Dinner with Mugabe

The Story of a Dictator

This is going to be a year of great reading if I come across more books as superb as Heidi Holland's Dinner With Mugabe. I began the book on New Year's Eve and finished it in the afternoon on January 1. The story from her book is familiar to anyone interested in African history. Current Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe becomes an international figure in the 1960s during the liberation war against minority rule in Rhodesia, he emerges (with a lot of luck, and what some would say, cruelty) as the face of the negotiations between the old regime and the black majority, he rules with the backing of the international community during the 1980s, and he turns increasingly repressive following the economic difficulties and the rise of a viable opposition in the 1990s and into the 2000s.

Holland's book has some new facts and anecdotes, but a lot of what she covers has been floating around in books and rumor circles for years. What makes her work so compelling and new, however, is the fact that she manages to talk with a wide range of those within Mugabe's circle. She meets with Mugabe's brother, his priest, Mary Churchill Soames (wife of the last British Governor of Zimbabwe), his tailor and his shoes salesman, the first white Cabinet Minister in the new government, and Mugabe himself. What emerges is the picture of an extremely complex and complicated man.

Because of this complexity, it is nearly impossible for one to simply categorize Mugabe in one way or another. He appears to have core values -- many of which are rooted in the Catholic Church and in British society -- but he appears to be a different person depending on the relationship. He can be the thoughtful man to thank someone he has not seen in many years, or the angry despot unwilling to take blame for his country's problems. Holland is able to tell a reader why Mugabe favors a "Hitler mustache" (apparently it was a way to fight back against the white prison guards in Rhodesia) and that he favors silk ties. This type of information is fascinating and rare in books on leaders (other than former South African President Nelson Mandela) from southern Africa. She notes that he loves to listen before making a decision, which often makes him seem passive or unwilling to lead.

There are places the psychological babble becomes a bit much to take in, but overall Holland does well to avoid hammering home her thesis at the end of each chapter after she describes meeting with someone who crossed paths with the African leader. As a journalist, her attempts to psychoanalyze Mugabe are ineffective while her thesis seems to be that understanding Mugabe needs to be a largely exploratory exercise rather than the oft-repeated "Mugabe is misunderstood" or "Mugabe is a horrible human being." She lets those she met with describe the man (even as she does not let them get off lightly if they try to pass off propaganda or a government line), which provides for a great way to understand someone so complicated; someone who at times did so much good but lately has done so much ill.

The Best of 2008

The Best

I had a hard time choosing just two books for 2008. I read more than 120 books this year and all of them were unique and interesting for a variety of reasons. Some of the titles that topped my list, but are ones I could not include as among the very best include Netherland, Slumberland, Lush Life, Jesus' Son, and Hollywood Crows. If I had to choose only two, I would select My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms race by Richard Rhodes.

My Revolutions, like all good books, stuck with me long after I finished it. The story revolves around a former radical in 1960s London who settles into a life of middle-class regularity by the time the 2000s roll around. The book unfolds like a mystery, but is much more than merely a page-turner because it explores loss, gain, and the retrospective ways in which humans understand their pasts. I enjoyed how Hari Kunzru weaves philosophy and political belief into a story about a man attracted to certain views only to become deeply impacted by them as a youth and then, surprisingly, as an adult. The book felt fresh to me even though it told a tale familiar to anyone with radically-inclined, Baby Boomer parents. Kunzru's writing is a big reason for such freshness and his work is to be commended.

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race was a great read because I learned so much from it. I not only learned more about Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but I learned how the United States and the Soviet Union came to be mutually dependent upon one another in terms of how they viewed the threat that each country posed. The book made not only nuclear history feel fresh -- and extremely relevant to the 2008 world -- but also gave greater context into American foreign policy decisions such as going into Iraq and Afghanistan. Richard Rhodes' style is readily accessible to a non-nuclear expert and his book makes history exciting and thought-provoking.

If I could choose a top five, I would include these three titles as well:

Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington. This was a great book in the same way that Matisse and Picasso was a great book -- it was totally unexpected and it told a fantastic story. I read the book in three sitting and listened to the albums as they were discussed in the pages. Reading the book in such a way made the music come alive and helped connect me to Davis and Coltrane.

Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson. This was a terrific read because it helped me better understand African American, male fiction in period between Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin and later writers such as Walter Mosley and Paul Beatty. McPherson's stories seem fresh and his narrative voice stays with a reader long after the book is placed down. He creates simple scenes and then uses powerful, short, declarative sentences to move the stories forward.

Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. The research Vanderbilt completed for this book was incredibly rich and he made such an everyday task -- driving -- seem new and exciting. The book is extremely valuable and prompted me to write down numerous follow-up questions so I could continue understanding how traffic works and why all of us could be better drivers.

Short Stops, No. 9

Trends

This CNN/CareerBuilder survey really interests me because of a New Yorker article I read several months ago on voting trends and the Democratic Party's future. The survey shows that the best places to get jobs in the United States right now are out West. Utah, Montana, Idaho, South Dakota seem to be attracting some job growth.

If this trend continues, with young people moving to smaller cities west of the Rocky Mountains, one wonders if the Democratic Party will actually continue forgoing the South in the future and focusing on growth West instead. This New Yorker article by the brilliant Ryan Lizza makes a pretty compelling case that such a strategy worked once and will work again. (Lizza's article on Barak Obama's Chicago roots is still the best on the President-elect).

Elbowing In

Elbow Room

Anyone seeking to link African-American male fiction written at the turn of the 20th century to African American male fiction written at the turn of the 21st century would be well-served by picking up James Alan McPherson's long overlooked Pulitzer Prize winning book of short stories. Elbow Room is the perfect connection between Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin on the one hand and Walter Mosley, Paul Beatty, Edward P. Jones, and Michael Thomas on the other.

McPherson's writing is so simple (there is not a declarative topic sentence that McPherson does not like) -- and so perfectly tuned -- that it is hard to compare it to any other book. He writes of characters trying to situate themselves in a complex American world fraught by racial tension and racial pasts. His stories involve a grocer accused of charging customers in the inner-city more than he does customers in suburban stores; a woman disfigured by a scar that she claims to deserve; a young man whose love of country music his wife cannot understand; a young hood deciding whether to challenge the social order in an urban neighborhood; an inter-racial couple trying to determine how best to raise a child. His characters are real and have seemingly lived forever. McPherson propels them forward not by force, but by a gradual building of scene, purpose, and interaction. Every cigarette takes awhile to burn, every pause in conversation mounts a little more meaning because of the way in which he crafts sentences.

His last story, entitled "Elbow Room," is unique in that in combines a dialogue between narrator and editor. The narrator is concerned with how a child may feel growing up in an inter-racial household while the editor is more cold and calculating about how a reader may feel while reading the story.

His use of language and story-telling surely was influenced by those who came before him; the story about the white grocer and the young, African-American man prepared to challenge the owner in a series of protests is one straight from the world of Ellison. Yet, one cannot underestimate how his use of words to craft a story influenced later writers like Mosley, especially in his Fearless Jones' series. Beatty, in the way in which he situates a young man in, of all places, an East German bar. Jones, in the way his characters negotiate the urban spaces of Washington, DC. And, Thomas, in the way his protagonist struggles with success despite seemingly having it "made." McPherson's stories provide the link between the Jim Crow world and the supposedly later, post-Jim Crow mind.

The power of McPherson's work is that in language so simple he constructs a world with so many complicated themes that they stay with a reader long after completing the final page. Moreover, the world he creates allowed for future worlds to be built and better understood.

The Adventures of Caramelo

Caramelo

Other critics almost certainly have drawn parallels between Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo. The parallels would be justified -- a coming of age tale, Chicago, Mexico -- as there are many connections between both works. However, such parallels really would not do justice to how wonderful Cisneros' book really is. While Bellow's novel is a sprawling descriptive tale of family and youth in the mold of Charles Dickens, Cisneros' work is a sprawling descriptive tale of family and youth in entirely its own mold. Her work really is an explosive fiesta.

Cisneros deftly traces the history of a Mexican family from the early 20th century into the 1970s and she does so with the style and the energy that few writers could achieve. Her passages on how the Awful Grandmother interacts with her son and with her grand-daughter are filled with small observations on what it means to be in a family, what it means to be human, and what it means to experience life and death.

What is perhaps most amazing is how Cisernos fits all these types of observations into a book of roughly 400 pages -- she incorporates footnotes and historical asides just as Junot Diaz does in The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Doing so serves not only to captivate a reader but also to bring the historical connectivity of the bookand the lives within it into focus. In a way, the history of the family and the times during which the family lived serves as another character. Without it, one would be lost and one suspects Lala would be lost as well.

2008, No. 4

The Age of Reagan

The fourth in an occasional series looking at American past and present politics ahead of the 2008 polls.

Sean Wilentz's new book presents a thoughtful argument -- namely that the last thirty or so years have been the Age of Reagan. For good or for ill, the age has been dominated by the thought, political plans, and subordinates of one man -- Ronald Reagan. It is precisely this argument that makes the book a compelling read. What the book lacks, however, is the weight-carrying historical research that made the Age of Jackson and the Age of Jefferson such paradigm changing works.

That said, there is a lot of historical research in the book. Wilentz covers the archives by citing thousands of primary sources. He shows what went on behind the scenes and in front of the cameras at conventions, summits, and speeches. He gives terrific biographical sketches of major players shows how those players fit into the larger political and economic world.

What he does not do as much as a reader would like is provide the threads that would carry the argument throughout the work. For instance, there are places where the pages read like those from a textbook, giving the standard historiography of the era. The passages are more than news clips of so many recent books, but they do not carry the weight of his central thesis -- that the era was entirely defined by Reagan. This is certainly the case for the section on Bill Clinton. Sure, Clinton encountered the challenges met or lost by Reagan and Bush, but it is hard to say that the former governor of Arkansas was encompassed by them. In fact, in several places Wilentz shows how that was not the case, particularly during the budget discussions under the Republican-controlled legislature or during the sexual crises the former president faced later in his term.

Perhaps a more compelling argument would be that we are living under the Age of Reagan, but that the age is a disparate as the man himself; more of a back-drop than a driving force. The age has been characterized by fragmentation and by social issues as much as it has been characterized by unity and by economic interests. This has made the country extremely difficult to theorize and analyze while it remains somewhat easy to categorize. One could say that Wilentz does the categorizing well and remains challenged by the same numerous puzzle pieces that make it difficult to understand the last thirty years.

Richard Rorty and the Left

The Left

How, then, do great cultural movements end? This is a question that Richard Rorty asks in Achieving Our Country, a splendid book of political philosophy and an exploration of American leftism history. The work, published late in Rorty's life, is an important capstone to a century that many felt began with the New York intellectuals and ended with the Clinton administration.

In my judgment, movements end when activists and advocates transition into more passive roles of authority -- as many of the Baby Boomer, Vietnam generation did during the 1990s when the Democrats assumed control of the White House. No longer hijacking universities or protesting government decisions in the streets, activists and advocates ended up running schools of higher learning and making important policy decisions. Thus, what ultimately emerges from such new found control is a breakdown of the status quo that leaves once unified ideas and directions in many fragmented pieces, giving others' voices and representation in an otherwise sanctified world. Greater representation and stronger voices are wonderful developments in the history of this country, but such changes leave little room for further activism or avocation. Therein lies the dilemma.

Rorty in several essays traces these changes by showing how the Cultural Left emerged as disparate voices that unified briefly during the early 20th century but then broke when Stalin's abuses were uncovered. The Cultural Left, then, had to reconcile support for a system that promoted change for the working class with the idea that a dictator was committing human rights abuses in the name of progress. The New York intellectual circle broke down and branched off. Norman Podhoretz traces this same development in his autobiography, Making It, in the chapter on "The Family Tree." This Left was weakened by its pursuit of an agenda that was matched by a communist behemoth.

The New Left, while still cultural but more legislatively and educationally centered, emerged with the outbreak of the Vietnam War and the call for expanded civil rights, but lacked the same moral and intellectual authority of the previous generation. True, powerful liberal icons such as Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe were still around during the emergence of this new group, but it lacked the same sense of learned urgency of the Cultural Left. The New Left concerned itself with expansion of rights and representation, and ultimately won important victories for African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and women. Also, the New Left won important victories for a new kind of educational curriculum that promoted and extended these groups. Having won such important victories, however, there was little room to advocate for further goals -- and the push for the extension of such victories became the new aim. With that, however, the cultural movement lost its potency.

Rorty does a tremendous job tracing this evolution and helping a reader understand it. He shows how movements end when the ideology can no longer back up action, which is not an altogether uncommon or malicious occurrence; it is mainly the further adaption. He notes that when this happens it leaves thinkers within a rope to hold onto and pushes thought and action is unexpected directions. This happened to the Cultural Left and happened to the New Left. Perhaps what happens more than anything else is the grounding of ideas in social action because that is the easiest way to advocate and activate change.

All of this is tough to understand, but Rorty grapples with it and raises questions that a reader may find altogether new.