Section B Book Reviews

I’ve been on a bit of a political kick lately with my books. Right now I’m reading All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The book is a good blend of hard reporting and colorful details on Watergate. I think Richard Milhous Nixon is the most fascinating character in the history of American politics so it’s about time I read this and I hope the book delivers scenes of Nixon flipping out and cursing and being Machiavellian. My one qualm is that I skipped ahead and (spoiler alert!) the book stops before Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation, which I would like to have read more about. But I’m sure I can find other material on that subject.

All the President’s Men had been sitting in my basement for years since I bought it at a book sale so I have no idea of the age of the note I found inside. It says, “This book is biased and definitely unsuitable for impressionable minds, i.e. liberals.” I can’t make out the signature but in my fantasy, Nixon wrote it to an autograph seeker in a fit of pique.

As I am a sucker for alternate histories, I very much enjoyed Stephen King’s 11/22/63. It is not a well-written book as King’s style includes heavy-handed lessons on the less rosy side of the past and he tries to force Jake’s life with Sadie to take on too much of a mythically perfect quality. However, the concept is fascinating: A man travels through a wormhole back to 1958 to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Predictably, the time travel creates a future that is even worse. I was riveted by the glimpses King provided of how U.S. history altered after Kennedy’s escape from death.

For a more down to earth take on an alternate history, I loved Then Everything Changed. Jeff Greenfield hypothesizes how history would have changed if chance had altered three key events in politics: If John Kennedy had been assassinated between his election and the meeting of the Electoral College, if Robert Kennedy had survived his assassination attempt, and if Gerald Ford had not made the debate gaffe that there was “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe” and won the 1976 election. Greenfield presents a thoughtful, plausible and intriguing picture of how one change in the chain of events changes the tug of war between factions in politics and could have remade the country. Greenfield writes the alternate histories as straight history. It’s a strange feeling, racing through a textbook as if it were a thriller, eagerly getting details about history that every school child in this alternate America would have known.

Along the way, Then Everything Changed offers little Easter eggs of familiar characters in history playing different roles, such as the Clintons, Sandra Day O’Connor, John McCain and George H.W. Bush. There’s even a bizarro Watergate-esque scandal involving a Democratic administration. It seems the events of history are destined to play out in one way or another as twisted versions of events we learned about in school. The most bizarre alteration was the series of events that led the Shah of Iran to die in a car accident in a tunnel in Paris that directly echoed the death of Princess Diana.

The book 1Q84 was an alternate history of sorts, Haruki Murakami’s contemplative look at a woman who finds her reality has “jumped the track” to a version of 1984 filled with more magical realism than the one she knew, ultimately finding her long-lost childhood crush in the same strange world. I was riveted to this story for awhile but there wasn’t much of a payoff at the end, like a storm that threatens but ultimately passes over.

I was glad I finally got to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which had been on my Amazon wish list for 27 years. It’s an elegiac, moving book; a man’s letter to his young son meditating on the twists and turns of his life. It gets especially emotional at the end as the man confronts his illegitimate son.

Disco Bloodbath was … I guess … fun? It’s James St. James’ account of his friendship with fellow New York club kid Michael Alig, who killed and dismembered drug dealer Angel Melendez, to whom he owed money. The story is also the basis for the awful movie Party Monster. St. James’ narration is appropriately informal and chatty for the subject matter but the stylistic tricks annoyed me after awhile as too much of the book is in italics or boldface or ALL CAPS for emphasis. In addition, all these people come off as horribly unlikeable. They are so shallow that their shallowness forms a Möbius strip that loops around in an endless cycle of shallow. With endless depictions of K-holes, people ripping apart their own apartments in search of forgotten bags of drugs and ending up with track marks and sores, this book confirms once again that I’m never doing drugs.