Inspiring Histories of Collective Vision

I am currently cruising through the Panama Canal. To prepare for the journey, I waded through David McCullough's National Book Award-winning tome The Path Between the Seas about the creation of the Panama Canal between 1870 and 1914. It is a story of delusion and determination, political treachery and cooperation, engineering feats and medical breakthroughs, tragedy and triumph, and the collective effort of historic figures like President Theodore Roosevelt as well as many thousands of unknown toilers. I finished McCullough's book amid the testy GOP and Democrat debates, as popular rejection of the political establishment propelled unlikely outsiders to the top of polls amid looming challenges to energy, environment, infrastructure and health technology. I found myself naturally longing to visit times when American politics was capable of the grand and visionary progress of McCullough's history (minus the gunboat diplomacy). I turned to my copy of Tom Wolfe's space-program tale The Right Stuff about another national effort that pushed the envelope of technology and individual heroism. I searched out the Hoover Dam saga told in Colossus by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hitzik, and the well-reviewed Empire Express, David Bain's sprawling history of the building of the transcontinental railroad. And I was reassured. All histories reminded me that America's great national projects have been born amid, and survived in spite of, political conflict and even outright skulduggery. If history is a guide, our thirst for common purpose toward uncommon achievement will survive spates of political aridity. For inspiration from McCullough's Panama Canal tale, see http://www.amazon.com/The-Path-Between-Seas-1870-1914/dp/0671244094

Books for Young Sleuths, From Toddler to Teen

Mystery fiction is not just an adult pleasure. Holiday book gifts can deliver the joys of detection and puzzle-solving to young people from teen down to toddler. Yes, there's even something for 3- to 5-year-old sleuths this year--appropriately titled Who Done It? by Olivier Tallec. On each page of the picture book, young readers are asked to choose a culprit from a lineup of human and animal characters in response to questions such as "Who ate all the jam?" Spotting the guilty party is not always clear-cut; maybe it's the fox with jam on his face or maybe the rabbit with the upset tummy. Children are exposed to concepts that even trip up adults, such as judging expressions and postures, and avoiding quick assumptions. Of course, some answers are easy and designed to get a giggle from small readers, such as "Who couldn't hold it?" Moving on to readers aged 10 to 12, check out Greenglass House by Kate Milford, a 2015 Edgar Award winner for Best Juvenile Mystery. Twelve-year-old Milo, adopted son of innkeepers of a spooky smuggler's inn called Greenglass House, is spending his winter holidays there when an odd assortment of visitors arrive in the middle of a blizzard. Soon objects have gone missing and secrets abound, and Milo joins the cook's daughter Meddy to follow the clues. For teens, The Art of Secrets by James Klise, 2015 Edgar Award winner for Best Young Adult Novel, provides a more complex and thought-provoking view of the modern world and human character. Muslim immigrant Saba Khan's family apartment burns down, perhaps due to a hate crime, but her high school and community rally to aid with fundraising. Soon she is living in a rent-free luxury apartment, enjoying Facebook fame and even being secretly romanced by a popular boy. The good feelings turn ugly, however, when a piece of "found" art donated to a school fundraiser turns out to be worth a half million dollars, and is later stolen from the school. A web of greed, jealousy, shocking accusations, hidden motives, lies and secrets enmeshes the characters. Check out the other nominees in the Juvenile and YA categories of the 2015 Edgar Awards: http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

Funny Women Top the Book Charts

Funny women are coming into their own. Six of the top 10 books in the humor category of the New York Times best-seller list this October are written by women: Why Not Me? and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling (No. 1 and No. 7 spots respectively), Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson (No. 2), Self-Helf by Miranda Sings (No. 4), Yes Please by Amy Poehler (No. 5), and Bossypants by Tina Fey (No. 8). Also note that, for the first time since it was established in 1996, the 2015 Thurber Prize for American Humor, went to a female author: Julie Schumacher for her novel Dear Committee Members. Now it's not that there haven't been female stars in the comic ranks before; Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett were icons long before the current crop of funny women. But more than a 50% female share of humor best-sellers is amazing. The next big step will be a woman host for one of the late-night talk shows! Of course, female humorists still face hurdles if former Disney CEO Michael Eisner could opine publicly to comedic actress Goldie Hawn at the Aspen Ideas Festival this July that "unbelievably beautiful women...are not funny." Eisner reflects a lingering gender gap; while both men and women tell pollsters that a "sense of humor" is a top attractiveness factor, it turns out that women mean they are attracted to men who make them laugh, but men mean they are attracted to women who laugh at their jokes. Hopefully, women are breaking through the laughter barrier in American culture at last. Why will that be a good thing? In a New York Times "Women in the World" article celebrating Schumacher's Thurber Prize win, author Brigit Katz explained "when funny people present us with their personal history and we acknowledge it--with laughter, with nominations, or with awards--those experiences become validated as stories worth telling." So consider yourselves a bit more validated, ladies, and check out the NYT humor best sellers: http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2015-10-11/humor/list.html

The Art of the Politically Cunning Tweet

I noticed the other day, thanks to NPR reporting, that Twitter has published a 136-page manual for politicians, "The Twitter Government and Elections Handbook," addressing questions from the basic "Where Do Tweets Appear? Who Reads Them?" to why politicians should be creative with tweets: "In 'stepping out from behind the podium' and showing natural personality, these leaders humanize themselves and the political process — and gain followers to boot." Personally, I don't think 140 characters are conducive to thoughtful political discussion. But there's no arguing Twitter has been a great tool for Donald Trump to keep media buzz constant and display his "natural personality." Those who dismiss his tweets as ego-fueled embarrassments are missing the political strategy in the social media campaign that has kept him top of GOP candidate polls. A recent article by InsideGov.com ranked 30 of Trump's most popular tweets (based on retweets and media attention) by scoring them for arrogance, offensiveness and political cunning. Consider the tweet judged most "Trump-tastic," an April 2015 comment on Baltimore's troubles: "Our great African American President hasn't exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!" InsideGov rates it strong on all counts: "It's arrogant. Politically, it appeals to Trump's base by belittling Obama and emphasizing crime — a particularly prickly issue among many Trump conservatives. Most of all, however, it maximizes offensiveness, ensuring that the tweet will be reposted, retweeted and criticized around the world." Aristotle's classic analysis of rhetoric posited that effective persuasion is based on ethos (authority of the speaker), logos (logic and facts) and pathos (emotional appeal). Even if facts are given short shrift in Trump tweets, he consistently hits two out of three persuasive power points for followers. Twitter also keeps messages in line with the political virtue of simplicity. To quote Aristotle again: "It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences." For InsideGov analysis of all 30 Trump tweets: http://tucson.com/news/data/ranking-donald-trump-s-best-worst-tweets/article_09035f9a-12d2-5002-92e1-df5379857d2f.html

Welcome These New Ghostly Tales for Halloween

By the middle of October, there are usually many articles listing the best scary tales for Halloween's annual celebration of the paranormal. But this year, editors seem to have less interest. Real humanitarian horrors abroad and mass killings at home may have sated the appetite for imaginary frightfulness. But I personally still welcome escape via a good ghost story's vicarious terrors, vaporous threats that vanish with the last page. And there is a choice of new, well-reviewed spine-tingling fiction this year to satisfy that yen. Start with Paul Tremblay's much-lauded A Head Full of Ghosts, a tale about a reality-TV demonic possession as recalled by the troubled narrator, a young woman who was a child at the time her sister was supposedly transformed by a demon. But steel your nerves; Stephen King, per Amazon, has said, "A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I'm pretty hard to scare." Also new this year is Little Girls by award-winning horror author Ronald Malfi: A woman returns with her husband and young daughter to a childhood homestead after her father's unnatural death, resurrecting unhappy memories and an uneasiness exacerbated by unexplained deaths, sinister neighbor children and eerie "bump in the night" events. For less modern ghostly doings, The Uninvited by Cat Winters, another award-winning author, is set in 1918 amid the fear and panic of the great influenza outbreak, as a young woman with the "gift" of seeing uninvited ghosts of loved ones--visions always heralding an impending death--struggles with the implications of her otherworldly revelations. Don't be discouraged by its bleak history; The Uninvited is "healing and moving rather than scary," per the Kirkus review. Finally, I'll include The Visitant: A Venetian Ghost Story by Megan Chance. Its American heroine disgraces her family and is sent to nurse an ailing man in a decaying Venetian palazzo owned by his friend, an impoverished nobleman, with both men seemingly in thrall to a dark force within a house of tragic secrets. I admit the Venetian setting is my main draw. If none of these appeal, see a selection of all-time scariest books: http://flavorwire.com/419194/the-50-scariest-books-of-all-time/view-all/

Deconfliction: If Leaders Speak in Jargon, Beware

This week I learned a new word: deconfliction. I wasn't exactly sure what it meant. It sounded generally positive and appropriate to U.S. efforts to defuse the tense situation created by Russian aerial bombing of Syria. But then I looked up the definition in the Oxford English dictionary. Deconfliction seeks to "reduce the risk of collision between (aircraft, airborne weaponry, etc.) in an area by coordinating their movements." So it is a word that, once understood, reveals the poverty of U.S. response: negotiations between two armed behemoths over how to avoid bumping into each other while they go about opposing policies that drop bombs with lots of "collateral damage" (coincidental civilian carnage) while seeking "targets of opportunity" (people and places for destruction). I comment on this in a blog about writing because it is an illustration of how much words matter, and not just to writers. According to an Oct. 1 article in Great Britain's The Guardian newspaper, "deconfliction" is a piece of jargon that appeared in U.S. military parlance in the mid-1970s, entered into Pentagon Gulf War reports in 1991, was wielded by Pentagon doublespeak master Donald Rumsfeld in 2006, and now is popping up in the mouths of President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. For a nice example of how to use the word deconfliction in a sentence, I turn to Brit Hume, a commentator with whom I don't generally agree, who summed up in a tweet: "Russian general to U.S.: We're bombing Syria in an hour. Get out of the way. Sec'y Kerry: We need a deconfliction discussion." Whenever leaders use jargon to conceal, abstract, excuse, dehumanize, euphemize and generally confuse the public, George Orwell turns over in his grave. His warning that "in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible" has gone unheeded. I fear we may be better informed by Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, where politics is defined as "a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles." For Orwell's prescient essay "Politics and the English Language," see http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/

Southern Gothic: 'The Night the Hogs Ate Willie"

I'm a sucker for Southern Gothic writing--works by authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers and Cormac McCarthy. So I was curious to read the recently published The Gates of Evangeline by Hester Young, described as a "Southern Gothic mystery debut." While a well-plotted mystery with Gothic elements--dream visions, an old mansion and family secrets--the book is more a paranormal mystery/romance with a Southern setting than a "Southern Gothic."  So what is Southern Gothic writing? It is regional literature using dark humor, religiosity or the supernatural, generational decay, violence and grotesque characters and events "not solely for the sake of suspense but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South," per a combination of definitions. Young's Louisiana locale is a sketched frame for her psychic East Coast protagonist's sleuthing and romancing of a manly Texan in boots. A Southern Gothic novel's powerful and authentic sense of place is its dark, inspirational core: decayed grandeur side by side with poverty and ambition; violence and hypocrisy embraced or defied; religious piety sitting on the same bench with perversion and corruption; family trees bearing love and poison; God and the Devil in daily discourse. This macabre and fantastical South is peopled by uniquely grotesque characters with crippled bodies, broken hearts or twisted souls. Or as Southern author Pat Conroy commented in this amusing quote: "My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, 'All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" See this Publishers Weekly listing of the top Southern Gothic books: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/66013-10-best-southern-gothic-books.html