lkedzie's reviews
311 reviews

Some men will destroy the third pillar of governance rather than go to therapy.

This book is the narrative of the purchase of the Website Formerly Known as Twitter by E. Musk. It includes more than that, specifically into the history of tWFKaT and Musk's initial period of control over the site. It starts as solid business history, then veers away. Some of that is necessary by the virtue of when the book is written. The end, and so by extension, the beginning is arbitrary in the sense that this feels like an ongoing story, so as the text shifts to the more recent tWFKaT gossip it reads as a burn book or tell-all.

J. Dorsey, one of the founders of tWFKaT, is the surprise anthologist of the piece. J.D. and E.M. each act in ways fitting to parody rather than reality, but at least Emmuy has the place of mind to act the Bond villian as opposed to JDo, who is an anime villian from one of those shows that starts off all robots and swordplay but swings into sophomore philosophy.

The biggest take from the book is that, in light of EM's current ?career? ?!?shift?!?, is this dude definitely thinks that he is Archilochus' hedgehog, possessed of One Good Trick and a monomaniacal end goal. But the end, in comparison to the blood and treasure spent it is pursuit, has only the most moderate of success. Yes, I write that even on his status now of Czar Czar. As such, more than a lesson or clever source of information, the whole thing feels like a drinking game for contemporary U.S. politics: take a shot whenever Mr. M. does the same thing again.

The highlight of the book are all the outlandish stories. Again, the choice of doing this now presents certain problems, namely that a lot of things are semi-anonymous and there is some to none participation from the principals. But the receipts are there, and the outlandishness is often the point. If nothing else, I will be thinking about the saga of Esther Crawford for some time. But I did, surprisingly, find myself wishing that this was more of the book it started off as, a much more solid and technical story of a corporation and a purchase of it.

Billed as a devastating piece of investigation reporting, at the end, I ended up feeling sad, sympathetic to Musk's self-built prison. Not in a redemptive or exculpatory way, but in the way that 

 The pedantic complaint about this book, a history of axe murder, is that it is not about murder. It includes both lawful and unlawful killings.

It is also not about axes, or it requires a sort of acknowledgment of the concept of the axe in conceptual rather than material form.

That is also what makes the subject interesting, in the sense that the axe exists as an ancient, prosaic tool that also has utility for death. But on the third hand, that is what makes the mixture of the types of killing awkward. It is not, strictly speaking, about the misuse of the tool, but also (considering war and executions) use of the tool as designed. It is like if a history of the fork included the history of the trident. In contrast to its subject, the read is short and breezy. Too much so sometimes, with abbreviated takes that walk right up to misleading, and odd springs where the author decides to police her own tone.

The emphasis here is on murder. Having been ...axe...pilled? by a previous book, I expected more of the material history. This is true crime primarily, a story that moves through time, starting in prehistory with what we think might be death via axe of hominins, and ending in the contemporary world. 

The stories are good. The storytelling is good. At worst, it tries too hard, landing more sentimental than sensationalist. But the author blends cultural study into the facts of the cases to look at the way that the deaths were perceived, specifically since 'axe murderer' is a trope, and that trope itself has a history. This is why I think that the later chapters are stronger than the earlier ones: the author is having a more enjoyable time with more extrinsic material to work with. Likewise, the tone of the book is nonchalant in a way that plain meshes better with more densely framed material, which the author has in the present and does not have in the past. 

My thanks to the author, Rachel McCarthy James, for writing the book, and to the publisher, St. Martin's Press, for making the ARC available to me. 

 Sick Houses is an examination of the haunted house, but is not limited to the horror sub-genre. The haunted house is a reference point for the examination of the uncanny in lived space, or the representations of lived space, such as with a dollhouse.

As is usual with a book like this, the quality of the chapters varies, but I found it stronger than most. The strongest is on formal architecture and haunting as a part of the city, specifically the designed city. The weakest is the one on the concept of the Witch's house, which has interesting reference points but has trouble relating to the core concept. In general, the chapter weaknesses are in the forest, not the trees, with the individual concepts studied with care and profundity the spine not working to connect them.

The book has the right amount of personality. It includes authorial commentary and lived experience, which accelerates the already readable into the unique. In reading this, I started to wonder about this in comparison to the times I have read an author doing something similar, but where I disliked it. I think that there are two distinctions, the lesser being that the author writes with humor, or the right balance of humor to seriousness. The important one is that it fits the material. The special quality of the haunted house is the invasion of the interior world. It is about violation, even if Aristotle-style the violation is unintended. And that invasion is into the the most ordinary: the domestic versus the extraordinary. The author's comments, stories, and narrative fulfill a similar duty. A text about hauntings that is itself haunted.

The complaint here is spoilers. I would make this blink Geocities-style if I could, so let me be plain: THIS BOOK IS FULL OF SPOILERS. SERIOUSLY, THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. DO NOT READ IF YOU WANT AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HAUNTED HOUSE GENRE. Or at least be prepared to skip a few paragraphs now and again.

This ought to be obvious. You cannot do work like this without including the facts of narrative. I did not complain about this for books doing the same with Jane Eyre or Moby Dick. However, the media here often relies on the twist or other surprise. So you are warned. 

I would also mention how much is not covered that could be. I could list works that I wish were included, because I want to see how the author would apply her theories to them, but the scope of the project is such that this is okay. And while the reason why is discussed in the introduction, the book is restricted in terms of its discussions about race. The explanation is persuasive, but I also suspect that it will be a point of criticism. 

Ridley Scott referred to his movie Alien as a haunted house movie in space, which never made sense to me. If anything it is a workplace drama, premised on the confines of the ship like a house, sure, but its look is unfamiliar to us and the matter at hand is much more invasive in character. And if that is the sort of thing that you like to think about, you will love this book.

My thanks to the author, Leila Taylor, for writing the book and to the publisher, Repeater Books, for making the ARC available to me. 

 Hey, I know that you are off to play Thirsty Sword Lesbians with your Divinity School cohort, but could you give Grantham back their copy of Evangelion? 

 In what is a dual first, I would like to complain about the magic system in this Gothic novel.

Our protagonist, a Black woman at the end of her tether in 60's Chicago, receives a mysterious job in New Orleans, where she discovers a crumbling house with many mysteries, including ones that relate to her past. Can she fix the curse? Can she fix all the curses? 

The book has strong debut novel energy. There is an intricate beginning and a strong end, while the middle is a plotless muddle. The amount of not doing things the protagonist engages in is impressive. There is grade-A fridge logic to certain character choices. This is expected, and each would work on their own, but there are a lot of them. 

The writing is stylistically spare, which feels intentional in terms of setting up the book as a sort of exercise in contrast to the gothic, commentary on the genre as much as a participant in it. I love this sort of approach, and the themes here about family, race, mental health, and the United States are as fine and as well-situated as they come. However, the narrative voice itself is hard to read. It gets judgy in a way that is tiresome and inapt. It makes feeling like or even pathos for the characters difficult. To be cruel, it feels like it was written to vie for space on a middle school reading list, just to avoid any worry that a reader might be left behind by something going on in the book. 

The plot writ large is predictable, but the events are not, which is perfect for this genre. I think it takes a miss on some of the history as relates to the plot. I do give historical fiction generous leeway for history, because it is not the point, even when it is a sort of dual (or even triple) history like this one. Here, since it involves race and the U.S., we must also deal with the frustration of Lost Cause mythos poisoning the well of even well-intended writing. And I get that I am thinking a lot about it already in context because of the recent read of (view spoiler) but I experience struggle around some of the bigger elements to the setup.

It wears its analogies on its sleeve, but there is something just plain likable about the book that leaves me rounding up. Maybe it is the Chicago thing, but the author has a great understanding of her characters, and I felt invested in them despite the book telling me not to be and their actions being pretty unreasoned at times. And it is sufficiently scary, starting with more moody atmospherics then moving into louder scares. Good marks for a first novel; waiting to see what comes next. 

 This is a biography of the pundit William F. Buckley, Jr.. Buckley was a conservative political commentator, the epitome of pundit and total lexiconizing crush-object for anyone like me. The only thing that kept me from full blown fanboyism is my dysthemia and I am still trying to do his shtick. Starting with Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, the Ur-text of all books on campus controversies, he would start the National Review in his goal to create an insurgent political magazine and alternative to the more leftward high-class reporting. He would go on to host Firing Line, a political editorializing interview show that is so deeply in the genes of the modern media landscape as to be invisible, and wrote On the Right, a popular syndicated column. Buckley is the architect of the contemporary U.S. political Right, while also in so esteemed a position that he could operate as a critic of it. 

Buckley has a legacy of being the adult in the room, the principled and erudite branch of the conservative party, particularly in contrast to the washed-up performers who make up the corpus of contemporary commentary. The biography dismantles all of that. It is a dry text, but it seems so out of necessity. If I understand correctly this project has been in the works for over a decade, and it shows with the sense of the need to impart volumes of information. This overrides any particular them about the subject of the biography, excluding that the author likes the Uno Reverse Card school where a virtue or vice must be followed in immediate succession by its opposite. 

The author gets into Buckley's anti-Semitic and anti-Black background (via his family) and the way that the National Review and his writing projects were about pulling the Republican party further right in things like his adoration of McCarthy and hatred of Eisenhower, through to his surprising and somewhat covered up part in Watergate. Buckley's later career breaks with the consensus that put him more in the radical centrist school (much like David Brooks, whom he trained), and there is something of a running theme about how much he has changed his views as opposed to his methods. Buckley on race, and trying to discern what changed, if anything changed, is a topic for the future.

I cannot call a 1000 page book too short and still look myself in the mirror, but the closing part of Buckley's career gets a quick glance as compared to the rest, to the point that I feel it suspicious. It reads as pathos, the Cold Warrior trying to hold by moving into writing Tom Clancy fan fiction, but it also provides a thesis for his career: Buckley had shockingly crude comments about AIDS, that are then contrasted with his personal treatment of queer people and how same thought about him and his opinions as worthwhile. Like you want to be able to say that this was a person who was master at separating out the private and the political, who could perform at being a jerk while then being a square dealer after the fact. Instead, it leaves the feeling that his life is a ruse. Buckley is the swamp in a populist sense. He affirms the idea of The Establishment as a thing by virtue of the way that he was able to freely move within it. That he was also a segregationist is a feature, not a bug. 

As such, the book shakes up the usual routine of him as the elevated form of pundit that would later be replaced by bombast and grift. Instead, Buckley is we have Matt Walsh at home. It is a totally different sense of profound disappointment than I expected, and not a factor of the ultimate quality of the book, though, perhaps misgivings about what the book treats insufficiently. In general, I think it a strong book as evidenced by the volume here. Faced with so many topics that could be books of their own it still manages an explanation that covers a topic like the National Review as a whole, Buckley's variability on race, or his story-worthy family in a comprehensive way. 

My thanks to the author, Sam Tanenhaus, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Random House, for making the ARC available to me. 

Can someone make a musical about this guy? While secular music is still permitted?

This is a biography of Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator before, during, and after the U.S. Civil War. Sumner was an early member of no less than three political parties (Free Soil, Republican, and Liberal), all of them influential in their era, yet none around today. 

The author, a lawyer himself like Sumner, focuses on Sumner's relevance in his jurisprudence, a sort of small-c, small-p conservative progressivism. While at a time when the Constitution was irreconcilable to human dignity and civil rights, Sumner represented the redemptive take. The Constitution stood for an increase in liberty, thus it should always be read with that in mind. He also gave us the term equal protection under the law, at least as a term of art, and the name Alaska, or popularized it.

Sumner's oratory was legendary. He has, perhaps, the benefit of history, but he put his considerable education to its best political use. Likewise his Rolodex. The list of Sumner's confidants and corespondents would overwhelm a review to try and list, so the clever comments fly freely between them. It also earned him enemies, notably within his own party(ies) that would effectively block him from any office outside of senator. Oh, yeah, and the guy who beat him up on the Senate floor.

This is a masterful biography. It is long, and moves slowly, but it is worth it. The author is a lawyer acting as historian, which works because it manages to provide a lot more context to Sumner's life and work. The relevance of Sumner's father and grandfather in his beliefs is particularly interesting in what can only be described as trauma working itself out well. The speculation on his sexuality is middling. I feel like it is going to draw a lot of attention, and outside of the impossibly of speculation, Sumner scans to me less gay than asexual, with a misogynistic streak that seems drawn from the Greek and Roman work with which he was familiar. (Okay, there is that book, but he did not write it).

What moves it from like to love for me is the time spent on Sumner's career after the U.S. Civil War and how that ought to re-frame our thinking about the country.

There are many figures who were important in their time and are forgotten about now. That is what history is. The act of repeating and restating that to figure out what is meaningful. In the case of Sumner, his reduction to a AP history note about the causes of the Civil War is more than the fickleness of memory and reputation, but a memory hole out of the Lost Cause mythos and the result, first of perfidy, then of negligence, of the campaign to re-imagine the Antebellum south as something other than the mother of terrorists and treasoners. 

Sumner’s attacker would get written as having a Texas defense, where, sure, it was a crime, but Sumner had it coming fro being so outspoken about slavery, making Sumner less a victim of violence – violence, which should be noted was both premeditated and chosen to invoke the violence of slavery – as someone who shared responsibility for what happened to him.

This is a convenient lacuna. Forgetting why Sumner achieved the popularity he did allows the erasure of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the power that Black voting had and the fear it provoked, before it was crushed, buried under legal arguments that are equal to or better than the ones used for the act around a century later. Sumner has his faults: pride, certainly, no consideration for the American Indian, and an antipathy to women's rights, but he stands out as someone who was not anti-slavery but pro-racial equality. He does not just outshine his contemporaries, but politicians now. 

My complaint about the book is that it sort of name checks this elision of Sumner's legacy, but as a blur of quotes in the beginning and the end. Yes, it is outside of the scope of biography, but it seems relevant to understanding the texture of the biography, and what sort of lessons it could take moving forward as the citizens of the republic labor under new attempts to erase Black history et al. 

My thanks to the author, Zaakir Tameez, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Henry Holt & Company, for making the ARC available to me.