Back in May I wrote about the death of my good friend and mentor Barbara Kerr Page, with whom I had the pleasure of working with at The Albuquerque Tribune. If you missed that, it’s here.

Many of you who didn’t know Barb wrote very nice notes to me. Some of you had a Barb-like person in your own newsroom life — someone whose wit and stubborn dedication to accuracy and excellence left a lasting impression on everyone she or he worked with.

A few weeks after she died, many of her friends (including yours truly) gathered at Ollie Reed’s house for a casual memorial. It was one of the most beautiful, breezy spring New Mexico afternoons. (Picture above, courtesy Mark Holm.) We talked about Barb and what she meant to us. She wouldn’t have wanted us to go to the trouble of getting there from great distances, but I think she would have loved it.

* * *

So. There’s a scholarship fund now, in Barb’s name, that’s been started at her alma mater, New Mexico State University. It’s a journalism scholarship, which will be given annually. It is my hope that it will be awarded to a student who demonstrates some 21st-century Barb Page-like tendencies: Someone who is drawn to editing and demonstrates a devotion to the collaborative art of good journalism. Someone who fusses over details, facts, truth, process, headlines, presentation, good management — and does so in the many platforms that now exist.

But that’s a decision for down the road. Right now, the main thing is to raise money. The fund, I’ve been told, is getting close to $10,000 — an amount that would begin generating an annual $500 scholarship.

I realize this isn’t much, but it means a lot to me and to others. So I’m asking.

I’m pretty sure I’m asking for the first time. I did an AIDS walk-a-thon in 1994 and I don’t think I’ve ever asked anyone for a donation for any cause since. I could be wrong about that — maybe I’ve been more needy than I recall. What I do know is the degree to which I’ve donated to others’ causes, things, efforts, events, etc. Triathalons, kid’s church mission trip, seats at charity dinners, self-funded journalism projects, cross-country relocations, job-finding assistance, etc.

I would like for you to consider a one-time donation of ANY SIZE to this scholarship fund. Here’s how to do it online: Click this link. At step 1, choose the button that says “Find a Giving Area/Fund.” This will bring up a new window — in the search field type the word “Barb” and you will see the Barbara Kerr Page Endowed Journalism Scholarship, the third item in the list. Click on that. Proceed from there. It takes no time at all.

It’s tax-deductible. You’ll get a receipt right away, and later, a more formal one from NMSU.

Here’s what else. I have made two large donations so far and intend to make one more before Dec. 31. For this donation, I WILL MATCH the total of what Tonsil readers have donated, up to a total of $500. If you donate, leave me a message here or e-mail me privately at hank [at] hankstuever [dot] com and let me know what you gave. Do this by Dec. 15 please, if you can.

It would mean a lot to me and to some young journalists. Thanks.

Somewhere near the White House, on a non-descript floor of a non-descript office building, an entire team of people sift through President Obama’s mail — thousands of letters daily. This is actual mail, the kind people put stamps on and mail carriers deliver. (I know! Despite everything you’ve heard, people still do that.)

Out of those thousands of letters, 10 are selected and sent over to the White House. Obama reads them each night. He likes it — even the ones that begin “Dear Jackass.”

Eli Saslow is a reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post. He’s insanely talented. (He doesn’t know this, but I secretly nicknamed him “A New Hope.”) A while back, Eli wrote an amazing story about how those 10 letters are chosen and sent to Obama and what motivated some of the people who write to the president to send their letters. (And how amazed or even puzzled they are when they get a handwritten reply.)

It was one of those stories that’s so good you think “This should be a–” and you’re already too late. The agent has called, the book contract is already signed, and off Eli went to report more about the lives of the people who wrote to Obama in 2010.

Now the book is out. Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their Presidents. I’ve started reading it. It’s good. It’s also the purest sort of old-school feature writing. It doesn’t announce any grand theme in the first 10 pages. It’s not about the writer writing the book. It just goes. You get the concept right away, so now you want to go deep into people’s lives, without judgment or heavy commentary. Every book claims to be “about America,” but this one just might be.

Want a signed copy of the actual book — the kind you hold in your hand and turn the pages of? I’ve got three copies here waiting for Eli to sign. One of them could be yours. All you must do is send me an e-mail (send it to hank [at] this web site dot com) and ask me nicely and I will mail it to you.

Hurry! Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

UPDATE: They’re all GONE. That was really fast. Thanks, everyone.

Fall TV season! For you it began long ago, when NBC first started airing those endless commercials for “Whitney.” For me it began even longer ago, and involved a two-week press tour in Los Angeles in August. (Rough life, I know — boo hoo.)

But at last I see a light at the end of this tube. At least for a while. Before all the new shows get cancelled, I wanted to post evidence of my efforts and the efforts of my colleagues. For this year’s Fall TV issue of the Washington Post‘s Sunday Style section, I belatedly came up with an organizing principle: For each show, I asked myself if it was better or worse than ABC’s “Pan Am,” which is perfectly, exactly mediocre television. From there, the shows sorted themselves. The talented Mr. Kim Maxwell Vu, who designs Sunday Style, checked in for early priority boarding on the “airport” concept and found a cool artist, Jesse Lenz, to pilot us to safety. Kim managed to bring it all together in less than a week. Here’s the cover:

And here are some other pages, from the section’s center, furthering the theme without going bonkers, arranging the shows into FIRST CLASS, VIP LOUNGE, BAGGAGE CLAIM and AIR SICKNESS. This is the meat of the TV issue: reviews of all the fall shows. (I’ll deal with mid-season shows later, in, duh, the mid-season.)

The print newspaper readers got the real treat of this design, but our online readers aren’t badly served either. All the reviews and everything else can be had here.

For those who like things boiled down …

My five favorite shows this season, in order: “Once Upon a Time” (ABC); “Hell on Wheels” (AMC); “Homeland” (Showtime); “American Horror Story” (FX); and “Up All Night” (NBC). Yes, you need cable if you don’t have it.

Wanted for the crime of bugging the living shit out of me.

My five LEAST favorite this season, in whatever order you care to NOT watch them: “New Girl” (Fox); “How to be a Gentleman” (CBS); “Prime Suspect” (CBS); “Hart of Dixie” (CW) and “Charlie’s Angels” (ABC).

Not that anyone may notice, but I’m trying to break a certain age-old paradigm in the Post‘s approach to TV reviews. This fall, instead of writing a full review for the daily Style section of lots of new shows, I’m letting these capsule reviews from the Sunday package state my critical case for now, which we’re “repurposing,” in even shorter form, next to the daily TV grids on the premiere nights. I’m just not convinced that the world needs 600-plus words on every show on the morning of the night it premieres, when no one’s figured out if they even like or dislike it yet.

I’d rather wait for the wave of cancellations and the revisit a particular show once it gains any sort of traction or triggers something remotely like zeitgeist. Some shows I intend to write fuller reviews on — right now I’m re-watching “Terra Nova,” “Homeland” and “American Horror Story” for further thoughts.

Okay, so: Thank you all for visiting the sausage factory today. Please be sure to enjoy some fresh sausage on your way out and remember to leave your protective eyewear goggles with Sandy at the front desk.

PS: If you missed the TV issue, I wrote a piece on WTF HAPPENED TO WOMEN?! here. Shorter version: I don’t for one minute buy this crap about how “The Playboy Club” and “Whitney” and “Charlie’s Angels” indicate a step forward for women. Zooey Deschanel, in my mind, certainly qualifies as a big step back.) Also, lately: My deadline take on that tragic Emmys show. And Ashton Kutcher joining that dumb sitcom your Nana always watches. Oh, and Anderson Cooper, getting so personal in his daytime show and yet still withholding…

Oh, ranger! Summer is over!

And so the One-Man Book Club reconvenes one last time* (more on that down below) for its summer vacation extra-reading credit. Books came along on a lot journeys since early spring: Out to Kansas and back, out to Albuquerque and back, on a train to Staunton, Va., and back, and — for 11 days in late June/early July — a 2,100-mile road trip through New England with the One-Man Book Club’s favorite traveling companion, the One-Man Photo Archive. Then the One-Man Book Club took a 16-day business trip out to Los Angeles to ingest the upcoming fall TV season, with books offering the only salve from long days of press conferences and network spin about bad pilot episodes. Then a quick trip to Jersey for a wedding in the family.

Carrying books around is starting to become more of a drag on these old bones, mostly because I notice how many people aren’t doing that anymore. (The tote-bag industry is doomed by the cloud.) Even the One-Man Book Club’s household has an iPad in it now, and one eyes it warily if curiously, from the other side of the bed. My concerns are all ephemeral at this point, sounding like nonsense to engineers and techno-consumers alike: What about the feeling of having a book with you? The object itself, not just the characters that make up the words that make up the sentences that make up the chapters. The pleasure of a book wasn’t only about words, was it? (Or was it?) What about the glee of buying a book on vacation? What about typography, cover art, the smell of a new book? What about sand and Coppertone and potato chip grease — all proof that you and this book had something going on together, a brief fling?

Ecch, the club has been over this and over this. Eventually, the tablet may win anyhow, just for being light.

Too much preamble. One-Man Book Club, report!

I share the sentiments of many a Bossypants reader, including this review in The Washington Post by Nicole Arthur. Basically it goes like this: There are laughs a-plenty from the brilliant Tina Fey here, but with no fixed destination. Here you have one of the great funny minds of Generation X, nicely situated between her youth and her old-ladyhood, at a career pinnacle, and she has nothing of much value to tell us. She “reveals” moments of self-loathing and anecdotal hilarity in order to not reveal much of herself at all. She transacts in one sort of market-friendly honesty in lieu of another that would have been more true. She has sold squillions of books by now, so, as the highly-paid pro-basketball players say: it’s all good. I read this book so long ago — early May — that I can’t even remember what I liked about it. Here’s all I recollect: When you are on an airplane from Kansas City to Washington Reagan National Airport, this is the book you’d want. I started it at lunch, resumed once the flight was airborne, laughed out loud, and hit the last sentence as we taxied in. Perfect and forgettable.

* * *

On a trip to Albuquerque, I picked up a copy of Caleb’s Crossing, the new novel by the incomparable Geraldine Brooks, which turns the true story of a 17th-century Harvard student (historically among the first American Indians to attend a colonial college) into a beautifully anguished fiction of early America’s perceptions of gender, race and culture.

Brooks’s other novels — March and Year of Sorrows — remain two of my favorites; but People of the Book, not as much. Caleb’s Crossing is somewhere in between, and it did achieve something her first two novels did so well: It made me want to leave work and come home and get on the couch and keep reading it. The Club highly recommends it, even though the pace and story falter slightly in the latter third. I was intrigued by something one of the reviews brought up, about how Caleb’s Crossing indulges in a bit of wishful feminist fantasy (the narrator is a young woman who conceals her intelligence from the men who control her life, managing to pick up Latin and Hebrew while toiling in the kitchen adjacent to the classroom), but you know what? FINE. Exactly how much wishful feminist idealism are we being exposed to these days? On Real Housewives of New Jersey? In teenage vampire novels? In Bossypants?

* * *

Iphigenia in Forest Hills is Janet Malcolm’s latest little book that is, as always, actually about something deeper, bigger and more elusively arcane than the thing it’s about — this time reported from a murder trial in New York’s outer boroughs. I liked it and recommend it.

And no sooner had I finished it than a weird spat broke out on Gangrey, in which people who’ve never really read Janet Malcolm took umbrage at Janet Malcolm’s first sentence in The Journalist and the Murderer — about 20 years too late. It was bizarre. You can read the exchange for yourself, which clearly brought out some of the hissy in me. This episode cured me of having any more online discussions about journalism for a good long while. If little ol’ mid-list intellectual Janet Malcolm can, well into her 70s, still produce work of this caliber and cause such a fit among a couple of puffed-chest male feature writers, then what better validation of one’s work is there?

Iphigenia in Forest Hills still puzzles over some of the same eternal qualms of the journalistic process. I identified strongly with this passage:

“Journalists request interviews the way beggars ask for alms, reflexively and nervously. Like beggars, journalists must always be prepared for a rebuff, and cannot afford to let pride prevent them from making the pitch. But it isn’t pleasant for a grown man or woman to put himself or herself in the way of refusal. In my many years of doing journalism, I have never come to terms with this part of the work. I hate to ask. I hate it when they say no. And I love it when they say yes. …”

I imagine that this might strike some of the outraged commenters on the Gangrey thread as further evidence of Malcolm’s weakness — journalism takes balls, lady!, etc. — but I would be willing to bet that more writers of nonfiction can relate to this than not. I always compared the task of asking complete strangers to cooperate with my reporting to having an entire trunk of band candy and only a day to sell it to complete strangers, and then discovering that everyone has put up NO SOLICITING signs.

* * *

The One-Man Book Club went off on a surprisingly difficult though ultimately successful ebay quest for a copy of the 1975 memoir Pat Loud: A Woman’s Story (by Pat Loud with Nora Johnson) after becoming immersed this spring in all 12 episodes of the original An American Family docu-series that aired on PBS in January 1973. I was reviewing Cinema Verite, HBO’s tragically mediocre dramatization of the Loud family’s experiences during the making and aftermath of An American Family. It’s my good luck that I was sent a complete set of the original series from WNET — they aren’t available on DVD and probably never will be, for a variety of legal reasons. I wrote a long piece about both the HBO show and the original, which ran in April.

Anyhow, having watched it all, Michael and I wanted to know much, much more. Pat Loud’s book is an interesting study in a lot of things: What a media circus looked like in the mid-’70s, for one. What a quickie memoir was in the publishing realm in the mid-’70s. It’s completely written in her meandering, Stanford-smart-but-SoCal-dopey voice. As an artifact, Pat Loud’s memoir is really about arriving at one’s middle-age in the freshly liberated but utterly depressing 1970s. She was on the verge of something, which she thought had to do with feminism, perhaps, or post-divorce self-awareness and self-satisfaction. (Fun fact: Pat and Bill Loud reunited years ago. They’re now 90 and 85.)

Now we all know what it was that she was really processing when she wrote this book: tragic, instant celebrity in the earliest era of reality TV.

* * *

Back in April, this blog gave away free copies of my friend Louis Bayard’s new novel, The School of Night — which I finally got around to reading and enjoyed very much. It’s about a lonely man named Henry — a divorced, failed academic who specialized in the Elizabethan era, who lives on Capitol Hill. A friend and mentor of Henry’s with a sizable Shakespearean-related archive has mysteriously died and Henry is hired by another collector to help track down a special document missing from the deceased’s collection, and soon enough, Henry is embroiled in a deadly race. The novel bounces back and forth between the now and the then, then being England in 1603, where we learn about Thomas Harriot (“England’s Galileo”) and Sir Walter Raleigh’s legendary “school of night,” a clandestine group of thinkers on the verge of dangerous ideas. And guess what? Harriot’s housemaid has been eavesdropping all her life, learned to read on the fly, and is now gleaning much about physics and – HOLY MOLY, IT’S MORE WISHFUL FEMINIST FANTASY! Just like Geraldine Brooks. We are so onto a theme here today.

Lou says at lunch, back in March: Don’t read my book. Don’t. No really, don’t.

Hank says: Oh, I’m gonna, Lou. I’m gonna.

Without putting words in his mouth, I think Lou perhaps feels that he caved too much to commercial pressures while writing the book (do you have any idea how many historical novelists get the Da Vinci lecture about marketability and sales from their publishers? It sounds like the sort of thing that would give me an ulcer), but I really got into The School of Night, even though it is not my usual genre. I read it on vacation — on a deck chair, in Bar Harbor, Me. — and briefly understood what so many other readers (i.e., customers) look for in a summer beach read. He makes it seem smarter than it has to be.

As I said, I gave away free copies of The School  of Night back when it was released. I have since rescued another one from a life of freebie pile doom in the Post mailroom — would YOU like to have it? E-mail me and I’ll send it to you, free.

* * *

There’s really nothing left for me to say about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad that a gazillion online reviews haven’t said already. Huzzah for its Pulitzer! I’m a year late in reading it!

Except to say: How nice, in this era of hammered-flat, super-linear novels (not yours, Lou!) to encounter a true crazy-quilt sewn from meticulous scraps, an assemblage of parts meant to evoke a whole, a novel about everything and nothing except the ways a set of lives can glance against one another over time. Though I’d be hard pressed to recall (or envy) a single sentence, I am in love with the structure.

For those who don’t know, it’s about a bunch of people who had something to do with a punk rock band in the Bay Area — directly or peripherally — and it just gently but darkly ripples outward from there, back and forth through time, from the 1980s well into the 21st century. It ends up in much the same place Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story wound up — foreseeing a future generation’s rational response to the chaos of the techno-renaissance, a calming down on the other end of a cultural revolution, in which future generations break through the traditional formats of narrative and reject this generation’s tattoos, coarse language and emotional vacuity.

Nice thought, but, you know, probably not how it really ends.

* * *

While in the Maine woods for a few days, I picked up a copy of The Maine Woods by someone named Henry Thoreau. You know, because. (The loons, Norman — you old poop! The loons.)

“In the middle of the night, as indeed each time that we lay on the shore of a lake, we heard the voice of the loon, loud and distinct, from far over the lake. It is a very wild sound, quite in keeping with the place and the circumstances of the traveller, and very unlike the voice of a bird. I could lie awakefor hours listening to it, it is so thrilling. …Like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. …”

Oh, ranger!

After the first 100 pages or so, I found it more helpful to skip around and look things up by index (mosquitoes; blueberries; Penobscot; loons). This is a remarkable travelogue, reported in 1846, 1853 and 1857 and  (before-ish Walden, the first excursion began when Thoreau was 29; the last was when he was 40). This was back when pushing deep into the Maine woods really meant exploring the boonies.

I myself read it while thoroughly spritzed in Deep Woods Off!, enjoying my pre-dinner cocktail on the porch at The Birches lodge at Moosehead Lake, which Thoreau visited. The boonies, I guess, are in the eye of the beholder. An excerpt:

“The moose is singularly grotesque and awkward to look at. Why should it stand so high at the shoulders? Why have so long a head? Why have no tail to speak of? for in my examination I overlooked it entirely. Naturalists say it is an inch and a half long. It reminded me at once of the camelopard, high before and low behind, — and no wonder, for, like it, it is fitted to browse on trees. The upper lip projected two inches beyond the lower for this purpose. … The moose will perhaps oneday become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, — a sort of fucus or lichen in bone — to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this!

“Here, just at the head of the murmuring rapids, Joe now proceeded to skin the moose with a pocket-knife, while I looked on; and a tragical business it was, — to see that still warm and palpitating body pierced with a knife, to see the warm milk stream from the rent udder, and the ghastly naked red carcass appearing from within its seemly robe, which was made to hide it. The ball had passed through the shoulder-blade diagonally and lodged under the skin on the opposite side, and was partially flattened. … At length Joe had stripped off the hide and dragged it trailing to the shore, declaring that it weighed a hundred pounds, though probably fifty would have been nearer the truth. He cut off a large mass of the meat to carry along, and another, together with the tongue and nose, he put with the hide on the shore to lie there all night, or till we returned. I was surprised that he thought of leaving this meat thus exposed by the side of the carcass, as the simplest course, not fearing that any creature would touch it; but nothing did. …”

Speaking of, we had wonderful food in Maine.

* * *

From loons to ducks.

Like its Melvillian namesake, Donovan Hohn’s nonfiction book Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them takes far too much effort to get through. I lugged this thing around all summer. It’s based on the author’s original Harper’s article, which reported the already-reported (and widely misreported) tale of a shipping container full of rubber duckies that toppled off a freighter in the stormy Pacific in 1992 and loosed a squillion packages of bath toys.

The packaging eventually dissolved and the toys floated free, en masse. Not just rubber duckies (that’s the legend taking over) but also other varieties of bath toys, made in China, on their way to America. This rather apocryphal scattering of plastic took on a narrative meaning all its own, as the toys turned up all over the globe and are believed by some to still be a-swim out there, metaphorically representing mankind’s trashing of the planet — and just about anything else you want them to stand for: lark, economy, waste, happiness, loss, civilization, geopolitics, global warming, etc.

This is that rare, super-ambitious work of nonfiction that in almost any other writer’s hands would become tedious. I admired it, but Moby-Duck certainly didn’t win me over the way it won over most of the book reviewers, whose praise convinced me to climb aboard. It’s a pretty nifty book — elegantly reported; sincere and glib on the same page — but it is almost certainly too long, even if the writer is attempting to match Melville’s breadth, verbosity and his reach for universal themes. As a way of turning a single magazine article into a doorstopper-weight book, it’s a smashing success, but it’s also a slog — and like Moby-Dick, at some point the goal is just to endure it and finish it off. I like how Hohn manages to be Ishmael, Ahab and Starbuck all at once –which, in that order, means naive, delusional, and homesick for his wife and kid. The futility of the hunt becomes clear in the first 30 pages; it’s up to you if you decide to press on.

Be prepared — like the ducks in the book — for seemingly endless drift.

* * *

My reward for finishing Moby-Duck was picking up a copy of Wayne Koestenbaum’s wee little Humiliation on the day it came out. I’m such a fan of his insights and his words — last summer, after reading Hotel Theory, I declared in the One-Man Book Club that anyone who could read Hotel Theory and talk excitedly with me about it would be considered a lifelong friend.

Here, Koestenbaum tackles an abstract but important concept in a way that only he can. The book is a series of ruminations, research and conclusions about the feeling and essential power of humiliation in the human character. He looks at it from every possible angle, in 183 tight pages — everything from Abu Grhaib photos to Google searches to throwing up in front of classmates in the third grade. Humiliation, like humiliation, is best taken in small doses, so it humiliates me to say I read it in one feeding frenzy, while sprawled on the big white bed in my room at the Beverly Hilton (my own Hotel Theory), deliberately forgoing a network’s big red-carpet party for its fall television shows, all of which (the stars of which) are certain to be humiliated once the shows air.

Koestenbaum — I want his brain. Here’s a taste:

“The newspaper, too, is humiliating — a viper’s den, a circle of hell, alive with lamentations. The victim, a prominent socialite, a chemistry student, a working mother, a drug addict, an accountant, a morbidly obese boy with severe mental disabilities, a jogger, an underpaid au pair, a chauffeur, a hotelier, a diet doctor. Photo of a suspect, with hoodie, with Down’s syndrome features, with a face like the young Sean Connery’s, with a scar above the lip, with a face like the young Jennifer Jones, with a beard, with surgically augmented lips, with a shaved head and radical fringe tattoos on the skull, with a yarmulke, with a charity-gala coif. The accused killer’s shocked family, congregating outside the house. Embarrassed or depleted eyes of the murderer’s mother, in the courtroom, after the verdict.”

* * *

I think weddings can often be humiliating — if not for the key players, then for someone. Popularly, it’s the bridesmaid who is in for some level of emotional debasement, though I’d also nominate certain guests. There’s also the standard-bundled humiliation formats of weddings: the “insulting” toasts, the groom’s ritual smearing of the cake on the bride’s face (and/or vice-versa), the desperate grab by maiden hands for the tossed bouquet. The cost of some weddings is certainly humiliating; the process of staging one must feel that way too. Sometimes, I mean.

So, a little comic book. Adrian Tomine, usually so great, humiliates himself here in the autobiographical Scenes from an Impending Marriage, in which he reveals that even he, with all his hipster cred and ability to sniff bullshit from far away, is no more immune to the bridal-industrial complex than anyone else. I quickly grew bored with his and his betrothed’s first-world, well-trod dilemmas encountered while planning their “simple” wedding. Ultimately the book winds up endorsing that which it purports, half-heartedly, to oppose. But as always, the art and mood of his work pulls us through.

* * *

Okay, it’s cruelty time! These are the books that failed THE FIFTY-PAGE TEST, which means that at some point near or past the 50-page mark, they fell off my Chinese shipping freighter (perhaps tossed?) and scattered to sea. They’re humiliated! But keep in mind, often as not, it’s the One-Man Book Club’s fault for choosing something the club did not, it turns out, want to read.

Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland. Well, this should have been a slam dunk. A writer I’ve liked a lot in the past, lasering in on a subject I want to know more about, in a very cool-looking (and once again tiny!) book. But right from the start the writing seemed murky, padded. I quit the book early in, after noticing that Coupland had two different birthdates (a day apart) for McLuhan, within a couple of pages of one another. If that’s not a typo and instead an inside joke or some other expression of irony — McLuhan was so ahead of his time that he was literally born ahead of his time! – then I just didn’t get it.

This Life is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone, by Melissa Coleman. It’s sad to give up on a memoir early in, because it basically says to the writer: “your life story is boring me.” This is another book I picked up in Maine on a Maine bookshelf display, being as it’s the story of how Melissa Coleman’s parents moved off the grid in the late ’60s and took up residence down the road from Helen and Scott Nearing, who’d became sort of culturally famous for articulating and exemplifying the “back to the land” movement that attracted (and still attracts) so many idealists seeking to live deliberately (a la Thoreau) way out in the sticks. Though the writing is lovely enough in spots, I have an issue with basic structure here, in that — through a collusion of jacket copy and intentional foreshadowing — we learn the book’s big reveal too soon. (The little sister drowns.)

Stolen World: A Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skullduggery by Jennie Erin Smith. This got some good reviews for its quality of reportage and level of writing. Twenty or so pages into the book it hit me: I don’t give one shit about people stealing reptiles for some larger underground commercial gain. Coldblooded, but there it is.

Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff. Also highly praised, and a boffo bestseller. I was eager to read, despite Judy’s warnings that Schiff assumes too much of the casual reader who has no firm grasp on ancient North African civilizations. Twenty or so pages in it hit me: I don’t give one shit about Cleopatra. (Well, maybe a little tiny singular shit about Cleopatra? So it sat on the desk forever and a day. I tried once more and now I give up.)

(Yes, I do realize that the time to arrive at these opinions is before I bring the book to the cash register. I’m working on that.)

Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Our Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. Brand new summary of a decades-old plaint. I started nodding in assent as soon as I read the title of the book, bought it, and kept nodding in assent for 30-40 pages or so. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Then I just nodded off. After you’ve made the case, why go on for another 2oo or 300 — yow! 400! — pages?

* * *

Finally, a motion to adjourn. (So seconded.)

I’m going to retire the One-Man Book Club, right now. It was fun while it lasted (two years!), and a small group of loyal readers seemed to really enjoy it. And I did too, but here’s the thing. A few things, actually:

– I’m a TV critic for a living, writing a crap-ton of reviews and essays. As such, books are a refuge for what’s left of my Kardashian-addled mind. I need to go back to reading books without the self-added burden of writing about them. I started these book reviews as a way to keep a conversation alive on this blog (and in my head) about my own frustration as a book writer and reader and my eagerness to belong to a bookish world. The initial fun of One-Man Book Club has come to feel like an obligation to a nearly non-existent audience. (Imaginary friends are so demanding.)

– I seem unable to make these entries into a quick and riffy experience that I can just dash off and post. Look at how grotesquely long this entry is. Look at how much time I wasted, first putting it off, then finishing it. The One-Man Book Club is something I would love to hone and post more frequently if I was, say, unemployed. Maybe one day I will be. Until then, I am quite intellectually occupied with writing the criticism I’m being paid to write.

– I’ve recently become more fond of Goodreads, the book-review social network. That’s where I’ll be filing any thoughts on what I’m currently reading and what I read long ago — pithy, just a sentence or two, starred reviews, which will be attributed to me by full name. I also have an Author Page at Goodreads now, synced to this blog. The One-Man Book Club, in other words, is joining a club of thousands. (Millions?) I’ll occasionally link to my Goodreads reviews here and I’ll still do book giveaways when friends publish new books.

– I’ve got other writerly stuff to do with my spare time — some of it pressing. Specifically, I am working on an overdue essay for a friend’s photo book. I’ve also started reporting and writing a long contribution to a very intriguing group project in L.A. that may one day become a book. Both of these need to get done by year’s end.

– And without getting into it, I will tell you (and only you! You’re the only one here!) that I’m in the pre-conception stage on two new book ideas of my own. One might be a novel and one is nonfiction. It’s time to see if either has any pull.

Now … who wants more wine?

I’m a bit tardy imploring you to read my friend Eric Dezenhall’s new historical thriller The Devil Himself. This book, which came out in mid-July, is a departure from Eric’s earlier crime/mob/PR-disaster novels, and it is the product of many years of Eric’s particular fascination with the mob’s involvement in WWII and his research into the life of Meyer Lansky. I’ve read it and it really is Eric’s best and most deeply-thought novel. (Don’t feel embarrassed, reader; Eric and I get together for lunch every other month or so for the sole purpose of heaping praise upon each another.)

Here’s what the flap copy says about The Devil Himself:

In late 1982, a spike in terrorism has the Reagan Administration considering covert action to neutralize the menace before it reaches the United States. There are big risks to waging a secret war against America’s enemies—but there is one little-known precedent.

Forty years earlier, German U-boats had been prowling the Atlantic, sinking hundreds of U.S. ships along the east coast, including the largest cruise ship in the world, Normandie, destroyed at a Manhattan pier after Pearl Harbor. Nazi agents even landed on Long Island with explosives and maps of railways, bridges, and defense plants. Desperate to secure the coast, the Navy turned to Meyer Lansky, the Jewish Mob boss. A newly naturalized American whose fellow Eastern European Jews were being annihilated by Hitler, Lansky headed an unlikely fellowship of mobsters Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, and naval intelligence officers.

The Dezenhall himself

Young Reagan White House aide Jonah Eastman, grandson of Atlantic City gangster Mickey Price, is approached by the president’s top advisor with an assignment: Discreetly interview his grandfather’s old friend Lansky about his wartime activities. There just might be something to learn from that secret operation.

The notoriously tight-lipped gangster, dying of cancer, is finally ready to talk. Jonah gets a riveting—and darkly comic—history lesson. The Mob caught Nazi agents, planted propaganda with the help of columnist Walter Winchell, and found Mafia spies to plot the invasion of Sicily, where General Patton was poised to strike at the soft underbelly of the Axis. Lansky’s men stopped at nothing to sabotage Hitler’s push toward American shores.

Based on real events, The Devil Himself is a high-energy novel of military espionage and Mafia justice.

I bought an additional THREE copies and had Eric sign them at his book party at the Crime Museum. It’s time to give one to YOU. First three people who send me an e-mail will get one mailed to them for FREE. Jump on it!

UPDATE AUG 31:  ALL GONE! WINNERS HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED.

I was trying to figure out why I haven’t blogged in so long (erm, THREE MONTHS) other than the usual excuses, most of them having to do with my undying admiration for what Nancy Nall manages to pull off nearly every weekday morning of the year — while also working her fingers to the bone on other paying gigs. My stuff here definitely remains in the slowest possibble slow-blogging category. And yes, that’s a thing, or once was.

On the upside, I guess, it’s just you and me now. No one comes here anymore.

The One-Man Book Club still exists and has much to discuss, and will soon. I also started and abandoned an epic entry on Newspaper Computer Publishing Systems I Have Known. (I want to finish that one, which is about the dozen or so different and increasingly arcane systems on which I’ve written and edited over the last two decades of newsroom employment — in other words, a rant about what the kids today call CMS. I started in on that entry with the hope that it would be as much fun as my nostalgia trip about newspaper layout. With some tweaking yet, perhaps it shall.)

The truth? Every time I come back here with the intent to update the blog, I see the lovely face of Barbara Kerr Page — and the nearly three dozen lovely comments people left on that item about her death — and I just want to keep her there, uppermost in thought and deed and display. I had a delayed reaction of deep sadness after returning from her memorial service in Albuquerque on May 21; a month-long funk that turned out to be more about me than about her.

But that’s crazy — Barb was a fan of this blog and urged me to file more often. So here we go again.

I’m writing this from Beverly Hills, where I’m learning everything there is to know about the new fall TV season at the annual Television Critics Association press tour. Today is day 10 of a 16-day stay. Tonight we went to the Fox lot to get a special screening of Ryan Murphy’s new horror show on FX. Followed by dinner. It’s a hard life.

While I contend with high temps in the low 80s, many friends and loved ones are on their sixth week of 100-plus temps in the American Elsewhere: Frisco, Texas, home of Tinsel — 110 today; Oklahoma City, der Stuever homeland — 111; Wichita, where my mom lives — 113!

Here in LA, it’s easy-breezy, cover girl. Not to gloat; I feel guilty about it. The other night, at a party the BBC threw on the roof of the London Hotel in West Hollywood, they brought out a troupe of Esther Williams-style bathing beauties in feathered swim caps, who performed a synchronized dance routine in the pool. The debt crisis raged on and yet up there, with LA twinkling below, everything felt (as usual) very fin de siecle.

Esther Williams got me thinking about a story I wrote eight summers ago, about the cultural (in)significance and consumer history of the above-ground pool. (Did you know Esther lent her name to a brand of above-ground pools?) That piece was one of my favorites — or rather, it’s one of my favorite KINDS of stories I used to do, but it’s also one I’d rework a little if I could have it back. It was a candidate for Off Ramp, but didn’t make the cut.

As a way for us all to cool off, I’m reprinting it here. Have a dip and dream of waves, palm trees, inflatable alligators, 7-Eleven Slurpees, or whatever floats your personal boat…

HEAVEN ON EARTH

By Hank Stuever | The Washington Post | Originally published on Aug. 3, 2003

THE ABOVE-GROUND swimming pool, and all that it is not: It is not the pool John Cheever had in mind in his 1964 short story “The Swimmer,” and it is none of the pools Burt Lancaster swam through in the movie version. Not the kind of pool beside which Truman Capote drank and loafed away his unwritten words. Not what David Hockney painted and not what Calvin Klein’s wife took pictures of for her coffee-table book about something so obvious as the beauty of pools. Not kidney-shaped, with no terra cotta tiles. Not what Herb Ritts put Cindy Crawford next to, and not where Dominick Dunne accepts telephone calls. Not the pool of the presidential family photo-op, and therefore not the Reagans, and therefore not California, at least not that part, not that style of California. Not the valley, not the dolls.

Not the Chateau Marmont and not even the Best Western. Not the country club, and not Club Med, and not seen in any of the vacation brochures. It is not the pool that Eddie comes to skim-clean every other Tuesday, taking his time to slowly drag the net across the deep end, only because he wants another look at the daughter who is home from college (and so it is not the pool in which her mother catches them together). Not the kind of pool that inspires you to buy festive new plastic tumblers in which to serve cocktails on the matching tray late in the afternoon. Not where you find cabana boys (or cabanas). Not the kind of pool decorated with candles that flicker on inflatable lily pads at the outdoor wedding reception, where the waiter slips and falls and takes the bride and the cake in with him.

Not the pool where Captain Kirk’s third wife was found floating, accidentally drowned, four summers ago. Not the pool that the Great Gatsby is found dead in, either, or William Holden in “Sunset Boulevard.” Not the pool of death and not the pool of the hereafter. Not the still turquoise rectangle ethereally half-framed by the shadow of a Richard Neutra house out in the desert. Not dreams, not fantasies, not transporting you to any psychic heaven. Not the pool you see in the movies. Not the pool you see on the news (“Toddler who wandered into family’s pool — “).

Not in-the-ground, not as expensive, not as permanent, not as pretty.

And not in this neighborhood, thank you, although the rules permit you to apply for a variance to the ban on above-ground pools. (Basketball hoops, driveway oil changes, parked campers, above-ground pools — we don’t go for that here in Regulated America, as per the homeowner covenants, if you’d please turn to Section 5, Item 3b. You understand — property values and such.) Above-ground pools almost escape the rude detection of cultural discernment, which keeps them far down the list of any possibly loaded statements about suburban class and lifestyles. They exist, except they don’t. Mostly you see them from the train, in all those sprawling back yards near the tracks, between Wilmington, Del., and Metuchen, N.J. To see one is to think of Tallahassee, or Lubbock, or Buffalo, or to recall the first family on your childhood street to get a divorce, before everyone else’s parents got divorced.

When the spirit did not gain easy access to the river of life, above-ground pools became fixtures in Pentecostal churches, for the purposes of baptizing souls.

You see above-ground pools making cameo appearances on reruns of “America’s Funniest Videos.”(Muffin’s climbed all the way up and got in the pool! She thinks she’s people!) (Or remember the one where the pool wall gives way and Momma and all the lawn chairs are swept toward the back fence in a torrent?!) Here is the one marvelous thing about the above-ground pool’s rise over four decades to partial respect and acceptance: It is the ultimate triumph of the have-nots over the haves.

You want a pool?

You can get a pool.

You can get a pool delivered, assembled and filled in a matter of days.

(You want to buy the custom deck to put around it? Let me spec that out for you.) It is the ultimate thing that is not . . . quite . . . the . . . real . . . thing. Of the 8 million or so residential swimming pools in the United States, perhaps as many as 40 percent are above-ground models, according to data from the National Spa and Pool Institute, and the market keeps growing. The more people buy them, the more the pools keep improving. They keep looking more and more like something Celine Dion might wish to own, with faux stone and marble walls and columns, fancier decks, nighttime mood lighting, sprinkling fountains, a halo of shrubs and flowers around the base.

And in each of them someone is having a moment of bliss. Someone is splashing around, and this is what matters most. Happiness, water, the smell of chlorine. This is the above-ground pool industry’s firmest claim: You can spend as little as $3,000 or as much as $50,000 for the pool that is not really a pool — it can be made more real — and it will be every bit as good as the pool of our wildest dreams. You just have to believe in it.

* * *

THEN, LAST MONTH, came the tantalizing notion that the remains of Jimmy Hoffa could possibly be buried deep beneath an above-ground pool in far suburban Detroit.

No. In fact, what the Oakland County, Mich., sheriff’s department was looking for was a briefcase, purported to contain a syringe, which, according to a hyperimaginative prison informant, was used in the Teamsters boss’s supposed murder. So backhoes were brought into the Hampton Township yard of what the Detroit Free Press flatly described as a “one-story brick home . . . in a middle-class, semirural neighborhood.”

The key word here is semirural. This is where you want to put your above-ground pool — someplace in the semirural. The entire uneventful history of above-ground pools occurs in that American elsewhere, where people who wanted to own a pool found a way to own a pool, and the above-ground pool took on a certain panache and permanence. It would also seem like a good place to stash Hoffa. Who looks for crime in something so nondescript, so benign, so long-lasting?

The home was purchased five years ago by Al and Linda Foote. They like it here, they say via a statement from their lawyer to the media, plan to stay — despite recent unpleasantness stemming from a “Dateline NBC” report that led to the discovery in March, in the crawl space under their house, of the body of Robert A. Woods, an autoworker missing since 1974.

Long story short? After eight hours of digging, the mythic former Teamsters boss wasn’t under there, nor was the briefcase. Nothing turned up because nothing ever does, when it comes to 28 years of looking for Hoffa.

A more pressing matter is that one family’s pool has been needlessly destroyed, here in the dead middle of summer: Oakland County promised to replace the Foote family oasis if it could not be repaired.

Paradise not lost. Surely the county could be compelled to throw in a newer, snazzier deck, a better filter pump, a sapphire-colored, terra-cotta-like vinyl liner and matching stepladder for the Footes’ troubles. (Let me spec that out for you . . . )

* * *

CONSIDER THE Mulcahys:

Peter and Margherite Mulcahy have six children, ages 3 to 20. They also have a back yard stretching toward the hilly forever, up and up I-270 into lushest Maryland, a sanctuary in the town of Boyds, beyond Germantown, where most of the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to them yet.

It’s a place where everyone got his or her own bedroom. They left behind a house in Montgomery Village three years ago, where they had easy access to a community pool. Peter, who runs an interior painting business with his wife, thought it a stroke of genius to move farther out here — all the land! a tractor! horses! — until he realized the kids didn’t have as much to do: “I felt bad,” he says, the way a dad feels bad about these things. “I was trying to make it nicer for them, make them happier. So I got this pool.” He bought a 10,000-gallon, oval, above-ground pool used from a guy in Virginia for “around $1,000.”

It wasn’t so easy to get the ground level beneath it.

The oldest son, Joe, 18, came home from football practice that first summer they had it, soaked for a while, got out, and noticed the water level looked slanted relative to the rim of the pool (relative, even, to the tilt of the earth; relative to the eye of God) and water was leaking out the bottom. Some more leveling followed, shoring up the sides with gravel. A new vinyl liner was put in. Then things were okay.

“Dad, did you tell him what happened to the pump?” asks Joe.

Yes, Peter sighs, the reporter has been told about the pump, but let’s go over it one more time: “I knew that you can let the water freeze in [the pool] over the winter, and that was kind of cool. The ice got real hard, and the kids could even get on it,” Peter explains. “But I forgot about water in the pump. Well, really, I kind of knew that. I knew I should get out there and empty it for the winter. But it was one of those things, you know that you keep telling yourself, oh I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll do it tomorrow, and well, then it’s too late.” The water froze and the pump cracked.

So the Mulcahys had to buy a new pump this spring.

“So that’s it,” Peter says. “That’s our pool. Not a very exciting story, I guess.”

No, not at all. But you know what? The world has been too exciting lately. Let us now take a moment to slap at bugs and talk about the above-ground pool’s magnificent dullness. How it is both Dad and dada. How much about pure love it is — love that is not about a hole in the ground, love that knows no property values.

Get in, already.

The Mulcahys have just finished the deck that juts into the knoll next to the pool. The neighbor kids over the next hill come over and use it. “I told Matt and what’s his little friend’s name, James? I said, ‘You guys can come over and use the pool whenever you want, but no drowning in my pool,’ ” Peter says. “That’s the last thing we need.” (Another plus: People have a hard time drowning in above-ground pools. The standard wall height is 52 inches, amounting to about four feet of water. Kids can’t easily climb into them, if the ladder is taken away.)

The above-ground pool’s invention coincides, roughly, with the rise of the suburbs in the 1950s. Of course it does. It comes with all the potentially tacky things that set off the alarms of snooty tastemakers. It comes with the pop-up camper, the metal patio chairs, the plastic coolers.

Get in one and you’ve got nowhere to go. You can only float, and look at the sky. Here is the beginning of a path to bliss.

“A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable,” Joan Didion wrote in the ’70s, perhaps during one of her famous Santa Ana migraines. “A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the Western eye.”

Bets are pretty certain that Didion was not ever transfixed by an above-ground pool, but let’s hold out hope that one day she will be. Her point is the same, anyhow: Kept water — any kind of pool — is a passport to a calmer state of being.

All Peter Mulcahy wanted was a more satisfied family. This is what these pools do. They please.

* * *

TOWN OF ISLIP, N.Y., Zoning Board of Appeals, Agenda Item, Thursday, March 23, 2003
Oakdale: Vito and Glynnis Gaeta seek permission to retain a one-story addition to dwelling with side yard and to retain an above-ground pool with insufficient side yard on the west side of Wichard Drive. – Newsday

In a world micromanaged by various zoning boards of appeal, shouldn’t it be the Vitos and Glynnises and their desires for above-ground pools whom we should exalt as modern folk heroes?

Why all the hassle?

Why so many rules?

Why not just fun fun fun fun fun?

* * *

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago, the people who had an above-ground pool in their back yard also used to be the kind of people who had a trampoline in their back yard.

They also had a teenager or two, who always used to drag the trampoline nearer to the pool, for stunts. You could use swear words at this house. They were the first people you ever knew who wired stereo speakers to the outside patio, over which were broadcast songs by the Steve Miller Band or Kenny Rogers. They discovered, and held onto, the elusive idea that the inside and the outside were interchangeable in summer, and therefore had very few rules about shoes or Popsicles or shouting. They were the best family on the block, the best house to go to, if you could deal with the unpredictability of their lives, the sudden shifts to Family DefCon 4, the crisis moments, the screaming, the slamming of the sliding-glass door.

To hang out with the people who owned the above-ground pool (and the monkey bars with the trapeze, and the motorboat that never went anywhere) was both a privilege and a reason to get your tetanus shot.

To the kids in the neighborhood, this home was a fancy-seeming wonderland of thrills and glamour. In the collective doldrums of any cul-de-sac, it was the equivalent of Florida: a buggy, leafy Shangri-La; a slightly lawless realm, with kids addicted to powdered Lik-m-Aid instead of cocaine. It was good so long as you didn’t ask where (or if) the dad worked, or what he did, specifically, to provide such capital bounty. Your mother never wanted you to go over there, which is why you always went over there, to swim in their above-ground pool, to soak in their exotic brew. If enough people climbed in the above-ground pool, and all jogged in the same direction, you could create a swirling, whirlpool effect. This was mesmerizing fun, and lingers in the memory in slow motion, a blissful moment framed with a gauzy, peach-colored sunset. Up and until a fight broke out and everyone was sent home.

* * *

ESTHER WILLIAMS! THE bathing beauty of MGM, surrounded by all her synchronized angels. She lent her name to some of the first mass-produced above-ground swimming pools in the late 1950s, and it may have been her shrewdest business decision. She lives in Beverly Hills and will be 81 in August, and the pools that bear her name are now an industry leader.

Williams has no part in the manufacturing or marketing end of the business, says Ilene Fink, the marketing director of the Delair Group Inc., which makes Esther Williams (and Johnny Weissmuller) pools at its factory in Delair, N.J. “She just allowed them to use her name, and it was a really good way to market them,” Fink says. “At first, people knew who she was, the older generation really responded to it. Now, consumers know ‘Esther Williams’ as a really good swimming pool.”

Here, Fink launches into a reverie on above-ground pools, from the days when “people just thought they were a real eyesore,” to the present aesthetic, the 60-year warranty, the carpet to put on the deck that matches the mosaic liner, and all the many, many customers who can’t brag enough about their aluminum above-ground swimming pools. She has a sales video that she swears leaves people breathless with wonder.

Frank J. O’Connor Sr. owns Hawaiian Pools and Spas on Richmond Highway in Alexandria. (It’s the place next to the Cedar Lodge motel, with the giant above-ground pools and decks kept behind tall chain-link fences topped with barbed wire.) O’Connor is one of Ilene Fink’s favorite Esther Williams dealers. If someone in Wyoming needs to custom order an Esther Williams, Ilene sends him to Frank.

Locally, it’s been a little slower this year than Frank would like — he usually sells around 50 pools in a season. There’s been all this rain. There are too many neighborhoods in Northern Virginia where an above-ground pool breaks all the rules.

* * *

Q: WHAT WILL MY pool look like when I am finished?

A: That is the beauty of the Medallion Above-Ground Pool. It is so versatile we leave it up to you. . . . You can put it partially in ground with a decorative wood deck. And of course, you can install your pool completely above ground and use a wood or vinyl siding to match your house. – Medallion Pools Web site

So much did John Mazza love his children that he dug them a square hole in the ground, 20 by 20, and lined it with cinder blocks a few feet deep. That was the family’s first swimming pool, and his son, John Jr., reckons this would been the summer of 1958.

“That first pool leaked like a sieve,” Mazza says, “I was about 8 years old. You had to keep the garden hose running in it to keep any water in it. But my dad kept trying.”

The elder Mazza saw an ad for potential franchisers with the E-Z Do Pool Co. in a magazine a few years later — “Life or Look, I’m not sure,” Mazza Jr. says — and so the family piled into their ’58 Buick and drove up to Long Island for a look. That’s how the Mazzas started their Medallion Pools company, and how Mazza’s father continued his quest to perfect the above-ground pool, experimenting with steel and other materials, Mazza Jr. recalls. “Till finally we built one that a backhoe couldn’t destroy. We figured that would be a good pool to have.”

Mazza Sr. died in 1990, but Mazza Jr. and his sister still run the business, in Matoaca, south of Richmond, with about 60 employees.

Mazza remembers when above-ground pools were ugly. “I think finally the people in the swimming pool industry realized that [above-ground] was a part of this industry, it wasn’t going anywhere and it was time to start treating them like real swimming pools. I hate putting it this way, but for a long time they made people react a certain way, like it gave you the impression of trailer parks.”

And here he gets a bit Didionesque: “When you enjoy the pool the most, you walk down into it, sit on the stairs, just float. If it’s a good pool, with the right things, if you have an automatic chlorinator, if you have a pump and a filter, it’s a great thing. If you spend more than five minutes a week working on that pool then you’re doing something wrong. That’s not a salesman talking, either; that’s the facts of life.”

* * *

RAMIE HOOKS IS the manager at Playtime Pools & Spas, which sits on a small bluff overlooking Jeff Davis Highway in Woodbridge. There’s a collection of premium Vogue and Strong brand above-ground swimming pools assembled and sparkling blue in the yard next to the store. A sprinkly fountain has been rigged up in the center of one. It could be a resort up here, a pool garden, with views of the Super China Buffet and the Knock On Wood furniture store, the nail salons, multiple 7-Elevens and a place called Mattress For You!

Oh, to be able to swim in the tempting Coliseum, or the Impact, or the Zenith.

Hooks, who is tanned and friendly and spends his days in a store that smells gloriously of pool chemicals and new vinyl, says he used to own an above-ground pool. “The dog liked it more than anything.”

There’s a vacant circle on the lot as well, larger in diameter than the other display pools; the earth beneath it is a light, dead shade of brown. That was the Lexel.

The Lexel is gone, Hooks says. A man just bought it the other day.

It’s the kind of circle that aliens might leave behind, and it inspires yet another summertime fantasy about above-ground pools. Only this time they fly.

Will you indulge me? I need to bid a sorrowful goodbye to my good friend, Barbara Kerr Page, 62, who died Wednesday morning, April 27, 2011, after a gallant struggle with kidney failure and other health issues. She was preceded in death by The Albuquerque Tribune, which died in February 2008 after its own gallant struggle with a JOA-related illness.

Barb is survived by more admirers and friends than I can count, some of us still laboring in newsrooms as part of a Trib diaspora, having not nearly as much fun at it as far as I can tell, but doing it nevertheless, with her singular voice still inside our heads. That calm, cool voice is still asking questions that aren’t answered in our raw copy, giggling at some of our good lines, and, of course, recommending some block-moves and whacking away sentences that bog it all down or don’t make sense.

Anyone who worked at the Trib with Barb at any point over her 26 years there (1982-2008) can back me up: although the paper had many editors and managers, it had only one Barb. In a newsroom no bigger than 50 full-time staffers (and ultimately smaller than that), she was at various times an editor on the city desk and features desk, but mostly she was a copy editor.

Which was an understatement. To us she was a copy editor and everything else — the soul and conscience of the place, the paper’s harshest critic and its greatest cheerleader. She was also our newsroom’s dearest, sharp-witted auntie.

As a colleague, Barb was Yoda, Batgirl and Dorothy Parker all rolled into one Buddha-like package. As a copy editor, she was a top neurosurgeon, especially on deadline. She also saved many long, months-in-the-making project stories from autoerotic asphyxiation, turning them into prize-winners. And as a headline writer, she was sublime and legendary. She won the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain’s headline-writing award so many times they retired her from the field, with a cash payout of several thousand dollars.

* * *

I could type all night and not get Barb quite right for people who didn’t know her. I’m not sure I should try. I’ve found that when I try to describe the Trib and its many characters to other journalists, their eyes kind of glaze over. It’s probably not good to think that one’s “crazy-times-at-a-small-newspaper” tales are better than anybody else’s memories of their own time in scrappy little newsrooms. But I think so anyhow.

I’m glad to say her death has occasioned –  as I knew it would — some tender writing from others. For a sense of Barb’s great, bizarre, beautiful mind, I’m going to direct you to Will Reichard’s blog item about her. Will has scintillated the most curious and delightful traits of the Barb many of us knew. As a friend, she was at once engaging and yet reticent. She was gregarious but also deeply private. She liked being alone, or said she did. She was the first person I knew who made my own desire for solitude seem normal. Barb said that for every hour she spent in someone’s company — away from work — she needed a few hours to herself.

For a sense of Barb as a copy editor and newsroom muse, I’m leaning on Bob Benz, who wrote a fond remembrance the other day:

… “Every day after deadline at The Albuquerque Tribune [note: at an afternoon paper, "after deadline" means 10 a.m., between the first and second editions], Barb Page would start her rounds. We called it Schmooze Patrol. She’d set sail in the back of the room at the copy desk. Wade through the city desk. Drift past the features and sports departments. And moor at the front desk, loaded down with a day’s worth of gossip, anecdotes and newsroom drama. Along the way, she’d also engage in a few hearty arguments about our news strategy and offer writing tips to cub reporters.”

To which I would add: On those slow newsroom laps, Barb was mostly in search of a good chortle. She had a marvelous laugh, starting as all grin and cheeks and a tight squint of her eyes.

I’ve known a lot of copy editors since the Trib, some of the best in the business, but I’ve never met another one who made herself such an integral part of an entire newsroom. One of the most valuable things Barb taught many of us — something all writers struggle with — is how to love an editor. She also taught editors how to love writers. Of all the newsroom archetypes I’ve worked with in 20-plus years, none is more pathetic to me than the writer who hates every editor he or she ever had, and vice-versa.

The best thing ever written about Barb has already been written — Tribune editor Phill Casaus’s ode was published after Barb worked her last shift a little more than three years ago, just before the paper closed for good. Here’s a chunk of it:

She might be as good a wordsmith as I’ve ever known. For all the wonderful writers this newspaper has possessed — Pulitzer winners and best-sellers have slurped the black acid we call coffee — she may very well be the best. Excellent reporters can make 14 or 40 or 70 inches of copy sing. Only the most extraordinary talent can construct an aria of three or five or 10 words.

It’s a craft and an art and an avocation: something to appreciate, impossible to replicate.

This isn’t all hearts and flowers, though. I have to note that I’ve often wanted Barb’s head on a plate. She can be a pain in the neck and beyond. I’ve sometimes considered her my worst professional enemy. I used to call her, dismissively, the “managing editor emeritus,” because she always had a better way to write a story — and was never afraid to clear her throat when the opportunity presented itself.

I used to worry that I was the only one who’d bump heads with Barb, but the truth is, we all have — photographers and sports guys, fellow copy editors, office managers and editorial writers. She wasn’t always right, but her percentages were pretty good. And, damn, that bugged a lot of us.

Like many copy editors, Barb’s a stickler for detail — often to the point where I’ve wanted to grab the nearest stick and beat her with it. But her gift, I came to learn, was more than a copy hound’s reflexive need for order. It was a drive for perfection, for symmetry, for the very best.

In an industry where too many have cut corners, budgetary and otherwise, done a little ethical shimmy and shake, or simply tried to accept mediocrity, Barb was a boulder in the road. Often, I think this newspaper’s unstated goal was to try to reach the tough standard she set for two decades. And thank God for that: The Trib, a winner of just about every journalism award there is, still strives even in some of its darkest days.

Maybe that’s because we can actually watch Barb’s magic under unimaginable duress.

For a couple of years now, she’s struggled with serious eyesight problems. Talk about cruel ironies — a nonpareil reader and writer facing blindness.

It would’ve shelved others for good. Not Barb. Every morning, she trundled in at 5:30, ready to meet the day. By 5:31, she was squinting into her blue screen with her one good eye, arming herself with a question or 10 that would make a story better, fairer, more complete.

By 5:32, she was dialing the telephone to our sleep-deprived desk editors. Trust me, we all know the ring.

In retrospect, such predictability may have given me, given all of us, a false sense of security.

The morning after Christmas, Barb walked into my office — the office she almost certainly could have occupied, but never did — and told me she planned to leave The Trib.

It was time, she said. And while I respect her right to decide that, I have to think part of her is worn down, heartbroken by the uncertainty she and her colleagues find themselves in. This situation flies in the face of a woman who has always searched for a true north and battled for what is right and fair. …

* * *

There are three or four people who’ve had an incalculable influence on my own struggle to be a better journalist and writer. Barb was one of them. It’s a real loss — deeply personal, and more psychic than immediate. Though I’ve sentimentalized that time greatly, my days at the Trib were filled with manic amounts of work and a mood often colored by a sense of hurt and failure, of the sort that can only be ginned up by a 23-year-old city desk g.a. reporter who’d rather be at Rolling Stone.

Barb understood me almost immediately. “Hey, guy!” she always said. “What’s going on?” (What are you writing about? What have you seen?)  She understood what I was trying to do sometimes before I understood it, and how the stories were working and how they were not. More than once, she boosted me up and over a wall. Barb understood those quiet observational moments contained within news features and longer narratives; the need to slow the story down to set a mood and report the vibe. She believed in wise narration and interpretation. She helped make the case for the extra five, 10 or even 25 column inches that kind of thing can  sometimes add to a story length.

Her great gift was an ability to love everything a newspaper does. She liked sports, lifestyle, comics, editorials, the “TV Queen” recommendations, the angry punk rock record reviews by Jeffboy Neumann. She liked writing heds for Ann Landers columns. She could also edit the impenetrably dense stories from the science writer who covered the national labs. She loved photos, and helped set a tone in the newsroom that prized visual journalism and page design as much as the written word.

She was a newshound — as much as anyone, Barb enjoyed the breakneck speed with which the Tribune would remake pages and update files as big stories broke between the “metro” morning edition and the “home” edition that was tossed onto subscribers’ driveways, and the “stock final” that included the day’s NYSE market close. (In a strange way, working at an afternoon paper very much resembled the pace of today’s online news sites.)

Tribunistas agree that one of her greatest headline moments came on a wild 1988 news day (before my time), when a woman highjacked a helicopter and ordered it to land at the state penitentiary in Santa Fe in broad daylight, in an attempt to spring her husband. (A day recalled for you here, fondly, by John Temple.) Barb’s across-the-front headline that afternoon, with, as I recall, a big picture of a sad-looking gal surrendering herself to authorities:

Chopper woman: I did it for love.

* * *

Barb was such a culture omnivore — she knew art and old songs and movie references; theater and poetry too. She had always just seen the latest thing at the Guild Cinema. She liked comic books and smart, sad novels. We shared an addiction for getting our found oddities professionally framed. She traveled. Talking with her, you’d forget that Albuquerque was 444 miles from Denver and 787 miles from L.A. and a million miles from everywhere else. Barb gave our lives a little more elan.

Ever since I left the Trib in 1996, Barb had kept in better touch with me than the other way around. I did try my best to keep up with her.

It should be noted that the U.S. Postal Service has also suffered a blow with Barb’s death, one they won’t realize for many months, until they begin to wonder whatever happened to that lady in the 87199 Zip code who sent so many colorful and jury-rigged bubble envelopes out? You know, that lady who scribbled out entire epistles via serialized postcards, sometimes 30 in a batch to the same recipient, all adorned with alluring rubber-stamps, stickers, cut-outs? Where has she gone?

Last summer and fall, she had taken to sending notes written on paper plates, which she decorated with swans.

I got a 24-postcard “note” (see above) from Barb about eight weeks ago. By now she could barely see, but you wouldn’t know it. She was using an iPad and had caught up on this blog — she had lots to say about One-Man Book Club, which she dug. She also suggested an idea for a book she thought I should write. (And it’s a great idea.)

* * *

Then, at the end of March, came a four-page letter. Different from Barb’s previous missives, it was unadorned. She had typed it — something her letters never were — in big in 24-pt Times Roman. Dear Hank, it began:

I have sad news but not bad news. I am going off dialysis March 31 and entering hospice care. The care will be at my apartment; if things go as expected, I will be here until the end, most likely not longer than six weeks.

It’s the right decision. My health, especially my vision, has declined significantly in the last several months. It’s not the life I want; it’s not life.

I have a feeling Barb wrote a lot of versions of this letter to her many friends, with the same opening lines. Maybe not.

In the next graf, it gets extremely personal. She enclosed a card that she had given to me in 1996 during another bout of my newspaper-writer blues. On the outside it reads: Fall down seven times, get up eight.

Inside it, Barb had written, simply: “On your side. — Barb.”

Not long after she gave me this card, I left the Trib and New Mexico behind. I had to go, and no one encouraged that flight more than Barb, who rooted for all her babies to move on to something bigger.

After keeping this card tacked up in my cubicle in Austin for a while, and then on various refrigerator doors in different apartments, and later on my cubicle wall at the Washington Post, I sent it back to Barb in 2007, when her health was getting worse and Scripps-Howard all but sealed the Trib‘s fate by putting it up “for sale.” (That period was mostly a charade, maybe to appease the legal requirements of a JOA.)

So, in her final letter to me, Barb wrote:

The Buddhist card, which I am returning, has been a comfort for a long time, but I’ve fallen eight times (or, more accurately, 20 times), and it’s time to rest. They say it’s a relatively easy death: The body fills with toxins, and you slip away. I have no idea what lies ahead, but I see it as another travel. …

* * *

When Barb and I talked on the phone four days after I got her letter, it was a good and frank farewell. She told me she had discovered the ultimate reporting trick: Tell people you don’t have long to live and they will start telling you all their secrets.

We gabbed, gossiped and laughed. We talked about this other travel she was embarking on. We both had our doubts that anything awaited her on the other side, but I hope that if there is a there there, she’ll try her best to send us a postcard from it, in whatever form that would take.

Near the end of our talk, I told her I would not still be working as a writer if it hadn’t been for her example of how to relate to one’s colleagues, how to collaborate on a piece of writing with photo and art, and how to bring grace, accuracy and wisdom to every part of the process. How to be alive in the work. She said I would have figured these things out all on my own. I don’t know about that. I think I would have flailed about, disappointed a lot of assistant city editors at various small newspapers, and then wandered away from it.

I wrote her another letter last weekend. It was still unfinished when I heard things had radically worsened and that her body was shutting down fast.

What I wanted to tell her was that I’ve been falling down seven times and getting up eight a lot lately, in terms of newsroom life at the Post. Something about the new media landscape — the hurry, the worry — has been bringing out the worst in me. I feel overworked and even bitter some days; I miss co-workers who’ve retired or jumped ship; my writing is suffering. I want very much to be more Barb-like in my relationship with my colleagues. I am now the age she was — early 40s — when I first walked into the Trib newsroom as a young kid. I hope I can become more like her, if possible — spread some cheer; listen and advise; love good stories; and speak up in meetings, even when it’s something my bosses don’t want to hear.

On schedule, those toxins did fill her body. Barb’s many angels — among them several former Tribunistas, who had helped care for her for several years as her health worsened — were at her side whenever she needed them.

Ollie Reed, a Trib feature writer for three decades, was with her the morning she died. She woke and told him she had been watching a Navajo dance. Ollie said that he and Barb talked a little bit.

Then she decided to close her eyes and see if she could find the dancers again.

(Former Trib photo editor Mark Holm took this. He says the paper’s logo is still on one side of the Journal‘s delivery boxes all over New Mexico’s roads, with the Scripps lighthouse insignia. [Motto: "Give light, and people will find their own way."] I think they work very nicely as roadside descansos.)

Book luvvers, the One-Man Book Club has some friends and they have been — I believe the term busy as shit applies here, writing some very good books. I’ve got my own copies and if you’re lucky I’m going to give you yours. But really what I want you to do is go out an’ buy one. Hardcover is nice; e-book works too.

I’ve not read all of these yet, but you can bet I intend to. If I wait until I do, then I’ll miss the wave of woot-woot that has accompanied each of these. Let’s get to it. Here are the rules:

Do you want a copy of one of these books? Write me at this web site (click on “contact” from the Home page of hankstuever dot com) and tell me why. First-come, first-serve, but it’s also subject to my mighty whim. Don’t be greedy and ask for all four. I’ll mail you the book for totally free.

Why will I do that? Because not much makes me happier than to buy multiple copies of a friend’s new book and spread the hosannahs. It’s just a thing I have.

If I can swing it, these will be signed copies. (These are some busy fellers.) You are urged to enjoy the book and then pay it forward somehow — give it to a friend or donate it to a library or, at the very least, give the book a review on Amazon or Goodreads.

Here are the books:

1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart. The praise for this one just keeps coming. I remember when this book was just a gleam (and a partial advance) in its daddy’s eye, nine years ago. From the critical buzz, this is the Civil War book to beat, and it’s for people who might not fancy themselves Civil War buffs. Open to any page and have your mind blown by its elegance, intelligence and surprising illumination of everyday life 150 years ago.

I’ve got four 3 (hurry!) copies. If you don’t want it today, you’re going to be kicking yourself after the Sunday NYT Book Review comes out. (Wink, wink.) Oh, lookie — it is out.

* * *

Next, The School of Night, by Louis Bayard.

A novel, bridging the present (divorced-guy writer on Capitol Hill) with the past (mysterious smartypants writers club from the Globe theater era) — the new book from the master of historical novels that aren’t cheesy.

Got three copies here — someone’s already beat you to the first one, so don’t delay. Signed, if I can entice the author to lunch. (Oh, it’s not that hard.)

One of these copies is yours?

* * *

Small (and polluted) world: Of the eleventyseven new books about now the BP oil spill that are out, I am friends with guys who are responsible for the two best ones.

That’s not just me saying so. That’s the Los Angeles Times‘s environmental editor:

All but one of the nine works examined here has in common a cinematic recounting of the rig explosion, largely cobbled in a “Rashomon” fashion from public testimony and published accounts. It’s hard to fail at that part of the narrative, and none does. From there, however, nearly all veer toward the polemical, political and ideological.

Standing above them are “Fire on the Horizon: the Untold Story of the Gulf Oil Disaster” (Harper, March 2011), a book that deftly navigates around the good-guy versus bad-guy leitmotif; “A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher” (Simon & Schuster, April 2011) by Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post, which adds a candid view of the media’s coverage; and “Drowning in Oil: BP and the Reckless Pursuit of Profit,” by Loren C. Steffy (McGraw-Hill, November 2010), business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, who demonstrates what a veteran journalist in oil country can bring to bear on a story that was unfamiliar to the majority of the country.

“Fire on the Horizon,” by longtime oil-rig mariner John Konrad and former Washington Post reporter Tom Shroder [ahem! Editor. As in Tom the Butcher. -- Ed.] is the most cinematic of the lot. Artfully and compellingly told, the book marries a John McPhee feel for the technology to a Jon Krakauer sense of an adventure turned tragic. …

About Achenbach’s book, the LAT guy says:

“Achenbach appears to be the only author among the bunch who bothered to obtain emails and other documents that were not revealed in testimony, which allows him to focus on Washington’s response to the disaster, an institutional strong point of the Washington Post. That work pays off in such gems as this:

‘A White House aide asked the Interior Department to put together a list of things the government had done to help plug the well, saying that even a partial list ‘would be tremendously helpful in pushing back against the current press narrative’” about the spill response. But a later email counseled: “Also understand we may not wish to claim credit for top kill approach until we see what happens.’

Still, Achenbach’s unique contribution to the BP anniversary redux is the mirror he flashes regularly on himself and the media horde that descended once again on the Gulf of Mexico.

‘The essential nature of the event eluded most of us in the national media,’ when the blast erupted April 20, he writes. ‘We did not realize that the fire was not the cause of the catastrophe but a symptom of it… We had no cultural memory of a deep-sea blowout. We were like island people who had felt an earthquake for the first time in generations, and did not understand that the receding of the sea was the harbinger of a terrible wave approaching from beyond the horizon.’ ….”

So. Feelin’ lucky?

Don’t delay, e-mail today.

(“Arlo & Janis“: Not only is it America’s most marital-relations-positive — and cat-positive, and power-walk positive — comic strip, it also honors old, analog media every now and again. I never miss a day of “A&J” — it’s the only comic strip I read.)

All right, Tonsilites, at last, another session of the One-Man Book Club. It’s been so long since the club met to discuss recent reads that EVERY MEMBER has completely forgotten the smartest thing he had to say about each book. (On the plus side, that also means every member has also forgotten his most biting criticism of each of the books. )

Let’s get to it — books that I’ve read since October or so.

First up is the broodingly intelligent, howlingly funny Half Empty, a new book of essays by the one and only David Rakoff — among my favorite books of 2010. To disclose, yes, Rakoff has done a few things that could be construed as Stuever-supportive.

So what? I consider him an acquaintance-type friend only and one of enviable, multifaceted brilliance at that. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure he considers me a WHO? Oh, right, HIM. Here’s how you know you aren’t truly friends with someone, at least not in meatspace: While cackling and admiring how he weaved together this book of gloomy, frank misanthropy and spot-on cultural criticism, we  learn that he almost got his arm and shoulder amputated because of cancer.

Oh. (And this was probably going on while I was annoyingly pelting with him with e-mails to pretty-please read and blurb my book. And he kept politely replying that now was not such a great time, to which I kept begging, seeing as there would likely not be another time I would be needing book blurbs, etc., until he finally, wonderfully relented. Do I feel bad about that?  Naw.)

(Well, maybe, a little.)

This is a book for people who just cannot pretend to look on the sunny side of the street yet sometimes enjoy actual and verifiable sunshine, which is not at all the same thing. You know who are. “I like everything,” Rakoff tells a cheerfully minded inquisitor. “I don’t hate the world. I’m scared of it. There’s a difference.”

What I love about Rakoff is how well he masters the tangential, in a way that never makes it seem digressive. In the middle of a very good chapter about what’s really wrong with the musical Rent:

“… New York was becoming far too expensive and criminally inhospitable to young people who tried to come here with dreams of making art, and how regrettable that the town’s vibrancy and authenticity were being replaced by a culture-free, high-end-retail-cluster-fuck of luxury condo buildings whose all-glass walls essentially require a populace that doesn’t own bookshelves or, consequently, books. A metropolis of streets once thriving with local businesses and services now consisting of nothing but Marc Jacobs store after Marc Jacobs store and cupcake purveyors (is there anything more blandly sweet, less evocative of this great city, and more goyish than any other baked good with the possible exception of Eucharist wafers than the cupcake?). And even though Jonathan Larson’s musical was meant in its own ham-fisted, undergraduate way to be a call to arms against this very turn of events, was it just me, or was this middlebrow lie a symptom posing as an antidote, like watching a sex-ed film narrated by gonorrhea? Were others also leaving the theater rooting for the landlords?”

* * *

Next, the club dove into the irresistible Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, by Justin Spring. Now THIS was my favorite book of 2010. It’s a deeply-researched, heartbreaking, even-handed biography of someone we’d probably otherwise never know of, a gay university professor and novelist named Sam Steward, who taught in Chicago in the mid-20th century and was a friend (of sorts) to such writers as Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas.

Steward was also, from a very young age, a sex enthusiast. By modern terms, he’d probably be diagnosed as a sex addict and would have to tell his story to a 12-step group; in his time, though, he merely risked his livelihood, possible jail time and personal safety to pursue illicit pleasures. Steward kept meticulous records of hundreds of consensual encounters he had with other men over many decades, sometimes at great personal risk, years before the so-called sexual revolution. He carefully noted and described each encounter in what he called his “Stud File,” a card catalog. In fact, he kept records and observations to such a degree that he became one of Alfred Kinsey’s favorite (and beyond willing) research subjects.

After some near-misses with scandal and arrest, Steward left academia behind to focus on becoming a tattoo artist of some renown, which is where Secret Historian becomes a much broader exploration of someone who followed wherever his psyche and desires led him. He later became a writer of gay pornographic novels, under the name Phil Andros.

I’ve promised to absolve myself of the chore of summarizing books at the One-Man Book Club. You can find out everything you’d want to know by reading other, much more carefully crafted reviews of the book, which heap deserved praise upon Spring’s book. (Including a nomination for the National Book Award.)

Instead, I’m more interested in the miracle that Secret Historian exists at all. Had it not been for the hoarder-like instincts of one of Steward’s friends, who, after Steward died in 1993, kept the Stud Files and other numerous boxes of his old papers and materials (they had become literally filthy) hidden away in an attic, this magnificent and important book simply never would have been possible. That thought — which occurred to me only as I neared the end of the book — terrifies me in a way that’s difficult to describe, but it must be the same sort of terror that historians and biographers feel when they learn that entire archives went off to the landfill years ago. It also makes me nervous all over again for how we’ve come to rely on the electronic archive — the cloud — to preserve the very marginalia of our lives that will comprise “the good stuff” to future historians and journalists:  the e-mail, the tweets, the texts. Something tells me whole chunks of our manic 21st-century existence will not make the journey into scholarship and permanent history.

After locating Steward’s papers, artwork and other ephemera and recognizing their potential importance; and after winning the trust of the man who held them, it took Justin Spring a decade to go through them all with the hopes of discovering (as well as corroborating) Steward’s life story. Then, of course, nobody wanted to publish it.

Though the subject matter is dark — to say the least — it is also undeniably alluring, and a fascinating glimpse at a side of gay life, pre-Stonewall, that never shows up in tame portrayals of gay history. Strike that. This is a book that should be fascinating and even dangerously appealing to anyone who has ever had or desired sex, regardless of their orientation or proclivities; for anyone who can privately recall for you (in verbal or diary form) the basic outlines of their own sexual histories, down to details about who with and how many times, etc. I dare someone (HBO? Scott Rudin?) to make a movie of this book. Secret Historian is that rare biography that becomes a true page-turner, without becoming illicit or dirty. I admire the way Spring keeps his book on track, making it accessible to casual readers who might otherwise blanch at reading about such a life. It’s one of those books that I feel lucky to have read.

* * *

Next up is Infidel, photographer Tim Hetherington’s beautifully haunting book about the men of the 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade, who fought battles in Afghanistan’s treacherous Korengal Valley in 2009. Hetherington made these pictures around the same time that he and Sebastian Junger were embedded with the 173rd, on reporting trips that became their documentary film, Restrepo, and Junger’s nonfiction book, War.

I haven’t seen Restrepo or read War, but my boyfriend, Michael (who works as a photo editor), and I went to the Corcoran Gallery last fall to hear Hetherington speak about the pictures and work in Infidel, which, as far as I’m concerned, ranks up there with David Finkel’s Iraq book, The Good Soldiers, for helping me understand our current wars — and the Americans who actually fight them — more than any straightforward news accounts.

A good bit of Infidel is preoccupied with the tattoos the soldiers acquire while out in the field (applied by other soldiers), as a way of more deeply understanding who they are — their vulnerabilities and worldviews. It’s a classic example of how the most powerful pieces of journalism are often found in the mundane events and situations. There is such wonder and trust in these pictures, as well as menace and grief. The most talked-about photos in Infidel are the images of the soldiers when they are asleep.

That’s what I mean about journalistic trust. People in the audience didn’t ask much about this during the Q&A — they were all more obsessed about war correspondence and his take on matters of war policy — but I was dying to know more about how these sleeping-beauty pictures were made: Did he ask the subjects if he could take them while they slept? Or did he just tell the men later that he had done it? Did it no longer matter, since he’d been with them for so long, confined in bleak circumstances, and they became so used to his presence? Were they so exhausted that the shutter’s click — so much softer than mortar fire and helicopters — acted as a reassuring whisper, maybe a kind of lullaby?

* * *

Yes, the Club also totally realizes (now) that these books are sort of going together in a lovely way — Rakoff’s pessimism and dark tendencies, Sam Steward’s preoccupation with the flesh, and the tattoos on the dozing American infidels in the middle of a terrible war.

I think Patti Smith fits right in there, don’t you?

What else is there to say about Just Kids that hasn’t been said? I finished it on an airplane, in tears.

Like me, you may have thought you wouldn’t be interested in her memoir, perhaps because the music hasn’t interested you enough, or for whatever reason. Like me, the National Book Award that Just Kids won may have convinced you to give it a try. I think you should read it.

Granted, even when you fall into the melody of her prose, there’s something affected about it. Or is there? I think it’s the very quality that most readers found mightily, irrefutably genuine — but no matter. It’s one of the best books I’ve read about the pain and delusions and actualities of trying to be an artist, and having someone in your life who mutually wants it for you as well as for himself. It’s also a pretty powerful work on the subject of friendship. And love. I gave a copy, signed by Patti herself, to Michael for his birthday, because I felt that for once someone had told the inner struggle of art and artists in a whole new way.

Only weeks later — and after a trusted good friend had a reaction to the book that was the complete opposite to mine — do I wonder if there wasn’t something more … cockamamie about Just Kids? Something suspect, detectable only in the light of day after a candlelight wine binge?

Well, as Robert Mapplethorpe would have said: shove it up your ass. For a few days I was held in the grip of Just Kids, and it was like my brain had been delivered roses, with petals ready to press between parchment pages. Whatever she was trying to do here, she nailed it. And that’s all I have to add.

* * *

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart: The book of the fall, until Freedom came along. Turned out to be sort of a slog to get through — a book that gives off a whiff of being way too pleased with itself and its inventions. This is a dystopic (yet depressingly, probably spot-on) novel about two lovers caught up in the further intellectual and organizational collapse of America in the not-too-distant future. It has been read (and praised) by everyone who would probably bother to read it. Written for people with advanced literature (preferably Russian literature) degrees who can also keep up their end of an “American Idol” conversation and are already tired of the bands who got the most buzz at last year’s SXSW.

In other words, certain people. (Population, what, 11,000?)

There was something just too high/low about this book. Lenny and Eunice are star-crossed, well, lovers is not quite the right word. She sleeps with him mainly for a place to live in New York while she figures out her life; he disgusts her with his passion for actual books, which nobody reads anymore. The sections about Lenny, written as a diary, get tedious; Eunice’s sections, written (improbably) as long, first-person social network messages to her friends and relatives, of a depth at which nobody is supposed to write in the future, are what keep the narrative moving.

Super Sad True Love Story‘s strongest moment comes fairly early, in a scene set in a trendy bar where everyone’s smartphones (now called äppäräts) provide a constant “fuckability” update on everyone else in the bar (including other up-to-the-moment stats and indexes, such as their income and credit rating).

Chilling, funny, but unsustainable. I made it through, and there was a nice twist at the end, but I can barely remember what it was. Oh wait, now I remember. I won’t tell.

* * *

From too smart for its own good, to too sweet for its own good …

At last, Jeanketeers, there is a Jean Teasdale book! It’s called A Book of Jean’s Own and it turns out, sadly, to be entirely too much Jean, too much of a good thing disguised as a bad thing disguised as a good thing.

I overdosed, like eating an entire tray of brownies. This is for hardcore fans of her longtime Onion column only. And maybe not even them.

* * *

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, is New Yorker writer Tad Friend’s absorbing, acerbic, yet tremendously honest and even tender memoir of his family — actual East Coast Wasps who lived the Wasp life long before cultural anthropologists (chiefly, The Official Preppy Handbook) came along and named it, tagged it and chased it into the fatal, harsh light of modern American diversity. This is a broad epic about one family, yes, but also a thoroughly-researched and even indispensable take on a particular kind of upper-class American.

The first 2/3 of the book is skillfully woven and well-written, as fans of Friend’s New Yorker profiles would expect. Though the author is never entirely likable, he does create in the reader great fondness for the characters who populate his family. He frankly explores the moments at which it begins to dawn on everyone that the money — fortunes made in steel in the 19th and 20th century — has mostly dried up. He also does something these sorts of memoirs never do: he provides some actual dollar amounts here and there, in terms of his own inheritance and the degree to which his family helped him get started in life. (In money memoirs, I’d probably only ever be fully satisfied with an online appendix made up of computer scans of old checkbook ledgers and ATM receipts.)

Cheerful Money is about as close as most of us will ever get to these sort of people, as we are all regrettably NOCD. And something falls apart in the book’s final third. Near the end of the journey, when the new generation has worked through significant emotional issues and come to terms with the remaining real estate; after mumsy has died (as have most of the elders), Friend seems to believe that he’s won the readers over and it will now be impossible for him to seem smug and self-absorbed.

Think again.

Still, that’s what makes Cheerful Money succeed — the author is true to his story and true to himself. One of the saddest and wittiest books I’ve read in a while.

* * *

Cripes, are we done? We would be, except for the part where we bow our heads and make very quiet tsk-tsk noises for the books that failed to pass the FIFTY-PAGE TEST. Stick a pitchfork in ‘em — they were either too dull or too … “something” for me to get much further than page 50.

Without further comment, they are:

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

<<– Grant Wood: A Life, by R. Tripp Evans

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan

Life in Year One, What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine, by Scott Korb

In the Neighborhood: The Search for Community on an American Street, One Sleepover at a Time, by Peter Lovenheim

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Now we’re done. Will the One-Man Book Club ever meet again? I hope so — but if so, it’s clear we need to have our meetings before the content of the books slips sadly away from the addled mind. Also we need better snacks. Til then…

If my book-related blog “to-do” list had anything to do with a public library, I would owe some serious overdue fines by now.

The One-Man Book Club languishes; since the last post, none of the members are speaking to one another and we have about a half-dozen books that have gone un-discussed. The neglect has meant that the club has been slapped with an injuction: NO MORE NEW BOOKS can be cracked open until the situation is remedied. And that’s a problem, because, very soon, there are two books coming out any day — both written by friends — that I want to dive into the minute I get my dirty paws on a copy.

Which brings us to another book, by one of my oldest friends (oldest meaning longest, but also, indeed, oldest) … Bob Drinan: The Controversial Life of the First Catholic Priest Elected to Congress by Raymond A. Schroth, S.J.

“S.J.” = Society of Jesus, aka The Jesuits. Both the author and Drinan are part of the order. Drinan, who died in 2007 at the age of the 86, served as a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts from 1970 to 1980. He ran on a platform to end the Vietnam War and stood for a raft of old-school, left-leaning causes that were once more clearly identified with the social-justice fixations of the post-Vatican II American church.

I know — a priest! In Congress!

How quickly we forget it ever happened, but as Schroth’s book thoroughly (quite thoroughly) describes, it not only happened, it also stirred a lots of thoughts that needed stirring, about the line between church and state and also about the line between one’s commitment to faith and to social ideals, and where those two are at odds. Drinan’s time in Congress included the Watergate hearings and his outrage over the bombings in Cambodia; he was passionate about gun control and U.S. criminal code; and, perhaps my favorite bit of trivia in the book, he campaigned for a system of national bike trails that would link the country.

Drinan is a difficult man to suss out; as a book subject, he is neither the most sympathetic nor legendary character and apparently not effusive with his personal feelings. Schroth’s biography is not necessarily ennobling, but it is human. It’s a frank and complete portrait –  one that was not easy to draw out of Drinan’s archives and the people who knew him.

Pope John Paul II put an official end to Drinan’s political career in 1980, decreeing (decree? I’m getting further away from the church all the time, especially church vocabulary) that ordained priests may not hold public office.

Don’t you know the whole thing came down to … yep, abortion rights. (Guess where Drinan stood. If you guessed pro-choice, then you might also be able to join me in remembering that brief time when modern-day, mainstream Catholics could be pro-choice and not constantly detect the stench of brimstone fuming up the room.) Long story short, one calling took precedence over another, and Drinan decided to remain in the priesthood. He spent the next 25 years teaching at Georgetown’s law school.

Which is where I took a cab last Wednesday afternoon, to hear Father Schroth talk about the book. I found him in a classroom on the lower level of the main building, speaking to a gathering of law students as well as some faculty and staff members who knew Drinan personally.

It’s been 21 years since I’ve sat in a classroom and listened to an hour of Ray Schroth, who is now in his mid-70s, lives in Manhattan and works at America magazine. Sneaking in five minutes late, taking a seat in the back and hearing his voice tell a story made it seem as if no time had passed at all.

To say Ray helped me as a writer and journalist is like saying wings help out with flight. At Loyola, I took four of his classes, which emphasized rigorously critical reading along with writing. His syllabi exposed me early on to great writers I might have otherwise taken forever to discover: Joan Didion, David Halberstam, Bruce Chatwin, Richard Ford, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Rebecca West, Neil Sheehan, to name a few. Two of his courses — Interpretive Writing in the fall of 1988 and Travel Writing in the spring of 1990 — turned out to be the closest experiences I had to the academic workshop setting, in which a small class of students were assigned essays and articles of some length. After first drafts, we gathered around a conference table to critique each others’ work. His classes were difficult but never dull. Our papers always came back with a lot of marks. Ray and I started out as mentor and student and over the years have become good friends.

I could go on about Ray Schroth, but the most important thing to me is that he has never stopped writing. (If Bob Drinan doesn’t sound like your thing, see if you can find a copy of Ray’s 1996 biography of the broadcaster Eric Sevareid.)

Ray and I went to dinner Wednesday night, like we always do, about once every year, when he comes to town or I go to New York; the conversation was about people we know and the past we share, but ultimately, as ever, it was about the work. Not “work” as in job, but work as in the work. What are you writing? What are you reading? What do you think?

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Want a free copy of Bob Drinan? I bought extras. Be the first to drop me a line at: hank [at symbol] hank’s-first-name-hank’s-last-name [dot] com and tell me why, and I’ll ship it out to you.