Toni Morrison's A Mercy and T.R. Reid's Healing of America

I read two really good books lately that have nothing in common.

First, Toni Morrison's A Mercy. She's Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize winner, author of the harrowing and well-respected Beloved. She's also very intimidating, because her recent novels have struck me as long, difficult and dense. So I found her recent novel, A Mercy, tempting, because it was fairly short -- 176 pages -- and the first few pages were intriguing. Read the excerpt; it begins:

Don't be afraid. My telling can't hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark--weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more--but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth. I explain. You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog's profile plays in the steam of a kettle.

The setting is 1682, and the narrator above is Florens, a young enslaved woman, who tells her own story, interweaved with stories of others who live on a Maryland homestead. There are two other enslaved woman, a Dutch trader, his "mail order" wife (probably they didn't call it that back then), two indentured servants, and a free African blacksmith. I don't want to tell too much here, but I'll just emphasize I thought this was a fascinating, poignant gem of a novel, very thought-provoking and beautifully written. And it inspires me to go back and and read Beloved.

The other book I liked was The Healing of America, by T.R. Reid. This is nonfiction, a look at health care systems in other countries and what lessons they might hold for the U.S. Reid was in the unique position of working abroad for many years, and having a stiff, sore shoulder. So he took his shoulder to all the doctors and health systems of the world and wrote about it. (OK, maybe not all the health systems of the world, but the United States, France, England, Germany, Japan and India.) What he finds is pretty interesting. According to Reid's telling, the French seem to have the most hassle-free system for records and billing. In Japan, you don't really need an appointment, you just walk in and get seen. In England, you don't get whatever treatment you want, but whatever you do get is free. India's traditional medicine yielded surprisingly good results. And the United States loves its high-tech surgeries.
Another interesting point Reid makes is that in other countries, doctors get their med school tuition paid for by the state, and then they make more middle-class salaries. This is different from the States. Little insights like these made for a fascinating book, very thought-provoking.
One thing that made me chuckle mordantly is that Reid felt the need to put a brief justification in the book about why he was writing about the medical systems of other countries. Some Americans may feel that we shouldn't consider any information from other countries, because ... why? Because we're better than them? Because they couldn't possibly have anything to teach us? He rejects those ideas, and so do I. I just don't get not being curious about new ideas and ways of doing things. It's kind of an anti-learning mentality, and I can't stand that, as you well know.

Books about the '08 campaign

I consider the 2008 election something of a subject specialty, so I've been trying to be strategic about reading new books about the election. I just read The Battle for America 2008 by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Balz is with The Washington Post, so this is a fairly straightforward political account of the election, with a few minor new revelations. Interesting things that jumped out at me: They report that Democrat Ted Kennedy made a condition of his early endorsement that Obama address health care reform in his first year. And, they go into brutal and hilarious detail about Republican candidate Fred Thompson's reluctance to actually campaign for the presidency.
The other book I'm reading now is Renegade: The Making of a President, by Richard Wolfe, who covered the election for Newsweek. I'm just starting this one, but the book's selling point is that Wolfe got the most inside access to the Obama campaign.
Other campaign books I'd like to read:

• How Barack Obama won : a state-by-state guide to the historic 2008 presidential election, by Chuck Todd and Sheldon Gawiser: I expect this to be a very geeky (in a good way!) analysis of voting patterns in the 50 states.
• The audacity to win : the inside story and lessons of Barack Obama's historic victory, by David Plouffe. Written by Obama's campaign manager. Again, this one will probably be pretty much in the weeds for true politics junkies. I'm hoping to gain insight on Obama's caucus strategies from this one.
• An unnamed book (or at least I don't know the name) from Ryan Lizza, who covered the election for The New Yorker magazine. I really liked Lizza's reporting during the campaign; his article "Making It" was one of the best things I've read on Obama's years in the Illinois state senate.
• And no list would be complete without Going Rogue: An American Life, by Sarah Palin. I can't wait to see what she has to say about the campaign. I hope it's well-written and interesting. Sometimes books by elected officials can be really boring, but we'll see.

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 is an exceptional book about the historical background of the 9/11 attackers. It explains in details why they did what did what they did, what their motivations were, what their strategies were, how the moved around the world and organized the attack. The main focus is on Osama bin Laden and the history of his ideology. It is marvelously concrete and detailed.
Before I read this book, Osama bin Laden always seemed to me more like a movie villain, like Darth Vader from Star Wars or Sarumaun from Lord of the Rings. Now he seems much more real, which is of course a bit scarier. The ideology these guys operate with is truly frightening.
There's a dialogue on Slate between the book's author Lawrence Wright and his fellow journalist Steve Coll. Coll summarizes the book so well I'll simply quote him here:

The book opens with an account of the influential Egyptian Islamist writer Sayid Qutb's radicalizing experiences in America during the late 1940s, when he was a young man far from home. It then develops biographical portraits of the young Ayman Zawahiri and the young Osama Bin Laden, who both read Qutb ardently. The book follows the pair to Afghanistan during the 1980s and tracks the origins and formation of al-Qaida during the anti-Soviet war. The evolution of the group after it was forced into exile in Sudan during the early 1990s, and then returned to Afghanistan, in 1996, is blended with reporting about the FBI agents who were assigned to understand and pursue al-Qaida. The book follows all these strands of narrative to Sept. 11 and then to Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora the following December.

Read the whole dialogue here.

Crunchy Cons

Rod Dreher is a noted conservative commentator -- his day job is opinion editor of the Dallas Morning News. But more importantly to me is that he is an alumni of my high school, the beloved Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts. This has motivated me to keep an eye on his career. Plus, he's a really great writer and highly readable.
He wrote a book recently called Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party). I read it, and I really liked it. (It comes out in paperback next week.) It is a trenchant critique of the rampant consumerism of the culture and the knee-jerk pro-corporate stance of the mainstream Republican Party. It also has interesting insights on living a good life, advocating organic farming and the restoration of older homes. My favorite advice: Everything in your home should be either useful or beautiful -- if it's not either, get rid of it! The book also shakes up our notions of the right/left political divide, which is another one of my pet interests.
Dreher has a Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com that is consistently fascinating reading. He announced recently on his blog that he is converting to Orthodoxy, and it set off a firestorm -- more than 431 comments and counting. Wow!
I just did a search to see what's the most comments I've ever had on my blog. In case you were wondering, it's four.

New from Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis has a new book coming out next week -- The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game -- and it looks like it will be good.
The New York Times Magazine exerpted part of it this weekend; read it here while it's still free. Meanwhile, another favorite author of mine, Malcolm Gladwell, praises the book on his blog:

It's about a teenager from the poorest neighborhood in Memphis who gets adopted by a wealthy white family, and who also happens to be an extraordinarily gifted offensive lineman. Simultaneously Lewis tells the story of the emergence of the left tackle as one of the most important positions in modern day football. I thought MoneyBall was fantastic. But this is even better, and it made me wonder if we aren't enjoying a golden age of sportswriting right now. ... The Blind Side is as insightful and moving a meditation on class inequality in America as I have ever read--althought to put it that way, I realize, makes it sound deadly dull. It isn't. You should read it.

Read Gladwell's entire post here. Gladwell wrote The Tipping Point and Blink.

The price of higher education

The New York Times has a darkly humorous opinion piece about the cost of higher education and the expectations game:

Laudable could be cheaper, but you wouldn'’t like it. You and your parents have made it clear that you want the best. That means more spacious and comfortable student residences ("dormitories," we used to call them), gyms with professional exercise equipment, better food of all kinds, more counselors to attend to your growing emotional needs, more high-tech classrooms and campuses that are spectacularly handsome.

Our competitors provide such things, so we do too. We compete for everything: faculty, students, research dollars and prestige. The more you want us to give to you, the more we will be asking you to give to us. We aim to please, and that will cost you. It's been a long time since scholarship and teaching were carried on in monastic surroundings.

Laudable's surroundings, by the way, will remind you of where you came from. That'’s because your financial circumstances are pretty much the same as those of your classmates. More expensive schools have students from wealthier parents; less expensive schools draw students from families with fewer financial resources. More than half of the freshmen at selective colleges, public and private, come from the highest-earning quarter of households. Tell me the ZIP code and I'’ll tell you what kind of college a high-school graduate most likely attends.

Read the whole op-ed here. The author is William M. Chace, author of 100 Semesters: My Adventures as Student, Professor and University President, and What I Learned Along the Way, which I'll have to check out.