It’s the year 2000, and you’re embroiled in a heated debate over the salience of Second Wave feminist organizations while on a car ride to catch that summer’s Lilith Fair. The book shoved in the space between the emergency brake and the passenger seat? MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. Like so many inspired ideas, the book was conceived over a few glasses of red wine between two friends who had met each other in their heady post-college days; Jennifer Baumgardner was a young editor at Ms. and Amy Richards was Gloria Steinem’s assistant. Both were struck by the different ways the young women around them were “living” their feminism in a culture that frequently proclaimed the F-word as a dirty one and the Spice Girls as paragons to contemporary women’s lib. Their female friends were often sexually liberated, empowered in their jobs, and pursuing activist goals in their downtime. So why, they asked, is a generation leading revolutionary lives best known for saying, “I’m not a feminist, but…?”

They identified a different breed of movement from the one their mothers had imparted to them, which the older generation had learned from women’s groups against the backdrop of the civil rights and anti-war struggles. If the imprecise terminology held that the First Wave was the Suffragists and the Second Wave was the modern women’s liberation movement, then the Third Wave seemed fractured and potentially ungrateful for it all. Baumgardner and Richards wanted to explore and extend this tenuous drawbridge; aware of the achievements secured by Second Wave feminists, the post-Judy Blume generation didn’t always relate to its every letter, and grappled with its limitations: “Ms. wasn’t effectively getting the news out there to our peers; nor did we necessarily feel represented by the fresher, younger, Jell-O-shots versions of feminism,” Baumgardner wrote in her original introduction to the book. The hefty and sprawling volume that resulted from their collaboration was eventually endorsed by Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler, debated by their fellow daughters of the Second Wave (who didn’t always agree with its vision of “everyday feminism”), and read in Women’s Studies classes across the country. MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future is being reissued this month with updates and a new preface by the authors, who will be appearing in New York at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on March 20th and the 92^nd Street Y Tribeca on April 21^st. I talked with co-authors Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner about activism, formerly righteous rage, and why they don’t give a hoot about Twitter.

In the book, you attempt to address the relationship between older generations of feminists and younger feminists. What kinds of criticism and feedback did you get from the older generation after the book was published?

JB: At the time, Amy and I were just barely thirty, and the second wave feminists in our lives loomed larger than they do now. But just simply by having this book, this serious thing, we were treated differently—or we treated ourselves differently—out in the world. Some of my most fraught relationships with older feminist writers changed a lot by being able to argue, by being old enough to write a book that seemed significant.

AR: From that demographic, we get criticism mostly from professors now, since we had our friends then who were second wave feminists who we had sent the book to before it was published. But now we see the feedback from professors, who, more often than not seem to say, “My students love your book.” Yes—they’re sort of saying, “I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with everything in your book, but it does seem to make feminism relevant to my students, so I teach it.”

Does it still read as relevant when you kick your feet up and flip through it, or does it feel like a trip back in time?

AR: The sadness is in some ways how relevant the book still is. One of the reasons we wanted to write the book was to prove that young people—young women in particular—were connecting to feminism, and were living feminist lives and weren’t resistant to feminism, which had been the assumption at the time. There’s still an assumption that young people still aren’t living feminist lives to the extent that they should be, given the history that has preceded them.

Were you tempted to recant anything from the first publication?

JB: A lot of our ideas have evolved in the last ten years. For example, there’s very little mention of trans issues in the book. After the book came out, organizing around trans/transgender/transfeminist issues became so much more visible, and the Third Wave Foundation, which Amy co-founded, now states in its mission that it’s for young feminist and trans activists. It became twinned with younger feminists in a way that we didn’t know would happen, but now it’s a really big part of what we talk about.

AR: Looking at the media chapter ten years later, we thought, well, maybe the internet has helped solve these problems of what sexist traditional magazines have been, but it hasn’t. You can take the same standard of analyzing a Glamour and a GQ and apply it to what’s on the internet today. With the exception of the Spice Girls and Monica Lewinsky—

JB: Every TV show we mention is no longer on.

AR: Although Britney Spears made a comeback from the time we wrote it until now.

JB: There have been some technological innovations that are significant to organizing—blogging wasn’t happening yet, and Twitter—but they’re not really being pioneered by us. Amy and I aren’t innovators when it comes to things like Twitter, and we don’t want to be. We don’t want to be afraid of it, but it’s not our thing.

AR: But the analyzing of it is the same analyzing we did in the media chapter. Who has access to it? Who is more popular? Why? I think you can apply the same analysis and get the same answer. If anything, blogging has only reinforced mainstream assumptions about women writers. ‘Oh, they only write about themselves. And they only write about personal things.’ And frankly, the majority of blogging does not pay—

JB: And women do things for free all the time.

AR: It’s wonderful that some women get to say, ‘I’m a writer now, I have a column,’ but they’re not getting paid for it.

In the original introduction, I was intrigued by your discussion of the rage that motivated you and your activism. Is your work now inspired less by rage? Is that part of the youthfulness of the book for you?

JB: I had more righteous anger then, and what I was trying to do was make sure my righteous anger wasn’t just expressed by bitching, but actually feel like I had some power that could be translated into social change. I think the more privileged and older I’ve gotten, the less I feel that sense of rage; the more I have things that could ostensibly make a change, the less I see what that does.

AR: I feel the opposite; I feel more angry. I see certain things come true that I was told would come true, and I always thought it wouldn’t be the case with my generation—child-rearing will be shared 50/50, or women will make the same as men. I look at the majority of my female friends, and most of them are not working, but are ostensibly supported by their husbands. Has it really changed all that much? In all of these women’s instances, they had very raised expectations for what they wanted for their lifestyle. And I’m not sure that any of these women could have actually chosen a career path that could have sustained that for them and had kids. So I look around, and I say, “yes, that’s their choice, and I’m happy that women have that choice,” but I’m increasingly angrier at the system that makes women have to choose at the end of the day, making choices that are not feminist choices to me. Women taking care of their aging parents: if there’s a brother and a sister, the woman is frequently taking far more responsibility for that parent. That’s what happened twenty years ago.

JB: When I was standing on the outside as a younger person, I had more faith. Now, the more I’m actually within some sort of cog of change and probably have done more than I did back then, I have less faith that it’s actually going to make a big difference. This is getting too depressing.

I was just thinking that.

JB: But there’s a slightly more positive way of looking at this, which is that while it was true that we used to think that trans issues were so marginal, it’s not that we didn’t care. We now realize that they’re not marginal at all, but are central—so some of our rage has been diluted by expansiveness. Students on college campuses ask us a lot about how to interact with people who didn’t agree with feminists. We always say, ‘do you have an actual relationship where you can talk and have coffee with other campus leaders?’ Often they haven’t built a relationship. That’s being youthful. It would be very hard to maintain the energy and idealism of youth without that. If you were so empathetic, which you hopefully gain with age, maybe you would never have the imagination of things being really clear. But I have a lot of— not exactly shame— but remorse about different assumptions I made while I was in college, even though I was a very gung ho feminist and am proud of it. There were a lot of assumptions I made then; “Oh, so and so said they liked the book Lolita!” Now I recognize it as a very important book, and then I was like, “You’re a date rapist.”

We were on a depressing track before. What’s the work that’s exciting to you now?

JB: We’re working on another book, called The Family Bed: Is There Sex After Kids?, about how people are creating relationships nowadays and parenting simultaneously. I’m also working on a documentary film and rape awareness project right now; there’s always a bunch of issues that we work on individually or as a team. I rarely feel that I have the blahs. As depressing as it is that these things keep not getting better there’s always new and interesting ways to deal with them. We own a feminist speaker’s bureau together, called Soapbox Inc.: Speakers Who Speak Out, to handle our own speaking engagements, as well as other people.

AR: Soapboax hosts a Feminist Winter Term, where students come from around the country and we take them to see feminist activism in action around the city. To be with twenty twenty-one-year-olds for a full week— we get such energy from them. It always reconnects us to groups and organizations that we have relationships with, and it connects us to our own feminism really intensely. And reminds us how much we love the city.

FSG, New York, 2010. 240 pp.

Image: Jay Morrison via Flickr

So the 1984 Summer Olympic Games were in Los Angeles. The Soviets thought the CIA was going to drug Russian athletes and “trick” them into defecting so the Soviet Union and its allies refused to compete. The Americans were upset because we thought this meant no one would watch the Olympics; ABC felt ripped off, and the Olympic committee nearly refunded ABC more than $90 million in fees. (Repeat: $90 million in 1984.) But then Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet boycott and competed, endearing itself to the United States and setting the stage for the American debut of the “simple, utilitarian, and honest” Yugo. The Yugo, which had been manufactured by Zastava Automobiles in Kragujevac (the “Serbian Detroit”) for seven years, went on sale in the U.S. on August 26, 1985 with the tag line “Yugo, $3,990. The Road Back to Sanity.”

It was the cheapest new car ever. Some places would let you pay $99 down and $99 a month. The man responsible for bringing the Yugo across the pond was Malcolm Bricklin, a crook and a genius, who realized that Americans wanted something cute and cheap. In 1984, he told the Dallas Morning News: “It looks a little like everything out there…it looks like a Rabbit, it looks like a Colt, it looks like a Tercel. It looks like all the cars in the $5,000 to $7,000 price range, except it’s under $4,000.” The car itself was worth about $2,000. But Bricklin was moving forward with no capital. He accepted advance franchise fees from car dealers, which were supposed to remain in escrow accounts, and used them to cover his operations costs. He made dealers provide him with $400,000 letters of credit, which he then used to secure loans, which he then used to buy the cars from Yugoslavia. By 1984, he’d declared bankruptcy three times. He wore “silver and turquoise jewelry, Indian beads, a big belt buckle, pointed cowboy boots, a straw rodeo hat, and a wide leather belt with MALCOLM spelled out in silver studs.” His neighbor says, “he had such flare.”

Tony Ciminera, then Vice President of International Auto Importers, drove a Yugo over “a historic one-lane bridge that crossed over a very busy set of railroad tracks.” As Ciminera crossed the bridge: “the driver’s seat gave way. ‘The weld snapped and I’m suddenly laying flat. My head was on the backseat. I was totally prone. I couldn’t reach the steering wheel anymore. But the car’s still moving and I’m trying to steer it with my knees…’”

In spite of such obvious crappiness, and despite the fact Bricklin was flying by the seat of his pants, the Yugo sold. It showed enough promise in its first year on the market that Chrysler tried to buy the rights to American distribution for $15 million. Bricklin declined the offer; sources say he wanted ten times that.

The climax of the book comes in January 1986. That’s when Consumer Reports panned the car in a cover story. The Yugo had been on the market for a little over one year. Yugo of Pensacola sold the most. Consumer Reports wrote: “The price is the come-on for the Yugo, but you can’t buy it for $3,990 (because of fees) and it’s hard to recommend at any price.” The Yugo had the 8^th highest death rate, with “3.6 occupant deaths per ten thousand cars.” The car did not accelerate quickly enough.

But it was really cheap and it had sold well! By April 1986 Yugo America had sold 10,000 cars. Of course, more trouble was coming. The car was the butt of a joke on Dragnet. Jay Leno said: “More problems for Dr. Kevorkian, the suicide doctor. It seems the makers of the Yugo are suing him for copyright infringement.”

By 1988, Yugo America had a net worth of $3.2 million, but was losing $1.5 million a month in operations. A now-defunct New York brokerage firm agreed to bail the company out, provided Bricklin leave and not come back. The firm planned to team up with Mitsubishi to sell Yugo-like cars, manufactured in Malaysia, called the Proton Saga. Bricklin was furious, but in April of 1988, he agreed to sell his shares, and the shares of his sons, for $13 million. He got lucky. Mitsubishi flaked on the deal and the brokerage firm lost an estimated $10.5 million on “nine utterly boneheaded months of work.”

In January of 1989 Yugo America filed for bankruptcy. They were sued, sued, sued. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America formed a special Yugo-suing group. In September of 1989 there was a terrible Yugo accident on a bridge in Michigan. People thought the car got “caught by a sudden gust” of wind and blew away, over the bridge, into the water.

Around this time, Bricklin was sued by Citibank for a $98,171 balance on his Diner’s Club card. His helicopter was repossessed. He owed the IRS almost $400,000. By 1991, Bricklin had less than $50,000 in assets and was $20 million in debt to more than 150 creditors. In one case, a judge issued a $17 million dollar judgment against him.

Yugo America was completely out of business by April 1992 and warranties weren’t honored. Warranty lawyer Vernon Vig said: “I don’t know what happens in a case like Yugo. I think everybody’s probably out of luck.” On May 30^th, 1992 President George H. W. Bush “froze Serb accounts and prohibited American businesses and individuals from conducting trade business with and other transactions with Serbia and Montenegro.” (In the fall of 1992, Bobby Fischer violated the sanctions by playing chess against Borris Spassky. He was indicted, escaped to Iceland, died there.) Meanwhile in Kragujevac, Yugo’s manufacturer Zastava Automobiles, crushed by “war, sanctions and bankruptcy,” subsisted by manufacturing AK-47s. NATO started bombing Serbia on March 24, 1999. They bombed for 78 days, destroying Zastava’s power station, computer center, and assembly line. 124 workers were injured, and “mangled Yugos swung from conveyor belts.” The war ended in June of that year. Zastava, like all of Serbia, was broke and needed a foreign investor. Malcolm Bricklin stepped up. Inexplicably, Zastava signed a new deal with him in 2002, but, not surprisingly, the deal was dead one year later. Bricklin moved on to China where he failed to import a Chinese luxury car for Americans. This Yugo book is supposed to be funny and sometimes it is. I’d rather, though, read a biography of Bricklin.

In 2008, Fiat bought the company and officially killed the Yugo. Vuic estimates that there are 1,000 Yugos working today. “Stay Tuned,” Vuic writes, because “as of late 2008, the Serbian government was negotiating with officials in the Congo about moving the Yugo to Africa.”

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of Worst Car in History is one of those awesome magazine articles no one should have turned into a book. But since that has already happened, how come there’s not more Cold War drama? Vuic notes but does not discuss the relationship between Josip Broz Tito and the U.S. administration. When Tito withdrew from the Soviet Bloc, Vuic writes: “he took his Mediterranean ports with him, a coup of immeasurable importance to the U.S. Military…successive American presidents treated Yugoslavia like a ‘pampered child,’ giving it billions of dollars in aid and loans, most-favored trading status, and tons of military equipment.” We were cool with that. “We believe that cars do not have politics,” wrote Automative News in 1985. But still, how come Vuic doesn’t enlarge upon the claim that Yugoslavia successfully did “everything capitalists say socialists can’t do”? The Yugo, as a “product of a state-owned socialist enterprise” was snatched up by an American con-man and sold, for a profit, as the best of what socialism could offer us Americans by the dawn’s early light.

Hill and Wang, New York, 2010. 272 pp.

Photo: Flickr, Damian Corrigan

Point of view is the big challenge for the historian. After years of research, travel, interviews; years of note-taking, transcribing, sorting-out, arranging, using the floor of one’s study to map out chapters; years of consultation with trusted colleagues willing to read drafts and offer suggestions – the writing begins, and you have to decide: Where do I stand vis a vis my subject?

Even if the facts at hand are as real as today’s headlines, history is not journalism. You regard situations sui generis at some distance: an arm’s length, a decade’s, or a century’s. You may also be looking at a culture foreign to your own. Every few pages of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss seems to be reminding the reader of his invasive behavior; so does De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America.

Two Frenchmen in foreign countries spring to mind not only because the past is a foreign country, but because, in The History of White People, instead of geographical travel, Nell Irvin Painter historicizes a race that is not her own. When well-meaning people approach her at symposia and cocktail parties, as they are wont to do, and ask her if she is “writing as a black woman,” her response – after the possible joke riposte-question, “What are my options?” – is, simply, “I am writing as an historian.”

The History of White People is therefore a scrupulously well-chosen title. The core of the story is made up of discrete individuals with defined cultural roles. This book is not a litany against racism. It is not a catalogue of injured aberrations and finger-pointing. It is not a guide to the oppressed. It is, rather, a narrative in the most accomplished and deliberate sense, as the beautifully-paced genesis and evolution of an habituated definition.

The story begins in antiquity, a time we already tend to idealize, made all the more fascinating as we learn – or are reminded – that “back in the day,” Scythians, Celts, Gauls and Germani knew no such thing as race. It was where you were from, the climate of your home, that defined you. Nevertheless, slavery was omnipresent; before the color-line there was social hierarchy.

Before too long, the reader is on home ground, among the slave-owning colonials of America. Slavery was an integrated practice, and remained so for some time. This perversely mirrored the alabaster-skinned ideal of the odalisque. Painter skillfully guides us through the convoluted path of race-awareness in the plastic arts. Winckelmann and Blumenbach and Meiners and de Stael, eighteenth-century standard-bearers for whiteness, contributed in important ways to the elaborate taxonomy of race on the edge of modernity in America. Painter maintains stride as she penetrates the mind of our quintessential, prototypical intellectual, Thomas Jefferson, and his depiction of Saxon forbears – again, by process of elimination, tilting the balance toward whiteness.

Painter casts “The First Alien Wave,” the immigrant explosion of the first decades of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the myth of the Melting Pot, in a disturbing new light. She shows how the influx of Irish Catholics and their brand of “blackness” made them “people bred to be dominated,” thereby an accelerant upon the flame of indigenous race-thinking. From there, she segues to Ralph Waldo Emerson, presenting a chillingly authoritative discussion of the Transcendental idealist as polluted by the machismo, rough-hewn Germanic philosophies of his close friend Thomas Carlyle. Idealizing “English Traits,” Emerson devalued the darker hues. In his eyes, the paradigmatic “American” was a white male.

The line from Emerson to William Z. Ripley, Franz Boas, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Goddard and Madison Grant is likewise Teutonic. By the time the second great immigrant wave – the Jews – engulfed our shores, prejudice was systemic. Henry Ford, with his publication of The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem emerges through Painter’s saga as the one of the prime movers behind American anti-Semitism, an integral ingredient in race-thinking.

A keystone in this historical arch, the black power movement, arrives in the mid-1960s when heightened black identity and black pride turned the white man into The Other. Painter’s analysis here trenchantly torques the preceding story into a distorting mirror wherein white America was caught by surprise – the intellectuals seized upon Malcolm X as a man whose excoriations brought them closer into empathy with black nationalism. But Malcolm’s effect on right-wing American society was the opposite: “If black people could proclaim themselves black and proud, white people could trumpet their whiteness.”

“Any nation founded by slaveholders,” Painter writes, “finds justification for its class system, and American slavery made the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, which nineteenth-century Americans rarely disputed.” The History of White People is replete with this kind of causal reasoning, sophisticated, fact-based logic that has always been foundational to the praxis of history. The facts in this book do not “speak for themselves.” No facts can do that. Facts need to be substantiated by a scholarly apparatus, which these are; but the scaffolding of The History of White People is never allowed to overwhelm the artful edifice. By the time Painter concludes her study of whiteness on the minutest, granular level, the genome – upon which “race-talk” is still being grafted – makes eminent sense.

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010. 496 pp.

Hannah Seligson’s term for this amorphous period of courtship is “a little bit married.” Her new book, “A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door,” is about couples who have postponed marriage for a year or ten and decided to just play house instead. Play is, according to Seligson, a big reason for the trend. Generation Y (born 1977 - 1989) might as well stand for Generation Youth; we still pine for our days in the sandbox. “In previous generations there was no transition into adulthood, you just became one,” says professor Jeffrey Arnett, one of dozens of relationship experts interviewed in the book. These mini-marriages provide a “stay against loneliness” during those not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman years. Seligson spoke with over a hundred unmarried monogamists and the book mostly consists of snippets from her interviews.  They offer quips that will hush your most prying relatives and suggest topics - like determining a monthly budget -you ought to cover before you move in.

According the U.S. Census, there are 6.7 million unmarried couple living together; they outnumber the population of Arizona. However, a little bit married, Seligson writes, is not vying to replace the real thing. Studies show 75% of cohabiters plan to marry eventually. It’s a trend with a limited following, occurring among “upwardly mobile college educated twenty- and thirty- somethings living in urban areas.” This is hardly the seed of revolution, Seligson states upfront.

In fact, reading Seligson’s book makes you realize that dating hasn’t changed very much since the advent of Facebook, except for its ever-yawning duration. Changes in our courtship rituals hardly inspire ethnography. In one chapter, “Dating Peter Pan,” Selgison describes the maturity gap between men and women; in another “Are We There Yet?” she comforts readers fretting because their man hasn’t proposed yet. Seligson’s book is much like other self-books for women anxious about marriage, a genre that, given the recent release of Lori Gottleib’s Marry Him, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, and Kate Figes’ Couples: The Truth, appears to be the only recession-proof strain of the publishing industry. Seligson is less interested in analyzing the little-bit-married phenomenon than she is in patting the anxiety-ridden shoulders of the women navigating it.

What distinguishes ALBM from other books in this genre is Seligson’s gently prodding tone. Her advice is never too specific; instead she asks her readers valuable, self-reflective questions. “To be clear, though, this is not a chapter about how to get your guy to propose through trickery, manipulation, or harassment” she writes at the beginning of “Are We There Yet?” Instead, she inquires about the origin of the anxiety - perhaps social pressures have gotten under your skin? - and offers suggestions on how to discuss marriage with your partner. The book begins with a brief synopsis about her experience being a little bit married. But following those three pages, the book takes a decidedly impersonal turn; there’s scarcely another sentence in the first person. This might explain why her tone is measured, her prose low-drama; her run-in with partial matrimony was years ago, and now she’s empathetic to your woes but doesn’t quite share your obsession. Also, while the book does reinforce a number of stereotypes (”you’re ready to register at Pottery Barn and he’s playing Grand Theft Auto”), there are certain traditions she identifies as outdated. Engagement rings, for instance, get to her: “What if the engagement ring went where it should historically be catalogued: an anachronism of a time when women were considered something to which an economic value could be assigned.” She questions whether marriage really is the epitome of love. “Cohabitation is more committed than marriage. When you cohabit with someone you are making a conscious choice, outside of a forced institution, to be with that person.” She quotes hordes of people who advise against marrying before thirty. It makes the stereotypes in the book far easier to digest - you don’t sense that she’s projecting her own neuroses as the national standard, nor recycling old wives tales. She’s just reporting what she heard during her interviews.

If marriage isn’t your thing and never will be, a better guide might be “Unmarried to Each Other” by Dorian Solot and Marshal Miller. Solot and Miller, the founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, have been unmarried for eighteen years. Their book, which was published in 2002, has a chapter about legal precautions unmarried couples ought to take - like signing a health care proxy form. Another chapter is about “commitment ceremonies” for those who want to throw a party without the institutional baggage of a wedding. For Solot and Miller, postponing marriage isn’t just an issue of cold feet or dawdling before you turn thirty. The unmarried couples they interview haven’t tied the knot because they can’t (Seligson book only applies to heterosexual couples), or because it’s just not appealing. Some feel uncomfortable getting married when their gay friends can’t, others just think there’s something awry about mixing their emotional and legal relationships. Most of the people they spoke to never want to get married, not even the littlest bit.

]]> http://thefastertimes.com/nonfiction/2010/02/16/love-and-no-marriage-tft-reviews-hannah-seligsons-a-little-bit-married/feed/ http://thefastertimes.com/nonfiction/2010/02/14/judgment-day-twittering-fairly-recent-nonfiction-books-by-their-covers/ http://thefastertimes.com/nonfiction/2010/02/14/judgment-day-twittering-fairly-recent-nonfiction-books-by-their-covers/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 16:44:06 +0000 Abbey Arnett http://thefastertimes.com/nonfiction/?p=496

The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed: This book has a lovely cover, feels weighty with knowledge, and has excellent page-feel. However, I don’t think it will make a good pillow.

What Color is Your Parachute? 2010 edition by Richard Nelson Bolles: Embiggen parachute on front; sets mood 4 fantastical recession career (creative director, hedge fund mngr).

Going Rogue by Sarah Palin: I’d rather read Going Rouge, An American Nightmare. Where’s she looking in this pic–watching people walk away? What color’s HER parachute?

The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss: DO TELL. Was thinking I’d write the 1 nanosecond version. Literary ponzi scheme.

Twitterville by Shel Israel (or any book on Twitter): Bad news: book is too long. And it’s a book. It’s like rollerblading about the solstice. Wait, did I do that right?

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert: Committed: EAT PRAY LOVE EAT PRAY LOVE EAT PRAY LOZZZZ… ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ………….ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…………ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Food Rules by Michael Pollan: OMG you GUYS, have you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma? …..Silence.

Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe: Big book, scary picture! Propped it against O’Reilly book: they made out and had a baby Rogue. Cue Billy Ocean: When the goin’ gets tough…

America For Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty by Jerome Corsi: Ooo, America with a barcode! CuYute, can I get that in a necklace? I’m thinking, make America red and put little yellow stars in the corner?

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer: This is a nice cover. I read the flap—it’s an inspiration story based in Madonna, I mean Malawi. Madawa? Malonni? Crypt keeper?

The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn: My fav cover, altho ambiguous. Poster worthy. He <3s parenting? Wait, Abu Ghraib+baby=love? Can’t wait to see how this feel-good plays out.

I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth by Brenda Peterson: Brother and moi discussing Rapture. Me: Why did they pick the word Rapture for 2nd coming? I mean, it’s a BIRD. Him: Um, you mean “raptor”?

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin: You know what makes me happy? A good project. And a good project about becoming happier? (Walks slowly back to irrelevant hamster wheel.)

Talented Mrs. Highsmith by Joan Schenkar: Hey, see what she did there? Cause PH did the Talented Mr. Ri… ya get it. If not, you won’t read this. If you do, useful life points 4 u.

Redeeming Features by Nicholas Haslam: Pink and orange dude bio? Says one thing: men won’t pick this up. But I will. Guess interior designer. That was easy.

Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me by Howie Mandel and Josh Young: HM is an OCD guy trapped in a bubble. ANOTHER game show host with OCD? I would read this if Marc Summers were in the bubble, too.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Early Years by Ilan Stavens: OMG you GUYS, this book looks amazing from cover alone. And it’s re: Marquez: super. Angels sing. Must save Glenn and Bill from the raptor.

New York City has lost its soul. If this is an argument that you’ve already read and talked about to death, do not turn to Sharon Zukin’s latest offering. But, if this seems like a good jumping off point for an inquiry into the last fifty years of New York’s changing cityscape, Naked City could appeal.

The book doesn’t so much strip the city naked as it does point out the weighty adornments that contribute to its contemporary culture. Zukin, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and a prolific writer on cities, relies less here on the data and demographics found in her previous books, choosing instead to take a softer approach. She grabs our hands and leads us through neighborhoods, remarking on zoning changes, recent clashes between communities, shifting understandings of public space. At times, this approach gives Zukin’s writing a lively blush, and we’re happy to be along for the ride; at others, it’s temping to want to wrench free of her grip. Troubled by the alterations to her city, she also experiences tinges of guilt around the edges; after all, she admits, “I would never shop in a discount store or drink bodega drip coffee when I could have a latte.”

This bind may ring true for Zukin, but the discussion of her own patterns of consumption sets a distracting tone. We want a tougher tour guide to navigate these streets, someone who will bypass the dull imagery of lattes and fancy cheeses. Since we’re listening for insight on what lurks behind these shifts, her occasional revelations of complicity feel unnecessary. Especially if you’re someone who doesn’t mind deli drip coffee or yellow cheddar instead of raclette, but you’re still interested in the knotty landscape of “supergentrification.”

This book may not be for every urban enthusiast, as some of Zukin’s territory is well worn. The narrative she provides for Brooklyn’s ascent into cultural “coolness” provides a familiar cast of characters, as artists displace manufacturers in live-work lofts, and are displaced in turn by lawyers and media moguls who buy these lofts as luxury condos; a gourmet cheese store or quirky coffee bar replaces a check-cashing service, and is in turn displaced by a chain store. Similarly, armchair urbanists will have probably already read how Veselka (the famous Ukranian restaurant) used to exemplify the East Village’s uneasy combination of change and constancy.

Yet there’s much to be gained from this book as hand-in-hand we stroll from Red Hook to Williamsburg, the East Village to Harlem. Rhetoric, the power of capital, state power, consumer tastes, and media manipulation: all are implicated in her mapping of “authenticity.” The habit of identifying authenticity has been with us since the days of Shakespeare and Rousseau, but Zukin explores all of its contradictory and contemporary uses: representing as a vision of the city that is timeless; as a status symbol thrust upon groups of people; as an expression of origins; as a style that can be produced, sold, and consumed by everyone from the media to the real estate agencies to the city itself. Zukin’s writing about authenticity is most powerful when she links it to a desire for origins, contrasted with the experience of strangerhood in the spaces of our shared city. While the notion doesn’t always apply so cleanly to each of her subjects, it’s one that we want to hear more of; the people of the city and their searching for neighborhood and home is the muted energy in this book that wants to be set free of the relentless (and often tedious) inquiry into appearances.

The book gains strength as it departs from this pursuit of authenticity, sold and consumed, and instead shifts to the maneuverings that have created some of our most prized spaces. Her look at the politics and economics behind community gardens, Union Square, and the World Trade Center site, emphasizes how some of our most dearly held “public” spaces are operated and regulated by a complex blending of city, state, and private involvement.

As the title suggests, she references Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities throughout, using the landmark text alternately as a guiding light and a tool of comparison and critique. We hear echoes of Jacobs most clearly throughout Zukin’s final recommendations when Zukin peels off the kid gloves to argue for reclaiming “our origins in the small scale of old buildings, the low rents of working class neighborhoods, and fewer corporate names” along with new “public-private stewardship” that would protect people, buildings, and institutions.

Throughout, she reminds us that appearances can be deceiving, and much of this contemporary city culture is revealed to be a bit like the emperor sans clothes. Constant tatter on real estate blogs can be filled with inaccuracies and falsehoods, a quick scan of the patronage at a crowded café can be misrepresentative of a neighborhood’s unemployment rate, and, finally, the theories of Jane Jacobs can be implemented in law, but not in spirit. Naked City may be best suited to former New Yorkers who mourn their altered urban village but haven’t had to experience the changes while reading the New York magazine articles that Zukin frequently intones. For those who remain and question the daily reality of changes, it might be too painful to see the emperor naked once more.

An epilogue: Roman Polanski, Joan Didion’s fugitive co-godparent, is suddenly on house arrest in Switzerland as his 1977 sex-with-a-thirteen-year-old case comes out of cryogenic limbo. Susan Atkins, one member of Charles Manson’s zombie family, died last September. Squeaky Fromme is elderly and out of prison. Huey Newton is twenty years dead; Eldridge Cleaver, ten. Joan Didion herself is seventy-five, just a month younger than Manson, who is still in prison. And her book The White Album has a new edition out from FSG Classics. The era it describes has grown up and graduated into history, into Classics.

I was born in 1980, the year after The White Album was published, and now I’m old enough to “reflect” on Didion’s second nonfiction book on the Sixties and their aftermath. I look uneasily toward my own thirtieth birthday and full-fledged adulthood, but the essays in The White Album at least offer a creation story for uncertainty.

The title essay and a few others plumb the breakdown of narrative and meaning that attended the Sixties. The stories we tell ourselves in order to live, to scramble Didion’s memorable first line, dissolved into “flash pictures in variable sequence”: an anti-structure she invented for the essay and for those bewildering years. Nothing made sense anymore.

The crumbling of the narrative traumatized Didion, but she was witheringly critical of those who slouched toward comforting mirages. Hollywood liberals’ naïve vanity and “dictatorship of good intentions”; the Jaycees’ “astonishing notion” that campus social groups would solve student unrest; Colombians’ “hallucination” that they descended from Spain’s highest aristocracy: these were “stories a child might invent.”

The White Album is also a book about the American West, staking a claim in the rubble of the region’s defunct heroic stories. (Gunsmoke disappeared in 1975, and with it the unself-conscious Western.) Didion was deeply attracted to hydraulic engineering—“the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water”—and deeply distrustful of social engineering—coolly furious, for instance, at the bureaucratic arrogance behind an early carpool-lane project in Los Angeles. She was fascinated by the institution of the shopping mall and enchanted by the “hardness” of Georgia O’Keeffe, an “angelic rattlesnake.”

I grew up in the inland West wholly in this nonsense era. By the 1980s Didion’s California seemed to be the generative laboratory for the rest of America. Malls replaced downtowns, carpool lanes multiplied. While governor from 1967 to 1975, Ronald Reagan had commissioned the steroidal ranch house of a governor’s mansion Didion tours in The White Album (its ersatz adobe walls and vinyl-topped wet bar she describes as “insistently and malevolently ‘democratic’”); Reagan’s aggressively pacific successor, Jerry Brown, then refused to live in such splendor (also somehow an insistently and malevolently “democratic” act). Now Reagan was president, bringing Star Wars to life, and my parents were refusing to buy me G.I. Joes. Brown and Reagan appeared as contrapuntal icons in two versions of one of my favorite punk rock songs from back then, the Dead Kennedys’ “California Über Alles,” which in 1979 had satirically imagined Brown as a “Zen fascist” U.S. president; in 1981, for obvious reasons, the band released a sequel, “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now.” Then Mötley Crüe and crew brought Jim Morrison’s black vinyl pants, and the coke-and-hookers Sunset Strip, to ranch houses across the country. Didion describes Californians having to drain their swimming pools in a drought; this state of affairs sparked rapid innovation in the only sport that really drew me in as an ’80s kid: skateboarding. California über alles.

How have we coped growing up with only “flash pictures in variable sequence” as a story line? It seems telling somehow that The Simpsons recently surpassed Gunsmoke as the longest-running prime-time TV show. “I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults,” Didion writes. As The White Album turns thirty it comes to seem almost a book of Genesis for the period of American history I’ve happened to live through. Joan Didion could be a frazzled and eloquent Eve, seeing the new world as the harrowed skeptic from a more straightforward time and place.

“I am not the society in microcosm,” Didion writes at one point, yet reading her I get the sense that everything is a metonym, the world in a grain of sand. The White Album remains a memoir of an idiosyncratic woman in a strange era, but a bellwether one. This acutely aware yet distant soul needed to pick up the New York Times two days late in Bogotá, a day late or by hearsay in Honolulu, not at all on a book tour.

It’s hard, reading The White Album as a Classic, to avoid thinking of the author not as the expressionless, beautiful young woman smoking in a white Stingray on the new cover but as the frail septuagenarian whose biggest book sales and National Book Award came from The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 memoir about her husband’s death. When the author of The White Album writes about the New York Times, I flash forward to her horror as her agent calls the Times obituary editor on the night of John Gregory Dunne’s heart attack: “‘Obituary,’ unlike ‘autopsy,’ which was between me and John and the hospital, meant it had happened.” She wants to not tell the story, the obituary, in order that John might live—magical thinking, something a child might invent, but vastly sympathetic. When the young Didion writes of going on book tour with “six Judy Blume books and my eleven-year-old daughter,” I think of that daughter’s death less than thirty years later, more or less on the heels of Dunne’s. When she details the paranoid insanity of “White Album” L.A., I can’t help but think of the shades of Roman Polanski and Charles Manson, an Abel and Cain both incarcerated long after the fall of narrative.

The rest of us children of divorced words and meanings still oscillate between quixotic Sixties idealism and helpless cynicism looking at a country that becomes ever more plutocratic through our uncertainty. I’m often frantic to connect the flash pictures into a collage of references (Reagan… skateboarding… Crüe… ranch houses…), but it’s hard to live according to a collage narrative, or a Simpsons episode, or The White Album’s opening essay. Ultimately, I wonder if I won’t settle, as the book does, on a pre-Sixties personal resignation, living out the equivalent of Didion’s “quiet days in Malibu.” Her Genesis would account for that, too.

A.N. Wilson’s Our Times is the final volume in his ambitious trilogy discussing the whole of British history. In this third book, Wilson covers 1953-2008. His research, as noted by many others, isn’t great. He cites Wikipedia. In his discussion of Princess Diana and the effects of her death on Britain, Wilson trots out the terms “Dianology” and “Dianologists.” Sometimes Wilson is so full of shit he’s charming: “The Rolling Stones are “more capable of irony” [than the Beatles] and “Jagger’s contortions on the stage, his overt sexuality, his exploitation of the bisexual signals which he gave out, both on and off stage, were all reversions to Lord Byron.”

That’s not to say that this American reader didn’t learn anything.

I learned about Albert Pierrepoint, a prolific executioner who hanged an estimated 433 men and 17 women. Pierrepoint’s record execution time was 7 seconds. I learned that Britain didn’t abolish hanging until 1964, but that capital punishment was abolished altogether by 1971.

I learned about Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, lovers-turned-serial killers. Wilson writes: “Quite early on in their relationship, he persuaded her to buy a tape recorder, then (1961) a new fangled device.” They used it to record their victims scream, and the audiotapes were used against them in court.

I learned that when Prince Charles returns from hunting he likes to find seven boiled eggs lined up for him, organized from runny to hard, so he can find out which egg has been cooked “just right.”

While these are among many highlights from Wilson’s annals of contemporary British history, I’m not sure he should get credit for his presentation of these facts. On the whole, Wilson’s book reads like a confusingly organized Op-Ed in which he argues, grumpily, that Britain has quit being deferential to authority and is less “stuffy about sex.”

Wilson is grumpy, but doesn’t explain why, or offer a critique. I guess it’s not that kind of book. It’s a serious-seeming book, but the more you read, the more suspicious you get. I contend that Wilson’s pointless sentences are among the most enjoyable; Prince Charles is “often intelligent and interesting on the subject of food” and “Suicide as a way out of misery will always remain an option for some.”

However, there are certainly moments in which Wilson has a wizard’s grip on his material and my attention:

1.) Of Winston Churchill:

At the end of November 1952, for example, he asked to be told the numbers of coloured people – as they were called in those days – who had entered Britain. He wanted to know where they lived; also, the number of ‘coloured’ students. Two days later, he asked in Cabinet whether the Post Office was employing any ‘coloured’ workers, pointing out that ‘there was some risk that difficult social problems would be created’ if this turned out to be the case. On 18 December 1952, he set up an inquiry to see how further immigration by ‘coloured’ people could be prevented, and whether they could be kept out of civil service.

2.) Of Michael Ramsey, the 100^th Archbisop of Cantebury:

When his communist atheist sister was widowed, he drove to Oxford to sit with her and her children for half a day but did not utter a word. He had the habit of repeating words or phrases in a trance-like chant. “Baldock” Michael Ramsey once remarked out loud while driving home the morning after he had dined with the Cambridge Union and taken part in a debate. “Baldock. Baldock.” He had raised his eyes from The Times and spotted the signpost as he entered this spectacularly uninteresting Hertfordshire town. “Baldock. Baldock.” Again and again, in monotonous tones, the word “Baldock” was repeated….He must have repeated the word “Baldock” thirteen or fourteen times.”

I wanted a lot more of these surprising distillations of history and a lot less of Wilson yammering. He is skeptical of the influence of the Internet. He seems afraid of Richard Dawkins and drugs. He is ornery toward young women. He writes that artist Tracy Emin “resorted to that device which many women consider necessary as a way of crossing the barricades of male stuffiness – buffoonery. Germaine Greer and Jessica Mitford come to mind.” Wilson describes Sylvia Plath’s “shrill admirers” and opponents of the Suez invasion as a “rent-a-mob of poets, dons, clergy and ankle-socked female graduates.”

Wilson fascinated me with his reflections on the particularly British combination “of frivolity and anger” because it is this very same combination that screws up Our Times. The book isn’t gossipy enough to be fun, and not analytical enough to be useful.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 496 pages.

Editor’s Note:

For more than two semesters Ms. Emily Rubenstein has been offering guidance on suitable manners. Her sensible rules of behavior have helped a sorority’s worth of Barnard co-eds cross the threshold from Clarissas to Felicitiys. Recognizing the need that still prevails today, Emily has been kind enough to include her rules of proper etiquette here. It is the editor’s fondest hope that this post will serve the current generation of young Mary Kates and Ashleys.

I. Deflowerment by Clog-Wearing Co-Op Shift Leader

In hopes of obtaining affordable healthful produce, you join local food co-op. At obligated working shift, you meet clog-wearing supervisor. Remarking on lack of fresh flowers, he takes yours.

After deflowerment, you say, “I suppose I will no longer need this Diva Cup” and leave with brussels sprouts and pumpkin seeds only.

Iron absorption enhancers such as pumpkin seeds and brussels sprouts are excellent choices for a recently impregnated young woman. E.R.

II. Deflowerment by Alt Rock Pop Star in Specialty Tea House

Entering tea café playing melancholic ambient electronica, you are confronted by alt rock pop star holding trademarked tea beverage.

“Thirsty?” he says.

“Terribly,” you say.

After deflowerment, he says, “Did you enjoy my raw food?”

You say, “I think I’d prefer a different diet.”

When one has been offered an undesirable food item, it is customary for a woman to taste a small amount, out of politeness. E.R.

III. Deflowerment by Santa Claus at Macy’s.

Whilst shopping for ideal fragrance, you are approached by jolly man in red suit and white hat. After deflowerment, you begin to list desired holiday gifts.

He says, “You are a naughty, naughty girl.”

You say (frankly), “Well, you would know.”

He says (flatly), “I don’t know what you mean.”

You say, “Santa!?”

He says, “I’m not Santa, little girl, I am just a fat man.”

Before engaging with Santa Claus, it is compulsory to ask if man in question is indeed Santa Claus. Otherwise, you are unlikely to receive any presents. E.R.

Coming soon:

Deflowerment by South Brooklyn Novelist Turned Premium Network Television Writer

Deflowerment by Spiderman-suited Pedicab Driver

And Deflowerment by Blue Man Group

Photo by Janis Krums

Ever since Chesley Sullenberger landed a U.S. Airways plane in the Hudson River, the man has gotten plenty of attention. Here’s my favorite Sully moment: in mid-October, he was interviewed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. A few minutes into the interview, Stewart pointed out that Sully had ditched the plane in the Hudson just blocks from the Daily Show’s studio in New York City, then asked: “Did you at any point, during the landing or anything like that, think to yourself, ‘Oh my god, the Daily Show tapes there?” Sully laughed and said, “Not so much, not so much.” Stewart added, “So you were able to hold it together, knowing that I was maybe a block and a half away?” “I was cool like that,” Sully said.

Sully indeed has been celebrated for his coolness under pressure, and has seen plenty of fame since January 15, 2009. But what has been less prevalent in the news coverage of the story is the kind of airplane that Sully and Jeffrey Skiles, the first officer, were flying: an A320, made in Toulouse, France by the European consortium Airbus. In a new book, “Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson,” William Langewiesche looks at this event from pretty much all angles possible, but the main character is the airplane itself, and the flying system that it uses called “fly by wire.” The book itself is slim and concise; it grew out of a roughly 10,000-word article in Vanity Fair. “From takeoff to splashdown, the flight had lasted just five minutes,” Langewiesche writes of Flight 1549, and the resulting book, like the flight itself, is rightly short.

What’s so interesting about the specific kind of plane that Sully was flying? It has to do with the way the controls the pilot uses are connected to the movable surfaces on the exterior of the aircraft, and, controversially, limiting factors that Airbus has built into those controls. The A320 is flown using a joystick, and that control sends electric signals to the plane’s movable surfaces—there is no physical, mechanical connection between the two. The A320 has, as Langewiesche describes it, “a no-compromise, full-on digital fly-by-wire control system that radically redefines the relationship between pilots and flight.” The most controversial—and to Langewiesche’s mind, the most brilliant—part of this system is a set of self-protective measures in the plane’s design that prevents the pilot from, say, maneuvering the plane into a stall or a turn so steep the plane crashes or comes apart. From “wings-level flight,” as Langewiesche describes it, “if you slam the sidestick fully back, the airplane will pitch up rapidly, but … will impose no greater gravity load than the maximum safe 2.5 Gs. You can be as rough as you want, and you won’t shed your wings or tail.” I’m not a pilot, but I’ll take a stab at an analogy: the anti-lock braking system in a car. You can’t step on the brakes hard enough to make the car skid—the computer intervenes.

I was fascinated by this event, in part because when it happened I was just about to start working as a blogger covering air travel news for a website owned by the Travel Channel called WorldHum.com. I was living in New York City at the time, and the day after the plane landed in the water, I took a trip down to where the plane had been tied up at Battery Park City, snapped some photos, and wrote a somewhat solemn blog entry about it. Most of all, I felt keenly about the event what I think most people did—that it did seem miraculous that the plane touched down without any loss of life, and that rescue came so quickly on that freezing day.

Langewiesche’s thesis is basically this: Sullenberger is a brilliant pilot, but the unique design of this plane helped him in the critical moments. In other words, because the plane was of such good design and such a dream to fly, Sullenberger could focus on making the important decisions: deciding where to land, and then doing so smoothly—all the while Skiles was trying to restart the engines. “They could have done it in a Boeing, too,” Langewiesche writes, but adds that “it was helpful to their immediate cause,” that they were flying this type of plane.

What gave me the most pleasure in reading this book was Langewiesche’s dry, understated sense of humor. About that flock of geese the plane hit? They were “tending to business as usual, with nothing special in mind.” About the extraordinary range of vision a goose has? “This means they would see every word on this page simultaneously, though comprehension would be a problem.” About the early career of Bernard Ziegler, the French engineer who developed the fly-by-wire system for the A320? He went to war in Algeria, flying a fighter plane and “doing the usual thing of bombing and strafing rebellious peasants.” The book is an excellent work of long-form journalism that thoughtfully dissects a complicated incident.

The book has spurred some controversy. The New York Times reported that Sully questioned the factuality of the book, and it has gotten people talking about the role of automation in the cockpit, and about the extent to which a human or a computer should have ultimate control over how a plane is maneuvered. For anyone interested in this debate—and it’s a debate much more relevant to pilots than to passengers—a good place to start reading is Patrick Smith’s excellent “Ask the Pilot” column in Salon.com (Smith points out how much luck was a factor in the event, too).

But, as for the debate about where the credit for their safe landing is due, I have this to say: Why not praise both pilots and plane?