What’s the Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One probably shouldn’t read political analysis 16 years after publication, but here I am. Frank’s account of Kansas’s slide into conservatism tells the story of how Kansas voters allowed themselves to be conned into voting for politicians who gladly take votes from salt-of-the-earth voters and then hand out tax breaks to corporate pillagers. It’s the progressive view on why people vote against their self-interests. Most of the fault lies with hypocritical politicians who gladly ride to power on Moral Majority messages while never intending to enact those promises. Another good chunk of fault lies with the Democratic Party, which happily sold its working-class soul in exchange for the possibility of big fundraising checks from corporate America.
But it seems that the biggest portion of fault needs to be the voters who’ve chosen ever-more conservative politicians year over year. That angle is strangely missing from this often funny, somewhat insightful book. Of course, I have the benefit of seeing the Obama years (or, 8 years of Republican backlash), and now Trump, who seems like a Frankenstein’s monster made from the worst parts of the Kansan conservatives that Frank profiles.
Frank seems to end this book with the thought that Kansas will continue to push more conservative, but that the men and women they send (or sent) to Washington were powerless to bring out the kinds of change their constituents clamored for. Fourteen years later, it looks like the conservative movement was working tirelessly to achieve exactly the Trump administration (which helps explain why so many conservative Christians are reluctant to speak against him). I think Frank (and many progressive pundits of his day) imagined a check in the system that would have never let a president do what Trump has done. But that check never materialized, which begs the question of what the ultimate goal of such a conservative movement could be. As we stand on the precipice of an election that feels more monumental than ever, I fear the ultimate goal of the conservative movement is complete domination, in essence a complete refutation of our core democratic principles.
It’s easy to chuckle at the crazy Kansan politicians voters were sending to Washington in the early 2000s. It’s a little harder to laugh about it now.
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Category: Book reviews
Kindred
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t think it’s possible to overhype this book. I can’t believe it took me so many years to finally read it.
From a very simple idea (a woman travels back in time to her ancestor to protect him from danger) this story grows and takes on incredible significance. The woman is African-American; the ancestor is white, Southern, and born into a slave-holding family. The mechanism for her travel through time isn’t explained, but it’s also the least important detail of this novel. What quickly takes center stage is the dependency that develops between Dana and Rufus. Dana needs him to stay alive long enough to allow her family line to originate; Rufus needs her to guide him and protect him from his poor judgment. Nothing is neatly or easily solved. Heartbreaking loss makes itself known over and over. And the unbelievable pain of slavery comes to life through a multitude of characters who are vivid and well-drawn.
This is science fiction that’s character-driven, and all the richer for it. The people and ideas on these pages will be with me for a long time.
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book was dark and disconcerting in the way that it destabilizes assumptions and reveals a fundamental violence lurking beneath our thin veneer of humanity. That the narrator turns out to be a hypocrite doesn’t undo the message so much as strengthen it. I loved the pace and tone of this story, and felt the menace right alongside Duszejko, our narrator. So many things to enjoy here, not the least of which is Duszejko’s use of astrology to make sense of events and to anticipate outcomes. I found these passages surprisingly persuasive.
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Leonardo and the Last Supper

Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Clear, readable, engaging, and a few details that are truly revealing (for instance, that Da Vinci really wanted to build armaments, but settled for sculptures and paintings while he sought those military commissions). The account of the construction of the Last Supper is fascinating, and King carefully contextualizes the painting and its legacy. But I found myself more fascinated by the archeological work that King uses to undergird his narrative—the myriad shopping lists, notes, letters and other bits of historical data that reveal the everyday existence of the artist.
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Sing, Unburied, Sing

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I found Ward’s The Men We Reap very moving, and had high hopes for Sing, Unburied, Sing. This story of a family attempting to put itself back together follows the teenaged Jojo and his mother, Leonie, as they collect Michael, Jojo’s father and Leonie’s boyfriend, from prison. Jojo is old beyond his years, and Leonie is for some reason stuck in a permanent state of fractured childhood—she wants to be a better person, but can’t seem to ever see outside of herself. Pop and Mam are the grandparents who provide the backbone of the family, and they’re the ones providing Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, with a home and food and the example of adults who’ve learned to navigate a cruel, difficult world. Leonie’s desire for wholeness is palpable, which makes the story all the more heartbreaking when it eludes her best efforts. I found the spirit world and the nature lyricism a little taxing at points—the mysticism gets a little thick—but overall it’s a beautiful story of a terrible world.
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Future Home of the Living God

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Erdrich’s apocalyptic pregnancy novel features a strong, funny narrator, strange events just beyond the border of the story, and a family defining itself and uniting in the midst of societal breakdown. It’s a tough, bleak story that feels scarily possible (with the help of 1 or 2 cataclysmic events), but Cedar (our narrator) carries us along with wry humor and clear observations about this strange new future. I wanted to know more about the events happening beyond Cedar’s narrative (which takes the form of a journal for her unborn child), but we catch only snippets. Occasionally the theologizing goes on a little long, and the ending felt thin to me, but perhaps that’s the story for humanity as we face our next chapter.
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Chasing the Sea

Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia by Tom Bissell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I should mention that I struggle to make it through nonfiction books. I like long-form journalism, but find my attention dissipating around page 40 with most nonfiction. That’s when I start eyeing the tall stack of novels and story collections on my nightstand. But Bissell’s Chasing the Sea held my attention all the way through and kept me curious about this corner of the world.
The book is a mix of personal reporting and a condensed history of Central Asia and its relationship to Russia, China, and the West. Bissell spent a few months in Uzbekistan as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, but washed out of the program. This book is his return visit. Now he’s a successful journalist and editor, and we get the feeling that he’s trying to prove something to himself. And along for the ride is Rustam, his translator, who brings levity and color to the story. Rustam is a great character, and I wish we could have spent more time with him, especially as the narrative winds down in the end.
The history of Uzbekistan and its major cities is fascinating, and Bissell does a decent autodidact lay-of-the-land from his own reading. It’s more like getting a fascinating rundown of historical events from a friend at the bar than it is a history lecture, though the details can get pretty thick. But this region and its history have been neglected for so long that even these difficult passages feel like a tiny amount of the attention we should pay to this part of the world.
As the narrative winds perpetually forward with its stumbling progress toward the ever-elusive Aral Sea, I started to think that reaching the once-shores of the sea was really a distant subplot all along. When we do arrive, it feels too late, and in many ways it is.
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Zinky Boys

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It’s impossible to convey how profound this book is. If I could recommend it to everyone, I would. Through stories that are clear, honest, and heartbreaking, we experience the Soviet war in Afghanistan through the eyes of soldiers, nurses, and civilians—all of them grappling to make sense of why they were sent to war and the toll it took on their lives. Perhaps harder to deal with are the stories from mothers and widows who can’t make their sacrifices add up to the silence and shame heaped on the veterans of this war.
I have no connection to the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and neither do I have a connection to America’s war in Vietnam. The introduction draws a parallel between the way veterans of both wars were treated, and that is a powerful bond. But on a deeper level, Zinky Boys lays bare the cynicism and craven nature of a government that is willing to send soldiers and civilians into almost-certain death with little regard for their safety, the safety of civilians, and the long-term prospects for peace. In an era where proxy wars are still being waged, Zinky Boys is prescient and damning.
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The Friend

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Beautiful, lucid, and candid in its examination of a friend’s suicide. Nunez adopts the disarming format of a letter to her protagonist’s recently dead friend, following the thread of her thoughts in a way that reminded me of Sebald’s Rings of Saturn (though with a bit more grounding than Sebald). I found the digressions (whether into the state of teaching, her friend’s love life, an affection for dogs, the writing life) fascinating and refreshing. Is it that grief lances the sugarcoating so often added to these subjects? I don’t know. But there’s no cynicism here either. For all of its bleak subject matter (suicide is a running thread) The Friend feels full of life, even in the midst of struggle, bewilderment, and loss.
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There There
There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I expected a novel of the contemporary Native American experience, and I got that and much more in There There. Orange’s debut is a story told through a rotating cast of characters who reveal the urban Native American experience with complexity and honesty. Each one introduces him or herself, sometimes providing a little backstory, and then gradually the strands gather momentum as we move toward the powwow that represents something different for each individual. There’s real human emotion on every page, and I felt myself connected to the plight of each one—even the quote-unquote bad guys. Orange writes with confidence, and if I had a complaint it’s that the novel was over so soon. I could have stayed in this world longer.