Ban these books!

Happy Banned Books Week, everyone! I just looked at a list of "most commonly challenged" books in the U.S. and see some great work I've read over the years, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Young Huck uses the "n" word about 200 times, which irritated me on second reading--but the kid's voice was that of the 1850s and bore no malice. We need to read this book to help us understand how far our great country has come.

Also on the list is Bless Me, Ultima by Rodolfo Anaya, which I'd never heard of until I moved to the southwest. The eponymous Ultima may or may not be a witch, which apparently had some readers' knickers in a twist. So what? It's a touching story.

Then there are To Kill a Mockingbird, a beautiful book that's only objectionable to people who hate justice; Lady Chatterly's Lover, of which I avidly read select passages as a teenager; the likes of Hemingway, King, Angelou, Sinclair, Capote, Morrison--so many scurrilous scribes--little wonder I have grown up to be so depraved.

Perhaps it's the combined influence of all these bounders that influenced my writing a banned book of my own. Did you know that When Pigs Fly was banned in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the same city that burned Harry Potter and other un-Christian books in 2000? In '07 the city's Friends of the Library first invited me to do a reading, then disinvited me because my antagonist (you know, the bad guy) lacked moral character.

In one of my frequently recurring daydreams, enemies of iniquity light a bonfire made exclusively of copies of When Pigs Fly and Getting Lucky--all having been purchased at list price, of course.

Blind but Now I See

Nonfiction
Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson 

368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “Music awash on our shores

BLIND BUT NOW I SEE:
The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson
By Kent Gustavson
368 pp. Blooming Twig Books (Cardinal’s Publishing Group) $14.95

Reviewed by Gary Presley

American music takes multiple forms—classical, jazz, show tunes, big band music, blues, rock and roll, hip-hop, and more—and most of these genres have evolved by blending into one or more of the others. But there is one genre, entirely American now, that owes its origins to the Celts, Scots, and Brits who brought their music as they washed up on these shores. It’s the music of the South and the Appalachian Mountains, and it is the music of Doc Watson.

I knew the styles of the music but had never really connected with the people who played it ... I just had this sound ringing in my ears of this beautiful pentatonic, archaic-sounding music sung in a vocal style that left Frank Sinatra far behind.

So said Ralph Rinzler on first hearing Doc play. Rinzler, a young folk aficionado, was instrumental in bringing Watson out of the hills of western North Carolina to perform on a New York City stage. This occurred in 1961, at the initial wave of the folk music revival. Watson’s rendition of “Amazing Grace” at that performance created a sensation, making the old hymn once again part of the American songbook and identifying Watson as an icon of acoustic instruments and traditional singing.

Rinzler soon became a combination of representative, agent, manager, and friend to Watson, even pressuring him to maintain the purity of his repertoire when Watson wanted to incorporate other genres into his performances.

The musical wizard known as Doc was born Arthel Lane Watson in 1923, near Deep Gap, North Carolina on the family farm, a few meager acres of the three thousand passed down from David Watson, a Scotsman who came to America to fight the British “in exchange for the promise of land, should the Americans prevail in their struggle.”

Possibly as a result of an injury from an ill-measured dose of silver nitrate eye drops meant to prevent post-natal infection, Doc has never been able to see, but the blind youngster grew up without being coddled. He was allowed to run free across fields and farmland with his brothers and sisters, and he pitched in with chores, right down to being stationed at one end of a cross-cut timber saw. Like some who are blind, young Doc learned to listen. He calls it “sound radar,” a skill so highly developed that he can easily memorize music, or diagnose a car engine flaw simply by hearing it run.

Kent Gustavson’s biography is filled with such minutiae about hill country life, about the music and musicians of Appalachia, about Doc’s short sojourn at the Raleigh School for the Blind, and about the Watsons and related families.

Gustavson is a music professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and his knowledge, passion, and expertise offers readers a thorough insight into the magic that Watson makes. He chronicles Watson’s career from local dances and juke joints to appearances on small town radio stations. It was prior to a broadcast performance in a furniture store, in fact, that Doc earned his nickname. The host didn’t think “Arthel” came across well on the airwaves, and a young woman in the audience yelled out, “Call him Doc.” And so it was.

Watson married, had two children, lived off the land, a state pension, and his meager earnings from playing music at dances and picnics across the hills and hollers, in churches, and juke joints, but it wasn’t folk music then. It was “ ... America’s other traditional folk music ... rockabilly ... music that transformed Doc Watson from a street musician ... to a professional musician who could support his family on his own pride.”

Much of this biography covers those years before Watson met Rinzler. Rinzler had come to Appalachia to record the legendary Clarence Ashley, also known as Tom Ashley, a session for which Watson has been hired to play the electric guitar. Rinzler doesn’t want a modern instrument ruining music not meant to be amplified, but when he heard Doc sing “Tom Doula” and accompany himself with a banjo, Rinzler realizes he has found an American original.

Gustavson quotes a Who’s Who of folk musicians, and tidbits about music legends are scattered throughout the book. Pete Seeger is everything Doc Watson is not—a political and social liberal and scion of a prosperous family—but he can only imitate Watson’s blood-rooted authenticity. Woody Guthrie, dying from Huntington’s disease, is spirited from a hospital by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott to be at one of Doc’s early New York City appearances.

Gustavson’s research is admirable. While an index would have been helpful, the author does include extensive notes at the end of each of the twenty chapters. Curiously, a reading of the author’s acknowledgements suggests Watson was not interviewed for this biography, but I would not doubt that Gustavson’s work presents an authentic picture.

The final chapters of the book are deeply affecting. They chronicle Watson’s years of international renown as his legend reaches outside the folk genre; the grind of day-after-day touring on the road; the integration of his son, Merle, into his performances; and the collapse of Doc’s world when Merle, also an extraordinary guitarist, died at age thirty-six in 1985. Doc Watson cherished Merle as musical soulmate and best friend. Merle also had orchestrated and guided much of Doc’s tour life for fifteen years, and the older man felt his loss deeply, so much so that some of the people interviewed note his son’s death left him a “harder” man. But the legend continued to tour and record for several years, and to take part in an annual acoustic music festival in honor of his son. Watson resides in North Carolina today, although friends sometimes characterize him as reclusive.

Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc’s singing style, and his guitar work, both flat-picking and finger-picking. Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose “ ... approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz’s approach to the piano ... “

Barefoot in Baghdad

Nonfiction
If only

BAREFOOT IN BAGHDAD:
A Story of Identity—My Own and What it Means to Be a Woman in Chaos
By Manal M. Omar
237 pp. Sourcebooks $14.99

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

She speaks American English, but she also wears a headscarf, is fluent in Arabic and can quote the Koran. It’s right after the 2003 American invasion, and she says she’s in Iraq on a humanitarian mission. Neither side trusts her.

But she’s not a spy, a journalist, nor an agent of the CIA. Manal Omar is a Palestinian-American, who comes to Baghdad after the U. S. invasion as regional coordinator of Women for Women International, an organization struggling for women’s rights. Her memoirs from this period, 2003 to 2005, shed considerable light on our nation’s problems in Iraq.

Fearing she might be seen as a tool of the American occupation, Omar at first refuses to enter the Green Zone or attend meetings run by the military. Thus pro-war Iraqis are suspicious of her. Because her headscarf bespeaks religious conservatism, Baghdad women accuse Omar of being Iranian and insidiously bent on rolling back the freedoms they have won. They deny there are pockets of poverty in the city and irately reject any idea Iraqi women need help. She finds it difficult to add a woman to her staff, because educated women are loath to go into the poor areas, as she does.

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have entered the country have little clue about what’s needed. Because Omar has the courage—and the contacts—to talk to all classes of Iraqi women, she is able to persuade representatives of other NGOs that the basic needs—food, shelter, health care, electricity—must be met before they can think about larger issues like women’s rights and teaching money-making skills to women.

Initially, Iraqis welcomed the allied armies and celebrated the end of Hussein’s rule. But as time goes on, slowness in meeting those needs alienates the people from the temporary government of the occupiers. The situation sours—aid money goes to crooked contractors who deliver shoddy work and pocket huge profits. Powerful clans resent loss of their power and property and turn to murder. Civil strife erupts.

Omar’s friend Fern Holland expressed this pessimism:

...the window of opportunities to create a new Iraq was rapidly closing...the people to pay the price were going to be the women of Iraq...These women are unbelievably strong. And I am afraid we are setting them up for failure. We are giving them nothing but bricks and fancy equipment.

In an epilogue, Omar says,

I have worked in other war-torn countries, but my time in Iraq haunts me more than any place I have been... It maddens me that so many of the mistakes that pushed Iraq into chaos were avoidable. From the outset of the U.S. invasion, those in power repeatedly betrayed the people of Iraq by standing on the sidelines as the society crumbled and making promises they could not keep.

Because she still adheres to her culture’s family values, “The decision to go to Iraq was not mine alone. It was a family affair. ” The author had worked for the UN, Oxfam, and then for World Bank, and her Arabic-American family couldn’t understand why she would leave an enviable job to go into a dangerous situation. Omar felt she had a perspective few others did—she was right—and after a long campaign received her father’s permission.

For my Palestinian family, the Iraq war hit a raw nerve. It was a reminder of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948...another humiliation of the Arab world at the hands of the West. And as far as they could tell, I wanted to be part of it — and I was on the wrong side.

When she is introduced to her staff—all men, she is shocked to discover—she gets a chilly reception. It takes some time for her to find out what the problem is: having been told they would have a female American boss, they had entertained visions of the blond, blue-eyed Barbie starlet type they had seen on television. They were crushed to find they would be working for a scarf-wearing Arabic woman instead.

The author makes many of her points anecdotally, recounting the stories of individual women she helped—or was unable to help. Patriarchal customs hampered her time and again, and U. S. military rules often imposed other obstacles.

She makes good friends in Iraq and finds a husband—but they are forced to flee by extremists. One of her staff is murdered. Some of the others flee to the U. S. But Muna, the woman Omar recruited to her staff, courageously remained in Iraq carrying forward the work of Women for Women, pushing the program to help the most vulnerable.

Despite the retrogression in Iraqi life in the past six years, Omar remains optimistic that the strength and resilience of the Iraqi people will win out and make the country the great nation it could be. If only. 

The self-publishing experiment, part 2

The self-publishing experiment with CreateSpace worked out nicely, with the second chapbook going through without a hitch. Here is the front cover of the second one. The artwork is by the terrific El Paso artist Maritza Jáuregui-Neely. My co-editor and I asked her to capture the flavor of El Paso, and she certainly did:

About a Mountain

Nonfiction
A Noble Miss

By John D’Agata
236 pp. W.W. Norton $23.95

Reviewed by Tim Elhajj

In 2002, John D’Agata helped his mother move to Las Vegas and found himself following the ongoing controversy to relocate and store radioactive waste material from all over the country nearby. He then volunteered for a local community suicide prevention help line, and that same summer sixteen-year-old Levi Presley jumped from the roof of a hotel to his death. In About A Mountain, John D’Agata takes these disparate threads of his experience and weaves them into a meditation on bureaucracy and corrupt politics, the self-destructive impulses of individuals and nations, and the limits of language over time.

For over twenty years Yucca Mountain has been at the heart of a plan to dispose of waste from every nuclear power plant or weapon development site across the United States. The government plans to store this material inside the mountain until it no longer poses a threat to human life. But as D’Agata unpacks the decisions that led to this course of action, it becomes clear that the threat to humanity isn’t what’s driving the policy.

There are politics at play at almost every level of the process, from the assessment of risk—does the threat of transporting nuclear waste outweigh the threat of storing it in multiple locations?—to adopting Yucca Mountain as the central storage facility. Will anyone be surprised to learn that Congress selected this mountain, which may not be the most suitable location for a variety of geological reasons, because its state and federal representatives were among the weakest and least able to protect their constituents from harm?

Fortunately D’Agata has his sights set higher. He isn’t primarily concerned with rabble-rousing against corrupt politicians, but wants us to consider instead the act of self-destruction itself. We consider it literally as he traces Levi Presley’s last hours. We consider it figuratively as we reflect on how long the toxicity of the radioactive waste we’re creating will last, compared to the length of the longest-known civilizations and cultures, or the efficacy of language itself.

D’Agata gets high marks for the scope and breadth of this work. He reaches for and imagines descriptions of everything from Edvard Munch contemplating the world as he paints The Scream to the few hours prior to Presley’s leap from the tower at the Stratosphere. I really wanted to enjoy this book, and for the most part I did, but somehow, something about its execution left me cold.

D’Agata has a penchant for lists. He includes lists of contradictory facts, lists of the exact types of devastation that might occur in a traffic accident involving a truck with a payload of nuclear waste, lists that include everything that would be contaminated in such an accident from rusted bolts to light bulbs, lists of the accumulation of cosmic sums of interest that accrue over vast periods of time. One or two these lists seems fine, a good idea—this is, after all, a book about the existential grief of modern life. What better way to present this than by asking the reader to wade through this sort of data? But I am the type of reader who wants to drink in every word, and I feel cheated when I am tempted—no, invited is a better word—to scan so many lists by the author.

Worse, D’Agata has chosen to bring into the story his own experience, and his tale of moving his mother to Vegas is incredibly inconsequential and dull. Mom and son look for somewhere to live. Mom and son march in a small parade. He describes a visit to the proposed site at Yucca Mountain, which isn’t as trite. And his work on the suicide prevention hot line allows him to segue more easily into the material about poor Levi. But there is little self-revelation here. The material from his life is simply a way to frame the text, lacking any sort of urgency or depth. Why bother?

Compare D’Agata’s use of memoir here with something like Nick Flynn’s sublime memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb, where Flynn, a soon-to-be father, uses his book to examine his fears of fatherhood and intimacy and, as the Abu Ghraib scandal breaks in the news, his growing obsession with torture and pain. Under Flynn’s deft hand, the connections between his own personal fears, American fears of terrorist attack, and the fears of torturer and tortured alike seem plain enough, but each is made all the more urgent by the immediacy of the prison scandal or the infant growing in its mother’s womb. This is how to use personal experience to inform a political issue. D’Agata presents some intriguing ideas, but his text misses on some important marks. It’s a noble miss, but a miss all the same.