Category: Book reviews

George Saunders’s first novel is a weird, wonderful and woeful book about young Willie Lincoln, son of the President, who is trapped in the “bardo.” That is a Tibetan term for the intermediate state or gap we experience between death and our next rebirth. 

Willie has died and been taken to Oak Hill cemetery, buried in a marble crypt. Based on true historical data, on at least two occasions the president visits the crypt to mourn the loss of his son. The cemetery is populated by the spirits of the dead who have been unwilling to complete their journey to the afterlife and in the bardo. They have continued to remain near their corpses.

The spirit’s narrative is interspersed with quotations from primary and secondary sources about Lincoln’s life. They paint conflicting depictions of the president and his mental state. The spirits themselves are conflicted, referring to their coffins as “sick boxes”, as part of their strategy to avoid facing the reality of their deaths.

The spirits are motley assortment: soldiers, rapists, slaves, drunks and a hundred others. Their advice is also an assortment of conflicting advice on whether to stay or go.

I’ve been consuming a great number of books year as audiobooks. Lincoln in the Bardo is one of the best produced audiobooks. It has a cast of dozens voicing the spirits who are the main characters of the book. That includes the wonderful Nick Offerman and David Sedaris as the lead spirits. There are different voices for the main historical quotes. In total the audiobook production has a 166-person cast.

The narrative readings are as compelling as the words in the novel themselves. This a book you should add to your to-read stack or to-listen library.

Imbolo Mbue created a great novel on immigration and the American Dream in her 2016 Behold the Dreamers. I admit that I only came to read this book because of a reading challenge. Book Riot’s Read Harder Challenge number 5 was to read a book by an immigrant or with a central immigration narrative. Behold the Dreamers was my choice for the challenge. It’s not a book I would have naturally grabbed to read. But that is the point of the challenge.

I found the book to be wonderful. The central character of Jende Jonga grapples with the financial crisis as Lehman Brothers collapses. It’s not that Jende, an immigrant from Cameroon, was working for Lehman Brothers. Jende had started driving a cab to support his family while waiting for his asylum application to be approved. His wife is with him on a student visa.

Jende knows that he may have to return to Cameroon if his application is unsuccessful. He has left that country for the hope of prosperity in America. Jende is joyous at being in America and believes in the American dream that hard work will lead to success.

His hard work allows him to move from driving a cab to working as a personal chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers executive. As you might expect, problems arise.

The writing is spectacular. The characters are wonderful. The depiction of the American dream and immigration are thought provoking. Behold the Dreamers will be an excellent addition to your reading list.

I went on Spring vacation to Kentucky with Mrs. Doug and the compliance nuggets. There was a lot of bourbon and horses. For vacation reading, I dug into my ever-growing tower of books to read and brought along Bourbon Empire by Reid Mitenbuler to read. It seemed appropriate.

Reid Mitenbuler portrays bourbon as a balance of Jefferson and Hamilton’s ideas, still being argued today in politics. On one side is the small agrarian culture championed by Jefferson, in opposition to the capitalist growth of Hamilton. Bourbon is Jefferson on the outside, with Hamilton on the inside.

In Kentucky, bourbon finds that its color. History collides with myth, filling in the recorded gaps with burnt oak.

I found the origins of “proof” to be a fascinating relic of taxation. Ever since President Washington imposed the whiskey tax, distillers have tried to work around taxes for profit. Tax collectors would measure the strength of the whiskey by mixing it with gunpowder and setting it on fire. If the flame sputtered, the alcohol content was low and if it flared up it, there was too much alcohol. A steady flame proved that the alcohol content was proper. This proof came at about 50% alcohol. So if the whiskey was 100% proved, it was was about 50% alcohol.

There was little government oversight of what could be put in the bourbon bottle or put on the label. The biggest first step of regulation was the 1897 Bottled-in-Bond Act that required the whiskey be made a single distillery by a one distiller, aged for at least four years, unadulterated and bottled at exactly 100 proof. The bottle’s label had to identify the distillery where the whiskey was distilled and bottled. If it met those standards, the whiskey would have the right to bear the green stamp of approval featuring the image of John G. Carlisle, a Kentucky congressman.

Whiskey, like all alcohol, was scrubbed out of existence by Prohibition. Okay, so that is clearly an overstatement. It went from local farmers and big distillers, to the underground criminal element. One interesting loophole of prohibition was an exception for medicinal whiskey. (Medicine has come a long way in the last few decades.) If you are going to dispense medicine, you need pharmacies. Walgreens grew from 20 stores in Chicago to over 525 stores during the era of prohibition. Mr. Mitenburger points to The Great Gatsby in which Daisy describes the mysterious bootlegging Mr. Gatsby as having “owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores.”

Bourbon and Kentucky are linked. My tourguide at the Woodford Reserve distillery point to Kentucky limestone, with its removal of iron from the water, as the key to Kentucky bourbon. Whatever may be the truth or the myth or marketing, 95% of the world’s bourbon is made in Kentucky.

With the fall of Prohibition, government regulation of alcohol increased. That was especially true in labeling and identification of what was inside the bottle. To earn the “straight” identification, the whiskey needs to be aged in brand-new charred oak barrels for at least two years.

It was the rise of Maker’s Mark in the 1980s that turned bourbon towards its “craft” status, embracing quality over mass-production in its marketing. It was the embracing of the Kentucky mystery and Jeffersonian small-batch aesthetics that define most bourbon today. Behind the scenes, a handful of distilleries make the vast majority of bourbon and pour different variations into long line of product labels.

I enjoy a good bourbon and I enjoyed Bourbon Empire.

Matthew Desmond took a deep dive into poverty and housing. He published the story of what he saw in Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. The book follows several people in deep poverty living and being evicted from terrible housing in Milwaukee. Mr. Desmond lived among them in 2008 and 2009. He split his time between the poor, white College Mobile Home Park full of the white poor on one side of town and a rooming house on the poor black side of town.

The housing problems did not appear to discriminate based on race. However, Mr. Desmond found that the vast majority of evictions were against black women. Regardless, the problem was a lack of money. Most of the subjects were scrapping by without any meaningful work or on public assistance. That assistance paid for the rent, but left little remaining after rent. They pay a crushing share of their income for rent. The book’s subjects were paying 75%+ of their income for rent. That left little for food, health care, clothing, furniture, and transportation.

Part of book’s story is that evictions are much more common than previously thought. More than one in eight Milwaukee renters faced a forced move in the course of three years. A forced move includes a larger selection of reasons beyond formal evictions, including strong arm tactics, building condemnation, and paying unwanted tenants to leave. In Milwaukee, 16 families lose their homes each day: 16,000 people being forced out of 6,000 housing units every year.

Mr. Desmond also included the two landlords in the book. They were doing better financially than their tenants, but they were not fat cats rolling in cash. There is money to be made from renting to the poor. But it also means an uneven flow of cash when rent goes unpaid, properties are damaged, and the court fees for getting an eviction. The biggest financial windfall for the landlord was when one of the buildings caught on fire. She pocketed the insurance money and bulldozed the charred remains.

The landlord are overlooking the convictions and evictions to rent to tenants that would be excluded from other mainstream housing. In exchange, the tenants overlook the poor housing conditions.

There are no easy answers in the book. In the epilogue, Mr Desmond offers some direction. It requires money. More government assistance for the poor to get housing.

The book is compelling. While not necessarily enjoyable to read, it is well written and easy to digest, as distasteful as it may be. The book has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

Publishers occasionally send me books in exchange for a review. That was the case the here.