"The Polluters" and "The Warmth of Other Suns"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Tuesday October 5, 2010 THE POLLUTERS: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter Oxford Univ ISBN 978-0199739950 223 pages $27.95 Reviewed by Seth Shulman With nearly 5 million barrels of BP's crude having gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months on end, the summer of 2010 will long be remembered for environmental catastrophe. News of the oil spill came close on the heels of the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners in West Virginia -- the nation's worst mining disaster in some four decades. In both cases, most of us couldn't help but wonder how things could go so terribly wrong. How could corporate safeguards have failed so miserably? How could government regulators have been so feckless? As such questions linger, along comes "The Polluters," a remarkably timely, extensively researched and accessible book offering a fresh perspective as we search for answers. Most works on U.S. environmental history begin with the watershed publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," the federal Clean Water Act of 1963 or perhaps the crescendo of public engagement on the issue that culminated in the first Earth Day in 1970 and the ensuing formation that year of the Environmental Protection Agency. But Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter, two scientists with a small environmental consultancy in Washington, D.C., and an expansive interest in the history of pollution, take a different approach. Intrigued and presumably frustrated in their professional work by the gaps and limitations in current environmental regulation, the two spent the past decade delving into governmental and corporate archives to exhume the roots of today's environmental regulatory framework. "The Polluters" documents with well-chosen detail how the chemical industry managed for decades -- since the 1930s administration of Herbert Hoover, and even before -- to avoid and forestall the increasingly glaring need for federal environmental legislation. We meet a rogues' gallery of stridently laissez-faire industry executives aware of the pollution they are creating but allergic to federal oversight, along with craven and even corrupt regulators unable or unwilling to protect the public. The authors show how companies blocked the discovery of environmental problems associated with their products and practices, and how research that might have found these problems was "starved of funds." When alarming findings did emerge, such as about the threat of lung disease from coal dust, or the risk of cancer from vinyl chloride, the authors document how "well-paid advocates concoct(ed) grounds for doubt" and "studied" problems to death as a substitute for action. The authors dredge up this enraging, disheartening and ultimately illuminating history lesson for a reason: The tactics, which they contend came into full bloom by 1950, set the stage for the ongoing environmental woes we face today. As they put it, "Sixty years later, these strategies are still in use, protecting polluters who spew out toxic chemicals and globe-warming gases." Written before either the BP spill or the West Virginia mining disaster, the book has a historical perspective that resonates powerfully in the face of such recent debacles. Some parts of the story are wrenchingly familiar. Just as tobacco executives twisted the science and strove to manufacture uncertainty about the dangers of their products even when fully aware of them, so did the chemical industry undertake a similar campaign through its main lobbying arm, the Manufacturing Chemists Association (now the Chemical Manufacturers Association). The authors quote the minutes of a 1950 meeting of the industry group where, despite the growing evidence of illness and an acute case in Pennsylvania where pollution from a zinc smelter had led to 20 deaths of nearby residents, a plan was explicitly outlined "to prevent the development of public demand for drastic and impractical air pollution and smoke control legislation." If the tactics sound familiar, the tracing of the roots of this story as far back as the early 20th century will likely surprise many readers. "The Polluters" documents how the coal industry co-opted federal regulators at the Bureau of Mines in the 1920s to avoid regulation that would protect miners against the growing scourge of lung disease. As early as 1924, the authors show, the scientific literature contained studies indicating that "coal dust itself must cause lung disease." Nonetheless, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover explicitly reminded a press conference that his department's Bureau of Mines -- the best hope for federal regulation at the time -- had been "created as a service bureau for the mining industry," according to press accounts from the period. Following Hoover's lead, the government scientists looking into the health threat served the wishes of industry executives, even designing epidemiological studies to include only "active" miners, so that anyone who had gotten sick enough in the mines to keep them from work would be excluded from the statistics. This book is too well researched and its tone too reasonable to be considered a polemic. For one thing, there is plenty of blame to go around. "The Polluters" makes much of the public's and the media's longstanding infatuation with the chemical industry's products. "Modern chemistry rubs its Aladdin's lamp, shakes up its test tubes, and presto!" So said The Washington Post in 1929, as quoted by the authors. Ultimately, "The Polluters" contends that only loud public outcry has ever managed to tip the balance in favor of the kinds of tough environmental laws we desperately need. Alas, as Ross and Amter chronicle, too often the public has either been in the thrall of the latest chemical convenience, or has let its outraged calls for a cleaner environment get squelched en route to Capitol Hill. It is, of course, an open question, whether we will do the same in the face of the latest environmental insults. Thankfully, perhaps, this is not an exhaustive history of environmental regulation. Owing to the combination of the book's brevity (171 pages of text) and broad purview (including fights over everything from pesticide regulation to smog in Los Angeles and elsewhere), the authors leave themselves open to the charge that they have cherrypicked the record to bolster their case. Still, this is little-known history that makes for fascinating reading. It places our past summer of environmental disaster and discontent into its proper perspective, reminding us that our nation's continuing fight for a clean environment has been a long and often dirty one. Seth Shulman is a journalist and author, most recently, of "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret." Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Isabel Wilkerson Random House ISBN 978-0679444329 622 pages $30 Reviewed by Paula J. Giddings For African Americans, restriction of movement has long had profound meaning -- and never more so than after the end of slavery. The flight of 6 million Southern blacks to the North between 1915 and 1970 was, as Isabel Wilkerson writes in "The Warmth of Other Suns," "the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free." Much has been written about the push and pull of oppression and opportunity that drove blacks north and how this mass movement changed the political, economic and social landscape of American cities. Blacks not only brought their muscle and creative talents to the North but also, as some highly touted studies contend, distinct and dysfunctional behaviors that created the intractable poverty and crime that turned cities into ghettoes. Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose own family made the trek north, puts a different face on what is known as the Great Migration. Those who made the momentous decision to leave the "Old Country," as writer James Baldwin called the South, were as diverse and determined as those who passed through the way stations of Ellis Island. "They took work the people already there considered beneath them," Wilkerson writes. "They tried to instill in their children the values of the Old Country while pressing them to succeed by the standards of the New World they were in." In other words, black migrants shared a common culture that was animated by the promise and possibility of the American dream. The author tells the migration story through the portraits of three people whose sojourns began in the 1930s and '40s: George Swanson Starling, a Florida fruit-picker who found his way to Harlem; Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a Louisianan and Morehouse College graduate who went to Los Angeles to establish his medical practice; and Ida Mae Gladney, a married-at-16 Mississippi sharecropper who settled in Chicago. In some ways, all three found what they were looking for. Starling, who abandoned Florida to escape retribution after he organized fellow fruit-pickers, found work as a train attendant; he gleefully advised passengers of their right to sit in desegregated coaches and reveled in the wondrous Harlem life of the 1940s. The charming and ambitious Foster, a surgeon who began his career collecting urine samples door to door for an insurance company, built a lucrative practice that included such clients as the musician Ray Charles (who wrote a song about him). Gladney, whose family of five had been crammed into a cabin in Mississippi's backwoods, found work as a nurse's aide and became a blue-collar, churchgoing homeowner with enough space for her and her husband's multigenerational family. However, personal triumph was accompanied by pain and tragedy -- the seeds of which were not brought from the South but awaited the migrants in the North. Foster's relentless climb up the social ladder, in part an effort to compensate for the racial humiliation he met in California, created psychological wounds that alienated him from his wife and family. Two of Starling's children became addicted to drugs in a deteriorating Harlem. And soon after the Gladneys moved into their home, whites fled the neighborhood, eventually relegating the area to urban blight and forcing Ida to live out her old age as "an eyewitness to a war playing out in the streets below her." And yet, as becomes clear in this extraordinary and evocative work, the refusal to be captives in the South may have saved their lives -- and perhaps their souls. "If all of their dream does not come true," wrote the Chicago Defender, a newspaper that beckoned Southern blacks early in the migration, "enough will come to pass to justify their actions." Paula J. Giddings is the Elizabeth A. Woodson 1922 professor of Afro-American studies at Smith College and the author of "Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching." Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Help your kids pick out fun costumes this year that will also keep them safe -- read up on color choices that will keep them visible during the dusk hours. More tips like these, as well as decorating tips, trivia quizzes, and free book samples from BookDaily, are available from ArcaMax's Halloween feature. -- From the ArcaMax editors Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Recent Stories    MY LIE: A True Story of False Memory    101 PLACES NOT TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE    MINI SHOPAHOLIC    HOW TO BECOME A SCANDAL: Adventures in Bad Behavior    JIMMY CARTER	Quick Clicks Free Starbucks Vanilla Coffee Watch Over 3,500 HD CHannels Directly on Your Computer - Easy! Get Yours Today. 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"My Lie" and "101 Places Not to See Before You Die"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Monday October 4, 2010 MY LIE: A True Story of False Memory Meredith Maran Jossey-Bass ISBN 978-0470502143 260 pages $24.95 Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle One of the more bizarre stories of the 1980s and '90s was the widespread conviction that day-care centers had become hotbeds of sexual abuse, all memory of which the young victims had suppressed until prompted by therapists to break down the walls of resistance. A related phenomenon was the one Meredith Maran writes about in "My Lie": accusations of incest against family members, in this case her father, with -- again -- memory of the incidents needing to be awakened by therapy. Maran had originally taken an interest in child abuse as a journalist. Soon she became fascinated by the McMartin case, in which therapists "used hand puppets and anatomically correct dolls to help the children describe what had happened to them." Reading about this and similar cases caused Maran to fret about her uneasy relationship with her dad: He hadn't just tried to control her life, she came to think; he had abused her sexually. She let him know of her belief via her mother and refused even to speak with him for 10 years. "It is natural that you have periodic doubts of your experience," reassured one of the many books she read on the subject. "But that's because accepting memories is painful, not because you weren't abused." Yet even so Maran did have doubts, which became stronger the more she looked into the issue. For instance, according to a 2007 news article, "A team of psychiatrists and literary scholars reports that it could not find a single account of repressed memory, fictional or not, before the year 1800." The study team suggested that repressed memory is "a culture-bound syndrome and not a natural process of human memory." In other words, the alleged victims had been coached. Finally, Maran sought out her old therapist, who explained, "There was so much pressure during those years to try and find incest memories in every client. In the therapeutic community in the late 1980s and early 1990s, incest was this cookie-cutter answer to every woman's problems." Fortunately, Maran explains, "When I came to my senses, my father was still alive and relatively well. I still had time to make amends." Dennis Dravelle can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top 101 PLACES NOT TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE Catherine Price Harper ISBN 978-0061787768 249 pages $13.99 Reviewed by T. Rees Shapiro Catherine Price, a blogger, traveler and freelance writer , realized a little bit ago that "the last thing I need to read is a book that pits my desire for adventure against the time pressure of mortality." Books such as "100 Places to See in Your Lifetime" and "101 Places to Have Sex Before You Die," she concluded, stressed her out. Her solution was to write an antithesis, a compilation of experiences and situations readers never need relish: hence "101 Places Not to See Before You Die." Much-visited entries in her avoid list include Euro Disney, Times Square on New Years Eve, Ireland's Blarney Stone, Stonehenge and the entire state of Nevada. Many of the entries are weird and funny ("Any Place Whose Primary Claim to Fame Is a Large Fiberglass Thing"), but some aren't, such as Hell, an AA Meeting When You're Drunk and the Inside of a Spotted Hyena's Birth Canal. The book is seemingly well researched, so you can take her word for it when Price says you can skip a Giant Room Filled with Human Crap (a sludge-recycling plant in Southern California); the Testicle Festival, where revelers chow down on Rocky Mountain Oysters, which, Price clarifies, are not a "high-altitude mollusk"; and Your Boss's Bedroom. T. Rees Shapiro can be reached at shapirot(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement Congratulations...You've Won: Free* $1,000 Sam's Gift Card   * Use at any Sam's Club location   * Works the same as cash - never expires   * Get the latest Toys and Gifts   * Groceries, Furniture, Tools...   * HDTV Or A New Computer... *Participation required...Click And Claim Yours! p.s. - Also includes a Full Sam's Club 1 Year Membership. Recent Stories    MINI SHOPAHOLIC    HOW TO BECOME A SCANDAL: Adventures in Bad Behavior    JIMMY CARTER    FUR, FORTUNE, AND EMPIRE: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America    BODY WORK	Quick Clicks Free Starbucks Vanilla Coffee Why pay over $90 a month for Cable or Sat.TV services? Download A TV! Discover Why the Every Other Day Diet's Weird Tips are Changing Lives!
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Homer

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New Books Newsletter For You Sunday October 3, 2010 Homer (Dates of birth and death unknown) Very little is known about Homer, save for the fact that he was blind and is believed to have been born in what is now western Turkey. His name is Greek for "hostage," which may mean he was descended from prisoners of war. He is best known for his epic poems "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," which may have been told on the spur of the moment from fragments of pre-existing stories. He is believed to have had many students and disciples who, while very few are known by name, became poets in their own rights after his death. Featured Book and Quizzes Featured book by Homer: The Iliad (translated by Samuel Butler) This week's quizzes: Emily Dickinson Poetry First Lines Who Was Shakespeare? This Week's Birthdays Gore Vidal -- October 3, 1925 American novelist and playwright who made his debut as a writer at the age of 19. Read The Golden Age by Gore Vidal at BookDaily. Jackie Collins -- October 4, 1941 Prolific British bestselling novelist and sister of actress Joan Collins. Read Drop Dead Beautiful by Jackie Collins at BookDaily. Frank Herbert -- October 8, 1920 American sci-fi writer, best known for his Dune series. Read Dune by Frank Herbert at BookDaily.	Quick Clicks Free Starbucks Vanilla Coffee "How To Send Your Child To College For Free or Close To It" Try RegTOOL...Maximize your PC's performance! Fix your tired old PC - Click For A Free Checkup: Details Here.
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"Fur, Fortune, and Empire," more

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Saturday October 2, 2010 JIMMY CARTER Julian E. Zelizer Times ISBN 978-0805089578 183 pages $23 Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Precisely whom we must thank for this sudden outpouring of books by and about Jimmy Carter -- in addition to the two here under review, there is also "Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years 1924-1974," by E. Stanly Godbold Jr. (Oxford Univ., $29.95) -- but an outpouring it most certainly is, though how many readers actually will welcome it is uncertain. This is because the principal effect of Carter's diary of his four White House years and Julian E. Zelizer's brief assessment of them is to remind us that it was a difficult time for the country and that Carter, for all his strengths, was not the right man for the time. It has been three decades since American voters decided, by a thumping margin, that they'd rather take their chances with Ronald Reagan than give another term to Carter, and during those years Carter has done much to refurbish his reputation. Inspired by what appears to be a combination of genuine altruism and calculated public relations, at the age of 85 he has transformed himself into one of the world's elder statesmen, won widespread respect for his efforts on behalf of various certifiably worthy causes, and been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it is for these three decades, not for his four years in the presidency, that history will remember him. He and his admirers can only hope so. Little of the blame for what happened between Carter's inauguration in 1977 and his involuntary return to Georgia in January 1981 can be laid directly at his feet. Much of any president's time is spent reacting to events caused by others rather than initiating ones on his own -- viz., the first two years of the Obama Administration -- and Carter was no exception. Though he did establish the Department of Energy, push through ratification of the treaties turning over the Panama Canal to Panama, and preside over the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, he was bedeviled over and over again by such matters as the effects at home (gas lines, inflation) of the OPEC decision to raise oil prices, the taking of American hostages in Iran, and the predictable run of scandals and contretemps among his appointees and associates. Zelizer, who teaches at Princeton and seems to publish almost as often as his fellow Princetonian Joyce Carol Oates, acknowledges in this latest volume in "The American Presidents" series of mini-biographies that Carter suffers under a reputation as "incompetent, weak, and unable to lead" while in the White House, but says in rebuttal that he "was an exceptionally smart man" who "was unafraid to innovate, willing to take risks by experimenting with new policy ideas and challenging the orthodoxies of both political parties." This is true, as is also Zelizer's argument that Carter's training "as an engineer helped to shape (his) approach to tackling issues." He "developed a technical and managerial, as well as a nonideological, mindset to problem solving that would inform him throughout his career." But as the presidency of Herbert Hoover nearly a half-century earlier had demonstrated, the engineer's "mindset" is not necessarily ideally suited to the challenges the presidency poses. Carter was exceptionally skilled at analyzing issues and proposing solutions, as his essential role in the Camp David negotiations made clear, but his overweening confidence in his own brilliance and rectitude made him impatient with those he considered his inferiors -- i.e., just about all of us -- and did nothing to improve his relations with Congress. In an afterword to his diaries, he admits that "sometimes I was not adequately concerned with how my proposals affected the views of the voters on whom (Congress) relied for reelection" and that "a somewhat less rigid approach to these sensitive issues could have paid rich dividends." The key word there is "rigid." As Zelizer puts it, "Through most of his presidency, Carter was unable to nurture strong relations with congressional Democrats or core Democratic constituencies, as too often he was unwilling to engage in the kind of deal making and compromises that were expected from the White House." Stubborn and willful, he was more comfortable being holier than thou than with the back-slapping and horse-trading that are so important in executive-legislative relationships. The irony is that he occupied the White House at a time when bipartisanship was still in flower, and he was able to work closely with congressional Republicans, especially the Senate minority leader -- "I met with Howard Baker, which is always a pleasant experience and constructive," he says in one diary entry -- yet he couldn't work with his own party. Early in 1978 he told his diary, "I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do the others, although the liberals vote with me more often." Mostly, though, they did so holding their noses, and as Edward Kennedy began to move toward his unsuccessful campaign for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, the split between Carter and the left wing of his party became so wide, and feelings so acrimonious, that his presidency effectively fell apart. He had run in 1976 as an outsider, capitalizing with great skill on public reaction to Watergate and the suspicions about Washington it had engendered, but in office he proved unable to strike a balance between his maverick image and the need to work with the Washington establishment. The trouble with running against Washington is that although it may play well out there on the hustings, it ignores the reality that any successful candidate will have to deal with Washington as it is rather than as others wish it were. Carter was simply too rigid and self-righteous to accept this unfortunate reality and work with it, and he paid the price. Still, by comparison with his relations with the news media, Carter and Congress had a four-year love-in. From one of his first diary entries on the subject ("as always, the reporters are searching for some signs of discord or disharmony, and when a slight incident does occur and is quickly resolved, it's greatly exaggerated in the news media") to one of the last ("The irresponsibility of the news media is almost nauseating"), Carter rarely rises above a self-pitying whine. As one who has spent half-a-century in newspaper work, I think I know a good deal more about the press than Carter does and some of my judgments of it are considerably harsher than his. But his endless rants in these diaries strike me as having more to do with his own psychology than with the business itself, the positive aspects of which completely escape his notice as he zeroes in on its vanity, shallowness and stupidity. Interestingly, these are among the few moments in these stupendously dull diaries when Carter permits his emotions to rise to the surface. For the most part he is dry, mechanical, literal-minded, petulant and utterly humorless. What, exactly, are we to say about the mind and heart of a man who can write (and then choose to publish for all to read) a passage such as this: "So far I don't feel isolated from the rest of the country since I've been in the White House. Reverend James Baker from South Carolina, immediately after he talked to me, called his sister-in-law and was so excited that he died, unfortunately. I called his wife to express my regrets." That must have made her day. Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top FUR, FORTUNE, AND EMPIRE: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America Eric Jay Dolin Norton ISBN 978-0393067101 442 pages $29.95 Reviewed by Kirk David Swinehart Even among historians of colonial America -- who should know and care about such things -- the fur trade tends to elicit groans of boredom. The subject is so blandly ubiquitous that it seems to demand little explanation even as it remains, at heart, a confounding mystery to anyone but the most narrowly focused specialists. Like the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the fur trade exists more as a nebulous concept than as a richly complex industry populated by some of the most colorful and nefarious personalities in world history. And that's because the trade is rendered unrecognizable by its powerful association with a primitive, far distant past. Yet the fur trade remains very much alive in our time: a multi-billion-dollar global business with discernible ties to its earlier incarnation. In "Fur, Fortune, and Empire," Eric Jay Dolin ranges far and wide over land and sea, searching for the beating heart of a gargantuan industry touched by almost every aspect of human society and human nature: war, power, money, faith, desire and ambition. Dolin concerns himself primarily with the trade's North American theater between the 17th and late 19th centuries, from European colonization to post-Revolutionary America's colonization of its own Western interior. But he keeps a close eye on the wider world, too. As in "Leviathan," his highly praised book on American whaling, he restores what most of us regard as an American institution to its rightful place on the international stage. The result is easily the finest account of the trade in recent memory, a crisply written account unburdened by excessive detail or homespun provincialism. One of the great virtues of "Fur, Fortune, and Empire" is its emphasis on continuity. The American trade ebbed and flowed over its first 150 years, often dramatically. But contrary to what historians of the trade's earliest days suggest, the storied American pursuit of fur didn't cease with Britain's disruptive wartime invasion of the rebelling colonies or even with the near extinction of certain fur-bearing animals in the Northeastern colonies. If anything, the trade expanded and flourished as never before in the wake of decolonization -- when American traders were forced to seek out pelts well beyond familiar shores. The craze for furs inaugurated by Henry Hudson's abortive search for the Northwest Passage, in 1609, had waned for numerous reasons by the time George Washington assumed office nearly 200 years later. But it came vigorously to life again in the Pacific Northwest, when Americans eventually learned of Capt. James Cook's lucrative trade in sea otter skins. The colonists were probably too busy fighting Britain in the late 1770s to follow Cook's machinations in the Pacific, much less in Canton, where his sea otter pelts fetched unheard-of sums. Although word of Cook's success in China ultimately "sparked one of the biggest rushes of the American fur trade," the man's place in the history of the American trade is easily overlooked. After all, he wasn't American. Dolin claims too much when he says, "In time, the fur trade determined the course of empire" and "spurred the colonization of eastern North America." Imperial policy and colonial settlement never hewed to a starkly economic course. What about those elaborate Elizabethan schemes for the transplant of social undesirables, or those starry-eyed French Jesuits angling for martyrdom? Yet there is no disputing the fur trade's deep implication in the clash of empires that embroiled the continent in vicious warfare throughout the colonial period and in the tumultuous wake of independence. The Netherlands, England, France, Sweden and Russia all engaged in the 250-year contest for domination of North America and control of its natural resources. Dolin's cast is suitably polyglot -- a welcome reminder that ethnic discord among traders ran deeper than animosity between Indians and whites. If any theme dominates, it's violence. As supermodel Naomi Campbell has surely learned from her blood diamond imbroglio, the earth's bounty isn't always as unspoiled as it appears. No doubt Campbell would take little consolation in the knowledge that she's hardly the first person to divest a natural wonder of its weight in human misery. But from Dolin's book she might acquire a deeper understanding of why her critics have judged her so harshly. To be sure, the current international legal uproar over blood diamonds owes at least part of its intensity to the 20th-century conservationist movement that grew up in opposition to fur. Like Campbell's lovely stones, America's precious beaver, sea otter and buffalo pelts drew people across the globe into sinister relationships with the natural environment. They, too, enriched and adorned people separated by thousands of miles from a world of hurt. Kirk Davis Swinehart teaches history at Wesleyan University. He is at work on a book about a family undone by the American Revolution. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top Advertisement DeClutter FAST! How To Get Your Home In Order Almost Immediately * Does your clutter keep you from having company? * Do unannounced guests get turned away? Not anymore... Click here to bring order to your home! Recent Stories    BODY WORK    WHITE HOUSE DIARY    ROOM    SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT    THE SADDEST MUSIC EVER WRITTEN: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings	Quick Clicks "Your Belly or Your Life!" said Doc. 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"Body Work" and "White House Diary"

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Washington Post Book Reviews For You Friday October 1, 2010 BODY WORK Sara Paretsky Putnam ISBN 978 0 399 15674 8 443 pages $26.95 Reviewed by Kathy Blumenstock, a writer and blogger in Washington, D.C. A Chicago nightspot featuring nude performance art is hardly V.I. Warshawski's top choice for entertainment. The feisty private detective, who has figured in 14 previous mysteries by Sara Paretsky, would likely prefer watching a Cubs game, sipping Johnnie Walker with old friends or taking a lakeside run with her dogs. But as "Body Work" opens, V.I. -- Vic to her pals -- is at Club Gouge to keep an eye on her impulsive young cousin Petra, who's waitressing there for the awesome tips paid by those eager to glimpse the mysterious Body Artist. Attired only in makeup, the Artist invites clubgoers to paint on her naked expanse, while Web cameras broadcast every brushstroke. One volunteer, Nadia Guaman, draws intricate pink-and-gray scrollwork topped by a female face, a design that prompts an enraged response from Chad Vishneski, an Iraqi war veteran in the audience. When V.I. overhears Chad and Nadia shouting, each accusing the other of spying, she wonders who, if anyone, is really a spy and what they're trying to find out. And when Nadia is shot and killed after leaving Club Gouge, V.I. is drawn into a case as enigmatic as the Body Artist herself. As in other V.I. Warshawski stories, crime-solving mingles with social issues. Last year "Hardball" recalled the racial tensions of the 1960s, and earlier books have explored political favors ("Burn Marks"), medical malpractice ("Bitter Medicine"), and the plights of the elderly ("Guardian Angel") and of immigrant families ("Fire Sale"). In "Body Work," Paretsky shows how the war in Iraq has affected those who've seen it up close, as well as those who've endured its losses back home. The prime suspect in Nadia's murder is Chad, whose apparent suicide attempt doesn't prevent the police from arresting him. His parents hire V.I. to clear his name, certain that their son, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, is innocent. The investigation twists back to Club Gouge and the Body Artist. Why is the club's muscleman using her as a message board, painting numbers and letters positioned for the Web cameras? And what was Nadia drawing on her? While V.I. hunts for a link between the dead woman and the accused veteran, the Body Artist vanishes, taking her answers with her. V.I. may favor golden retrievers, but her terrier-like persistence keeps digging up details. She learns the horrific reason behind Nadia's artwork and uncovers Chad's disturbing discovery about the war. Her usual posse provides both support and frustration, and Chad's fellow vets, who address V.I. as "ma'am," add their own expertise and perspective. Since her 1982 arrival on the mystery scene, V.I. has aged and adapted. No more Olivetti typewriter for reports: She now deciphers texts, syncs her cell phone and laptop to aggregate photos, and plugs background searches into websites. But her signature physical toughness hasn't faltered, despite shootings, beatings and enough concussions for a discount on MRIs. Now facing 50, V.I. is still quick with her fists, and she proudly describes herself as a street-fighter. That she is, readily taking on thugs from Club Gouge as she collects bruises and clues. Her protective instincts remain steady, too, whether she's taking in Nadia's injured sister or riding herd on her own impetuous cousin. That highly responsible nature stems from her upbringing: "Growing up the way I did," V.I. says, "my mother dying when I was in high school, my father forced to turn the house and meals over to me, I felt as though I'd been born old. ... I wondered for a moment if my whole detective practice was built on my private history of being an adolescent caretaker." Don't expect V.I. to change careers, though. Her skill set is just the right fit for a one-woman detective agency, cracking complex cases, and taking us along for the action. Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top WHITE HOUSE DIARY Jimmy Carter Farrar Straus Giroux ISBN 978-0374280994 570 pages $30 Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Precisely whom we must thank for this sudden outpouring of books by and about Jimmy Carter -- in addition to the two here under review, there is also "Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter: The Georgia Years 1924-1974," by E. Stanly Godbold Jr. (Oxford Univ., $29.95) -- but an outpouring it most certainly is, though how many readers actually will welcome it is uncertain. This is because the principal effect of Carter's diary of his four White House years and Julian E. Zelizer's brief assessment of them is to remind us that it was a difficult time for the country and that Carter, for all his strengths, was not the right man for the time. It has been three decades since American voters decided, by a thumping margin, that they'd rather take their chances with Ronald Reagan than give another term to Carter, and during those years Carter has done much to refurbish his reputation. Inspired by what appears to be a combination of genuine altruism and calculated public relations, at the age of 85 he has transformed himself into one of the world's elder statesmen, won widespread respect for his efforts on behalf of various certifiably worthy causes, and been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Perhaps it is for these three decades, not for his four years in the presidency, that history will remember him. He and his admirers can only hope so. Little of the blame for what happened between Carter's inauguration in 1977 and his involuntary return to Georgia in January 1981 can be laid directly at his feet. Much of any president's time is spent reacting to events caused by others rather than initiating ones on his own -- viz., the first two years of the Obama Administration -- and Carter was no exception. Though he did establish the Department of Energy, push through ratification of the treaties turning over the Panama Canal to Panama, and preside over the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, he was bedeviled over and over again by such matters as the effects at home (gas lines, inflation) of the OPEC decision to raise oil prices, the taking of American hostages in Iran, and the predictable run of scandals and contretemps among his appointees and associates. Zelizer, who teaches at Princeton and seems to publish almost as often as his fellow Princetonian Joyce Carol Oates, acknowledges in this latest volume in "The American Presidents" series of mini-biographies that Carter suffers under a reputation as "incompetent, weak, and unable to lead" while in the White House, but says in rebuttal that he "was an exceptionally smart man" who "was unafraid to innovate, willing to take risks by experimenting with new policy ideas and challenging the orthodoxies of both political parties." This is true, as is also Zelizer's argument that Carter's training "as an engineer helped to shape (his) approach to tackling issues." He "developed a technical and managerial, as well as a nonideological, mindset to problem solving that would inform him throughout his career." But as the presidency of Herbert Hoover nearly a half-century earlier had demonstrated, the engineer's "mindset" is not necessarily ideally suited to the challenges the presidency poses. Carter was exceptionally skilled at analyzing issues and proposing solutions, as his essential role in the Camp David negotiations made clear, but his overweening confidence in his own brilliance and rectitude made him impatient with those he considered his inferiors -- i.e., just about all of us -- and did nothing to improve his relations with Congress. In an afterword to his diaries, he admits that "sometimes I was not adequately concerned with how my proposals affected the views of the voters on whom (Congress) relied for reelection" and that "a somewhat less rigid approach to these sensitive issues could have paid rich dividends." The key word there is "rigid." As Zelizer puts it, "Through most of his presidency, Carter was unable to nurture strong relations with congressional Democrats or core Democratic constituencies, as too often he was unwilling to engage in the kind of deal making and compromises that were expected from the White House." Stubborn and willful, he was more comfortable being holier than thou than with the back-slapping and horse-trading that are so important in executive-legislative relationships. The irony is that he occupied the White House at a time when bipartisanship was still in flower, and he was able to work closely with congressional Republicans, especially the Senate minority leader -- "I met with Howard Baker, which is always a pleasant experience and constructive," he says in one diary entry -- yet he couldn't work with his own party. Early in 1978 he told his diary, "I feel more at home with the conservative Democratic and Republican members of Congress than I do the others, although the liberals vote with me more often." Mostly, though, they did so holding their noses, and as Edward Kennedy began to move toward his unsuccessful campaign for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, the split between Carter and the left wing of his party became so wide, and feelings so acrimonious, that his presidency effectively fell apart. He had run in 1976 as an outsider, capitalizing with great skill on public reaction to Watergate and the suspicions about Washington it had engendered, but in office he proved unable to strike a balance between his maverick image and the need to work with the Washington establishment. The trouble with running against Washington is that although it may play well out there on the hustings, it ignores the reality that any successful candidate will have to deal with Washington as it is rather than as others wish it were. Carter was simply too rigid and self-righteous to accept this unfortunate reality and work with it, and he paid the price. Still, by comparison with his relations with the news media, Carter and Congress had a four-year love-in. From one of his first diary entries on the subject ("as always, the reporters are searching for some signs of discord or disharmony, and when a slight incident does occur and is quickly resolved, it's greatly exaggerated in the news media") to one of the last ("The irresponsibility of the news media is almost nauseating"), Carter rarely rises above a self-pitying whine. As one who has spent half-a-century in newspaper work, I think I know a good deal more about the press than Carter does and some of my judgments of it are considerably harsher than his. But his endless rants in these diaries strike me as having more to do with his own psychology than with the business itself, the positive aspects of which completely escape his notice as he zeroes in on its vanity, shallowness and stupidity. Interestingly, these are among the few moments in these stupendously dull diaries when Carter permits his emotions to rise to the surface. For the most part he is dry, mechanical, literal-minded, petulant and utterly humorless. What, exactly, are we to say about the mind and heart of a man who can write (and then choose to publish for all to read) a passage such as this: "So far I don't feel isolated from the rest of the country since I've been in the White House. Reverend James Baker from South Carolina, immediately after he talked to me, called his sister-in-law and was so excited that he died, unfortunately. I called his wife to express my regrets." That must have made her day. Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com. 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