I'm Writing About the Books I Read...and a Short Note of Clarity

Okay! Time for another edition of Books I Read, but first:

Life isn’t just politics and it’s important to step away for a moment or two to remind us of that fact and to remember what we are fighting for. So, before I start rambling about books, I want to acknowledge that these are very stressful times, stressful and unsettling. Hour to hour, day by day, and even week by week, it is impossible to peg where we are at other than “not a good place,” but even then, we flounder only to surface into calm, and then a wave comes and we are dunked, and we surface again. Sometimes when we find air, we are able to see the shore. Other times, no shore: we are either too far away to see it or we are simply turned around, looking out to sea instead of at land. Through all this, we are so stressed that we can’t judge whether we are in shallow or deep water (or something in between). Bobbing up and down, we feel fear, anger, elation, relief, sadness, confusion, frustration, hope, and determination, in no sequence and sometimes in fragments all mixed together.

This is a completely normal response to the environment we are in, one in which things seem to change so fast and also not at all, where one headline sends our minds and emotions reeling and another news story whiplashes us. Because each one of us experiences this stuff differently, it’s tough to find emotional solidarity on anything other than “It’s fucked up” – but do we really want to sit around in “misery loves company”?

Then, though we are dragging ass, we make ourselves go to a protest or rally, which puts us in a great place, in the company of hundreds or thousands of others who feel the same ways we do. We find solidarity that is deeper than despair. We find strength and hope and feel refueled, and then we walk way, check our phone, read a headline, and question what we felt at the rally we were just at and then it’s back to “It’s fucked up.”

Step back and look at the whole of what we are going through. Think about it objectively, while putting this historical moment in the context of the many years we’ve lived and the non-political chaos we’ve experienced. Put the small moment that is our lives within the bigger context of human history: We are in the thick of one small chapter in a much bigger book, a book in which the plot is unclear (or nonexistent), the theme is muddled, and the storyteller an unreliable narrator! Of course, this moment is confusing; life and human existence is confusing and, in a lot of ways, unknowable and absurd. Make peace with that (not easy!) and despair retreats while possibilities flourish. Remember that we aren’t just fighting to preserve what was, because, honestly, there’s a hell of a lot of what was that shouldn’t have been. We are fighting to save some stuff and for the possibility to make things much better going forward.

Onto some books:

There are piles of books next to my bed. Most of them are current, future, or past reads. A few of them are either ongoing reads or reads that I return to. One of the ongoing reads is a very entertaining book called The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E.P Evans. Originally published in 1906, it is a historical survey of stupidity cloaked in legalism, intellectualism, and responsibility, and a great reminder of how our minds can hold and mold nonsense and contradictions. But, most of all, Criminal Prosecution… is full of great sentences, like this, one of the best opening lines in literature:

It is said that Barholomew Chassemée, a distinguished French jurist of the sixteenth century (born at Issy-l’Eveque in 1480), made his reputation at the bar as counsel for some rats, which had been put on trial before the ecclesiastical court of Autun on the charge of having feloniously eaten up and wantonly destroyed the barley-crop of that province.

Excellent!

Another great read from out of left field is Robert S. Desowitz’s New Guinea Tapeworm & Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People. Desowitz was professor of tropical medicine and an advisor to the World Health Organization. This is Desowitz’s reflection on his experience in the field studying parasitic diseases and how we’ve supercharged their spread by creating environments where they thrive, often with the best of intentions but also a lot of arrogance. A downer? Not really. Desowitz is not only a good writer, he has a great sense of humor and a healthy appreciation of the absurd. He also keeps coming back to the one, proven, low-cost, effective way to keep parasitic disease away: sound sanitation measures. Though published in 1981, New Guinea Tapeworm is well worth reading today.

A project I’m working on led me to cognitive psychologist/behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty and I am very glad it did. Ariely’s research is pretty essential for understanding the lies that ooze out of the Trump administration and its supporters.

To start, we are all dishonest in some measure, a measure which is gauged by how we feel about ourselves and others, and dishonestly sits with us. Because we tend to think of ourselves as good and righteous people, we justify our dishonesty in many ways. One example: You work a cash register. When you count out at the end of your shift, you see that you are $5 over. You pocket the $5, thinking “I’ve been working here for two years and, though they give me more responsibility, I’ve only gotten one small raise. They owe me more.” Under different circumstances, that $5 can easily become $50 or $500 or $50,000 or $500,000. Pump up the grievances and bloat your sense of entitlement; there is no limit to what level of dishonesty we justify to ourselves. Know this and Trump’s comfort with his deep dishonesty is understandable in light of him being the most aggrieved and entitled person on Earth.

A second lesson from Ariely is that dishonesty is contagious, especially when it is a leader that sets the bar for lying and grift. Once a leader like Trump convinces himself and others that his suffering and status justifies “a few lies,” his followers start thinking “What about me?” As their sense of entitlement increases, so does their comfort with the level of dishonesty shown by their leader, a comfort which they extend to themselves. A culture of dishonesty is not only established, because there’s a leader modeling it, that culture is mainstreamed. Ugh!

Another interesting and disturbing book that I am quickly plowing through is The Ochrana by A.T. Vassilyev. The Ochrana were the Russian Tsars’ secret political police. It was the Ochrana’s job to spy on dissidents, break up rebel plots, and arrest revolutionaries. During its time, the Ochrana was feared, especially by the Bolsheviks, who also learned from it. The Ochrana was used by the Soviet Union as a model for the KGB. Later, Putin used it and the KGB as the template for the GRU. The Nazi’s Gestapo and other fascist countries’ political police owe a lot to the Ochrana. The FBI, especially during the Red Scare of the early 1900s, took tips from their Russian predecessors. I wouldn’t be surprised if A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover, and others in America’s political police gave this book a thorough read.

What makes The Ochrana a unique book is that Vassilyev, its author, was a chief in the Ochrana and felt a deep need to “set the record straight” against what he considered Bolshevik lies. To do so, he dives into the minutia of the Ochrana, explaining their structure, strategies, and methods, as well as its role and function within Tsarist Russia. Vassilyev is certainly biased, and I’m sure he downplayed some, but The Ochrana reads true enough. It is also very engaging.

Now some lighter stuff: A few years back, Bill Griffin, the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, penned a graphic biography on the great Ernie Bushmiller called Three Rocks. Bushmiller was the creator of the comic strip Nancy and, to many comic book geeks and especially illustrators, the man is the comic strip Picasso. His strip’s plotlines, construction, and especially composition is much, much more radical and ground-breaking than a simple glance suggests. Bushmiller’s story sense parallels what was going on with his contemporaries in the Theatre of the Absurd. Not that Griffin gets all intellectual about Bushmiller. Nancy, after all, isn’t a philosophical treatise, but a comic strip designed to entertain and distract. Bushmiller, though, got creative in his creativity. Find a few Nancy panels like the ones below. Look at the composition as you would a painting hanging in a gallery. If you see something special, give Griffith’s book a read.

My top 2025 read (so far) is And the Roots of Rhythm Remain by Joe Boyd. It’s not only my current favorite, but one of the best books on music I’ve read. Joe Boyd is a record producer who owned and ran a few labels. He is known for having discovered and produced Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, and Sandy Denny. He also is a pioneer in “world” or global music, having produced many albums of such for his Hannibal label.

Boyd’s first book, White Bicycles, focused on his early years in music, his involvement with the Newport Folk Festival and his production of Pink Floyd and the lot. And the Roots… is his follow-up, delving into his global music years. But, as White Bicycles was a memoir, And the Roots… is much more than that. Boyd is not so much interested in telling of his involvement in “world music” (though he does), as much as he uses his experiences prompts to tell the social, cultural, and political history of the music, musicians, and regions he was involved with.

Boyd’s chapter on South African township music is a lesson in Black South African music as well as European colonialism, apartheid, repression, revolution, and resilience. In telling the story of Ravi Shankar and the West’s introduction to Indian classical music, Boyd takes us not only from India to America, but documents the Roma people’s journey from India to Persia to Europe, a story which links Indian classical music with Gypsy jazz, flamenco, and other styles of music central to Roma culture, a culture constantly under attack from anti-Roma bigots.

My favorite chapter is on Cuba, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin music, though Boyd’s trip through Nigeria with Fela, King Sunny Ade, and other highlife, juju, and afrobeat greats is also exhilarating. Outside of India, Boyd ignores Asia, but the book clocks in at nearly 1,000 pages, so maybe next time?

Yes, at 940-pages, And the Roots… is a huge book, but it reads fast. Boyd is a good writer and an engaging storyteller. His historical knowledge is deep, but he relays what he knows as a reader and fan, not as an academic, while still being smart, smart, smart. He is very free with giving credit to the musicians, so there’s a ton of names to track down and a lot of new sounds to soak in. If this sounds good, lucky you, And the Roots of Rhythm Remain just came out in paperback.

That’s all I have for you today. Happy reading!