2021, Year in Review!

Posted on January 6, 2022 by smellincoffee

What’s this? Another year gone? Well, on to the books!


Most of my reading fell into the above categories, the remainder being small fry like fantasy, Star Trek, and world affairs. Most of my reading was nonfiction, no surprise there – 62% if you want the cold hard number. A slight majority of my books were e-books rather than physical, and an even slighter majority of them were borrowed instead of purchased.  

Starting out I had several goals – to restart the Classics Club with fifty fresh titles; to read more southern history and literature, and to make progress on my TBR pile.  I’d say I did well on all three; the continuing existence of TBR pile is mostly my friends’ fault. They keep giving me books, the villains! The Classics Club Strikes Back is off to a good start, with 20 titles read, and a respectable distribution across the categories I chose, the exception being Classic Science Fiction, I most favored One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, not only for its illustration of how abysmal life in the Soviet Union was,  but  for its message that a man could still triumph over the dehumanizing nature of the prison camp. 

History made its usual showing, though science was right on its tail for most of the year. There’s no shortage of excellence here; Midnight in Chernobyl and Touching History: 9/11 in the Skies both come to mind, as does Liza Picard’s Victorian London. The latter drove me to buy several books by Picard, which will feature in 2022’s Read of England. 

Science had, on the surface, a strong year, with twenty titles read. When I looked back at my reading, though, I was dismayed to find that I hadn’t posted many proper reviews at all, instead relegating virtually all my science reviews after February to mini-reviews, presenting them in twos and threes. My favorites were Good Reasons for Bad Feelings and How Emotions are Made, though The Storytelling Animal was another strong contender.  

 Religion and Philosophy had a good, if….weird, year. I attempted to read all of Ayn Rand’s nonfiction (two volumes remain), finding her more interesting than expected, and a welcome rebuttal against the mobbishness that’s dominated 2020 and 2021. My favorite reads in this area, though, were Brad Birzers’ Beyond Tenebrae, and Seeking Christendom, both reviewing Christian humanism and literature connected to it.

In Science Fiction and Technical Thrillers,  there were numerous hits. Project Hail Mary was arguably the best, but The Warehouse  showed a future we’re not too far away from now. Doctorow’s Attack Surface was a welcome continuation of his Little Brother series.  I was in a serious dystopian mood during the summer, thanks in part to how insane organizations, governments, communities, and private companies have been in the last year. It’s been a strange period of collective madness, of institutionalized hypochondria.

Historical Fiction, which typically puts in a strong showing, faltered a bit this year. I continued with a few familiar authors (Cornwell, Collard) and began exploring Ben Kane’s works, which proved very promising. His Eagles at War was a superb depiction of Rome’s defeat by the Germans; only the surprise return of Richard Sharpe in Sharpe’s Assassin gave it any  competition. 

Southern Fiction, which debutes in the end-year review this year,  has Robert Ruark and Rick Bragg in serious competition; as much as Bragg’s writing moves me, though, I love The Old Man and the Boy’s  combination of outdoors adventure and the unique moment in time it captured (1920s-30s Carolina).  I read five Bragg books, enjoying his family trilogy the best — and its middle volume, Ava’s Man, particularly.

One fun thing I did this year was Space Camp, in which I read numerous astronaut memoirs. Of these, my favorite was Spaceman by Mike Massimino, followed by Eileen Collin’s Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars.

What’s next?

So, what’s coming in 2022? ….much the same as came in 2021, to be honest. I’ve done legwork for several themes of varying lengths (weekly, monthly, and year-long), but haven’t locked in anything at present: in consideration are a month devoted to the medieval epoch, a year-long series with a traveling spotlight on cities that dominated or epitomized a particular era (think caliph-era Baghdad, renaissance Venice, Victorian London, etc), and revisits of my past Mideast and Asian reading focuses. I’m leery of launching into a project that will require getting access to a bunch of books, though, when I live with the draining presence of my TBR pile. I want so much to be rid of it, and yet friends keep giving me books — so that despite the dozens of TBR titles I tackled in 2021, the mount is as substantial as ever. What will definitely happen is the usual:

Science Survey:
– BASE GOAL: 12 books, one for each category
– SECONDARY GOAL: 20 books in total
– SPECIFIC TARGETS: Science books in my TBR stack include DNA is Not Destiny, This is Your Brain on Music, and The Moral Animal.

The Classics Club Strikes Back, Year II
– BASE GOAL: 10 books
– SECONDARY GOAL: 15 books

Readin’ Dixie
– BASE GOAL: One book a month in southern literature or history
– SECONDARY GOAL: An average of two books a month in southern literature or history
– SPECIFIC TARGETS: Finish reading available Rick Bragg works, try Pat Conroy

Climbing Mount Doom
– BASE GOAL: Confront at least one TBR book a week with the aim of reading or discarding it.
– SPECIFIC TARGET: Level Mount Doom.

Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!

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Brothers and Friends

Posted on January 6, 2022 by smellincoffee

Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis
© 1981 Warren Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Mead
301 pages

Reading of C.S. Lewis’ life and letters, I often encounter his brother Warnie Lewis, and regard him with complete sympathy. An historian and  lifelong bachelor, he was happiest with a book, a beverage, a comfy chair, and his pipe. Though overshadowed by his younger brother Jack, Warren held no grudge;  he and his brother’s life centered around the other, and he was only happy to help Jack cope with his affairs when the younger Lewis became a celebrity. Brothers and Friends makes their close relationship plain,    evidenced by their constant activity together and Warnie’s obvious loss of heart in the years after Jack’s death in November ‘63.  

Warren’s initial diary begins at the close of the Great War, upon receipt of a journal for Christmas; he then writes faithfully with interruptions for the remaining decades of his life.  He is a vociferous a reader as his brother, and the book brims over with recollections of their frequent pub arguments and long walks together in the English countryside, discussing and debating matters of literature, politics, and theology. (These walks included short strolls with the dogs, and longer annual hikes  that went on for days.)     Although Warren didn’t share his brother’s tastes for Shakespeare and philosophy,  he was an avid consumer of English poetry, biographies, histories, and novels, and he contributed several French histories to his chosen field.  A reader who is aware of Warren’s later struggle with alcoholism will note with sadness the frequent and steady mentions of whisky-and-sodas early on, but cheer Warnie on when he begins recording his tee-totaling days, having become aware of the cycle of insomnia, depression, and drunkenness that he was slipping in to. Warren is amusingly uncomfortable around the fairer sex, and asserts that men in general find women poor company indeed unless they’re attracted to them. (Warnie seems to have been fond of at least two, though: his brother’s semi-ward, Maureen Moore, and Joy Davidman.)  

Warren is wonderful company, especially for a chronic bachelor-reader like myself who sees in him a kindred spirit. Not for Warren was the rat race, or the pursuit of honors; he wanted nothing but stimulating reads and good conversation, and his life was filled with both. As life wore on, especially after his brother’s death, he was increasingly sad for the world they were leaving behind: he saw country scenes plowed under for dismal architecture, and witnessed a growing sterility in the world around him. In his later years, he turned to the classics with fuller devotion, even reading Shakespeare which he’d once found unpalatable.  Although it’s very difficult to separate an appreciation for Warren from an appreciation for Jack — so closely do they stand together — he does appear here a distinct figure, with his own tastes entirely apart from his brother. Those who are interested in the personalities of the Inklings will find this especially attractive, given that Warren documents who was at which meeting and so on, and the subject of conversation at each meeting: poetry and literature, typically. Interestingly, he harrumphs against the idea of the Inklings as a deliberate literary society, with a characteristic influence on its members: Warren writes that they were merely friends, who, by virtue of their common literary interests, spent part of their time comparing and improving the others’ work.

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No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes

Posted on January 4, 2022 by smellincoffee

No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes
© 2021 Mark Eglinton
271 pages

How could one life possibly have so many dimensions? How could it all be true? How the hell was this man still alive?

When the talking heads begin rattling on about notable deaths of 2021, they will mention all manner of useless, uninteresting people — politicians, athletes, pop musicians. They will not mention John McAfee, who after months on the run from multiple states and various criminal organizations, was captured by the Spanish and succumbed to ‘suicide’ in his lonely prison cell. He lived hard, fast, and brilliantly — embracing chaos in his own life and almost exulting in it, until at last it got the better of him. He entered the public domain as a self-made tech millionaire, riding the wave of his antivirus software, and decades later would be more notable as an eccentric fugitive, whose paranoia or zest for life led him to live abroad and frequently abandon everything to start again — who made his return to the United States by mocking the media’s presentation of him as a druglord with a harem. John’s is a voice which has been silenced — but not quite, for here we have a collection of interviews in the last year of his extraordinary, singular life, getting another look into this mind that occupied the line between genius and insanity.

No Domain is not a formal biography of McAfee, but a collection of interviews between himself and Englinton that were given with an eye to creating an authorized story of the man’s life. The interviews are given sporadically, as McAfee was on the run at the time, and Englinton ties them together with a narrative detailing his struggles to make progress getting a self-professed paranoiac to trust him — and to trust what the subject was telling him. McAfee grew up in a troubled household, with an abusive father who beat him and committed suicide when he was but a teenager. Something of a math prodigy, McAfee quickly realized he could game college by reading and mastering the textbooks quickly, then spending his time partying and making money on the side. This philosophy continued as he aged; in his twenties, he accepted training as a computer programmer back when executing a program meant manually flipping switches on a computer control board. His talents here led him to work at numerous high-profile companies, and at each he employed the same strategy that worked in college: knock out the work quickly, then focus on drugs and women. As computer technology matured, McAfee became fascinated by the appearance of the first computer virus, and crafted a way to detect and remove it from affected machines. This was the beginning of McAfee Associates’ VirusScan, which would catapult him into the realm of the super-rich and allow him to become the….colorful character of the 2000s.

McAfee, throughout these interviews, presents himself as someone who was devoted to Living — not merely existing. He couldn’t abide a 9-5 grind, to live every day according to a preordained pattern. He chased highs, through a wide array of illicit substances and women, and once he had money, explored his creative side by sinking money into developing properties throughout the world. Some were more art projects than functional residences. McAfee often appears to be a creature of impulse, attempting to solve social problems in Belize and Hawaii through massive expenditures, and invariably attracting the wrath of local powers and authorities who didn’t like this strange outsider throwing his weight around them. His time in Belize was particularly…dramatic, as he was compelled to hire a security force the size of a small army to prevent retaliation from hurting those he was trying to help. (That’s his story: what passes for authorities in Belize claim he killed his neighbor.) Eventually the chaos forced him out and back to the United States, where after some political activities, he is targeted by the IRS for not paying tribute to the state — for ten years. Such was the path that led him to living on a boat and eventually being arrested in Spain.

I was disappointed that there’s almost no content on McAfee’s warnings about the technocratic surveillance state, and the exposure American IT infrastructure has to cyberattacks. These were what first drew me to McAfee, and kept me interested despite realizing he was….troubled. In many ways, his was not a life I’d model mine after, and yet I valued him for his frequent warnings about the rising surveillance system, his full-throated advocacy for cryptocurrency to thwart the corruption of money by states and banks, and admired him for his continued defiance of the state. They killed him in the end, as no state-gangster can abide someone who doesn’t cower under Ozymandias’ glare, but his spirit lives on. While this is not the biography of McAfee his fans might hope for, it’s a welcome release.

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What I Read in 2021

Posted on December 31, 2021 by smellincoffee

Books in bold are superior favorites.

— January —

1. Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell us About Ourselves, Frans de Waal 
2. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (CCSB)
3. Permanent Record, Edward Snowden
4. The Old Man and the Boy, Robert Ruark (CCSB)
5. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,  Ernest Gaines (CCSB)
6. A Walk Around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Covers, & Other Stuff You See Every Day (and Know Nothing About),  Spike Carlsen
7.  Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West, Brad Birzer
8. Star Wars: Kenobi, John Jackson Miller9. A Time for Mercy, John Grisham
10.  Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South, Rick Bragg
11.The Wonder Boy of Whistle Stop Cafe,   Fannie Flagg
12. Alabama: The Making of an American State, Edwin C. Bridges
13. Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin
14. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
15. Battle for the Southern Frontier:  The Creek War and the War of 1812,  Mike Bunn & Clay Williams

— February —
16. Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans, Brian Kilmeade
17. The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think, Jennifer Ackerman
18. Why We are Here: Mobile and the Spirit of an American City, E.O. Wilson & Alex Harris
19. The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age, Scott Woolley
20. Forgotten Continent: A New History of the New Latin America, Michael Reid
21. The Lost Classics,  Robert Ruark. ed. Jim Casada
22. The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History,  1962-1976,  Frank Dikotter
23. Cold Sassy Tree, Olivia Ann Burns (CCSB)
24. The Last Stargazers, Emily Levesque
25. The Hardest Job in the World: the US Presidency,  John Dickerson

–– March —
26. Jesus the Son of Man, Kahlil Gibran
27. Camino Winds, John Grisham
28. Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature, Anthony Esolen
29. Disasters by Choice: How Our Actions Turn Natural Hazards into Catastrophes, Ilan Kelman
30.  Travels with Foxfire:  Stories of People, Passions, and Practices of Southern Appalachia, Foxfire fund
31. Rogue Code, Mark Russonovich
32. The Big Book of Autocorrect Fails, Tim Dedopoulous
33. WTF Evolution? A Theory of Unintelligble Design, Mara Grunbaum
34. Just in Case: How to be Self-Sufficient when the Unexpected Happens,  Kathy Harrison
35. Women of Genesis: Rebekah, Orson Scott Card
36. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human, Johnathan Gottschall
37. Conspiracies Declassified: The Skeptoid Guide to the Truth behind the Theories, Brian Dunning
38. Davita’s Harp, Chaim Potok
39. The Fox from his Lair, Max Hennessy
40. How to Live: What the Rule of St. Benedict Teaches Us About Happiness, Meaning, and Community,  Judith Valente
41. The Rebel Killer, Paul Fraser Collard

–April–
42. A Visitor’s Guide to Jane Austen’s England,  Sue Wilkes
43. Master of War: The Blooding, David Gilman
44.  We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State, Kai Strittmatter
45.  His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
46. Captains Courageous, Rudyard Kipling
47. Victorian London: The Tale of a City, Liza Picard
48. Sword and Serpent, Taylor Marshall
49.  Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
50. Traveller,  Richard Adams
51. The Tech-Wise Family,  Andy Crouch
52. The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, Leon Podles
53. Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail, Ben Montgomery

–May–

54. Countereconomics, Samuel E. Konkin III
55. Alongside Night, J. Neil Schulman
56. No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, Lysander Spooner
57. Forward collection, various
58. Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
59. Clean: The New Science of Skin, James Hamblin
60. Drug Use for Grown-Ups, Carl Hart
61. She Come By It natural, Sarah Smarsh
62. Enemies: A History of the FBI, Tim Weiner
63. ST: The Captain’s Oath, Christopher L. Bennett
64. Broke, USA: How the Working Poor Became Big Business, Gary Rivlin
65. Gambling with Other People’s Money, Russ Roberts
66. Make Russia Great Again, Christopher Buckley
67. A Gathering of Old Men, Ernest Gaines
68. Spying on Whales, Nick Pyenson

–June–
69. Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, Tim Weiner
70. Never a Dull Moment: A Libertarian Looks at the Sixties, Murray Rothboard
71. #agora, Anonymous
72. Vonu: A Strategy for Self-Liberation, Shane Radliffe
73. Steal this Book, Abbie Hoffman
74. The Return of the Primitive, Ayn Rand and
75. The Man in the High Castle, Phillip Dick
76. Possum Living: Living Well without a Job, Dolly Freed
77. The Eagle’s Claw: A Novel of Midway, Jeff Shaara
78. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
79. Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, Joseph Pearce
80. Nomadland: Surviving America in the 21st Century, Jessica Bruder
81. Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Helen Smith

–July–
82. The Return of George Washington: Reuniting the States, Edward Larson
83. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, Sarah Vowell
84. Stars on the Sea, F. Van Wynck Mason
85. The First Conspiracy: The Plot to Kill Washington, Brad Meltzer
86. The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand
87. Stoicism for Inner Peace, Einzelgaenger
88. Spaceman, Mike Massimino
89. Los Angeles is Hideous: Poems about an Ugly City, Andrew Heaton
90. Leonard: My 50 Year Friendship with a Remarkable Man, William Shatner
91. The First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells
92. Endurance: My Year in Space, Scott Kelley
93. Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle, Rowland White
94. Through the Glass Ceiling: The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission, Eileen Collins

–August–
95. The Social Instinct, Nicholai Raihani
96. The Red Planet: A Natural History, Simon Morden
97. Collapse Depth, Todd Tucker
98. Ghost Sub, Todd Tucker
99. The Choice, Claire Wade
100. The Disappeared, Amy Lord
101. Broadcast, Liam Brown
102. Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it More Difficult for Blacks to Succeed, Jason Riley
103. The Call to Antarctica, Leiliana Raashida Henry
104. The Unplugged Alpha, Richard Cooper
105. There is no Cloud, Kat Wheeler
106. Back to Earth: What Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet, Nicola Stott
105. Attack Surface, Cory Doctorow
106. What’s Eating the Universe? And Other Cosmic Questions, Paul Davies
107. Chemistry for Breakfast, Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim
108.Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Biology of Climate Change, Thor Hanson
109.Soviets in Space: The People of the USSR and the Space Race, Colin Thurbett
110.The Lost Outlaw, Paul Fraser Collard
111.Like a River Flows, Hanna Grace Kraker
112.No More Mr. Nice Guy, Richard Glover
113.Seeking Christendom: An Augustinian Defense of Western Civilization, Brad Birzer


–September–
114.Traitors of Rome, Simon Scarrow
115.The Moon is Down, John Steinbeck
116.The Pearl, John Steinbeck
117.The Red Pony, John Steinbeck
118.How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett
119.The Unbroken Thread: The Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos, Sohrab Ahmari
120.The Warehouse, Rob Hart
121.Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants, Garrett Ryan
123.Anthropology: A Degree in a Book, Julia Morris
124.A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
125.Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democratic Plantation, Candace Owens
125.Eagles at War, Ben Kane
126.Revolutionary Ride: On the Road in Search of the Real Iran, Lois Pyrce
127.From Fire, by Water, Sohrab Ahmari
128.Anti-Politics, ed. Sal Mayweather
129.Touching History, Lynn Spencer
130. Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham

— October —
131.ST: The Dark Veil, James Swallow
132. An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield
133.Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychology, Randolph Nesse
134.Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, Mary Roach
135.D-Day Girls: The Spies that Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win WW2, Sarah Rose
136.Natchez Burning, Greg Iles
137.Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
138.ST: The Enterprise War, John Jackson Miller
139.Zulu Five Oscar, Todd Tucker
140.Covert Duress, Todd Tucker
141.Erasing Death: The Science that is Erasing the Boundaries between Life and Death, Sam Parnia
142.The Death of Ivan Illyich, Leo Tolstoy
143.The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebees, Farm Fields, and the Dinner Table, Tracie McMillian
145.The Five Capitals of Alabama, Tom Bailey
146.For all the Tea in China, Sarah Rose
147.The War that made the Roman Empire, Barry Strauss

–– November —
148.When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, Ryan Anderson
149.The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
150.The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
151.Travels with George, Nathaniel Philbrick
152. The Vampire Economy: Doing Business under Fascism, Günther Reinmann
153. The Reading Life: The Joy of Seeing New Worlds through Others’ Eyes, C.S. Lewis
154. Philosophy – Who Needs It? Ayn Rand
155. Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terror, Scott Horton
156. Jacked: The Outlaw Story of GTA, David Kushner
157. A Furious Sky: The Five Hundred Year History of American Hurricanes, Eric Jay Dolin
158. Watership Down, Douglas Adams
159. The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham
160. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Alan Jacobs
161. The Problem of Pain, C.S Lewis
162. Lewis Agonistes, Louis Markos

–December–
163. Once Upon a Wardrobe, Patti Callahan
164. The Naked Man: A Study of the Male Body, Desmond Morris
165. The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body, Desmond Morris
166. How to Live in a Car, Van, or RV, Bob Wells
167. Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order, Bruno Macaes
168. Sharpe’s Assassin, Bernard Cornwell
169. The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and his People, Rick Bragg
170. Police Craft: What Cops Know About Crime, Communities, and Violence, Adam Plantinga
171. Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt, Todd Harra
172. Patrolling the Heart of the West, Steve Raab
173. Trucking in English, Carolyn Steele
174. All Over but the Shoutin‘, Rick Bragg
175. Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg
176. The Prince of Frogtown, Rick Bragg
177. No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes, Mark Eglinton

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A southern trilogy: Rick Bragg’s folks

Posted on December 30, 2021 by smellincoffee

All Over but the Shoutin’ is perhaps Rick Bragg’s most well-known work, beginning a trilogy that, in its focus on one family in the early and mid-20th century,   takes readers into the generally ignored territory of the poor white working class of the South.   The book is a tribute to Bragg’s mother, Margaret Bragg, who was abandoned by her alcoholic husband and struggled to raise three boys on her own in unforgiving times, but also serves as a biography of Bragg – revealing how he became a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist despite his challenging upbringing.    Bragg accredits his gift for storytelling to his many hours listening to family members tell stories; the oral tradition has always been strong in the South. That gift is on display early here, when he struggled with his father’s legacy, knowing he was a good man at some point who was broken by Korea and whiskey and could never quite find the way home again.   Although All Over is replete with hardship and suffering – no more so than when his mother, struggling to make ends meet by picking cotton in the fields, is  made redundant by the arrival of the machines,  the story is flecked with humor and joy, too – culminating in Bragg’s being able to fulfill his lifelong dream, to buy his mother a home and place of her own.   

Ava’s Man takes us back earlier, to  Bragg’s maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum. Charlie appears briefly but memorably in All Over but the Shoutin’, as a hard-working man and a merry drinker who Bragg’s father compares unfavorably against. . Bragg never knew his grandfather Charlie; the man died the year he was born, but Charlie gave Margaret and his other girls a strength they needed to carry them through difficult days. Bragg couldn’t help but notice how powerfully Charlie’s memory affected his aunts, who would cry at the very mention of his name; such was their loss.  Although he never found material wealth,  through work and talent (at roofing and brewing moonshine) he made life for his wife and girls comfortable at times, and unlike many his love for ardent spirits never led him to jail or to abusive behavior. He was a happy drinker, a singer of songs, and when he quarreled with his wife it was because they both liked arguing with the other too much to give it up. Although his work as a carpenter had given him great, strong hands that could flatten a man in a single throw when they were used in anger, he was known for his gentleness — adopting a poor drifter who lived by the river, and taking joy in playing with his young grandchildren. He was no pushover, though, as many a revenuer learned — to their painful embarrassment.

In The Prince of Frogtown, Bragg returns to his father, Charles Bragg, attempting to find the man he was despite the wreck he became — a story told while Bragg also recounts his own experience with sudden fatherhood, having become a stepfather to a young boy. The book grew out of one of Bragg’s friends’ observation that he would never be able to rest until he’d tackled his father’s legacy square on. Bragg here focuses on the mill village that offered so many of his family a way out of poverty, as treacherous as it was. It was a society saturated with whiskey, violence, and cotton fiber; Charles sought to escape the fate being trapped into mill work, hoping for a career in the Marines, but between the war and a bad auto accident, he came home a different man — one who needed the whiskey to numb the pain, not just to have a good time. Although the track of this story will be familiar to those who have read Bragg’s other works , we get a much fuller idea of the Boy who was Bragg’s dad — a short but feisty boy who was the leader of his own pack, who took pride in his juvenile accomplishments and who was later frustrated by his lack of progress as a man. The story tends toward sadness, given Charles’ fate as a suicide eaten up with liver damage and tuberculosis, but it’s replete with memorable characters and funny stories.

These books are a tribute to not only Bragg’s family, but all the poor but proud southern workingmen forgotten by the history books, capturing their — our — unique culture and often chaotic history. The writing is superb, frankly, drawing the reader into these lives and making the emotions that drove them all the more real when life takes a comic — or tragic — turn. I can only admire Bragg for the difficulty undertaken in trying to face the sorrow and pain in his family history — and admire, too, his ability to take the oral history of his elders and turn it into three narratives that are each as spell-binding as the other. Ava’s Man remains my favorite among these, largely for the near folk-hero character of Charlie Bundum.

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Quotes from Rick Bragg’s family trilogy

Posted on December 30, 2021 by smellincoffee

ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTIN’ 
 

“I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.” 

“That night, when he came home, Sam and I, pitiful in our inability to help her, to protect her, stood in the door of the kitchen and watched as he opened the cupboard and reached for his home brew. ‘Not all of it?’ he asked, and she nodded. My momma did not run, did not hide. She stood there like a statue. Then, slowly she took off her glasses. 

‘Don’t hurt my teeth,’ she said.” 

AVA’s MAN 

But then, there were not many saints working at the end of an ax handle in the woods of Alabama and Georgia, as an era of failed, corrupt reconstruction gave way to a new century. The history books showed it in black-and-white, and in my mind’s eye, as a child, I imagined it that way, a place just too mean for color. I saw a gray landscape under lead-gray sky, where white-robed Klan rode through dead gray trees, where convicts striped in gray and white swung picks into the bleached, colorless ground, where even the big rivers, in my mind’s eye, ran black as tar. 

He was blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. He thought people who would lie were trash. “And a man who’ll lie,” he said, even back then, “will steal.” Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker—a full pint is enough to get two men drunk as lords—before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization. He saw no reason to obey some laws—like the ones about licenses, fees and other governmental annoyances—but he would not have picked an apple off another man’s ground and eaten it. 

Some historians say the time that defines us, as a people, was the Civil War, and I guess that is true for those Southerners who hold tight to yellowed daguerreotypes of defiant colonels, distant ancestors who glare at the camera like it was a cannon, leaning on their swords. But you seldom hear people of the foothills talk much about the Civil War, contrary to the popular belief that all of us down here are sitting around waiting for the South to Rise Again, gazing at our etching of Robert E. Lee and sipping whiskey from the silver cups our great-aunt hid in the corncrib when she saw the Yankees comin’.  But you hear them talk a lot about the Depression, at reunions, at dinner on the ground, on that bench outside E. L. Green’s store, down the road from my momma’s house. They cannot tell you who commanded much of anything at Little Round Top or Missionary Ridge, but they know the names of all the knothead mules that dragged their daddies cussing and sweating across ground so poor that grass would not grow, and will look you dead in the eye and tell you that, yes, people really did work themselves to death. The Depression, endured in the lifetimes of people we know, was our time of heroes and martyrs, and our monuments are piled neatly on the ground. 

The doctor didn’t know when exactly, just that it was certain, the hurting and the dying. Charlie walked out of there and went to work, and just kept working, for months, because pity don’t feed the bulldog. 

THE PRINCE OF FROGTOWN 
The machines shut down five years ago. The roar that shook this village across a century shushed to a hateful quiet, and a blizzard of cotton fell through dead air to lie like dirty snow on scarred hardwood planks. The last to leave said they heard a rustling, as if generations still moved in the vast rooms that killed them one cut, one cough at a time. 

The sharecroppers marched away to hurrahs in one of the true oddities of Southern history, to die to preserve a way of life closed to them. It is hard to explain that to Northerners, hard to explain why, a century and a half later, poor men still fly the Confederate battle flag from rusted pickup trucks. It is hard to explain that, for some men, the fight, not the cause, is what they have. 

“I have run,” I explained, when I knew I couldn’t win, and the cause didn’t seem worth the pain. But I was always sick, after. You choose the sick feeling you can stand most, the one before you fight, or the one after you run away. But that was complicated, for a ten-year-old. 

“Doin’ somethin’ was always better’n talkin’ ’bout doin’ somethin’.” 

“I remember this time, up in Rich Bundrum’s barn loft, we found this case of dynamite,” Jack said, and then he paused and shook his head, as if realizing now what he should have then: that there are no good endings to stories that begin with we found this case of dynamite. 

Jack wiped at his eyes a lot as he talked of the last days. It is an acceptable way for a Southern man to cry. You can leak, when your heart busts in two, but you by God better not make any noise. 

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Top Ten Tuesday: My Ten Favorite Reads from 2021

Posted on December 27, 2021 by smellincoffee

Final Top Ten Tuesday of 2021!

The Old Man and the Boy, Robert Ruark. Stories of a young boy growing up under the watchful eye and biting wit of his grandfather, who teaches him to be a man who lives and works with respect to the land and creatures around them — even the ones they hunt. A mix of nature writing and human interest, as if Aldous Leopold and Rick Bragg came together, it was an instant favorite.

Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West, Brad Birzer. Reviews how Christian intellectuals (Lewis, Kirk, Solzhenitsyn, etc) responded to the acceleration of Western decay in the 20th century.

How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett. A critical attack on the conventional explanation for human emotions, one which argues that specific emotions are a learned language of sorts.

Project Hail Mary.A man wakes up alone in a spaceship. His mission? Save Earth from the Sun’s destruction. One problem: he has no idea how.


Eagles at War, Ben Kane. A fantastic historical-fiction account of the Battle of Teutoberg Forest, Rome’s greatest military defeat.

Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham. A detailed but very human history of the Chernobyl nuclear accident which poisoned parts of the western Soviet Union

Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg. This has displaced The Best Cook in the World as my favorite Bragg work. I’m going to post an altogether review of it and the other books in this trilogy (All Over But the Shoutin’ and The Prince of Frogtown).

Touching History, Lynn Spencer. A history of 9/11 as experienced by air traffic control, airline employees, and US air defense.

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, Randolph Nesse. An analysis of emotion and mental problems from an evolutionary psychological perspective.

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The Razor’s Edge, W. Somerset Maugham. A young socialite goes to war and comes back searching for answers — a compelling character drama driven by the human need for meaning.

Honorable mention:

Natchez Burning, Greg Iles. A disturbing but engrossing thriller, driven by a two-part story — with a beginning in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties, and ending in the present day, each with a series of deaths. As huge as it is, it’s scary to think Iles wrote an even larger sequel called The Bone Tree

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Science Survey 2021

Posted on December 27, 2021 by smellincoffee

In the last four years it’s been my habit to structure my science reading, mitigating my tendency of reading some subjects devotedly and ignoring the others (‘others’ almost always being physics and chemistry.) This year I completed the survey early, on 9/2/2021, and continued reading for an end total of 22 science books. I’ve already got some interesting titles lined up for 202!



Science Survey 2017 | Science Survey 2018 | Science Survey 2019 | Science Survey 2020

Cosmology and Astrophysics

Local Astronomy

Geology and Natural History

Chemistry and Physics

Biology

Flora and Fauna

Archaeology & Anthropology

Cognition, Neurology, and Psychology

Weather and Climate

Ecology

Thinking Scientifically

Wildcard (Science Biography, History of Science, Natural History, Science and Health, or Science and Society)

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Wide open spaces: riding with state troopers and a British lass

Posted on December 26, 2021 by smellincoffee

Goals and ambitions disappear in the glow of Christmas lights, lost in the end-year hubbub and reflection. I’ve been taking it easy by reading a couple of on-the-job memoirs, one by a Nevada state trooper and the other by a British immigrant to Canada who began driving commercial freight trucks in her fifties.

I suspected Patrolling the Heart of the West would make for a good read, given how desolate Nevada is; there, a trooper works alone, and has to be a resourceful jack of all trades, equally skilled at un-snaring traffic after a wintry jacknife or rendering first aid to someone critically injured. There were no desperate straits recorded here to witness Trooper Raab climbing out of, though; the one time he squares off with an armed felon, said felon is so tired of running that they shoot themselves in the car. There are a lot of human-interest stories here, but not much of the “A Man Alone Against the Elements”-type adventures I was expecting. It’s…cop work — pulling over people, sometimes chasing them, analyzing traffic accidents to figure out whose insurance agency gets the unhappy news. If you like COPS or LivePd (and I’m an addict of the latter’s youtube clips), it’s enjoyable enough.

Far more entertaining was Trucking in English, the story of a middle-aged ambulance driver and British mom turned American truck driver. Steele offers the most detailed memoir I’ve ever encountered on learning to operate big rigs, devoting a full third of her book to training alone, then detailing her first few months as a driver — beginning in the Canadian winter (!) before finding warm respite in Texas, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. Steele introduces herself as a longtime feminist crusader, claiming to have fought for the right of women ambulance drivers to be taken seriously some decades prior. The advancing of years apparently removed the chip on her shoulder, as she takes the kidding of other drivers in good humor and occasionally uses the lovable-English-mum to good effect in enlisting help or getting past obnoxious bureaucrats. I found Steele to be warm, amusing company; although frequently on the verge of feeling overwhelmed by the challenges before her (climbing the Canadian Rockies in winter, navigating Detroit), she buckles down and does the work. She learns from her mistakes, too, filling a book with notes about particular drop areas and accumulating tools in her cabin to handle any contingency. Not until the end of the book, when months of seventy hour weeks take their toll does her dauntless and good humor begin to fade Steele’s memoir is breezy but detailed.

Other trucking books of interest:
Danger Heavy Goods, about the UK-Middle East run of the 1980s. Unique.
Truck This For a Living: Tales from a Lorry Driver.
Pedal to the Metal: The Work Lives of Truckers, Lawrence Oulett. My favorite trucking book, a sociological study of the profession.

This year is not over yet. I may finish The Prince of Frogtown (Rick Bragg) or The Judge’s List (John Grisham) before 2022 rolls around…provided I don’t get distracted by my Christmas gift to myself, Farming Simulator 2019.

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Thoughts from Philosophy: Who Needs It

Posted on December 22, 2021 by smellincoffee

In early November I finished reading Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand. Her works are so much of one piece that every time I’ve started tinkering with a review I find it repeats some of the same assessments of her other work this year. Rand’s answer to the question is that philosophy is necessary for all, because being one’s fundamental approach to the world, everything else develops from it. In addition to her making this argument, she also analyzes some of the intellectual trends of the time of her writing.

A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.

Nothing is given to man automatically, neither knowledge, nor self-confidence, nor inner serenity, nor the right way to use his mind. Every value he needs or wants has to be discovered, learned and acquired—even the proper posture of his body. In this context, I want to say that I have always admired the posture of West Point graduates, a posture that projects man in proud, disciplined control of his body. Well, philosophical training gives man the proper intellectual posture—a proud, disciplined control of his mind.

The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion and, ultimately, the destruction of one’s cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one’s emotions.

Most men spend their lives in futile rebellion against things they cannot change, in passive resignation to things they can, and—never attempting to learn the difference—in chronic guilt and self-doubt on both counts.

He has the power to suspend, evade, corrupt or subvert his perception of reality, but not the power to escape the existential and psychological disasters that follow.

If any man feels that the world is too complex and its evil is too big to cope with, let him remember that it is too big to drown in a glass of whiskey.

Justice does exist in the world, whether people choose to practice it or not. The men of ability are being avenged. The avenger is reality.

If you find it puzzling, the premise to check is the idea that governmental repression is the only way a government can destroy the intellectual life of a country. It is not. There is another way: governmental encouragement. Governmental encouragement does not order men to believe that the false is true: it merely makes them indifferent to the issue of truth or falsehood.

If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell. But time is on our side—because we have an indestructible weapon and an invincible ally (if we learn how to use them): reason and reality.

Only one thing is certain: a dictatorship cannot take hold in America today. This country, as yet, cannot be ruled—but it can explode. It can blow up into the helpless rage and blind violence of a civil war. It cannot be cowed into submission, passivity, malevolence, resignation. It cannot be “pushed around.” Defiance, not obedience, is the American’s answer to overbearing authority. The nation that ran an underground railroad to help human beings escape from slavery, or began drinking on principle in the face of Prohibition, will not say “Yes, sir,” to the enforcers of ration coupons and cereal prices. Not yet. If America drags on in her present state for a few more generations (which is unlikely), dictatorship will become possible. A sense of life is not a permanent endowment. The characteristically American one is being eroded daily all around us. Large numbers of Americans have lost it (or have never developed it) and are collapsing to the psychological level of Europe’s worst rabble.

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