North Carolina Press may be an unlikely center of Cuban scholarship, but it continues to publish highly useful tomes, such as political scientist Lars Schoultz’s comprehensive analysis of the longstanding failed American policies toward our Caribbean neighbor in That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution. His organizing principle is viewing U.S.-Cuba engagement through 10 presidential administrations—one would hope the present president might take heed of America’s voluminous past mistakes and foibles. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 9, 2009

The mantle of unacknowledgement falls on many shoulders beyond the poetic brotherhood (and sisterhood): librarians, primary school teachers, booksellers, and so forth. The many small (this description apparently refers to circulation size) magazines and their preternaturally dedicated staffs existing across the U.S. and the known world are overqualified for this honorable designation.

The newly redesigned Ploughshares is one of my favorites based on its policy of having each issue guested. This recent issue was compiled by author and memoirist Kathyrn Harrison and anthologizes 20 essays, of which Harrison writes:

What connects these narratives is that they are true, and represent a struggle, a particular struggle whose value I can’t overstate. The author of each labored to put words to his or her experience. To articulate it, to speak it, to write it honestly, which requires something more than effort. Each made a commitment essential to writing about one’s own life, a promise that goes far beyond the act of writing.

Is the personal essay a narcissistic form? Not when it succeeds as art. Narcissus perished because he fell in love with his reflection. The twenty writers whose work is collected in this volume pushed past the masks all of us present to the mirror, the neighbor, the spouse. The commitment they’ve made is to report what they find under the surface of their lives no matter how disappointing, threatening, or admirable. Because our virtues are difficult to own, perhaps even more than our faults.

Open City continues to offer offbeat gems and a variety of unorthodoxies. The Summer 2009 issue by editors Thomas Beller and Johanna Yas contains fiction by Vestal McIntyre, Eva Marer, Zachary Lazar, and A.M. Homes, with nonfiction from Bryan Charles, Patricia Bosworth (on Lois Gould), and Edmund White (on Harold Brodkey), plus poetry by Billy Collins.

The venerable Paris Review contains its trademark mélange of literary nuggets, including an interview with Gay Talese on the art of nonfiction. You can also read my conversation with Gay Talese here.

A Public Space, which is a somewhat recent entry into the literary fray, publishes wonderful writing, some by familiar names like Samantha Hunt, Yiyun Li, Adrienne Rich, Matthew Zapruder, and Carl Phillips—and many more by names that will become familiar. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 26, 2009

It was not too long ago (that’s in historical time, not 24/7 time) that comics, along with blue jeans and rock and roll, were somehow considered—by anxious parents and the usual whack jobs—to be contributors to juvenile delinquency. It was just one of the great panics of the allegedly idyllic Eisenhower years (others included nuclear devastation, miscegenation, and communist conspiracies—to which we owe the slogan, “Better Dead than Red”—and so forth). By the ’60s, parents and other authorities had other worries and so-called comics, in the nimble hands of Jules Feiffer, Robert Crumb, Edward Gorey, Gahan Wilson, and a host of others, took on a more socially relevant turn. With Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus, illustrated narratives were finally legitimized—leading to the designation “graphic novel.”

In recent months, A People’s History of American Empire and Waltz With Bashir have continued to add gravitas to the illustrated text. Now comes Nelson Mandela: The Authorized Comic Book by the Nelson Mandela Foundation, illustrated by Umlando Wezithombe (W.W. Norton). This comic (and biography) of Mandela’s life adds to his published memoir Long Road to Freedom, with newly recovered archival information and fresh interviews.

Paul Buhle, Brown University mentor, who guided the graphization of Howard Zinn’s seminal work, teams with Harvey Pekar (American Splendor) on Studs Terkel’s Working: A Graphic Adaptation (New Press) to adapt Studs Terkel’s celebrated documentation of the American worker’s ethos.

French graphic novelist Emmanuel Guibert brings us The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders (First Second), which presents a humanitarian mission to 1980s Afghanistan through the reportage of the late Didier Lefèvre, a revered war correspondent and winner of all manner of international awards. It has well-known book critic and U.N.H.C.R. Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie extolling:

“An unflinching and gripping photographic memoir, The Photographer takes you on a breathtaking journey through the best and worst humanity has to offer in times of war. Turning its pages, the reader begins to understand what it means to lose everything as a refugee of war, to cross mountains to help someone you never met, to feel the intense responsibility of being the only one able to capture the last moments of a child’s stolen life. Suddenly Afghanistan, a distant land, a foreign culture, a courageous and resilient people seem closer, more familiar—more human. I love this book.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 21, 2009

Before you are deluged with the press release parroting of what I hope are well-meaning literary journalists rushing to present you with the lists of forthcoming books for the fall season (as if you have come close to reading much of the last season’s list), let me offer a list of my own creation. Though it must be said—and I will say it—that book lists seem to me to only be useful for course or seminar preparation. Don’t you think?

A familiar aria amongst us reader/writer types is the anguished hand-wringing that accompanies intoning the cruelty and myopia of the rest of the barbarous world in failing to recognize the brilliance of that which we (meaning I) deem to be genius. I am not immune to such pedestrian foibles—and so, here’s my list of wonders. The only thing that they have in common (besides me) is that they were all read in this century.

The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux: Louisiana native Gautreaux throws all of best things (you know what they are) into this period piece set in a timber/lumber mill camp circa the mid ’20s—naturally, in west Louisiana.

One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash: South Carolinian poet Rash gives a taste of America around the Korean War with characters who are much more than mannequins to accessorize what is ostensibly a murder mystery. Or is it?

Night Talk by Elizabeth Cox: Two childhood friends of different races set in 1950s Georgia is a rich hook upon which to hang a narrative; if Cox had balanced the changes taking place in the world at large (i.e., the Civil Rights movement), this story would be close to perfect. As it is, it’s pretty good.

The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow: This is a grand, sweeping, narco-political novel that is jam-packed with everything you could want in a so-called thriller: intrigue, violence, Machiavellian plotting, admirable and not so characters—sketching out very plausible (scarily so) connections between drug cartels, governments, terrorists, the Church (including the Vatican), and various drug law enforcement agencies. This should be made into a HBO miniseries, stat.

Night of the Jaguar, Tropic of Night, and Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber: Gruber’s trilogy of novels about Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American homicide detective in Miami, is so compelling that I overcame my series resistance in order to read the first two, and even found the third of interest. Gruber is smart and funny and imbues Paz with rich depth—you’ll want to keep your eye on him, looking out for his next move.

A Philosophical Investigation by Philip Kerr: Kerr was celebrated early in his career as one of those Granta-anointed young writers, and has written a broad horizon of novels including his well-known Berlin Noir Trilogy. This 1993 novel is set in near-future London and has Chief Inspector Isadora “Jake” Jakowicz investigating a serial murderer (code-named Wittgenstein) and the computer designation of certain people as criminally dangerous.

God’s Country by Percival Everett: Everett has written 17 novels and nary a clinker in the lot—if he has a well-known book, it is probably Erasure, his send-up of America’s endless racial foibles, set in book publishing and academia. I prefer his earlier work, which joins McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Little Big Man and, most recently, Deadwood, as a entertaining demythologizing of the Old West.

The Wild Girl by Jim Fergus: It is 1999 and nearly destitute photographer Ned Giles, 84 years old, sells his only copy of La Niña Bronca for the handsome amount of 30 grand. It’s a photo he took in 1932 of a Apache girl—the same girl after which this book is entitled. The book flashes back to that year and Giles’s account of the Great Apache Expedition, mounted in the badlands of the Sierre Madres to retrieve the son of a Mexican rancher kidnapped by the Apaches.

The Outlander by Gil Adamson: To recap—set in 1903, the book follows young Mary Bolton as she flees her dead husband’s sadistic twin brothers, who are seeking to avenge the murder of their sibling. Bolton’s flight takes her into the snowbound Canadian Rockies of Alberta, where she recounts the details that led her to her homicidal act.

The Criminalist by Eugene Izzi: Chicago crime story writer Izzi was found hanging outside his office window in 1996, having written 13 books (two published as Nick Gaitano). As Raymond Chandler and Michael Connelly are to Southern California, George Pelecanos to D.C. and George V. Higgins to Boston, Izzi was the dark laureate of Chi-town. All his novels, as the sports guys intone, “get it done,” but I am partial to this one.

What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt: Hustvedt’s story of the friendship of two men over 25 years is abruptly and shockingly transformed by a “sudden and incapacitating tragedy.” It’s a stunning narrative in more ways than one.

Redemption Falls by Joseph O’Connor: This is a rip-roaring tale set in Civil War-era Montana Territory, and O’Connor uses all manner of texts—ballads, letters, songs, memoirs, and reports from spies—to shape a full-bodied narrative.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza: Piazza looks at New Orleans during the Katrina deluge and after through the lens of a white Midwestern transplant family and a black lifelong resident. It’s a moving and evocative story of an unresolved black mark on America’s heritage, not to mention a Tournament of Books finalist.

Bullet Heart by Michael Doane: Doane, who published a number of decent novels in the late ’80s and ’90s, seems to have slipped off the face of the Earth. In this one he uses a true event, the construction of a golf course on Lakota burial grounds in South Dakota, and the dispossession of the bones of Sioux Indian girl to form a taut and dark thriller.

The Darkest Jungle: The True Story of the Darien Expedition and America’s Ill-Fated Race to Connect the Seas by Todd Balf: Earlier this year, David Grann’s The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon deservedly occupied the (narrowing) vision of the book-reviewing community—which reminded me that the best exploration adventure story I have read to date is Balf’s account of an 1854 U.S. Naval expedition commanded by 33-year-old Isaac Strain (a truly fascinating character in his own right). What was supposed to be a ten-day jaunt across the Isthmus of Panama turned into a deadly disaster in the treacherous terrain that is known as the Darien Gap.

I Should Be Extremely Happy to Be in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark by Brian Hall: It’s an unwieldy title, but Brian Hall’s account of the two legendary explorers (and their Indian guide Sacagawea) has all the verisimilitude and plausibility of a historical account of the greatest exploration of the American continent.

Burning Marguerite by Elizabeth Inness-Brown: Inness-Brown’s first (and so far only) novel is set on a sparse, beautiful New England island, and focuses on the relationship between James Jack, orphaned at an early age, and the 94-year-old title character, Marguerite Anne Bernadette-Marie Deo, who took him in. The story bounces to New Orleans to give us Marguerite’s back story. In 200 pages or so, it is a big story, well presented. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 11, 2009

If you are paying attention to the ideas I am trying to express here (I hope they qualify as ideas, and I thank you if you are paying attention), my vexation at the declining attention paid to the study of history is a regular sore spot. I lay the fault for this cultural somnambulism at the deficient pedagogy entrusted with this important task—but maybe it is all merely a little rebranding, the ubiquitous strategy of choice in our brave new world. Let’s call history “back in the day,” which plays to an important human instinct: the desire to know what happened, especially before.

Anyway, that’s what I think history is about. That and good storytelling, which is why three recent books about history have grabbed my attention (when I am not being beaten over the head by Michael Jackson mania or the sex scandals of white Christian politicians). Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan (Modern Library), Inventing American History by William Hogeland (Boston Review/The M.I.T. Press), and World War One: A Short History by Norman Stone (Basic Books) are all excellent examples of concision and the attainable skill of being succinct.

MacMillan’s (Paris 1919 and Nixon and Mao) short text (under 200 pages) investigates how history affects us all:

History is something we all do, even if, like the man who discovered he was writing prose, we do not always realize it. We want to make sense of our own lives and often we wonder about our place in our own societies and how we got to be here. So we tell each other stories, not always true ones, and we ask questions about ourselves. Such stories and questions inevitably lead us to the past…

We use history to understand ourselves and we ought to use history to understand others…History can be helpful; it can also be very dangerous. It is wiser to think of history not as a pile of dead leaves…but as a pool, sometimes benign, often sulfurous that lies under the present silently shaping our institutions our ways of thought, our likes and dislikes.

Peppering her discourse with examples (Robespierre, Leon Trotsky, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Golda Meir, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, George W. Bush, the Dalai Lama, and Henry “History Is Bunk” Ford) vividly and lucidly makes her uncomplicated point.

In his slender tome (132 pages), Hogeland (The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty) argues that American public history—the stuff of Ken Burns and other documentaries and museum exhibitions—is inclined to celebration (without the kind of scrutiny and careful analysis that inevitably leads to compromised conclusions). To make his point, Hogeland discusses three examples of distorted history—the rehabilitation and revival of Alexander Hamilton; recent tributes to gadfly, activist, and folksinger Pete Seeger and conservative standard-bearer William Buckley; and Philadelphia’s Constitution Center—and argues that there are negative consequences in politicizing historiography.

Even a brief glance at any bibliography on World War I will show you that there have been countless doorstop-sized tomes written solely on the causes of the war, particular battles, leaders, peace treaties, and on and on. That former Oxford University mentor and historian Stone (Eastern Front 1914-1917) has fashioned a concise 200-page survey is a commendable feat of clarity, bringing readers to the (inevitable) conclusion that the great disaster of the Great War’s end was that the Germans did not think they had been defeated. They had been, as General Ludendorff parroted, “stabbed in the back” by you-know-who. So the conflict that lead to 14 million deaths and 20 million wounded became a temporary cessation of hostilities.

And so it went. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 28, 2009

I actually lived through and participated in the era unimaginatively referred to as the Sixties—there was war and drugs and madness and dancing in the streets, assassinations and a presidential resignation and Woodstock and Watts, the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, the Grey Panthers, and, well, you know, a lot of action. And there were some heroes and villains. Recently, a few books have been published that add some small pieces to the incomplete historical jigsaw puzzle. In 1968, Mark Rudd, author of Underground: My Life With S.D.S. and the Weathermen (William Morrow, excerpt) was a Columbia undergraduate and a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Rudd soon transmogrified into a more militant radical—one who founded the S.D.S. splinter group Weather Underground, which was responsible for the post-1968 “Days of Rage” and a string of bombings.


The Baader-Meinhof gang (Red Army Faction) were ’60s era radical Germans-turned-lethal terrorists who continued operating into the ’70s and ’80s, keeping various European intelligence agencies fully occupied. The monograph Baader-Meinhof: The Inside Story of the R.A.F. by Stefan Aust and Anthea Bell (Oxford University Press) fills in the huge blank spaces behind the newspaper accounts.


Chesa Boudin’s parents were radicals who were imprisoned in the early 1980s and entrusted his upbringing to Weatherman William Ayers (you know who he is) and Bernardine Dohrn. As a response to his parents’ (real and surrogate) beliefs on issues of economic and labor justice, Boudin crisscrossed Latin America. In Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America (Scribner, excerpt), Boudin travels through 25 countries and melds his personal hegira with perceptive observations of the ongoing ecological devastation, intermittent economic crises, and the development and struggles of various indigenous movements.


And then there is subversive satirist and gadfly (or as he describes himself, investigative satirist) Paul Krassner, author of Who’s to Say What’s Obscene: Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today (City Lights, excerpt). Friend of martyred comic Lenny Bruce and the editor of Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, Krassner was also publisher of The Realist magazine from 1958 to 1974, and co-founder of the Youth International Party (the Yippies) with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. He has now been inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame (created in 1997). Here’s Kurt Vonnegut on Krassner:

…in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM.

At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. In the most humanely influential American novel of this half century, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield, it will be remembered, was shocked to see that word on a subway station wall. He wondered what seeing it might do to the mind of a little kid. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 1, 2009

Add the names of Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer to Ed Sorel, Seymour Chwast, and David Levine, and this group of masters will give you a Mount Rushmore of American illustration for the latter half of the 20th century and onward. I have already noted Mauldin’s two volume set of Willie & Joe: The WWII Years (Fantagraphics) when it was published. If you need a snapshot of Mauldin’s genius, look to his poignant illustration of the Lincoln Memorial crying upon Kennedy’s assassination.


Feiffer’s great work at the Village Voice has also been compiled (and also by Fantagraphics). Now come three recent works by the three amigos that warrant notice. Sorel, whose illustrations and caricatures have adorned more than a fair share of New Yorker and other smart magazine covers, normally collaborates with wife Nancy on his forays into literature and history. In the case of Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present (Harmony), book critic Adam Begley and Sorel lampoon (and harpoon) nearly 50 world historical figures (Tom Cruise? Madonna?) who were convinced of some notion or belief—only to be clearly and definitively wrong. As the authors cheerfully exhibit with this well-chosen epigram from Ambrose Bierce, “To be positive: to be mistaken at the top of one’s voice.” In Christopher Hitchens’s introduction (an essayistic gem that redoubles the value of this small but mighty tome), he observes, “from George Armstrong Custer to the teak headed British generals on the Western Front, we have shining examples of those who kept doing the same old thing, each time hoping for a different result. This conforms to George Santayana’s definition of fanaticism, which is redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aims.” This collection of sketches of the likes of Girolamo Savonarola, Carry A. Nation, Arthur Conan Doyle, Herbert Hoover, Sam Goldwyn, Joseph Stalin, and Bush & Co excellently illustrates that point exponentially.


David Levine also has a long career illustrating: The New York Review of Books (in which he has appeared in every issue for 45 years), Time, Newsweek, Esquire, Playboy, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The Nation, among others. His drawing of Lyndon Johnson revealing a scar in the shape of Vietnam is considered one of the most recognized (and most copied) of the Vietnam era—just one vivid example of Levine’s extraordinarily acute vision and biting humor. Bill Moyers comments, “of another contemporary American political cartoonist it has been said that had he not become an artist he would have found his calling as a professional assassin…not so with Levine… He has far too much class… But remember this too about a man who could be so merciless and devastating in his portrayal of our poo-bahs. A great intelligence guided his hand and also a great heart. Even as he held their flaws and foibles high on the skewer he never seems driven by malevolence. ‘I love my species,’ he one said. And why not? He could not have had better material.” American Presidents (Fantagraphics) is a 128-page compilation that assembles Levine’s survey of American leaders and their coteries and skewers them with delightful results. It should be a required text in American history courses—Levine’s images powerfully expose the venality, duplicity, and hypocrisy of the upper reaches of our government.


Seymour Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios (with Milton Glazer, Reynold Ruffins, and Sorel) has been a design trailblazer and seminally influential illustrator for nearly 60 years, and has designed and illustrated more than 30 books. While more commercially involved than other artists mentioned, as shown in Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast (Chronicle Books), a splendidly edited and reproduced 270 page monograph, Chwast does indulge his sense of engagement with The Nose, a regularly published, 24-page newsletter that he designs and illustrates in order to “draw attention to relevant social issues as well as trivial ones.” Design historian Steven Heller and designer Paul Scher (also Chwast’s spouse) both provide illuminating commentary—if you want to go deeper than the compelling illustrations. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 25, 2009

You know a good chunk of time has passed when what was once viewed as aberrant achieves trend status and becomes simply idiosyncratic. For much of my life I have been fascinated by Cuba: the music, the politics, the food, the literature—pretty much everything. By the late 20th century, my interest was viewed as hip and even respectable, especially as mojitos and Cohibas gained some recognition during the Great Cigar Boom that coincided with the Great Wall Street Pig-Out of the ‘90s. In 1990, Cuban-American Oscar Hijuelos won a Pulitzer for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which was later made into a movie, and the film of Buena Vista Social Club and Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls showed up in mainstream culture at the end of the decade.

American attention to Cuba waxes and wanes, but the panache of all things cubano remains; the Caribbean island nation is still a source of wonder for progressives, thrill seekers, and would-be bohemians. This year being the 50th anniversary of the Revolution’s triumph and the inevitable instability of an aging leadership, President Obama has declared his intention to regularize relations with Cuba (and perhaps the prominence of the Cuban team in the World Baseball Classic played a part). Recently (more or less), there has been a spate of books connected to Cuba that showcase the compelling stories and speculations that continue to orbit around that magical place.


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Rachel Kushner’s debut novel Telex From Cuba (Scribner), which garnered her a National Book Award, is set in an American community in a Cuba that is on the verge. It is 1958, the Castro Brothers are successfully fomenting change, and this story’s two young protagonists, residing on United Fruit’s fiefdom in Oriente province (where the action is), are aware of the cruel underpinnings of America’s island idyll.


Anthropologist and MacArthur fellow Ruth Behar’s An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (Rutgers University Press) is a narrow slice of Cuban life, but no less fascinating—as is the preview of her documentary, below. Jews in Cuba, who knew?



University of North Carolina mentor and scholar Louis A. Pérez, Jr. has created a singular oeuvre (On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture; The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography; Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba; To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society) and his recent Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (The University of North Carolina Press) “is in one sense a summation of his distinguished work over the past several decades,” as distinguished historian Walter LaFeber points out. He goes on to sagely assert:

It is particularly significant because the U.S.-Cuban relationship is going to have to be fundamentally rethought and reshaped in the near future, and this work not only provides critical information, but also acts as a loud warning about how that debate must not be conducted.

This is exactly the kind of book policymakers and the chattering classes ought to be reading—something beyond the ignorant regurgitations of past thinking.


Boston writer Roland Merullo, in Fidel’s Last Days (Shaye Areheart Books) takes on the amorphous period that marks the decline of Fidel and his cadre. There is a lot of spycraft and bureaucratic chicanery being employed by various government and non-government operatives, whose real allegiances (as the reader is no doubt supposed to question) may or may not provide dramatic tension. Former C.I.A. agent Carolina Perez is an interesting character—having given up a promising career to join the super-secret (and wealthy exile-sponsored) White Orchid in its mission to rid Cuba of Fidel. Across the straits, Carlos Gutierrez, minister of health and a member of Castro’s inner circle, is recruited to aid in Castro’s curtain call.


The Bacardi name, instantly recognizable as a brand, is also attached to a family with a rich Caribbean history—a century and a half of which is intimately entwined with the growth of a Cuban national identity. Professor Pérez, cited above, comments about Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (Viking) by Tom Gjelten:

Contained within family genealogy are often found profound insights into the history of an entire people. The Bacardis represent one such family. Gjelten has fashioned a splendid prism through which to cast new light on the human dimensions of the Cuban past. The epochal transitions of Cuban national formation are experienced through successive generations of Bacardis, revealing the complex ways that a people are overtaken by the forces of their own creation. Anyone with an interest in Cuban history – and a fondness for Cuban rum – will find the Bacardi family history irresistible.

You can read an excerpt of the book here.


Awareness of the mafia in Cuba (or at least in Havana) began with Coppola’s The Godfather, Sydney Pollack’s Havana, and the startling (well, to some people) revelations regarding the spy agency/mob attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. T.J. English’s Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba…and Then Lost It to the Revolution (William Morrow) is a sobering and compelling (considering the American love affair with its gangsters) account of the way American organized crime attached itself to Cuban society—documenting the machinations of Meyer Lansky and his cronies to gain control of Cuba’s sin industries.

You can read an excerpt of the book here.


Master artist Spain Rodriguez (one of the original Zap Comix collaborators from the late ‘60s) takes on a so-called graphic biography of the famed Cuban revolutionary hero Che Guevara in Che: A Graphic Biography (Verso). For those of you not inclined to read Jon Lee Anderson’s definitive biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, Rodriguez’s 100-page volume will serve you well—not the least by Sara Seidman and Paul Buhle’s thoughtful analysis in the included essay, entitled “Che Guevara, Image and Reality.”


Continuing in the same vein as the Seidman/Buhle essay, Michael Casey’s Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (Vintage) investigates what is the purportedly most reproduced image in the world, the various iterations of Alberto Korda’s immortal image of Che—a picture that has adorned all manner of things from hotels, T-shirts, and posters to Swatch watches and now a web site dedicated to tracking the image’s worldwide appearances and other mutations.


Chicagoan and DePaul University mentor Achy Obejas (Days of Awe), whom Junot Díaz, with a small slight of hand, calls “one of the Cuba’s most important writers,” has a new novel, Ruins (Akashic Books), which deals with a concern that no doubt has confronted and continues to confront many Cubans—loyalty to the Revolution, its ideology and precepts, and the ongoing Cuban reality. The book’s main character, Usnavy, remains a good 26th July adherent from 1959 even beyond his best friend’s departure during the 1994 Mareil Boatlift. The discovery of the potential value of an oversized stained-glass lamp he inherited from his mother puts his dismal but well-ordered life into disarray.


By now, the presence of pre-’60s American cars is very much a part of the picture of present-day Cuba. Not quite preserved in amber (no American auto parts have made it to the island for half a century), about 60,000 cars are kept rolling with bailing wire, chewing gum, ingenuity, and the waving of chicken claws. Barcelona based journalist Richard Schweid traveled the island creating an auto-centric account of Cuban life in Che’s Chevrolet, Fidel’s Oldsmobile: On the Road in Cuba (The University of North Carolina Press). Not quite as interesting as Carlo Gebler’s Driving Through Cuba: Rare Encounters in the Land of Sugar Cane and Revolution (the Irish writer’s hunt for a 1959 Coup deVille Brougham), but packed with anecdotes and everyday life moments. By the way, the title refers to the claim that Fidel rode to the embattled Bay of Pigs in an Oldsmobile.


Cuban (and Cuban-born) literary scholar Eduardo R. del Rio interviewed a dozen Cuban-American writers (all born in Cuba) to investigate their commonality in One Island, Many Voices: Conversations With Cuban-American Writers (University of Arizona Press). He spoke with Nilo Cruz, Roberto Fernández, Cristina García, Carolina Hospital, Eduardo Machado, Dionisio Martínez, Pablo Medina, Achy Obejas, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Dolores Prida, and Virgil Suarez—but as the title of this anthology indicates, commonality was not the case. He concludes:

What strikes me most is how unique each of them is. At first this seems like a trivial, inconsequential observation. However, when I consider my mission was to collect a group of ‘similar’ writers, all of whom left Cuba as children or young adults, their divergence forces me to examine the issue more closely.

Happily, del Rio’s mission is ambient to the good stories and vivid voices encapsulated in this collection.


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Finally, in addition to Jon Lee Anderson’s Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, here are five essential books about Cuba.

Cuba: Or the Pursuit of Freedom (Da Capo Press) by master historian Hugh Thomas is the original comprehensive survey of Cuban history from pre-Columbian innocence to Spanish conquest to American annexation to the revolutionary present.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was the quintessential Cuban man of letters and his Mea Cuba (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), a collection of prose miscellany, showcases his wry wit, penchant for puns, and encyclopedic overview of Cuban literary culture.

Many writers have attempted to write the Cuban-American exile story; with Los Gusanos (HarperCollins), gringo John Sayles lays out a compelling tale as illuminating as any documentary on Cuban-American relations during Fidel’s tenure.

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria’s The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (Oxford University Press) among other things dispenses with the myth that Castro was scouted by the U.S. major leagues and was signed…well, you can guess the rest. Echevarria also does well to restore dignity to Caribbean and Cuban beisbol that suffers at the hands of other nasty yanqui habits and attitudes.

Texan musician Ned Sublette, founder of Qbadisc records, taps his unparalleled knowledge of Cuban culture and music to provide the informed and impassioned history Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago Review Press). P.S.: A second volume is forthcoming. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 9, 2009