Books We Wish We’d Read Sooner + WWW Wednesday

Posted on July 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is, “Books We Wish We’d Found Sooner”. I tend to think I find books when I’m meant to. I have mentioned on numerous occasions, for instance, that Death and Life of Great American Cities was a life-changing book for me. I was only a quarter of the way through it and knew I would never view politics the same way again. It would not have had that effect, though, if I’d read it 2-3 years earlier. Rather, other books had started shifting my thinking in unintended ways, and then when I read Death and Life it acted on those small alterations to create a paradigm shift. I doubt that’s always the case, but I think our reading lives are journeys, in a way, knit together — not just a random string of book titles.

And now. WWW Wednesday!

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero by Chris Matthews and The Thirty-First of March, a memoir of the LBJ administration.

1WHAT are you reading now? I’m trudging through Vendetta, about the RFK/Hoffa legal contest. I’m a couple of chapters into Crusade in Europe by Dwight Eisenhower, but that will be a peck-at-it-for-weeks project, I think. It’s an extremely detailed military history of World War 2 that has already proven interesting. Here’s a couple of quotes:

The million men who had come into the Army through the National Guard and Selective Service could not be required to serve anywhere outside the Western Hemisphere or for more than twelve months at home. In the summer of 1941, consequently, with the Germans racing across Russia and their Japanese ally unmistakably preparing for the conquest of the far Pacific, the Army could only feebly reinforce overseas garrisons.

History testifies to the ineptitude of coalitions in waging war. Allied failures have been so numerous and their inexcusable blunders so common that professional soldiers had long discounted the possibility of effective allied action unless available resources were so great as to assure victory by inundation. Even Napoleon’s reputation as a brilliant military leader suffered when students in staff colleges came to realize that he always fought against coalitions—and therefore against divided counsels and diverse political, economic, and military interests.

WHAT are you reading next? I just received a preorder, Lost in Curiosity: Field Notes from Scientists’ Adventures into the Unknown; and I’m looking into The Age of Eisenhower.

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The Thirty-First of March

Posted on July 21, 2026 by smellincoffee
Book cover, THE THIRTY-FIRST OF MARCH< showing LBJ in the Oval Office, in contemplation.

I begin the first of presumably several books on LBJ by peering into his office as he made the decision to not run for office again in 1968. The door is opened by Horace Busby, a newspaperman-turned-speechwriter and confidant for LBJ, who began work on his memoirs but died with them unfinished. His son published them years after Busby’s death. This was an interesting little book, which was published in a half-complete but throroughly readable form. The partial memoir recounts how Busby came to join Johnson’s staff, and more entertainingly how he began to grow used to LBJ the man: the future president was every inch The Character when he was a representative as he later became as master of the Senate and then president. The content passes through the better part of 20 years at a very shallow cruise, and then we find ourselves with Johnson as vice president, then president, facing JFK’s death and then the prospect of running the country. LBJ’s slow decision to not run for president again in 1968 consumes the last third of the book, and it’s a decision Busby was intimately involved in. One of his roles appears to have been a counselor of sort: while Johnson’s other “boys” had definite work to do (creating policy, reaching out to allies, etc), Busby was someone for Johnson to talk to and bounce ideas off of — as well as receive honest opinions. Even when LBJ was being withdrawn and moody, he liked to ask Busby into his office to talk — and sometimes forced Busby to hang out with him until he’d fallen asleep. While readers who are unfamiliar with the late 1960s are going to be a little confused (Why is LBJ resigning?), having circled LBJ for weeks now in my 1960s history and presidential reading project, I liked starting to draw close to LBJ at last. He’s one of my least favorite presidents (rivaling only Wilson), but he was a tremendously interesting and complex man — disgusting at times, but sincere in his desire to help the least of these. This little book left me very interested to learn more despite my long disdain for him.

Quotations

Since morning, you would have been at the side of the most powerful man in the world, listening as he talked of prime ministers and kings, of senators and congressmen, of preachers and charlatans; of war and peace, of live dreams and dead hopes; of happy times past and other times ahead; and of the proper size for cuff links, of the respective merits of various hair tonics, of the price of sirloin as opposed to club steak. But when you reached your own house and your wife awakened to ask what you and the president had been doing all day, you could answer only “Nothing” and fall off to sleep. The Sunday shift was over.

“People are good,” he said. “What the average folks want is very simple: peace, a roof over their heads, food on their tables, milk for their babies, a good job at good wages, a doctor when they need him, an education for their kids, a little something to live on when they’re old, and a nice funeral when they die.”

I commented that this would be difficult to write in a campaign speech, and he shook his head in amusement. “You’re thinking like a public relations man,” he explained. “No good political speech comes out of a typewriter. It has to come from the heart.”

I had known Lyndon Baines Johnson for almost sixteen years: as congressman, senator, majority leader, and vice president. Over that span, I had liked him and disliked him; respected him and disrespected him; at times thought his public performances magnificent and at other times thought his private preoccupations monumentally boring. I had traveled with him, campaigned with him, laughed with him, worried with him, shared with him moments both of the greatest consequence and of complete unimportance. I knew him better than I wanted to know any man. But on the night of November 22, 1963, waiting for him to arrive at The Elms, I was not waiting for any man I had ever known; I was waiting for the President of the United States.

“I get the best minds in Washington together,” he went on angrily, “and what do they come up with? Vomit. Fifty pages of vomit.”

“You must never forget that fellow out in Omaha or Indianapolis or Denver. He has a wife going into the hospital for a cancer operation, a daughter he’s trying to put through school, a boy on his way to Vietnam, car payments to meet, insurance premiums due, a mortgage hanging over his head, and his mother needing to go into a nursing home. When that fellow looks at the White House, he thinks the man there has it made, has everything in the world—and he’s right. All my troubles put together aren’t as big for a president as that little fellow’s troubles are for him. We have to remember that. We have to remember that here in this house”—he slapped his palm firmly against the arm of his chair—“no man who sits here can ever afford to think of himself first.”

On most speeches I wrote slowly or, to be exact, rewrote again and again, often completing the text only minutes before it was to be read. Once, in fact, Lyndon Johnson began reading a speech to the Senate before I had completed the last pages.

A strong January wind blew his hair and the cold must have been severe, but he continued standing on the ramp, his eyes searching the horizon of a lifetime that he was leaving behind. The face on the television screens became intensely private. It was the face of another Lyndon Johnson, one whom I would never know.

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Top Ten Books that Live Rent Free

Posted on July 21, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is ‘books that live rent free in our heads’, which is an interesting premise. But first, Teaser Tuesday Time!

RFK told the reporter that his Hoffa proposal seemed promising on paper, but he had one reservation: Who the hell had ever heard of Jimmy Hoffa and David Beck?
“If you do your job right,” Mollenhoff replied, “everybody will have heard about `em — and you, too.” – VENDETTA

Top Ten Books that Live Rent Free

(1) The Geography of Nowhere, Jim Kunstler. Geography is a history of American urbanism, but written from a punchy newspaperman with a fun prose style. I attended a talk by the author on this book and its connection to the then-emerging financial crisis of 2007/2008. I am fascinated by the built environment and its impact on our lives: Kunstler argues that low-density sprawl and ticky-tacky constructs are not only unsustainable, but profoundly demoralizing.

Born in 1948, I have lived my entire life in America’s high imperial moment. During this epoch of stupendous wealth and power, we have managed to ruin our greatest cities, throw away our small towns, and impose over the countryside a joyless junk habitat which we can no longer support. Indulging in a fetish of commercialized individualism, we did away with the public realm, and with nothing left but private life in our private homes and private cars, we wonder what happened to the spirit of community. We created a landscape of scary places and became a nation of scary people.

(2) The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. I’m always having to quote this book to myself, mostly so I don’t lost patience with exasperating people. (“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.”)

(3) Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry. Thoughts of Jayber, Mattie, Athey, and Burley — especially good ol’ Burley — often flit through my mind. It contains one of my favorite quotes in fiction:

One Saturday evening, while Troy was waiting his turn in the chair, [he said] “They ought to round up every one of them [war protesters] and put them right in front of the communists, and then whoever killed who, it would all be to the good.”
There was a little pause after that. Nobody wanted to try and top it. I thought of Athey’s reply to Hiram Hench.
It was hard to do, but I quit cutting hair and looked at Troy. I said “‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’”
Troy jerked his head up and widened his eyes at me. “Where did you get that crap?”
I said, “Jesus Christ.”
And Troy said, “Oh”.
It would have been a great moment in the history of Christianity, except that I did not love Troy.

(4) The Bible. This one is kind of a gimme since I grew up in a strict Pentecostal sect that was emphatic on Bible knowledge, but even during my period when I was aggressively anti-religious, the language and stories of the Bible filled my imagination and formed my thinking. KJV phraseology is especially ‘sticky’: when I’m serving as lay reader at church I have to stop my brain from automatically ‘correcting’ RSV expressions into KJV ones.

(5) The Rainmaker and (6) The Last Juror, John Grisham. These two compete for my favorite JG novel, and it’s striking that they were both written in the first person. I have read and re-read them many times, with the consequence that there are lines that sometimes just float up from the ether. Like this, from The Rainmaker:

And just like that, this woman I met three minutes ago has reduced her husband to an alcoholic imbecile.

The Rainmaker is the story of a fresh law school grad taking on a corrupt corporation, and it’s the classic soup-to-nuts story of a lawsuit being filed and executed. The Last Juror is rather different, as it’s told from the POV of a young man who buys a small-town weekly newspaper and then experiences it throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. I really owe it a re-read.

(7) Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. This is cheating a bit because it’s a mix of the book and the movie, but whenever I use a word like ‘penultimate’ or ‘denouement’ I can thank Lemony Snicket.

(8) The Airman’s War, Albert Marrin. Another one to re-read: this history of WW2 aviation was immersive and inspired a continuing interest in prop-driven aviation. I’ve had the same copy since 2000 or so.

(9) Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis, or (10) The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis. Not a surprise here since I continually re-read them, but the stuff that often floats up is not stuff you’d expect. In Surprised by Joy, for instance, it’s stuff like this:

At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a [Catholic], and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both. 

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Jack and Bobby

Posted on July 20, 2026 by smellincoffee

“You and those Kennedys!” exclaimed the waitress at my usual lunch spot when she walked by to see me deeply invested in yet another title about the Brothers K.   I must admit, becoming obsessed with the Kennedy men was not something I thought would mark the summer.    While I have one more book in the Kennedy set (Vendetta, about RFK’s war against Jimmy Hoffa),    reading these two Chris Matthews tributes pushes me close to feeling ‘finished’ with JFK for the time being.

I refer to these as tributes rather than biographies because the author, Chris Matthews, is definitely ‘on board’.  The opening of JFK: Elusive Hero entails Matthews’  early obsession with politics, and  his feeling distraught that his man Nixon had lost against  this Kennedy guy.  Matthews, however,  soon found himself enchanted by Kennedy;   he would even wind up working in JFK’s Peace Corps.  Matthews himself seems to have undergone much the same transformation as another reporter he mentions, who asked to be taken off the RFK beat because, as he admitted, “I think I’m falling in love with this guy!”  Their assassinations, of course, are part of their mythic legacy;  we’ll never  know what might’ve become of the New Frontier, and can only see the two men in a cloud of vision and what-might-have-beens.

Digging into books like these, though, has made me  aware of how personally compelling  both men were.  While they’re remembered as liberal icons, the truth is more complex and interesting. They were, for instance, hardened cold warriors:   while RFK had softened a little by 1968 (trying to talk to a young leftist group to understand them, only to be  spit on),   they were resolutely anti-Communist.  JFK is known for his stands against Khrushchev, but RFK worked for Joe McCarthy during the red-hunter’s rise to fame and then infamy. While RFK left McCarthy’s office before the end – viewing his office as increasingly irresponsible – the Kennedys and McCarthy were close enough that RFK attended both Joe’s funeral and the burial itself. 

Although I view his numerous affairs, including when his wife was heavily pregnant and in need of his support, as despicable, it was hard to not see the other sides of Jack Kennedy in Elusive Hero and other books. Kennedy took history and its lessons seriously; he loved reading history, enjoyed writing it, and when he faced off against Khrushchev he did so wanting to apply the wisdom he’d learned – like  trying to understand an event from the other guy’s perspective, and anticipate what decisions his own might force the other guy to make. There was a balancing act between needing to show resolve and needing to not force Khrushchev into a corner. 

Admirable, too, is Kennedy’s resilience.  Before this Kennedy summer I’d heard that Kennedy had back problems; I didn’t realize that he’d spent large parts of his childhood on his sickbed from scarlet fever and other diseases, and that his ‘back pain’ was so crippling that he had to resort to crutches and even contemplate life in a wheelchair. (Matthews’ books also show the tender side of Nixon in connection to this – not only was Nixon in distress when he heard JFK was in a coma and might not live, but when he was vice president he offered JFK the use of his office in the Senate so Kennedy didn’t have to traipse across the entire building.)      He came close to death several times and often worked in pain, but for whatever reason –  perhaps knowing his father would never tolerate it, perhaps believing he had responsibilities that outweighed his misery – Kennedy kept on striving, not sinking into self-pity and despair.  Chronic illnesses can open wide that particular door.

While my appreciation of JFK was ambiguous before the summer, my appraisal of RFK was far more hostile.  This is, as I’ve admitted before, partially for stupid reasons:  I was obsessed with Frank Sinatra twenty years ago, and RFK essentially ended the Kennedy-Sinatra friendship. In behalf of Ol’ Blue Eyes,  I’ve nursed a grudge against RFK for years. I was also highly influenced by the movie Hoffa in which the smug richie-rich boy goes against the working-class hero Jimmy Hoffa and gets berated by Hoffa in one glorious scene. (“You don’t impress me, and yer office don’t impress me, and yer family don’t impress me. I don’t need a hundred thousand dollars and my brudder elected president to WOP YOUR –”)   In my early Kennedy reading, I frequently saw this disliked RFK –  who held on to grudges, who  acted like a stiff-necked jerk, etc –  and enjoyed the reinforcement of my own prejudices. However,  real people are not caricatures, and Bobby, too, had different aspects. I kept noticing those, too,  especially in Raging Spirit. 

I was, of course, fascinated to learn that RFK was a hardline anti-communist,  an attitude that’s always attractive to a libertarian such as myself. One prominent theme of Raging Spirit is that RFK was at his heart of hearts a moralist – a strict moralist. Unlike Kennedy, whose Catholicism was so poor his wife commented on it, RFK was very faithful and understood the world in clear, black and white lines.  This is presumably why he doesn’t appear to have shared his brother and father’s proclivities for chasing anything in a dress, and why he went after Hoffa and other corrupt union bosses. RFK wasn’t born a politician:  while he never got into World War 2 properly, he had the constitution of a fighting executive. He liked making decisions, liked building an organization and putting it to work, and didn’t mind if people thought he was a jerk.

It was after JFK was shot that something changed.  The loss of his brother meant the loss of purpose, but it also meant that his feelings about morality no longer had to play second fiddle to the need to support Jack. RFK increasingly became marked by not moderation, but idealism – rising to criticize the ongoing waste that was the Vietnam War, and then becoming increasingly concerned with both Civil Rights and poverty.  A son of privilege traveled in the ghettos, migrant camps, and Appalachian mining towns and transformed himself into a near prophet – but, as one Civil Rights activist cautioned him, ‘prophets get shot’.

I truly enjoyed reading Matthews’  books on the Kennedys, beginning with Kennedy and Nixon and this pair of biographies on the brothers.  While he’s more of a journalist doing history than a full biographer,   the fact that he was writing about two men whose memory had shaped his life and inspired him for decades made the story of the Kennedy brothers even more compelling. Matthews’ Kennedy and Nixon is a large part of why I became interested in Kennedy to begin with. Seeing him through the eyes of a man who had opposed him politically more than once, yet genuinely admired him, made Kennedy seem more human and interesting than mythic. Tt was fitting, then, to wrap up with Matthews.

Coming up: I’m a third of the way through One of Us (Tricky Dick is back!), and I began a Sarah Ruden title about language and beauty in the Bible. President-wise, I am trying to decide if I want to tackle Truman, Eisenhower, or LBJ next. I have books chosen for the former two but find the prospect of a proper LBJ biography daunting. All the really reputable stuff is multi-volume.

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The Gospel of Mark: A Beginner’s Guide

Posted on July 17, 2026 by smellincoffee


The Gospel of Mark: A Beginner’s Guide  to the Good News is an informal introduction to the first of the synoptic Gospels.   It’s markedly different from the other Gospels in its spareness and pace. Mark moves,  and everything is done ‘immediately’, from the disciples going out on missions to Herod Antipas having John the Baptist beheaded, chop-chop.  I checked this out to support my mission in January of reading books about the Bible in tandem with reading the Bible in a year, and was eager to get into it because I’ve read several books by Amy-Jill Levine over the years and enjoy her style. She’s more informal in this than in her commentaries in The Jewish Annotated New Testament, but that’s to be expected.  Although the book has serious scholarly content, Levine is also appreciating it on a spiritual level –  looking at the parables, for instance, and asking the reader provocative questions that rise from them.  She settles into etymology when appropriate, pointing out that Mark often uses ‘kairos’ rather than ‘chronos’. The distinction is important, because whereas chronos simply refers to time as we experience – second by second, day by day – kairos is sometimes called “God’s time”.   Mark’s very language conveys that now the hour is at hand, now is the hour of salvation. 

While I found the book very interesting at times, I soured on it the more I read it. Levine’s joking asides are fun at first, but quickly wear off their welcome, and her personal views are sometimes in the driver’s seat, leading to nonsensical takes. She does not like the Parables which attack the Temple and its leadership, for instance, and this results in her somehow skewing the parable of the murderous tenants as a labor dispute against a corrupt landlord. Said tenants literally murder anyone the landlord sends to pick up his portion of the revenue — revenue that owes to him buying the land, establishing the fields, fences, and presses — and nothing in the text supports him being corrupt. The worst one can say is that he’s absent. That was the point (60% through the book or so) when I lost trust in the author. She also completely dismisses the idea that Peter wanting to create tents during the Transfiguration has anything to do with the Feast of Booths, saying it “does nothing for me”. Considering that the Feast of Booths is sometimes associated with the coming of the Messiah (all nations celebrating it once the Messiah comes), Elijah heralds the Messiah’s arrival, and Elijah is present at the Transfiguration, it’s a vein rich enough to demand addressing. Her outright dismissal of it is far too cavalier.

This was a mixed bag on the whole; I enjoyed some of the deep dives and side-trails (like her fascination with the ‘naked man’ in the arrest of Jesus), but it felt too chatty for me and some commentary was entirely off the rails. If this had been my first Levine, I doubt I’d read her again: as it is, I still enjoy her work — just not this one.

Quotations

The mountain, and the prayer, lead to an eruption of the uncanny, or the
miraculous. Go up the mountain, and you may be a different person when you return. While the bear who went over the mountain only saw the other side of the mountain (does anyone remember this song?), we are not bears and we should be awake rather than hibernating. We can understand a change in perspective.

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More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Posted on July 16, 2026 by smellincoffee

Two years ago I checked out Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and began an on-again, off-again fling with Japanese literature. The story concerned young Takako, who had been just been dumped by her boyfriend when he announced he was getting married to his other girlfriend — the real one. Terms out she was just a sidequest. Takako was forced to move into a little apartment above her uncle’s bookshop, where over a course of months she found healing and meaning in talking to people who came into the shop about the books they were reading. More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is a direct continuation of that story, with heavier emphasis on Uncle Satoru and his wife Mamoko. In the original book, Satoru’s wife had run off on him, but here’s she’s returned — but with bad news. The relationship between the older adults really made the book for me at the end: the first part, about Takako trying to date a young man named Wada and being haltered by her memories of heartbreak, wasn’t as interesting because Wada was such an un-interesting character for me. The only thing that was memorable was the fact that he lives in an apartment that’s in such a state pigs would be offended if you called it a sty. The general setting was just as inviting as before — a close-knit neighborhood dominated by bookstores and coffee shops is a place I’d love to visit.

Quotations

What did it mean to be in a relationship? I wondered as I stared vacantly at the ceiling. We went to the movies, we went out to eat, we slept at each other’s places. But if I never got inside his heart, would we ever really be together?

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The Rupture

Posted on July 15, 2026 by smellincoffee

One minute, Nymeria was just a college sophomore; the next, she was bewildered, panicked, and part of a world she had no idea existed — one which is now on the precipice of war and destruction. Great lines of light appear in the sky, and all around her people appear to be turning into animals or fairy-tale creatures. As Nymeria flees a chaotic school full of people suddenly turning into magic creatures and attacking each other, she’s led to safety by a friend of hers, Jake, who has obviously been hiding something. Jake is an elf — and so is Nymeria. She’s not just any old elf, though, she’s the princess of a city who has been hidden in the human world — and hidden from herself — to protect her from a fated prophecy. Now, however, the woman and the hour have met. The Rupture is part one of a series in which Nym, still getting used to her role and powers, is forced into a position of responsibility as she tries to restore peace before all hell or chaos-monster dragons break loose.

A fantasy novel of this kind is outside my usual reading scope, but considering that this summer my scope has been ‘1960s politicians’, it could do with a little freshening up. The reader is thrown, with Nym, into an unfamiliar world to sort out what’s happened. What we find is that the magical world used to be concealed from humans, but something’s happened to create the Rupture — now magical creatures, including humans who use magic (witches), are visible unless they take particular pains to conceal themselves with ‘glamour’. Part of the fun of starting a new fantasy series is seeing where it strikes a balance between old tropes and new ideas; there are a lot of familiar magical races here, but others exist with different ‘spins.’ This world has a lot of races who keep entirely to themselves, like the fae folk, as well as others like elves who are in regular contact with ‘shifters’ and witches. While there are some familiar tropes, like elves being graceful creatures who prefer the forest, and ogres being nasty beings all around, there are also variations. We have characters who ‘read’ like werewolves, for instance — shifting into wolves, living together, operating as a pack with an alpha — but they’re part of a larger group called shifters, or humans who can shift into an animal form and often live that way. One shifter will become increasingly important to Nym, resulting in a romance thread that’s not graphic.

Because this is the beginning of a series, we have a dramatic denouement at the end, but not the epic finale; this book appears to be mostly about introducing us to the characters and worldbuilding, though Nym does make significant progress on her quest, sometimes unintentionally. Because she is completely new to being a magical creature, Nym has no control over her powers at first and unintentionally attracts attention from creatures of the deep forest, like the centaurs; contact with whom will be important later on in the series. Her inability to control her powers, basically being a walking piece of magical explosive ordnance, also makes friendships and alliances critical, because she is completely vulnerable after she loses control.

All in all, an interesting start to a new series! I was as confused as Nym first, but enjoyed starting to get to know this new world.

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WWW Wednesday & “Would You Go Sky-Diving?”

Posted on July 15, 2026 by smellincoffee
A screenshot of a facebook post in the group GENEALOGY HELP in which a user says "Done with this group. to many grammar police and premadonna's in it". Three subsequent replies point out the errors in spelling and grammar in the supposedly-exiting member's post. (Said member has not, in fact, exited.)

Today’s prompt from Long and Short reviews is, “Would you go sky-diving?”. Ever since kindergarten when the janitor made our merry-go-round go super-super fast and I got flung onto the grass throwing up, I have been very sensitive to motion sickness and hyper-aware of G-forces. So…no, no. Probably not.

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? RFK: Raging Spirit, Chris Matthews; End of the Road, Gord McGill. Also finished The Hidden Coalition, which was about LBJ, Eisenhower, and 1950s politics. Interesting for the general history, but I don’t know that it really carried its thesis — that LBJ and Eisenhower were secret collaborators — beyond the title.

WHAT are you reading now? Nosing into both More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and The Thirty-First of March, the latter being a short memoir of the last days of LBJ’s administration.

WHAT are you reading next? Who knows? I still have a JFK biography by Matthews, and a book on the Hoffa vs RFK tussle that might get my attention considering I just read about the trucking industry, and I’ve a book on the Gospel of Mark by Amy-Jill Levine which I’d planned to read in tandem with my Bible in a Year project. (As it happens, I’ve left the second messianic interlude and am now back in 2nd Kings/2nd Chronicles.) However, one never knows with me: last week I posted WWW Wednesday and decided to tackle End of the Road which had been absent entirely.

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The War against Truckers

Posted on July 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

A few months ago, video surfaced of a ‘truck driver’ deciding to execute a U-turn in the middle of a busy highway. If you are familiar with the physics of truck-trailers, you’d know immediately how insane and irresponsible a move that is. It met with the inevitable, tragic result: an SUV, not expecting such imbecilic behavior, plowed into the sudden obstacle. Three people were all killed; the ‘driver’, a recent immigrant with an un-tested CDL, looked annoyed. How the hell does that happen?

End of the Road: Inside the the War Against Truckers is a history of how absolutely antagonistic governments and market forces have grown to be towards that vital percentage of workers who keep the blood of modern economies flowing. While it’s largely about the American labor market, author Gord McGill has worked in Canada and his insights and experience cover Australian trucking as well: he’s a man who has freighted goods in all three countries. McGill mostly writes about the American market, but some of the forces he writes about are in effect across North America in general even if the specific legislation that feeds them varies by country. McGill’s targets are a mix of both deregulation and regulation, but both are tied to labor. The main thrust of this book is that completely opening access to trucking has made the labor pool shallow and treacherous: because US CDL licenses are not graduated the way other Western countries’ are — with multiple levels indicating increasing proficiency in more varied and demanding situations — a kid who graduates from a diploma mill can be thrown in well over his head. Responsible companies, with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, would presumably not want an inexperienced driver driving their equipment on huge contracts, right? You’d think, but jiggle the variables a bit and the law of average wins out. What if the driver isn’t driving your equipment, but has instead been seduced into leasing his own? He wrecks the rig, he’s liable for it, not you, and paying new drivers jack while accepting some levels of accidents (new drivers are 70% more likely to ‘hit something’ and 40% more likely to be in a serious collision) is evidently more cost effective than paying experienced drivers what they’re worth. This is especially true when the new drivers are FOB immigrants who can’t speak English and who have been recruited with a promise that it will help their bid for citizenship. The poor pay and baptisms by fire that many new drivers encounter leads to an incredible amount of turnover, so corpos and the government constantly fret over ‘driver shortages’ and throw CDLs at anyone capable of putting on a pair of boots despite the fact that there are more registered CDLs in the country than could ever find work — if they were active. McGill writes that many young drivers would leave the industry if they could, but they’re debt slaves: they have to pay for their ‘training’ and the rig they had to lease as part of their hiring contract.

Drivers, especially on-the-road drivers who spend most of their time on the open highway shuttling goods from terminal to terminal, are highly mythologized in American culture, hailed as modern cowboys of a sort. There have to be reasons a man would forgo seeing his wife and children more than a few times a month, to being incapable of making regular social plans, to knowing he might end his day peeing in a jug and sleeping on the side of the road. There used to be: a reliable paycheck and the prestige that came from being a king of the road. These days, though, the pay envelope is lighter and lighter, and truckers are reduced by technology to being just one more drone. Their trucks are infested with tech that spies on them, and routes are handed down from on high rather than being left to their experience, local knowledge, and shared information with other drivers. Much of these tech measures have been inflicted against a declining pool of experienced, safe drivers to counteract the gross negligence of new hires, who often have no knowledge of English or local road cultures, committing outrageous errors. It adds insult to injury, and is made even worse by the fact that local knowledge is often superior to those GPS routes — new drivers often find themselves driving in places where a truck has no right to be.

McGill covers a lot of other ground here, like analyzing the role of brokerage firms — who connect drivers and firms with loads, often manipulating both parties — and reviewing the various organizations who claim to speak for truckers. Many of these are certainly not spokesmen for drivers: the huge corporations who drive down wages by having the government subsidize their training of 90-day wonders are antagonists of the ordinary driver, not his friends; and the Teamsters, while previously being titans of (corrupt) labor, now only represent a meager portion of them and are often as dismissive of drivers’ interests as the corporate powers. During the Freedom Convoy, for instance, when drivers and their rigs aimed for Ottawa to protest the COVID regimes, the Teamsters followed the party line. Why? Because the men who run these organizations are not and have never been drivers themselves: they’re the same soft-handed out of touch ‘professional managers’ that can be found in every overwieldly and unproductive corporation and ngo.

As infuriating as this book was, I enjoyed being pissed off — mostly because I’m the son of a driver and the nephew of many others. I grew up in truck yards, watching my dad pore over maps with other drivers and discuss road conditions. I’d watch with fascination as these men hurled straps over their loads and tied them down, and began meticulously looking over their rig before hitting the road. I have heard complaints like McGill’s for decades — the grumbling over electronic systems that are constantly making the entire rig break down, the feeling that you’re not your own anymore. Part of what makes End of the Road work, I think, is that even when he’s pointing out that immigrant drivers are a huge part of the problem, he’s not treating them as the problem — he even argues that they themselves are being exploited, since many have no idea how radically challenging the North American landscape is to driving than to what they’re used to. He keeps his fire on the collusion between profit-hungry corpos and the government, rather than the working man.

Related

Pedal to the Metal: The Work Lives of Truckers. Written in the 1980s, this already showed how technology was starting to degrade the king of the road.

Trucking Country : The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy. I used to have this one but it focused so much on economic and regulatory policy I let it go. Reading End of the Road makes me think I need to hunt down a used copy again..

Quotations

Yet nothing has been done to beef up lax training systems, and efforts to remove the incompetents from the road have only just begun. Instead, veteran seasoned truckers like myself, people with a lifetime of safe operation and clean driving records, are forced to work under ever more punishing scrutiny and surveillance technologies that insult our professionalism. Trucks themselves are now built to accommodate lower-skilled drivers, perpetuating a cycle that further degrades the respect and honor once afforded us. Life on the road continues to deteriorate in numerous ways: there’s not enough parking, truck stops are closing or converting to fast food only, and surveillance technology and the flooding of the industry with recent arrivals have completely upended our culture. How we relate to each other, how we are treated at customer facilities—it’s all part of a pattern of dehumanization.

Truck-driver training is exactly back-asswards in America. Most new truckers, once they have learned the bare minimum to pass a state CDL exam, are sent out on their own to crisscross America without any experience whatsoever. The results are about what you would expect.

If there were an actual shortage of truckers, trucking companies wouldn’t get away with barely paying minimum wage, would they? If the market for drivers were this hot and this desperate, maybe a guy with two decades of experience and a near perfect driving record would get offers more befitting his profile? In a properly functioning market economy, wouldn’t the shortage boost the price of truckers’ labor a little higher than what one might expect at a fast-food restaurant, a job often advertised as a stepping stone for teenagers into adulthood, and one not meant to pay that much? What are we missing here?

Scratch beneath the surface of the ad copy for any truck-driver training school or local- and state-funded retraining program, and the government grants and subsidies become immediately apparent. From funds doled out by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding from the Biden Administration in a 2023 handout, it is clear that the trucking industry is awash in taxpayer largesse, and unless we recognize this corporate-welfare program for exactly what it is, the money will continue to flow.

Another clothing-related issue might not seem like a big deal but is revealing about the nanny-statism animating certain Australian workplaces. Even when working outside in heat exceeding one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, you must wear a long-sleeved shirt for any job, regardless of the task. The stated concern is that you might get skin cancer at some point in the future, and the assumption is that you, a grown adult, are not to be trusted to apply sunscreen. “It’s for your own good, mate,” was the near universal reply whenever I spoke with Australians about this. Nanny statism runs so deep in their society that it’s like talking to the proverbial fish about water. It is inconceivable that you may have legitimate agency, as an adult, to make your own decisions about the clothes you wear or whether to apply sunscreen.

While sitting there, I noticed he had a flat-screen TV showing a square for every driver camera in the fleet, and nearly all of the cams were on or displaying a cycle of all those twelve-second clips running together. I could watch any guy in the company—and so could the people who claimed they would never do that.

The data is clear: truck-involved collisions on American highways started ticking up in 2016, which is when English language proficiency enforcement was waived. So what is the argument for this waiver? Who benefits? Major corporations, that’s who, for which this simple requirement is a hurdle to incremental increases in shareholder return.

Dhillon recalled telling Biden Administration officials that a “person crossing the border with no experience . . . gets a work permit in two months, and within one month gets their CDL. Well, they never even drove a car in this country, so why are we doing this? This is not even an issue [just] for the trucking industry. This is a national security issue.”.

The modern labor movement has a problem in the divergence of interests between its members and its leadership. Most union leaders today come from what Barbara Ehrenreich referred to as the “Professional Managerial Class.” They are university trained and credentialed and more often than not have never sweated a day in their lives—not to earn their keep, anyway. They also have fixations on those cultural issues which obsess the progressive political class and often offend regular working men and women.

The people who insist that aesthetics don’t matter, that trucking is strictly business, and a truck is just a tool to get work done as cheaply as possible, are missing or ignoring the fact that in virtually any other trade we could all be making more money in fewer hours without spending weeks away from home. Clearly there is something about trucking—incomprehensible to the spreadsheet brain of your average accountant—that draws us to it, but we don’t agree on what exactly that means or what we’re willing to compromise to be here. As for me, I’ve had enough of being a half-assed cyborg in today’s highly surveilled, mostly automated fiberglass and plastic aero trucks. I’m glad that many fuel-saving features are available for those who want them, but I’m an American—I shift gears, I piss standing up, and I resent not having a choice. When I wake up early in the morning I put on steel-toed boots and a pearl-snap shirt and I set out to do my job with dignity, respect, and, when possible, good cheer. I do the right thing even when I’m not being watched by the cops, a safety manager, or the safety manager’s AI assistant. I treat my work with a level of seriousness appropriate for an environment where a lack of skill, or more likely one lapse in judgement or attention, can easily kill half a dozen innocent people—as news reports show with increasing frequency despite our electronic babysitters. Is there still a place for me in the trucking industry? After thirteen years of professional driving all I can say is that I honestly don’t know. I’m about to take a huge step in my career and an enormous financial risk to find out—by buying an older, less automated truck and putting it to work full-time. We’ve all heard the cliché “Trucking isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle.” That’s true. That’s why the freedom to live in accordance with one’s own values is so critically important. What I’ve come to realize is that if I can’t do this job my way, there’s no point in doing it at all.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Chansons et Livres Français

Posted on July 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is books from new-to-us authors we’d like to read, but given that today is Bastille Day, I’m going to salute la belle France instead! There was a period (2012 – 2013) in which I was besotted with France, so much that I even ordered a book on learning French. (French: How to Speak it and How to Write It. Dover.) The mood eventually left me,but I remember the period fondly. Today, I’m going to do a mix: first, some books from that period, along with pieces of French music that bring back the old feeling. (Someone, Wordsandpeace I think, requested that I share some of my favorite French music on July 1. I did mean to.) All the French is from Google translate. Mais d’abord….

Teaser Tuesday

The people who insist that aesthetics don’t matter, that trucking is strictly business, and a truck is just a tool to get work done as cheaply as possible, are missing or ignoring the fact that in virtually any other trade we could all be making more money in fewer hours without spending weeks away from home. Clearly there is something about trucking—incomprehensible to the spreadsheet brain of your average accountant—that draws us to it, but we don’t agree on what exactly that means or what we’re willing to compromise to be here. – Gord McGill, END OF THE ROAD: INSIDE THE WAR ON TRUCKERS

Top 10 du mardi

(1) A Life of her Own, Emile Carles. I really owe this one a re-read, because it’s fascinating in itself — the memoir of a schoolteacher in the early 1900s who taught her village schoolchildren to think freely and question the state and their culture — but it played an important role in my own political biography. Carles’ leftism was anti-authoritarian, allowing me to begin reading anarchists like Emma Goldman and then find myself surprised to be in the company of right-libertarians.(One of these days I’m going to do a paper on Emma Goldman and Ayn Rand — both Russian emigres, both individualists, with very different worldviews.)

‘Beware of politicians, beware of silver-tongued orators, do your utmost to judge for yourself, and above all, take advantage of the beauty life offers.”

(2) Citizens: A History of the French Revolution, Simon Schama. A comprehensive and eye-opening book. One comment from my notes that leaps out: at one point the revolutionaries were so intoxicated with fighting the king that even when he was trying to fix things in a way they’d like, they obstructed him anyway.

Et maintenant, un peu de musique….

(3) “Mon Oncle” soundtrack. I adore Jacques Tati’s movies, at least those with M. Hulot. The soundtrack is a happy place in its own right. I listen to it several times a week. (It’s only 30 minutes — don’t be too impressed.) I can almost imagine Wodehouse writing Bertie Wooster to this music…

(4) Avalon Jazz Band. Man alive, I love listening to Tatiana Eva-Marie and the Avalon Jazz Band.

Un retour aux livres…

La Belle France: A Short History, Alistair Horne. A lovely narrative history of France.

French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure. When I read this, I had just changed my diet from the ‘normal American diet’ to one that ruled out processed foods. I was doing this to minimize salt; I wound up losing, almost inexplicably, well over a hundred pounds. I read a lot on food and food culture in 2012 as a result, in large part because I was trying to figure out What Am I Doing Right and How Can I Do More Of It?

Bringing up Bebe: One Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. In my twenties I was starting to think about the possibility of children and fatherhood, and thus reading books like this and Unschooling: increasingly, this book was part of a course in French culture, which I was loving. I recently tried to explain to someone why I enjoy Japanese literature so much — it’s because it makes me aware of a coherent culture, one with rules that are learnable and are generally intended to make life more humane and meaningful. My French kick at this time was communicating something very similar.

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong. A general review of why ‘we’ like France but not the French. I suspect I would argue with this book a lot more now from economic terms — I didn’t read Hayek until the very end of December 2012 — but it captures my mood from this year.

Et maintenant, encore de la musique !

“La vie en Rose”, Edith Piaf. I found this via Saving Private Ryan, I think, though I got really into 1930s – 1950s pre-rock vocalists in the early-mid 2000s. Couldn’t very well forget to mention it here! I also enjoy Dean Martin and Louis Armstrong’s versions of it, which have a mix of English and French lyrics.

“I Will Wait for You”, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Umbrellas is a romantic drama about a young couple who fall passionately in love, but then the man is called to serve France in war: they decide to consummate their relationship in case they are forever separated, which leads to a little croissant in the oven. Drama ensues as la fille must choose what to do. Unfortunately, the best version of this song from the movie — where they are singing together before the night that changes everything — has been removed from youtube. Oh! Everything in the film is sung. Everything.

This is technically ten books or titles, but there are two tracks I cannot not mention. The first is “Flower Duet“, performed by sopranos , Sabine Devieilhe & Marianne Crebassa. I’ve shared it before in flower-related posts. The other is a mix I have been listening to for fifteen years on youtube: somehow it has survived copyright strikes and other vagaries of fate. I wake up, I make coffee, I put this on. When it goes off, I know it’s time to get showered for work.

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