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My sabbatical ended on Sunday with a very happy return to UUCPA. But I have one more post to write about what I did on sabbatical.
One thing I thought I might do was get back to the book I began several years ago, and maybe even get it completely finished and ready for publication. I did not, but I moved a few steps along that path. I reconnected with the editor, apologizing for letting it drop (I had never signed a contract, but I had been offered one) and asking whether they were still interested; I had a Zoom meeting with her, in which I learned what I would need to do to get the process re-started; and I got my revised proposal about halfway to readiness for submission. I like all the changes Skinner House has undergone that (along with the passage of time) make it necessary for me to revise it, and I’m sure that if they accept it again, the changes will make it a better book. I’m fairly confident they will accept it. But I have not yet finished the proposal.
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The other addition I want to make to this series is the books I’ve read since I last reported on my reading.
I finished The Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese) and Justice is Coming (Cenk Uygur).
I finished only a couple of chapters of Goodness and Advice (Judith Jarvis Thomson) and then shelved it with the other philosophy books in my office. I guess I wasn’t up for that much dense philosophy. Earlier in the year, I ground to a similar halt with Re-Enchantment Without Supernaturalism, by David Ray Griffin. With a title like that, I have to go back to it–also, he was a process theologian, and a great teacher from whom I was lucky enough to take a theology class during my one semester at the Claremont School of Theology–but it was slow going. I am in the unfortunate position of being at heart a postmodern theologian without having the head to read postmodern theology.
I read:
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. It made me want to reread David Copperfield, which I think I read in high school (I may be imagining that), but I couldn’t do that right away because I had finally gotten hold of the book I’d been impatiently waiting for:
The Fraud, Zadie Smith. I wanted to keep reading Smith after that, so went straight on to
On Beauty, Zadie Smith, which I might have liked even more than The Fraud. They were great in different ways.
Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, Andrew Shyrock. I’ve already forgotten what put me on to this book. I read some chapters deeply and skimmed others. It was very interesting.
The Sword of Summer, The Hammer of Thor, and The Ship of the Dead, Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase trilogy. My daughter had recommended them ages ago when she first got into Riordan. She liked Percy Jackson best; that’s Greek mythology, and I liked it but I have a particular love for the Norse myths, which is the milieu of this trilogy. I finally got around to them and gobbled them up like buttered popcorn.
Also fun, easy reading: Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn.
Let’s see, that’s going backwards. What did I read more recently? Oh right.
The rest of the assigned books for my grad school course: How to Lead When you Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Susan Beaumont; The Art of Relevance,Nina Simon; and The Church Cracked Open, Stephanie Spellers. We were also assigned Salsa, Soul, and Spirit, by Juana Bordas, but I had read it for a course the previous fall, so that was just a skim.
The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I did not read them in Spanish, though a UUCPA member assures me I could do it. These are the second and third books in his series about the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, so the last one, The Labyrinth of Spirits, is on my must-read-soon list.
Most of Music is History, Questlove. Thanks to my mom for recommending this one. Not only has he forgotten far more than I’ll ever know about popular music in the United States, but his thoughts on history itself are deep and fascinating. I let it go back to the library before I was finished, but I’ll resume it one of these days.
Passage, Connie Willis. This one-off, with its serious inquiry into the nature of death, was so, so good that I had to dive back into Willis, so I read two of her Oxford Time Travel series I hadn’t read yet:
Blackout and All Clear. They are really two halves of the same book, as I learned when I started reading All Clear and felt like I had plunked myself down in the middle of something. I had; it should be labeled Volume 2. I had to go get Blackout (unlike All Clear, we didn’t own it) and start from the beginning, and I was really glad I did. Willis has successfully implanted her version of London in the Blitz in my mind, to the extent that I could ask an actual survivor of the Blitz what it was like and I might look askance at them if their version contradicted hers. That’s historical fiction for you. Hers is so well-done that I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there either. She’s just trying to bring it to life for those of us who were born at a later date.
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe, which I reread because the television version was the talk of the internet. I love his lush, dense prose, but it didn’t make me want to watch the show, or read more Poe, for that matter. Sorry, Edgar.
Since Christmas, when I gave and got a pile of books: The latest No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book, From a Far and Lovely Country, Alexander McCall Smith; A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid. Joy picked books for us based on the recommendations of Alix E. Harrow, since all of us liked her novels. Harrow is right; Reid is an excellent writer; but this one was for young adults, and it had one of the failings to which young adult fantasy (though not Riordan’s) is prey: the strikingly beautiful young female protagonist is so clueless about love that she keeps having experiences where suddenly noticing that she can feel the main male character’s breath makes her flush, “for some reason,” and she wishes he would stay in her room awhile longer, “for some reason,” and he looks at her for an uncomfortably long time, “for some reason,” until I start to have fantasies of being a young-adult-fantasy editor so that I could hit Ctrl-F, search for “for some reason,” and delete its every appearance. This one was particularly egregious because before she started crushing on him, she found a piece of paper where he had written her name over and over, and it still came as a surprise to her that he was crushing on her. No one in the real world is that naive. The plot was a bit of a mess, too, but despite all of this, she is a writer I’ll watch for. There was just so much there that made me want to keep reading.
And on our way to Solvang just after Christmas, I downloaded a few books I was willing to read or reread, hoping the fam would all agree on one. They did: The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki. So I reread it, first listening en route, then finishing it via audio and eyes after we got home. What a great book. The only problem with Ozeki is that she can’t write as fast as I can read, and I am forever impatient for her next book.
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Finally, I assure anyone who has read this series of posts and thought “Did she sleep at all during sabbatical?” that I did, as late as I wanted to most days, and that I also took time to do two crosswords (New York Times and Washington Post) almost every day, and also do my daily Spelling Bee, Connections, Wordle, and Quordle. I didn’t think my word games took that much time until this week, when I got back to work and my Spelling Bee game really began to suffer. I wrote this series of posts because I have an overwhelming tendency to look back at opportunities like this and think I wasted them (anxiety: it’s the fun mental disorder!). I needed to document, for my own sake, what I’ve been doing, so that I could look back on these posts and reassure myself that I did not waste the time.
And it is totally legit for sabbatical to be a time of relative relaxation. For me, the biggest stress reliever is simply not having anything I must do. Reading–even books that are pretty heavy, slow going–and making art and playing piano and going to the gym are all challenging in their way, but like the Sunday crosswords, they are the challenges I enjoy. The daily tasks of maintaining a household also continue during sabbatical, but add next to no stress when they aren’t competing with work. So for six months, I could sleep until I was ready to wake, then go up the hill to the gym, then come back and fold and put away a load of laundry, then play piano, without feeling like I was stealing time from my job. I could sit down at the art table at 10 pm and not go to bed until 12 without worrying that I was going to be exhausted during the next day’s meetings.
Now, to add the job back in without unbalancing myself: that’s the next joyful challenge.
I hope you’ll check out my new column, Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed or Vexed
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In 2000, it seemed as if the whole world was reading the Harry Potter books. That did nothing to make me want to check them out. Truth be told, even though I was in my 30s and ought to have been well past any sense of adolescent nonconformity-for-the-sake-of-conformity, it made me less interested in checking them out. My sister told me, “Really, they’re really good!,” but someone in the grip of unacknowledged adolescent rebelliousness is likely to do the exact opposite of what her older sister recommends. I stayed steadily unintrigued. All those people lined up for the midnight release of the fourth book? Yawn. Even the discovery of a Harry-Potter-themed sermon online by a much-admired colleague and teacher, Ken Sawyer, didn’t draw me in, though I enjoyed the sermon.
Then a church member pressed the audiobooks of the first three books on me–I had a long commute and listened to books on tape all the time–and within the first few minutes, all my resistance crumbled. I loved them. I gulped them down, got a hold of the fourth, gulped it down too. They lived up to all the hype.
Oh, they’re conventional in many ways, and even the best of them has a plot hole you could fly a hippogriff through. And I’m angry with their author, who has torpedoed a deserved reputation as one of this planet’s kindest, most generous people by stubbornly insisting on a bigoted, mean mischaracterization of transgender. But the delights of these books are too many to list, and they keep on delighting me.
When I first discovered them, I sought out people who wanted to talk about them all the time, the way I did, and found them in the Yahoogroup Harry Potter for Grownups. I made good friends there, people I’m still friends with 20 years later, and among the funniest, smartest people in the group, I met the woman I would eventually fall in love with and marry. So Harry Potter changed my life in the most literal way possible. If I had continued to avoid it because it was so annoyingly ubiquitous and adored, Joy and I wouldn’t be married, we wouldn’t have our child . . . it’s scary even to think about it.
It’s rare for anything to live up to its reputation when it’s as widely hailed and appreciated as Harry Potter. But once in a while it does. Listen to my cautionary tale, dear reader. Do not deprive yourself of a greatly hyped cultural phenomenon just because it’s a greatly hyped cultural phenomenon.
The other work that has inspired me to say, “It lives up to all the hype, and more,” is Hamilton. Yes, it won 11 Tonys after being nominated for a record-setting 16 (inspiring this pre-Trump parody by Randy Rainbow). Its composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has won Tonys, Emmys, Grammys, the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, well before the age of 40. Its songs have been quoted by countless articles and as the title of a self-serving book by a wingnut who managed to become National Security Advisor and still undermine U.S. national security. It caused millions of middle-class white people to enjoy hip hop; millions of people who would never cross the threshold of an opera house to enjoy an opera; and countless people who don’t love musical theater to be unable to stop singing its tunes. Doctor Who predicts that it will be performed by 900 different casts over time, all of which the Doctor will see. Despite its near-universal popularity . . .
. . . it really is that good.
So, dear reader, don’t believe that the hype is wrong. Once in a while, something comes along that lives up to its stratospheric reputation. Heed my tale of narrowly-averted woe, and if there’s something you’ve been avoiding (despite the recommendations of people you respect) because it’s just too popular, give it a try. I won’t guarantee that you will meet the love of your life, but it might change your life, which is what art is all about.
Black History Month, day 16
At the time of its rediscovery in 1981, Our Nig was the earliest known novel written and published by a black woman in the United States. I learned about it at a lecture by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., that I attended with my parents not long after that–I think it took place at my high school auditorium. Gates was a young scholar at Yale at that time, and told the audience about how he had come across it in an antiquarian bookstore and, based upon the title, put it on his “Racist Literature” shelf. It wasn’t until later that he opened it and began reading, and realized that the narrator was a black woman whose agenda was fervently opposed to slavery. So was the author, research revealed: Harriet E. Adams Wilson.
At the time that Gates did his research, he wondered why the book didn’t receive more attention at the time of its publication. It was published by a Boston firm in 1859; Boston was the center of a great deal of abolitionist activity; it was known to be by a free black woman (though she remained anonymous at that time). Yet judging from its reception, it was barely known to her contemporaries. How could that be?
Eric Gardner, doing further research ten years after Gates republished the book, proposed an answer that I’m afraid is probably correct: the abolitionists did know all about Wilson’s novel, and did very little to publicize it because it indicted Northern abolitionists.
Many abolitionists may not even have recognized Our Nig as having an anti-slavery message simply because the story takes place in the North, where most abolitionists were not prepared to recognize “slavery’s shadows.”
Furthermore, he writes, it is “far from flattering to Northerners or abolitionists.” He makes the case that Our Nig is the opposite of most slave narratives, and other sympathetic works, of the time, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in that the North is not “portrayed as a magical land where the protagonist will eventually realize the promise of freedom.”
My parents owned the book (they must have bought it after the lecture) and I am pretty sure I read it at that time, but I don’t remember the plot at all. It sounds extremely relevant to our own troubled times, when many white liberals will go so far for racial justice and no farther. Another one for the reading list!
Black History Month, day 15
Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, traces the history of two branches of a family, from the Asante woman Maame through her two daughters, who are unknown to each other, and their descendants in West Africa (mostly Ghana) and the United States. The telling moves forward in time, alternating between the two lines of descent. We the readers are given what the characters themselves can’t access: a view into the characters’ history. As one of them says, “My grandmother used to say we were born of a great fire. I wish I knew what she meant by that.” We know, because the book begins with the fire. But few of us know much about our ancestors’ lives more than a few generations back, if that.
It is a stunningly beautiful book, making it un-put-downable despite the painful subject matter (war, slavery, convict labor, rape, drug addiction . . . ). It manages to be epic in scope despite being only about 300 pages long. Each portrait is so vivid that I wanted to read an entire novel about just that character. Then the story would move on to the next generation, each person’s story both anchored in history and drifting on its own.
How do we go home, if we know so little of our own heritage? For my part, after reading Homegoing, I feel homesick for villages whose names I don’t even know, where ancestors whose names I might be misspelling lived and dreamed and died. Maybe all we can do is learn the history of those regions, those peoples, and imagine the specific stories, as Gyasi does for people with roots in West Africa and everywhere.
Black History Month day 13
First, the apology. Several years ago, when Jacqueline Woodson won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for Brown Girl Dreaming, Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) made a comment that undermined her achievement in a racist way. He apologized (whether adequately from Woodson’s point of view, I don’t know), but I haven’t done so myself, and I need to. I resisted understanding the problem, resisted hearing the voice of my better self, and thus amplified the harm. I won’t go into the details of my response at the time, because I think White People Publicly Repeating Insults They’ve Inflicted Upon Non-White People is part of the problem, but I’ll be happy to go into it privately to anyone who wishes to know more. I just want to apologize: to Ms. Woodson, though she will most likely never know or care anything about my struggles to awake to white supremacy, but more importantly, to friends who patiently tried to get me to see what now seems obvious. Thank you.
I gave my daughter Woodson’s book Harbor Me for Christmas, and of the big pile of books she got that day, it was the first one she read. She recommended it highly and I read it last month. Now I want to read everything Jacqueline Woodson has written. (I didn’t get my daughter Brown Girl Dreaming because I thought it was the one she was most likely to have read already, but she says she hasn’t, and plans to soon.) It’s about a small group of students who become close through sharing their struggles with each other: grief, racism, deportation. Each unsafe in their own way, they seek harbor with one another, as Sweet Honey in the Rock sings:
Would you harbor me? Would I harbor you?
Would you harbor a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew,
A heretic, convict, or spy?
Would you harbor a runaway woman or child,
A poet, a prophet, a king? . . . (lyrics by Ysaye M. Barnwell)
The book deals with so many issues, but it soars above the young adult “issues” book genre because the characterizations are so real and the writing so poetic. Stories unfold the way they do in real life, bit by bit and reluctantly. Some loose ends remain loose. I want to learn so much more about the characters, but we probably never will; we were given a glimpse into a few months in their lives and we will just have to wonder what has become of each of them. And try to make their real-life counterparts’ stories end well, by harboring whomever we encounter who needs it.
Black History Month, day 3
I learn as much about history through fiction as through non-fiction–probably more. That’s not because it’s historical fiction (it seldom is) but because fiction is such a powerful way into other people’s minds and experiences. Several years ago I made a personal reading list to remedy the lack of African-American writers (and history) in both my formal and informal education, mostly fiction. If you’re like me and love sci-fi/fantasy, you won’t be surprised to learn that one of the books from this genre, The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, had a particular impact on my understanding of history.
Whitehead is a kind of literary surrealist. He takes historical facts, like the Underground Railroad, and adds some dreamlike twist, like the actual subterranean rail line in The Underground Railroad. Or in John Henry Days, he draws a connection between the legendary John Henry and a modern-day self-imposed endurance contest, his character J. Sutter’s junket-a-thon: how many literary junkets can one freelance journalist string together? And Zone One is quite straightforwardly true to life if you accept that zombies are taking over New York City. Maybe most sci-fi is essentially surrealist, which explains one reason I like it (I’m a fan of surrealism in visual art as well).
The Intuitionist has a comically bizarre premise: that elevator inspectors are a powerful political and politicized force. Accept the premise, and the book becomes a heartbreakingly realistic (and sometimes hearteningly hopeful) portrait of African-Americans’ options for their own identity and dignity within a culture where whiteness is held to be superior. I knew as soon as I read it that I would want to pick it up again in a couple of years–that it would have changed me in the meantime and that I’d want to check in on those changes and learn something new from the second reading. It’s about time to do that.
As I’ve done before, I’m challenging myself to blog about African-American* history, thought, and culture every day this month.
Today’s post arises from my having just finished the audiobook of Letters to a Young Artist, by the actor, playwright, professor, and author, Anna Deavere Smith. She reads it herself, naturally, and I’m glad I heard it in her voice, though I am going to buy a paper copy as well. It’s a book I’ll want to reread, thumb through, underline bits of, pull off the shelf frequently, and give copies of to friends.
She’s writing to a painter, and many of her examples come from acting and writing, but the advice–no, the wisdom–goes far beyond any particular art form. In fact, what the artist M. C. Richards once said kept running through my head as I listened to Smith’s direct, engaging, humble yet confident words: All the arts are apprenticeships; the true art is our life. It’s life wisdom she’s imparting here, as valuable for minister-me as artist-me, and most of all for human-me.
Not having a print version before me, I can’t properly remember the things I wanted to underline and share. (I couldn’t even place electronic bookmarks, because I was driving.) But if you’re looking for a hopeful, urgent response to the crisi/es that we 21st century people face, try listening to the voice of Anna Deavere Smith.
*or African, or African diaspora
My mind usually goes blank the moment Joy asks, “So what do you want for Hanukah / Christmas / your birthday?” Then reminders keep popping up when all the present-shopping has been done. Just now, an article someone posted on Facebook reminded me that I have been wanting a book about how to diagram sentences. This way of teaching grammar is recalled by a few people fondly, and by most as an archaic torture device, like an oubliette, but for me it is only an artifact of times long past. It didn’t even appear in unused chapters of our grammar books, as far as I can recall; I encountered it in whichever of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books she passes her teacher’s exam (Little Town on the Prairie, I think).
Being visually inclined, I thought it looked kind of cool. I don’t know if I would really have learned grammar any more easily with such a concrete, spatial analogue of parts of speech, but I would almost certainly have found it interesting. My daughter (also a visual thinker) agrees it would be fun to see how it’s done.
So I told Joy just now that I want a book on how to diagram sentences. She advised me to go look for one myself, as she wouldn’t know where to start. So I hied over to AbeBooks, used books being preferable to new in most cases, and the very first item that popped up in my search was by a woman I know. Well, I knew her when I was a little girl; she and her then-husband were longtime friends of my parents. Both couples have since split up and I haven’t seen her in years, but she is a novelist, and her daughter, whose wedding I officiated, and I are friends on Facebook. (The daughter is not the person who posted the aforementioned article.) Her book is actually a history of sentence diagramming as well, and I think it sounds fascinating.
So, Kitty Burns Florey, I have ordered a copy of your book, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, and I can’t wait to read it.
I kept a list of everything I read during my sabbatical two years ago. It’s been on this blog as a separate page, and as part of some blog housekeeping, I’m converting it to a post.
Books read during study leave & sabbatical, 2016
Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje fiction (f)
Promoting Diversity and Social Justice: Educating People from Privileged Groups, Joan Goodman nonfiction (nf)
Christ for Unitarian Universalists, Scotty McLennan nf
Armada, Ernest Cline f
El Cuaderno de Maya, Isabel Allende f
Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, Adam Gopnik nf
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot nf
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates nf
Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago (the Xenogenesis Trilogy), Octavia Butler f
The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke f
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Jack Thorne f (play)
Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech f
Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell nf
John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead f
My Grandfather’s Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen nf
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr f
The Amateur Marriage, Anne Tyler f
The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton f
The Great Train Robbery, Michael Crichton f
An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro f
The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd f
My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante f
Inkspell, Cornelia Funke f
Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell nf
Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell nf
Persuasion, Jane Austen f
Malafrena, Ursula K. Le Guin f
The Wanderer, Sharon Creech f
Lock In, John Scalzi f
Orsinian Tales, Ursula K. Le Guin f
Unlocking the Air, Ursula K. Le Guin f
Family Sabbatical, Carol Ryrie Brink f
The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine, Alexander McCall Smith f
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie f
plus numerous mysteries just for fun
and Emily Dickinson poems when I remembered.
I’d be hard pressed to name a favorite of the eight or so books by Philip Roth that I’ve read, but I wouldn’t hesitate at all to name the one that comes to mind most often: The Plot Against America. It affected me strongly when I first read it, and now it seems terrifyingly, but usefully, prescient.
Roth takes a few facts as his foundation and spins an all-too-possible alternative history from them. Those facts: Charles Lindbergh, son of a Minnesota Congressman, and a national hero for his solo transatlantic flight, ardently opposed a United States entry into the Second World War. He was a member of the anti-interventionist America First organization; unlike the organization, he was also anti-Semitic and a lifelong advocate of “racial purity.” His sense that Russia was a greater threat than Germany was not so much about fearing Communism more than fascism, but about his preferring the Nordic to the “semi-Asiatic”; he hoped that the U.S. and Germany would unite to oppose the “semi-Asiatic” Russia. He did support U.S. entry into the war after Pearl Harbor, as did many America-Firsters (the organization disbanded immediately after the attack), and fought bravely in the Pacific. But by then, he had set himself up as an opponent of the three forces he saw as agitating for war: the British, the Roosevelt Administration, and the Jews. He and Henry Ford were longtime friends, drawn together in part by their anti-Jewish paranoia. Lindbergh was also a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 1936 presidential election. The only scrap of this paragraph that I learned in school was that he was the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic.
The Plot Against America proposes that Lindbergh wins the 1940 Republican nomination and goes on to defeat FDR. With the anti-interventionist in office, the U.S. stays out of the war; those who do want to fight the Nazis must flee to Canada and join the despised (by President Lindbergh) British forces. With a vocal anti-Semite as President, Henry Ford’s racial theories are given free rein and U.S. Jews have an increasingly uncertain and frightened existence, like immigrants and Muslims in 2018. Roth fills the novel with specific detail by focusing on the experiences of one family–“his” family–in Newark, New Jersey.
It’s a portrait of a nation gradually sinking beneath an internal sea of fascism. Last week, the president suggested that people who peacefully protest racial injustice should maybe just not be in our country; his administration pursued a policy of asking teachers to report students without documents and another of removing children from any undocumented adults; it was revealed that 20% of the children thus removed are either unaccounted for, or so terrified of the government that is supposed to be their guardian that they have gone into hiding; and the administration has repeatedly accused the investigators of foreign interference in a presidential election of employing “spies.”
In the middle of it, Philip Roth died, and for all his fear of death, was probably glad to shake the dust of Trump’s United States off his feet. But before he went, he weighed in on the nation’s tumble toward the dystopia he had so vividly envisioned. The parallels between Lindbergh and Trump were considerable, he said, but with this difference:
Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also . . . an authentic American hero . . . [a] courageous young pilot . . . . Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac. (New York Times, January 16, 2018)
Lindbergh’s fictional rise to power is more probable than that of a multiply-bankrupt self-promoter who only regained wealth and a household name by parodying himself on a game show about business, and you’d think that it would be easier to both see through Trump and get him out of office. But so far, that sea is still threatening to take the whole country under. If you’re looking for insight into how it happens and what we can do about it, in the marvelous prose of the writer who came up with that phrase “the evil sum of his deficiencies,” or you’re just looking for an excellent novel for your summer reading, check out The Plot Against America.
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