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Edward Kennedy

Burton Hersh's new biography of Teddy Kennedy has me in its grip and won't let me go. I'm 245 pages into this 650-page book and I keep waiting for it to drag. No dragging in this one. As in the life of the senator one event follows another at breakneck speed.

Hersh has been watching the Kennedys for decades and writing about them for nearly as long and he really knows his subject. Since the 1960s he has interviewed everyone from Foster Furcolo and Estes Kefauver to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the maids at Bobby Kennedy's house, Hickory Hill, and he has been taking notes. It's all used here to fill out an astoundingly complete portrait of one of America's tragic figures.

Edward Kennedy was a man of tremendous appetites and he denied himself little, following the advice of his father: "If it's on your plate, eat it." Says Hersh, who by the way is a liberal and very sympathetic to Teddy Kennedy:

Control, never depend for anything on the loyalty or good intentions of people better placed than you. You have a wholly legitimate claim to absolute loyalty, unstinted performance, complete self-sacrifice from menials -- superheat their atmosphere to make them fervid with the ultimate importance of what you are doing for yourself. Afterward, you owe them very little. They were being paid.

The boys were introduced early to the presumptions of the predatory. There is no truly authentic counterclaim to what you are after except your own unanswerable insistence. Take whatever you want and deal with the consequences later -- attractive women are there for you.

Hersh is a fine writer. Here he is talking about the importance of labor unions to the Kennedys' political success:

And dominating everything, grunting, Labor, big rich all-overlapping Labor, with its savvy well-connected lobbyists wandering around Capitol Hill all day, its high-priced top-quality legal people like Arthur Goldberg and Joseph Rauh, Walter Reuther, its brain-bank of political action committee experts, its heavy old muscles still aching a little from the violence of its unforgotten past, its nose for who loved it truly -- and why -- impossible to fool.

I read about this book in one of two companion articles in last Sunday's New York Times, a roundup of conservative and liberal political books published recently. In this book Hersh does a good job of portraying the idealistic liberal millenarian quest for the perfect answer to every perceived problem, the sensitivity to search for and find problems that need solving, the longing to improve the lives of the little people, those perceived to be disadvantaged in any way, to feed and house them, to provide free education and health care, to clear the slums, to regulate business, to reach always for "social justice," as it is defined at that particular moment.

Kennedy's answer was always legislation. This is understandable. If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail; if you're a senator everything looks like it needs a law to prevent it, fix it, require it, improve it. 

If you are interested in the legislative process there is much here for you. If you are interested in the sensational parts of Kennedy's life, you can skip the twelve pages about the poll tax amendment to the voting rights bill. If you want a window into corrupt big-city politics in the 20th century, you need look no further than Boston; this book is for you.

The English Language at Its Ghinest

At the same time, Dad was working on a book arguing the case for phonetic spelling. He called it A Ghoti out of Water. “Ghoti,” he liked to point out, could be pronounced like “fish.” The “gh” had the “f” sound in “enough,” the “o” had the short “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” had the “sh” sound in “nation”. 

- Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses

Nemesis

Philip Roth's books are not usually easy to read. His work is dense, often in a confusing modern style, using his own name as the name of his character, for instance, leaving the reader to work out how much of the book is intended to be autobiographical. And the theme that he established early on in Letting Go, never compromising, never hesitating to be perfectly frank in order to be polite, has made for bitter characters and alienated protagonists.

 But Nemesis is different. It's a book about Bucky Cantor, an honest, gentle, caring man who has always been careful to do his duty and who is deeply in love with a young woman who loves him. He is an athlete, a javelin thrower, who has just graduated from college and who has a dream job as a gym teacher ahead of him in the fall. For the summer he is working as a playground supervisor in the Weequahic section of Newark, the Jewish section of the city where Roth himself grew up.

It's the torrid summer of 1944. Cantor has attempted repeatedly to join the army but because of weak eyes he has been classified 4-F, unqualified to serve because of physical disability. This is frustrating for Cantor because he is otherwise in superb physical shape. But he makes the most of things and puts all his energy into teaching young boys and providing to them an example of courage and integrity.

This isn't just another hot summer, it's the summer of the worst polio epidemic since 1916, and the people of Newark are on edge as first one neighborhood and then another reports unusually high numbers of cases of polio. Fear is everywhere. People are confused, angry, grieving. Weequahic is hit harder than any other neighborhood in the city and it seems the sound of ambulance sirens is seldom silent.

I am old enough to remember the epidemic of 1952 when there were 58,000 cases of the dreaded disease in the United States. Our school opened in September and then closed for a time when one of the students contracted the disease. There were only about 80 students in the school and everyone knew Peggy. The fear among the students, parents, and teachers was palpable. No one knew how polio was spread. No one knew what to do to protect themselves and their children. It must have been something like that in 1944.

Cantor's fiancee is working as a camp counselor and she begs him to leave his job in the stricken city to take a job at her camp where he will be safe from the disease. He wants to do this, but he feels an obligation to the boys in his summer program who cannot escape from Newark. From the book jacket:

Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos - whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants" - Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point abut Cantor's passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood.

I will be surprised if this book is not one of the New York Time's 10 best books of 2010. 

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Soul

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.  --  C S Lewis

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Mme Bovary

My copy of the new Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary has just arrived. I've found myself bogged down in the book more than once in the past and have great hopes that will not happen with this new and much-touted version.

Giller Shortlist

The Scotiabank Giller shortlist was announced this morning:

• David Bergen, The Matter with Morris
• Alexander McLeod, Light Lifting (short stories)
• Sarah Selecky, This Cake Is for the Party (short stories)
• Johanna Skibsrud, The Sentamentalists
• Kathleen Winter, Annabel

The winner will be announced on 9 November.

Fall of Giants

There's a brouhaha building over at Amazon.com about the Kindle pricing of Ken Follett's new 1,000-page book, Fall of Giants, the first book in the Century Trilogy. The Kindle owners are infuriated because the publisher (not Amazon, apparently, but the publisher of the book) has set the price higher than the price at Amazon for the hardcover book.

I don't read Follett. My database shows I listened to On Wings of Eagles on Books on Tape in 1984 but that's it. However, I asked for a sample for my Kindle. And what a great start this book has.

It begins in 1911 with a lad of 13 going down the coal mines in Wales for the first time. Then it moves to January 1914 to the estate of the man who owns the land under which the coal miners are working. And then there is an explosion in the mine and the lad, now 16, in the absence of anyone in authority, takes over and begins the rescue efforts.

And there the sample ends. Classic cliffhanger. I was about to click on BUY just to see what happened next until I spotted the price. $19.99. Too much for an e-book that I can't lend or give away. Apparently even the serious Follett fans feel the same way and the publisher and Follett himself need to listen up. These folks aren't talking about waiting for the paperback. They are talking used books and libraries.

Why is the publisher pricing this e-book higher than the paper book? I understand that Amazon sells more e-books these days than paper. And the publisher needs to recoup the costs of paying the author, editing the book, materials, printing, transportation, advertising, and who knows what else. But judging from 2/3 of the Amazon reader-reviewers of the book, to price the Kindle copy higher than the paper is being taken as an insult to e-book readers.

Are the best-seller lists recording paper copies only? If so, the publisher needs to manipulate prices so that people buy the paper and not the e-book version, especially when the book is first released (Fall of Giants was released four days ago), so as to open high on the list. But at the cost of alienating so many Follett fans? And missing out on new Follett readers like me? It's a puzzle.