JKC

El veradero padrino

Revisado: 12-30-20

Everybody knows that el Mayo Zambada – not Chapo Guzman - is the real godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel. But nobody knows anything about him – what he’s like, how he operates, why he alone among the first rank of narcos has been able to avoid arrest and imprisonment for 5 decades. This is the book that answers these questions. The first real look the public has had of the most mysterious and elusive of Mexico’s drug lords.

Must reading for anybody who thought El Chapo was the biggest Narco. It needs to be translated into English for the U.S. audience.

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A punch in the gut

Revisado: 10-23-20

This novel fits me particularly well. It travels roads I am familiar with, from Tucson, to Tonopah, to lonely ranches in Ralston Valley, to the messy bustle of Monterey Mexico. It is peopled by people I know. Not so much the boxers, but the others: earnest, hard-working young farmhands, exiled Peruvian sheepherders on H-2 visas, mean drunks seeking day labor at county employment agencies, used tire merchants trading on the lowest tier of commerce. And even, perhaps especially, Mr. Reese, the aging rancher slowly losing his battle against time and the harsh Nevada desert. He seems too sensitive and noble to be true, but in my experience, he is closer to type than Cliven Bundy; I have met him, in various guises, on ranches throughout Nevada.

And, to some extent, all of us resemble Horace Hopper/Hector Hidalgo, confused about who we are, about who we were meant to be, about how to traverse the gulf from here to there.

Chris Arnade’s book, Dignity, has received a lot of well-deserved admiration for opening our eyes to the limitations that overwhelm and demoralize the “back-row” denizens of our modern economy. But sometimes fiction can hit closer to emotional truth than documentary. I admire both books, but I read Don’t Skip Out On Me much more avidly.

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...is that it's a little dull

Revisado: 10-18-20

The Trouble With Peace fills the same place in the circle of Joe Abercrombie's world as The Phantom Menace occupies in the Star Wars universe: it has too much political backstory and that makes the first half of the novel a bit of a slog. One trusts that Abercrombie is simply setting the stage for a return to the action-packed, cynical barbarism that characterizes his fantasy world. The action picks up in Part VI and leaves us anticipating plenty more from the sequel.

Steven Pacey's brilliance is undiminished. Few stories are populated by as many characters as Abercrombie's; few readers besides Pacey could give all of them distinct and appropriate voices.

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Awesome (intense, impressive, engrossing, etc)

Revisado: 08-18-20

If you want to know about the Theranos scam, read John Carreyrou’s book or his Wall Street Journal articles.

If you want to experience the unique personal stress that it caused Tyler Schultz, listen to this podcast. The scam put him in an almost impossible situation, and he handled it as well as anyone could be expected to. This is his personal story, recounted in an engaging, conversational tone –

Which is what dismays me. Tyler Schultz is an intelligent, Stanford-educated scion of a patrician family. Does he really not know that you should say “my friends and I” rather than “me and my friends”? Has he not learned any synonyms for the adjective “awesome”?

Am I fighting a forlorn battle when I correct my grand-kids’ grammar? Is it preposterous to expect the next generation to learn English grammar?

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Ignorance is no Excuse

Revisado: 03-28-20

In a review of “Separate”, Steve Luxenburg’s commendable history of the Plessy v Ferguson decision, I wrote that there was still a need for a similarly thorough treatment of the Jim Crow era that followed that decision.

I was wrong. Douglas Blackmon’s book is a definitive treatment of the postbellum re-subjugation of African Americans in the south. The history is both readable and scholarly; it is both condensed and detailed. It does not take the reader long to understand how the horrifically efficient convict labor system was used to return vast numbers of black citizens to involuntary servitude. And yet Blackmon adds case after well-researched, specific case to demonstrate how this system persisted for 80 years after the end of the Civil War.

Q.E.D. By the end of the book, there can be no rebuttal to Blackmon’s contention that in the United States, “real slavery did not end until 1945.” Nor can the reader “wonder as to the origins, depth, and visceral foundations of so many African-Americans’ fundamental distrust of our judicial processes.”

This book reset my thinking on race relations, on affirmative action programs, on Black Lives Matter movements, on reparations. I don’t know how I’ll eventually work these issues out, but henceforward my thinking will be based on a fundamentally more honest and sympathetic acknowledgement of proximal white responsibility for the tragic and chronic inter-racial dysfunction that plagues this country.

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Black and White in shades of grey

Revisado: 03-15-19

Northern segregationists. Southern slaveholders who took up arms for the North. Carpetbaggers both venal and altruistic. Freed slaves who themselves owned slaves. And the ultimate paradox: Homer Plessy, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that rationalized “separate but equal”, being classified as “white” in the 1920 census.

This book is more than just the story of Plessy v. Ferguson. It’s an anecdotal collage of the manifold aspects of race relations in the U.S. from slavery to the Civil War to the Supreme Court. From Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington. From Charles Sumner to Jim Crow.

Too often in this country, the struggle for civil rights is told in terms of the 1860s and the 1960s. The period in between, the Jim Crow period during which segregation policies reasserted white dominance, is seldom covered in detail, is poorly understood, is hooded and cloaked, as it were, in secrecy and subversion.

Luxenberg does a good job making this era accessible by telling it from the perspectives of 4 main Plessy v Ferguson protagonists; H. B. Brown, the northern segregationist judge who wrote the majority opinion, John Marshal Harlan, the southern justice whose solitary and prescient dissent predicted many of the woes that resulted from the decision, Albion Tourgee, the carpetbagger who pleaded Plessy’s case before the Supreme Court, and the “gens de couleur libres”, New Orleans’ Free People of Color, the people who brought the case and who were so cruelly betrayed by the decision. In this book, we relive Reconstruction, with all of its aspirations and contradictions and ultimate failures, through the experiences and writings of these very real people. Luxenberg has done us the overdue and important service of humanizing an adumbrated period of our past.

Luxenberg’s subject is Plessy v Ferguson, and except for a brief epilogue, he ends the book with the Supreme Court decision. There is still room for a similar treatment of the dismal history that followed, when Judge Harlan’s forebodings were fully realized.

The writing contains a few stylistic irritants but they are minor. I recommend this book as much for the subject it illuminates as for the writing style.

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Not death, and Not borders

Revisado: 05-01-18

“The House of Broken Angels” is the first Great San Diego novel. It is written in a language not classically literary, and yet exactly accurate and appropriate to the place, the time, and the people. It is the melting-pot amalgam of two cultures, and two languages, and too much history; about a family that encompasses all of this, a family that is real and believable because in fact this is what an increasing, perhaps preponderating, majority of families are like - in San Diego and all along the US – Mexico border.

The plot is simple. It is sort of an Aztlan “As I Lay Dying”: the ruminations of the terminally ill Angel de la Cruz at his final birthday party. But the ruminations of any human being open up a history with so many memories, regrets, accomplishments, subplots, fantasies – that they provide a portal through which to view the entire panorama of a life nearly finished. And beyond that, the entire world in which he lived.

And that entire world is displayed here: the origins in Mexican poverty, the “Children of Sanchez” machismo and misogyny, the strange gravitational field that keeps Hispanic families continually falling apart and bonding together, the older generation which immigrates to the US but never really leaves Mexico; the younger generation that lives in its own little gang-boundary barrio with its own culture neither Mexican nor American, the half-assimilated cousins that hardly know Spanish but still have quinceañeras, the weird gringo uncle who wears Hawaiian shirts. (And, yes, Cheech: there is probably a son-in-law named Jeff!) They are all there, and they are all real, and they are all what San Diego really is.

The language is simply brilliant. Only the author, Luis Alberto Urrea, whose ear has captured and whose pen has transcribed these borderland dialects with such verisimilitude, could have done justice to this book. The English narration is literary, the Mexican Spanish is authentic, the pocho amalgam of both is spot on. Even the occasional gringo-Spanglish bastardization rings true. This is the way the border speaks, and Urrea is the laureate who has captured it on the written page and in the spoken word.

There is simply NO WAY that reading this book could be as rewarding as listening to Urrea's narration.

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A clinical eye for the hypochondria of exile

Revisado: 07-15-17

This is a novel about the Vietnam War. But it is unique in that: a) there are no Americans in it, and b) the war is already over. For everybody except the Vietnamese, that is.

We have come to think of the Vietnam War as an American conflict. Donald Goldstein deemed it “the most traumatic experience for the United States in the twentieth century”). How much more must it be so for the Vietnamese themselves? We don’t think too much about that question. (Try Googling “Vietnam conflict”. You’ll get more references to 60’s protest music than to Vietnamese society.)

But the themes are even more profound than that. This is not just a novel about a shooting war in southeast Asia; it is about the conflict between the individual and the state. To what extent does the culture in which we are raised supply the social environment and physical habitat we require to flourish?

Viet Thanh Nguyen has mastered the art of writing fiction from the viewpoint of displaced persons. Some authors – Faulkner, Steinbeck – illuminate a region through the eyes of its denizens. Nguyen’s perspective is the opposite – he studies the individual by removing him from his natural habitat and analyzing what happens to him.

In “The Sympathizer”, Nguyen studies a varied population of Vietnamese displaced by the war. The largest cohort is composed of ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) officers and their families exiled to southern California after the fall of Saigon. But there are also individual specimens of alienated NVA/VLF partisans: one man estranged from family and friends by horrible disfigurement suffered during the war; another whose humanity has been replaced by political slogans; a woman ostracized by her own family for her affair with a French priest. All observed and reported by her biracial son who is also a sort of double political agent: the most stateless and equivocal character in the whole novel.

Nguyen has a clinical eye for the symptoms that beset the uprooted - the diminution of stature they suffer when removed from their community, the despondency that sets in when they lose their place in society. Chapter 6 has a poignant passage cataloguing the humble Orange County occupations of men who once wielded military might in Vietnam. Nguyen finishes with a brilliant riff about these men “moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments, as their testes shrivel, day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation…”

But the Sympathizer sees the other side of the war’s dislocation as well. Back in Vietnam, the victors suffer their own sorts of alienation. The community in which the Vietnamese people have flourished for centuries has been replaced by a sterile and inhuman ideology.

So, does the State nourish the individual, or crush his spirit? Which is to be preferred, Imperialism or Communism? Catholicism or Capitalism? In his isolation cell in a Vietnamese re-education camp, the narrator reaches his own, searing conclusions.

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A clinical eye for the hypochondria of exile

Revisado: 07-15-17

This is a novel about the Vietnam War. But it is unique in that: a) there are no Americans in it, and b) the war is already over. For everybody except the Vietnamese, that is.

We have come to think of the Vietnam War as an American conflict. Donald Goldstein deemed it “the most traumatic experience for the United States in the twentieth century”). How much more must it be so for the Vietnamese themselves? We don’t think too much about that question. (Try Googling “Vietnam conflict”. You’ll get more references to 60’s protest music than to Vietnamese society.)

But the themes are even more profound than that. This is not just a novel about a shooting war in southeast Asia; it is about the conflict between the individual and the state. To what extent does the culture in which we are raised supply the social environment and physical habitat we require to flourish?

Viet Thanh Nguyen has mastered the art of writing fiction from the viewpoint of displaced persons. Some authors – Faulkner, Steinbeck – illuminate a region through the eyes of its denizens. Nguyen’s perspective is the opposite – he studies the individual by removing him from his natural habitat and analyzing what happens to him.

In “The Sympathizer”, Nguyen studies a varied population of Vietnamese displaced by the war. The largest cohort is composed of ARVN (South Vietnamese Army) officers and their families exiled to southern California after the fall of Saigon. But there are also individual specimens of alienated NVA/VLF partisans: one man estranged from family and friends by horrible disfigurement suffered during the war; another whose humanity has been replaced by political slogans; a woman ostracized by her own family for her affair with a French priest. All observed and reported by her biracial son who is also a sort of double political agent: the most stateless and equivocal character in the whole novel.

Nguyen has a clinical eye for the symptoms that beset the uprooted - the diminution of stature they suffer when removed from their community, the despondency that sets in when they lose their place in society. Chapter 6 has a poignant passage cataloguing the humble Orange County occupations of men who once wielded military might in Vietnam. Nguyen finishes with a brilliant riff about these men “moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments, as their testes shrivel, day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation…”

But the Sympathizer sees the other side of the war’s dislocation as well. Back in Vietnam, the victors suffer their own sorts of alienation. The community in which the Vietnamese people have flourished for centuries has been replaced by a sterile and inhuman ideology.

So, does the State nourish the individual, or crush his spirit? Which is to be preferred, Imperialism or Communism? Catholicism or Capitalism? In his isolation cell in a Vietnamese re-education camp, the narrator reaches his own, searing conclusions.

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Archaeology reduced to reality show

Revisado: 01-21-17

The story this book tells – about a high-tech search for pre-Columbian ruins in the Honduran jungle – is an interesting one. But the writing falls far below the high standard achieved by John Lloyd Stephens in his classic account of the exploration of Copan, and even below books in the second tier of this genre, like Hiram Bingham’s “Lost City of the Incas” or Sidney Kirkpatrick’s “Lords of Sipan”. Even the photos provided in the PDF file cannot hold a candle to Frederick Catherwood’s renderings of the Copan stelai.

There’s too much Discovery Channel-style exaggeration of the challenges to be overcome during the exploration stage, and not nearly enough information on what really matters, which are the ruins and artifacts. Too much focus on airborne technologies and not enough insight into a rediscovered culture. Even the title strains to oversell the subject matter.

One wishes that the book had been written by Chris Fisher, the archaeologist who accompanied the discovery team, rather than by Douglas Preston, a novelist most best known for his Pendergast mysteries. In fact, I recommend Fisher’s web site to readers who want to learn more about the real archaeology Mosquitia.

Bill Mumy’s narration is mediocre. I don’t mind his mis-pronunciation of Hispanic place- and surnames so much as his infomercial style, his Norman Vincent Peale tonality that reminds me of “Gold Rush” or “Alaskan Bush People” or other artificially dramatized reality programs on TV.

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