“Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets” by Sudhir Venkatesh

by Patrick Baker

Whoever has problems with the word “nigger” might very well have problems with Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. The N-word appears on nearly every page and begins to ring in the ears after a while. Yet (or perhaps, “for”) the word and its use are emblematic of the larger problem at issue in the book: the everyday life of poor blacks in America’s cities and the way it is studied and approached by academics and government alike.

    Early in the book, Venkatesh recounts how, as a young sociology PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, he finds out the hard way that his subjects are not, as he thinks, “black” or “African American” (N.B. the sociologist being trained today would use euphemisms like “urban” or “inner-city”). Having entered a gang-controlled building in the Lake Park projects to ask its inhabitants, among other things – “How does it feel to be black and poor?: (a) very bad, (b) somewhat bad, (c) neither bad nor good, (d) somewhat good, or (e) very good” (14) – Venkatesh receives from a young gang leader, J.T., the answer that sets the tone for the rest of the book, not to mention for his career as a sociologist: “I’m not black. . . . I’m not African American either. I’m a nigger.” J.T. explains, “Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.” And finally – and here is the point for academics, politicians, and the American public – “You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing [i.e. the sociology survey]. . . . How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” (16). Indeed, one wonders how the findings of sociology keep from stinking if the field does not recognize the basic identity of its subjects.

    Venkatesh gained renown for his description of the economics of crack dealing in Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics. Venkatesh’s research on drug dealing came from his attempt to answer J.T.’s challenge. For the next several years after their first encounter, Venkatesh followed J.T. around the Chicago projects, especially the infamous Robert Taylor Homes on the city’s South Side. Here are just a few of the fascinating things he learned about and reports on: the inner workings of gangs and their hierarchy; gangs’ symbiotic relationship with supposedly legitimate entities, like building managers, the housing authority, social workers, and even local government and the police; the unreported, underground economy in which residents, nearly all of them officially unemployed, participate; the absence of medical care, ambulance service, and law enforcement, and what residents do to compensate; the fear instilled by rogue criminals (i.e. those without gang affiliation) and the rare yet dependable drive-by shooting; the community-oriented outlook of drug dealers; the true sense of community that reigns in a place considered inhuman and unlivable by outsiders. In short, Venkatesh learns what it means to be a “nigger,” which turns out to be much worse, much better, and much more interesting than the rest of us imagine.

    Gang Leader for a Day provides the layman with an education in ghetto life. For the scholar, and more specifically for the social scientist or sociologist, it raises important questions – and challenges sacred assumptions – about the validity of statistically-based quantitative research. A predominant belief in social science is that statistics are the only way to measure salient features of economy, social life, psychology, and well-being. Only by sifting through large quantities of data can patterns be identified. Furthermore, according to this line of thought, qualitative studies, such as the one Venkatesh used for his book, tend to be too anecdotal or case-specific, and thus they cannot be used to formulate broad conclusions. But as long as statistics are based on questions as self-delusional as “how does it feel to be black and poor” – self-delusional, in this specific case, because for J.T. and his gang, blacks and African Americans are by definition not poor; so-called “niggers” are – how could their analysis lead to accurate generalizations? Social scientists have long been wary of the veracity of surveys, and they have long held their own prejudices and presuppositions suspect. What Venkatesh shows, though, is that their quantitative methods are haunted by a more basic problem: lack of experience, the experience that comes from daring to do extensive field research in places considered dangerous. It is this experience that is necessary for data to be meaningfully collected and intelligently interpreted. And thus it is experience that is necessary in order to reach informed policy decisions. It cannot be substituted by asking how it feels to be “black and poor.” According to Venkatesh, it can only be answered by going to see for oneself.

“Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert

by Patrick Baker

What results from a reading of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is first and foremost that the reading of novels is dangerous business. Well, certain novels. Romantic novels. Stories of love – not merely its consummation but more importantly its indulgence, its feeling on the bone, its transfiguration of the soul. What is different about the novel in question? Despite its (for the time) breathtaking depiction of the physical act of love and the ceremonies of courting, it would in no way inspire anyone to infidelity, much less to the foolish notion that love leads to happiness. Flaubert’s novel is an antidote to the Romantic novel. It explodes the commonplaces about Cupid’s gift, or, as it were, affliction, revealing it as the insistent self-delusion of the distressed mind. Passion is not the release or realization of the self; it is the self’s will to power manifested in a sick, perhaps the only, kind of possession open to the middle classes: the possession of another’s body, thoughts, and time, the conquest of another self.

    Flaubert explodes not only the myth of love but also that of pastoral bliss or simplicity. An obvious appreciator of nature and the pastoral setting, he is disarmingly honest about its ugliness. Romanticism’s Caravaggio, he describes oil floating atop rivers, broken-down dwellings, crumbling chateaus, the precise anatomy of cows, and a ubiquitous shabbiness. Of humans, only two content characters appear in the book, and only one of them might incite emulation. The first, whom no man could ever desire to imitate, is Madame Bovary’s indolent husband, Charles, content because oblivious to the point of solipsism. The other is her father, Père Rouard, content because he has what he needs, knows what he has, and respects what he has had in the past. He is simple but no fool, calculating but not deceptive, caring without limit. Yet for all his fine traits he is destroyed by the self-immolation of his daughter, whom he could lead to nothing better than a bourgeois existence.

    As for the French bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, which might just be Flaubert’s true protagonist, it appears as an utterly execrable collection of nobodies: enlightened, self-important apothecaries, tavern-keepers unwilling and cantankerous, lascivious administrators, distracted vicars, busy-body homemakers, incorruptible lathe-operators, and earnestly incompetent medical officers pleased to masquerade as full-fledged physicians. And let us not forget the desperate housewife played by the title character. The poor below them fare even worse – only a filthy blind man enters the scene. As for the aristocracy, they are party-goers, horse-chargers, broke diamond-bearers, but above all corrupters. No one would err in calling them nobles.

    The only escape for a woman who has had visions of ecstasy – in this case the direct result of a juvenile flirtation with the Church, the reading of Romantic novels, and a single attendance at a ball – is to take comfort in the arms of illicit love. She will naturally fall prey to the aristocracy, although an up-and-coming specimen of the professional class, so long as he is thoughtful and sighs in all the right places, can equally claim the lien on her heart. What she yearns for is a fantasy of kings and princes, mistresses and ladies, being swept off her feet and waltzed around a room until dizziness overcomes her. Her heart has been penetrated by the ancien régime, whose twin pillars of greatness – Church and nobility – were emasculated by the Revolution, Napoleon, Voltaire, and decades of Restoration. Her tragedy is that her heart can never realize its desires, for modernity has rendered them illusions. The noble, the gallant, the beautiful, the majestic, the austere, the unapproachably foreboding – they have all vanished in a puff of semi-democratic nullity. The import of Madame Bovary is not that a lustful woman will not be satisfied by an affair, but that modern man would do best to forget his longing for a grand existence. That beautiful possibility has been obliterated by the benighted boringness of science, embodied perfectly in the doltish medical officer Charles Bovary. For we are all married to him, and we are all quietly desperate. But who among us has the strength of will to autodestruct in the name of transcendence? Or is that, too, worthless Romanticism? There is no way out, except perhaps to follow Flaubert’s example and write about it.

“The Great Books” by David Denby

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’ve read a handful of books on the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, but none surpasses the lay critic David Denby’s The Great Books. Although I admire Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and tolerate portions of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, I find that such books are only interesting as philosophical or literary arguments; they don’t actually make me want to the read the precious books that form their core concern. Furthermore, straight-up polemics like William A. Henry’s In Defense of Elitism or E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy or William Bennett’s Book of Virtues, or any other politically motivated investigation of the curriculum debates that have wracked (and continue to smolder in) American universities over the past two decades, are limited in their practical impact for the same reason. Too often these ardent culture warriors, from both within and without the university and from both sides of the political spectrum, are so obsessed with looking at particular books and whole fields of study through the lens of “values” – liberal and conservative – that they ignore the most basic and crucial function of the reading experience: edifying the self.

    Denby’s perspective is not ideological but rather admirably selfish yet supremely earnest. He wants to reread the books for himself and find out what they have to say to him. A well-known film critic and journalist (now with the New Yorker), Denby decided “to go back to school” in 1991, attending core curriculum classes at Columbia University for a whole year, 30 years after he’d studied there as an undergraduate. He had two simple goals. His first goal was to see what the big fuss was all about. In 1991, Columbia was a lonely holdout, maintaining two required, year-long humanities seminars in the great books tradition under heavy fire from liberal critics. Many universities had already given up the fight, if they fought at all. Some had gone even farther and dismantled or at least reduced liberal arts requirements of any scope, including basic competency in a foreign language. In the face of all this ripe controversy and hand-wringing, Denby wanted to see whether the courses he took in 1961 were worth battling for a generation later.

    His second goal, inextricably linked with the first, was simply to feed his soul. He describes having felt intellectually depleted by his years in journalism and critiquing movies. He worries about the decline of his own reading skills. He’s stopped doing “serious reading” and become just another daily consumer of the New York Times. Also, as a denizen of New York, he sees crime and deterioration blighting a great city (and in one instance, experiences it directly) and wonders whether literacy or education might have anything to do with what is happening on the streets. But most principally, as an adult and a father, Denby wants to restore something basic and sacred in his cultural and mental machinery, something that the great books (he hopes) might exercise as nothing else could.

    These two goals are linked because, by the end of the book (and after the year of reading), Denby illustrates exactly what was missing in the ink spilled by renowned professors and intellectuals over “political correctness” at the university: the joys and sorrows of a direct reading experience. He puts himself into an actual laboratory, a functioning classroom of talented and diverse students at an elite Ivy League university, under the guidance of capable teachers, and well, just reads. And as he reads, he listens to the conversation, occasionally contributes a remark himself, and interweaves his own memoir into a thorough inspection of the role books play in his life. He lives the great books, not in any cliché sense, mind you – some of the books he finds boring and oppressive – but in the best, genuine significance of a reading life: explore, listen, discover, reflect, and apply.

    He fully admits that his “adventures with the indestructible writers,” as he calls them in his subtitle, are not always easy or pleasant excursions. Aristotle turns out to be quite tedious. Kant is insufferably convoluted and dense. Dante is flat in translation. Who in the Ivory Tower possesses the courage to confess such sentiments in writing, sentiments which nevertheless many devoted readers like Denby have felt and agreed with? On the other hand, to witness Denby’s passionate rediscovery of Homer, Montaigne, and Virginia Wolf – writers he’s sampled before but whose impact was minimal – rings with the triumph of awakening. Great writers speak in different tones to different people at different stages of life – that is why the books remain on reading lists and bookshelves after hundreds, even thousands of years. Their endurance has nothing to do with a white-wing cabal hell bent on enshrining the cultural values of European civilization in the face of diversity’s assault. It’s not to exclude the voices of those who have been left out of or have suffered under that grand narrative. And it’s not about shaping democracy or freedom or any other abstraction. These books keep getting taught because they simply refuse to stop speaking. And now, if you will excuse me, I need to reread The Brothers Karamazov.

“I’m a Stranger Here Myself” by Bill Bryson

by Joshua H. Liberatore

America is a funny place, let’s be honest. And there’s no better writer to remind us of exactly why and how it is a funny place than the inimitable Bill Bryson. I’d read his Made in America last year and learned a great deal about the peculiarities of American English. Even in that more scholarly exploration, I’d enjoyed his wit, intelligence, and likable prose. So when I picked up I’m a Stranger Here Myself, his charming collection of short essays, I was ready for a reading experience that would juxtapose pleasantly with the heavy, sober themes that make up the lion’s share of my reading. More than ready for something both smart and light, I think I even needed Bryson’s kindly reprieve. I’m a Stranger is the type of book you pick up in a bookstore and read the first 10–15 pages of without trying, which you enjoy immensely, even laughing out loud at spots, but you hesitate to buy it in deference to your backlog of “serious” reading. Or perhaps you buy it as a Father’s Day gift for your dad and sneak in a few more chapters before wrapping it up and signing the card. And then, without planning or calculation, you return to it years later on a lark. At least, that has been my experience with Bryson, and he always rewards my odd loyalty.

    I’m a Stranger has an excellent premise, relevant to anyone who has traveled or lived overseas for more than a few months: the resplendent joy and sorrow of rediscovering America after a sizable absence. Originally from Des Moines, Bryson lived, married, and raised four children in England for over 20 years before relocating to Hannover, New Hampshire. His short articles – initially written for a British audience – read as postcards from the visitor we see in ourselves at those precise moments when we feel our own strangeness in the most familiar and intimate settings, the paradox of self-aware belonging. His topics of interest are as varied as America is broad: the national obsession with statistics, the reliable friendliness of service staff, the incompetence of our postal system, our propensity for absurd waste, the special feel of a true classic diner, our consummate hatred of walking even the shortest distances, the immensity of New Hampshire’s forests, the bedazzling abundance of junk food in our grocery stores, the fundamental illegibility of all owner’s manuals, the endless silliness of new gadgetry.

    The list goes on and on. Bryson’s range is impressive, and though his main purpose seems bent toward making us laugh, he also leverages keen observations on more serious fare. Some of the pieces in I’m a Stranger focus on the idiosyncrasies of living in a small, New England town, but even these avoid becoming parochial. Writing in an era just before the dawn of personal blogging, Bryson reminds us – and we do need reminding – that making daily analysis of one’s surroundings and milieu need not be banal or exclusionary. This is “occasional” writing, in the sense carried by genre paintings in an earlier age, the stuff of everyday life brought to a level of insight and scrutiny that is neither so specific that it alienates nor so general that it bores. And Bryson is a master at the craft. Not every piece is first-rate, of course, but all have something unusual to offer. Bryson feels a curious mixture of affection, bemusement, and disdain toward American life and culture that is, for this fellow stranger anyway, nothing short of irresistible reading.

“Engaging the Muslim World” by Juan Cole

by Joshua H. Liberatore

If there’s one book on public affairs and foreign policy that every American should read as soon as possible, it is Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World. Cole’s name will be familiar to anyone who has been listening to or reading responsible reporting on the Middle East since September 11, 2001. An established professor of history at the University of Michigan, Cole also maintains a daily weblog on Middle East issues called “Informed Comment,” offers a regular column on Salon.com, and appears often as a guest commentator on NPR, PBS, and even some mainstream radio and television networks. “Informed Comment” is probably the most literally titled news source on the Internet; it offers nothing less than an essential education on Middle East affairs, not just for Americans who blithely assume all Arabs are Muslim or all Muslims are Arab, but for serious consumers craving direct, unvarnished news from those sore spots in our imperial adventures. Often relying on his own translations from Arabic-language media, Cole provides insightful glosses on what’s happening in the Middle East and what people on the ground are saying about it.

    That same breadth and energy characterize his latest book-length meditation, which constitutes an erudite and clear-sighted handbook for how the West, but in particular the U.S., should “deal” with the Muslim world, not as a monolithic, medieval, irrational society but as a nuanced and reasonable culture that we cannot afford to trifle with paternalistically. Cole examines the most critical areas where U.S. foreign policy has blundered, where America has failed to be the engaged leader it must and could be in securing a more peaceful and prosperous dialogue with Muslim-majority nations: Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan. In each chapter, he debunks the prevailing myths and stumbling blocks that keep American lawmakers and the public at large from first understanding and then actually achieving a better way forward. But there is not only educated complaint in these pages. Professor Cole also offers actionable suggestions for improved relations with the Muslim world and basically spells out a step-by-step program by which the Obama administration can make real progress there.

    Any brief summary of Cole’s explications and solutions would likely trivialize the complexity and gravity of the concerns he undertakes, but a few examples will suffice in demonstrating the compelling logic and intelligence of Engaging the Muslim World. In the case of Iraq, President Obama has inherited a most unholy albatross, a conflagration which has nevertheless empowered and legitimized its Shiite neighbor Iran. The sooner the U.S. withdraws its forces from Iraq and allows the elected government to work out its own problems, the better for all concerned, but most of all the Iraqis. As long as U.S. military might provides both political cover and security backup for Nuri al-Maliki’s sectarian policies, risky short-term governing serves mainly to alienate minority Sunnis and prevents real compromise and power-sharing. Similarly, as Israel’s chief enabler, the U.S. government is serving neither ordinary Israelis nor the long-suffering Palestinians by continuing its reactionary and knee-jerk support for the Zionist project, often under considerable pressure from right-wing lobbies such as AIPAC. The quicker U.S. “diplomacy” is able to encourage Israel – cutting off loan guarantees and military aid to a country with $14,000 per capita income – peace with its Arab neighbors, and a one-state solution for its non-Jewish population, will become an existential necessity.

    Similarly, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Obama administration too often clings to old – and according to Cole, discredited – scripts of surging troops and leveraging military aid as the best way to prop up feeble civilian governments. Here too there are practical solutions. Cole’s review of polling data from Pakistan is particularly illuminating: bolstering schools and medical facilities would be a more cost-effective and humane way of winning hearts and minds than Predator drone attacks on Pushtun warlords. How do we know this? The Pakistanis themselves are saying it. In Afghanistan, overzealous counternarcotic raids that scorch poppy fields without brokering profitable and sustainable agricultural alternatives only embitters the already desperate rural poor. Cole is not naive, however. Solutions to these foreign policy disasters are complicated and require considerable patience and political will. Recognizing the errors of received wisdom and cultural prejudice within U.S. foreign policy is the first step toward forging a more responsible future.

“The Future of an Illusion” by Sigmund Freud

by Joshua H. Liberatore

I’m not sure what moved me recently to pick up my copy of Sigmund Freud’s classic critique of religious belief, The Future of an Illusion (1927), which has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. Perhaps the impulse grew out of my observation of (and growing distaste toward) the breezy manner in which religion is often dismissed by fashionable liberals and otherwise smart men like Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens but also many among my educated, well-meaning peers. I’d read and profited from the successor companion volume, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), in which Freud explains how the destructive instinct in mankind is firmly rooted in both his culture and his psychological makeup. The order of these two books might well have been reversed, I now realize, since Freud was clearly interested in exploring how men can (and must) control and suppress the will to destroy that grows out of intensified individualism (our native egocentrism) in order to preserve civilization, which many do through mythmaking and religious doctrine. Civilization (Freud’s untranslatable Kultur), in turn, paradoxically propagates and encourages this destructive principle, for men tend to demonize and lash out at the forces that keep them from realizing a full expression of their egos, sometimes unconsciously, often in full awareness of their dangerous folly. So perhaps the order of Freud’s essays makes sense after all, since Freud’s overarching narrative suggests a dynamic feedback loop connecting the desire to destroy with the necessity to civilize. So, religious belief, even though childish and predicated on fear according to Freud, is nevertheless useful as a functional way to keep the house in order.

    Consummate scientist that he was, Freud can’t help himself from positing a possible civilization in which scientific principles and reason prevail over the “magical thinking” (Bill Maher’s characterization) that has made religion such an indispensable component to the successful “maintenance” of societies thus far. Is that the epoch in which we live in 2009, more than 80 years after Freud hoped for its emergence? Not at all, say our liberal critics, who attach themselves to the idea that religion, contrary to Freud’s contention, breeds all sorts of destructive and violent (indeed repressive) behaviors, motivating men to commit great evil in the name of their gods. Thus, they say, religion itself has become an impediment to the flourishing of enlightened civilization. Though I’m not a very religious person myself, I often find myself defending religion in conversations of this drift if only because I think religion gets singled out so narrowly and so blithely, whereas I see it as just one item from a vast menu of organizing forces that may lead to good or ill, depending on the user and the context.

    Now, I can arm myself with Freud’s own insights, though he nowise concealed his skepticism of religion as the chief purveyor of lies and fantasies, circumscribed by infantile wish-fulfillment and longing for the father. Lies and fantasies, nevertheless, have been quite effective in historical terms, argues Freud, in so far as they function in their high purpose of restraining our base natures. He only wishes their eventual replacement with what he calls “the primacy of the intelligence over the life of the instincts.” I venture to add, however, that science cannot boast a better – or at least a pure – record in any case, despite Freud’s ardent projections, which turn out to be naive from the relatively placid vista of the late 1920s. Europe to date had only flirted with self-annihilation just the once, with the help of industrial-grade weapons and scientific planning quite inferior to what the next generation would witness beginning in 1938 (Freud died in 1939). Rationalist liberals often point to the persistence of jihad and abortion-clinic arsonists in our modern world as proof that religion begets hatred and violence. Religious traditionalists meanwhile offer nuclear weapons and industrial pollution as equally destructive and barbaric on the global scale. Neither camp, it seems, has read Freud carefully.

    Civilization, I contend, is not vulnerable to an epic clash between religion and science. Both exist at once, in one cultural space (yes, even in the “Muslim world”!), as competing loyalties, by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, both religion and science exist alongside and in grand mixture with all the other organizing structures Freud would recognize as buffers to self-destruction, all of them irrational loyalties, de facto “faiths” of a sort: political ideologies, patriotism and ethnic identity, cults of personality and hero worship, institutions of marriage and family, even technology itself. Ours is a world in which Sunday mass is no more destructive or benign than Facebook or “The Bachelorette,” no more repressive or productive than income tax or the all-volunteer army, no worse or better than Brita filters or Viagra. Religion is simply another instrument with which we tamp down our all-consuming egos. But make no mistake: I’m not advocating any kind of easy relativism here. The contextual equality of these competing, organizing forces does not relieve us of the burden of making choices and value judgments, nor does it remove the necessity of constructing meaning out those choices. Our postmodern birthright is such that we choose our discipline as freely as we choose our poison. Our ignorance is often that we posit poison and discipline as opposites, adversaries, when in fact they are two sides of a coin.

“Absurdistan” by Gary Shteyngart

by Joshua H. Liberatore

In Gary Shteyngart’s brilliant novel Absurdistan, the narrator and protagonist Misha Vainberg is struggling – in vain, it seems, for most of the novel – to free himself from the “sins of the father.” His father, a post-Soviet Russian businessman whose corrupt profit schemes and murderous ruthlessness have come to haunt Misha, whose sole goal is to get back to New York to live with his Puerto Rican soulmate. Instead, he is stuck in his patriarchal homeland, held hostage by Immigration Services officers keeping tabs on his father’s criminal activities. Later, one of his father’s colleagues jokes that Misha’s father killed an Oklahoman (ruining Misha’s dreams for a renewed American visa) just to keep his son close, but Misha does not see it as a joke.

    The dizzying fates of chaos and circumstance, which eventually leave him stranded in Absurdistan, a Caspian Sea republic, seem to conspire, in his father’s honor, to keep Misha living within the Russian midst. Misha’s dream to live a simple life with his uneducated girlfriend Rouenna is in direct rebellion to his father’s wishes that he marry a Jewish girl and succeed him as oligarch in the “family business,” but throughout the novel, Misha seems to be running from both his heritage and his family expectations to carve his own path, however absurd that path may appear on the surface.

    In the first part of the novel, Misha finds himself living the life his father wants for him. He lives like an aristocrat in a huge St. Petersburg apartment, resting on the luxury of servants and extravagant comforts, while the surrounding city crumbles in poverty and despair. With no job or ambition to speak of, Misha thinks of founding a philanthropic mission to “save the children,” but this stratagem merely constitutes another (albeit more humanitarian) excess in his otherwise “superfluous man” existence, a prototype familiar to anyone versed in Russian literature and culture. In short, though highly intelligent and possessed of an American liberal arts education from Occidental College, Misha has learned only to throw his money around and live high on the hog, quite literally as a cultured pig.

    Although he appears genuinely to care for the humanitarian cause he hopes to serve (motivated in part by his pity for Rouenna’s native urban poverty), besides hiring a fleet of social workers and contracting a web designer, Misha does not show an active drive to build and run the service himself. When his father is suddenly killed (in revenge for his own assassinations, no doubt) and Misha is left all alone and stuck in a city he loathes, Misha slips into a serious depression, which culminates in the egregious decision to sleep with his recently widowed stepmother (a young “peasant” girl from the provinces who also evokes his pity). This extreme blunder marks the nadir of Misha’s desperation but also the beginning of his new awareness that he must leave Russia – and his father’s post-mortem grip on his future – at any cost.

    The second stage of the novel lands him in conflict-ridden Absurdistan, where Misha’s wealth and his dead father’s connections promise to secure him Belgian citizenship and a ticket out of the old Iron Curtain. His machinations, though hopeful at first, are soon thwarted by the collapse of Absurdistan’s government in a trumped-up coup attempt (later revealed to be staged) and a violent civil war between Sevo and Svani factions of the country’s Christian population for control of its natural resources (later revealed to be all but depleted). Here Misha finds two things that put him on the path to productivity and redemption: love and courage. Despite his wealth and connections, Misha’s gambit to survive his stay (now indefinite) in Svani City requires daring, cunning, and a newfound appreciation for life’s simple pleasures. The borders have shut down, violence rages in the streets, and refugees (including Misha) crowd into prostitute hovels at the Intourist Hotel, which doubles as a bomb shelter (the Hyatt has long been plundered).

    Meanwhile, Misha falls in love with a young tour guide, Nana Bragabagovana, who shows him the city’s modest charms and introduces him to delectable fresh sturgeon and ripe red tomatoes that capture his senses almost as aggressively as her beauty does his lust. As his relationship with her deepens and he becomes embroiled in the local politics (Nana’s father, a local kingpin, recruits him to serve as Minister of Multicultural Affairs in the post-coup government), he exercises his generosity and compassion, and for the first time, not by spending money. His inquiries and adventures reveal a civil conflict that is more than absurd – there is nothing real to fight over – it is fictitious. In these simultaneously bewildering and formative circumstances, he begins to plan his escape to the West with Nana, an objective that the reader somehow understands will never be consummated.

    On September 10, 2001, just as Misha hopes to cross the border toward his freedom, his attention turns back to his deep love for Rouenna and he decides to leave Nana behind (her father, Misha discovers, has plans to ambush their train and “kidnap” her back). And although readers can’t be sure Misha will fulfill this dream, his final email to Rouenna (as he composes it mentally) reveals how much his adventures have liberated him from his father’s loving but domineering hold on him, and from his own paralyzing superfluity. Emerging from his trials more self-assured and focused, Misha is ready to do right by Rouenna and come after her, to live with her, look after her education, and help her raise her child. The descent into absurdity and his short, but transformative tenure in Absurdistan have awakened in Misha a fresh purpose to living, not born of family guilt and spoiled entitlement, but sincere affection and a thirst for a new kind of freedom. Despite these promising tropes, however, Shteyngart is thoroughly rooted in the Russian tradition, and the fateful paring of Misha’s date and region of departure suggest that he will not be leaving Absurdistan any time soon.

“Lives Per Gallon” by Terry Tamminen

by Joshua H. Liberatore

California EPA Secretary Terry Tamminen delivers in Lives Per Gallon a compelling if not altogether shocking diagnosis of our present energy ills. Its subtitle “The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction” may first suggest another liberal tract full of liberal self-loathing and guilty hand-wringing about American dependence on cars and the fossil fuels that run them. But Lives Per Gallon presents a much broader, wide-ranging discussion of the problem whose catchphrases are all to easy to utter in public without a firm grasp of either the full extent of the consequences or the ready solutions that have been systematically ignored for decades. It’s as if policymakers and politicians have convinced themselves that using a loaded clinical word like “addiction” means they have recognized and accepted viable treatments, in many cases, available at the rehab clinic around the corner. But Tamminen, as Governor Schwarzenegger’s special assistant on environmental policy, is neither so blithe nor so naive as national politicians have proven to be. In an era when we increasingly must look to states, municipalities, and even private companies and organizations, rather than the Federal government, to lead on forging solutions to our most pressing environmental and energy problems, Tamminen’s candid voice and direct experience in California’s largely successful energy policy portfolio are welcome refreshment.

    One of the most striking aspects of Tamminen’s analysis that may motivate those otherwise indifferent to the ecological costs of our dependency on hydrocarbons is his extensive look at their lesser-known health effects. From a variety of perspectives, Tamminen evaluates the hidden costs of petroleum consumption: on oil workers, on the lungs of commuters and urbanites, on populations exposed to oil spills, on plant and animal life adjacent to oil activity. Besides visible exhaust from cars and factories, petroleum products produce a miasma of pernicious elements (benzene, dangerous particulate matter, volatile byproducts, etc.) in our atmosphere that linger, penetrate our food chain for good, enter our bodies, and taint our water resources. Tamminen stipulates that an industry-wide class action lawsuit could brought against oil and auto manufacturing companies on a scale that would put the famous tobacco settlement to shame. Furthermore, true pricing of gasoline and petroleum products that accounts for all the hidden costs would offer a shock to our economy and pocket books that we would not easily dismiss.

    Anyone who has seen eye-opening documentaries like The End of Suburbia or Who Killed the Electric Car? will recognize some of the same damning themes in Tamminen’s assessment as well. In particular, as we continue to approach “peak oil” – the point at which no new reserves of oil are harvested and available world supply thereafter drops precipitously – the immense costs of our car-dependent lifestyles, which have never been truly borne by consumers, unless you count tax dollars spent on overseas wars, exorbitant corporate subsidies, generous aid to oil states, just to name a few, will shortly become ominously apparent and are certain to yield social and infrastructural consequences that boggle the mind. And the relevant industries know it, which is why oil companies and conventional utilities have emerged as huge investors in and developers of renewable energy sources and technologies. The only question is when will governments and consumers catch up? Those among us who offer tired rhetoric about some undiscovered technology or scientific advancement that will save us from our errant ways ignore the fact that viable, affordable technologies already exist that would begin to repair the damage. The short-lived electric vehicle (EV) movement that California’s landmark 1990 zero-emission regulations sparked remains an unflattering example of superior technology and sound science being squashed by industry intransigence, political cowardice, and consumer impatience. Perhaps a major energy cataclysm – not merely the $4.50/gallon fill-ups of spring 2008 or the ongoing painful misadventure in Iraq, but something that really hurts average Americans – will be required before a wide swath of people, not just those bleeding-heart Californians, muster the political will and consumer forbearance to break the addiction for good.

“I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” by Tucker Max

by Patrick Baker

Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is an irresistibly crass expression of juvenile male fantasy. The emphasis in the first sentence must be on irresistibly for this fleeting reviewer to distinguish himself from others whose testicular diminution keeps them out of Max’s league while simultaneously making him a hero they feel they cannot openly acknowledge. Did I laugh at Max’s stories and hop on a few as vehicles for my own personal fantasizing? Of course. There are men out there who are totally immune to Max’s appeal. They are called eunuchs. Having testicles means being aroused at some level by this book. But its value transcends arousal and entertainment. If our socialization gives us one imperative, it is that Max’s misogynistic, (ab)use-em-and-lose-em triumphalism is anathema to the proper treatment of women and adult sexualized relationships. But if Max teaches us anything, it is that the central premise of this socialization is false: some women do indeed want to be treated like the whores men like Max take them for. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is the Moynihan Report of studies on sex and social mores, substantiating through empirical evidence the things that our right-thinking ideology does not permit us to believe. What do women want? Apparently many of them – well-educated, successful, attractive – want Tucker Max.

    Anyone who has attended a state university is familiar with the kind of behavior lionized in Max’s pages. It is the kind that thrives at fraternities and which stands on two pillars of ennui-induced iniquity: binge drinking and anonymous sex. The object of this version of “life” (death, afterlife, and reckoning being presupposed in Max’s title) is to indulge the Dionysian to the utmost and thus to turn it into a vice in the Aristotelian sense of making far too much of a good thing. For one need not be a prude to characterize Max’s pursuit of happiness as iniquitous; one need merely possess the requisite amount of respect, for other human beings certainly, but above all for oneself. Its absence is what allows the indulgence in pleasure to turn vicious. In Max one recognizes not the reveler but the addict, the prisoner, not the master, of the passions. In modern parlance we might say that Max “is compensating” or “has issues,” and it comes as no surprise when he describes his upbringing in a broken and fragmented family. News to Max and his fan-club: you will never be satisfied no matter how many holes you stick your thing into. Your stuff will never fill any receptacle of pleasure. From a University of Chicago graduate I might have expected more. Tucker, didn’t they make you read Plato’s Gorgias?

    Well-deserved criticism aside, Max is funny. He is a devil, but he is funny. Max is Andrew Dice Clay incarnate. Dice was flesh and blood, of course, but his jokes were not. Somehow you knew the guy had scored, as Max would put it, in the low double digits at best. Max is a bad writer but a great storyteller, which is possible only because his escapades are true yet, for all those who are not Tucker Max, simply unbelievable. This is the secret in Max’s sauce. It is what makes him so tempting, and also so discomfiting. Are we permitted to laugh out loud at his degradation of himself and others? It is a simple question of self-respect.

“Wars, Guns, and Votes” by Paul Collier

by Joshua H. Liberatore

The subtitle of Oxford economist Paul Collier’s new book, Wars, Guns, and Votes, reveals its principal appeal of timeliness: “Democracy in Dangerous Places.” (In fact, if I’d been his editor at HarperCollins, I would have made that the title and scrapped the gimmicky triad, which in any case has already been used in Jared Diamond’s bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel.) As we continue to confront the foreign policy disasters presented by the twin wars “on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq, failed experiments in forced nation-building and democratization cannot be far from our minds, nor should they be, since, like it or not, we are responsible for the actions of our government, however misguided, and must own up to their consequences. But Collier focuses his analysis on the broader trends of democracy’s varied potential in the countries comprising what he calls “the bottom billion,” the one billion poorest, most oppressed people in the world. For his argument, sub-Saharan African countries – rather than neoconservative playgrounds in the Middle East – provide illustrative examples of the specific ways in which a rush to democracy in poor, unsafe, and recently decolonized places can often lead to results that are not only disappointing to liberal ideologues and conservative universalists in the West but also functionally pernicious, yielding conditions and precedents often far worse than those fostered under the unsavory but pragmatic dictatorships or oligarchies we reactively distrust. We in the United States don’t much like to admit some of those unpleasant realities, but the more we turn a blind eye to the inherent vulnerabilities of the democratic principles so cherished in our national discourse – elections, power-sharing, diversity, plurality – the more we will damage the potential for the world’s poorest and most insecure societies to raise themselves out of their despondent and perilous patterns of self-government.

    It would be tedious to rehearse all of Collier’s conclusions, which range from the self-evident to the truly provocative, but a brief sample will suffice as a prelude to a direct encounter with the book. First, democracy and its trappings often make insecure societies – Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana are illustrative here – fundamentally less secure and prosperous. Elections are messy affairs, and the necessity of garnering votes and popularity can encourage bad behavior among unscrupulous politicians. In fact, career dictators who crave the legitimacy of a democratic platform may resort to the worst kind of corruption (vote buying, patronage, and nepotism), extortion (voter intimidation), and outright fraud (ballot manipulation) in the process of making the transition. As an example of the full suite of such nefarious practices in action, witness Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

    Second, democracy without accountability is worse than functional dictatorship, partly because disaffected populations often choose to arm themselves in rebellion or support enterprising partisans who do so on their behalf, leading to greater violence and, potentially, civil war. Armed rebellion can occur under harsh authoritarian rule too, it will be argued, but there’s not question that a disappointing outcome on election day, after the intense rivalries necessary for proper democratic competition, may often devolve into the ugly factionalism normally suppressed by despots. The utter breakdown of order in Nigeria and Kenya leading up to and following elections are cases in point.

    Third, diversity in small places is often dangerous and destabilizing. Collier describes public goods such as security as “economies of scale,” and as such, small countries – not in population but in economic girth – have a hard time managing the necessary pluralities of democratic rule. When diverse ethnic groups compete for scarce resources, under straightened circumstances (famine, drought, price-wars), competitive politics may organize along (and capitalize on the emotions of) tribal loyalties. Genocide and civil war in Rwanda and Congo, respectively, are brutal examples of what can happen when small societies fail to achieve public goods like security.

    Finally, democracy is quite likely to make already poor countries more vulnerable and fragile. The institutions that make healthy, mature democracies function smoothly and equitably take time and, it turns out, extensive resources to achieve. Neither of these elements has been successfully substituted by international aid, to the dismay of rich donor nations. In fact, one of Collier’s most interesting findings is the specific link between stable democracy and economic development; statistics and modeling reveal that democracy is dangerous and unstable in countries with a GDP per capita of $2,600 or less. In other words, only after GDP per capita reaches $2,700 does democracy become a viable and stabilizing regime. China, of course, is a notable exception to this paradigm, and Collier does well to recognize it as such. As China continues to develop at impressive rates of growth and income is shared more broadly, more and more pressure may be exacted on the socialist oligarchy to yield democratic advances. If Collier is right, China’s failure to do so could be explosive.

    It must be said that although Wars, Guns, and Votes proves itself an accessible and readable work intended for a general audience, Collier’s methods are statistical and mathematical, based on extensive case studies, massive international data bases, and firsthand field research. He works with a dazzling array of talented, young political scientists and economists from around the world, and unlike many scholars of his stature, is happy to give them their share of the credit for every insight his book furnishes. His book is, on the whole, a very humble account of ideas in discovery, theories in development, self-consciously untainted by Ivory Tower arrogance or abstruse jargon. Peppering his discussions with tangential notes on the competitive, merciless atmosphere of academic scholarship, Collier seems almost at pains to remind us that what he’s offering us is as tentative and refutable as the electoral exercises of the bottom billion. Moreover, his writing style is a quirky mixture of tender familiarity and detached candor that may put off some readers; at times, stylistic idiosyncrasies such as his loose paragraphing, too liberal use of colons, and penchant for anecdotal asides puzzled me, but in the end I found them charming. On the whole, the book provides a wide-ranging and instructive examination of contemporary political economy in the world’s toughest places and gives us a much-needed antidote to discredited rhetoric about the “blessings of liberty” and our deleterious attempts to export them abroad.