Reviews – Page 8 – Koba English

A Gun in My Gucci: Two Outsiders Take Down the Chicago Mob

A Gun in My Gucci: Two Outsiders Take Down the Chicago Mob is right what it says on the tin. Author E. C. Smith, one of a mere handful of women in the FBI in the 80s, recounts how she managed to help put away a not-insignificant chunk of the Chicago mob based on testimony from gangster-turned-informant Ken Eto, the highest-ranking (and maybe only?) Japanese-American member of the Chicago Outfit.

I first came across the book from an episode of Parallax Views, but this story might be familiar to anyone who’s deep into true crime. At any rate, Smith’s inside account of not only the Ken Eto case but how she became an FBI agent is worth reading on its own merits. Have I ever stopped to think about what it takes to become an FBI agent? No, and I doubt many people have. But now that I know, it’s little wrinkle that will stay in my brain forever; another puzzle piece in my understanding of how the world works.

Over time, I’ve realized that my favorite non-fiction is biographies, auto- or otherwise. It’s all of the interesting bits of going out and meeting new people without all of the stress entailed by smalltalk and social interactions. This certainly holds true for A Gun in My Gucci. Smith’s personality (warts and all) comes through crystal clear in lucid prose packed with wry humor and direct asides to the reader. In the hands of a less competent writer this would be awkward, but since Smith started her professional life as an English teacher she can put together a sentence or two. Is it polished, NYT bestseller writing? No, not quite, but it also doesn’t need to be. Even though I’m not sure we’d get along in real life, all the way through I was rooting for Smith (and Eto) and found her an engaging pyschopomp in the world of FBI agents and Chicago organized crime.

This expertise from a past life also means that A Gun in My Gucci is a quick read; according to my Kindle, I finished it off in three and a half hours. All killer no filler. Insecure writers often fail to trust their prose—usually with no good reason—and end up conveying the same point in two or three different ways, making redundancy a hallmark of amateur writing. If it’s not redundancy, then it’s superfluousness: an inability to murder their darlings. Part of the reason that A Gun in My Gucci reads so fast, in addition to the Hollywood-level source material, is that Smith doesn’t mince words or pad things out with a bunch of irrelevant incidentals. Not once did I get bored enough to start skimming, and praise from Caesar is praise indeed.

Smith was also interviewed for a Japanese documentary about Eto in 2008, Tokyo Joe: The Man Who Brought Down the Chicago Mob (Mafia o Utta Otoko), which is available in full on YouTube (for now). But if you want an engaging read for your next flight, or to keep you occupied during your commute, A Gun in My Gucci is worth the buy.

What Money Can’t Buy

What Money Can’t Buy was probably one of the first books I read after I moved to Sweden, and it’s been in my library ever since. Every time my eye passed over the title when looking for something new to read, I tried to remember what the book was about and couldn’t; mostly I just remembered being underwhelmed. I thought about it even more often after I finished Debt: The First 5,000 Years back in January this year and decided this time I would be more diligent about putting down my impressions.

Michael J. Sandel hit the popular philosophy market with the book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? based on a long-running course he had been teaching at Harvard. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets is a follow-up that focuses on how moral judgments and free market practices are entangled, based on an article he wrote for The Atlantic on the same topic.

I think what I found frustrating in 2013 was the way Sandel shrugs and seems to just give up on a providing an answer or at least a clear-cut condemnation. (Except in the case of baseball. That’s a topic where Sandel finds the courage of his convictions.) Most of What Money Can’t Buy consists of lists of things that can be purchased, sorted into five rough categories: queue jumping, incentives (which he often compares to bribes, “the cost of doing business,” or indulgences), relationships, advertising (which he calls “naming rights”) and corporate-originated life insurance and the “life settlement” market. The question for each category is then whether or not these things should be available for purchase. Which instance of queue jumping or advertising is permissible? Which isn’t? What’s the difference between them? Most of the time Sandel doesn’t present a particularly strong opinion either way and just reminds the reader that the two main objections to purchasing certain kinds of things are either based in “unfairness” or “corruption.”

What I found frustrating in 2023 was the lack of context and historical consideration for some of the problems he raises, taking certain problems to just be natural facts of life rather than something that can be addressed or prevented, or that have a specific material history behind them. When highlighting Project Prevention, for example, Sandel glosses over the (very fair) criticism of the project as a form of eugenics and instead credulously rehashes the 1980s moral panic of “crack babies,” even though by the time he was writing in the Atlantic in 2012 the entire phenomenon had been called into question.

Or when discussing carbon offsets and credits, Sandel argues that emitting carbon dioxide is “in itself” a morally neutral act. After all, we all do that every time we breathe! Such an assertion is such a patently facile rhetorical trick that you almost wonder if he’s being facetious. But no, Sandel is seriously attempting to equate the human need to breathe with the act of burning fossil fuels to ship consumer goods from “low-cost” countries to rich nations because you don’t want to pay workers a decent wage or the carbon cost of maintaining the US military apparatus. And even when he goes on to admit that yes, carbon dioxide emissions en masse constitute a serious problem for everyone on this planet, he sidesteps the fact that almost none of the countries and communities that are already bearing the brunt of climate change are the ones actually causing the carbon dioxide emissions in the first place.

Milquetoast moments like these deflate everything Sandel is trying to say, which already feels like an article-length thought padded out to meet the minimum page count for a standalone book. The thesis that market thinking can “crowd out” morals and social norms is a compelling and defensible one, but What Money Can’t Buy ends up being a feeble “could we have a civil discussion about this, guys?” rather than any kind of clarion call to action or bold moral assertion.

Except when it comes to baseball. Sandel’s not afraid to make moral assertions there: Billy Beane definitely ruined baseball.

Becoming Beauvoir

This was actually my second read-through of Becoming Beauvoir. I alluded to it, briefly, in a summary on my vacation reading in Falun from 2021 but it deserves a bit more than a one-sentence summary.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote voluminously about her own life and had already been profiled in several biographies by the time Kate Kirkpatrick sat down to work on Becoming Beauvoir. Is there anything else one more biography could add?

Actually, yes. Kirkpatrick was able to draw on a great deal of previously unpublished or untranslated documentation and correspondence to shed light on relationships and ideas that for whatever reason Beauvoir herself had been less than forthcoming about in her own writing. Kirkpatrick’s stated thesis at the beginning is to rebut what she considers to be ad feminem attacks against Beauvoir: criticisms that boil down to “you’re just an unhappy woman” and “you’re just Sartre’s lapdog.” Thus the focus is on leveraging Beauvoir’s early student diaries and correspondence to show that she was puzzling over the same philosophical issues as Sartre before they ever met, or how she influenced him in these matters. Kirkpatrick also uses later correspondence (some of which not available until 2018) to highlight Beauvoir’s philosophical and ideological criticisms of Sartre and, despite the closeness of their relationship, her erotic and intellectual independence from him.

Kirkpatrick also takes up Beauvoir’s relationships with Bianca Lamblin, Natalie Sorokin, and Olga Kosakiewicz, perhaps as a means of allowing the deceased Beauvoir to respond to the allegations from all three women, pointing out that Beauvoir’s own correspondence indicates that she felt remorse over her (and Sartre’s) treatment of them. It would also seem a pretty glaring omission, all things considered, to not address them. And here we land in one of Beauvoir’s favorite topics: ambiguity. Kirkpatrick doesn’t give much space to the allegations from Lamblin, Sorokin, and Kosakiewicz. Is it because this is a biography of Beauvoir, and not them? Is it an attempt to gloss over abuse? How should we read that editorial decision in tandem with the total lack of reference to Beauvoir’s connection to the “Affaire de Versailles”? Then, larger questions: How would we read these relationships if Beauvoir were a man? How much moral commentary and judgment should a biographer provide on their subject?

I don’t know. I find Beauvoir’s ideas and writing compelling, and I’ll continue to engage with her ideas and take the best of them with me. In other words:

We Don’t Know Ourselves

After The Best of Myles made me realize how little I knew about Ireland, Fintan O’Toole was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts to discuss his new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves. I put a hold on it at the library while I was still in the middle of Philosophy in the Flesh, expecting it to take a couple weeks for such a doorstopper to be available, but lo and behold it was ready to take home a couple days later.

In other words, May was an intense month of reading for me!

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 takes an approach to a rather broad topic (twentieth century Irish history) that resembles the one Christle uses in The Crying Book. Like Christle uses her grieving process to lead the reader through historical views on crying, grief, and “hysteria,” O’Toole ties his own life to larger events happening in Ireland at the time: a discussion of his parents’ wedding photo transitions into a brief explainer on Irish city planning in the 50s, an early job at a department store segues into Ireland’s economy in the 90s. Unlike Christle, however, O’Toole structures his personal history in discrete, concrete sections: each chapter covers a specific topic and focuses, more or less, on a single year. (The departure point is 1958, the year he was born.) He also returns to the idea of “unknown knowns”: the open secrets in Irish culture, at the local as well as national level, that shaped the arc of many of the events covered in the book. So many things, according to O’Toole, happened in plain sight but nonetheless were never bluntly stated in polite conversation. Hence the title of the book.

We Don’t Know Ourselves is a doorstopper of a book but it’s breezy reading that goes fast. Usually in books with this kind of scope I get lost in all of the names, but recurring figures are contextualized and grounded well enough that I had no problem keeping track of all of the threads. Will I remember everything I read? Of course not. Do I have a better context and bird’s eye view of contemporary Ireland and how it’s situated in European politics? Definitely.

I still wouldn’t count on me to know the answers to any pub quiz questions, though.

Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination

My renewed diligence in reading the physical books I already own has had the unintended consequence of vastly increasing my short story consumption. Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination is the third such anthology I’ve read this year, and might be the last.

This one was a collection that I picked up in my high school thrifting adventures, though I can’t remember if I bought it myself or if my best friend and partner in crime bought it for me on one of our trips out. Regardless, even though I kept putting off reading it, at the same time sentimental value kept me from culling it. (I think it has a companion purchased at the same store, a collection of Russian fiction, but it’s not here. Not sure if I got rid of it, or if it’s still at my parents’ home owing to a delicate physical condition that I wouldn’t trust to international shipping.)

Also, please appreciate that cover art, which has absolutely nothing to do with any of the stories inside.

This anthology was compiled by Philip Van Doren Stern, an academic and Civil War expert remembered today as the author of the short story that went on to become It’s A Wonderful Life. While Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination is maybe around twenty years newer than the other collections I’ve been carting around in my library, in his introduction Van Doren Stern expresses the same uneasy relationship with pulp magazines as Schweikert: those stories are trashy but these stories are high art.

However, since this collection specifically focuses on the fantastic—fantasy, science fiction, horror, and magical realism before the genres had been entirely codefied—Van Doren Stern does have some interesting thoughts about how the fantastic can be used as a means of elevating a story and highlighting the worries and dreams we all have.

Out of the three short story collections I’ve read for this project (the third was another one of my Dede’s but for whatever reason I didn’t note it here?), this one had the best killer/filler ratio. Out of the twenty-one stories in the collection, only three or four were really disappointing. Lord Dunsany‘s “Our Distant Cousins,” already dated by the year of anthologizing (1943), is too old-fashioned to really have any appeal left in the year of Our Lord 2023; Walter de la Mare‘s “All Hallows” is fantastic gothic atmosphere but without much resolution; the same could be said about A. E. Coppard‘s “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” though it’s comic rather than gothic; and the Poe story in the collection (“William Wilson”) doesn’t have the visceral appeal of The Greatest Hits.

In contrast, there were too many really great stories to name them all in a blog post without quickly becoming tedious. Instead, I will limit myself to naming Stella Benson‘s “The Man Who Missed the ‘Bus” as the most unsettling story in the collection and point out that the entire collection is available to borrow at Archive.org.

Den högsta kasten

This was the second book for the local library’s newly established book circle. (The first being Educated.)

It was also the first time I found myself formulating my responses to a book in Swedish rather than in English, which I think is because Den högsta kasten is such a niche Swedish (and Stockholm) interest. I vented a lot of spleen about it in Swedish but trying to talk about the book in English just leaves me feeling indifferent. Maybe because an English review is the most pointless thing I can imagine. Is there anyone who would simultaneously be interested in Sweden’s culture and arts figures of the mid-90s and unable to read a word of Swedish? Not likely.

Yet onward shall I soldier!

Den högsta kasten is the story of a dissipated year (or less, maybe just a few months) in Carina Rydberg’s life. The book is officially categorized as a novel, as fiction, but all of the people in it are real people and the discussion around Rydberg and the book has always been based on the understanding that it’s not aspiring to be fiction or even a roman à clef, but actually true events. Maybe publishing it as a novel was a way for the publisher to dodge legal liability. Who knows!

My first problem with the book is that its marketing and reputation are entirely misleading. I went in expecting a Dorothy Parker style takedown of rich snobs. Instead, the book pulled a bait-and-switch and made me spend half of the page length with Rydberg in India, which I wouldn’t have minded if she were a gifted travel writer instead of another white European who’s constantly explaining how she’s not like the other tourists, she gets India. When she’s not doing that, she’s locked in a really toxic and unpleasant dynamic with two of her fellow travelers or padding out the lack of content with random childhood memories about beauty and exclusion.

I thought things would improve in the second part, but no. Back in Stockholm and hanging out at PA&Co in Östermalm, Rydberg does not have a particularly keen eye or insightful understanding when it comes to her fellow bar patrons. Instead she latches on to another man, has a few months of some kind of ambiguous connection to him, and then finally declares him a jerk when he refuses to lend her a fair chunk of money. The book ends with Rydberg deciding to turn the whole debacle into a book.

It’s also rich for a book to claim that the “unwanted” would ever be among the regulars at a posh bar in the swank neighborhood of Östermalm alongside all the media movers and shakers, which is exactly how the back text markets itself. It occurs to me that maybe that was an attempt to paint Rydberg as the “unwanted” one, but I highly doubt it.

And finally, the scandal surrounding the book itself seems to have missed the mark when it comes to the content. It seems (based on my cursory reading) that people were clutching their pearls because Rydberg was talking a lot of trash about Important People, how rude, but the only people who really come off as dirtbags here are her lover in India (director Kaizad Gustad) and the lawyer she meets at PA&Co, known only as Rolf or Roffe. Maybe spilling the tea about Rolf’s affair with Harry Byrne’s wife was bad form, but for all I know that was public knowledge before the book came out.

Far more off-putting to me is Rydberg’s complete lack of self-awareness throughout the whole thing. Men treat her like garbage, or at least not like how she wants them to treat her, but she continues to follow after them like a puppy. Are we supposed to understand that there’s a connection between her embarrassments in childhood and her behavior now? Maybe, but in a book that’s otherwise hellbent on interpreting itself for the reader, she refuses to signpost that connection at all. Other times it’s obvious that Rydberg is inferring a whole lot about people’s motivations, mixing it with a heaping helping of wishful thinking and presenting it all as Objective Fact when there’s no way she can know one way or the other. “He was talking so loudly at the bar because he wanted me to hear him, even though we weren’t talking to each other anymore, I just know it.” Rydberg comes off as the most clueless person on earth.

My second problem with Den högsta kasten was that it’s a structurally incoherent book. The two parts have nothing to do with each other. In the second part, Rydberg tries to draw connections between what happened to her in India and the people around her now in Stockholm, but it always feels like either a very naked attempt to foist cohesion on a book that has none or to bully the reader into liking the first part. On more than one occasion she tells us that after hearing about her trip to India, so-and-so tells her, “Wow, what a great story, you should turn it into a novel.”

I wonder how often Rydberg failed to detect the note of sarcasm in someone’s voice.

My third problem is with the content itself. In addition to not living up to its reputation, Den högsta kasten reads to me like a book that could be written by the people in my life who later turned out to be, to put it bluntly, stalkers. Specifically, I’m thinking of two people I knew who, beyond being obsessed with a crush, invented entire relationships out of whole cloth and then villainized the other party for not returning their feelings when faced with undeniable reality. Talking trash about movie directors or broadcasting a couple’s marital troubles for all the world to hear is one thing; ruminating in a thought pattern that could well lead to violence or other drastic consequences is another, and that’s probably what made Den högsta kasten so unappealing for me.

Philosophy in the Flesh

“There are two major contemporary philosophical traditions,” my professor told the class on our first day of a survey of contemporary philosophy course, the third such survey course required for the degree. “You have analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. If you were studying in Europe, you’d be studying continental philosophy at this point. But in the US and England, we follow the analytic track instead.”

Not an exact quote, but the gist of it. That class was a slog, not through any fault of the professor’s but because the material was deeply frustrating and not the kind of thing any starry-eyed teenager is excited about when declaring their major. Boo on analytic philosophy, in other words. What a surprise, then, that Lakoff and Johnson have a whole chapter in Philosophy in the Flesh dedicated to dunking on on it!

I was originally interested in the book for entirely different reasons, however. Somehow or other I’d been pointed in the direction of Lakoff and Johnson’s earlier book, Metaphors We Live By, and I loved it and wanted a deeper dive into the topic. Philosophy in the Flesh is just that: a comprehensive look at the mechanics of brain studies carried out to investigate their points, a summary of the larger organizing metaphors in English, “primary metaphors” to use their terminology, and an examination of some of Western Philosophy’s Greatest Hits through the lens of these metaphors. All of this is in support of their thesis that the human mind (and other minds as well) arise from being embodied, and that sensory input from existing and moving in the world fundamentally shapes our thinking, even for the most abstract discussions. They claim that the idea that we can use a purely disembodied reason completely abstracted away from physical experience and the body, à la Cartesian dualism, is at odds with the evidence we now have about how the brain works. A section-by-section summary is available through the archives of the NYT. The claim seems pretty well argued to me, though I am a mere layperson unqualified to fight in the Linguistics Wars. I only have two disappointments/criticisms, and they pertain more to the presentation rather than to the actual content.

The first is that I felt like the level of universality they were ascribing to their primary metaphors was unclear. While Lakoff and Johnson emphasized that the metaphors they were proposing were not all necessarily universal across languages or cultures, they didn’t provide enough details about exceptions or variations from these primary metaphors to really drive the point home. More comparison between two distinct, relatively unrelated languages/cultures would have been helpful, for example English and Navajo.

The other was the near-complete lack of attention given to AI. Lakoff and Johnson aren’t the first to tackle the mind-body problem—it’s a tale as old as time and all that—but the cognitive science they bring to bear, thanks to new studies we can carry out regarding human cognition, is above and beyond the usual hot takes on Cogito ergo sum and sets the ground for some potentially formidable criticism of strong AI. (Related reading: Nicholas Humphrey’s A History of the Mind.) But Philosophy in the Flesh came out in 1999 and in a very different technological context. The concerns we had about AI were pretty well summed up in The Matrix; we had no DALL-E, no ChatGPT, no LaMDA, and we were still over a decade away from automatically generated sports journalism. The discussion of embodied minds seems more relevant than ever now, so reading this book in 2023 is a bit frustrating in that regard. The points that Lakoff and Johnson raise have a lot of juicy implications for people working with AI, and for anyone in jobs that might be affected by the introduction of AI, but those implications aren’t discussed because the text is simply too old.

But just because AI looked different in 1999 doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, and the topic still feels underexamined and overlooked. Funnily enough, Lakoff and Johnson take the time to dissect John Searle’s famous Chinese Room argument against the possibility of AI, but only to point out the network of primary metaphors underlying Searle’s thinking—they leave the actual topic of AI well enough alone. We can hope that an updated edition will come out and give the discussion the space it deserves, I guess, but that seems unlikely. Philosophy in the Flesh hasn’t been updated since its original publication, perhaps because these days Lakoff appears to be more focused on politics and policy than academia. (For comparison, 1996’s Moral Politics has been updated twice; a third edition that came out as recently as 2016.)

But those are small nitpicks for an otherwise fantastic book. I’ll probably eventually splurge and buy a copy of for myself. Not only would it be handy to have their list of primary metaphors at hand to occasionally ponder and review, but there’s no way you can take in everything a 600-page book is saying in just one reading.

Picknick vid vägkanten

It’s always interesting to me to read books that had to undergo significant censorship for their initial publication. Sometimes the ideological clash between author and state is pretty clear, but other times it’s a head-scratcher. Picknick vid vägkanten is one of the latter. It’s difficult for me to find what Soviet censors would have objected to, as opposed to books like We or One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All the implied black market and organized crime, maybe? Regardless, a censored version was published in the Soviet Union, and Tartovsky worked with the Strugatsky brothers to turn the idea into the 1979 movie Stalker. (The entire movie, with English subtitles, is available for free on YouTube from Mosfilm.)

A strange alien visitation in the near future (officially the book takes place at some unspecified year in the twentieth century) has resulted in six Zones around the world, all filled with baffling scientific marvels and unpredictable hazards. Picknick follows Red, one of the people who now make a living by navigating the life-threatening terrain to bring back items, a group of people who have come to be called “stalkers.” It’s implied that Red’s regular exposure to the Zone is the reason for the strange mutation in his daughter, who is born mostly normal but covered with long fur and black eyes. She starts out life with the same mental capacity and personality as any child, but eventually becomes withdrawn and non-verbal. Hoping to cure his daughter, Red makes one last incursion into the Zone to reach the Golden Sphere, which is rumored to grant wishes.

Picknick is another classic that feels a bit pointless to review, established as it is within the science fiction canon. I appreciate its weirdness and its refusal to provide any kind of explanation for the Zones or the items, or to descend into a pew-pew space lasers alien invasion story. Instead it’s just people dealing with the fallout (pun intended) of a brief and inexplicable encounter with an alien Other. Science fiction really does get an unfair reputation because everyone’s seen Star Wars and no one’s read books like Roadside Picnic. Next thing you know, we have Ian McEwan convincing himself he’s invented an entirely new genre.

Sigh.

The Swedish translation is worth noting, since it took a lot more research than one would expect to dig up the details of its history. Ola Wallin—who was also responsible for translating and publishing Trötthetssamhället—put out a new translation of Picknick in 2020. That’s the one I read and it’s a fine translation. I think. My Russian is far too gone to attempt a meaningful comparison.

But! Before Ersatz and Olla Wallin, there was a Swedish translation from Delta by Kjell Rehnström, which Wikipedia purports (by way of Neil Cornwell’s Reference Guide to Russian Literature) won the “Jules Verne prize for best novel of the year published in Swedish.” Confirming that last part is proving trickier than one might expect, and will involve a trip to the library over the weekend to check an actual physical reference book. Stockholm Library also appears to have a copy (in addition to Wallin’s), which I might read for comparison’s sake if the mood strikes me.

Olla Wallin is alive and well, so finding out more about his biography isn’t particularly difficult. Kjell Rehnström is, well, alive at least, but if Ratsit is to be believed he’s also 85 years old. Unsurprising that he doesn’t have much of an online presence, then, though it seems he also translates from Polish, including Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz.

Educated

On a whim I decided to join a bokcirkel at the local library, and the organizer cheerfully informed me that the next book would be Tara Westover’s Educated.

Much like the neighborhood book club, I’d signed up in hopes of reading Swedish books, rather than Swedish translations of American bestsellers, but here we are! Not to mention that Educated was one of those phenomenon books where, thanks to everyone talking about it, I felt like I had read it by osmosis. Having now actually read it, I can indeed confirm that the experience of hearing everyone talk about it is enough to really get the gist of the book. Westover has an incredibly isolated and traumatic childhood, decides against all odds to go to college, comes to terms with her childhood trauma and by the end has become a history scholar. No surprises there.

My hypothesis is that part of the reason Educated made such a huge splash was that by 2018, Mainstream Liberal America had realized that Hillbilly Elegy was Bad, Actually and saw in Educated an attempt to make amends for hyping up Elegy. Obviously I can’t exactly prove this, and J. D. Vance didn’t complete his face heel turn until 2022, so who’s to say. (Go give the If Books Could Kill podcast episode a listen for more on Hillbilly Elegy.)

This is not to throw shade on Educated. Westover overcame tremendous obstacles to be where she is today and for that she deserves accolades. And unlike Vance, she’s not trying to make a larger political point or diagnose the ills of large swathes of the American population. If you grow up Mormon, you’ll end up talking about other Mormons in your memoirs, but Educated never feels like an explainer on Mormonism, or like a critique or an apology. The book itself is…fine? I think it was probably an essential part of Westover’s recovery process to write the whole story out and to present it to a public after spending several years being gaslit by her family about her own memories.

What makes me uneasy about Educated is where it lands in the book market and the reasons the reading public has for latching on to it. It’s not quite circus sideshow gawking, but it’s not quite not circus sideshow gawking, either. However, the fact that I read this in order to discuss it with a group of Swedes (and that I’m already anticipating being asked to give an impromptu “US History and Culture” lecture) might be coloring my reaction here. There’s also a part of it that feeds into the collective American obsession with rags-to-riches “bootstraps” stories, where a particular kind of reader might point to Educated as proof that America really is a meritocracy and that if you’re not succeeding you’re just not working hard enough.

Again, I don’t think Westover is deliberately writing to pander to either of those instincts. How the public responds to a book and where one particular life story falls in the general ideological fabric of a culture is kind of beyond the scope of an author’s consideration. There’s something to said about a publisher saying “yes” to this particular life trajectory but “no” to others.

Also, unrelated to anything, but a huge content warning for pretty frank descriptions of gruesome accidents of all kinds: serious burns, head injuries, gashes, you name it. I’m squeamish so those were sections I just skimmed through. A significant portion of the book also focuses on the abusive behavior of one of Tara’s older brothers, again with pretty frank descriptions of bullying and violence.

The Best of Myles

Fresh out of college, I read At Swim-Two-Birds at the recommendation of a friend who went on a bit of an Irish literature kick after studying at Trinity College Dublin. Not long after that, I stumbled across The Best of Myles on a visit to The Strand in New York City; so well disposed was I to Brian O’Nolan that I added it to my basket. Plus it was an old, possibly original hardback edition (and pretty beat up at that), and I’m a sucker for old books.

And then it languished in my collection for something like thirteen years!

Push came to shove when an Irish co-worker moved into a new apartment. “Wouldn’t that make for a reasonably appropriate housewarming gift?” I thought. And then later, as I read it: “It certainly makes more sense in his library than in yours.”

Not that I didn’t enjoy it, or that it’s not funny, but I’m not Irish and I have yet to do an obsessive deep dive into Irish history*, so a good portion of the references were beyond me, including the occasional section written in Irish. Hardly surprising, considering that O’Nolan’s “Cruiskeen Lawn” column anthologized in the collection was written in both English and Irish.

An overall fun read, and a reminder that I should dip my toe back in the pool of O’Nolan’s novels. There aren’t that many, after all, so might as well read the entire collection.

*The universe seems to have heard my request in this matter and brought Fintan O’Toole as a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. I immediately put a hold on We Don’t Know Ourselves at the Stockholm library.