I wish I remembered where I saw this book recommended, because I really would like to thank the person who got me to put it on my to be read list. Devices & Desires is a history of contraception in America, covering the late 1800s until the early 1970s. The coverage focuses on the makers, proponents, and users of birth control, rather than the legal and political status. I haven’t done the independent research to know whether Tone’s tome is accurate (voluminous end notes notwithstanding). Because Tone wrote about both the warts and the virtues of the characters involved, I tend to credit her with completeness. And of course, it’s an interesting subject matter. Who doesn’t want to know more about the history of making sex more risk-free?

I have to warn potential readers of something though. Don’t read this book if you are squeamish. It’s not just that some of the early methods of contraception (camel dung!) are distasteful. There was quite a bit of quackery involved in selling and marketing birth control. Birth control was illegal for so long, and other restrictions remained in place long after the ban was lifted. We can’t regulate the content of items that aren’t within the realm of legal products. And so, we got Lysol as the leading form of contraception for decades. Lysol doesn’t even work as contraception but its makers sold it that way, and millions of American women inserted a caustic cleaning product into their vaginas in order to kill off sperm after sex. Then again if you are reading it here, you might as well read the book.

The biggest takeaway from the book is the trajectory of birth control from banned product to something controlled by medical professionals. Margaret Sanger embraced medical control of birth control for several reasons. It carved out an exception to the existing bans on contraception in place with the Comstock laws. Medical prescription also reduced the dangers from unregulated birth control. However, medicalized contraceptives means that those who need them aren’t in sole control of whether and when to use them. There’s got to be a doctor or nurse involved. Devices & Desires covers the history of how Sanger embraced the medical profession from initial radical revulsion.

The second main focus in the book is on those who made the devices. Condoms and diaphragms in the 19th century required very little to make. Some rubber and some chemicals and a place to put it together. Douches, although not particularly effect, could also be made cheaply. Combined with legal bans that kept larger legitimate companies from selling them, small proprietors could thrive. Many of the small proprietors were poor, immigrant, and frequently women. As birth control became more accepted, the smaller companies became bigger, or disappeared. Particularly interesting to read about was the story of the creation of the Pill, created by male scientists but funded and encouraged by philanthropic motivated women.

The last main thrust to draw from the book is the effect on people who have sex. Tone’s book covers the benefits to women primarily, but touches on men in a few cases as well. One of the big moves from illegality came as a result of World War I, where millions of men contracted venereal diseases. Pregnancy wasn’t considered by society to be morally acceptable to prevent, but disease was. It’s one of the many instances of disparate treatment of women that Devices & Desires highlights.

I do wish Devices & Desires covered the science more in depth. I don’t mean that this should have been a book about how contraception works. I mean the social science. What gets people to use contraception? Why did the idea of contraception as sin go by the wayside? From a history perspective, we can see the events that happened but not always the reasons why. After World War I where the military started providing condoms to soldiers, what was the mechanism by which they were accepted? I wish there was more sociology here than there was.

I noted this on Twitter: I think this is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in several years. Never dry, it was balanced, informative, and interesting.

Title: Devices & Desires: A History of Contraception in America
Author: Andrea Tone
Cover creator: Skouras Design
Imprint / publisher: Hill and Wang
Format: Hardcover
Length: 292 p.
Publication date: 2001
ISBN-10: 0-8090-3817-X

Last year Lisa Reardon attempted to kill her father after her cat died. According to the newspapers, she claimed to be protecting relatives from abuse, though no abuse has been alleged by anyone but her. I don’t have any idea if abuse happened in her family or not. I did read her book Billy Dead, which I loved, but which featured some pretty twisted family dynamics. I decided to get her two other books from the library this year, and see what I see. Call it me a looky-loo.

One of the tenets of reviewing is that the book’s voice is not the author’s voice, except when it is. An author is usually capable of writing characters with opinions she does not hold herself. Nevertheless, as many a book blogger can tell you, some authors abandon the book-author separation when a reviewer criticizes a book. Suddenly it’s intensely personal.

I say all that as a prelude to this: I couldn’t help but look for clues about Lisa Reardon herself when I read Blameless. I tried not to. There’s every likelihood that my conclusions are completely wrong.

Blameless tells the story of Mary Culpepper, a school bus driver in Michigan. The first hundred pages or so are actually pretty dreary. Mary isn’t working. Her father was a womanizer, but is dead. She has a strained relationship with her mother, her sisters, and her ex-husband. She has a cat named Frank. A neighborhood girl, Julianna, stops by periodically to play cards and to tell Mary about her imaginary road trip to the North Pole. Mary plays softball.

I had a hell of a time following along during that portion. Too many names. Too little differentiation between the characters’ personalities. But there’s definitely some inkling of something really really wrong. Mary can’t sleep many nights. The Night Visitor, a stone gargoyle like thing, sits on her chest in bed. There’s also an upcoming murder trial in which Mary is to be a witness, though what exactly about isn’t clear for some time.

Mary’s essential problem is a combination of two things: overwhelming untethered guilt, and an aversion to facing or even acknowledging her guilt and other problems. For instance, she never had it out with her ex-husband when he cheated on her and left her for someone else. Instead, she was a bridesmaid in their wedding! It’s pretty messed up, and that’s not the worst of it. When Mary starts flirting with a married man, the pigeons come home to roost. (I do have to say this is not a people-have-affairs-and-feel-guilty-about-it novel.)

It’s fascinating actually. It helps that most of the characters are charming, though a little evilly so.

Back to Lisa Reardon. Both books are filled with people who have secrets. Both are filled with very dysfunctional and screwed up people. Parallel to her own life? Stuff she saw around small town Michigan? Completely made up? You don’t chase your father through the house with a shotgun if everything is all right in your world.

Title: Blameless
Author: Lisa Reardon
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 319 p.
Publication date: 2000
ISBN-10: 0-375-50405-2

I liked Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self bunches, but I’m somewhat at a loss to explain why exactly. The best I can say is that there’s a realness to the characters that I connected with, which is somewhat disconcerting because disconnectedness is a running theme throughout the stories. But sincerity in characters isn’t sufficient reason for me to read a book through in just a sitting or two (which is what I did). There’s something more here that I can’t quite figure out. I suspect I’ll see or hear someone else describe why they liked the book so much and I’ll have an a-ha moment. This is well worth reading.

The first adjective that comes to mind to about the characters in Danielle Evans book is that they are sad and melancholy. The stories feature mostly middle class blacks in not quite everyday situations, but not exactly extraordinary ones either. I’m not sure how to classify that. For instance, in one story a returned soldier from Iraq babysits his ex-girlfriend’s kid, but tells a story where he’s the girl’s father and it spins beyond his control. Because these aren’t tales of extraordinary people, everything they do is understandable, even when it’s clear they aren’t exactly doing the right thing. Or even that they are doing the right thing for themselves. But all very human.

What makes them seem sad is that they are very disconnected from their families or loved ones. They try to make connections during these episodes to fill a sort of sad void, but they mostly fail. In Virgins, two girls head into the city to spend a night clubbing after the local high school boys annoy them. They want someone to treat them well. The thing is, the attention of the city men is not effectively more meaningful, though they don’t readily recognize it. The story is filled with abandonment. Both girls leave Michael, their guy friend and escort, Jasmine leaves Erica, Erica leaves Jasmine, Erica leaves Michael (again). Looking for connections, but leave the ones they have. Other stories include the disconnect in ways other than abandonment.

Race in the United States infuses the stories, several of them explicitly. They don’t confront overt racism, the David Duke kind. Somewhat more subtle but still damaging prejudice appears. One story follows two girls dealing with reproductive issues: a white college student makes money selling her eggs, but no one wants to spend thousands for an egg donor with brown skin. Another features a school that is nominally integrated, yet the students from the whiter, richer neighborhood still receive preferential treatment. The smart black girl still does well, and might possibly be used by the administration as an exhibit for their fairness. But each character isn’t just a black person, but also a soldier, or a woman, or a parent, etc. Intersectionality is the term I would guess fits best, though I’m not knowledgeable about the sociological term to be quoted on that. Still, this is more complex than being about black life.

That’s about all I can say coherently (and that’s a stretch even) at the moment. Maybe after I see some other blog reviews something will pop into my head and I’ll leave a comment or two. I expect to see a few laudatory reviews, as it showed up on quite a few Currently Reading side bars during my searches just now.

Other blogged reviews:

• Postbourgie
• [tk] Book Bites
• 50 Books for 2010

Title: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Author: Danielle Evans
Imprint / publisher: Riverhead / Penguin
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 229 p.
Publication date: September 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59448-769-9

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in return for providing a review of the book on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $17.13 (the cost of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

One of the things I like to do in my reading is to occasionally pick up a non-fiction book about something almost completely random. This practice enables me to learn something about stuff outside my normal range of intellectual curiosity. The last week or so I read A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles published by the South Dakota Historical Society about Black Hills tourism in the early part of the last century. When the book showed up on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, I requested the book precisely because it seemed outside of my normal interests, but still possibly filling in lots of useless bits of knowledge.

Both my grandfather’s and my stepfather’s families hail from the Dakotas. However, I’ve only visited a half dozen times, all when I was fairly young. On one trip, my family first visited southern California where some of mom’s high school classmates lived. Then we drove diagonally to Bismarck where dad’s family lived. Only three things remain of my memories of that leg of the trip: a bit of camping near St. George Utah, camping on top of a mesa in western Colorado, and seeing Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

Mount Rushmore is certainly very memorable, and the entrepreneurs of South Dakota designed it, and quite a bit of their whole economy, in an attempt to get people to come to the area and spend money. As soon as the gold rush waned after 1876, folks saw the possibilities of bringing in outside money in addition to their mining, ranching, and forestry interests. The scenic landscape provides a natural draw, and local hot springs were an initial impetus to get health minded tourists to come.

Julin’s book tells the history of the growth of the industry from 1880 until World War II. A large portion of her history concerns Peter Norbeck, state legislator, governor, and U.S. senator. At each level he championed Black Hills tourism, primarily Custer State Park, but also nearby national parks and monuments. But in addition to being a champion of public lands, he micro-managed these lands. He maneuvered to see that people he approved got the jobs running the parks, and not just for patronage reasons. Norbeck had an aesthetic in mind and he wanted like-minded people implementing it. So when he thought burros would be a bonus for the parks, all he had to do was let his hand-picked people know. From World War I until the Great Depression, Norbeck was the driving force behind Custer State Park.

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles focuses mostly on the movers and shakers as well as the business owners and entrepreneurs. The politicians who feuded over visions of the Black Hills. The towns competing for tourist dollars who would remove other towns road signs. The hucksters and Native American tribes that sold phony and simulated experiences to eager middle-class white people.

I also quite enjoyed the numerous photographs included. I believe all of them are from the period. I’m particularly taken with photos of the landscape as well as photos of the tourists who came to the Black Hills. While most of them are of the stiff overly-posed variety that was required by photographic equipment and then contemporary style, they still give a really view into just what the experience might have been like at the time. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that.

A couple things I felt were missing though. I never got a sense that I understood how the regular people, those not involved in building the tourist economy felt and lived through it. Those who worked as ranchers or mere workers. But more importantly, the experience of the actual tourists really felt like it was missing from this story. They come into the narrative mostly in the context of being sold the Black Hills, not so much as how they experienced it themselves. What was a day trip to the Black Hills like? How did a tourist experience Wind Cave? Why would they come to Rapid City rather than Deadwood? Sometimes the questions are touched on, but mostly so far as how the entrepreneurs catered to these choices.

I’m not too surprised those were missing though. Julin wrote her graduate school thesis about the political foundations of tourism development in the Black Hills. This appears to be the book version of that; the politics is much more heavily covered than anything else.

This well-written history will appeal to folks who already have an inclination for the subject matter, or for those who like me get into random curiosities. I enjoyed reading it. Pretty awesome stuff, particularly the photos. But for a random person, I don’t think there’s enough to grab them if they aren’t already gravitating toward the subject.

Title: A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941
Author: Suzanne Barta Julin
Cover creator: Rich Hendel (designer)
Imprint / publisher: South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 183 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-9798940-6-0

South Dakota State Historical Society Press provided me a review copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I have donated the equivalent price ($19.72 on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

This is the second book published by the Concord Free Press, a non-profit publisher that’s trying to spur charitable giving by publishing free books. Their deal is: they will send you a book completely free if you agree to a) give money to a charity or simply someone who needs it, and b) pass the book on to someone else so they can give. Their first book was Give and Take by Stona Fitch. If this publishing model intrigues you, stay tuned for another post on how you can get this copy.

Push Comes to Shove starts in New York as the 1960s come to an end. Muriel is a black radical who has joined up with a group called Push Comes to Shove after years in the south agitating for racial equality there. Push Comes to Shove isn’t as militant as the Black Panthers though. They demonstrate some, physically attack a slumlord or two, and the one real action they take is to damage a school built without windows. Then someone bombs a police station and Push Comes to Shove is blamed. The police raid the group’s house, killing Muriel’s boyfriend Walter Armstead as he lay in bed.

Afterward, Muriel becomes a reporter for a leftist newspaper. On probation, she can’t really participate herself, but she interviews militants and becomes somewhat their public voice. As another character tells her, when things scare her, she moves toward the danger. She meets and marries Raymond, who plays it safe. The rest of the story is really the story of their differing methods and their relationship. They don’t exactly mesh well together.

It’s not just about Muriel and Raymond of course. But it’s not really all about black radicals and their struggle for justice. Most of the characters are former Viet Nam veterans, and some were radical leftists. Each of them has to come to terms with the 1960s in their own way. None remain activists. The most involved are Muriel as a leftist reporter and Naomi who puts her legal expertise to use in developing countries. The rest try to find themselves by essentially dropping out: joining communes, living above the ground in redwoods, refusing to talk for two years, etc. None of the things they do really surprise me.

However, the conversations the characters have really confuse me. They sound like the conversations literary critics would have, not activists. But then, I don’t know much about how people talked except brief excerpts in news footage of the time. They talk in layers of meaning. Here’s a minor example from fairly early:

From what you wrote in Out in Left Field, they just wanted to be done with their lives.

That’s the way it seemed.

Then accept it and ask yourself why you are spending so much energy on folks who are beyond your reach.

What do you mean?

Do you want this child? (Muriel is pregnant.)

Of course I do!

Then start treating yourself like you want to be in this world enough to want this child in it too!

Wait! Huh? How was discussion about Muriel’s choices on who she interviews really a discussion about whether she thinks the world is worth something? Other discussions are much more multi-layered. People write that way but did they ever talk that way?

The biggest problem I had with the book isn’t so much a problem with the book than it is with me: I was born in 1970. I didn’t even participate in the 1960s much less live as an activist. Activism of the radical sort and war didn’t take any toll on me. Push Comes to Shove assumes some of that shared experience rather than working to get the reader into a sympathetic state. Without my own experience, this was an interesting relationship story but not super-engrossing. Your mileage may vary.

One other blogged review:

• Reading Is Sexy

Title: Push Comes to Shove
Author: Wesley Brown
Imprint / publisher: Concord Free Press
Format: Paperback
Length: 246 p.
Publication date: May 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-9817824-1-6

If you check out Alyssa Katz’ blog, you’ll see that the author of Our Lot obviously reads a lot of economics blogs. I hoped the book would distill a lot of information about the real estate bubble and it’s associated economics and make it understandable to an average person. The jacket copy promises that the book helps … understand what really happened, how it affected our homes and communities, and how we can move on to a future we’ll want to live in. On those promises, the book succeeded partially on the second item and fails pretty badly on the others. The book does contain scores of sad tales of real estate villainy and loss. Horrible as these are, they bury the nuggets of real information rather than illustrate them.

What was economic situation that precipitated the financial meltdown over the last couple of years culminating with bailouts and handouts to the rich last fall? From the mid 1990s through 2006 real estate prices outpaced inflation and comparable housing rents driven by speculation, government incentives, fraud, and wishful thinking. Like any Ponzi scheme, the only way to keep things afloat is to bring in new people willing to pay ever-higher prices. When the game of musical chairs ends, the people holding title lose it and possibly lose more. This explanation does appear in Our Lot but it’s buried.

There are many villains in the real estate bubble. Some of them are featured. But the book often failed to explain why these actors were bad, and almost always failed to paint a complete picture of the crime. What is most often omitted is that the victims usually were witting accomplices who just weren’t as smart as other perpetrators. Investors thought they could make a quick buck and got burned. The tale of woe includes a foreclosure at the end, but doesn’t delineate between gains they thought they would make and actual losses.

Another service that Katz could have done but didn’t would be to better explain how the individual scams worked. I’m thinking particularly about chapter six, entitled Crime Spree, which covered the loosely defined crime of mortgage fraud. In other words, people that tried to scam usually lax lenders. The centerpiece is the case of Phillip Hill, who paid William McGill and Renee Donewar to buy houses and condos with Hill’s money as down payments after which the latter two would assign the properties back to Hill. The loans were for inflated amounts. But how Hill extracted the inflated money from the loans Katz never explained. And never explained what he did with the money. She explained that the general modus operandi was have a front home improvement company get paid for work it never did. I’ve re-read this portion a couple of times and still can’t tell if that’s how Hill did it. All I can tell is that the loans were inflated. Instead I learned how Hill was such an asshole that he took control of a homeowners association because he owned so many of the houses on paper. And he collected their homeowner’s dues and perhaps kept that money. But that doesn’t add up to the $100 million in fraudulent loans Katz describes.

That’s a big failing of Our Lot: the constant referencing of irrelevant minutia like Hill’s takeover of a homeowners association. On page 105, the book describes how home builder Jeff Spitzer’s fluffy mustache and golden shock of hair had not yet turned white. Phillip Hill had been hired to play a temple builder for the opening ceremony at the 1996 Olympics on page 133. There’s lots and lots of that stuff.

Katz would have been better served by a standard high school paper structure. Tell us the broad outlines, then in further paragraphs get more and more detailed and provide the supporting information. Finally, explain the implications of the information before summing up. Or something like that. But stop jumping all over the place and don’t put details in the middle of higher level explanations.

It’s not all bad. From what I can tell, the information that’s there is all correct. It does give a good feel for all sorts of chicanery. The mortgage fraud perpetrated by Phillip Hill that I previously mentioned, the reader will get a good idea of the scale of the fraud perpetrated by the guy and how many people he affected. Chapter 2 shows a pretty good progression of the relaxation of regulation and how government relied on home ownership to prop up part of the economy over the years. The book gives the reader a good idea of the relaxation of lending standards that would be necessary to bring in more buyers. Lower standards meant more people who wouldn’t be able to pay the money back. It’s spread out over too many individual stories, but it’s there.

But I wouldn’t recommend the book. And that’s coming from someone who agrees with Katz’ politics for the most part.

A couple other blogged reviews:

• FT’s Books
• Jeff Kelly Lowenstein’s Blog

Title: Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us
Author: Alyssa Katz
Cover creator: Natalie Slocum (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Bloomsbury
Format: Hardcover
Length: 228 p.
Publication date: June 2009
ISBN-10: 1-59691-479-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-479-7
Subject: Real estate business — United States — Marketing
Subject: Real estate business — United States — Managing
LC classification: HD1375.K348 2009

I read Geoffrey Stone’s Perilous Times a couple of years ago. Daniel Farber’s Lincoln’s Consitution has a similar focus, but covers only the Civil War rather than the entirety of the history of civil liberties during troubled times. In addition to examining whether the Lincoln administration’s curtailment of civil liberties during the Civil War was constitutional, Farber also looks at the question of secession and use of military force against the south. Farber’s conclusion is that most of Lincoln’s actions were constitutional.

For the most part, Farber’s analysis was understandable to this non-lawyer. Irrespective of his personal views on the proper framework for constitutional analysis, Farber looks at each of the situations under several of the analytical paradigms currently advocated: originalism, textualism, and that of the constitution as a living document. The book is somewhat dismissive of textualism, at least as practiced today. The drafters didn’t nit-pick every word or phrase for exactness, so such analysis done today isn’t very valid according to his writing. His greatest focus is on analyzing in terms of what the framers and the country originally understood the document to mean. One big caveat though is that even then many of the clauses were ambiguous, by design or by inattention. Farber writes that we shouldn’t ascribe detailed meaning to the framers when it didn’t necessarily exist at the time.

As to the question of secession, Farber writes that under all but the most radical of interpretations, the south did not have the right to secede. The union was meant to be perpetual; no clauses for secession were included. Under standard rules of contracts, entering into one has to be universal, but unless the terms for abrogating it are written into it, other parties must approve a release. So unless the south got the permission from the entire country, it could not secede from the U.S. or de-ratify the constitution. He also dismisses a right of revolution as the south had not endured any indignities from the U.S. or the north. In fact, until Lincoln’s election is had exercised a great deal of control over U.S. policy. At best, international law and norms meant the south could enter into negotiations to secede. It did not. It unilaterally seceded and then started the war by firing on Fort Sumter.

James Buchanan, the president prior to Lincoln, came to the conclusion that while the South had no right to secede, under the Constitution he could not use the military to stop them absent a congressional declaration of war. So he did nothing. Lincoln, and Farber in retrospect, disagreed. To them, the south clearly had started insurrection, which gave the President the right to defend the U.S.

Civil liberties were more questionable though. Lincoln ignored a writ of habeas corpus, summarily arrested opponents, and shuttered newspapers critical of the war. Not all actions did he take himself. Some were attempted by his subordinates, but Lincoln usually supported those actions after the fact, at least publicly. In some cases these might have been legal, such as the preventive arrest of southern sympathizers. Others, such as the shuttering of newspapers critical of the war probably were not. Most of the time Lincoln was pretty careful to not abuse his authority.

One nice thing Farber did in summation was to look at Lincoln’s evolving theory of the rule of law, which was his ostensible reason for prosecuting the war. While he was against slavery, he was fine with a decades long slow death for the practice. He fought the war to preserve the rule of law and to preserve the United States. But his ideas for what that meant changed over his lifetime.

Having read Perilous Times, I thought the chapters on civil liberties were somewhat redundant to my earlier reading. However, I learned some things from his examination of secession and the sources of the theory of the unitary executive. (He doesn’t embrace that theory.)

Interesting, but not really enough a-ha moments to rate it as a must-read. A worthy read, definitely.

One blogged review:

• Brian Flanagan excerpted at Legal History Blog

Title: Lincoln’s Constitution
Author: Daniel Farber
Imprint / publisher: University of Chicago Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 200 p.
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 0-226-23793-1
Subject: Lincoln, Abraham — 1809 – 1865 — Views on the Constitution
Subject: United States — Politics and government — 1861-1865
Subject: Constitutional history — United States
LC classification: E457.2.F216 2003

Well, personal events in my life have conspired to prevent me from accomplishing one of my reading goals. If you look at the first week of this month, I reviewed a book a day. My goal was to read a book a day for the entire month. I was already a bit behind, though I had some catch-up plans, when I made two trips to the emergency room over the weekend accompanying other people (I was not ill myself). I was not able to devote enough time to reading, and even my catch-up plans probably aren’t going to suffice to return me to the proper pace. I’m also a weasel for not writing of the goal publicly until now so that this blog’s readers could keep me honest. But I have finished a book, and so I shall review …

I spent twelve years living and working in Idaho, a state very heavily populated by Mormons. The rumor I heard while living there was that the state actually had a higher percentage of Mormons than Utah did. I knew (and know) a lot of Mormons. My acquaintances ran the gamut in personal qualities, much like any other group. I can’t say I ever met a truly unlikable Mormon.

My earliest knowledge of Mormonism centered on their strict dietary proscription against caffeine and alcohol, and my Jack Mormon friends’ failure to adhere to that rule. I was also aware that nearly every Mormon was expected to go on a two year mission, and that most would marry shortly after completing the mission. Beyond that, I knew very little. Many Idaho non-Mormons held an intense dislike for Mormons, which seemed to be mostly about the Mormon mono-culture and near exclusive control Mormons had in the small towns from which my friends came. If you weren’t a Mormon, you didn’t get to be a cheerleader. That kind of thing.

I’ve never been anti-Mormon. I had too many nice Mormon friends for me to fall for that. On the other hand, I was pretty atheist when I first encountered practicing Mormons. It always boggled my mind that anyone would believe a religion whose tenets were supposedly inscribed on gold plates that disappeared shortly afterward, when they supposedly were transcribed in a period where such things are easily verifiable if true. In other words, the L.D.S. Church was started in the mid-1800s, pro-claimed some things that are easily disprovable by the records of the time, and yet people still believe. That’s the atheist and skeptic in me talking. Mind you, I hold all religions to such standards, which is one of the reasons why it’s unlikely I will every become traditionally religious.

According to Jon Krakauer’s afterward, the work that became Under the Banner of Heaven was originally inspired by the same question. How does a rational mind believe this? Along the way, he became entranced and sidetracked by Mormon fundamentalism and a particular murder of a woman and her child by two possibly insane Mormon fundamentalists.

While he gave up on the original focus, that question still seems to get asked multiple times in this true crime story. Krakauer devotes one late chapter entirely to Deloy Bateman, a former fundamentalist polygamist who not only apostatized from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints sect, he became an atheist. I thought his story of being educated and that education slowly eating away his belief was extremely compelling. (Then again, perhaps I that’s just my own bias.)

Krakauer also devotes a chapter to question of the sanity of Ron and Dan Lafferty, the fundamentalist polygamists who killed their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her daughter in a bloody attack that by its very nature raises the possibility of insanity. The question explored is this: what differentiates the actions of a Christian who helps someone after receiving the command in prayer from the Laffertys who believe God commanded them to kill? The legal answer in the chapter doesn’t suffice, but the question of belief obviously plagues Krakauer for him to even include the chapter.

Just for exploration of belief alone I have to recommend the book.

In addition, there’s quite a bit of history about the L.D.S. church that is utterly fascinating and which I did not know: the trail of Mormons from Palmyra to Ohio to Missouri to Navoo to Utah, the birth and death of Joseph Smith, persecution the church received, the disdain the church held for Gentiles, details of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Other items I knew more about, but still the book provided me with new insight: the Mormon story of Nephi and Laban, the polygamy doctrine, and the splintering of polygamist sects.

Two criticisms though: I think Krakauer focuses too much on too many fundamentalist L.D.S. sects. I’m not sure why this was done. The stories are lurid, and they do form some of the background of the Lafferty brothers. But the stories of communities in Bountiful, B.C. and in Mexico didn’t seem to add a lot of insight. The intertwined family trees were confusing while being horrifying, and I kept getting lost as to who was who. Perhaps if he had included a diagram.

The second criticism isn’t so much a criticism as a question about which I’ve wondered (and received only bits of information from other sources). What about all the boys in these communities? If you marry all the girls to the older generation, and marry them at a ratio of multiple women to one man, your community is going to have a surplus of boys with no marriage or romantic prospects. Are these boys just killed off? Abandoned? Do they become disillusioned and become mainline Mormons or just wander off the religious road altogether? Krakauer chronicles the horrors the girls undergo as well as their peculiar Stockholm Syndrome adherence to their malefactors, but there’s nary a word about the boys. I wish he had at least given a paragraph or two to the question, but I don’t recall it.

Obviously I think this book is a fascinating and engrossing read that has a lot more depth than most true crime books.

Title: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Author: Jon Krakauer
Cover creators: John Fontana (designer) / Will Funk (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Anchor / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 399 p. (includes extensive supplemental material)
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 1-4000-3280-6
Subject: Mormon fundamentalism
LC classification: BX8680.M54K73 2003

I’m back to working on Rat’s Reading, somewhat. I wrote this on my About Rat’s Reading page, but it’s important to restate it before continuing with this review:

I believe any review often reveals more about the reviewer than it does anything about the book or author.

That statement applies particularly to this review. On Tuesday evening last week, I received a call from the evening caregiver watching over my mom. Mom had aspirated her evening meal, and her breathing was quite distressed. I went over to help, throwing in my car a few necessities and this book. I expected few breaks while I was there and wanted something short to read should I need distraction during those periods. Mom finally slept around midnight, but mom’s possible imminent death weighed heavily on me as I crashed in the guest bedroom. There I read all 54 pages of this book before turning in shortly before 1 a.m. I was too wound up to sleep before then, despite being very tired. At 3 a.m. the caregiver woke me up and I watched mom decline over the next 11 hours until she died. For details of my experience, please read my personal blog.

I have not seen the movie version of Brokeback Mountain. My best friend did and described the big kiss scene as less an intimate moment and more a wrestling match. That put me off. Now that I’ve read the book I think I understand why, and perhaps I should revisit my decision on the movie.

The story: two cowboys hook up with each other while working as shepherd’s on a remote Wyoming mountain. Both proclaim their heterosexuality, but they continue to see each other on annual fishing trips and occasional other outings. Their relationship colors their marriages and leads to all sorts of cognitive dissonance.

I don’t see the greatness of the story. We readers aren’t really witness to these men wrestling with the conflict between being rednecks and their homosexuality. Witness to the struggle between them. To the clash between them and their wives. And witness to the odd reactions of the people who know what they do. But our two cowboys go almost magically from homophobia to acceptance. I really wanted to know how they came to terms, and Proulx didn’t tell me that. I lived in Idaho, a similar place to the Wyoming depicted. I want to know.

It’s a love story. A pretty damn good love story. But love stories are plentiful. Subtract the gay from the story and it doesn’t stand out.

And it’s missing what would interest me about a gay cowboy love story, the inner conflict.

Which brings me back to my opening statement. When reading reviews one often learns more about the reviewer than the book being reviewed. I found a decent enough story that helped me wind down enough to get a couple of hours sleep as my mom lay dying. I am not so interested in love stories. And what intrigued me about gay cowboys is how they retain all the redneck except the homophobia.

One thing I really liked was the simple release of a short story in book form. I didn’t know publishers did this! Obviously they don’t do it a lot, and they did this one particularly to take advantage of the movie. And the price! $9.95 is outrageous! Thankfully I got it from the Michael’s Books free pile. However, I would pay a few bucks for a good short story or two in a small book so I wouldn’t have to wade through the lesser stories that inevitably appear in an anthology. I hope this happens more often.

Well, that’s about all for now. Free book roundups will resume tomorrow night. I have a couple other books I finished reading over the last few days which will see reviews shortly too.

Title: Brokeback Mountain
Author: Annie Proulx
Imprint / publisher: Scribner
Format: Paperback
Length: 54 p.
Publication date: November 2005
ISBN-10: 0-7432-7132-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-7132-5
Subject: Cowboys — Fiction
Subject: Ranch life — Fiction
Subject: Gay men — Fiction
Subject: Wyoming — Fiction
LC classification: PS3566.R697 B76 2005

Random House provided the ARC of American Wife I read for this review through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. In return, I agreed to write a review of at least 25 words to be posted on LibraryThing.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s new book American Wife has certainly received a lot of buzz, and it’s not even officially out until 2 September. It doesn’t take a genius to see why. It’s a thinly disguised ripped from the headlines take on the life of Laura Bush. Some things have been changed: the Bushes are the Blackwells, the family is from Wisconsin, the elder Blackwell never made it to the White House as President, and more. But all the major events in Laura Bush’s life have parallels: an auto accident where Alice Blackwell kills a classmate, a quick marriage to rich ne’er-do-well Charlie Blackwell, Blackwell’s purchase of a baseball team, runs for governor and the presidency, and even a carefully scripted disagreement with her husband over abortion rights. I’m probably a little too cynical in thinking the differences are meant to either ward off legal action or the book was done with Laura Bush’s acquiescence and input and the differences were meant as cover. I don’t want to speculate as to motives too much though, because that’s my biggest criticism of the book.

The story is pretty pedestrian. Middle class uptight midwestern woman marries charming loose rich man, then subsequently sublimates her life to his. Really really pedestrian. And about a character type I hate. I hate female characters that have no lives of their own, where everything is domesticity. I recently found a link to the Bechdel test through Charles Stross’ blog. That test has three prongs: there exists more than one woman in the story, they talk to each other, about something other than men. Nominally this book passes that test (there’s a discussion about abortion rights and political responsibility between two women near the end of the book), but it sure feels like it doesn’t. This is all about Alice Blackwell’s kowtowing to Charlie Blackwell.

If the book were about her changing Charlie Blackwell, or being an equal partner or something redeeming, I might be more sympathetic. But it’s not. Time after time, incident after incident, Alice Blackwell metaphorically and literally says yes dear and goes back to cupcake baking and banquet hosting. Fine. Some people are like that. But I don’t need to read about it for 551 pages.

A couple of reviews I’ve seen have called this a sympathetic or compassionate portrait. Hogwash. Creating an image of someone who never participates in her own life is not sympathetic. Alice Blackwell doesn’t stand up to anyone. She doesn’t pursue the boy she has a crush on, she waits for him to make a move (which he takes over half a decade to do). She’s not responsible for hooking up with Charlie Blackwell, he’s just too handsome and charming and persistent. On and on. If these reviewers think that anyone wants to be portrayed like that, they run with a different crowd than I do.

The only way this comes out ahead for me is if it shows some sort of insight into the real Bush’s marriage. But there’s a problem with that. Curtis Sittenfeld is an author, not a psychiatrist with intimate knowledge of the First Lady’s psyche. Ability to divine the inner thoughts of someone else is not something I would credit to authors. Fictional people, sure. Real people, no. It’s simply another form of punditry and if you read folks like Beat the Press or the Daily Howler, you’ll have an idea of how futile it is to figure out motives.

So unless there’s some sort of deep research involved here, I pretty much have to say this doesn’t pass the smell test. It sure could be a portrait of Laura Bush. But more likely it is just conjecture.

Title: American wife
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Advance Readers Copy
Length: 551 p.
Publication date: September 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-6475-5
Subject: Presidents’ spouses — United States — Fiction
Subject: Women librarians — Fiction
LC classification: PS3619.I94 A8 2008