Self-Help For the Wealthy, Beatings For the Weak

Steve Olsher, What Is Your WHAT: Discover The One Amazing Thing You Were Born To Do

I fear I’ve grown jaded. Authors and publicists send me books like this, anticipating the glowing reviews I’d have written before I slid backward on society’s ladder two years ago, and I can’t write them. These authors say something which sounds right, sounds ennobling, sounds humane, and I think: “Yes, yes, yes!” Then they inevitably say something that bitchslaps the poor, and I pull a facepalm, moaning “no, no, no!”

Psychological theorists like Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and their heirs have written copiously on how every human has a purpose they’re born to fulfill. Psychologists call this “disposition;” theologians call this “calling.” Until we find that purpose, we’ll drift unmoored through life. Many have written on this; Steve Olsher proffers a systematic approach to finding your purpose. Following Olsher’s very specific steps may help unlock what you subconsciously know.

Olsher’s approach involves unpacking your history to recognize patterns. Thus, it probably helps adults more than youth, especially people trapped in unfulfilling careers and lives. It relies on the Four Stages of Learning, famous in educational circles, to help readers realize what they don’t previously know about themselves. While hints of this approach resemble Larry Winget or Rhonda Byrne, Olsher’s presentation combines multiple influences smoothly and dynamically.

I’d appreciate Olsher’s message if he stopped there. His arguments against passively accepting life’s circumstances are energizing, his exercises concise, and his approach straightforward yet potentially very surprising. Rather than surrendering to life’s whims, getting blown around “like a windsock,” as Olsher repeatedly puts it, we have responsibilities as freethinking adults to take ownership and pilot our own lives. So far, so good.

Yet Olsher inevitably keeps talking. Worse, I doubt he’s listening to himself, or he’d realize how rich, urban, and white he sounds. He openly disparages people who accept undesirable circumstances as life’s necessary trade-off. I got downright angry reading this statement: “If you’re working in a dead-end job, it’s because you choose to be there.” I don’t quote out of context; Olsher really says something so tone-deaf and economically obtuse.

Consider what this statement means. Accepting work beneath your capabilities because the local economy can’t absorb your skills, is a moral judgment on you. Taking what you can get to stay close to family, friends, and the life you’ve made, means you have failed. Nor does Olsher stop there. If you persevere in a struggling marriage or can’t shed scars of childhood abuse, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Moreover, imagine the implications if everyone “follows their bliss,” as Joseph Campbell put it. Consider how many people really, really want to be actors, novelists, stay-at-home parents, or (let’s not kid ourselves) drunks. People become self-supporting in these fields only after years of effort and investment, during which time food never becomes optional. Does Olsher really blame them for choosing bodily sustenance over the uncertain dream?

It’s tempting to say “we can’t all be Steve Jobs.” But as Malcolm Gladwell has demonstrated, even Steve Jobs couldn’t have been Steve Jobs if circumstances broke differently. Wealthy, successful, happy people get that way because they’re prepared, Gladwell proves, but also because circumstances break their way. We shouldn’t bend to life’s whims, like Olsher says, but we’re all beholden to conditions we can’t control.

Nobody wants to clean sewers, wait tables, or operate assembly lines. But we make compromises in life. We have to. Immanuel Kant writes of the “categorical imperative”: imagine the consequences if everyone did what you propose to do now. Hopefully Olsher would agree, we must honor first commitments first. If you have a spouse, two-point-four kids, and a mortgage, you can’t drop everything to dance banghra in a traveling circus.

When Olsher moralistically blames poor people, rural laborers, and disfranchised minorities for not knowing how to sort their hash, he really pisses me off. My reaction is only compounded by the fact that, up to the moment he says something so bone-headedly outrageous, he’s absolutely right. It really frustrates me that an author can have such intellectually solid, morally defensible foundations, and build such an ugly, offensive house upon them.

Olsher joins other recent books, like Zebras and Cheetahs and Give Yourself a Raise, that dogpile on poor people and ratify an essentially wealthy agenda. Worse, I fear these books conspire (perhaps unintentionally) to construct a moral framework letting rich people blame the poor for their poverty. I’m no socialist, yet I fear such blatant displays kicking the weak cannot end well for a capitalist society, or for our democracy.

CODA: After I posted an abridged version of this review on Amazon.com, the author posted a strange, incoherent comment (subsequently deleted under pressure) stating, among other things: "I thank God daily that morons like you... exist because you don't have the wherewithal, ability, or desire to make an inordinate difference in our world." He also claims that nobody could interpret his book any way other than how he intended, unless they didn't actually read the book.

When I wrote this review, I was angry at Olsher's implicit prejudices and judgmentalism, but considered him misguided. I repeat, he has a solid premise, but appears unaware of its ramifications. Following this comment, which includes personal insults and attempts to silence dissent, I fear he's something worse. After 140 consecutive positive reviews, answering one negative review with personal abuse, then acting contrite eighteen hours later, is domestic abuser behavior.

Olsher's opinions are arrogant and elitist; though in fairness, this could be accidental, a simple failure to anticipate poor laborers' differing needs. Steve Olsher himself, however, is potentially dangerous.

Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Cheryl Strayed, editor, The Best American Essays 2013

In reading this year’s edition of the Best American Essays, the format struck me before the content. Most years’ editions sequence the essays alphabetically by authors’ last names. Not so this year, where editor Cheryl Strayed organizes twenty-six essays in a manner somehow differently. The thematic structure doesn’t present itself obviously until readers penetrate well into her sequence. Even afterward, her subtleties aren’t necessarily obvious.

The word “essay” has been cheapened by generations of schoolteachers who, lacking any other term for the five-paragraph monotonies students write to prove they’ve done the reading, yclept them “essays.” But this does the idea no justice. This series returns essays to the meaning they had when Montaigne pioneered the form, calling them the French for “attempts.” As in, let’s try this shit and see what happens.

And boy, oh boy, does something happen. Strayed compiles some well-known authors, including Charles Baxter, Zadie Smith, and Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro, but she mostly shares less famous writers who, by turning hard, unblinking eyes on their own lives, manage to recount stories that exceed their authors. These writers prove George Bernard Shaw’s adage that only the intimately personal ever becomes truly universal.

Some essays address larger topics. Walter Kirn’s “Confessions of an Ex-Mormon” answers media stereotypes about Mitt Romney’s religion by recounting Kirn’s brief flirtation with Mormonism, and how it continues to save his life. Angela Morales’ “The Girls in My Town” gently laments how economic realities create two classes in America’s wealthiest state. Jon Kerstetter’s “Triage” reveals what happens in the moment combat surgeons choose to let a GI die.

Others remain more insular, unpacking something specific to the author. Tod Goldberg’s “When They Let Them Bleed” correlates “Boom Boom” Mancini’s most famous fight with his own obese, self-mortifying youth. Richard Schmitt’s “Sometimes a Romantic Notion” debunks the melodrama behind joining the circus. Steven Harvey’s “The Book of Knowledge” reveals what he discovered when he reread his late mother’s letters, discovering a disquieting stranger in his house.

Cheryl Strayed

Strayed also includes the most chilling essays I’ve ever seen in this series, Vanessa Veselka’s “Highway of Lost Girls” and Matthew Vollmer’s “Keeper of the Flame.” These two invade readers’ consciousness with such incisive power that I dare say nothing more about them. However, Strayed places them very early in the collection, leaving readers’ nerves frayed and jangling, prepared for the profound nuances of everything that comes after.

Early essays start big, addressing the authors’ personal weight in major issues. There’s a great deal of objective fact: the 1987 Black Monday stock collapse, Mitt Romney, a schoolboy’s death in a Dallas trash dumpster. These stories have a place not only in the authors’ worlds, but in ours, and their stories impinge upon us readers as concretely as the nightly news. We respond because we recognize ourselves.

As the collection progresses, however, essays become increasingly personal. Authors start omitting details like dates, geographical addresses, and sometimes even names. The language becomes transient, narratives grow non-linear, and the essays come to resemble poetry for our aggressively non-poetic age. By inviting us into their lives, rather than visiting ours, the authors make themselves vulnerable, and we find ourselves wanting to trust them.

I’ve used prior editions of this series as Freshman Comp texts, and would cheerfully use this edition too. Strayed’s selections don’t merely showcase diverse, challenging topics—from cancer and postpartum depression and grief, to love and family and music. She also chooses authors who convey their topics well, with professional attention to well-chosen words and phrases that convey beyond their literal meaning. I can pay no higher compliment than to say this collection makes me want to try something new as a writer.

Unfortunately, as more states move to adopt Common Core educational standards, many parents don’t realize the standards explicitly discourage personal writing. Though Common Core explicitly encourages nonfiction reading, that doesn’t include essays like those in this collection. David Coleman, who co-wrote Common Core, has said: “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Yet this series’ continued success, and the caliber of writing in this collection, prove the lie in that statement. Personal writing matters because humans are empathetic beings; by sharing others’ thoughts and feelings, we think and feel more deeply ourselves. As the dwindling magazine industry dries up venues for innovative, risk-taking essays, philistines like David Coleman threaten to overtake our discourse. Editors like Cheryl Strayed stand fast against them.

The Glitter and the Gore

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 23
Joseph Wambaugh, Fugitive Nights

When PI Breda Burrows accepts a bog-standard infidelity case, she considers it a typical weekday rent-payer. Almost simultaneously, a swarthy stranger attacks a security officer at the Palm Springs airport and flees into the desert. Neither realizes how they’ve set upon a collision course that will transform California’s famous über-rich playground forever. They just know that if embittered ex-cop Lynn Cutter doesn’t stop cracking wise, they’ll shoot him.

Like Dashiell Hammett, Joseph Wambaugh’s novels have a hard-bitten edge reflecting their author’s personal history, which for Wambaugh means fourteen years “on the job” for the LAPD. But Wambaugh has a Monty Python-ish sense of humor that Hammett discovered only later. Wambaugh’s characters laugh because it hurts too much to cry. And their infectiously bleak gallows humor carries onto readers, conveying his characters’ intense, inescapable suffering.

Burrows, Cutter, and their geeky tagalong, Nelson Hareem, an exuberant but green cop with sweeping aspirations, form a sort of crime-fighting family looking for a crime. Burrows wants respect as a woman PI. Cutter wants to live a sexy, glamorous life which his disability pension can’t possibly cover. Nelson thinks these two can mentor him into becoming some heroic supercop. They embody Blind Justice as scripted by PJ O’Rourke and Dave Barry.

But like Shakespeare, Wambaugh uses humor to emphasize society’s widespread tragedy. While Burrows’ Wacky Trinity tries to understand why a millionaire is making deposits in a sperm bank, a glowering Mexican stranger is stalking the outskirts of Palm Springs. They slowly discover The Fugitive is circling their client’s estate, and he bears a grudge they can’t quite explain. They only know he intends bloody vengeance, and he has the skills to kill.

Wambaugh has long used his exciting, smart novels to examine the gap between law and justice. He enlists us into his scrutiny here, as two narratives converge in a confrontation that will inevitably hurt somebody. Though Nelson is a cop himself, his extracurricular status, alongside Burrows and Cutter off the job, blurs the line between police and vigilante. The Fugitive’s payback mission proves founded on a basis in justice, but not law.

The inexact nature of justice, for Wambaugh, comes from not only from who delivers it, but from what we cannot know. His characters lack important pieces of information they need to make vital decisions, and often make disastrous choices. Wambaugh softens the blow with slapstick, but the theme remains the same: nobody can truly exercise justice, because nobody has enough knowledge. Truth exists, but we cannot comprehend it.

Not that we can’t pursue truth. In a genre overcrowded with derivative police procedurals, Wambaugh brings a level of scientific precision most authors miss. Besides a novelist, Wambaugh has also written copious nonfiction; his 1991 classic The Blooding was the first mass-market introduction to forensic DNA identification. Despite his fiction’s frenetic pacing, Wambaugh brings a sober, journalist’s eye to how police do their job.

Wambaugh peoples his novel with an ensemble of fully realized characters. Burrows, an ex-cop, divulges to readers the struggles of a modern police woman in harrowing detail: her long descriptions of harassment, discrimination, and disenfranchisement make Taliban law seem downright liberal. Lynn Cutter’s sarcastic asides seem like whiskey-soaked farce, but reveal an exceptionally precise knowledge of the powers that enforce subjection in Palm Springs.

But of all his ensemble, none evinces greater humanity than The Fugitive. Wambaugh reveals his story incrementally, slower than Chinese Water Torture, yet always keeping us ahead of the heroes. From a story perspective, this offers flashes of witty, bleak irony. But The Fugitive himself never joins the novel’s aggressively comic sequences. As Wambaugh reveals his secrets, The Fugitive became the first character in years to actually make me cry.

This novel debuted in 1992, and includes topical references: George HW Bush, Operation Desert Shield, Mayor Sonny Bono. Yet rereading it twenty years later, it never feels dated or gimmicky. Wambaugh’s surface ornaments disclose deeper truths permeating his story: Palm Springs’ innate, violent inequality. The way society prizes order over justice. How rich people want police and security, but won’t pay for them. These themes remain timeless.

If this weren’t genre fiction, literary critics would embrace Wambaugh as a paragon of layered narrative, subtle characterization, and unflinching themes. They’d examine it for transcendent truths until they drained it dry. They’d force students to read this remarkably rich story until, like with Shakespeare or Hemingway, they made generations hate what they should love. But they haven’t discovered Wambaugh yet, so he remains ours to love.

The Fall of Truman's White House

Robert Klara, The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence

Harry Truman never wanted to be President. A wartime compromise Veep candidate, he inherited the Presidency only 89 days into FDR’s fourth term, and made history, sometimes against his will. But besides a formidable job in dangerous times, Truman also inherited a dilapidated White House. Political historian Robert Klara infuses humor, insight, and panache into his novel-like tale of how Truman rebuilt the Executive Mansion.

Truman received an essentially 18th Century house, suffering terrible subsidence and a rat problem. The Roosevelts, resident at 1600 Pennsylvania for thirteen years, refused their $50,000 annual refurbishment budget as unpatriotic during the Depression and WWII. The resulting neglect, coupled with over a century of haphazard upgrades, conflicting Presidential personalities, and fire during the War of 1812, left Truman a White House ready to collapse.

America’s unlikeliest President, and his struggles to restore America’s most prestigious residence, have been largely forgotten, but make astonishingly gripping reading. With its high-stakes political wrangling, famous names, and cast of thousands, Klara’s narrative resembles a Tom Clancy thriller. That’s no mere hyperbole, since it includes assassination attempts, appalling idealistic intransigence, and the Soviet nuclear research program.

Irish-American architect James Hoban designed the White House as a gentleman’s urban manor, but he built it on spongy reclaimed swampland, erecting its massive sandstone edifice on foundations only eight feet deep. As the Presidential role evolved, an elaborate Georgian mansion appeared increasingly extravagant. Hoban’s interior, built of untreated local lumber, wasn’t updated substantially between 1817 and 1949, and rotted badly.

Klara embroiders what could have been tedious architectural discursions with anecdotes that enliven his story: the time Truman, naked in the tub, nearly fell through the floor, into a formal Blue Room reception below. The precarious antique chandelier that jeopardized a concert pianist’s life. The many fabled White House ghosts which proved to be the sound of rotten superstructure settling. This makes Klara’s tale moving, humane, and often very funny.

More than a building history, Klara writes a biography of Truman’s fraught relationship to the White House. Truman’s wife, Bess, and daughter, Margaret, notoriously hated the house. Bess hated the official secrecy that ended her longstanding partnership in her husband’s career. Margaret nearly died when a floor joist collapsed beneath her beloved piano. Truman’s women fled to Missouri every summer, driving a wedge into a formerly close family.

Plagued by professional pressures and the nascent Cold War, Truman spent increasing time in Key West. His centrist views, plainspoken manner, and Midwestern thrift alienated an aristocratic Congress. After a Republican upset in the 1946 midterms, he couldn’t admit his White House was collapsing; the political implications for the “fall” of Democracy’s home address would have been lethal. So he began refurbishments surreptitiously, paying out of pocket.

But Truman’s ferocious re-election brought enough political capital to demand significant upgrades. Just in time, too: as Stalin’s scientists detonated their first plutonium bomb, the President’s role evolved, and with it, his house needs. No longer democracy’s showplace, Truman needed his White House to serve as command center, fortress, and bomb shelter. His architects gutted the old monument, transforming the house and everything within.

Klara combines journalism with deft storytelling, unpacking scorched roof beams and sagging brick foundations so the White House becomes a storied character, rich with events and hidden implications. She proves rife with secrets that reflect her evolving status, and repurposing her for the Nuclear Age reveals secrets throughout American history. Klara’s storytelling manages breathless urgency without resorting to naked hyperbole, no mean feat in political history.

Simultaneously, Klara keeps focus where it belongs. He doesn’t attempt a sweeping Truman biography; rather, his notes direct readers to David McCullough’s renowned Truman for more details. Klara limits himself to how world events, and powerful personalities, transformed one prestigious building. This focus keeps Klara’s story concise, energetic, and readable. His history moves with brisk, novelistic pace and a flair for images and characters.

As history does, Klara’s story brims with multiple players telling multiple stories, some entering and leaving with little explanation. Unlike novelists, who streamline events and characters, Klara remains true to events, meaning readers might feel confused by his constantly evolving dramatis personae. This does require active readership, and good readers might make notes on the endpaper.

Yet Klara’s story never feels cluttered, and rewards eager, curious audiences. Klara’s Truman recognizes his Presidency’s role in changing America, and his White House makes a powerful intersection between America’s elegant past and its post-war world leadership duty. Klara shows Truman renovating America for a new age.

The Laureate Looks Back On Life At 72

Billy Collins, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems

Former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins regularly reads to standing-room audiences, and reading his poems, it’s not hard to see why. They reward multiple levels of interpretation, unpack hidden implications in seemingly undistinguished moments, and wink sly humor at playfully receptive readers. But there’s a moment in this collection where a switch flips unexpectedly. This produces a book that starts strong, but ends on a surprisingly flat, tired-sounding note.

Collins’ longtime readers know his familiar arc: an ordinary moment on an ordinary day triggers a Proustian connection, seemingly sudden but wholly consistent. Perhaps memory intrudes, or ruminations run wild—a quote from a writing text imbues a moment with unanticipated urgency, or an ancient photo in a modern building creates a discordance Collins can’t easily reconcile. Sometimes he just starts thinking, and the results surprise even himself:

“Writing in the Afterlife”

...
I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe the place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles…

While scholarly poets vanish into themselves, equating incomprehensibility with depth, Collins recognizes who reads his work. The baker doesn’t bake the bread he wants to bake, but the bread his customers need to eat. No wonder, in a crowded poetry market, readers seek Collins out.

Collins’ poems have familiarity not in their outcomes, which persistently surprise even attentive readers. Rather, we relish the surprise as his words expose something distinctly novel in familiar circumstances. We anticipate being blindsided, and come to prognosticate: what will he do next? Thus he forces us to reexamine our own preconceptions, and turns us into poets ourselves. Could you have created “Divorce,” which I quote in full:

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

Yes, I suspect you could have created it if, like Collins, you have practiced thinking like a poet. Collins challenges us to circumvent our learned limitations and see moments anew. At his best, Collins opens our eyes, guides us through the labyrinth of our own minds, and returns us to the start, enlightened and ready to bring his lessons in poetic insight into our regular life.

At his best. Sadly, like any of us, Billy Collins isn’t always at his best.

This book suffers moving into the “New Poems” section. Compiled for the first time, these poems lack the muscular through-line that defines his prior sections, and meander episodically. This last section, running nearly ninety pages, percolates with such Hail Mary passes as (gasp!) poems about poets and poetry. Seriously. He has a villanelle, titled “Villanelle,” about writing a villanelle. MFA instructors work assiduously to stop students doing that.

“Lines Written at Flying Point Beach”

or at least in the general vicinity
of Flying Point Beach,
certainly closer than I normally am

to that beach where the ocean
crests the dunes at high tide
spilling tons of new salt water into Mecox Bay,

and probably closer to Flying Point Beach
than you are right now
or I happen to be as you read this. [...]

Not that he stops being good. Moments of insight penetrate, as in “Digging,” about backyard artifacts unearthed, and histories imputed to them. But it becomes much harder to find such moments. Instead, he gives over to what many non-poetry readers disparage in contemporary poetry: formless prose broken into ragged, end-stopped lines. It reads like diary entries, like Collins stops pushing himself to that next level.

It pains me to say this about one of my heroes, but at 72, Collins may be getting tired. Poetry’s heightened aesthetic, its language inviting multiple interpretations, its intensively layered themes, demand time and energy. And Collins, who maintains a teaching and reading schedule that would deplete much younger men, maybe can’t dedicate himself to writing like he once could. That would explain these later poems’ rushed feel.

I love Billy Collins, and I love most of this book. Like the best poets, when Collins succeeds, he could transform our world. But the more a poet risks, the bigger his potential disappointment. Let’s just say, Collins writes more reliably than William Wordsworth; but if you read his work, recognize, not everything succeeds equally.

Poets on parade. From left: Sam Stecher, Kevin L Nenstiel (the reviewer),
Billy Collins, and Rick Marlatt