THE FIGHTING BUNCH, a little-remembered story of when elections mattered so much people rebelled to *retain* their vote

THE FIGHTING BUNCH: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution
CHRIS DeROSE
St. Martin's Press
$14.99 Kindle edition, available 3 November 2020...pre-order now!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The incredible, untold story of the WWII veterans who destroyed a corrupt political machine―the only successful armed rebellion on US soil since the War of Independence.

They fought for freedom abroad and returned to find that they had lost it at home. A corrupt political machine was in charge, kept in power by violence and stolen elections - the worst allegations of vote fraud ever brought to the attention of the Department of Justice, according to the Attorney General.

The GIs formed a nonpartisan, all-veteran ticket. On Election Day, the GIs and their supporters found themselves assaulted, intimidated, arrested, and even shot. A small band of veterans - the Fighting Bunch - armed themselves and marched on the jail to demand an honest count. The sheriff and his men refused. These men who thought they had seen the last of war returned to the battlefield, one last time.

This episode in U.S. history has never been more relevant, but has never been fully told. At the time of the rebellion, national news outlets jammed the phone lines into town, asking questions before the shooting had stopped. Journalists beat a path to Athens from across the country. Hollywood came calling, but the people of McMinn County had moved on.

After years of research, including exclusive interviews with the remaining witnesses, archival radio broadcast and interview tapes, scrapbooks, letters, and diaries, author Chris DeRose has reconstructed one of the seminal―yet untold―events in American election history.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THIS TITLE FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU. (I THINK.)

My Review: This book made me so sad.

There were once people who stood up to machine politics. People whose sense of honor forbade them to participate in the establishment of a single-party state.

Their grandchildren are now actively seeking to make that sense of honor, that duty to accept others' rights of access to the ballot box as a means of free speech, obsolete in the USA.

If you want to know what the Greatest Generation, in their youth and idealism, went to war for, it was NOT the enshrinement of a single point of view as the only acceptable one to express and uphold.

The three-hundred-plus pages of Author Chris DeRose's astonishingly well-researched (honestly, it feels as though this book was played out in front of him) story of one unique moment in our country's ongoing history of voter suppression did not fly by. Not because Author DeRose did not write the story well. They slogged past my tear-blurred eyes because these passionate rejecters of Conformity and Submission did not go on to spark a movement against the real perpetrators of the atrocity: The Powerful, the elite that could not care less what "party" label you mark your vote next to. After all, Boss Tweed said it best:

If your nineteenth-century history is faded to sepia tones, this will remind you of who he was and why Tammany Hall has so many lessons for the erstwhile democracy of the USA.

That rebellion lies in our future.

I hope and pray that it will come before I go for good.

DEATH KEEPS HIS COURT, a Kindle Single about today's White House...I mean, Richard II's court! Heh. Of course I do.

DEATH KEEPS HIS COURT: The Rule of Richard II 

ANSELM AUDLEY 

Kindle Singles 

$2.99 Kindle only, available now 

Rating: 4 shiny stars of five 

The Publisher Says: A tyrant on the throne... 

Richard II was young, handsome, and elegant. Last living child of the brilliant Black Prince, he came to the throne bearing the hopes of his people on his shoulders. His court glittered; his tastes were refined; his portraits shone with gold. Regal, composed, aloof, he was the very picture of majesty. He became a murderous, capricious tyrant. His favourites plotted against his family. He rewrote the laws of England to give himself absolute power. He raised an army against his own subjects. 

 His subjects deposed him. Twice. 

This is the story of the forgotten civil war of 1387, which saw Richard set against his brave, ill-starred uncle Thomas of Woodstock. Of how a boy’s bright promise turned deadly, provoking his nobles to fear, flight, and finally open war. Of how a humiliated King set out on a course of vengeance which would cost him his life and sow the first fatal seeds of the Wars of the Roses. 

From royal banquets to battles in the mist, Death Keeps His Court tells a tale of real-life tyranny, treachery and tragedy in the age which inspired A Game of Thrones. 

Anselm Audley holds BA and Master’s degrees in ancient history from Oxford, as well as a degree in planetary science from University College London. He is a published fantasy novelist, the author of Heresy, Inquisition, Crusade, and Vespera. 

My Review: Never, ever fail to believe a tyrant:

The King was the revolutionary, twisting law and justice into weapons, setting his own arbitrary whims above the settled custom of the realm, and giving not only protection but honours and riches to men whose conduct had been reprehensible. He had not the slightest respect for the laws of the land or the rights of his subjects, yet he was still the King – great Edward’s grandson and anointed monarch.

When low, cunning men and women gain power, they bluster and threaten and posture. Good, reasonable people who want to believe the best of them say that they don't mean what they are saying.

To show his friendship and appreciation for his favourites, Richard had given them everything they had asked for. He had bent laws, misused his power as King for their benefit, made himself the friend of France and the enemy of his own people. He had protected them no matter what they did.

They do. Always and without fail, they are truthful in their lies. What they intend to do is always in the bluster. And good people will never, ever believe them.

Thwarted, Richard instead resorted to one breach of faith after another: refusing to turn up to a council meeting, trying to delay the writs for Parliament, using every trick he could think of to keep the Appellants from acting. There could no longer be any doubt; de Vere was coming, and he had an army. All Richard’s delays, all his stratagems, had been attempts to buy time, to keep the Appellants’ eyes fixed on London.

So, here we are!

Even now, it seemed, the King believed he had the power to make reality conform to his will. –and– Richard was incapable of forgiving and forgetting. His tender sense of his own regality, still bruised, was one reason.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, mes amis.

THE LAST SUMMER OF REASON, a beautiful tale of one rational man's losses to a manic mob mentality

THE LAST SUMMER OF REASON
TAHAR DJAOUT (tr. Marjolijn de Jager)
Introduction by Alek Baylee Toumi
Foreword by Wole Soyinka
Bison Books
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This elegant, haunting novel takes us deep into the world of bookstore owner Boualem Yekker. He lives in a country being overtaken by the Vigilant Brothers, a radically conservative party that seeks to control every element of life according to the laws of their stringent moral theology: no work of beauty created by human hands should rival the wonders of their god. Once-treasured art and literature are now despised.

Silently holding his ground, Boualem withstands the new regime, using the shop and his personal history as weapons against puritanical forces. Readers are taken into the lush depths of the bookseller's dreams, the memories of his now-empty family life, his passion for literature, then yanked back into the terror and drudgery of his daily routine by the vandalism, assaults, and death warrants that afflict him.

From renowned Algerian author Tahar Djaout we inherit a brutal and startling story that reveals how far an ordinary human being will go to maintain hope.

THIS WAS A BIRTHDAY GIFT (ALBEIT UNWITTING!) FROM A FRIEND. THANKS, YOUR KICKASSNESS!

My Review: First of all, let's clear up something that could cause a lot of people pleasure-robbing confusion: This is not a novel. It is a récit. The narrative is so limited in its focus that there is no sense of a world larger than itself, which makes the reader aware at all times that they are reading a narrative. This is not an insult or a criticism of the technique used, but of the marketing decision to call this a novel. It will disappoint novel-readers who buy it hoping for that immersive, multi-faceted experience of a story.

The Introduction by Toumi and the Foreword by Soyinka are essays fully worthy of reviews of their own. I will not be providing those reviews because I am not a scholar. The context they present is the infuriating context of the murdered Author Djaout's life and times. The facts of his all-too-brief life are on Wikipedia for monoglot English speakers. There is so much that US citizens have simply ignored or willfully shut out of their experience of the world, and as a result we seem to be willing to leap over high precipices to fall into fathomless oceans of rage and hatred, as Djaout warns his readers against. Boualem, his PoV character, is thrown over the edge willy-nilly, but he's got just enough time to form himself into an arrow.

The dive one takes while reading the book is deep, though, so don't think it's not profound and perception-altering to experience Boualem's deep dive into despair as his world, his entire life's work of defining and refining himself as a moral actor in that world, is fractured and flattened by a social earthquake. The depths of despair Boualem plumbs will be familiar to book-lovers watching the steady, pernicious, and malicious attacks on education, intelligence, and erudition we're seeing in the US.

I used up about half a can of Book Darts (may the goddesses please bless my kind friend Stephanie for gifting me this timely top-up of my supply for this past birthday!) marking beautiful passages to quote in my review. The lovely translation done by Translator de Jager is almost too rich a confection to be devoured in a sitting...but I did it. Yes, it was like a breakfast of rich brownies topped with lemon curd and served with a café viennoise, but it was also a heady experience of glorious phrase-making. I was Zooming with my Young Gentleman Caller while I was writing an earlier draft of this review. He said of my Book Darted copy, "I don't dare take it to the airport like that."

"Hmm?"

"It's got more hardware than a Goth biker."

Oh. Well, yes. Permaybehaps I'd better make the point sharper and more targeted:

Books—the closeness of them, their contact, their smell, and their contents—constitute the safest refuge against this world of horror. They are the most pleasant and the most subtle means of traveling to a more compassionate planet. How will Boualem go on living now that they have separated him from his books, his most invigorating nourishment? He is like a plant that has been torn from the soil, separated from liquid and light, its two vital necessities. He has been excluded from the life of books. He has been exiled from all the landmarks of his childhood: values, trampled, symbols corrupted, spaces disfigured and wrecked.

That, my olds, is what's right and what's wrong with this récit. If you ran across the first two sentences in a novel, you'd think, "oo, that's pretty." Put the rest of the para behind it and you're in a récit not a novel, and one that needed a developmental editor's unkind attention. There is so very much of this sort of pretty, pretty phrasemaking that just goes on that little bit too long, that says what's already been said (“For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.”–Cicero, b. 106BCE, and a famous enough quote that Author Djaout can reasonably be expected to have read it during his education) in a not hugely fresh way.

That said, one is disinclined to hammer the hell out of the book because it was incomplete and fished out of the author's drawers after his murder. I know, and I can't explain how, that this book would've been absolutely earth-shattering had he lived, and had the chance to work with an editor to bring its many stregths and beauties into a finer, sharper focus. There is about this read the ozone smell and static crackle of greatness. The sadness that follows reading it is rooted in the sense that this promise is undelivered, in fact undeliverable, because Author Tahar Djaout was murdered by the pro-ignorance, anti-beauty forces that ran roughshod over his country.

Do not think the same can not happen here, happen again, happen to the resisters and artists and truth-tellers you're ignoring, skimming, marginalizing today. Vote Blue in November 2020 and allow Author Tahar Djaout's sacrifice of his life to be worthy.

STILLICIDE, necessary and beautiful cli-fi about our future...if we don't stop it

STILLICIDE
CYNAN JONES
Catapult
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: New Yorker fiction writer Cynan Jones returns with a powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage.

Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage.

As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.

From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.

I WAS SENT A COPY OF THE GRANTA BOOKS EDITION FOR REVIEW.

My Review: A series of episodes commissioned from Author Jones by BBC 4 (podcasts linked), these stories are truly condensed and thoroughly distilled verbal essences of reality. Their heightened language avoids sentimentality, but uses the simplest and most unadorned locutions bare of ornament to create the effect of verbal stained glass: Pattern emerges from intense, simple, interlocking shapes.

I'm a fan of Author Jones's going back to The Long Dry, another deceptively simple tale of a man whose world, not to mention life, is heading into a smash. Longer, fuller than this read, it is still marvelously economical. It is clearly written by the same writer, someone whose words aren't gushing forth but are bucketed up from a deep and refreshing well, poured without slosh or slop into the reader's extended cup with neither stint nor slosh.

It is in Author Jones's negative spaces, his wordless interstices, that the reader is invited to exist inside the story. The world is different, this we know, but the people are not and nor should they be. A long chain of change and loss and compromise extends into their past, our future; Author Jones says clearly, distinctly, "Is this the world you wish to see come for your family?"

You'll know what I mean.

As always, the Bryce Method of short assessments coupled to snipped passages will bulk out my ideas and opinions of this read.

The Water Train brings us into the Hellscape of Branner's job, neutralizing threats to the train feeding water to the city. In the rain, Branner kills a boy who might've been planning to disrupt the Water Train's stolen water going to the city. At what cost to himself? That is the story. 4 stars

Paper Flowers tells us of an economic migrant who polishes surfaces for the captured iceberg that sends water on the Water Train to the great city. They awake next to Nita in her bedsit above a dry riverbed, her daughter Hillie bouncing about; the migrant misses home, appreciates Nita's makework creating paper flowers to sell, worries about the coming destruction of their home, their lives, as the Water Train's owners need their bedsit's space.

There is only early morning light. Then the Water Train passes. Different. A weight of sound. The sound of a great waterfall crashing into a pool. It has the power church bells must used to have.

Harrowing; the cost of greed made personal. 5 stars

Butterflies renders the longing of Ruth, nurse/worker, to feel something, to be fully alive, as she presents her gifted paper ticket to walk in a garden for the first time in her adulthood. She plans to be unfaithful to obsessive Colin for the first time; she expands to fill her own body in a scrap of nature, experiencing things she's forgotten in her new, dry, wealth-centered world. Names of plants mean nothing to her...but google them, worlds of meaning there, this is an English city where this garden is...

She walks. Feels sun on her shoulders; a warmth tracing her edges. Reminds her of her shape.

A buttercup bends with the ballast of a bumblebee; a bluebottle iridescent, like a piece of blue glass.

Beetles, like articles of cast-off jewelry, scuttle in the grass.

She takes some sips from her shift ration, holding the water in the funny space under her tongue.

Last time she saw a bumblebee she caught it in a cup. Rescued it from the fake daisies pattern of the staff room tablecloth.

It kept trying to come back in, after she had set it free, bumping on the window.

Ruth, full in and of herself for the first time in a long, dry time, tentatively realizes she can do what her feelings prompt her to do, she can be as full of herself as the sunshine makes the flowers, the insects, the right-feeling world she has such joyous (temporary) access to. And how criminal it is that she is denied this world until someone who can afford access gifts a bit of it to her. 4.5 stars

Coast begins the knitting of shard to fragment. David, old engineer/husband/man, watches as a berg is towed to the Ice Dock past his eroding homeplace. He was a planner of the now-replaced water pipeline whose infrastructure we first met in "The Water Train." He doesn't hear the whine of now-retired wind-turbines from the coastal sandbank any more:

The air had unfilled when they shut down the wind farm out on the sandbanks, the horrible whine dropping from the sky around the ocean.

They had not realized how much they had come to brace themselves against the sound until it was suddenly gone. The same had happened when the air traffic more or less stopped.

In that welcome peace, he collects his dinner-limpets to go home to wife Helen with. Their son Leo, Ruth's sister, pays a surprise visit and brings his gift bounty of lamb chops (part of working for the Water Train, access to better resources); as dinner ends, he receives the past in the form of a gift of his mother's jewelry to his own wife. Death got no pockets, his loving, aging, dying parents remind him. No loving child wants to hear that truth. But time and water and death have no truck with human-scale things. 3.5 stars

Chaffinch is the Big Meeting (coinciding with the Big Protest, naturally), that introduces the "needed" destruction of the lives and property of the many, many Nitas and Hallies. New homes will be provided for many...

"Shantytowns! Out of rusty metal boxes." Colin must be hard to live with.

"The reuse of containers from the decommissioned shipping yards provides a cost-effective and flexible solution with minimal eco-impact."

I swear, it's like he refuses to see it's for the betterment of the many:

"...We live in a society. It isn't always possible to take into account every individual. Policy always aims to arrive at a solution which helps the greatest number."

The needs of the many excuse the destruction of the few if it's to increase water supplies. Ruth's Colin, weedy and "looks like he eats a lot of kale but not because he likes it," is there to poke and stab the flaks. "We all benefit," they intone; "not equally" ripostes spiny Colin. The meeting moves to the roof, looking down on the Dock...also the protest. Bitter, angry people, half-a-million strong (not such a great showing, we're told), protesting the end of their lives and for the benefit of others.

There never can be a complete and completely fair solution to this issue. Never. 4 stars

Dragonfly brings back a Red-Listed apex predator in the silty gulches of the repurposed riverbed near Nita and Hallie's bedsit! Callooh! Callay! The day, the day might yet get a stay, the day of de/con/struction might yet be held at bay.

The Professor receives his research assistant's package from a chatty courier:

"I've got a gutter garden on my building," the courier said, excitedly. "We group-funded. ... And we're going to get an alittlement on the roof!"

The professor looked at the package on the desk. An itch in his fingers.

"They'll make a difference."

"A lot's got from an alittlement," the courier smiled, reeling off the jingle.

His work making the world as incrementally better as possible clearly paying off, since he hears his pet program's jingle sung at him in the streets. But what he knows is in the package, this small thing, will change everything in a flash, will stop the changes that are being protested...if it's true...

The dorsal barbs, down to the penultimate section of the abdomen. The fact of the dried silt. He has pushed back the prospect. An intuition of its species he felt instantly.

But as he sees the skin, magnified, it speaks to him as an artifact. Seems utterly sure of itself. It is.

Bloodless? That's not assured. Success isn't even assured. But Hope, like a marigold shoving her way to the light from cracks in concrete, Hope ain't dead yet. 5 stars

Rooftop is Branner, marksman extraordinaire, living the nightmare of loss-in-life while he focuses on the Big Protest, waiting for a chance to act...to kill...so he can turn off the agony he can not shake, forget, alter, deny, or evade:

The protest now was filtering. The crowd seeming to pour.

Something microscopic in the fact the smallest tap could send a hundred-and-seventy-grain bullet three-quarters of a mile.

Move your finger just a millimeter and you could end a life; but you cannot save one. Her. Not with the strength of your whole body.

It is a close call...the professor in the culvert, seeking the eggs, instars, imagos...in Branner's sights.... 4.5 stars

Lake clarifies the high personal cost of the insecurity required of the denizens who have the bad luck to live in the security state. Cora wants to make Leo some gorse-syrup ice cream on this hot summer day:

Cora's dress stuck a little to her skin.

Delicate yellow day-flying moths flew amongst the gorse.

There was a heady coconut smell to the flowers. She picked them and dropped them into the bowl. Patient when she pinned her finger. Sometimes felt showered seeds on her sin. Took a while to link the tickle to the spiky, sporadic pops, punctuations in the air, as the flat, mature pea-pods on the bushes burst in the sun.

She gently pinched the part-closed petals together and pulled; took soft buds, the faint hairs between her fingers, like stroking a small animal's ears.

She looks down the hill to wild patches above the reservoir, is accosted by armed guards reminding her she isn't safe. She spills her gorse buds around her feet in her fearful startlement.

She *was* and they tell her she wasn't.

The fury of being surprised by a lie ruins her mood, her ice cream, her peaceful happiness. Her violated self and sense of self in security of home can not reconcile the awful, brutal armed-man energy, lying about her bodily safety, to force her to obey a will not even truly his but amorphously the state's. It is trauma and fear delivered as safety, and it ruins her lovely surprise for Leo. What else will Cora need to give up, surrender, be rent from? 5 stars

Sound starts with two boatsful of men nervously jockeying for best position to get their harpoons into the calf; the shots, the running before the great calf either strikes out at them or drags them under the freezing water; then, quieter but more deadly, the anchor goes down, they meet to discuss the huge calf's fate as it groans, wallows, taking new forms as it moves free of the great shelf.

Ice is incredibly valuable after all. They will bring it into the Ice Dock, they decide; the least loss to melt, if not the highest price and so it equals out in the end. 3.5 stars

Potato Water finds one of the boys, the older one, that Branner saw from his rooftop sniper's nest fevered, shaking, frightening a grandmotherly woman who, with her gardener husband, grows fresh green crops in what sounds to me like night soil. I think it is but anyway they are among the few using this resource to grow fresh vegetables, healthy food, and the nurturer in her soul can't let this child suffer:

They are built out of energy, children, I say. Even when they are ill. They are mainly no more than energy.

The boy gets potato water from her hands, and probably has never had such nourishment in his life. As a result he grows well enough to speak, to chafe with worry over the brother and the dog who both ran away; ultimately he, too, runs away before he's really well, to the older woman's distress. But his purpose in life is to find his little brother and the dog. He must care for them, so he must find them. Well told, if quotidian, tale. 3.5 stars

Letter slayed me.

You would watch. That's all. I would not be able to help.

But this will help, I hope. I want to say some things.

I want to say that I knew in the first few minutes I was going to love you, and would love you, and would fight through things for that.

There are people together all their lives, and they don't have that. But we do. Even through the fights and niggles, and the things that come. We do.

Branner, he, well he just won't ever believe that there was nothing...something he could...he should, would have done anything.

And now it's over. Ruth, ever-caring Ruth whose life is wasted with Colin, is amanuensis for this outpouring; it slays her as it did me; and in the end the letter for John Branner is so incredibly powerfully concentrated, such a beautiful, perfect declaration of love, that...you'll have to read it, I don't think I know how to end this sentence.

Oh John. Treasure your letter. Read it until it falls apart, engrave it in your mind, because you will need it so very very much. The days drag and the years fly and you will never, ever be that awful, empty sorry if you know what she left for you to know. 5 stars

Patrol brings us full circle, to "The Water Train" and John Branner deciding life or death, kill or die, shoot or be shot, as the whole arc of his love for Anne Branner from the day she sewed him up to the day she ripped him apart, plays full Technicolor in a rain-soaked night patrol guarding the Water Train's precious cargo.

For other, richer, "more important" city people.
***
At the bitter, fearsome end, Author Jones thanks "you two, who help me be certain the future is not a bleak place."

I thank their unknown-to-me twoness as well, because without them this perfect gem of economical and powerful protest against the world unfolding before my, and the Author's I am convinced, appalled gaze, would not exist.

FOUR PERFECT PEBBLES, a timely (when isn't it timely?) reminder of the horrors of populism

FOUR PERFECT PEBBLES
LILA PERL (tr. Marion Blumenthal Lazan)
Greenwillow Books
$16.99 hardcover edition, $6.99 paperback edition, $1.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s unforgettable and acclaimed memoir recalls the devastating years that shaped her childhood. Following Hitler’s rise to power, the Blumenthal family—father, mother, Marion, and her brother, Albert—were trapped in Nazi Germany. They managed eventually to get to Holland, but soon thereafter it was occupied by the Nazis. For the next six and a half years the Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps, including Westerbork in Holland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, before finally making it to the United States. Their story is one of horror and hardship, but it is also a story of courage, hope, and the will to survive.

Four Perfect Pebbles features forty archival photographs, including several new to this edition, an epilogue, a bibliography, a map, a reading group guide, an index, and a new afterword by the author. First published in 1996, the book was an ALA Notable Book, an ALA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, and IRA Young Adults’ Choice, and a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies, and the recipient of many other honors.

My Review: In the annals of man's cruelty to man, the Holocaust stands out for its sheer, industrial-scale coldness and horror. There is ample literature attesting to the awfulness of being condemned to death for the mere accident of being born to a Jewish parent. This book, another entry into that crowded segment, is aimed at young readers.

I don't know that any book about the Holocaust is something I want young readers to read. It's too huge and too vile a topic to make me feel comfortable introducing it to those whose lives are still in the vulnerable and bendable stage. I wouldn't let my child read this book, far better she should read the Marquis de Sade than this kind of material.

But the world disagrees with me. So I am renewedly glad that I have no young children. But I think this story is one that makes the idea of the Holocaust, its especial and unique evil in human history, more painfully poignantly real than any other literary work I've ever seen: This is the story of a child who went through the system with her family intact, until the bitter horrifying end of the tale. This is what the horrible, vile, evil, disgusting Germans wanted to destroy: A little girl, her mama, her papa, and her big brother.

Because they were Jews.

Now look at the humanitarian crises of economic and war refugees being towed out to see and left by the Greek Government; the tide of Islamophobia wracking European countries; the perennial racism and populism of the US against Hispanic and native-born Black people; the Othering of every Asian minority because of a disease that was first detected in China; and tell me that this book is no longer relevant. Has nothing to say to you, your concerns, is old-fashioned.

It isn't.

BANANA, a good-enough book about an increasingly urgent global problem of food security

BANANA: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World
DAN KOEPPEL
Plume Books
$5.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

2019 UPDATE Climate change bids fair to deprive us of a childhood icon, says this book.
One step closer to reality.

The Publisher Says: A gripping biological detective story that uncovers the myth, mystery, and endangered fate of the world’s most humble fruit

To most people, a banana is a banana: a simple yellow fruit. Americans eat more bananas than apples and oranges combined. In others parts of the world, bananas are what keep millions of people alive. But for all its ubiquity, the banana is surprisingly mysterious; nobody knows how bananas evolved or exactly where they originated. Rich cultural lore surrounds the fruit: In ancient translations of the Bible, the “apple” consumed by Eve is actually a banana (it makes sense, doesn’t it?). Entire Central American nations have been said to rise and fall over the banana.

But the biggest mystery about the banana today is whether it will survive. A seedless fruit with a unique reproductive system, every banana is a genetic duplicate of the next, and therefore susceptible to the same blights. Today’s yellow banana, the Cavendish, is increasingly threatened by such a blight—and there’s no cure in sight.

Banana combines a pop-science journey around the globe, a fascinating tale of an iconic American business enterprise, and a look into the alternately tragic and hilarious banana subculture (one does exist)—ultimately taking us to the high-tech labs where new bananas are literally being built in test tubes, in a race to save the world’s most beloved fruit.

My Review: This is yet another entry in the single-subject world of non-fiction. The narrowness of focus in books such as Salt and Cod and The Book on the Bookshelf and The Pencil and Longitude seems to be an increasingly prevalent trend in publishing. I am all for it on one level, since I like delving into the abstruse and wallowing in details that leave most people I know colder than a penguin's butt in the middle of the Antarctic winter; but on another level, I want to stop these publishers before they bore again with books inadequately edited and organized.

There are three pieces to the banana...the history of humanity's first cultivated plant (modern archaeological evidence (albeit disputed because perish forbid someone should change The Story white folks tell!) from New Guinea shows human cultivation from 9000 years ago was of bananas, but for their corms not the fingers we eat today); the politics of the modern cultivation of the banana (the term "banana republic", which I have used without thinking for 30+ years, has a very literal beginning and a scarily modern {2020 version} ring); and the future of humankind's most basic and widely distributed food crop (essential to survival in several parts of the world, the banana is also under threat from several pests that defy modern chemistry to abate, still less conquer, and squeamish food-o-phobes in wealthy countries oppose all modern genetic engineering that could save the survival crop of many parts of the world). These three strands are awkwardly interwoven, with no obvious guiding editorial hand to make sense of their interrelation.

It's a shame, too, because this is a huge, important topic, and the author's not inconsiderable talents are well-used in bringing the facts to light. The loss of our American favorite banana, the Cavendish, from grocery shelves will be an inconvenience at most; the fact that two major American corporations are, double-handedly (is that a word?), responsible for the spread of the blights that threaten the world crop with the complicity of the American government, should mean that we as a country are liable to find solutions to the pressing problems of food security in the places we've so screwed over. Free. But with 45 attacking US food security, that won't happen. You can bet the balance in your 401(k) on that.

Back to the book...too much narrative drive is lost in the author's back-and-forth cross-cutting of the basic story. I wish someone had said, "Yo Dan...first third of the book is the banana as a plant; second third is the politics of the banana; last is the science of the plant." I wonder if that was what they tried, and the interconnections of all the information prevented its success? I somehow don't think so.

It's a good-enough book on an important topic that SHOULD cause each person who reads it some discomfort at our societal callousness and myopia. I recommend it to those most likely to be irritated by progressive politics and social liberalism. Isolationists particularly encouraged to apply!

TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, a fair and balanced view of a deeply dysfunctional family

TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man
MARY L. TRUMP PhD
Simon & Schuster
$28.00 hardcover, $14.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In this revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J. Trump and the toxic family that made him, Mary L. Trump, a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece, shines a bright light on the dark history of their family in order to explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric.

Mary Trump spent much of her childhood in her grandparents’ large, imposing house in the heart of Queens, where Donald and his four siblings grew up. She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr. and Donald.

A first-hand witness to countless holiday meals and family interactions, Mary brings an incisive wit and unexpected humor to sometimes grim, often confounding family events. She recounts in unsparing detail everything from her uncle Donald’s place in the family spotlight and Ivana’s penchant for re-gifting to her grandmother’s frequent injuries and illnesses and the appalling way Donald, Fred Trump’s favorite son, dismissed and derided him when he began to succumb to Alzheimer’s.

Numerous pundits, armchair psychologists, and journalists have sought to parse Donald J. Trump’s lethal flaws. Mary L. Trump has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick. She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga, not just because of her insider’s perspective but also because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.

I CHECKED THIS EBOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE YOUR PUBLIC LIBRARIES, FOLKS!

My Review: First and foremost, this book is *NOT* a takedown of 45. It is *NOT* a cash-grab by an angry, estranged niece whose greed was stoked by envy. Sorry haters, Dr. Mary Trump outflanked you and wrote her own family's story.

It is the story of Fred Trump's family from the viewpoint of someone who, despite not being welcomed within it because her father needed to be himself, still was there inside the bunker until her father's death. A childhood spent among people like the Trumps is not a healthy childhood, and Dr. Trump clearly felt the miasma of wrongness that permeated The House (as her grandparents' monumentally ugly Queens home was referred to in the family).

Trumpshack in all its straight-from-the-factory glory.
These are formative memories, even though the occupants can't see the wrongness from within they leave their scars. Freddy Trump, Mary's father, wasn't someone who did a lot of sharing with his youngest child. But that did not prevent her from making memories, with or without him in them, that included all the extended family, aunts and uncles all.

It is the memory of a person whose entire life was formed by bad parents, her own as well as each of theirs. It is the analytical conclusions of a trained psychologist whose degree is from a highly regarded school. It is also chilling, infuriating, and deeply, deeply saddening to read.

Freddy Trump never got a break; he died before his life developed meaning and long after he stopped caring about it. Fred, father of the Devil's Brood, was a tyrannical, withholding man without a shred of empathy or a trace of capacity to experience, still less express, emotion. Mary Anne Trump, illegal Scottish immigrant, was useless and indifferent as a mother or grandmother.

And there is no doubt that 45 was formed in this nuclear reactor to be exactly who he is. Mary Trump, future psychologist, had a balcony seat to the process and tells us exactly what happened on the occasions she was present. This is not sensationalized or presented as a bid for pity. Dr. Trump made a concerted effort to tell us what happened *then* contextualize it on a psychological level.

I didn't want to read another hatchet job on 45. Of course I despise him. I don't need more fuel for that binfire (started as a typo...became what I really meant!). I do, however, need to have some context, some sense of *why* this catastrophe is unfolding. Dr. Mary Trump told me what I wanted to know.

The seeds of the present are always in the past.

NOMADLAND: Don't sit down yet, old folks, the table's got no place for you

NOMADLAND: SURVIVING AMERICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY
JESSICA BRUDER
W.W. Norton
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

WINNER, BEST PICTURE ACADEMY AWARD!

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD WINNER! Is an Academy Award next?

SEPTEMBER 2020 UPDATE Read all about the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of the film based on this book! FRANCES MCDORMAND STARS!! There is a link in the CBC article on how to watch the Festival offerings via web from 10 to 20 September.

The Publisher Says: From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers." Building on her groundbreaking Harper's cover story, "The End of Retirement," which brought attention to these formerly settled members of the middle class, Jessica Bruder follows one such RVer, Linda, between physically taxing seasonal jobs and reunions of her new van-dweller family, or "vanily." Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of both the economy's dark underbelly and the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and hope of these hardworking, quintessential Americans—many of them single women—who have traded rootedness for the dream of a better life.

My Review: I'm not sure how this happened: A talented writer with a well-regarded agent sells a book to an established and deeply experienced editor at a very good publishing house; the net result is a series of magazine articles, good ones mind you, strung into chapters with some basic tarting-up transitions stuffed in the cracks.

The subject is the source of my upthrusting the earned three-star rating. I'm amazed and appalled that "the world is such a cruel place for the US middle class" needs shouting about. Yet it does. I read Methland not so long ago; its tale of towns being eaten alive by the desperate need to Make It even if it means going against the law of the land like Lori Arnold (sister of Tom Arnold, ex-husband of loudmouth Roseanne the Racist) did seems almost quaint. Making It isn't a viable option for the unemployed older worker. Keeping up a house has been replaced in the older homeowner's worrywarting with plain old keeping the house they scrimped and saved to buy. Pensions are no more; 401(k) plans are flattened; Social Security is under attack from greedyass politicos and banksters. What in the hell does someone who can't make her (most likely medical) bills going to do?

That medical-bill thing is an underplayed thread constant throughout the narrative Author Bruder spins. Person after person, story after story, has its starting point with the medical issues that beset all of us and are particularly prevalent among us oldsters. Author Bruder never fails to elucidate the nature of the medical issues. She's letting you know without doing the teller and the told the insulting condescension of saying outright, "this is due to the insane US medical system, and yes these are people with genuine conditions and diseases who need treatment not shirkers." The mostly older workampers (a word coined by the owners of Workamper dot com in 1987 for the growing legions of mobile, seasonal workers) do jobs that stress their already taxed and aging bodies; then they go "home" to a space most of y'all would sneer at. But it's their own. And so they remain houseless but not homeless.

The people houseless after the 2008 implosion are, in significant numbers, taking to the road. They've traded real estate for wheel estate. They have no choice. It's a simple truth that women are the major sufferers, since they've historically earned less than men and now, in older years, are in line to receive lower Social Security payouts. And the hiring bias for permanent, professional jobs (that we're told doesn't exist) discriminates against women and then, insult to injury, against older workers. Takin' it to the streets has changed meaning in the forty-plus years since the Doobie Brothers sang it. (That was only partially ironic.)

The unbearable whiteness of the mobile homeless is another sad commentary on how the inequality of the US system plays out. People of Color don't follow the nomadic way. Why? When one is at risk of DEATH in a goddamned traffic stop why do you even ask the fucking question?! So the meager assistance and illusory control offered to whites as they take to the road is denied to darker-skinned citizens.

I'm seriously irked by the disjointed nature of the book. Many things are excellent. Author Bruder is a quality storyteller. I'm a smidge uncomfortable about the smacks-of-disaster-tourism nature of a three-year research project into a subject that has no real relevance to the life of a Boerum Hill-dwelling Columbia University professor. I'm willing to skip past that for the light her work shines on those of us thrown away by our sacred US system...absent timely and generous help from friends, this story could be my very own...but then I smack into the disorganization problem.

I don't doubt that there is an organizing principle at work here. The author's a journalist. The editor's an experienced pro. But I can't follow it in any kind of satisfying, narrative-building way. My failing? Permaybehaps...but from the first chapter I got the idea that a narrative would unfold that included two people as my focus. That didn't happen because one person, Linda, whose story really is the backbone of the tale, disappears and reappears at different times doing different things at various stages of her life, while Silvianne vanishes for the length of a Bible before sprouting back into view near the end, and what I assumed was a close friendship kinda wasn't but there's another closer friend who doesn't appear that much in Linda's narrative. I'm left wondering if the reason might not be that LaVonne (the aforementioned friend) called out Author Bruder's motives early on (which we're not told early on, another chronological lapse).

Whatever my quibbles about structure, the information in the piece is grounded in solid reporting. You'll have to look at the endnotes to know this. There are a few footnotes, but these are parenthetical asides. The absence of inline citations is, in my view, not a good decision. Howsomever I can at least see the point of it: Inline citations in a popular social history will scare off the punters, and the slenderness of the proffered analysis of a section of the homelessness epidemic will cause derisory snortings and contemptuous pooh-poohings from Academia.

I hope this book achieves a wide readership among those most in need of its blend of qualities: The comfortable and clueless six-figurers who infest our gentrifying coastal cities. It can happen to you, kids, and it becomes a very great deal more likely to the less likely you are to vote in November 2018.

METHLAND: The Death and Life of American Small Town, votes have consequences and not all good!

METHLAND: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
NICK REDING
Bloomsbury USA
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic as it sweeps the American heartland a timely, moving, very human account of one community s attempt to battle its way to a brighter future.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren t enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, longlasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.

Over a period of four years, journalist Nick Reding brings us into the heart of Oelwein through a cast of intimately drawn characters, including: Clay Hallburg, the town doctor, who fights meth even as he struggles with his own alcoholism; Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose caseload is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime; and Jeff Rohrick, a meth addict, still trying to kick the habit after twenty years. Tracing the connections between the lives touched by the drug and the global forces that set the stage for the epidemic, Methland offers a vital and unique perspective on a pressing contemporary tragedy.

My Review: The major take-away of this book, for me at least, was to explain something I've been at a complete loss to comprehend: The virulent, violent hatred of Immigrants by the Trumpanzees. Racism makes no sense to me...I hate a person, not A People...but its prevalence in what I don't accept as the Heartland, more flyover country, attests to its power. But why?

It's not their skin color, or their accent, those are things that familiarity will wear down to nubs in a remarkably short time. Say a generation. My father still made fun of Italians and Poles; I can't pick an Italian-American or Polish-American out of a lineup.

It's not that they're taking our jobs. That's misdirected class warfare, and can almost always be redirected against the vile perpetrators of the crime of job theft after a few months of patient and factual discussion.

It's the lawlessness of the Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations and their enforcers. All Mexican. All brown skinned and all Spanish speaking. The roundups and the crimes and the staggering cost of the drugs' prevalence in an area of little to no economic opportunity, coupled with the lack of other, countervailing examples of good, law-abiding, tax-paying people of the same ethnicity and skin color and language family, make the only experiences the Trumpanzees have negative to cataclysmically horrible ones.

During Prohibition, the wine-drinking Italians became bootleggers as the idiotic and useless Volstead Act drove demand for the high of alcohol underground. Others were in the game as well, of course, but the Italians used their cultural priority of family-before-others to create and run a lucrative industry supplying Americans with their hooch. Bathtub gin blinded people. Straight-up wood alcohol killed people, despite being cut with water and flavored with gawd-knows-what. People still got high because the Depression was on and the world was horrible and this guinea down the road could hook you up with some oblivion for a dime.

A few minor modifications to that and you have the Irish moonshiners of the 19th century, the Black crack dealers of the mid-20th century, or the Mexican meth dealers of the 21st.

Does a pattern become apparent here? People want, maybe even need, to get high. There's always a way, and there's always a law against it. Which makes satisfying the need profitable, which attracts the disenfranchised (often immigrants), which leads to stigmatization then outright calumniation and scapegoating.

Methland lays the case against stigmatizing the fulfillers of the need and directs our attention to the creators of the need. It's done without hysteria or shrillness, no finger-pointing orgy of shame. It's a rational, reasoned discussion of the costs and the causes of a scourge that won't stop scourging our backs until we look up and see it clear and plain:

Corporate capitalism.

CHRISTIAN NATION, a cautionary tale about believing the Believers

CHRISTIAN NATION
FREDERIC C. RICH
W.W. Norton
$25.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5 appalled, terrified stars of five


It's Banned Books Week, so we are well advised to think about what the ability to ban a book really means.

“The biggest mistake that we can make is that we don’t believe that they believe what they say. And for many of them, they do mean exactly what they say," says author Frederic C. Rich in his Politico.com interview from this past July. Look at the Texas school textbook adoption wars over presenting creationism as a scientific theory. All of those folks are elected...by the few who bother to show up, and those are usually the wingnuts from the religious right with an agenda to impose.

Start where you are. Do what you can, what you're capable of doing. Fight the small battle here, and win or lose, the war's course will change. Maybe you'll even live long enough to be glad that you did. I only hope you won't live long enough to regret that you didn't.


The Publisher Says: “They said what they would do, and we did not listen. Then they did what they said they would do.”

So ends the first chapter of this brilliantly readable counterfactual novel, reminding us that America’s Christian fundamentalists have been consistently clear about their vision for a “Christian Nation” and dead serious about acquiring the political power to achieve it. When President McCain dies and Sarah Palin becomes president, the reader, along with the nation, stumbles down a terrifyingly credible path toward theocracy, realizing too late that the Christian right meant precisely what it said.

In the spirit of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, one of America’s foremost lawyers lays out in chilling detail what such a future might look like: constitutional protections dismantled; all aspects of life dominated by an authoritarian law called “The Blessing,” enforced by a reconfigured Internet known as the “Purity Web.” Those who defy this system, among them the narrator, live on the edges of society, sustained by the belief that democracy will rise to triumph over such tyrannical oppression.

My Review: Every Banned Books Week we are well advised to think about what the ability to ban a book really means. In Author Rich's novel, banning a book is no longer a concern. The apparatus of theocracy has taken over the libraries. Nothing so trivial as banning A book is necessary, slate entire areas of human knowledge for destruction. Pulp those books that don't tell the story you want told. Knowledge dies, after all. We saw that after the fall of the Roman Empire. The only libraries were in monasteries, and the only works supposed to be preserved were dogmatic, didactic christian texts. Fortunately, some subversives hid works by Lucretius, Epicurus, Juvenal, Suetonius, in their stacks. As theocracy self-destructed, as all -ocracies (including dem-) inevitably do, sharp-eyed secularists found these works and brought them out into the public gaze for the first time in as much as a millennium. (For more about this, see my review of The Swerve.)

Think about that. For a millennium, a thousand years, knowledge that might have led the world out of pervasive hunger, away from destructive hatred and war over trivia, was hidden away so it would at least survive as words on paper. It couldn't be discussed, because it couldn't be read. It was banned. Very effectively and efficiently banned. When the ban was lifted, the world's best brains went into overdrive and they've never slowed down since.

Yet we still, after this excellent example of the benefits of freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom from the fear that censorship breeds, we still have to fight the well-meaning, well-intentioned, and always wrong "moral protectors" and "nicey-nice police." It doesn't have to start big, and in fact, that is author Rich's point in this novel. His story, of a subversive in the Christian Nation, a convert to the Church of God in America from the losing side in the Seige of Manhattan, starts with the run-up to the 2008 election. In Rich's horrifying nightmare, McCain and Palin won, and then they did what they said they would do: They "restored American to a Christian Nation." They used your smartphone with its eternal connection to communication satellites to track you. It's the law that you must have it on you. It's the law that every device you use must be connected to the Purity Web (which we call universal wi-fi connectivity, and long for!) that your every utterance or interface with another person be monitorable.

Imagine how many petaflops of information this state collects. And sifts. And uses against its citizens, but only in the kindest of spirits and in the expectation of their draconian rules and totalitarian controls bringing all souls to the Rapture as pure as is possible.

This kind of nightmare is all too possible. Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan. Look at the rhetoric coming out of the Tea Party. No, no, says the complacent and lazy citizen, who can't be bothered to vote for school board members or participate in electioneering, no way can that happen here.

“The biggest mistake that we can make is that we don’t believe that they believe what they say. And for many of them, they do mean exactly what they say," says author Rich in his Politico.com interview from this past July. Look at the Texas school textbook adoption wars over presenting creationism as a scientific theory. All of those folks are elected...by the few who bother to show up, and those are usually the wingnuts from the religious right with an agenda to impose.

This novel is set in a world that didn't happen, where the battle against censorship costs lives. Those lives are lost because, in that world like this one we live in, so very many of us can't be bothered, don't want to, are too tired or bored or stressed or lazy to, stand up and say NO MORE when censorship is proposed or imposed. And Rich, a high-powered financial industry lawyer, works with the kind of people whose money-making and self-interest are tightly bound up with the trends in thought and speech around the world. In short, if he doesn't know from the inside whereof he speaks when he speaks about the consequences voicelessness, of stifled freedom to speak and think as one desires, no one alive does.

Start where you are. Do what you can, what you're capable of doing. Fight the small battles and, win or lose, the war's course will change. Maybe you'll even live long enough to be glad that you did. I only hope you won't live long enough to regret that you didn't.

Read the entire review at Shelf Inflicted, a Group Blog.

PREDATOR NATION, a seven-year-old wake-up call as trenchant now as it was then

PREDATOR NATION: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
CHARLES H. FERGUSON
Currency
$15.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators’ path to conquest.
Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.
· Finance has become America’s dominant industry, while manufacturing, even for high technology industries, has nearly disappeared.
· The financial sector has become increasingly criminalized, with the widespread fraud that caused the housing bubble going completely unpunished.
· Federal tax collections as a share of GDP are at their lowest level in sixty years, with the wealthy and highly profitable corporations enjoying the greatest tax reductions.
· Most shockingly, the United States, so long the beacon of opportunity for the ambitious poor, has become one of the world’s most unequal and unfair societies.

If you’re smart and a hard worker, but your parents aren’t rich, you’re now better off being born in Munich, Germany or in Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New York.

This radical shift did not happen by accident.

I BORROWED THIS BOOK FROM THE LIBRARY. THANK GOODNESS I HAVE A LIBRARY NEAR ME! SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY FOR A BETTER WORLD.

My Review: I am second to none in my passionate love for and gratitude to the United States of America for the astoundingly amazingly wonderfully free-from-want life I lead.

And as that life is, day by day, taken from me piecemeal by the rich, the greedy, and the stupid, I am going to shout and point and wave my arms a lot to get the attention of the few, the many, the unwilling or willing, to see if I can't effect some small change to build on.

Count on it.

This library book was a fourteen-day loan, and I've had it seventeen days. I couldn't read much at a time because it made me furious, hysterically angry, livid to the point of stroke. I am disabled by a chronic, genetically transmitted condition that causes severe and painful acid buildup on my joints and near areas that have tendons. (Check the photos on my profile...that claw-lookin' thing is my left hand.) I have health care AND get prescriptions for the medicines that ameliorate my disabling condition. As they are given under regular supervision, I am able to avoid the problem of renal failure that comes with more than one of the medications, not to mention horrible gastric consequences, which I just have to put up with.

And in this rich nation, would you like to know what the princely payout to me, to enable me to survive? A little under $1200 a month. Food stamps, $150 a month at most, can't be awarded to someone in assisted living. Medicaid and Medicare, working in tandem, keep my illnesses from becoming *dire*. These programs, which here in New York State are more generous than most places, are part of the privilege I experience as an old white man with friends whose positions of experience and power were used to my benefit in acquiring my safety net. And, were it not for the charity of friends, not please be assured my family members, oh nay nay nay, never dare even to ask them for help (well, now, one aunt handed over $4000 as I was losing my house, which put off the evil day for several months), I would've been completely unable to face the wall of bureaucracy still less get what I need. Imagine that case, ill and despairing and truly at rock bottom, without my white male privilege. The COVID-19 plague's ravages fall disproportionately on poorer communities; many of those people are wage-earners on the ragged edge already; their employers are firing right and left, unemployment is running out, and many are simply unable to make do without private charity. Which has a limit.

And then what? I don't know.

I am, as you see, not alone in my predicament. I am, in fact, a reasonably common-or-garden recipient of the fucking that corporations and CEOs and banks are doling out to each and every one of us not in their club. It's not new, this phenomenon. It was for millennia the norm. Then, one day in 1773, a group of rowdy, angry, sick-of-it colonists in Boston (of all places) said “oh fuck you” to king and church and country. Go Massachusetts!

Now, 240 years on, the rotten sleazy fucks we kicked out of power are back with a vengeance, thanks to 1) greedy politicians, 2) evil, evil, evil preachers, 3) stupid, complicit conservatives and “libertarians” (aka the Authoritarian's Best Friends League), and last but not least the laziest, most astoundingly selfish population of “future millionaires” (tip: if daddy wasn't a millionaire, you won't be either, sure as the sun rises in the east) ever fattened up for the slaughter on the American Dream (of what? for whom?).

No. I don't mean the immigrants. I don't mean the union workers. I mean you. The person who doesn't know who his/her state senator is. Who the county tax assessor is. Who watches fucking idiot-box crap and not presidential debates because it's too hard, it's boring, it doesn't matter anyway.

Welcome to what happens when you're not paying attention.

And you deserve it.

I, on the other hand, who have voted and shouted and waved my arms about this shit since 1980, do not. But here I am in the same goddamned boat as the lazy, the stupid, the religious, the conservative or libertarian. Is that in any way fair? No. It sucks wookiee balls. (Nobody likes hair in their teeth.)

But still, there it is. Hate is written into state constitutions because the Jesus Brigade for Tradishnull Fambly Valyews (aka Focus on the Family, et alii) doesn't like faggots. State senators, the same goddamned fucks in the GOP who authorize spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on casinos, *still* want to cut funding for public health IN THE MIDDLE OF A PLAGUE.

And this angry, prescient book details how it got this way, why it stays this way, and, in one short ending chapter, what possible means there are to combat it. I am not, by nature, an optimistic person. I sincerely believe that humans love one thing more than hate, and that's group hate. Food, sex, money...all significantly farther down the list. Hate is the killing ape's favorite pastime. What else (as we see increasingly obviously in 2020) is fandom, sports or TV or celebrity? What else is religion, politics? So I expect things will get worse, because the haters like that. Everyone should suffer!

And so we do. In our billions, we suffer. Unnecessarily, inexcusably, preventably. And so it goes.

But it does not have to. Everyone, and I mean every last one, of the US's eligible voters has a moral duty to vote in the November 2020 elections. The entire House of Representatives, a third of the Senate, and the Presidency of the United States of America need to be elected. All of those offices need to be held by people whose ideas and goals for the USA are in line with yours...and I am willing to bet that a lot of y'all have undergone some sort of shift in those goals.

So get out and vote!