wahistorian's Reviews (506)

This extraordinary work of non-fiction unpacks an historical event that seems outside of history when Herbert begins working on it. In 1911 Mexico, when guerilla forces challenged President Porfirio Diaz’s rule, over three days men on both sides perpetrated a “little genocide” (Herbert’s term) on 300+ Chinese in the town of Torreón. Most Chinese were successful relative to Mexican workers and farm workers, and Madero’s followers took the opportunity to right the social order by terrorizing the outsider. Herbert checks primary sources against the one scholarly historical account of the incident to draw out the complicated story of the Chinese diaspora, Mexican politics, and racism in the Americas. It’s a fascinating take on racist violence and helped me think about U.S. history differently.

A modern-day Don Quixote tale, in which fired teacher Ignacio Matus inspires a band of hapless students to re-take the Alamo and thus reclaim Mexican honor and secure their own places in history. Matus is obsessed with Mexico’s status—military and Olympic—and depressed by his students’ lack of understanding of history; what better way to galvanize the next generation than by taking Texas back? The general genuinely loves his enlightened army of six and Toscana’s writing reflects that tenderness and indulgent humor. The tragic but inevitable ending still allows that this army was ennobled by their reach for something more important.

This is the fourth campaign bio I’ve read so far this season. I can’t honestly say it is one of the most well-written or compelling, but Castro’s candor is refreshing and his life journey has been extraordinary, however matter of fact his tone is sometimes. The book traces his childhood as one of the twin sons of a single mother, raised part-time by his Mexican grandmother who never stopped crying about the fact that her education was cut short. Julian and Joaquin Castro became determined to excel in their school careers, applying only to Ivy League schools without a thought about how they’d pay for them. His story is short and remarkable for his determination to succeed at public service. At 30 he was Mayor of San Antonio and a few years later, Pres. Obama’s HUD Secretary. Watch him go; I have no doubt there’s more to come.

A delightful summer read, in which New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot uses the life of her father, B-actor Lyle Talbot, to explore Hollywood and the ways in which it shaped the mores of 20th-century Americans. She writes about him with obvious affection, leaving out the excruciatingly detail that some family-authored biographies can fall prey to. Instead the focus is on how Talbot’s life and work exemplified some profound things about American life: the striving of rural kids in the early 1900s and how they got out of genuinely hard-scrabble circumstances, but also the ways in which that success could appear to be luck to those who made it in the talkies. Most fun for me we’re his early years as a magician’s assistant on the road and his pre-Hollywood repertory theatrical experiences, in which “the essential sprightliness of his nature” stood him in good stead. Later there were multiple failed marriages and a brush with alcoholism before the marriage that took—30 years with Margaret’s mother and her three siblings—steadied him in his 60s. The books includes an excellent set of annotated sources at the end. So lovely to read a warm tribute to a Hollywood father.

The best candidate’s book I have read so far. If you can wade through the increasingly dark first third of the book, in which Yang lays out the indicators of dysfunction in the American economy and society, the policy prescriptions are well worth the patience. As he puts it, he is writing from the center of the tech bubble and, if your job escaped outsourcing and offshoring and automation, now AI is coming for it. Opioid addiction, high rate of disability, discouraged job-seekers, the gig economy, social media obsession and underemployment are all the results of a century of putting capital before humanity. One-percenters seeking immediate returns have no incentive to invest in people or communities, and the rest of us have become too demoralized to demand change—unless Donald Trump’s false promises count. Yang’s major proposal is universal basic income, or UBI, but he also recommends community service credits (a system of service bartering that strengthens ties between neighbors), incentives for better parenting like paid family leave, and a general focus on policies that unleash human potential. I came in skeptical and left inspired.

This is the first book by Zola I have read, and I marveled at his astute social observation and his ability to weave that into a novel that recreates a world in flux. The Ladies’ Paradise—modeled on Bon Marche, Paris’s first department store—becomes almost a character in this book, growing and changing under the direction of Octave Mouret, a retailing visionary who seeks to demonstrate that Paris’s many small shops can be brought more efficiently under one roof. The store is variously described as a machine, a church, and, of course, a paradise, but one that brings out the worst, Zola believes, in the sales staff and the customers, however amazing it is. Mouret is aided and abetted by Baron Hartmann (in history the Baron Hausmann who transformed the city), whose demolition and rational rebuilding helps Mouret’s store take over his neighborhood. In Dickensian detail, Zola describes the destruction and bankruptcy of the individual local haberdashers, cloth sellers, lace-makers, and umbrella-makers. Most importantly, we follow one provincial girl from her arrival in Paris—penniless with two young brothers to care for—to the peak of her profession at the Ladies Paradise. Denise Baudu fends off the advances of her employer and other salesmen, to maintain her honor, care for the shopkeepers in their neighborhood, and raise her brothers. But she is also a woman of the future and has her own ideas about retail innovation; even if Zola does not outline them, he makes it clear that Denise has found a way to be forward-looking *and* humane. Although the marvels of merchandising get a bit tiring sometimes, this book is in an incredible accomplishment.

I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as many readers I know, and in general for me Ruth Ware has been a three star writer. It wasn’t clear what the stakes were for the protagonist—Harriet “Hal” Westaway, a tarot reader on Brighton Piet—when she receives a mysterious letter summoning her to the reading of a will. Sure, she owes a loan shark money, and is pretty sure the bequest is an error, but she’s determined to maintain the fiction long enough to collect. She meets all the members of her long-lost supposed family at the family estate, Trepassen, and tries to unravel her connection enough to stay one step ahead of any disinheritance. But the sense of place isn’t strong enough to really enhance the story, nor are the aunts and uncles well-defined as characters. As a result, for me the story was a bit of a muddle.

I found this book difficult to put down, thanks in part to Ross’s obsessively detailed observations, but also to the colorful cast of Director John Huston, producer Gottfried Reinhardt, studio execs, writers, actors, and all the myriad of other workers it takes to make a movie. ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ was a flop—“flop d’estime,” as Si Seadler, studio advertising exec called it—but the process of trying to draw it back from commercial failure is ultimately the fascinating part of the story. In Ross’s hands, ‘Red Badge’ becomes a fascinating case study of the tension between art and commerce in Hollywood. The happy part for me was how intensely everyone cares about their little role in trying to make a film a success. And John Huston was a mensch. This is a book I’ll think about whenever I watch a movie.

“That’s the trouble with Hollywood; the things that don’t exist are likely to kill you if you threaten them.” No one I’ve read describes California the way Eve Babitz can, except maybe Nathanael West: the dry weather, the heat, the lush sunsets, then the Hollywood obsessions, with money and love and appearance and work and drugs. Ostensibly fictional, her life in this book is a series of encounters with ordinary people who somehow appear extraordinary because of their surroundings, at Chateau Marmont or Palm Beach or even Bakersfield. The author lets herself be taken in enough to create a sense of the place as a hothouse full of exotic flowers. A delightful place to visit, but I can’t imagine who would live there.