The Price Of Hunger In The Garden Of Beasts: In Which Three Recent Books Are Lumped Alongside Each Other And Sort Of "Reviewed," Except This Is Not Exactly That

I always liked the type of book review that I think is referred to as an essay review — the kind of critical piece that compares one or more similar or thematically similar books in a way that allows the reviewer to sit above both works in judgement.

There's a great moment in all essay reviews where the reviewer brings the hammer down. It's that moment when a review goes from praising the really wonderful, insightful first book to making you feel badly for the person who had to read the second one. It goes something like this:

The climactic ending of [Insert Title] is as gripping as it is long, as unrelenting as it is buoyant, and as quietly devastating as it is unforgettable.

And then there's [Insert Other Title], which labors to get going, is unenjoyable when you finally get there and ultimately reads like it was written by a committee of monkeys . . .

I would like to do the same thing with Jeffrey Sachs' The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. I would also like to throw in Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin.

I think that I could almost pull this off with the first two. The third would be a stretch, I imagine.

These, I should add, were the last three books we read for book club.

Maybe at the very least I could think of a unifying theme. OK, let's sketch this out . . .

We've read many books in the fantasy/sci-fi/young adult genre (and I understand I'm lazily lumping it all together) and each time I think that I'll finally understand what people like about those kinds of books. And each time I'm disappointed. We've tried some supposedly good ones, too: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (October 2007), The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (June 2008), Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (May/June 2009), City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer (October 2009) and The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (January 2011). I feel like I've given it the old college try. (An aside: I finally thought to Google the origin of this phrase; I didn't realize there was an ironic twist to it.)

It's not that I don't like the philosophy or moral underpinnings of these books — on the contrary, they're interesting, or at least interesting enough to build a story around — but maybe too much of the writing is lacking some artistry. Sometimes, as in the case of City of Saints, the fantasy is too unmoored from real life. Sometimes there's a moment in an otherwise perfectly good book that takes me totally out of it, as is the case of the bizarre (no, really bizarre!) sex scene in Snow Crash.

Which is to say, when I started reading Hunger Games, I expected to eventually find something about it that I didn't like. And then that moment never happened. While reading it, I kept thinking that it would make a good movie. I found out later that that is exactly what's going to happen. A friend in book club who couldn't participate that month asked what I thought and I told her. Then I lent her the book.

My only real familiarity with Jeffrey Sachs was through William Easterly, whose The White Man's Burden we read in December 2009. I didn't think I was going to like Sachs' The Price of Civilization but my mind was open. Those who know me would snicker, but I know what I felt and I'm telling you that my mind was open. Even after I started it late in the month, which gave me the opportunity to talk to fellow Club members who reported that the book was tear-your-hair-out galling, I was still open minded about the book.

So then I started reading The Price of Civilization and damn it if the thing didn't come off like an 18-hour-long Bill Moyers episode. It's fine to "polemicize," but reading an academic do it is depressing and hollow; not only simplistic, but cynically so. Maybe he intended to appeal to the mass market, but the bigger sin here is making someone care less, or worse, not at all. Though that in itself is an achievement. I guess.

Civilization is now helping to prop up the baby's "co-sleeper," in the hope that if we angle the crib slightly then the baby will be less likely to spit up. I wish I could say that this was my inspired idea but the truth is that Jen just grabbed a few hardcovers that looked sturdy enough. Now you understand why I don't have any concrete examples of what I disliked (though I do remember one oversimplified explanation of Sun Belt political demographics that made no sense if you stopped to consider that maybe East Coasters move there at least in part because they don't want to pay more taxes, not that they'll bring their tax-happy ways with them — but again, I'm going from memory here).

As for In the Garden of Beasts, it was pretty good. I was hesitant to read another Erik Larson book (we read The Devil in the White City in August 2005) but he's good at pulling you in and getting you interested in stuff — even stuff that you assume you don't care to know any more about. Nazis, for one. In Beasts, he smartly focuses on the one aspect of Nazi Germany that's still interesting, which isn't the pornographic violence but rather the dramatic irony that continues to serve as the best "lesson" of that horrible point in time. And the lens he chooses — an American diplomat — is a smart one for his American audience. It's an interesting quick read, even if it skips around toward the end; it's the kind of popular history that works, as opposed to Sachs' attempt at "popular policy."

Challenging, Revolutionary And Totally Unreadable

The Book Club just finished James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the New Deal-era assignment (commissioned by Fortune magazine) the writer and photographer took on in 1936 to document the lives of tenant farmers in the Deep South.

It takes a while to discern, especially when you're distracted by the way Agee perseverates on erections and such, but Famous Men is of a piece with Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, another equally unreadable book. With Tropic of Cancer, at least Miller sketches out the philosophy a little more clearly, specifically on pages 239 to 258 and further boiled down to this:

When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull. If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. . . . If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

Meaning, in my mind, if literature, books and writing are about anything, they're to express life and the world as it actually exists, in Miller's case, vis a vis gonorrhea, cunts and bed bugs.

It's an adolescent view, of course — reminds me of the mental gymnastics one goes through before you realize a white lie is sometimes better than the truth — but in an early-20th century artistic milieu that now saw the world as it actually appears (i.e., photography and film), you can see where writers might have felt a little threatened.

Agee is somewhat more interesting in that his writerly worldview was directly challenged on a daily basis, what with Walker Evans working directly beside him. You get the sense from Famous Men that Agee was keyed into this quandary from the beginning, and worked to "out-real" what was real. Thus the erections.

And the bed bugs. The bed bug part (pages 374-377) blows away any of Miller's bed bug depictions. Youch!

And what you perceive as Agee's desire to fuck a bunch of poor Southern whites. Not fuck over, though he does that, too — it's a good thing they're illiterate and Famous Men is so unreadable because it'd be bizarre to see yourself depicted as he depicts them — but literally have sex with them. I admire his honesty here but, geez, really?

The first sentence of Walker Evans' 1960 foreward seems to telegraph that he understands there's an adolescent tinge to Agee's writing: "At the time, Agee was a youthful-looking twenty-seven." It's an explanation of sorts, or at least I read it as such. He also adds that "[s]ome parts . . . read as though they were written on the spot at night." Yes, they do! They read sort of like the kind of idea that seems brilliant at 3:30 a.m. until you look at it the next morning and think, "Huh?" (He also says that Agee actually left out certain passages that were entertaining in an "acid" way; when you read this you can't imagine what he possibly left out.)

For some reason J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye popped into my head this week while I was trying to get through Famous Men. I sort of see James Agee's persona as Holden Caulfield if Holden went on to Harvard and stayed irascible, but of course the timing is off — Holden Caulfield is James Agee spun backward in time. I wonder if Salinger intended to take the "immediacy" of Miller and Agee and tighten it up a little bit (and comment on the adolescence of it all). If I had more time or inclination I'd look up that lousy idea and see if any other phonies have beat it to death, but not now.

I suppose it's true that without Agee and Miller you wouldn't have blogs, reality television, literary nonfiction and amateur porn, so that's something. And it is interesting to see American literature in its cranky adolescence. But ultimately I wonder who actually read this thing — and I mean cover-to-cover read it. Besides Lionel Trilling, that is.

Seriously though, as a think piece, it's good. The best part of the book is in the "Notes and Appendices" section at the end where Agee reprints an article about Margaret Bourke-White photographing life among the tenant farmers, I guess around the same time. Where you get the sense throughout Famous Men that Agee beats himself up for deigning to contain a pathetic human life in a volume of words, it's funny to see the breezy way Bourke-White is depicted in whatever article it was — how whipsmart she was and how deftly she captured these supposedly off-the-cuff images. It's a big fuck you — like Agee is saying, "Yeah, you did that? I doubt it."

One big missed opportunity was Agee not going further and questioning the motives those who gave them the assignment to begin with and the implications thereof. It would have made his philosophical point clearer at least and would have hammered home the idea that when it comes to literature, we are all guilty.

Between the Wikipedia and the Library of Congress you can basically figure out who is who in the pictures. The guy on the cover is Gudger. A tidbit even more ironic than the title itself: You can buy a fine art print of Gudger's kitchen for $85. I say if you do so, you should be forced to read Famous Men before you get the thing matted.

And then there's this: Fortune returned to Hale County in 2005 and found that the descendents were pissed. Agee died in 1955, so why not give these people the last word? First Ricketts' daughter:

Laura Minnie Lee Tingle. Elizabeth's younger sister. The wide-mouth girl with side-swept hair who appears in several Walker Evans photographs. She stands before me now, fearful and alone, her dog at her feet, with eyes that say plainly what she's too polite to speak: She wishes I had not come. "This is my momma, right here," she confirms, looking at the book of pictures I have brought. "That's my baby sister … that's my mother … this is my two older sisters … that's my two brothers right there … that's me and my sister."

Laura Tingle, who as a girl liked watching the grownups boil sorghum and skim the brine to make sweet syrup, and found occasional pleasure even in the backbreaking labor of picking cotton ("Well, yes, sir, I liked it. It was something to do"), and remembers well the arrival of two strangers from up North. "They was down in Greensboro," she says. "They come out to the house with my dad. What did I think?" She snickers. "I didn't think. I really wished they hadn't a showed up. I just wished they hadn't a showed up. After they published that book. They called my mama a liar and ever'thin' like that. I didn't like it." She snickers again. "They told a lot of things that was wrong. They just said they was making pictures. They didn't say they was reporters."

And then Gudger's grandson:

Another Burroughs, Phil, son of Floyd Jr., grandson of Floyd, lives in Moundville, maybe five miles as the crow flies from Mills Hill. Phil is a big man, works in maintenance for the city of Tuscaloosa, is still wearing his blue work pants and blue work T-shirt when I arrive in the early evening at his house out on the quiet edge of town, where the neighbors keep horses and grass grows in the pasture across the fence. Phil has those gray Burroughs eyes, but with a pinch of blue. He sits sideways in the porch swing, that's his spot, with his wife, Patti, a schoolteacher, and their two sons, Andrew and Jedadiah, seniors at Hale County High, silent and respectful, completing the circle. Phil is cordial but reserved, not exactly sure why I'm here, even less sure at first that he wants me here.

So your father would talk to you about the book?

"He would."

He was angry about it?

"Yes."

Purely angry about it?

"No doubt. And to be honest with you, I think he had a right to be. I honestly do. You were looking at people that were struggling to put food on the table, you know? It was a simple life. They didn't have anything. Everybody wants something. That's probably the American dream. Everybody wants something. So it kind of left a bad taste in everybody's mouth. Maybe that's hard for a lot of people to understand, but it absolutely did. It made him upset, it really did. They were cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant. How would you feel if somebody cast your folks, your parents, or your grandparents in that light? Even though I know they were real poor, no doubt about that, but they weren't ignorant, and they definitely weren't lazy."

60 Minutes You Can Probably Handle, But Never, Ever Get Jon Krakauer On Your Bad Side

No one felt like reading Frank Bruni's memoir, so the book club settled for another Jon Krakauer book. The pamphlet-sized Three Cups of Deceit teaches a valuable lesson: Be careful who you impress, and if you do impress, try not to impress an investigative writer. And if you do happen to impress an investigative writer, for god's sake, don't leave him or her thinking you ripped off him or her, lest your financial malfeasance becomes the topic of another tale of how a rugged, wayward individualist loses his way.

Here's another lesson for anyone who might fall into this category: Once that pamphlet and accompanying 60 Minutes report is released, try not to sound so defensive on your twitter feed. Linking to Salon readers' blogs doesn't help you. And while yes, Kristof does strike a "say it ain't so" tone, I would hardly call his opinion piece an "article of support." The same goes for the Trudy Rubin piece you reprint; both writers sound more pained — given the evidence — than supportive.

For me, the salient parts of the problem that Krakauer uncovers don't necessarily involve the financial shenanigans — after all, a case could be made, though not by the IRS, that if you raise $20 million for something good and use $4 million of that for your own benefit then that something good is still left with $16 million. Actually, I would still be pissed if I sent in a check to that guy.

But anyway, I think that there is something interesting and revolting about how you can put a crisis to good use. Like I started to say and then stopped myself, in some ways it's not so much the financial stuff as it is the myths and half-truths that Mortenson uses to raise money. Krakauer's most damning evidence comes when he shows how Mortenson took advantage of the world's fear of radical Islam to raise money for the schools he built. That he built many schools isn't in doubt (though whether they're actually useful is a different story), but over and over Krakauer shows that the schools were built in less-conservative parts of Pakistan, where the specter of religious madrassas wasn't such a problem. I think he brings up an example like this in the book, but it's sort of like saying you're raising money for charter schools in troubled inner city neighborhoods and then building those schools in, I don't know, Nashua or something. Are the schools helping kids in Nashua? Sure — but they're not going into, say, Baltimore. Except what Krakauer is alleged is worse because Mortenson preys on the West's fears about radical Islam . . . it's unsavory.

It's noble enough to build schools for kids in parts of the world that need schools. His original goal — building schools in the villages that service trekkers and climbers — was noble enough. But he took advantage of 9/11 and the subsequent GWOT Decade to raise more money. It's unfortunate that charities sometimes seem to be in the business of ginning up crises to stay relevant, but this example is one of the more egregious ones. And Krakauer gets some great quotes from folks on the ground in these places who feel betrayed by the narrative that Mortenson peddles.

It's always nice to read a 70-page book — who has time for 300-plus pages anymore? — but Three Cups of Deceit feels like a spec piece of sorts. It's one thing to get in and get out and John Mayer that shit, but I actually think it could have been a longer work. Greg Mortenson the persona is the type of character that is in Jon Krakauer's bold-loners-doing-risky-things wheelhouse. I was thinking that it'd be interesting to pull out more of that psychological angle. Then again, the danger in that is building a persona that the reader might feel sympathetic toward — and Krakauer clearly doesn't want that to happen. After all, he got ripped off and he wants to make that asshole pay. Some people tweet or blog their way to justice. Others get 7 (or 2 or 4 or 5) on their side. Jon Krakauer can rush out a 70-page book. Must be nice . . .