Omnivoracious

Read Up on 2013 Hall of Fame Rock and Rollers

Tuesday night in Los Angeles, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea announced the roster for the 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which will take place April 28.

This year's lineup is an eclectic mix spanning generations and genres, comprised of rap pioneers Public Enemy, stalwart arena rockers Rush, classic rock sister act Heart, prolific singer-songwriter Randy Newman, Queen of Disco Donna Summer, Mississippi blues guitarist Albert King, legendary producers Lou Adler and Quincy Jones.

How did they get here? An artist must have a recording career spanning at least 25 years in order to be eligible, and the committee considers more subjective criteria, as well, including the "influence and significance of the artists' contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll."

Learn more about the 2013 inductees and their rich histories.

 

 

Fight to the Finish: Two Books About the Killing of Osama Bin Laden

By Sara Nelson

Generally, I think you'd say I'm a mostly fiction reader, with a little memoir, some biography and the occasional think-y book thrown in for balance. The one thing you'd probably never say -- just ask the people who know me -- is that I'm known for my opinions on books by or about soldiers (except maybe The Yellow Birds, but that, again, is fiction).

I disclaimed as much when I previously wrote:

OK, so I'm not an aficionado of the genre: I've never seen Delta Force or read any of the other books about Navy Seals... In fact, I'm the mother of a MAM (military aged man in SEAL parlance); we're not generally the ones who love to read about anybody's children putting themselves in serious harm's way -- even for love of country, let alone the pure thrill of it.

As a MOMAM, I admit to fascination with Mark Owen's descriptions in No Easy Day, particularly about his childhood in rural Alaska: "My parents never let me play with toy guns because by the time I was finished with elementary school I was carrying a .22 rifle;" Less appealing, perhaps, but still fascinating was the stuff about the practical jokes SEALS play on each other: Hanging a bra on a buddy's backpack? Slipping a sex toy into someone else's bag of gear? This is a book that celebrates a certain kind of man and a certain kind of brotherhood.

There's none of that cartoonishness in The Finish, Mark Bowden's measured, reportorial account of the same topic. Instead, Bowden includes accounts of private conversations he had with Barack Obama, as well as interviews he did with some of Owen's very same SEALS. Ultimately he produces a better, more balanced, more interesting book -- which is why it's higher on our list.

But then, it depends what you're in the mood for. If you're hankering for what Jonathan Segura called, in Publisher's Weekly, "gear porn," No Easy Day is the book for you. If what you'd like is a more thoughtful account of how the Obama administration made one of the most important decisions of its first presidency, buy Bowden.

Both of these books can be found in our 2012 Best Books of the Year. Click here to see all our editors' picks.

 

Oliver Broudy: My Favorite Kind of Atheist

Non-believers generally fall on a spectrum from militant to utterly disinterested, but some, like New Yorker Oliver Broudy, truly care about religious faith. To their immense credit, they tend to be actively curious listeners with an overt willingness to suspend disbelief and approach the faithful with the peace offering of an open mind, in an attempt to understand better how the other half lives.

Broudy is fast becoming the essayist of record for such generous atheism. In the past eighteen months, his Kindle Singles have explored this theme through the lenses of three unique narratives, building a cohesive body of work that portends Broudy's emerging mastery of the long-form, high-stakes, nonfiction narrative.

The Saint (also available in Spanish as El Santo) profiles James Otis--a wealthy Gandhi devotee and collector of Mahatma-related memorabilia--a seemingly routine journalism gig that takes Broudy halfway around the world and through a whiplashing gauntlet of emotional crests and troughs. Forced to play friend, protector, fixer, PR agent, and a host of other duties on Otis's behalf, Broudy weathers lies, danger, and difficult self-discovery, emerging from his Gotham ennui with a tale that succeeds as profile, travelogue, and tale of true adventure.

On its surface, The Codex is a coyly unfolding narrative of Broudy's trip to Prague in pursuit of the meaning of a strange book, "a book so explicit that it would be banned by any public library, a book whose pages chronicled the extinction of mystery, and at the same time spawned new mysteries just by existing." Featuring an outspoken cosmetic surgeon--a mysterious artist of the female form who may provide the key to Broudy's own mixed feeling about adulthood--it employs gorgeous prose, a keen succession of nested structures, and a parade of scalping insights into modern life.

Gonzo Curiosity: David Wolman and "The End of Money"

The most important thing that teachers can impart to their students is a desire to learn. Similarly, there's a certain class of book that I think of--and evangelize--as "nonfiction for non-specialists." When successful these books tackle widely relevant subjects via more or less dramatic narrative, spun in language that's unabashedly intended for a popular audience. (Recent blockbuster examples include Moneyball, Steve Jobs, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks). The very best of these inspire a desire to find out more.

Enter David Wolman, a Portland-based journalist and contributing editor for Wired whose surprising bibliography illustrates just such eclectic curiosity. When I first came upon his work--via his Kindle Single, The Instigators--Wolman had already written books on the history of English spelling and the meaning of left-handedness. This year, he published The End of Money (print | Kindle). An Amazon Best Book of 2012 (#85 on our Top 100 list: Print editions | Kindle books), this fascinating book explores "the coming cashless society" through a cast of compelling characters that includes an end-times fundamentalist who views the growing obsolescence of cash as a sign of the coming rapture; an Icelandic artist whose claim to fame illustrates the complicated relationship between cash and nationalism; an American libertarian and coin-maker convicted on federal charges for the distribution of "Liberty" coins and Ron Paul dollars; and an Indian software engineer (self-billed as "the assassin of cash") whose firm is enabling digital payment methods that are lifting the living standards of thousands of poor New Delhi residents via their cell phones. Raising the stakes with a personal experiment, Wolman even goes (almost) a full year without using cash at all.

Readers need neither an advanced degree in economics nor even a basic understanding of currency markets to have a lot of fun with this book. If you've ever paid for a purchase in cash, you’ve got all the background you'll need. "I suspected the book would resonate, but I didn't anticipate such a loud and sustained response," Wolman tells Amazon. "Perhaps I should have. After all, the story of cash is enmeshed within the much broader story of money, the economy, and value itself."

Penned by Presidents

They are international superstars, and yet they are public servants. We are united by the ideal they represent, but we are often divided by the policies they enact. As the 2012 election concludes, take a look beyond the ballots and past the process.

Explore President Obama’s inspiring upbringing. See President George W. Bush’s choices in a whole new way. Discover President Clinton’s perception of his own complexities. Get a rare glimpse at President George H.W. Bush’s personal side. And follow President Reagan’s road from home to Hollywood to the White House.

Written by the five most recent Americans to be known as the Leader of the Free World, the Commander in Chief, Mr. President and (to a select few) POTUS, here are five books that transcend politics to help us understand the human beings who have occupied the Oval Office.

 

 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

"That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind.

In fact, I can recall only one story that dealt explicitly with the subject of race; as I got older, it would be repeated more often, as if it captured the essence of the morality tale that my father's life had become."

 

 

Decision Points by George W. Bush

"The decision process was all-consuming. I thought about it, talked about it, analyzed it, and prayed about it. I had a philosophy I wanted to advance, and I was convinced I could build a team worthy of the presidency. I had the financial security to provide for my family, win or lose. Ultimately, the decisive factors were less tangible. I felt a drive to do more with my life, to push my potential and test my skills at the highest level."

 

 

My Life by Bill Clinton

"Perhaps if Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had lived, things would have been different. Perhaps if Humphrey had used the information about Nixon's interference with the Paris peace talks, things would have been different. Perhaps not. Regardless, those of us who believed that the good of the 1960s outweighted the bad would fight on, still fired by the heroes and dreams of our youth."

 

 

All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings by George H.W. Bush

"Dear Mum, Well today was the big day—in fact one of the biggest thrills of my life, I imagine. We marched down to the #1 hanger and they read out the names for the first hop. I was in. I went down, got my gear, and then consulted the board. Plane P-18 1st hop—2nd hop Plane P-18 check pilot Boyle. I immediately went around trying to find out what kind of a check Boyle is. All I got was 'pretty tough'. This was quite disheartening."

 

 

An American Life: The Autobiography by Ronald Reagan

"If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, I suppose I would never have left Illinois.

I've often wondered at how lives are shaped by what seem like small and inconsequential events, how an apparently random turn in the road can lead you a long way from where you intended to go—and a long way from wherever you expected to go. For me, the first of these turns occurred in the summer of 1932, in the abyss of the Depression."

The Neurological and the Divine: An Interview with Oliver Sacks

Physician and professor Oliver Sacks is the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and Musicophilia, among many other works. A few months ago, Dr. Sacks—whose moving, fascinating collections of case studies nearly convinced this diehard fiction reader to major in neuroscience instead of literature—graciously welcomed me into his New York City study to discuss his latest book. Hallucinations, fresh off the presses today, is one of our Best Books of the Month selections for November.

Mia Lipman: In Hallucinations, you mention that your childhood migraines are one of the reasons you became a neurologist. How did they help shape your path?

Dr. Sacks: My experiences go back to my first memories of when I was three or four, suddenly seeing a brilliant zigzag which seemed to be vibrating, then enlarged and covered everything to one side. This has happened innumerable times since, but that first time was very terrifying…I know I was in the garden, and part of the garden wall seemed to disappear, and I asked my mother about it. She too had classical migraines, so she explained what it was about and said that it was benign and it would only last a few minutes, and I'd be none the worse. So though I'm not in love with the attacks, it's nice to know that one can live with this quite well.

So that early experience made you curious about why this was happening to you?

Indeed, and there were other experiences. Sometimes it was just color, perhaps in one half of the visual field, or things would be frozen and I couldn't see any movement. So I think this gave me a very early feeling that it's only the privilege of a normal brain which allows us to see the way we do—and that what seems to be a simple vision in fact must have dozens of different components, and any one of these can go down. So it was a learning experience for me as well.

Speaking of learning experiences, you talk in the book about a period in your 30s when you did a lot of hallucinogenic drugs—

Ah, I thought that would come up. [Laughing.]

Of course, it's the best part! I especially liked your description of the results as "a mix of the neurological and the divine." What did this self-experimentation teach you about your field, as well as personally?

I can't conceal that my motives were sort of mixed, but these were learning experiences as well as recreational ones, and occasionally terrifying ones. The gain, I think, [is that] it's a way of revealing various capacities and incapacities in the brain, including, perhaps, mystical ones…I quote William James, who, after taking nitrous oxide, said that it showed him there were many forms of consciousness other than rational consciousness, and that these seem to be uncovered one by one. And that's quite an experience. I do not recommend it to anybody, and I hope my writing about these things is not seen as a recommendation. I think I'm very lucky to have survived them, which several of my friends and contemporaries didn't.

The cornerstone condition in Hallucinations is Charles Bonnet syndrome, or CBS. Will you please describe CBS and tell us why you chose to center the book on this condition?

I see lots of elderly people who are hearing impaired or visually impaired but quite articulate and intact intellectually. In general, the hearing impaired get musical hallucinations and, even more commonly, the visually impaired can get visual hallucinations of a complex and dramatic character. These were described in the middle of the 18th century by a Swiss naturalist, Charles Bonnet, and we speak now of Charles Bonnet syndrome. It used to be regarded—when I say "used to," I mean until 1990—as very rare, with only a few dozen cases reported. But it's now obvious that it affects between 10 and 20 percent of people with significant visual impairment. But like all hallucinatory experiences, people are frightened to mention it, and one may only get an account of it when there's a nice, trusting relationship between the patient and the doctor.

[CBS] can be very frightening, as it was for the old lady Rosalie whom I describe. But she was hugely relieved when I could say, "You're not mad, you're not demented, you're not on anything, and this is a normal reaction of your brain to being blind." And I told her about Charles Bonnet, and she was very tickled by it.

She liked to have it named.

Yes, yes—she said, "Tell the nurses I have Charles Bonnet syndrome." I speak about a very different sort of hallucinatory experience she had when she thought she was dying, and I didn't know whether I should add that, in fact, she survived and is now enjoying her 99th year.

That's wonderful to know. I'd also like to explore the section on auditory hallucinations, particularly the cases where people hear voices when they're in serious danger. Are these recognized in retrospect as inner commands, or do some patients continue to believe it was an outside voice?

Well, it may depend on the person somewhat. Freud, no less, described this himself on two occasions when he was in mortal peril: hearing a voice, he said, as "a shout in the ear," saying "this is the end"—and at the same time seeing the words printed in midair. On the other hand, when he heard the voice of his fiancée occasionally when he was a lonely young man in Paris, he wondered if there was something, I want to say, paranormal. He wondered if there was some telepathy, and he would always note down the exact time and try and check. In fact, nothing ever happened.

That must have been very disappointing.

He was perhaps disappointed and relieved. I mention in a different context, in a chapter on epilepsy, a woman who heard a voice—God's voice—telling her to run for Congress. [Laughs.]

And she followed it?

She followed it. And she advertised it, and people thought, "Well, you know, if God suggested it…"

I wonder how she did in the polls.

She did very well. It had always been a strongly Democratic district, but she almost tipped it the other way.

Trend Stetting 23: Playing the Links

"If there's one thing that etymology proves conclusively, it's that the world is a wretched place," Mark Forsyth cheerfully informs us in his bestselling language guide The Etymologicon, out in a bright yellow paperback edition this month.

Marrying cheek and melancholy as only the British can (full disclosure for new readers: I'm half-English and addicted to Beyond the Fringe), Forsyth walks us through the workings of his frenetically interesting mind while unpeeling the layers of history behind common words and phrases. He traipses seamlessly from Pantheon to pandemonium, bunkum to bunk beds, pausing along the way to explain how fool's finger and leech finger evolved into their much less colorful modern counterparts, middle finger and ring finger. More's the pity.

I've read more books about words and language than the average bear, and sometimes (spoiler alert for future columns) they turn out dry and impenetrable. The Etymologicon is the opposite in all the best ways—easy to follow, free of jargon and footnotes, and uproariously funny—and I had trouble putting it down, even as Mr. Forsyth overstuffed my brain with obscure knowledge.

When a chapter on heroin follows a chapter on SPAM and the transition seems perfectly logical, you know you're in expert hands. The consequences of both words may be wretched, but you'll keep reading all the same.

Like the sound of The Etymologicon? Here's a treat for you: Forsyth's next book, The Horologicon, lands in the UK on November 1. Feel free to join me for a cuppa as I await the import.

Too Good to Be True: An Interview with Benjamin Anastas

Benjamin Anastas's first novel, An Underachiever's Diary, was hailed as the "funniest, most underappreciated book of the 1990s"; his second, The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance, was named a New York Times Notable Book. Then Anastas's personal and professional lives fell apart. His new memoir, Too Good to Be True, tells the story of this dramatic downward spiral—and how he slowly, painfully inched his way out of it.

In a recent email interview, the author answered questions about parenthood, process, and how to stake your claim as a writer.

Mia Lipman: This book is raw—much of it is a chronicle of personal failure. Was it cathartic or painful to write?

Benjamin Anastas: I started writing the book at one of those moments when nothing was working: I couldn’t pay my bills, I kept sending off résumés but never hearing back, my girlfriend was getting freaked out by my broke-ness, even my four-year-old son had started to bemoan the fact that we could never buy anything. It was a historically bad time. So when I started to write about it, I felt an immediate sense of relief—not that my troubles were magically over, but that I had some agency again. I could write about the feeling of living in a time and place—Brooklyn in the era of the $2 million brownstone—that just didn’t seem real sometimes. It definitely helped.

For most aspiring authors, just getting a book published seems like summiting the mountain. Your first novel was a hit, but it didn't guarantee more success. Do you think there's a point at which a writer can truly relax about the future?

Before I became a parent and ran into this extended stretch of trouble, I'd always subscribed to the F. Scott Fitzgerald school of economics: Sell a book, quit a job. Pay off your “terrible small debts” and decamp to Europe. Not anymore! Writing is too precarious, the rewards too delayed; aside from the harsh realities of trying making a living, there is the constant fear that the well is going to dry up. I don’t think there’s ever really a point where you’ve “made it” and can just relax. There’s always that next book gnawing at you, taunting from the other side of the empty page.

Too Good to Be True closes with a letter to your son. Is this book a diary of sorts, one you'll want to share with him when he's older?

My son knows about the book. I’d like him to read it when he’s older, but I’m not going to push it on him. I want his own curiosity to be his guide. While I was writing, it slowly became clear to me that he was my intended audience; that in going back to unravel the story of his origins, I was trying to free him of the bondage that comes from not knowing, the deceptions that families conspire to create and keep hidden over time. As a child of divorce myself, I never wanted him to question my commitment and my love.

Trend Stetting 22: Judgment Day

Lauren Leto is the coauthor of Texts from Last Night: All the Texts No One Remembers Sending, published in 2010, which I’d touch only if I were, say, stuck in a hostel in Italy on a Sunday without another page of English in sight. (This may or may not be why I once—once—read Dan Brown.) But with that caveat snugly in place, I’m pleased to report that Leto’s new offering, Judging a Book by Its Lover, takes today’s standard-issue literary snark and elevates it to an art form.

By turns hilarious (in “Stereotyping People by Favorite Author”: “Mitch Albom: People who didn’t go to college but do well on crossword puzzles”) and insightful (in “Open Letter to Ayn Rand Fans”: “How can you be so focused and not see that you’ve chosen the most transparent philosophy to live your life by?”), Leto manages to avoid her own traps nearly all the time. Skip the silly intro and the occasional anecdote about her love life—it’s easy to see them coming—and focus on her intelligent, biting, surprisingly useful insights about how what we read (or claim to read) reveals who we are.

But above all else, take advantage of Leto’s exhaustive “How to Fake It” chapter, which chronicles the basic facts, best-known works, and cocktail-party anecdotes about all the authors you’ll ever need to cite for street cred. If CliffsNotes had an opinion and a couple of drinks under their belts, they’d sound like Lauren Leto.

Full disclosure: Even if I hadn’t thoroughly enjoyed most of Judging a Book by Its Lover, I’d have to recommend it anyway because there’s an entire chapter about how the author never finished Infinite Jest. You might remember a certain Trend Stetter making a similar confession earlier this year.

Leto also has a penchant for cheap, ugly copies of books because “crappy paperbacks are tributes to use”—if she ever stops by my house for a G&T and a snarkfest, I know she’ll appreciate the worn stacks of novels from the annual library sale. We’re sisters of the dime-store edition. So for just a few minutes, if she catches me on a good day, I won’t judge.

Open Book: Are Men Necessary?

OK, the title  above is a bit of a cheat: Are Men Necessary? was actually the name of a book by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, published in 2005. But it's the question that jumped to mind over and over while reading Hanna Rosin's The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, an account of the way the sexes are relating to each other in an ever-changing economic and political world. I was lukewarm on Dowd's analysis at the time--it was funny, and smart and charming, as her columns often are, but the book felt somehow slapdash and excruciatingly anecdotal; while covering the same territory, Rosin's, on the other hand, is careful and journalistic, if, at times, more than a little padded. Like so many other well-intentioned cultural analyses, The End of Men sometimes feels like a magazine article on growth hormones.

Then again, sometimes a book is exhausting because it's exhaustive; Rosin addresses the topic of a changing world by talking to all manner of people, from the super-dude Brooklyn stay-at-home Dad to residents of Alexander City, Alabama, whose lives and marriages were unmoored by the closing of the Russell Athletic plant there. She talks to college kids and corporate superearners and criminals, and compares the North American culture to that in other countries. (She may occasionally fall afoul of the Political Correctness police when she blithely refers to Spain as a "traditional or more macho" culture than, say, Belgium or Switzerland.) But what she finds, over and over again, is that women--even if they're still not making the 100 cents on the dollar that men make, in some professions--are becoming increasingly powerful, in work and in the family, while men are suffering. One thru-line: Women, when suddenly unemployed or facing the prospect of having an unemployed husband, tend to "roll up their sleeves." They go back to school, they take lesser jobs, they get on with it; however well-meaning men might be in the same situation, Rosin suggests that their ideas of masculinity, their sense of their responsibility as stoics and providers, keeps them from being so flexible.

What's striking about Rosin's book is that while her bias is pretty clear--I'm assuming she signed off on the provocative title, after all--she doesn't sugarcoat her findings. I'm glad, for example, that she went ahead and discussed how, with the increase of women's power also comes the increase in female violence. I also love that she lets the "outliers" speak. In a section about men whose wives are the bigger breadwinners, she quotes a working Vancouverite husband who makes less than his wife, but shudders at the thought that he could ever be a stay-at-home dad. Guys like that "haunt" him, David tells Rosin. "I'm progressive and enlightened, and on an ideological political level I believe in that guy," he explains. I want that guy to exist. I just don’t want to be that guy."

Every couple of years, there's a book about gender issues that makes a lot of noise in the culture--you can expect to see and hear Rosin all over the media in the next few weeks, just as, a while back, we heard a lot from Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Judith Warner, Jessica Valenti and others. After all, the soundbitish stats are irresistible, e.g.: In 1970 women in the United States contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Today, the average American wife contributes 42.2 percent. But Rosin's book is particularly worth reading precisely because it is, well, a little bit relentless. You might get its message early on, but as you watch the details, personalities, and analyses accrue, you realize you won't soon forget it.

--Sara Nelson