Category: Books

A User’s Guide to Democracy, by Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy (Celadon, 349 pages)

If there’s anything we can take away from the 2020 election, it’s that everyone’s an expert on American democracy. In their own minds, anyway.

Your third cousin twice removed, the guy who comments on everything you post on Facebook or Twitter, and your father (especially your father) know exactly how this republic is supposed to work, and how we should keep it. This is because for many of us an alarming amount of time has transpired since we last took an American history class, and we weren’t paying that much attention anyway.

Enter Nick Capodice and Hannah McCarthy, hosts of NHPR’s Civics 101 radio show and podcast, who propose to correct this widespread trend of pontification without facts. Their A User’s Guide to Democracy: How America Works may not be the best book for holiday gift giving, as any recipient might perceive it as an insult, but it’s a delightful handbook of everything you used to know and largely forgot, plus a generous serving of interesting trivia about politics and players. An added bonus is that the book is a paperback, as any kind of user’s guide should be so you can highlight without guilt.

A User’s Guide to Democracy is basically a civics class, designed to equally inform and amuse. The authors are aided in this quest by Tom Toro, a cartoonist for the New Yorker, who puts a wry spin on the information. (Example: the cartoon illustrating a section on who can be a U.S. senator — which notes that only 10 Black Americans have served in the Senate — shows a white guy carrying a briefcase confronting a metal detector and melanin detector.)

It begins with an exploration of what the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government do, how they came to have these powers, and what they actually achieve. (Not as much as you might think. “Of all the bills and resolutions proposed in the House, about 3 to 5 percent become law. And that low percentage has been pretty standard ever since we got on this merry-go-round in 1789,” the authors write.)

From there, they explore federalism and the eternal tug-of-war for power between the federal government and the states. The authors see it as fraught co-parenting and understand that despite its fractious history this is the sort of subject that makes readers’ eyes glaze over. “We know you skimmed this section,” they write at the end of the chapter.

The reward for getting through it, however, is a base of understanding that is useful for exploring the stuff that is most relevant right now: elections and how they work. “The nation’s myriad voting systems and mechanisms are a source of perpetual confusion, fury, and mistakes. Methods vary from town to town, state to state. And then there’s that ‘wait, what?’ known as the electoral college — a last-minute additional to the Constitution that has tormented us ever since.”

Capodice and McCarthy do a fine job of explaining why 270 electoral votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December decide the presidential election and why the founders thought this so necessary. (It was essentially because although they believed the people — the ‘people’ being white landowners, of course — should make that choice, they feared America devolving into some sort of “mob-ocracy.”)

“These electors were to be men of high virtue, men who could see the high virtue and moral integrity in a candidate, and cast their vote for him regardless of how the proles voted.”

The authors then escort the reader through an entertaining tour of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its amendments, and Supreme Court cases they believe everyone should know. The most critical reader will have to hunt hard for anything that smacks of political bias; Capodice and McCarthy may show their hands ever so slightly in their interpretation of Citizens United v. FEC and a few other places, but never worryingly so; the reader emerges with a sense that A User’s Guide to Democracy is a solidly nonpartisan read, a relief.

Even an appendix, in which they offer presidential fun facts, intends to amuse, not enrage, although I suppose supporters of President Donald Trump could perceive bias in the fact that they choose to include about him: “He is the first president since Polk not to have a pet.”

Overall, the book is a fresh take on an old subject, and wildly relevant. It won’t elevate the authors to the ranks of storied historians such as Doris Kearns Goodwin or Jon Meacham, but will appeal to people who don’t even know who Goodwin and Meacham are, which is to say the vast number of Americans who participate in its democracy. Or talk about it from their armchairs, anyway. B

BOOK NOTES
In normal years, a good use of national book prizes is to arm yourself with a bit of knowledge in advance of holiday parties.
This gives you an arsenal of small talk that goes beyond the weather, even if you haven’t read the books in question, since probably no one you will encounter has read them either. If nothing else, you can amuse yourself by conducting a small poll of how many people even know of the existence of the books atop the elite lists, such as the New York Times’ list of the most notable books of the year, or the Booker Prize.
This not being a normal year, you may not have this opportunity, but it’s still good to know what the elites consider the best books of the year, if only to snicker at the lists. Cheryl Strayed did this on Twitter recently, when she noted that her bestseller Wild (Vintage, 336 pages) was left off the Times list in 2012, as was Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (Crown, 422 pages). Given the long legs of those titles, among the most successful books that year, year-end lists deserve our skepticism.
That said, here are the big-name winners announced in November; all work cited here is the paperback version, if available.
The Booker Prize: Douglas Stewart forShuggie Bain, a novel based on the author’s childhood in Glasgow, Scotland, with a mother battling an alcohol addiction (Grove Press, 448 pages).
National Book Award for fiction: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (Vintage, 288 pages): “Generic Asian man” discovers secret history of Chinatown and his own family history.
National Book Award for nonfiction: The Dead Are Arising, the Life of Malcom X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne (Liveright, 640 pages): Thirty years of research inform this biography on a controversial civil-rights leader.
The New York Times chooses 100 notable books of the year (making it even more perplexing that they missed Wild and Gone Girl), and they’re not ranked. You can see them all at nytimes.com/interactive/2020/books/notable-books.html but be forewarned: Even if you read a book a week like Bill Gates, this list will make you feel like the most uninformed person on the planet.

Books

Author events

• TY GAGNE Author presents The Last Traverse. Hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Online, via Zoom. Wed., Dec. 9, 7 p.m. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ALKA JOSHI & SARAH MCCRAW Joshi presents The Henna Artist and McCraw presents The Wrong Kind of Woman. Hosted by Bookery in Manchester. Online. Tues., Dec. 8, 6 p.m. Visit bookerymht.com or call 836-6600.

• THERESA CAPUTO the star of TLC’s Long Island Medium will present “Theresa Caputo: The Experience Live” at the Capitol Center for the Arts (44 S. Main St. Concord, ccanh.com) on Wed., April 7, 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $39.75 (with option for a VIP Photo Op for an additional $49.95).

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

Writing

• POSTCARD POETRY CONTEST Peterborough Poetry Project seeks submissions of original poems written on picture postcards for an upcoming anthology. Deadline is Dec. 31. Visit peterboroughpoetryproject.org/contests for more information.

• CALL FOR BLACK WRITERS New Hampshire-based theater company and playwright collective New World Theatre announces an open call to Black writers to submit monologues that reflect their personal experience of living while black, to be published in an anthology titled “08:46.” The deadline for submissions is Jan. 1, 2021. Visit newworldtheatre.org/08m46s.

Featured photo: A User’s Guide to Democracy

The Arrest, by Jonathan Lethem (Ecco, 307 pages)

Despite a vague discomfort with what it says about me, there’s never been an apocalypse I didn’t like. In 1998, when everyone was asking why America needed two asteroid disaster movies released within two months of each other (Deep Impact and Armageddon), I was wondering why we couldn’t have three.
So I was stoked for Jonathan Lethem’s latest, The Arrest, even more because it’s set in New England. Its premise seems the perfect antidote to 2020: a world in which all modern technology has stopped working. No more planes, trains and automobiles, no laptops, no electric blankets, no Googling, no doomscrolling. The doom is already here, and it’s not as bad as predicted. In fact, if you are the type who thinks wistfully about living off the grid on an organic farm one day, this is not the apocalypse, but paradise.
The disappearance of technology, which unfolded slowly, as opposed to one catastrophic event, has been dubbed “The Arrest.” The citizens aren’t sure what happened, but it appears the apex event in a long line of losses to include biodiversity, the melting of polar ice and the drowning of Miami. There were apparently no riots and mass human deaths, however, just a pervasive sadness at the loss of our cellphones. Some built shrines to them; others “needed eventually to be given a mug of herbal tea while someone else hid their inert former playthings.”
Our escort through this world is one Sandy Duplessis, a Hollywood screenwriter whose primary job, pre-Arrest, was to rewrite the work of others, and to enjoy whatever scrap-work was tossed to him by a longtime friend who has been much more successful than he was.
Sandy’s world is much different now. For one thing, he goes by the quaint moniker Journeyman, and his job is to deliver food and other necessities of life around the town in rural Maine where he has settled. He also assists the local butcher and has acquired an unsettling amount of knowledge about how to slaughter ducks.
He has settled in this town because it’s where his sister, Maddy, lives on an organic farm; he had come to visit her when the Arrest occurred. Now, for reasons that are unclear, New England has dealt with its collective loss of smartphones by organizing itself into Walking Dead-esque communities, taking care of their own but keeping their distance from other, threatening communities. Mostly, this works; life has essentially reverted to the 19th century, where all communities need is one everything: one butcher, one fisherman, one seamstress, one mediocre former screenwriter who ferries around homemade sausage.
People may miss their former lives; they certainly miss coffee. They nurse deep sorrow about the relationships they have lost. But they still have hot mulled cider and there’s currently no trauma, no drama, until Journeyman’s old friend, the smooth-talking mogul, shows up in a monstrous, futuristic rocket-ship of a car: a supercar that could decapitate intruders, run on nuclear fuel and make espresso.
The friend, Peter Todbaum, said he’d spent 10 months driving across what was left of the country to find Journeyman, and Journeyman’s sister, with whom he had a complicated history. (When Maddy visited the two men when they were newbies in Hollywood, she and Todbaum shared a weekend together that had apparently shattered her, although he doesn’t know the details. She only told her brother, cryptically, “He didn’t do anything to me that he doesn’t do to you.”)
Todbaum’s arrival sets up the mystery: What is he doing here? Is the supercar real? Is any of this real? In Malibu the friends had been working on a script called Yet Another World, with Maddy’s help. And when Todbaum arrives and Journeyman hoists himself into the vehicle, Lethem writes, “He climbed into surely that most abhorrent of things, a mixed metaphor.”
The unspooling of the answers provides only limited satisfaction, in part because the novel is so strange, and no single character endearing. There is also the matter of Lethem’s self-indulgent musings, which seem like observations he’s jotted in his journal over a lifetime and wants to put to use. Example: his recurring mention of “time averaging,” which he defines as the mental gymnastics in which we reconcile the younger version of people we know with the aged version confronting us today.
Another example: his introductory aside into a quirk of the wintry Northeast, frost heaves, which Lethem describes as “a verb itself frozen.”
“Maybe Frost is in fact a person, that poet we studied in high school. Frost heaves into the mind. His road diverged; ours doesn’t. Thought, really, isn’t any road you could follow in either of two directions divergent enough to begin with?” he writes, losing a third of potential readers from the get-go.
But Lethem, the author of 11 well-regarded novels including Motherless Brooklyn and several collections of short stories, is at the stage of his career where he can write what he wants, unmolested. His latest is not a bad book, just a meandering one that ultimately fails to, well, arrest. C — Jennifer Graham

BOOK NOTES
If the No.1 measure of success in America is the amount of money you make, No. 2 might be that people want to know what you read. Consider Oprah. A longstanding feature of her magazine (which ends next month, at least in paper form) is what she’s reading.
But after Oprah, Americans care passionately about what Bill Gates reads.
It seems there’s always some new breathless recommendation emanating from the Microsoft founder, the latest of which I came across on Medium under the headline “Bill Gates Just Declared This Optimistic Read His New Favorite Book of All Time.”
Gates declared this his “new” favorite book of all time in 2018. But if you are wondering, it was Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now (Penguin, 576 pages), which replaced Gates’ previous favorite book, also by Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (Penguin, 832 pages).
For something more recent, Gates recommended a handful of other books on his blog earlier this year. (Why has no one started Bill’s Book Club? He is said to read 50 books a year, by reading a minimum of an hour at a sitting.) A sampling of his recommendations this year:
Good Economics for Hard Times, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee (Public Affairs, 432 pages), the case for “intelligent interventionism” in public policy to solve inequality.
The Ride of a Lifetime, Lessons Learned from 15 years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company, by Robert Iger (Random House, 272 pages). “One of the best business books I’ve read in several years,” Gates says.
The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness, by Andy Puddicombe (St. Martin’s Griffin, 224 pages). Gates says he started to meditate after reading this book.
The Choice, by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a memoir and guide to processing trauma (Scribner, 320 pages). Added bonus for this title: It’s also endorsed by Winfrey, who has said, “I’ll be forever changed by Dr. Eger’s story.”

Featured photo: The Arrest