Added my brief review of Lisa Pulitzer and Cole Thompson’s Portrait of a Monster over at Good Reports. It’s the story of Joran van der Sloot, widely regarded as the murderer of Natalee Holloway and now serving a 28-year prison sentence in Peru for the murder of Stephany Flores. Van der Sloot liked to think of himself as an “alpha male” and I go off a bit on the mis-use and misunderstanding of this label.

There’s also an interesting CanLit connection to the story. According to interviews done at the time, Van der Sloot was working on an essay on Yann Martel’s Life of Pi the night of Natalee Holloway’s disappearance. In his own words, “Pi is a boy lost at sea on a boat with a lion, monkey, and a zebra.”

I don’t know if investigators ever followed up on this. Anyone who has read the book will recall that Pi is lost at sea on a boat with a Bengal tiger, an orangutan, a zebra, and a hyena. Given that a picture of a tiger appears on the cover of most editions of the book that I’ve seen, I wonder if Van der Sloot had even bothered to look at it, much less read it. But then alpha males don’t have a reputation for reading a lot, do they?

Added my review of Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge over at Good Reports. This is a must-read for political junkies, offering a thorough and insightful interpretation of the ’70s. (For another book on the same subject written by a kindred spirit I recommend Dominic Sandbrook’s Mad as Hell. For a more academic analysis, James T. Patterson’s Restless Giant. Or, if your tastes are more right-wing, David Frum’s How We Got Here.) Perlstein’s book is quite long and detailed, but manages to forcefully argue a single thesis: that in these years Reagan turned America away from self-criticism toward simple optimism and feel-good nationalism. It describes, in other words, yet another example of the deep and abiding anti-rationality that seems to be inherent in most societies. We should stop being surprised by this. As Perlstein remarks at one point near the end of his survey:

Liberals tend to get into the biggest political trouble when they presume that a reform is an inevitable concomitant of progress. This is when they are most unprepared for the blinding backlash that invariably ensues.

Blinding and blind. “Progress” is neither natural nor ineluctable. We can, and do, go into reverse.

From William Brittain-Catlin’s Offshore:

Yet no one was more adept at preserving himself in modernity than the bourgeois. Like the criminal, he would go undercover, but his cover was the interior of his home. He would escape into his private dwelling, where secrecy would become a fetish against the outside world. The bourgeois would cover up his traces in the interior as he would no doubt cover up the traces of his expropriation scams during the Hausmannization of Paris, with the proceeds and evidence of his criminality kept out of sight of the authorities. “To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself,” wrote Benjamin: as the crowd was a veil for the criminal, so the interior became a veil for the bourgeois.

The criminal and the bourgeois both hid undercover from modernity, obliterating their traces and protecting their freedom. The criminal hid his traces from the police — undercover, underground. In the bourgeois interior, objects and ornaments were covered in plush and velvet, sealing away what was under them. The bourgeois preserved his freedom with covers and boxes; his home became a shell, his possessions and wealth “removed from the profane eyes of non-owners.” The bourgeois would seek refuge in his library, his art, in his assets, which were the sacred objects of his ideal, free identity.

That the bourgeois continues to preserve his traces in a shell is evident to this day in the private banking and asset management schemes that run through the global offshore financial system, where wealth is protected against its uncovering through mechanisms that completely remove the identity or trace of ownership. The offshore system, built for the bourgeois by a network of other bourgeois — lawyers and accountants — also provides cover for the proceeds of organized crime and white-collar financial crime, money launderers, and corrupt presidents who have stripped their countries bare of assets, proving Benjamin’s point that “a career criminal is a career like any other.” The offshore system today it to corporate, private, and criminal wealth what the nineteenth-century interior was to the bourgeois and what the crowd was to the criminal: a cover behind which to hide their traces from modernity, where the criminal is masked as a bourgeois and the bourgeois unmasked as a criminal.

Or, as the great chronicler of the bourgeoisie had it: The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done.

Added my review of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (2003) over at Good Reports. In general I was unimpressed by this one, given how big a fan I am of true crime writing and how successful it was (a “major motion picture” is even reported to be in the works). Larson has been praised for his novelistic style, but I’m afraid this undercut some of my pleasure in the book. In brief, I thought he took liberties with the facts. He insists in his prefatory note that “However strange or macabre some of the following incidents may seem, this is not a work of fiction.” And at the end he mentions his agonizing over how to re-create some of serial killer H. H. Holmes’s murders when there were no witnesses to them. Buttressed by a reading of Capote’s In Cold Blood (perhaps not the ideal text in such a situation) he went on to build his murder scenes by using “threads of known detail to weave a plausible account, as would a prosecutor in his closing remarks to a jury.”

This sounds fair enough, but the fact is that Holmes had a rather bizarre and involved method of doing away with his victims and I think it would have been better if Larson had just admitted our inability to say for sure what happened. Far more troubling, however, was this account Larson gives of Holmes taking a pair of prospective victims on a tour of Chicago:

Holmes took the sisters to the Union Stock Yards, where a tour guide led them into the heart of the slaughter. The guide cautioned that they should watch their feet lest they slip in blood. They watched as hog after hog was upended and whisked screaming down the cable into the butchering chambers below, where men with blood-caked knives expertly cut their throats. The hogs, some still alive, were dipped next into a vat of boiling water, then scraped clean of bristle — the bristle saved in bins below the scraping tables. Each screaming hog then passed from station to station, where knifemen drenched in blood made the same few incisions times after time until, as the hog advanced, slabs of meat began thudding wetly onto the tables. Holmes was unmoved; Minnie and Anna were horrified but also strangely thrilled by the efficiency of the carnage. The yards embodied everything Anna had heard about Chicago and its irresistible, even savage drive toward wealth and power.

I was so struck by this passage that it was one of only two in the entire book that I made a note of. Did Chicagoans in the late nineteenth century really take young ladies out to the slaughterhouse on a date? As anyone who has been inside such a place will testify, they are truly horrifying. And yet Minnie was Holmes’s “wife” and Anna a newly-met sister-in-law.

Alas, this is what we are told in the notes by way of explanation:

Despite the stench and pools of blood, the Union Stock Yards were Chicago’s single most compelling attraction for visitors, and tour guides did indeed lead men and women into the heart of the operation. It seems likely that Holmes would have brought Minnie and Nannie there, partly because of the yards’ status,  partly because he would have derived a certain satisfaction from subjecting the women to its horrors.

“It seems likely . . .”? This will not do. Larson’s passage describing the visit is entirely made up, based on pure speculation. We don’t even know if Holmes ever visited the Union Stock Yards, much less what his reason would have been for bringing these two women on such a tour, or what their response would have been (“horrified but also strangely thrilled”?). Yes, it makes for a colorful passage with heavy thematic overtones (Holmes would run his own slaughterhouse in Chicago, where little would go to waste), but it’s a bit of writing that has no place in such a book.

Added my review of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything over at Good Reports. I believe the environment is the most pressing issue of our time, and that we are facing great challenges ahead. I don’t see how we’ll be able to hit any of the targets, no matter how modest and insufficient, that have been projected as necessary for keeping global climate change catastrophe at bay. As I say in my review of Klein’s book:

The phrase “Great Transformation” [used by environmentalists] recalls Karl Polanyi’s classic work on the birth of the market economy and the capitalist system, a development contemporary with the Industrial Revolution. That was one of the most profound shifts in all of human history, matched only by the beginnings of agriculture some 12,000 years earlier. And as Polanyi noted, the (first) Great Transformation marked a change not only in human society but in human nature.

The work of the next Great Transformation will be to effectively undo all of this, creating a new economy, or human ecology, and a new human nature, all within the next decade or so. A tall order, for which there is no historical precedent, despite Klein’s best efforts at finding one.

This is a subject I’ve returned to many, many times over the years, often repeating myself. Here, for example, is what I had to say in a review of Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff:

With all due respect to Annie Leonard, and I am deeply sympathetic to her concerns, her sharing, caring community in downtown Berkeley is not a viable model for a new economic order. It is an enclave, existing within and supported by industrial civilization. As Leonard correctly points out, it was the Industrial Revolution that changed the world and turned our economy into one based on mass production and mass consumption. To change things – either “back” or forward, if there is a difference – means to some extent undoing the Industrial Revolution. Unfortunately, that revolution has turned into what Ronald Wright, in A Short History of Progress, describes as a “progress trap.” There simply is no way out of it because of the sacrifice involved in tearing ourselves free.

It’s rare, and usually not a very good idea, for a reviewer to inject personal, biographical information into a review, but in this case I feel it’s warranted. I grew up, and spent a great deal of my life living on a farm. Briefly the house had no plumbing. We used an outhouse. We churned our own butter for years. We baled hay in the summer using small bales that had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. We cleaned out cattle stalls all winter – every day, seven days a week – by pitchfork. Today, I know of very few farmers – aside from the local Mennonites – who live like this. Hay is baled in massive round bales, stalls are cleaned out by automated systems or small tractors. Butter is so cheap there’s no point making your own. Or even, for that matter, growing your own vegetables (as we always did).

Most of the people I know would, I think, rather die than live the idyllic life I did growing up. And yet this is what a truly post-industrial, environmentally sustainable civilization would look like. Except it would be worse. We would not live in urban communes like Berkeley, but have to work as peasants. To pretend otherwise, to say (as many do) that we can live environmentally and still enjoy something approximating our current standard of living is the noble lie at the heart of a lot of environmental talk. Our world would be changed utterly. Even those of us lucky enough to reside in towns would find work far more labour-intensive and uncomfortable, with far less leisure time. Would we be healthier? Almost certainly. Would it be better for the planet? Absolutely. But it would not be anything like what we see described in this passage from Alan Durning that Leonard endorses:

“Accepting and living by sufficiency rather than excess offers a return to what is, culturally speaking, the human home: to the ancient order of family, community, good work, and good life; to a reverence for skill, creativity, and creation; to a daily cadence slow enough to let us watch the sunset and stroll by the water’s edge; to communities worth spending a lifetime in; and to local places pregnant with the memories of generations.”

In other words, a return to a News from Nowhere sort of medievalism. It sounds like the vision of Princess Nekayah [in Samuel Johnsons’s novel Rasselas], and is just as likely to be realized. When Pol Pot wanted to send Cambodians back to the land he had to do it at the point of a bayonet, and even so he ended up killing millions.

As I said at the end of my review of Rubin’s book [Jeff Rubin’s Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller], three things will be needed to respond to the challenge of finding an environmental balance for modern civilization, each of which is a total non-starter politically: real sacrifice, meaning accepting at least some diminishment, and probably quite a lot, in our quality of life; a spirit of radical egalitarianism, meaning we all sacrifice equally; and a global consensus on action, since the problems we face have global ramifications. To say that Leonard is right in pointing out the dangers of not doing anything, of just continuing to live the way we live now, is almost beside the point. We know smoking is bad for you – a major cause of cancer and heart disease – but people still smoke. We know fast food will kill you, but that hasn’t stopped billions of people from eating it.

And these are examples where the ill effects of our behaviour are personally and (relatively speaking) immediately felt! The fact of the matter is that we are not a rational species, and we’re even worse when it comes to planning for the future.

I hate to seem this cynical, but I honestly can’t see any way out. Elizabeth Kolbert was of a similar point of view in her review of Klein in the New York Review of Books:

To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.

In her response to Kolbert, Klein emphasized that her “book is about the huge public policy shifts needed to make . . . low-carbon choices far easier and accessible to all. It is, therefore, a book first and foremost about ideology, and the need for a dramatic move away from the dominant free-market logic that has made so many of these necessary policies seem politically impossible.”

This is fine as far as it goes, and I am in broad agreement with Klein that what is necessary is a transformation of our entire world view if we want to create a sustainable society. But Kolbert’s rejoinder is also correct:

I wrote that I found much of her book compelling, but indicated that, on several crucial issues, I found it vague. In particular, I wrote that the book glossed over the really significant—and politically unpopular—changes in American life that meaningful climate action requires.

Klein’s letter only confirms this assessment. She reiterates a claim she makes in her book that as far as cutting consumption goes, “we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s.” This claim is either purely impressionistic or just plain wrong. If you look at the figures, which, once again, are readily available online, you’ll see that since the 1970s, per capita energy consumption in the US has actually declined, as have per capita emissions. How far back would we have to go to make the kind of difference that’s needed?

How far back? To a time before the first Great Transformation, before the Industrial Revolution and all it brought with it. To be fair, there are those who believe that with new technologies we can continue to maintain today’s high standards of living with a “steady state” or “zero growth” economy. In my Story of Stuff review I called this the “noble lie” of environmentalism, but it’s one that many people believe in. Marq De Villiers made the argument in Our Way Out:

De Villiers says we can still enjoy the fruits of advanced technology and live “as well as, or perhaps better than, the well-off do now” in a green society.

I find this very hard to believe.

There is another s-word that cannot be dis-attached from the idea of sustainability: sacrifice. Yes, we could all do more with less energy and shrink our carbon footprints to a fraction of their present size. The economy as currently structured is incredibly wasteful. What’s more, living locally and consuming less may very well make us healthier and happier, both as individuals and as a society.

But so what? De Villiers’s principles may be perfectly rational, but reason has nothing to do with the way we live our lives. What we want is comfort and convenience, status and respect. To take an obvious example: we know that cigarettes and fast food are expensive luxuries that are bad for us, but they are still industries worth billions of dollars. And these are products that impact our personal health directly! We haven’t been able to give up cigs and greasy burgers even to save our own lives. Our concern for the future of the planet is probably less of a priority.

It is hard to imagine our being able to enjoy lifestyles even in the relatively near future that are anything close to those in the West now. But, as George W. Bush so eloquently and correctly put it, the American way of life is non-negotiable. Some people dream of living a life off the grid, growing their own veggies, darning their own socks, using public transit, turning vacations into stay-cations, and all the rest of it. But most of us would draw a line in the sand long before giving up air conditioning, air travel, and an expensive home entertainment system.

I want to be optimistic, but as you can tell from these review excerpts, I’ve been saying the same thing for years now and haven’t read any evidence to change my mind. We may be on the cusp of a Great Transformation, but it won’t come through planning, or willingly.

Added my review of Douglas Coupland’s Kitten Clone over at Good Reports. I’ve been pretty harsh on Coupland over the years, so I’m happy to say that Kitten Clone, which is about the corporation Alcatel-Lucent and the digital revolution generally, is one of the best books I read in 2014. It’s a dispiriting story (the employees of Alcatel seem a rather sad and pessimistic bunch, at least to me), but Coupland’s report is lively, mature, and full of insight. I hope we’ll get more like this from him.

Added my review of J. B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World over at Good Reports. I’ve read (and reviewed) a lot of these enviro-warning books over the past ten years. A lot. Currently I’m reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, which is very good but only adds to the pile. The problem seems pretty obvious though, and I’m not sure there are that many real “deniers” out there anyway. Everybody knows that our current way of life is unsustainable. It seems impossible for us to do anything about it though. Or perhaps it’s like knowing that cigarettes are killing you but smoking anyway. Cognitive dissonance. Either way, the result is the same, whether we’re talking about the environment or the economy. Here is the first sentence of Jeff Faux’s The Servant  Economy:

Historians who look back to our time will surely conclude that our problem was not that we didn’t know where we were headed, it was that we didn’t act on what we knew.

The problem is always what to do. All of these books come with suggestions for change, but they are invariably the weakest and least convincing parts. It makes me wonder what would be best for us: a soft, slow landing or a sharp shock to the system? Neither appeals to me, but one or the other is inevitable.

Added my review of Graeme Smith’s The Dogs Are Eating Them Now over at Good Reports.

The reality check is that Afghanistan has become a violent place where politics is intensely local and government thoroughly corrupt. The seemingly endless fighting (which has gone on for decades now) has had the effect of creating a moral callousness and “life is cheap” attitude.

There are many examples provided of this casual morbidity. The book’s title comes from an incident Smith witnessed where Canadian forces used Taliban corpses as bait to draw out insurgents, but instead had to watch the bodies eaten by wild dogs. Elsewhere we visit a morgue overflowing with so many corpses the staff can no longer document them, see anonymous body parts stuck to the side of armoured vehicles after a bomb blast, and meet an Afghan governor staring “with mild disappointment” at gruesome carnage left after a Taliban attack (he had expected more bodies).

“Death does not inspire the kind of seriousness in Kandahar that it does in rich countries,” Smith concludes. And what a world of tragedy is in those words.

From Who Owns the Future? (2013) by Jaron Lanier:

Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats book as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from  individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.

Added my review of Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge over at Good Reports. Pynchon is one of those all-too-common older writers who has just been living off past glories for decades now. He’s managed his brand well by cultivating a persona as a media recluse, long past the point where I think anyone would care if he “came out.” But his recent novels just go over the same themes, and they’re not well written at all. I guess some people get a pleasant retro buzz out of them (witness the new movie coming out of Inherent Vice), but I can’t think of any evidence from the past twenty years of him improving.

Why is it that we allow artists, and in particular authors, to get by for so long on reputation alone? Is it a lack of critical confidence? A deference to the cult of “genius”? Pynchon isn’t the most egregious example I can think of. Don DeLillo is probably worse. Haruki Murakami has been embarrassing himself for years. Cormac McCarthy is pretty awful now too. But it seems as if writers are given a lifetime pass if they’ve ever done anything good. In what other profession does that happen?