One Hour to Read

A Life in Journalism

This is the second book I have read this year by former CBS reporters who worked in Washington. First Roger Mudd, and now Daniel Schorr. I'm going to have to come up with a "CBS Washington" tag before long.

Frankly, I picked this book up, because the author seemed to be kind of a jerk. That's not my normal reason for buying books, but I was curious about Schorr after reading Roger Mudd's "The Place To Be" about his time at CBS. In that book, Schorr seemed to be such a controversial figure, rather than the grandfatherly commentator who has occasionally woken me up on NPR.

Mudd's book about CBS News didn't exactly attack Schorr, but much of the CBS bureau seemed to take great offense at Schorr's aggressive behavior towards his colleagues. He was widely suspected of stealing stories from others. And when he released the classified Pike Report to the Village Voice, it was felt by many that he tried to frame the whole thing on Lesley Stahl. Stahl still seems to despise him.

Not surprisingly, Schorr doesn't seem like a jerk at all when he's the one telling the story. All his actions seem perfectly reasonable. That's what's so great about autobiographies. He doesn't sidestep any of the controversies he was involved in, but he isn't apologetic for any of them either. After reading both books, I don't even know if he should be.

Despite all this, it was exciting to read Schorr's tales of Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall, and Watergate. Famously, he was also on Nixon's enemies list and had the surreal experience of reading out his own name (#17) when he revealed the list live on television for the first time.

Interestingly, Mudd's book devotes entire sections to his colleague Daniel Schorr. Meanwhile, Schorr mentions Mudd a grand total of four times, and only once in any detail. Mudd may have been more successful at the time -- and has probably written the better book -- but Schorr, jerk or not, is by far the more interesting figure.

After this, I have just one more month to go on David Copperfield. Strangely, after all the excitement of last month, this month's installment was a bit of a letdown. It was still entertaining and even quite dramatic at times, but Dickens also seems to be wrapping things up at this point

There is much here about the Micawbers getting ready to make their departure to Australia, along with Mr. Peggotty and Emily. However, both their storylines seem to have ended last month, and it feels like Dickens is just looking for a way to keep them in the book for a few more chapters.

However, he does resolve the storylines of both Ham and Steerforth in a thrilling and sad manner. Never to shy away from hyperbole, Dickens begins Chapter 55 this way:

I now approach an event in my life, so indelible, so awful, so bound by an infinite variety of ties to all that has preceded it, in these pages, that, from the beginning of my narrative, I have seen it growing larger and larger as I advanced, like a great tower in a plain, and throwing its forecast shadow even on the incidents of my childish days.

Well, then, I figured this ought to be good. And it was an exciting chapter, but these characters don't seem quite important enough to warrant such a buildup. The events were awful and somewhat indelible, but not quite bound by an infinite variety of ties.... Sorry.  

I think I may just be grumpy because the book is ending soon. I've compared Copperfield to a long-running television show before, and I think there is a similar disappointment now that one of my favorite books is ending. A lot of the enjoyment of these characters is just to have them there; I don't necessarily want to see a concluding story arc for each one.

As with television shows, I wonder if there were readers at the time who said things like, "Yeah, I used to read Copperfield all the time, but it's really gone downhill since Chapter 33." Was there a moment when David Copperfield jumped the shark? We'll probably never know.

This is just a wonderful book, although it is a bit odd. The plot seems almost incidental to the novel, and the most dramatic parts aren't even at the end. For me, the villain Ferdinand Lopez ("To give him his due, he did not know that he was a villain.") is far more interesting than the titular character, the Prime Minister, the Duke of Omnium. And to be honest, I don't even know who the protagonist is. There are about three or four different possibilities, although if it's the Duke he must be the most passive protagonist ever.

Perhaps the book seems so strange to me because it's the fifth in a series of six novels, the Palliser Novels. I didn't realize that when I picked this up. The story itself is compact enough, but many of the characters come from other novels. The Duke of Omnium, Plantagenet Palliser, was already a much-loved character when this was written, so it makes sense that Trollope doesn't waste a lot of time setting him up.

And yet, despite all this, the book is completely delightful. There's a subtle, wry humor in here that made me want to be Anthony Trollope when I grow up. Therefore, instead of writing about the book, I'm just going to quote some of my favorite parts.

I especially love the Victorian insults. Next time I'm in an argument, I want to remember this: "I think, Sir, that your proposition is the most unbecoming and the most impertinent that ever was addressed to me." Yeah, well, F you too.

And here's the Victorian way to tell someone that you're about to kick his ass, in letter form:

Sir,
Before this election you were guilty of gross impertinence in writing a letter to my wife -- to her extreme annoyance and to my most justifiable anger. Any gentleman would think that the treatment you had already received at her hands would have served to save her from such insult, but there are men who will never take a lesson without a beating. And now, since you have been here, you have presumed to offer to shake hands with me in the street, though you ought to have known that I should not choose to meet you on friendly terms after what has taken place. I now write to tell you that I shall carry a horsewhip while I am here, and that if I meet you in the streets again before I leave the town I shall use it.

Personally, I don't know if I could hold a grudge long enough to write a letter about it. I suppose this technique would help in reducing violence. It's like homework for your grudges. If you had to write a letter every time you wanted to beat someone up, you would probably think twice about it.

And finally, here's Anthony Trollope on the current financial crisis:

Sexty's fears were greatly exaggerated by the feeling that the coffee and guano [they were trading] were not always real.... His partner, indeed, was of the opinion that ... there was no need at all for real coffee and guano, and explained his theory with considerable eloquence. "If I buy a ton of coffee and keep it six weeks, why do I buy it and keep it, and why does the seller sell it instead of keeping it? The seller sells it because he thinks he can do best by parting with it now at a certain price. I buy it because I think I can make money by keeping it. It is just the same as though we were to back our opinions. He backs the fall. I back the rise. You needn't have coffee and you needn't have guano to do this. Indeed the possession of the coffee or the guano is only a very clumsy addition to the trouble of your profession."

This amused me even before I learned that guano is fertilizer, essentially bird dung. One man's guano is another man's mortgage-backed derivative.

The World of Baseball Scouting

This is a wonderful book, but I don't know if I can quite explain why. As a study of baseball scouts, it's a great work, but the book really shines when Kerrane allows the old baseball scouts to speak for themselves. There are long passages of oral history included here that rival anything in Lawrence Ritter's classic "The Glory of Their Times."

Kerrane spent the entire 1981 season with baseballs scouts. Admittedly, the book does seem a bit dated now, and I have a feeling that it may have seemed a bit dated even then, as it was in many ways a book about a bygone time. Scouting changed dramatically after the institution of the amateur draft in 1965. In the old days, scouts would spot a prospect and then be able to sign him on the spot. After the draft started, the personal connections made between the scouts and the players mattered much less when the team had a 1 in 30 chance of drafting the player.

In 1981, starting salaries were still somewhat reasonable, but now a player's signability matters almost as much as his talent when being drafted. Even the term "dollar sign on the muscle" has become obsolete. This referred to the dollar amount a scout placed on a player, "the highest figure you would go in order to sign a player if he were on the open market."

It was usually a number below $100,000, but when, for example, a number one draft pick like Stephen Strasburg is expected to get a $20 million bonus from the Washington Nationals after being drafted tomorrow, these numbers begin to mean nothing.

Perhaps the most enjoyable chapter is the one on the language of the game where I was able to learn several important items such as the distinction between horseshit and bullshit.

Horseshit: A universal term of disparagement in baseball -- Any baseball talent, body, body part, effort, action, player, team, city, or scouting assignment can be horseshit. The term covers everything but the world of words -- the world of stories, explanation, and scouting reports -- at which point bullshit takes over.

A real sentence spoken by a scout discussing a former colleague: "His written report was all bullshit, and that's when I knew he was a horseshit guy."

Bullshit can be a verb; horseshit can't. ... Novices sometimes elide the word into horshit, but the veterans get the first s down deep in the throat, with the tongue at the back of the palate, lots of air whistling past the lower teeth, and then they follow through for full emphasis. Horsse-shit!

Now, that's scouting. So to summarize: Kevin Kerrane, definitely not horseshit; this post, possible bullshit. That is all.

It seems wrong to read a book by Scott Carrier, but that's only because he is such a distinctive radio voice. Many of the pieces included here were first done for the radio. The book is still good, but the stories don't feel the same when not read aloud by Carrier. For this reason, I think I enjoyed the second half more. This part includes more of his pieces for Esquire when he went to Cambodia, Kashmir, and Mexico. Esquire hired him because they were looking for a writer to "go to really fucked-up places." If that's what you're looking for, then Carrier is definitely your man.

Like many, I discovered Scott Carrier through the radio show "This American Life." Along with Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris, Carrier was one of the fixtures of the early years of the show. Carrier is like a weirder version of David Sedaris, which is, um, weird considering how weird Sedaris himself can be. Still, with Sedaris, a lot of the weirdness seems like an act. With Carrier, it never seems like an act.

Bonus link: "This American Life's" recent collection of Scott Carrier stories is here. 

One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

I had some qualms about A.J. Jacobs' previous book "The Know-It-All," in which he read the entire encyclopedia and wrote about the experience. The whole thing seemed a little staged, as if he was only doing it for the book deal. I suppose I could have a similar complaint about this book, in which he follows the tenets of the bible for a year.

However, this book feels like more than just a stunt. It's possibly because the Bible is a far more important book than the encyclopedia. Even if you don't believe anything in the Bible -- and that seems to be where Jacobs is coming from at the beginning -- the Bible at least has had a major impact on the world. There's nothing wrong with the encyclopedia, of course, but it's still just list of random facts with no central theme.

The best parts of "The Know-It-All" were when Jacobs would go on an encyclopedia-related adventure that took him away from the book. Here, there are many more options for interesting adventures. It's the difference between writing about reading a book and writing about living a book. That alone makes this a much more exciting project.

Jacobs goes on several adventures. He visits a snake-handler in Tennessee. He attends Jerry Falwell's church in Virginia. He even travels to Israel to reconnect with his Judaism, as well as a crazy ex-Uncle who was once a cult leader. And, of course, he walks through Manhattan with a long beard and a white robe for much of the year. Along the way, his wife also gives birth to twin boys.

As Jacobs is Jewish and as the Old Testament is by far the longer Testament, the book mostly revolves around Judaism, although in the last third he does study Christianity in detail.

Religious readers may be disappointed that there is no great life change here. Jacobs began the project as an agnostic, and that's the way he ends up, though he does seem to feel he's a better person from the experience. He spends an entire year praying and doing good works for the people of New York and beyond. At times, he's worried that he's only doing all this for the sake of a book, but one of his spiritual advisers calmed him with this thought:

"C.S. Lewis said the distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuthhounds conceive." In short, pretending to be better than you are is better than nothing.

Lewis and Jacobs might just be onto something there.

A Story of Race and Inheritance

Historically, this is a fascinating book. I can't think of another President who wrote a memoir before becoming President. Obama wrote this in 1995 when he probably would have laughed if you had told him he would be President one day. I imagine that if he had any inkling of the future, he would have probably left out some of the more personal passages. In the 2004 introduction, he describes these passages as "inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research," but the book would have been much the weaker without them.

"Dreams from My Father" is split into three sections: Origins, Chicago (about his work as a community activist there), and Kenya. The last third about his summer in Kenya is where the book really takes off. There, Obama meets the paternal side of his family and comes to grips with his history, as well as his deceased father, a largely mythic figure in his life who he met only once.

If anyone should write a memoir about his family, it's Obama who has one half-sister on his mother's side, one half-sister on his father's side, six half-brothers on his father's side, a couple of stepparents, and was raised largely by his grandparents. As an only child, I kept getting confused, and I wish I had this family tree in hand while reading the book.

This is a book by the President, so I feel as if I should say more. However, this isn't really my genre of choice. I usually don't read the deeply personal memoir, so it's safe to say that I wouldn't have bought this book, if Obama was still a community organizer in Chicago. Nevertheless, he has an inspiring story -- even before running for office -- and he's a great writer.

I know I'm entirely biased here, but I just like the idea of having a writer in the White House.  It must be a little like what the plumbers thought about John McCain.

In the middle of this month's reading, I suddenly realized that I had made a miscalculation. The goal of this project was to read Copperfield as it was originally released. For the most part, the book was released in three-chapter installments each month, but there were a couple of months with extra chapters that I didn't notice. It turns out that I was two chapters behind, and so I had to read five chapters this month to catch up.

For that reason, and because I am nearing the end, a lot happened this month. Now, this is where I would normally put up a spoilers alert, but it's getting impossible to write about David Copperfield without revealing all that has happened. Read on at your own risk. There were three major resolutions this month.

Emily is found. Although I've never been enthralled with this particular subplot, I have to say this was one of the more dramatic chapters in the book. Dickens goes all out in this section, and he had me on the edge of my seat. I suppose my main problem with the Mr. Peggotty-Emily subplot is that it seems so peripheral to David's life. This is Dickens where the periphery is often more entertaining than the central parts of a book, but still this seemed a little too beside the point, especially since David's role in the search for Emily has been minimal.

Uriah Heep gets his comeuppance. And he does so in a very satisfying manner. I suppose one could make the argument that this is a peripheral story too. However, David is much more involved in the events, especially since Agnes has been one of Heep's victims. Besides, HEEP (as Mr. Micawber calls him) is an entertaining villain, so for the most part these sections are just fun.

Poor Dora passes away. It was obvious that this would be happening soon, and in a sad but short "retrospective" chapter at the end of this installment, David finally loses his "child-wife," as she called herself. I've never exactly liked Dora, but she really was one of the more entertaining caricatures in the book.

With all these resolutions and with just two installments left, I feel as if I am embarking on a whole new book.

I picked up this book about Ronald Reagan because I greatly enjoyed Marc Eliot's biography of Cary Grant. This one, though, isn't nearly as good. The problem is that the subject himself is not nearly as interesting as Grant. Yes, Reagan is, overall, more important and fascinating than someone like Cary Grant. However, Eliot focuses only on Reagan's movie and television career, and the book ends in 1964 just as Reagan decides that he wants to run for Governor of California.

It is as if Eliot went to his publishers and said, "Hey, I'd like to write a book about the most boring part of an interesting person's life." At times, the book feels like an endless list of awful B-movies starring Reagan and nobody else I've heard of. The best that can be said is that Reagan at least pals around with some famous people. Granted, there are important sections on Reagan's presidency of the Screen Actor's Guild, which clearly had an impact on his later career, although to be honest some of the labor history was a little over my head.

Admittedly, the book's not all boring. On the lascivious side, Ronnie does seem to sleep with a lot of actresses. At one point after his divorce to Jane Wyman, Reagan was sleeping with a different actress every night. Meanwhile, the main reason he married Nancy is that he had gotten her pregnant. Now, this is the type of material we need more of in Presidential biographies!

I also had one other problem with the book. I started to doubt its accuracy, which can be a problem when you're reading a biography. This is mainly because of Eliot's section on "Casablanca." Eliot writes, "Bogart was cast in the role that [Jack] Warner had originally designated for Reagan, whom the government insisted could not make for-profit movies while in the military."

This is a theory that seems to be discredited in several places, such as here. I don't know enough to say that Eliot is necessarily wrong, but it seems suspect that he states something so commonly thought to be a myth without a more thorough discussion. 

One final note: The lack of updates here is mostly because I have, for some unknown reason, decided to read five books at once (six, if you count Dickens). I'm not sure if I would recommend this, but it is interesting to switch randomly between several books. I imagine I'll be finishing all five at once and will eventually have a flurry of entries here.

The end is in sight, and there seems to be a resolution forming in the L'il Em'ly saga. Two whole chapters were devoted to that, and then in the last chapter (helpfully titled "Domestic") we gain some insight into David's home life. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of happy news there. David seems increasingly frustrated with his marriage, and then we also learn that Dora seems to be in bad health.

As I've made clear, I've never been a big fan of Dora, but I don't wish disease on her. I fear that we may end up losing Dora, and that David will end up marrying Agnes. I want to Dora to be out of the picture, but I don't want to be rooting for her demise. Perhaps a nice little divorce would be the solution, but of course we are in Victorian times, so consumption it'll probably have to be.

On the positive side of the ledger, it looks like next month's installment will start with a little excitement. Chapter 49 is titled "I am Involved in Mystery," and I can't wait. By the way, "I am Involved in Mystery" is something I definitely plan on stealing for an e-mail subject line, preferably one that is work-related.