Summer Reading

Summer is a time to relax and to catch up on your reading. During the past month, I read three really interesting books with completely different backgrounds. But what all three shared was a love of language and the authors’ ability to conjure up an atmosphere.

The first is a book by Pat Conroy, “ South of Broad”, one of the finest American authors, who burst into fame with his famous “The Prince of Tides.” Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, the narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Echoing some themes from his earlier novels, Conroy fleshes out the almost impossibly dramatic details of each of the friends’ lives in this vast, intricate story, and he reveals truths about love, lust, classism, racism, religion, and what it means to be shaped by a particular place, be it Charleston, South Carolina, or anywhere else in the U.S. South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest; a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds and who is an engrossing story teller.

The second book is from veteran espionage novelist Littell (Vicious Circle; The Company; etc.) who trades cold war spies for interwar Russian poets in his wonderful new novel “The Stalin Epigram”. In 1934, real-life poet Osip Mandelstam struggles to get published in the totalitarian state. A battered idealist who has witnessed his share of Stalin-orchestrated horrors, Mandelstam feels writers have an abiding responsibility to be truth tellers in this wasteland of lies. Littell dramatizes the horrific events that followed after the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote a 16-line epigram that attacked the all-powerful Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. When the novel begins, Stalin's farm collectivization policies were causing mass starvation, and a reign of terror had begun in Moscow, where the slightest criticism of the dictator could bring arrest, torture and death. With regard to politics, he is a naive idealist. After he sees starvation in the Crimea firsthand, he tells his friend and fellow poet Boris Pasternak: "I am through beating about the bush, Boris. A poem needs to be written that spells out the evil of Stalin so that any dense-brained idiot can understand it." The right poem, he believes, can bring down the dictator. His epigram calls Stalin "the murderer and peasant-slayer" for whom "every killing is a treat." Once arrested, Mandelstam is terrified. Mandelstam's interrogation is chilling; there are no right answers except to confess guilt. However, to our surprise, he leaves the prison alive, because Pasternak convinces Stalin that history sides with poets, not with politicians who murder them. There is lovely writing in this novel, as befits the story of four poets, and powerful scenes. Littell not only brings the four poets to agonizing life, he does not shrink from making Stalin himself a character. This is a timeless story of courage and truth confronting the madness of absolute power. It's a brilliant work, always readable, sometimes funny and often heartbreaking. There are many books about Stalin's terror, but there cannot be many that bring its truths more vividly, painfully to life.

The third book, “The Battle for America”, is about the historic election of 2008 in the US which brought an African American to the presidency. This election shattered political barriers, illuminated undercurrents of race, gender, and class, and ignited an extraordinary battle among some of the most formidable political rivals ever to seek the presidency in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain. It was an election that played out against a backdrop of wars, a shattered economy, and deep pessimism about the future. Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson followed this campaign from the candidates’ first forays into Iowa and New Hampshire to the historic night of Obama’s victory celebration. They take readers on a gripping journey through the epic battle for Iowa, Clinton’s dramatic comeback in New Hampshire, the racially tinged primary in South Carolina, the stunning endorsement of Obama by Senator Edward M. Kennedy over the Clintons’ objections. They reveal the strategic mistakes of the Clinton campaign and the story behind Obama’s breakthrough organization. They cover McCain’s struggle for survival in the Republican primaries, Sarah Palin, and the economic meltdown that ensured Obama’s victory. Post mortem books on presidential election campaigns are nothing new and there have been many of them, but 2008 was truly one of those landmark campaigns that truly warrant re-examination. Both Balz and Johnson are fantastic at bringing the highs and lows of the campaign trail back to life. Even though you know the inevitable outcomes they still keep the retelling lively and gripping. But rather than focusing solely on the candidates and what happened "The Battle for America" provides great insight into the minds of the voters and the tectonic shifts occurring in American society, for the 2008 election was as much about the changes the electorate was undergoing as the candidates who were running.