FATE OF THE STATES: The New Geography of American Prosperity

Jun 28, 2013

Meredith Whitney
Portfolio/Penguin
ISBN 978-1591845706
260 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Dante Chinni

When it comes to promise and peril in the U.S. economy, your first instinct is to listen to someone like banking analyst Meredith Whitney. Back in 2007, when sunny adjectives were used to describe the country's economic situation, she saw the storm clouds looming in the housing market, and unlike others, she warned of what was coming.

Whitney's understanding of the great collapse of 2008 is on display in her latest book, "Fate of the States." If you are looking for a quick, accessible explanation of how we got into the mess we're in, Chapter 2, "Housing Revisited," is a nice explainer. And she draws some thoughtful conclusions about the present and future from her understanding of the housing crunch. "In the near term, the economic gap between the have and have-not states cannot be closed without rapid reinflation of the housing market," she writes, "and that seems unlikely given the current state of mortgage finance in the United States." It's a good point, and one could argue that it is true not just of a few states but of the economy as a whole.

"Fate of the States," however, is about more than the housing industry. It aims to be a broad examination of where the country's economy is going and who the winners and losers will be in the great shakeout that we are all witnessing and that some of us are acutely feeling. This big point is where the book and Whitney's analytical powers hit a wall.

Her principal argument is that the states that missed out on much of the boom of the past decade, and on the bust that followed, are ripe for good times. The "coastal and Sun Belt states ... can no longer afford to spend as much" on services, she writes, while the "central corridor states," which essentially go from Montana and the Dakotas down to Texas, "are booming and so are tax receipts and spending on core services."

There are some real challenges to this framework. That "central corridor" area is massive. It includes states that have been economic winners for quite some time (Texas and Colorado) and others (the Dakotas and the Great Plains states) that are fundamentally different from one another, not just economically but in a variety of other ways, from ethnic demographics to education rates. Ascribing a common identity or future to them is a perilous game that can create awkward comparisons.

Bigger problems come in the data the book uses to make its points. Whitney holds herself up as a data person; her understanding of housing data allowed her to see that coming collapse. But numbers can be tricky. Much of their meaning is derived from viewpoint and context. The cardinal sin of dealing with data is mistaking correlation for causation, and Whitney does that often in "Fate of the States."

For instance, in her desire to talk about the economic struggles of California, Whitney notes that the state's education budget has faced cuts - more than $6 billion since 2008, she says. Then a few sentences later she ties those cuts to changes in educational achievement: "In 1990 California had a 1.3 percent lead over the United States as a whole in the share of its population that had graduated from high school. By 2008, California's population had 6 percent fewer high school graduates than the national average." That's an interesting set of numbers, but there is a long list of socioeconomic factors that might explain it - from immigration into California to improvements in graduation numbers elsewhere. Not to mention the fact that the cuts she writes about happened (BEGIN ITAL)after 2008.

Later in the same chapter Whitney writes that Wyoming boasts the country's lowest public university tuition even as the state spends more than most on higher education. "Perhaps not coincidentally," she writes, "Wyoming now boasts the fifth-highest per-capita income in the country." Or, perhaps completely coincidentally. There's simply no way of knowing without more data on a host of other potential factors. Starting with an idea and adding a number here or there without context doesn't show causation. This kind of numerical cherry-picking appears often in the book, on everything from states with rising poverty rates to migration to and from right-to-work states.

Some of the conclusions in "Fate of the States" frankly seem to be reaches. Yes, the idea that manufacturing is coming back, in the middle of the country and elsewhere, has been making headlines recently. But the 30-to-40-year trend shows an unmistakable decline, particularly when it comes to the number of people employed in manufacturing. Automation is a big reason. Far fewer people work on production lines today than in the past, and that trend is likely to continue.

And it's true that the Dakotas are seeing more tax revenue and building infrastructure thanks to oil and gas extraction. But it is far from clear whether that change is something permanent or rather a temporary boom like, say, the housing boom of the past decade. There is, as yet, no clear sign that all the workers coming for the jobs in those states are planning to stick around and raise families on the prairie.

The biggest issues in "Fate of the States," however, may come from the book's unit of measurement. States are big, complex places that are hard to characterize simply. Texas, for instance, is one of the book's big winners. Its population is growing, and it attracted about 225,000 people from California in the first decade of this century. And Whitney notes how Austin has gained jobs from California tech firms such as Apple and eBay. So there's some proof that Texas is ascendant.

But there's another side to the numbers on Texas not found in the book. About 30 percent of the state's counties lost population between 2000 and 2010 - small, rural, struggling places. The tech jobs and tax revenue Austin is luring into the state may help those counties some, but it's very unlikely we'll be looking at them as "winners" in 2020.

Dante Chinni is director of the American Communities Project at American University and the author of "Our Patchwork Nation."

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE DISPENSABLE NATION: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

May 3, 2013

Vali Nasr
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385536479
300 pages
$28.95

Reviewed by Warren I. Cohen

Vali Nasr - dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, a Middle East specialist and an acolyte of Richard Holbrooke -- has always believed that the Middle East is the center of the world. He recently discovered to his dismay that the White House rather than the State Department generally decides foreign policy, that domestic politics often influence foreign affairs. Too bad he never spoke to some former secretaries of state, such as Warren Christopher or Colin Powell, before he entered government service as a senior adviser to Holbrooke. Indeed, it's surprising that Holbrooke, who had been frustrated by White House interference when he served in the administration of Jimmy Carter, did not prepare him.

Nasr's new book, "The Dispensable Nation," argues that meddling by the Obama White House in foreign affairs has severely damaged American interests abroad. Nasr's focus on the Middle East is so sharp that he decries the American "pivot" to East Asia and contends that the outcome of the contest between the United States and China will be determined ultimately in West Asia (read Middle East). Usually supportive of the efforts of former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nasr finds intolerable her suggestion that the Asia-Pacific has replaced the Middle East as the world's most important region for the future of American interests.

On the other hand, he gives new credence to the China threat. He sees U.S. policies pushing Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Pakistan into China's orbit, creating opportunities for Beijing to promote illiberal institutions in those countries. And yet he endorses the be-nice approaches toward China trumpeted by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. His understanding of China, Chinese foreign policy and American policy toward China is clearly limited.

Nasr argues that President Obama's policies, especially toward Afghanistan and Iran, are not based on strategic considerations but rather are designed to satisfy public opinion. Although his case against White House intrusions into policymaking is persuasive, Nasr's inability to perceive any justification for such interventions is disturbing. He appears to have no grasp of the importance of domestic politics to foreign policy decision-making in a democracy.

Nasr's critique of Obama's management of Middle Eastern affairs is unquestionably valid. He contends that the hasty departure from Iraq unleashed chaos in the region and that the current plan to withdraw from Afghanistan is an abandonment that will leave American goals unmet. A more gradual departure from Iraq and a demand for political settlements in Syria and Bahrain, he suspects, might have stopped the sectarian violence in the region. He is appalled constantly by the White House's apparent indifference to diplomacy, especially when Holbrooke was involved. Obama, he insists, should have listened to Holbrooke but instead ignored him, and gave him minimal support and insufficient authority. Nasr argues that only Clinton's tenacity and the respect she commanded retained any influence for State. As he puts it, "When things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Hillary because they knew she was the only person who could save the situation."

Nasr's discussion of relations with Pakistan, much of which he observed first-hand, is superb. Holbrooke, he notes, thought American interests in Afghanistan were important but deemed our interests in Pakistan vital. Nasr reminds us that the powerful Pakistani military was always focused on India and had supported the Taliban to check Indian influence in Afghanistan. Obama's advisers understood this and realized that the Pakistani strategic calculus would have to change before the war in Afghanistan could be ended on acceptable terms. But Nasr claims that the White House -- and especially national security adviser Tom Donilon -- undermined Holbrooke. Policy toward Pakistan was dominated by the Pentagon and the intelligence community -- and with Holbrooke's death, failed completely. Nasr contends that the United States now treats Pakistan as an adversary rather than as a friend, applying pressure in place of diplomatic engagement -- to the benefit of China.

In addition to Donilon, Nasr points to Dennis Ross as an obstacle to wise policy in the Middle East. Ross, a longtime presidential adviser on the region, was responsible for relations with Iran and efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to Nasr, the appointment of Ross as senior adviser on the Middle East for the National Security Council signaled to Iran that the United States mistrusted Tehran's overtures and would rely on pressure rather than diplomacy. Obama's policy toward Iran was "a strategic blunder." Nasr also holds Ross responsible for an inadequate American response to the Arab Spring. The United States should have been involved more diplomatically and economically.

Nasr suggests that America's Arab allies would rather see war between the United States and Iran than a rapprochement. He insists that sanctions that weaken Iran will open the Middle East to Sunni radicalism and greater penetration by China and Russia. And, shades of the Cold War, he argues that the real threat to American interests comes not from Iran but from China and Russia.

Mostly, Nasr faults Obama for what he perceives as the president's disengaged attitude toward the Middle East -- and for pandering to public opinion. He fears that America's influence in the world is diminishing because it exercises power poorly, and he blames the White House staff for interfering with the just operations of the State Department.

Nasr's description of the interplay between the politicians and the diplomats suffers from two problems. First, though a brilliant scholar of Middle Eastern affairs, he is unable to see beyond his area of expertise and his brief experience in government. Today we lose the Middle East, tomorrow the world. Second, he lacks historical perspective. He has little sense of how policy has been made in the past, specifically the part played by domestic politics. Holbrooke knew -- and countless historians and political scientists, including some of Nasr's colleagues at SAIS, have written about -- the need for public support to sustain policy. Nasr can teach us much about the Middle East, but there is still much for him to learn about the policy process.

Warren I. Cohen is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the general editor of the New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE LAST LINE OF DEFENSE: The New Fight for American Liberty

Mar 15, 2013

Ken Cuccinelli with Brian J. Gottstein
Crown Forum
ISBN 978-0770437091
259 pages
$25

Reviewed by Steven Ginsberg

Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's attorney general, Republican candidate for governor and tea party hero, is a man under siege - and that's just the way he likes it.

He has become the target of ridicule from pundits on the right - in February, for instance, Joe Scarborough called him "certifiable when it comes to mainstream political thought." He is being challenged in his own state, where a pair of Northern Virginia business leaders recently berated him for being out of touch. Things have gotten so bad that Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling has refused to endorse Cuccinelli, even though deciding not to launch an independent bid against him.

A good bit of Cuccinelli's predicament comes from the release of his book, "The Last Line of Defense," an extended attack on what he sees as the criminal overreach of the Obama administration - a group he unsubtly describes in the title of Chapter 1 as "The Biggest Set of Lawbreakers in America." Moderate Republicans worry that "The Last Line of Defense" will place Cuccinelli out of the mainstream, while handing Democrats endless fodder to use against him. It's never a good sign when your opponents hold a press conference, as Democrats in Richmond did, to take turns reading aloud from your book.

But Cuccinelli, who rose to prominence with his opposition to a 2002 plan to raise regional taxes to fund transportation projects, has always drawn his energy by standing up for what he believes, no matter the consequence. He was tea party long before the tea party existed. And in "Last Line," he makes clear that he aims to be tea party well after the tea party, too.

Cuccinelli writes that the Obama administration has sought to "exercise control over the American people that it didn't have the authority to exercise, and in the process it trampled the sovereignty of the states, violated federal law, ignored federal courts and violated the Constitution to achieve its goals of redistributing wealth, concentrating power in Washington, and rewarding its political allies."

"Last Line" is not a particularly welcoming book. Those who don't embrace Cuccinelli's point of view are dismissed as naive or, as he puts it, "asleep." It reads a little like talk radio sounds - loud, one-sided and at wit's end. It is more a justification for what Cuccinelli has done than an invitation to join the cause.

Cuccinelli takes on the Federal Communications Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and other parts of the government, but the heart of his case and the bulk of his book are dedicated to his greatest defeat - his failed attempt to stop President Obama's healthcare plan from becoming law. He makes clear that this is a fight he has not abandoned at a time when many of his fellow conservatives have moved on.

As Florida Gov. Rick Scott, an equally fervent critic of the Affordable Care Act, put it in late February: "It doesn't matter what I believe. The Supreme Court made its decision. We had an election in the fall and the public made their decision. Now the president's healthcare law is the law." For Cuccinelli, what he believes is all that matters, and in this regard he repeatedly seeks to place himself in line with the Founding Fathers. "Patrick Henry's hard-fought effort is a lesson for everyone who fights for principles," he writes of the early Virginian's opposition to the original Constitution. "The lesson is that we don't always win on the first round, but that doesn't mean we go home and stop trying."

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THE LAST AMERICAN DIPLOMAT: John D. Negroponte and the Changing Face of American Diplomacy

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Aug 10, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

George W Liebmann
I B Tauris
ISBN 978-1848858695
368 pages
$99

Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle

As the author notes, his subject, John D. Negroponte was a Democrat early in his career, a Republican at the end of it, but "no partisan." As ambassador to countries as disparate as the Philippines and Iraq, as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations, as director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush, the long-serving Negroponte achieved a curriculum vitae that few American diplomats can match.

His last title was deputy secretary of state, in which capacity he found himself frequently at odds with the administration for which he worked - again, that of the second President Bush. "It is hard, without caricature," writes lawyer and historian George W. Liebmann, "to describe the difficulties under which Negroponte labored for the last eight years of his tenure, particularly for the first six of them." Liebmann calls Negroponte "the last American diplomat" in part because - against the modern tendency to take absolutist positions and disregard the views of allies - "he exemplified the diplomat's code, founded at its best on recognition that other people have interests and ambitions, and that flexibility in the conduct of personal and international relations is a good in itself."

Dennis Drabelle can be reached at drabelled@washpost.com.

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THE OBAMIANS: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power

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Jun 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James Mann
Viking
ISBN 978-0670023769
392 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Gideon Rose

The officials who make foreign policy don't have it easy. Trapped between the domestic political environment on one side and the international system on the other, they have only modest freedom to choose a course of action. They need to weigh the relative merits of several policy options on a vast range of intricate and thorny issues, many of them interconnected. And every few years, the senior management of the operation is completely replaced, with the top jobs going to newcomers who often know little about the issues in question.

How those newcomers handle themselves in office is a perennially interesting question and one that the journalist James Mann has made something of a cottage industry. His 2004 book, "The Rise of the Vulcans," chronicled the backgrounds and experiences of George W. Bush's initial foreign policy team, and "The Obamians" does something similar for the current administration.

Mann is a good reporter. He writes clearly and accessibly, often with insight and sound judgment. There are gaps in the new book's coverage (Israel, Europe, trade), but the subjects he does treat (national security, Afghanistan and Pakistan, China, the Arab Spring) are handled accurately and without ideological bias. And here, as before, Mann's strength remains his close attention to the political and professional backgrounds of key administration officials, many of whom he interviewed.

The portrait is mixed. Mann argues that Obama himself dominates foreign policy, relying on a few close junior staffers in the White House to execute his will while more senior, high-profile figures in the cabinet protect his political flanks. The president comes off as smart, disciplined and engaged, but also arrogant, controlling, thin-skinned and political. He gives big speeches filled with grand rhetoric and ambitious goals, but not much of that gets translated into policy or achievement. Obama tries to escape stark choices, preferring to reconcile seemingly opposed courses of action. The record includes some successes and some failures, some bullets dodged, and a lot of cans kicked down the road.

Little of this is wrong, but little is surprising either. The book is a good representation of conventional Washington discussion about the subject - event-driven, superficial and solipsistic. There is a lot of America in these pages, but not much foreign or policy.

At one point, Mann distinguishes between the actual Obamians (who had backgrounds in Congress and became the loyal White House aides) and a group of experienced Democratic foreign policy professionals he calls the Trout Fishers (because of their penchant for fishing excursions during meetings of the blue-ribbon Aspen Strategy Group). Compared to the Trout Fishers, the Obamians "tended to know less about the nuances and subtleties of an issue, and they were less concerned with the practical details of governance. They were, however, more adept at providing a determined opposition to the Republicans, and much better at figuring out what to say in public about foreign policy [during the 2008 campaign]. They found it easier to offer the broad perspective of outsiders."

The problem, of course, is that once in office, outsiders end up having to grapple with all those pesky nuances and details. The Obamians prove smart enough to understand that throwing the standard foreign policy playbook out the window will make things worse rather than better. And so they eventually trim their sails and act less transformationally than either supporters or opponents expected.

Mann tells this story, but because he rarely gets down into the weeds of specific policy choices, he doesn't give the reader a strong sense of why this evolution is usually a good thing. The reason is that, as the Trout Fisher types of both parties understand, the basic template for American foreign policy has been relatively constant for almost seven decades now and needs only tweaking and updating, not fundamental revision.

The central task facing each new administration is pretty much the same: figuring out how to consolidate, protect and extend the liberal international order that emerged in the West after World War II. This order had both domestic and international components: At its core were democracies with mixed economies cooperating and trading with each other, nestling closely under an American security umbrella. It has provided a framework within which local economic, social and political development has proceeded across the globe, to the net benefit of both the United States and the world at large. Generations of policymakers in Washington and allied capitals have nurtured and guarded their precious offspring, keeping at bay a host of dangers - war and aggression, economic nationalism, disruption and chaos.

The order derived from Western policymakers' reflections on the nightmares of the interwar period, when unregulated markets and uncoordinated behavior had led to economic disaster and the rise of aggressive dictatorships. The outlines of the system were sketched before the postwar break with the Soviet Union, and "containment" was a late (if complementary and appropriate) addition to the policy mix. Rather than saying that the Cold War caused the order, in other words, it is more accurate to say that the Soviet Union's unwillingness to take part in the order caused the Cold War. This is why the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union changed the world less than many expected: Since those were never central to the order itself, their passing did little to affect it, merely paving the way for its extension into areas of the world previously off-limits.

In recent years, the threats to the order have evolved. As the danger of conflict between the great powers has receded and globalization has taken off, terrorism - historically a secondary concern - has gained new importance. Countries such as China, India and Brazil have emerged as powerful regional actors and crucial pillars of an ever-more-interdependent global economy. U.S. influence in non-military arenas has diminished, and the institutions used to manage the system no longer work well. The challenge for policymakers in Washington and elsewhere today, therefore, is devising ways to revitalize the order, giving it a new lease on life so future generations, here and abroad, can continue to enjoy its benefits.

As for the Obama team's record on this front, history will probably say that they made some progress, primarily by cauterizing some of the wounds of the Bush years. Thanks to their efforts, the next administration will inherit a cleaner slate and be able to focus less on crisis management and more on the big picture of global governance. That might sound like a small win - but given the extraordinary stakes for which this game is being played, even a small win is welcome indeed.

James Mann is editor of Foreign Affairs.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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PRAIRIE FEVER: British Aristocrats in the American West 1830-1890

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Jun 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Peter Pagnamenta
Norton
ISBN 978-0393072396
338 pages
$27.95

Reviewed by Scott Martelle

We have a certain image, we Americans, of the early settlers who moved westward across the Great Plains. Solitary mountain men seeking hunting and trapping lands in the Rockies. Young families in carts and wagons hoping to farm a future. Hard-edged miners hungry for gold and silver. Then come the folks seemingly cut from a Mel Brooks movie: the 20-something sons of Britain's then-1 percent, seeking sport and adventure while traveling with large entourages, including valets who dressed them for the day.

These last ones are the focus of Peter Pagnamenta's entertaining new book, "Prairie Fever," a deeply researched and finely delivered look at what can best be described as a counterintuitive slice of American history. The Brits may have lost us as a colony, but by the mid-1800s they were happy to send their lads along as though on extended Spring Break.

The tourism invasion began, in part, because of James Fenimore Cooper and his Leatherstocking Tales, Pagnamenta reports. Natty Bumppo and his fellow travelers were popular among English readers, and the stories of life on the frontier whetted the appetites of young British men who found themselves in unusual straits. In that era, the eldest son stood to inherit the family estate, while younger male siblings received allowances but few responsibilities. What to do with the indolent rich was a conundrum, since working for a living was outside the sphere of social respectability. One solution was to send them packing to America, lured by the tales of buffalo hunts, Indian skirmishes and the taste of hardy adventure. Some sought to blend in; most did not.

One of the first to make the trip was Sir William Drummond Stewart, who was particularly taken with Cooper's 1827 novel, "The Prairie," and its descriptions of vast herds of buffalo. (Cooper, ironically, never laid eyes on them, having trekked no farther west than Buffalo, the terminus of the recently opened Erie Canal.) Stewart, a Scotsman, set out in 1832 and by the summer of 1833 was in southwest Wyoming for the annual rendezvous, which drew together fur buyers and suppliers from St. Louis, trappers from the range and Rocky Mountains, and the native tribes. It was a brawling, sprawling gathering of boozing, trading, resupplying, prostitution and horse racing.

Stewart spent most of six years on the Great Plains and in the Rockies, and toward the end brought along an artist to record the scenes. He and other early travelers also wrote about their experiences, adding to the Cooper canon, and the trickle of curious Brits turned into a full invasion.

A key draw was the easy slaughter of buffalo, and Pagnamenta, a London-based documentary film maker and social historian, is at his best describing the lure, and the savagery, of the hunting expeditions in which scores of buffalo were killed in single outings just because they could be had. The carcasses were usually left to rot where they dropped.

One of the highest-profile offenders was Sir St. George Gore, who one government report said had killed 6,000 buffalo. Gore's personal scorebook recorded "a mere 2,000 buffalo, 1,600 deer and elk, 105 bears, and thousands more mountain sheep, coyotes, and timber wolves." All for "sport." U.S. bureaucrats charged with watching over the native tribes that relied on the buffalo for sustenance became so outraged as to recommend that Gore's hunting trophies, destined for shipment back to England, be confiscated and sold off. Ultimately, no action was taken.

Traveling the prairie was no lark of an expedition for most. Some died. Others recoiled at the hardship and quit. A few sought to stay, establishing farm-centric communities like one outside Le Mars, Iowa, complete with polo fields and private social clubs. But cultural differences, the rigors of prairie farming, and tornadoes sent them packing after a few years.

But most of the aristocratic travelers had no intention of staying. Pagnamenta writes that while Americans saw "the extension of the frontier into and across the Rockies [as] another chapter of a work in progress" and marked by hard labor and stark personal risk, "British aristocrats continued to see" the frontier "in purely recreational terms."

By the 1880s, the rich tourists had morphed into rich investors, combining their wealth into investments in cattle-ranching and mining trusts. American resentment boiled over as hundreds of thousands of acres of land were bought up (often fraudulently so) by wealthy Brits, referred to derisively in newspaper coverage as "milords." In 1887, Congress enacted the Alien Land Bill, which barred non-Americans from buying land, as harsh winters and drought-filled summers decimated the herds amassed by British investment companies. The "prairie fever" Pignamenta so vividly describes was effectively over.

Scott Martelle is the author of "Detroit: A Biography."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance

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Jun 15, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Thomas McNamee
Free Press
ISBN 978-1439191507
339 pages
$27

Reviewed by Phyllis Richman

Craig Claiborne established his taste for the impeccable in 1961 when, four years after becoming the New York Times food editor, he published "The New York Times Cook Book." The recipes commenced with caviar and foie gras, then moved on to lobster en Bellevue parisienne with aspic-coated medallions.

In contrast, Claiborne's biography, "The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat," by Thomas McNamee, is a big juicy dish bubbling with scandals and rivalries, thickened with oft-told secrets, chock full of random bits as if a boxful of mementos had been upended into the stew.

Dig in, and it is likely to persuade you that this Clark Kent of a food editor really did exert superpowers on the cultural life of 20th-century America. There was no such thing as a restaurant critic in the late 1950s, when Claiborne won his long campaign to be hired by the Times, says McNamee. That may be arguable, but there is no doubt that Claiborne brought a new level of professionalism to critiques. He also introduced the techniques and ingredients of the outside world, particularly France, to the American home cook.

You thought Julia Child did that? Yes, but Claiborne was the one who brought her nationwide attention - a generous act in the cutthroat cookbook world, since her first cookbook was an immediate competitor to his.

A Mississippi boy whose mother ran a boarding house, Claiborne thoroughly prepared for the job that he coveted. After earning a journalism degree, he attended the world's foremost hotel school in Lausanne, Switzerland, for training in the front-of-the-house as well as the kitchen. Few of the chefs he wrote about were so well trained. He also soon established a close working relationship with Pierre Franey, one of the most respected of New York's French chefs. Claiborne's recipes were routinely developed in tandem, Franey doing the cooking and Claiborne the documenting and transcribing, his typewriter on the worktable.

Timing was on Claiborne's side. He joined the newspaper in time for it for to launch cross-country distribution. Food was also emerging as a hot topic across the country. By 1980 some surveys showed that dining out had overtaken television-watching as a favorite leisure time activity.

Remember the Cajun craze and how it almost wiped out the redfish population? It was Claiborne who introduced Paul Prudhomme to New York and therefore to the cooks of America. He made idols of Paul Bocuse, Jacques Pepin, Alain Ducasse. He interpreted France's nouvelle cuisine movement for Americans, then the New American Cooking for the rest of the world. He went on to produce two dozen books and revised editions.

Claiborne's authoritative restaurant reviews served as templates for a generation of critics, but no less did he set new standards for home cooks. Until Claiborne came along, fine dining - food embedded in money, prestige and power - had always been men's bailiwick, while home cooking was women's backwater. Claiborne blurred the lines. He championed French sensibility, rare ingredients and professional techniques for food prepared at home. The Times eventually transformed its womens pages into a Living section, and readers upgraded their kitchens to include Cuisinarts and KitchenAids. Sour cream took a back seat to creme fraiche, iceberg lettuce to radicchio. Claiborne also unearthed world-class talent in home kitchens, coaxing Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy into the limelight.

He became the official gateway to culinary fame. I watched it from a box seat. I wrote about Alain Ducasse in The Washington Post. Claiborne soon did the same, and Ducasse rocketed to stardom. But did Claiborne's power make him happy? Of course not.

However mild-mannered and conventional Claiborne appeared, his bottomless insecurity led him to seek ever more attention. His drinking was beyond measuring. His 1982 autobiography, "A Feast Made for Laughter," went far afield of great meals and noteworthy rivalries to his relationship with his lonely father after his mother disappeared. Claiborne claimed to have sexually explored his sleeping father night after night, though it would have seemed more a confession and less a boast if he'd resisted such language as "the throttle of his lust" and "warm waves of ecstasy."

Nevertheless, the book was launched with a typically Claiborne extravaganza on his 62nd birthday and the 25th anniversary of his being hired by the Times. The grounds of his East Hampton house were crowded with 400 guests (200 of them invited), who feasted on contributions from three dozen of the country's great chefs. It was a party to be surpassed only by his 70th birthday, a three-day tribute by European and American star chefs highlighted by a banquet at Alain Ducasse's Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo, awash in truffles, lobsters, clams, octopus, spit-roasted lambs, wild strawberries, champagnes and imperials (eight bottles each) of sauternes.

Over the next decade Claiborne paid for his feast of a life with heart surgery, strokes, alcoholic withdrawal, a misery of hospitalization. This cultural icon of the 20th century died as soon as the 21st arrived.

He did, indeed, leave the food world changed. By the time Claiborne was eased out of the Times (having threatened to leave and actually done so several times earlier), men were frequently filling food editor desks, and women were as likely as men to be restaurant critics. Arugula was found in brand-name packages of salad greens. French chefs were opening American restaurants.

Claiborne had shaken things up. In fact, he seemed driven to shake things up. He liked being a moving target. "I don't eat seafood," he insisted to me at lunch one day. Huh? What about all those lobsters and clambakes and truffled scallops you taught housewives to enjoy?

That was the day Claiborne told me the story of meeting the love of his life. The two were strolling past each other in Manhattan when they locked eyes, and it was love at first sight. The man was married, with six children, and living in Florida. Yet in Claiborne style, the two had trysts over the next two decades in choice hotels throughout the world and dined exquisitely until age and illness parted them. Claiborne left his lover his entire estate. Dying nearly a decade later, his lover left behind no acknowledgment of their even having met.

It's a dramatic encounter as related by McNamee, whose disparate earlier books have focused on the chef Alice Waters and grizzly bears. For me Claiborne embellished it beyond credibility with the wife and, I think, a child being present when the two men met. Lovestruck, they dashed off through the nearest door into a lobby, with the stranger declaring he'd never before been drawn to another man,.

I like McNamee's version better. And I like his book.

Phyllis Richman was longtime restaurant critic and food editor of The Washington Post, and is the author of three food mysteries.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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IT'S EVEN WORSE THAN IT LOOKS: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism

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May 4, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
BasicBooks
ISBN 978-0465031337
226 pages
$26

Reviewed by Robert G. Kaiser

Reading this book is a little like quaffing a double espresso on an empty stomach - it's a jolt. For this reader it was a welcome jolt. Others will find it less palatable.

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein have been Washington fixtures for three decades. They are two of the brightest, best informed and most scholarly students of our politics. They started out together as graduate students of political science at the University of Michigan, and decades ago took up residence at the Brookings Institution (Mann) and the American Enterprise Institute (Ornstein). Both have cultivated Democratic and Republican senators and House members to help them figure out the workings of the legislative branch. They acknowledge holding liberal views themselves, but throughout their careers they have tried to uphold a scholarly, non-partisan standard. Republicans once took them as seriously as Democrats did.

Six years ago they published a fine book on the problems of Congress, "The Broken Branch." Among its many admirers was Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, who gave it an enthusiastic "blurb" for the book's back cover: "The Broken Branch is a serious step toward strengthening the Congress."

That book was sharply critical of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for running the House with minimal regard for "regular order"- the traditional, bi-partisan way of doing business by the rule book that Mann and Ornstein revere - and instead putting political advantage ahead of careful legislating. Gingrich praised their book despite its critical assessment of his fellow Republicans.

Now Mann and Ornstein have decided that the time has come to abandon the evenhandedness still fashionable among political journalists (as opposed to the partisan talking heads and bloggers now so popular). The blunt result will be invigorating for some readers, and infuriating for others.

Their principal conclusion is unequivocal: Today's Republicans in Congress behave like a parliamentary party in a British-style parliament, a winner-take-all system. But a parliamentary party - "ideologically polarized, internally unified, vehemently oppositional" - doesn't work in a "separation-of-powers system that makes it extremely difficult for majorities to work their will."

These Republicans "have become more loyal to party than to country," the authors write, so "the political system has become grievously hobbled at a time when the country faces unusually serious problems and grave threats. ... The country is squandering its economic future and putting itself at risk because of an inability to govern effectively."

Today's Republican Party has little in common even with Ronald Reagan's GOP, or with earlier versions that believed in government. Instead it has become "an insurgent outlier - ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition ... all but declaring war on the government."

Mann and Ornstein consider "the debt ceiling fiasco" of last summer proof of these accusations. The idea of deliberately jeopardizing the credit rating of the United States by toying with a purposeful default on the country's debt was a carefully planned strategy, they note - the brainchild of Eric Cantor of Virginia, today's majority leader of the House.

After Republicans elected 87 new members in 2010 and took control of the House, their nominal leader, John Boehner, clearly recognized that the debt ceiling would have to be raised to keep the government operating. Unlike Cantor and those new members, Boehner remembered the political damage done in 1995 when Gingrich forced a shutdown of the federal government in a spending dispute with Bill Clinton, probably assuring Clinton's 1996 re-election.

Mann and Ornstein quote Boehner from late 2010: "We're going to have to deal with [the debt ceiling] as adults. Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations, and we have obligations on our part." Cantor disagreed. When the new Republican House majority convened at a Baltimore retreat in January, 2011, "Cantor implored them to use the coming debt limit vote as their golden opportunity." They quote Cantor in a story in The Washington Post that revealed this episode: "I'm urging you [Republican House members] to look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when ... President Obama will have to deal with us" and accept deep spending cuts.

The showdown soon arrived. After weeks of anxious uncertainty, Senate Republicans blinked. Their leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, acknowledged that deliberately putting the GOP in the position of being blamed for a national default was a bad idea - not because of the economic consequences, but the political ones. Allowing Obama to blame the Republicans for forcing the country into default, McConnell acknowledged, "is very bad positioning going into elections."

Precariously, a deal was struck. President Obama agreed to make $38 billion in cuts to the current federal budget. In return Republicans agreed to raise the debt ceiling enough to put off another fight on the issue until after the 2012 elections. Well, some Republicans agreed. Sixty-six Republicans in the House voted no; only Democratic support saved the deal and prevented default.

Those of us who follow the Washington circus may have forgotten (I had) that McConnell has already promised to repeat this drama early next year, when the debt ceiling will have to be raised again. Mann and Ornstein remind us that McConnell told Fox News, "We'll be doing it all over" in 2013.

It is this willingness to put perceived political advantage ahead of good government that persuades the authors that we are living in a novel time that is "even worse than it looks." They acknowledge that many of its features are not new, but all of them - from partisan warfare to the impact of money on our politics - seem worse than at any time in a century or more. Well-established, negative trends in our politics have "passed a critical point, leading to something far more troubling than we have ever seen."

In recounting the history of how we got here, Mann and Ornstein reserve a special place of dishonor for their one-time admirer, Gingrich. His eagerness "to paint ... his own institution [when Democrats controlled it] as elitist, corrupt and arrogant ... undermined basic public trust in Congress and government. ... His attacks on partisan adversaries in the White House and Congress created a norm in which colleagues with different views became mortal enemies. ... He helped invent the modern permanent campaign, allowing electoral goals to dominate policy ones. ... One has to look back to Gingrich as the singular political figure who set the tone that followed." So no Gingrich blurb this time.

Mann and Ornstein rightly blame the news media for doing a mediocre job covering the most important political story of the last three decades: the transformation of the Republican Party. They are critical of the conventions of mainstream journalism that lead to the evenhandedness they have now abandoned themselves. They see a "reflexive tendency of many in the mainstream press to use false equivalence to explain outcomes,"when Republican obstructionism and Republican rejection of science and basic facts have no Democratic equivalents. It's much easier to write stories "that convey an impression that the two sides are equally implicated."

The authors emphasize the deterioration of the American political culture, corrupted by money and embittered by partisanship, affecting not just Congress but also, they argue persuasively, the Supreme Court. This spoiled culture has encouraged the cynicism of voters, now a serious impediment to political reforms. Mann and Ornstein write at length about both bad and good ideas for improving the situation in four long chapters that are less passionate and a lot wonkier than their more than 100-page indictment of the Republicans, which they know is going to create a marketing problem for this book.

"Some readers may be struck by a lack of balance in our treatment of the two major political parties," they admit, but insist that they hope not for Democratic hegemony, but for "two vibrant and constructive political parties." They mean, of course, two parties that actually believe in the efficacy of government to help society, a notion the tea party Republicans appear to reject.

Mann and Ornstein chose not to explore the history of today's voters' cynicism, a powerful ingredient in the poisonous brew they describe. Doing so would have given them a chance to add some even-handedness to their story. In 1964, on the eve of the disastrous Vietnam War, 77 percent of Americans expected their government do "do the right thing" always or most of the time, according to opinion polls. Ten years later, after Vietnam and Watergate, 77 percent had become 36. Today it is less than 20 percent who have that confidence in the government. The Vietnam War, largely the work of Democrats, and Richard Nixon together destroyed Americans' confidence in their governing institutions. It has never been restored. Several generations have grown up since reflexively distrusting their government.

And now, as Mann and Ornstein document so vividly, at a time when only good government could help us rediscover our footing as a nation, our Grand Old Party defines itself as the party of anti-government. This is why the title of this book is so good: Our situation really is even worse than it looks.

Robert G. Kaiser is an associate editor of The Washington Post, and the author of "So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government." His new book on Congress will be published next year.

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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Immigrant becomes ‘Good American’

The immigrant experience as seen through the eyes of those who settled in America's heartland is the honest and delightful story Alex George tells in A Good American.

Most Americans are immigrants or descended from them. This universal experience grounds George's debut in sentiment and nostalgia relatable to many.

A Good American starts in 1904 in Germany, where Frederick Meisenheimer and Jette Furste, a lovelorn couple, decide to flee to New York after Jette is disowned by her family for getting pregnant.

They hop the first steamer not realizing it's headed to New Orleans. From the coastal Louisiana city, they head north to Missouri, where Frederick hopes to find work.

They settle in Beatrice, Mo., where generations of the Meisenheimer family will flourish and fulfill the proverbial American dream.

Like most immigrants of that time, Frederick turned his back on Europe and "looked ahead into the bright lights of the young century."

Those lights shine brightly on four generations of his family in George's novel.

Like all families, they have memorable characters — Frederick's grandsons, who form a barbershop quartet; grandson James, inspired by P.G. Wodehouse, who yearns to be a writer; his aunt Rosa, who's a chess whiz.

What makes this epic and lyrical novel's characters so compelling is not so much their uniqueness as the ordinariness of their lives. And through good times and bad, we watch as they walk through history. World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression and World War II come alive as does their All-American yearning to pursue a life abundant with happiness.

Music is a hallmark of this novel, too — through the songs coming out of the radio, to the ballads and blues sung in the family restaurant, to the arias Frederick's son Joseph sings to woo his wife. Do you hear me, Broadway? This story would make a delightful musical.

Readers also will be moved by this novelist's personal story. George was born in Great Britain but now lives in Missouri. Sometime soon, he'll be sworn in as a citizen of the United States of America.

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BRAVE DRAGONS: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing

BRAVE DRAGONS: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing - Washington Post Book Reviews « ArcaMax Publishing  ArcaMax News & Entertainment by Email Home Topics Automotive Business Current News Entertainment Games Gardening Health Home & Consumer Knowledge Life Advice Parents Pets Politics Recipes Religion & Spirituality Science & Technology Senior Living Sports Travel & Leisure Weather Women News Columns Comics Videos   Washington Post Book Reviews / Entertainment / ArcaMax LOGIN | REGISTER Subscribe to Washington Post Book Reviews newsletter ( Privacy Policy )

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BRAVE DRAGONS: A Chinese Basketball Team, an American Coach, and Two Cultures Clashing Feb 17, 2012 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS Tweet

Jim Yardley
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307272218
304 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Brook Larmer

It seems fitting that Jim Yardley's rollicking book about basketball in China should come out just as the world gets swept up in"Linsanity," the electrifying rise of Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks' 23-year-old Taiwanese American point guard. No, Lin wasn't born in China (try California). He didn't hone his skills in the rigid Chinese sports system (think Ivy League). Nor did he ever play for the Shanxi Brave Dragons, the team of misfits and underdogs that Yardley follows for a season in the Chinese Basketball Association.

Yet Lin's sudden emergence illuminates one of the deeper themes that make Yardley's tale resonate far beyond sports. For all the focus on Lin's ethnicity - the humble Asian boy with a Harvard degree and a dose of filial and religious piety - his inventive, take-charge style on the court is unabashedly American. This hasn't stopped millions of Chinese fans from embracing Lin Shuhao, as he is known in Mandarin, as the heir to Yao Ming, the 7-foot-6 center who retired from the National Basketball Association last year.

But it raises the same uncomfortable question that Yardley's main character, an American coach hired to save the Brave Dragons, can't shake: Why is it that a nation of 1.4 billion people and several hundred million basketball fanatics has never produced a single creative, world-class point guard?

In other words: Why are there no Jeremy Lins coming out of China?

The answers lie in the murky labyrinth of China's elite sports system, which Yardley - a former New York Times bureau chief in Beijing - explores during his season with what was once the worst professional team in China. In less capable hands, this journey might have resulted in a simplistic sports yarn - "Bad News Bears" with Chinese characteristics. But drawing on his six years of experience in China, Yardley manages to capture, in touchingly human detail, the essence of a nation in transition.

Chinese basketball, he suggests, is much like the country as a whole: caught halfway between an enduring socialist system and an amped-up commercial frenzy, anxious to absorb ideas from the West but deeply ambivalent about their influence.

Yardley's tale is set in motion by an unusual experiment. Boss Wang, the tempestuous steel baron who owns the Brave Dragons, has decided to buy an American coach from the holy land of hoops, the NBA. The experiment, which Yardley turns into a lively and often hilarious metaphor for the collision of Chinese and American cultures, seems almost doomed from the start.

The new coach is an amiable NBA veteran, Bob Weiss. He's never set foot in China before. But he suddenly finds himself in Taiyuan, a coal-choked provincial capital in what Yardley calls "the boiler room of China." The first inkling that the season will be fraught with surprises: Weiss's hotel, though seemingly topped by a Howard Johnson sign, turns out to be a run-down replica that, on closer inspection, is called "Howell & Johnson."

The team itself, a crew of quirky Chinese players with a rotating cast of NBA washouts and wannabes, strives to be the real thing: a winning club guided to the playoffs by its new American guru. But as Weiss soon discovers, all of basketball's familiar trappings in China - the NBA-style uniforms, the "Spicy Spicy" dance squad, players with names like Kobe and Joy - only serve to mask a disorienting amalgam of regimented state control and wild frontier capitalism. As Yardley, the son of Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, puts it: "The court was the same, the ball was the same, the rules of the game were the same, but everything else was different."

The epitome of this strangeness - and the book's most compelling character - is Boss Wang. A man with a volcanic temper and a soft spot for Michael Jordan, the team owner, now 65, is part of the first modern Chinese generation to make a fortune and spend it on a dream - this one inspired by the West. But Wang is still old-school, unleashing tirades at his players, firing 15 or 16 coaches in six years (who's counting?), even edging onto the bench during games with a young mistress by his side. Hiring Weiss was Wang's idea. Yet even before the season begins, the boss does an about-face, initially sidelining Weiss in favor of a Chinese assistant whose idea of a perfect practice is to run pointless drills until the players collapse.

This kind of "molten-iron" training, so deeply rooted in the Chinese sports system, provides one clue in the case of the missing point guards. China's athletic army, much like its mass of factory workers, has been extremely productive, going from five Olympic gold medals in 1988 to 51 in 2008. Yet the rigid training methods, Yardley points out, suppress the very characteristics needed to produce an NBA-quality point guard: creativity, freedom, passion and leadership. One other clue comes when the Brave Dragons' mediocre point guard confesses to Yardley that he won his position by default when his body didn't grow as tall as predicted. In a system where players are still recruited solely on the basis of projected height - preferably 6-7 or taller - Jeremy Lin never would have played basketball in the first place.

Thrust into this absurd situation, Weiss plays the role of straight man, absorbing every mishap with bemused affability. He is the reader's touchstone. But the book's humor and momentum come from the eccentric characters swirling around him. Yardley keenly depicts the foreign ringers Boss Wang has recruited (each team except the army squad is allowed two), whether it's the 6-foot-10 Nigerian nomad who has played in a dozen countries or the troubled former NBA star Bonzi Wells, whose bizarre mid-season cameo throws off the team's growing chemistry.

The foreigners overshadow the Chinese players on court - and in this book. Yardley remedies this by digging deeply into the lives of the strivers and dreamers on the Brave Dragons' staff, from the interpreter caught in the cultural crossfire to the DJ who revs up Taiyuan's notoriously raucous crowds. By the end, however, the set seems crowded with bit players, all of whom get to offer their life stories.

As the season rolls on, Yardley uses the team's road trips to explore bigger pieces of the puzzle. In Tianjin, he visits the original YMCA building where American missionaries introduced the game of basketball to China in 1895 - a century before the NBA turned China into its biggest market outside the United States (his guide's cellphone ringtone: the Village People's "YMCA"). Shanghai gives him a chance to understand why the country's most modern city - and the home of Yao Ming - fields such a lousy basketball team. (It has to do with the meddling of the city's Communist Party sports bureau.)

Back home in Taiyuan, Yardley takes on the dark side of the game: the "black whistles" - or corrupt referees - who can twist the outcome of a match, as they did during the Georgetown University game-turned-brawl in Beijing last summer. These digressions are colorful and informative, but as the season moves toward its conclusion, they begin to feel a bit dutiful. Besides, we just want to get back to the central drama.

No spoilers here. But by the end, we find ourselves rooting for the Brave Dragons - Chinese and American alike - until the final buzzer.

Brook Laramer, a writer based in Beijing, is the author of "Operation Yao Ming."

Copyright 2012 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Thu, Sep 22: Driving Home: An American Journey

by Jonathan Raban A review by Debra Gwartney

Jonathan Raban's new collection of essays, Driving Home: An American Journey, could easily have been titled "The Jonathan Raban Reader," as the brisk, smartly crafted pieces are just that representative of Raban's long and illustrative writing life. He is the author of 12 other books, fiction and nonfiction, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award among other prizes. The 44 (yes, 44) selections in this book, written over a near two-decade stretch, are largely culled from the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, with others published in such revered pages as the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Esquire, Outside and Playboy. By combining them in one volume, Raban offers a lively stew of topics, themes that most interest the British citizen turned Seattleite, subjects that get him most excited and riled.

Before we enter the territory of excited and riled, though, Raban first introduces himself -- in one of the most enchanting essays in the book and its first -- as a devoted reader from a young age. A reader who becomes a writer, hugely influenced as a young man by author William Empson who, in Raban's words, taught him to "slow down, to read at the level of the word, the phrase, the line; to listen, savor, question, ponder, think."

We are invited to do the same with Driving Home: to view aspects of American life past, present and future -- with a particular focus on the West -- from this outsider's vantage. To listen, savor, question, ponder, think. Readers have long been drawn to Raban for the elegance of his language and eloquence of his thought -- as well as a wry sense of humor on par with Susan Orlean's; precise research a la John McPhee -- and can expect to find the same in these essays.

"Nowhere do waves break with more reliable splendor than on the melancholy coast of Oregon, where the great Pacific wave trains come to a spectacular end on beaches of pulverized green sand," he writes in "The Waves." "Everything about the place is somber -- the crumbling basalt cliffs, the dripping conifers, the slanting gray cathedral light."

Along with such rich imagery, Raban dishes up an entertaining cast of characters -- poet Philip Larkin, a Seattle woman who visited heaven and then returned to Earth, delightful Montana homesteader Percy Wollaston, less-than-delightful Sarah Palin, to name a few -- though he's at his best when he's on the sea with the likes of George Vancouver, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Sir Francis Chichester (knighted in the 1960s for his solo circumnavigation of the world). He's also at his best when he's roaming the edges of the Columbia River, trying to make real sense out of "the quintessential American experience to arrive in a wild and inhospitable place, bend raw nature to one's own advantage, and make it home."

Some of these pieces, particularly the title essay, Driving Home, feel a bit stale -- they certainly captured a strong sense of their time at the time, but that time (the tech boom in Seattle, the vibrant air of hope around Obama) has passed. And too often the reader is confronted with yet another redundant statement about the West, the qualities that make Seattle distinct, for instance, or about Vancouver's shift from "dizzy elation to sullen melancholy," the deeper he sailed into narrow Pacific inlets.

Still, Raban's voice rings fresh and clear through great majority of this work, and the 500-page book is well worth picking up if only to read the gems, among them the astonishing "Indian Country," the most timeless and revealing essay here, and the only one of the bunch, apparently, that comes to us new, without having been previously published.

The Oregonian is the online source for comprehensive coverage of the Northwest literary scene. Its daily books report includes news, reviews, and poetry, as well as essays and opinions from local authors.

Plus: The paper's award-winning books section, published on Sundays, strips the buzz from national bestsellers and directs readers to little-known regional gems in a concise package.

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RETIREMENT HEIST: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers

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Nov 25, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Ellen E. Schultz
Portfolio
ISBN 978-1591843337
245 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Kelly Johnson

Hey, Occupy Wall Street. Here's a book to rally around. Looking for a study of the wealth disparity that's sent you to the streets? Ellen E. Schultz offers a guide. "Retirement Heist" is a concise and alarming look at how - in the span of a generation - the 1 percent has looted the futures of the 99 percent.

Schultz wields expertise from years of investigative reporting on the retirement crisis for the Wall Street Journal. Time was, she writes, when pension funds had "such massive surpluses that the companies could have fully paid their current and future retirees' pensions, even if all of them lived to be ninety-nine and the companies never contributed another dime."

With slick accounting tricks, Schultz writes, corporate America has funneled billions of dollars out of pension funds. Many companies used the money to pay for downsizing - covering early-retirement buyouts, which are considered voluntary, instead of imposing a layoff and cash severance. Some funds were simply terminated, and the money was used to offset operating expenses. And so, company by company, a great surplus dwindled.

To replenish the pension funds, companies cut benefits, Schultz writes. Their gains were immediate: Earnings got a boost. The companies' obligations were cut. Their bottom lines were bolstered. It took much longer for workers' losses to register: In many of the cases Schultz cites, workers realized the damage only once they were old and sick and had little in the way of resources to embark on a protracted legal battle.

It's utterly depressing, and that's just the start. Having plundered the pensions, companies exploited 401(k) plans to borrow money cheaply. With pensions underfunded or frozen, they dug into retiree health plans. The trend of tying executive pay to performance only made matters worse, Schultz explains, leading, for instance, to the death-benefit bamboozle, whereby companies take out life insurance policies on their employees. When a worker dies, even if he's long since found other work or retired, the company cashes in on the death benefit, tax-free. In many of these cases, the payout to the company dwarfs whatever benefit might go to the next of kin.

Schultz provides an anatomy of every abomination and shows how it unfolded in individual lives. The aggrieved were engineers and miners, pro football players and pilots. Distressingly, they appeared powerless to stop this bilking or defend themselves against it. If the retirement industry isn't reined in, she concludes, we'll be right back where we were in the 1930s, and "society - and taxpayers - will be paying for services to support the millions of elderly, formerly middle-class Americans."

Kelly Johnson can be reached at johnsonkl(at)washpost.com.

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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Review-a-Day for Thu, Sep 22: Driving Home: An American Journey

by Jonathan Raban A review by Debra Gwartney

Jonathan Raban's new collection of essays, Driving Home: An American Journey, could easily have been titled "The Jonathan Raban Reader," as the brisk, smartly crafted pieces are just that representative of Raban's long and illustrative writing life. He is the author of 12 other books, fiction and nonfiction, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award among other prizes. The 44 (yes, 44) selections in this book, written over a near two-decade stretch, are largely culled from the Guardian and the New York Review of Books, with others published in such revered pages as the Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Esquire, Outside and Playboy. By combining them in one volume, Raban offers a lively stew of topics, themes that most interest the British citizen turned Seattleite, subjects that get him most excited and riled.

Before we enter the territory of excited and riled, though, Raban first introduces himself -- in one of the most enchanting essays in the book and its first -- as a devoted reader from a young age. A reader who becomes a writer, hugely influenced as a young man by author William Empson who, in Raban's words, taught him to "slow down, to read at the level of the word, the phrase, the line; to listen, savor, question, ponder, think."

We are invited to do the same with Driving Home: to view aspects of American life past, present and future -- with a particular focus on the West -- from this outsider's vantage. To listen, savor, question, ponder, think. Readers have long been drawn to Raban for the elegance of his language and eloquence of his thought -- as well as a wry sense of humor on par with Susan Orlean's; precise research a la John McPhee -- and can expect to find the same in these essays.

"Nowhere do waves break with more reliable splendor than on the melancholy coast of Oregon, where the great Pacific wave trains come to a spectacular end on beaches of pulverized green sand," he writes in "The Waves." "Everything about the place is somber -- the crumbling basalt cliffs, the dripping conifers, the slanting gray cathedral light."

Along with such rich imagery, Raban dishes up an entertaining cast of characters -- poet Philip Larkin, a Seattle woman who visited heaven and then returned to Earth, delightful Montana homesteader Percy Wollaston, less-than-delightful Sarah Palin, to name a few -- though he's at his best when he's on the sea with the likes of George Vancouver, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Sir Francis Chichester (knighted in the 1960s for his solo circumnavigation of the world). He's also at his best when he's roaming the edges of the Columbia River, trying to make real sense out of "the quintessential American experience to arrive in a wild and inhospitable place, bend raw nature to one's own advantage, and make it home."

Some of these pieces, particularly the title essay, Driving Home, feel a bit stale -- they certainly captured a strong sense of their time at the time, but that time (the tech boom in Seattle, the vibrant air of hope around Obama) has passed. And too often the reader is confronted with yet another redundant statement about the West, the qualities that make Seattle distinct, for instance, or about Vancouver's shift from "dizzy elation to sullen melancholy," the deeper he sailed into narrow Pacific inlets.

Still, Raban's voice rings fresh and clear through great majority of this work, and the 500-page book is well worth picking up if only to read the gems, among them the astonishing "Indian Country," the most timeless and revealing essay here, and the only one of the bunch, apparently, that comes to us new, without having been previously published.

The Oregonian is the online source for comprehensive coverage of the Northwest literary scene. Its daily books report includes news, reviews, and poetry, as well as essays and opinions from local authors.

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Review-a-Day for Thu, Jun 23: The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century

by Scott Miller A review by Elinor Langer

Even without the intrinsic draw of the 1901 presidential assassination that shapes its pages, Scott Miller's The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century would be absorbing reading. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal with a flair for presenting complicated issues and personalities as an intelligible whole, Miller examines the social, economic and political forces that underlay the transformation of the U.S. after the Civil War from a feeble newcomer in world affairs to the global power we know today in a way that keeps you learning and turning pages at the same time. Rewarding as it is to be able to grasp at last such late 19th-century mysteries as the monetary debates that have befuddled college students ever since, what makes the book compelling is neither the narrative nor the explanations but the sense of familiarity that pervades it all. Indeed, so many of the circumstances and events of the earlier time have parallels in our own that the experience of reading it is practically eerie.

The key to the similarities between then and now lies in the "historic shift in the role of business in American politics" in the 1896 election. Rich Democrats supported Republican William McKinley, corporations made direct contributions for the first time and millionaires marched in the streets of New York. That was all to defeat populist orator William Jennings Bryan, who proposed to take the U.S. off the gold standard to provide the farmers and workers who were his followers with more money. And money they badly needed.

"For every tycoon smoking cigars wrapped in hundred-dollar bills ... there were tens of thousands of ... workers for whom life was simply a battle for existence," Miller writes. In this period of huge industrial expansion, it was not unemployment, but wages too low to provide even a fully-employed laborer with enough income to feed a family that was to blame. "'I don't live. I am literally starving,'" a Cincinnati cigar maker told an interviewer who asked how he supported his wife and three children on $5 per week. The same interests that benefited from the unequal distribution of wealth at home also benefited from the acquisition of territory abroad, as the U.S. took over from defeated Spain its former colonies, including Cuba and the Philippines, along with the bitter insurgents who had launched the anti-imperial struggles in the first place.

But it is in the details as much as in the larger framework that some of the most striking echoes seem to lie.

It is impossible to read about the strong-arming corporate-guarding Pinkertons of the past without the strong-arming corporate-guarding Blackwaters of the present springing spontaneously to mind. Anarchist theorist Johann Most's handbook on explosives, The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, is right at home on the Internet. Emma Goldman's lover Alexander Berkman was a Russian anarchist and not a Muslim terrorist, but his doubly-failed plan to blow himself up with nitroglycerine after assassinating Pennsylvania steel magnate Henry Clay Frick reads like today's suicide bomber headlines. The hunt for Philippine guerilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo who "would time and again slip through [the] fingers" of the Americans pursuing him was led by the very general who had led the hunt for Apache Chief Geronimo, the recent code name for Osama bin Laden. That water torture was first used by American soldiers to coerce information from Aguinaldo's followers makes it all the more chilling.

Historical analogies are both irresistible and inexact, and Miller has wisely chosen to let them speak for themselves, but he has made his point. The fatal encounter of McKinley and friendless anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Buffalo, N.Y., fairgrounds was a singular occurrence, but it was embedded in the life of its times. What readers take away from this lucid and disturbing book will inevitably vary with what they bring to it in the first place, but one possibility is, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer -- and sometimes the poor even get mad."

The Oregonian is the online source for comprehensive coverage of the Northwest literary scene. Its daily books report includes news, reviews, and poetry, as well as essays and opinions from local authors.

Plus: The paper's award-winning books section, published on Sundays, strips the buzz from national bestsellers and directs readers to little-known regional gems in a concise package.

New subscribers can receive four weeks of home delivery free as part of a trial offer.

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THE DEAL FROM HELL: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

James O'Shea
PublicAffairs
ISBN 978-1586487911
395 pages
$28.99

Reviewed by Jack Shafer

Eyewitnesses can't be expected to produce the best dispatches from a calamity. They're usually too bound in bandages and cross-stitched with sutures to understand anybody's pain but their own. That's what sort of witness James O'Shea was to the disastrous purchase of the Los Angeles Times media empire in 2000 by the larger media empire that owned the Chicago Tribune.

From vantage points first in the Tribune newsroom, where he supervised coverage of the deal, then later in the Times newsroom, where Tribune Co. executives installed him as the paper's top editor, O'Shea files a comprehensive report about the genesis of the deal, its rapid unwinding into a novel buyout by real estate wizard Sam Zell, and the final descent into bankruptcy where the combined company languishes today. But his book "The Deal From Hell" appears to make the reportorial mistake of coming to conclusions first and not letting the evidence, no matter how strong, shake him loose from them.

In O'Shea's view, the cause of the undoing of the newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. and Times Mirror, as well as other newspapers in the country, has not been the Internet, or declining circulation, or long stories and "skimpy attention spans, or arrogant journalists." It's been the reaction of newspaper executives to those forces. He writes: "The lack of investment, the greed, the incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy, and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public's are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today."

The problem with O'Shea's analysis is that important newspapers whose executives and owners weren't stingy, greedy, incompetent, corrupt, hypocritical or arrogant have also been forced to reduce news pages, cut whole sections, close bureaus and decimate newsrooms. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times, long controlled by families that have taken immense pride in providing the public service of great journalism, have bent before recent market forces and made the cuts that O'Shea deplores. (Candor demands that I disclose that I work for Slate.com, which is owned by The Washington Post Company.)

When the Hearst Corp. paid $660 million for the San Francisco Chronicle and paid another publisher $66 million to take its San Francisco Examiner off its hands in 2000, it had no idea that its losses would be so great by the end of the decade that it would threaten to close the newspaper if employees didn't make big concessions. Likewise, when McClatchy Newspapers, one of the best-run quality chains in the country, bought the larger Knight Ridder chain in 2006 for $4.5 billion (spinning off four newspapers it didn't want for $1 billion), the owners were guided not by greed and corruption when they later dramatically cut staff and features at all of its titles. They were guided by an instinct to survive.

You don't have to like the Tribune Co. number crunchers who put the deal together with Times Mirror -- or their demand that profits come before Pulitzer prizes -- to see that they thought their deal was going to make the combined company a lot of money. One of the lead Tribune dealmakers, John Madigan, predicted an additional $225 million in cash flow for the new enterprise.

O'Shea is not so blind that he doesn't correctly identify a few greedheads undermining quality journalism. There would have been no deal if the estimated 170 descendants of the Chandler family, which controlled Times Mirror, hadn't been so eager to sluice profits and capital out of the company. O'Shea reports that Times Mirror paid out $2.1 billion in dividends and distributions to investors and the Chandler heirs between 1995 and 1997, compared to $417 million the three previous years. The cash cravings of the Chandler heirs, practically none of them Times Mirror employees, made the deal happen. Readers of the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel and the other newspapers that suffered after the deal can hate the Chandlers all they want, but it was their cow to milk, bleed or slaughter.

As late as 2007, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. moved in with a $5.6-billion offer for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal, when heirs to that company showed a similar desire to cash out. Despite Murdoch's substantial investment in all aspects of the Journal, changes in newspaper economics forced News Corp. to take a $3 billion write-off in his newspaper division 14 months after the purchase.

Not to get overly counterfactual about this "deal from hell," but let's say the Chandlers had stood up for journalism -- as have the Grahams, who control The Post, the Sulzbergers, who control the New York Times (and the very much diminished Boston Globe), and even Murdoch, who has spent deeply to improve the Journal. Let's say the deal never happened just before the 40-year financial heyday of newspapers came to a close. Wouldn't the Tribune and Times Mirror newspapers still have had to cut employee perks, staff, bureaus, circulation and quality to prevail? The answer is obvious.

O'Shea's pocket histories of both Times Mirror and Tribune are succinct, and his reporting on the circulation scandals at Newsday and other newspapers in the last decade is superb. But, alas, he is not much of a writer. When he pokes former Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes for expressing himself with cliches like "think outside the box," O'Shea invites readers to catalog his own literary laziness. He writes of "gritty neighborhoods," "finishing touches," a "seasoned veteran," "a bear of a man," a "sympathetic ear," "a taste of their own medicine," a "crown jewel" and more. When he writes that somebody's eyes "twinkle," I found myself wanting to poke mine out.

O'Shea, an experienced reporter and editor, misses the story and writes poorly. If only we could send his terrific assignment back to the rewrite desk for fixing.

Jack Shafer writes about the media for Slate.

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THE STORY OF CHARLOTTE'S WEB: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic

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Jun 24, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Michael Sims
Walker
ISBN 978-0802777546
307 pages
$25

Reviewed by Valerie Sayers

It is hard to imagine a literate American who has not encountered E. B. White, and harder to imagine one who has not been charmed. Parents swipe their children's copies of the classics "Stuart Little," "Charlotte's Web" and "The Trumpet of the Swan" to reread after lights-out. College freshmen still find William Strunk and White's delightful 1959 "The Elements of Style" on required reading lists. Generations have read his stylish essays in the New Yorker, and 26 years after his death, the White bibliography continues to grow: The subject of several biographies and memoirs, he is fascinating in part because his literary wit and fame are complicated by his legendary shyness and hypochondria.

His instinct for privacy did not, however, prevent White from cooperating with Scott Elledge's comprehensive 1984 biography, published a year before White's death. A reader might be forgiven for asking whether this new book is necessary, even as White and James Thurber once asked, in a 1929 collaboration titled "Is Sex Necessary?" The answer, of course, is yes: While "The Story of Charlotte's Web" does not add earth-shattering revelations, its account of White's death and his work's continuing life are a fitting echo to the resolution of "Charlotte's Web." The new study is unabashed homage from a writer interested in connecting White's lifelong need to situate himself in the natural world to his determination to write with painstaking precision. In exploring those two habits of being, Michael Sims seeks to explain why we feel the complicated way we do when we read White, and why his vision of a now-receding America, one that paid close heed to nature, still feels crucial.

"The Story of Charlotte's Web" devotes nearly its entire second half to the most popular of White's children's books. The first half, a broader investigation of his work and life, wisely intersperses choice lines from White himself. It is delicious to read the adult White describe his childhood self as a "writing fool" who has "been tapering off ever since." The young writing fool, Elwyn White, was a paradox: He biked, swam and roamed in the dark of night yet was fearful of moonlight streaming in his window. Often more comfortable with animals than with people, Elwyn rambled through the suburban stables of Mount Vernon, N.Y., and the woods of Belgrade, Maine, where his family vacationed, his animal encounters as central to his early poetry and essays as they would be to "Charlotte's Web." Though Sims says that White was "not a particularly bookish child," by the age of 11 he had published in St. Nicholas, the famed magazine that also ran juvenilia by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner (Sims is especially good at putting White's work in context).

In a 1940 New Yorker piece, White invoked a child's "mystical inner life" and "nature publishing herself through the 'I.'" It is this mystical sense of life that he communicates with seeming effortlessness in his essays and stories, but Sims reminds us what a struggle that "effortlessness" entailed. White became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1926, when he was still in his 20s, and the glimpses here of the young magazine meeting the young writer, by then known as Andy, are delightful. But during his happy 48-year marriage to New Yorker editor and writer Katharine Angell, White found writing to be as much of a torment as a consolation. Though he had to write early in his life to understand his place in the world, he eventually wrote only when he felt like it.

The other requirement was living close to nature. In 1933, the Whites bought 40 acres on the coast of Maine, and as he and Katharine juggled their city and country lives (Sims is also good on the subjects of class and money), "Charlotte's Web" began to take shape in its barn. Though much of its fame rests on the forthright and unsentimental way the story faces death in the natural world -- not to mention the farmyard world -- Sims makes it clear that White contemplated the story for years and did scrupulous research before he committed a word to paper. Upon finishing a draft, he set it aside for almost a year and, when he took it up again, revised extensively (the opening chapters, in which young Fern saves the pig Wilbur from her father's slaughtering ax, were not added until then).

Though Sims begins this account with an attempt to inhabit Elwyn's consciousness ("Why were those leaves rustling? Was that a twig snapping?"), he soon abandons such you-were-there techniques for a more enjoyable voice that separates the biographer from his subject. If some of the passages about White's narrative methods remind us why it's more fun to read fiction than a study of how it's done, younger writers in particular may find this description of process bracing. Sims' research is thorough, his own prose clear, direct and concise: the ultimate homage. His book is a lovely and empathetic testament to E.B. White's vision of "nature publishing herself."

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, has a new novel coming out this year.

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THE AMERICAN HEIRESS

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Jun 17, 2011 ARCHIVES  |  Entertainment  |  COLUMNS

Daisy Goodwin
Unabridged, MacMillan Audio
ISBN NA
NA pages
$13 hours, 11 CDs, $39.99

Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers

Here is a novel that is just too silly for words: an ideal summer folly. The aptly named Cora Cash is 19, American, and longing to be free of her domineering mother. Suffice it to say that she ends up marrying into the English aristocracy, to a snooty but impoverished duke. Cora gives him an heir, and her money restores his ancient demesne and crumbling pile. But lavish interiors, breath-taking landscapes and elaborate feasts in the company of bluebloods do not compensate the young woman for her husband's chilliness. Who does he think he is, an unredeemed Mr. Darcy? An old suitor appears on the scene. What will happen? We don't really care, but we are definitely amused. Katherine Kellgren, a truly accomplished voice actress, affects a la-di-da intercontinental accent for the narration of this puree of Edith Wharton, "Downton Abbey" and pulp romance. In merely uttering the expression "the mansions of Newport," she conveys all the ravenous snobbery and envious fantasy to which the novel caters in its irresistibly shameless way.

Katherine A. Powers regularly reviews audio books for The Washington Post.

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Review-a-Day for Fri, May 27: Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition

by James T. Kloppenberg A review by David Greenberg

Barack Obama, though he is evidently thoughtful and intellectually capable, is not usually considered a man of ideas. In contrast to a policy wonk such as Bill Clinton or an ideological standard-bearer such as Ronald Reagan, Obama has never even brandished a distinct political philosophy. He sought the White House not so much on a platform as on a sensibility -- a spirit of change, a promise of redemption, a song of hope.

That sensibility was largely responsible for the almost otherworldly appeal that Obama exhibited, in the eyes of countless devotees, during the campaign in 2008. As much as any group, intellectuals rallied to Obama's candidacy with a zeal not seen in presidential campaigns since an earlier generation of students, horn-rimmed and tweed-coated, cheered the parlor poet Eugene McCarthy, or even the noble and quixotic sallying of Adlai Stevenson, with his famous varsity wit. The creative class' romance with Obama even recalled Irving Howe's explanation of Stevenson's allure: the so-called eggheads of the 1950s, he wrote in "Stevenson and the Intellectuals," were "tempted to abandon politics entirely yet felt themselves forced -- indeed, trapped -- into a lukewarm, gingerly participation....And here was this remarkable man from Illinois, so charming and cultivated...come to represent and speak for them. Roosevelt might be admired for things he had done, Stevenson was to be admired and identified with simply because of what he was." So the roles of the politician and the intellectual had been conflated, or perhaps confused.

To be sure, Obama showed a strategic savvy and political dexterity that Stevenson never did. Still, the lofty regard for Obama -- especially the intellectual regard -- has been extraordinary. Along with his historic achievement in becoming our first black president, it was this esteem that seems to have generated the large literature about him, by journalists (David Remnick's The Bridge, Jonathan Alter's The Promise) and scholars (Tom Sugrue's Not Even Past, William Jelani Cobb's The Substance of Hope). Of this latter group, none has gotten more attention than James T. Kloppenberg's book.

Reading Obama is a welcome addition, not least because it is the first book to try to tease out a coherent political philosophy from the president. Kloppenberg, a prominent intellectual historian at Harvard, does this not by analyzing Obama's pre-presidential record or his campaign rhetoric or his policies but -- like a senior professor sizing up a tenure aspirant -- by reviewing Obama's published dossier. The chief works, of course, are Obama's best-selling books -- his semi-fictional memoir, Dreams from My Father, and his campaign trial balloon, The Audacity of Hope; but Kloppenberg also draws on a passel of other writings and, most originally, on the issues of the Harvard Law Review over which Obama presided as editor in 1990.

From these writings, Kloppenberg concludes that Obama, despite appearances, does have a clear political philosophy. Kloppenberg calls it pragmatism. By pragmatism, Kloppenberg explains, he does not mean "vulgar pragmatism," which he defines as "an instinctive hankering for what is possible in the short term" -- a trait, it is worth noting, that all successful politicians need. When they possess it to the exclusion or betrayal of loftier principles -- as some have, from Alcibiades to Nixon -- we call this trait opportunism, expediency, spinelessness, or careerism. What Kloppenberg finds in Obama's writing, however, is emphatically not opportunism, but something more explicitly philosophical. He believes that Barack Obama belongs in the venerable strain of American thought that runs from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty and his disciples. This pragmatism deems ideas as valuable for their real-world utility and consequences: true ideas, it holds, are those that work. It rests on a commitment to experiment, a frank acknowledgment of human fallibility, an impatience with the search for a grander truth, a rejection of a priori absolutes.

Pragmatism is a subject close to Kloppenberg's heart, and his expertise. Among his many learned writings on the subject are the landmark Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920, which appeared in 1986, and "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?," a brilliant article in the Journal of American History in 1996, many of whose ideas resurface in his new work. With his breadth of knowledge and his simplicity of prose, Kloppenberg is a fine guide to these ideas. And lest we suspect that he is merely projecting a set of ideas he esteems onto a politician he admires -- Obama, after all, has described himself as "a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views" -- Kloppenberg is careful to elucidate the reasons for the happy congruence.

Obama is a product, he explains, of elite universities, having attended Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law School in the 1980s and early 1990s. In these years the academy was in intellectual ferment, and in many disciplines -- literature and history, politics and law -- pragmatism was enjoying a revival. In earlier decades, pragmatism, with its radical tolerance of uncertainty, had been on the outs intellectually; the times called for vital-center liberalism, a robust citadel of ideological conviction to gird the nation in its war of ideas against the fanaticisms of left and right. But as the Cold War urgency ebbed and liberalism came under fire, new ideas challenged the old axioms. Historians such as Gordon Wood directed scholars' attention to the traditions of civic republicanism, alongside Lockean liberalism, in American political culture. Legal scholars such as Frank Michelman and Cass Sunstein stressed the importance of republican values such as civic participation. Thomas Kuhn and Clifford Geertz influenced practically everyone with their arguments that meaning resides within historical and cultural contexts, not in timeless absolutes.

Philosophically speaking, these newly current ideas of communitarianism and civic republicanism are not precisely the same thing as pragmatism, and readers may be uneasy with the way that Kloppenberg folds them together. Yet in practice (and practice, after all, is the pragmatist's standard), these intellectual developments occurred simultaneously and their leading thinkers influenced one another. Kloppenberg is thus able to pull together intellectual shifts in myriad fields to fashion a creative and largely plausible narrative of late twentieth-century intellectual life writ large. Indeed, his portrait of academic thinking in this period may well be his book's signal contribution. Reading Obama may be seen as a companion to Daniel Rodgers's recent book Age of Fracture, which also highlights the erosion in the 1980s of confidence in philosophical absolutes and in the shared assumptions that once prevailed among disparate scholars.

Kloppenberg links his history of pragmatism to Obama by noting that precisely as the academy experienced its pragmatic revival, Obama came along as part of a generation of students seeking an alternative to Reaganite conservatism -- and also hungry for something more fortifying than a ubiquitous but seemingly etiolated rights-based liberalism. Unfortunately Kloppenberg lacks a strong evidentiary base for his speculations, since we have only Obama's limited writings about his educational experience; but his surmise is not terribly controversial. With a temperament given to deliberation and conciliation, Kloppenberg suggests, Obama took naturally to the ideas he was hearing in class and absorbing from the campus culture.

As a first pass at distilling and ordering Obama's influences as a young man, Reading Obama makes a compelling case for the importance of pragmatism in the intellectual formation of the future president. But finally the case does not persuade. The connection between Obama's significance and the ideas that Kloppenberg brings together under pragmatism's banner is too loose. Not all Ivy League-bred politicians of Obama's vintage bear the imprint of pragmatism. (Consider John Roberts.) Moreover, the first wave of elected officials to bring communitarian and republican ideas into the political realm belonged not to Obama and his post-1960s cohort but to the Baby Boom: Bill Bradley, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton were the ones who, striving in the 1980s to revive liberalism in the face of its declining electoral viability, broke with the doctrines of the postwar left by stressing -- much like Kloppenberg's neo-pragmatists -- responsibilities as well as rights, the community as well the individual, and the need to adapt to new historical conditions.

If pragmatism here explains too little in Kloppenberg's effort to understand Obama, it may in other ways be getting pressed into explaining too much. An ear as finely tuned as Kloppenberg's to the great works of American thought will hear resonances that are going to elude most readers. It is entirely plausible for Kloppenberg to find in Dreams from My Father the influence to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. But this is only one of many echoes of canonical pragmatist works that he detects in Obama's published oeuvre. The assertion in The Audacity of Hope, for example, that "what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart," Kloppenberg says, "echoes the almost identical words that [Jane] Addams wrote to explain the settlement house movement in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull House": "The things which make men alike," Addams wrote, "are finer and better than the things that keep apart." (Myself, I hear Bill Clinton: "There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.") When Obama urges his readers to "recognize the overlapping values that both religious and secular people share," he "comes close to paraphrasing the language of Political Liberalism," John Rawls's attempt to incorporate the ideas of his communitarian critics into his philosophy. And so on.

Readers who hesitate to credit Obama with such a masterly and unobtrusive command of the history of American ideas and letters may indeed wonder if Kloppenberg's judgments are not shaped in part by his admiration for his subject. Reading Obama brims with an enthusiasm that now feels dated. During campaigns, as Tocqueville wrote, "the whole nation glows with feverish excitement," and our last election -- during which this book was conceived -- was especially thrilling. Kloppenberg does not engage in overt political partisanship in his book, but his nearly unmitigated praise for Obama can be cloying. "Obama is," in Kloppenberg's estimation, "a shrewd and an unusually well-informed observer of American political life and the so-called culture wars of recent decades." As a student of history, "Obama has no illusions about the mid-twentieth century Democratic Party." At community organizing, he was a "genius." This portrait of Obama stands in marked contrast to Kloppenberg's contempt for the "discredited" Bill Clinton -- who in Kloppenberg's words "spent eight years 'triangulating'...and squandering the chance to...breathe new life into...American political ideals" -- even though Clinton and Obama resemble each other closely in their college and law school educations, their ideological (or post-ideological) commitments, their personal ambition, their penchant for compromise, and their attachment to neopragmatic ideas.

Kloppenberg's esteem for Obama leads him to over-value Obama as an intellectual. Here the praise strains credulity. He deems Obama's books "the most substantial books written by anyone elected president of the United States since Woodrow Wilson." Obama is credited with being "able to interrogate his own convictions -- to place them in a broader cultural and historical context by imaginatively scrutinizing them from a position centuries in the future -- without abandoning them, much as William James did." Of one excerpt from Obama's prose, Kloppenberg writes that "neither Madison nor Jefferson, neither James nor Dewey...could have said it better." Kloppenberg routinely presumes Obama to be "immersed" in the current intellectual debates of Harvard Law School, "wrestling with texts such as Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil," and "probing the arguments in [Walter] Lippmann's Drift and Mastery." Isn't it possible that Obama, like a lot of us who loaded up on humanities courses in college, left a few classic works on his shelves with their spines uncracked? Besides, does undergraduate and graduate reading really make one a full-fledged philosopher?

Kloppenberg has committed a category mistake. He asserts that besides being a politician, "Obama is also very much an intellectual." But while Obama is obviously smart and has strong intellectual tendencies, I do not believe that he can comfortably be awarded that label. Few politicians can. Jefferson, Adams, and Madison certainly warrant the term, anachronistic though its application would be; and a century later Wilson, a renowned political scientist, deserved it, as (perhaps) did his prolific and erudite contemporary Theodore Roosevelt. But most of the highly educated, well-read, brainy politicians of our own time -- Obama, Clinton, Gore, Gary Hart -- are cut of different cloth. They have traveled in the world of ideas, consorted with intellectuals, in some cases written books, in some cases taught at universities. They may even think about political philosophy. But everything they wrote -- everything they thought -- was necessarily refracted through the prism of electoral politics. There is nothing shocking or shameful about this, but it is not how intellectuals proceed.

Even Obama's memoir, whatever its literary merits, was not conceived in political innocence. When Obama wrote it, he was already telling reporters that he planned a career in elective office. Similarly, The Audacity of Hope -- the promotional tour took Obama to New Hampshire, triggering a nationwide craze of "Obamamania" and launching his presidential bid -- may be thoughtful, well-written, and better than most campaign books. But it is thoroughly strategic. "Audacity," the journalist Andrew Ferguson judged, cuttingly but not unfairly,"is an infinitely weaker, duller book than its predecessor, and its single interesting revelation is unintentional:...we have lost a writer and gained another politician." I am not suggesting that Obama's writings are unworthy of intellectual respect. Political documents, too, can reflect non-political influences and withstand close readings. But to elevate Obama's writing and thinking into the high stream of American intellectual history is untenable.

As Kloppenberg rightly notes, Obama (like all of us) is the product of not simply a history of ideas but also a history of our polity. Understandably, he does not delve into this topic very deeply in Reading Obama, but he does give some hints as to his own interpretation of recent politics. Reagan's election in 1980, he suggests, initiated what he considers a sharp and lasting break from the robust liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society. Since then, Kloppenberg states, key progressive ideas such as the graduated income tax and government regulation of the economy have fallen into "bipartisan" disrepute. Although this characterization of the Democrats' post-1980 priorities does not quite ring true -- Clinton, for example, spent considerable political capital restoring some progressivity to the tax code -- the larger problem is that the collapse of the political program that Kloppenberg supports coincided almost perfectly with the rise of the intellectual philosophy that he champions. In his telling, the decline of liberalism in national politics corresponds with the emergence of pragmatic and civic republican ideas. This is hardly to suggest that pragmatism led to the demise of New Deal liberalism, but it does further complicate the already thorny relationship between academic ideas and political practice.

Although Kloppenberg spends relatively little time presenting his own political beliefs, he is most certainly "a man of the left," to use a term that he applies to Obama. When he criticizes Obama, it is almost exclusively for adopting centrist or conservative policies -- escalating the Afghanistan war, using drones in Pakistan, and hiring Wall Street-friendly economic advisers such as Tim Geithner. These choices do not necessarily violate Jamesian pragmatism, of course -- but they do deviate from what you would expect from a leftist.

Kloppenberg might counter that these deviations of Obama's represent not the legacy of James and Dewey but merely the "vulgar pragmatism" -- the crude choice-making of everyday politics -- that he takes pains to separate from the Jamesian-Deweyan tradition. Yet it is unclear what the Jamesian-Deweyan tradition would instruct a president to do about financial reform or Islamist terrorism. Kloppenberg seems to want it to point to decisions that he himself could readily endorse: there is an implication, never stated outright, that it should yield progressive politics, maybe like John Dewey's. At other times, however, Kloppenberg insists that pragmatism offers no clear policy paths. Quoting James, he calls pragmatism "a method" that "stands for no particular results. It has no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method." On this reading, Jamesian ideas cannot, without some other prior principles, reliably lead us to the left-liberal politics that Kloppenberg would like to see. It may well be, as Sidney Morgenbesser once joked, that the only problem with pragmatism is that it is "completely useless."

Not only is pragmatism unable to produce a political program by itself, it also may be partly responsible for Obama's continuing difficulty, more than two years into his presidency, in presenting the pattern of principled consistency that we crave from our presidents. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal has often been called pragmatic for its shamelessly experimental style, as FDR tried out many different ways (sometimes simultaneously) of stimulating the economy, organizing business, producing jobs and succoring the poor during the Depression. But for Roosevelt the first principles of using government to forge a more just society in the form of a mixed-economy welfare state were always fairly evident. Kloppenberg shrewdly insists that for Obama compromise and a commitment to comity are "a sign of principle," but those are a contentless sort of principle. It is less clear what this president's first principles are regarding, say, economics or foreign policy.

The pragmatic turn in the academy has been valuable in opening up new channels of inquiry and upsetting pat narratives, but if pragmatism has had any appreciable impact in the political realm, it has probably been to weaken the articulation of traditional liberal tenets. (Self-styled education "reformers," for example, many of them on the left, now relentlessly stress outcomes over the intrinsic virtues of the life of the mind that liberals once used to proudly defend.) That impact should not come as a surprise. Politicians and intellectuals are different beasts. Their jobs are different and they think differently. Intellectuals, even the engage ones, operate with a critical distance in assessing the world and events that politicians do not enjoy; they are free to argue -- they are expected to argue -- whatever they believe. No politician, not even a refreshing and relatively forthright one, not even Barack Obama, can ever do that.

If problems arise when we try to turn politicians into intellectuals, they also emerge when intellectuals give themselves over to politics. What cause has not at some point expediently -- or should we say pragmatically? -- been justified by arguments, presented in petitions, signed by academic luminaries, that are owed more to political passion than intellectual consistency? To sign on to political causes risks tarnishing the intellectual's enterprise. Yet neither can intellectuals take comfort in sitting on the sidelines. From George Bancroft to Charles Beard to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historians, as much as any group, have enjoyed a proud and distinguished tradition of political involvement and journalistic commentary on public affairs. Bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on current events without bending interpretations of the past to meet the perceived needs of the present is a delicate, and worthy, task.

Of course, intellectuals, too, have the right, indeed the obligation, to make some contribution to the effort to improve the country or the world. Joined in one person, the role of the intellectual and that of the practical politician are not fully discrete identities. But there are important differences, and they should be accorded enough respect for us to judge both the politician and the intellectual by the standards of their respective realms.

David Greenberg, a contributing editor, is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. He is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for 2010-11.

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