by Corey Robin

A well-researched and thickly detailed yet not overly long book; the whole thesis is perfectly laid out in the introduction, while the rest is just supporting evidence. What do you know about Clarence Thomas? I was with most Americans: the only things they “know about him are that he once was accused of sexual harassment and that he almost never speaks from the bench.” And that he’s a black guy that always voted with the late Scalia. Hence the enigma of the title.

Corey Robin’s well-supported thesis is that Thomas is not a conservative who happens to be black. His conservatism is on the contrary rooted in black radicalism. Thomas grew up in the Black Power movement and read and listened to the speeches of Malcolm X repeatedly throughout his life. His vision is one of black separatism based on the traditional patriarchal values he grew up with, raised by an autocratic grandfather. His grandfather, a self-made black businessman, is also the basis for his vision of a black separatist capitalism and feeds into his jurisprudence on cases of economics, the free market, and decisions like Citizens United, which deemed corporate entities entitled to free speech rights.

It’s a thing to wrap your head around: Thomas is so radical he’s conservative. And yet it’s all out there in plain sight in his writings and his decisions on the Court. The book lays it out in detail. Yet somehow we don’t know this – I didn’t. We don’t see it. We see a black conservative and just kind of think, “Well, these things happen.” Robin’s book begins with a quote from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me… When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination – indeed, everything & anything except me.” Reading this book is exactly an eye-opening exercise. (  )

by Ben Ehrenreich

Disappointing. I don’t even have any good quotes bookmarked. It reads much like somebody’s “notebooks”, and I guess I should have taken the title more literally, but I’d been expecting something a little more coherent. Ehrenreich spends about half the book reporting from Joshua Tree, and the other half from Las Vegas where he is temporarily living due to having earned a fellowship there. The book is best describing the desert; his love for Joshua Tree shines through. Naturally, Las Vegas is described as being like some circle of hell. It’s so miserable to read; I get it, Vegas is crazy horrible, but you’re presumably there for a reason, right? The institution that hired you, your colleagues, surely there is some beauty or bright spot to be found? COULD WE HEAR ABOUT IT? Likewise, the guy seems to have the biggest horror movie scrolling on his phone’s Twitter feed. He’s always putting in asides where he looks at his phone and sees somebody being decapitated or watches the polar ice caps melt before his eyes; and again I wanted to shout, STEP AWAY FROM THE PHONE, DUDE. You don’t HAVE to subscribe to these horrible things. You don’t even have to be on Twitter! Sorry, I am probably missing some deep, dark beauty enveloped in this book, but it obviously didn’t find me. (  )

I can’t wait for this book to come out. I listened to a podcast tonight about it with the author, Virginia Postrel. I’m going to be interested in every single page. I know the author from the days when I used to read Reason magazine and she was the editor. I also read another one of her books, over 20 years ago. I’m very happy that as part of her research she learned how to weave on a hand loom, and took dye classes as well. I loved sitting on the floor listening to her talk about textiles while I sorted my carded fibers.

by Mohsin Hamid

I don’t know what to say about this. It wasn’t my kind of book. It went from horrifying to sad. 

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Addendum: I was coming down with Headache the night I wrote this and gave it short shrift. I could at least illustrate my commentary with representative quotes.

It started as horrifying: Saeed and Nadia are living in an unnamed nation being taken over by “militants.” Regarding how life can seem to go on in a normal, mundane way even when your nation is collapsing: “[O]ur eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings & middles until the instant when it does.”

[This was particularly depressing to me in light of a piece I read a few weeks ago arguing that we are already living in a failed nation. Lots of aspects of life may seem to be going on as normal, but that’s normal even in a failed nation. The piece was allegedly written by someone from Sri Lanka, where they had a civil war.]

And after the two of them escape, we go from the horror to the sad, as we get to read about the decline of their relationship: “…not unlike a couple that was long and unhappily married, a couple that made out of opportunities for joy, misery.” Ugh.

And: “[O]nce begun such cycles are difficult to break, in fact the opposite, as if each makes the threshold for irritation next time a bit lower, as is the case with certain allergies.” Ugh.

And finally, “…tension ebbing & flowing, & when the tension receded there was calm, the calm that is called the calm before the storm, but is in reality the foundation of a human life, waiting there for us between the steps of our march to our mortality, when we are compelled to pause and not act but be.”

by James Meek

A wonderful story and a wonderful read. We follow the journey of a motley group of pilgrims attempting a venture from the Cotswolds, England to Calais, France, in the year 1348. Among our group:

– Lady Bernadine, daughter of Lord of the manor in the small town of Outen Green, who ventures forth to escape an odious arranged marriage and chase down her erstwhile paramour, Laurence Hacket

– Laurance Hacket, who is eventually encountered and added to the group, who turns out to be perhaps not all Bernadine hoped for and dreamed of

– Will Quate, good-looking young labourer, whose bondsman/freeman status is vague, and who journeys to Calais to join the fight against the French as an archer

– Hab, lowly pigboy back in Outen Green, who follows Will because he’s in love with him, and spends most of the book cross-dressed as his “sister” Madlen

– Thomas, Scotsman by birth, now scribe and proctor of a church in Avignon, France, to which he now hopes to return (I wasn’t clear what brought him to England in the first place)

– A band of archers with whom Will has thrown his fate, each one more grotesque and morally questionable than the last

– Cecile, or “Cess”, a Frenchwoman raped and abducted by the archers back during their last round of fighting in France, now a captive of one of them, the one who goes by the name of “Softly”

But I encourage you to Google “1348” and “plague” to see the main character of the story. OK, never mind, I’ll tell you: in 1348, the Black Death arrived in England.

The story is good enough, but what is hypnotic is the writing. Will, Hab/Madlen, and the archers speak an English untouched by any French or Latin. Bernadine’s speech is replete with French flourishes, Thomas’ with Latin. But to the lowly, words we today find mundanely English such as “doubt” or “punish” have them staring with incomprehension, protesting, “Too many French words for me”.

The story’s narration takes place alternately from the perspective of, and in the language of the archer contingent; Thomas; and Bernadine/Laurence. Here’s a random sample of the writing when the archers are the focus:

“The drum beat faster, Mad sang of a freke who went with an elf, and Sweetmouth hopped with two high-born maids who laughed so hard they had to hold each other to keep from falling over.”

And Bernadine:

“‘Had I passed Laurence a message saying I desired him to ravish me of my family and marry me in secret, I’m sure he would have responded.'”

And Thomas (whose passages are all excerpts of missives he is writing to two people back home named Marc & Judith):

“‘What, Judith, is the significance of my indulgent confession that I desired to be desired by you, carnally as well as spiritually?'”

There’s just a taste of how the story goes. I thought the switching between the different voices, which is done frequently, sometimes three times per two pages, was a wonderful device for moving the tale forward, and I delighted each time in hearing the different perspectives. The characters of Bernadine and Madlen were particularly deep; Laurence comical, seeming closest to a modern-day personality; Thomas a bit inscrutable (he’d like that word). I admit I had a little trouble juggling all of the archers’ backstories, real names, and “ekenames” (nicknames). Follow them all through the English countryside, and try not to freak out too much as you watch “the pest” (pestilence) following them as well… (  )