Dan

The introductions are valuable even if you read some or all of the Atlantic essays when they were written. In particular the reparations and mass incarceration essays merit close reading that is more practical in a book than in a magazine. I think in 2021 Coates' effect on national politics on the basis of these essays may even be underrated. In part because he has consciously stepped back from continuing to make the argument and others have picked up his work and carried it forward. But he got these arguments into one of the biggest megaphones pointed at the liberal elite world. He acknowledges the many debts to the prior work of others and the way that his platform allowed him to amplify and present the observations they had made before, in ways they were not given the same opportunity to do. But from his perch, he made terrific use of it.

I started by skipping the Cosby and Michelle Obama and Malcolm X essays, but then I went back and read it all. Those are not as good as the rest, particularly Cosby (a failure as an essay, he admits, but a success as a first step to more writing at that magazine). It is interesting to track his growth as a writer instead of only having a book of his most refined work.

This aside from a few brief introductions is the text of the documentary, written out and with the sources provided. I think it is valuable to read through and sit with at your own pace, instead of the forward momentum of the documentary (although now with it on home video you can pause and rewind, but I saw it in a cinema where I did not have the ability to do this).

I started to read this before I was planning to visit New Orleans. I got bored with it and went there without finishing the book, then just recently decided to knock the rest of it out. It picked up and was not a slow read, but I still feel like the book was missing something, from what is often hyped as one of the great, most hilarious books of the century. Learning a bit about the origin story is oddly poignant for a book with many fart, burp, and other physical jokes at the expense of its slob lead character, but alas the story about Gottlieb telling him he should revise the work makes me want to side with Gottlieb. The book may have been better if Toole had been able to revise it. And I'd have been interested in his follow up works that were never created.

I like the way this meanders around its subject and ponders things like “why do people write hoax letters pretending that they are serial killers” ... I wouldn't read it ahead of Miracleman or Watchmen as far as the other Moore works I've read, but I was intrigued when I heard the Chapo interview where he discussed the church at Spitalfields.

I would recommend anyone read this who thinks of King as in any way conventional or liberal.

I did not read every single page of this door-stopping 1600-page book, but I read an upsetting number of them. In reading “Chaos,” Tom O'Neill's book about the Manson case (prosecuted by Bugliosi), I became interested in Bugliosi as a serially dishonest prosecutor and writer (at least w/r/t the Manson case) with bizarre personal antics (accusing his milk-delivery man of cuckolding him), and then I was reading about his career as a writer after “Helter Skelter,” the largest tome of which is this incredibly long treatment of the Kennedy assassination, which he uses to conclude that he agrees with the Warren Commission. So I checked it out from the library, intending to skim it, and found it surprisingly readable. The highlights are probably the minute by minute accounts of the days of the assassination and its immediate aftermath, then a full length biography of Oswald, who remains enigmatic simply because he was murdered (on live television no less) two days after his arrest.

Bugliosi also spends hundreds of pages debunking individual conspiracy theories, no matter how dumb they are. Rather, the dumber the better, because it serves his overall message that the theories are all that dumb. In doing so he has to acknowledge the existence of many true conspiracies, such as the CIA trying to topple numerous governments around the world (and often succeeding), to assassinate Castro in connection with the mob, and so on. It's just that none of this stuff happens to be connected to Oswald (not a guy who ever got along with anyone).

I have become interested as a genre in incredibly long books, books that the authors simply could not bring themselves to shorten. Here we learn things of the seemingly minutest possible detail, such as what meal Lee and Marina Oswald ate together on a particular night (cheeseburgers), the flavor of soda that Jack Ruby bought (celery?) and was trying to bring to a radio station host, and so on.

While Bugliosi may be an unlikable figure, and his tone here is often quite self satisfied, I ultimately find the bottom-line argument (Oswald acted alone to kill Kennedy) persuasive. As to Oswald's motive, it's quite a bit less persuasive, but perhaps no one can be. The portrayal is of an impulsive act that he likely only chose a day or two beforehand, as a result of a lot of coincidental opportunities (the parade happening to cross directly in front of the building where he worked), and out of some combination of a desire to make a name for himself and to strike a blow on behalf of Castro and Cuba. That year, in Miami and other places, Kennedy had been openly speaking about his support for additional coup attempts in Cuba. As a murder motive it's not very logical (no reason to believe that Johnson would act any differently toward Cuba), but obviously people are capable of acting illogically.

But logistically the argument is sound that Oswald would have been capable of firing from that window the two shots that hit the president, once you see that he wouldn't really have to re-aim between the two (pointing down from the window toward the car, which was driving downhill in a straight line away from the sight line from the window), and that where Connally's seat was positioned (not directly in front of Kennedy), that the first shot would have been capable of passing through Kennedy and hitting him where it did. Finally, the Zapruder film (as you see in Oliver Stone's JFK) makes it look somewhat plausible that Kennedy may have been shot in the head from the front, because he jerks backwards. But the persuasive case is made here that he jerks straight because of the traumatic damage of being shot in the brain, rather than as a response to whichever direction the bullet came from.

It's also a useful book in its discussion of the oddity of coincidences and the array of bizarre personalities that could be seen if you look under any rug in 1963 America. I think you could find the same kind of things if you chose to analyze almost any event in human history with the kind of scrutiny that the JFK assassination received. Bugliosi in writing about this is insightful, because the literature on his topic is neverending, and seems to have consumed decades of his life. We must resist in this case and in life generally, the desire to reject the probable truth of the case simply because it's narratively unsatisfying (Oswald's murky and/or dumb motive, the series of contingencies that allowed Oswald to kill Kennedy and then Ruby to kill Oswald) and try to replace them with a meaning behind the killing (say, that some powerful entity was trying to stop Kennedy from ending the Cold War ... he would not have done that). But I also don't believe that the search for “the truth” in a criminal case is ever really finished, or that our system of “law and order” is one that has much if any merit, and its function in ushering millions of people into our bloated criminal punishment system is a destructive and evil one.

So as far as prosecutors go, I would rather they spend their time writing books like this, chasing phantoms, and conducting fake trials (Bugliosi “convicted” Oswald for a lengthy TV trial in London in 1986), rather than using their time to put real, living people in prison or on death row.

THE most important history of the United States I've read. If you are pressed for time, read chapters 4 and 5. It answers the “whys” of the century better than any other effort. Why was there a civil war, why did it play out the way it did, and so on.

I bought this book because it was on a list of Lewis Lapham's favorite history books and his description of it sounded good to me. https://bookshop.org/lists/lewis-h-lapham-s-favorite-works-of-history/ I didn't read anything else about it or who the authors were, so I was a bit surprised when it arrived to find that it was written in 1968. This leaves you with some dated opinions on the part of the authors from time to time (particularly about sexuality), but generally it is interesting to hear them venture to give their impressions about civilization and history from having spent their entire lives studying it. With the “view from 3,000 feet” that they provide for 3,000 years or so of history, I found I was more interested in reading the book in very small doses (taking breaks between each short chapter), even though the book is a scare 100 pages. They venture to ask extremely broad questions, even as they acknowledge that it's a foolish thing to attempt.

This is a quick read, especially if you have seen Goodfellas. It takes you through the story with a bit more detail in some areas, but you will recognize a lot of it. I read it in something like two days. I enjoyed learning more about the details of the Air France and Lufthansa heists.

This is a readable portrait of the Lincoln/Douglas relationship although it doesn't really appear to have required much independent research on the part of the author, which, I doubt any is really needed, at least as far as Lincoln goes. You go look at the notes and it's just “I read some Douglas books and some Lincoln books and here you go for those of you interested in a summarization,” pretty much. Some takeaways:

1) the racism of the famous L-D debates on both sides; while Douglas is race baiting, Lincoln did not cover himself in glory either. The Lincoln we revere in hindsight was not the Lincoln of 1858.

2) I was particularly interested in the 1860 election and Douglas's last ditch attempt to stop the secession movement. Douglas was the only one campaigning for the office (it was not customary at the time for nominees to do so), but to some degree the general election result was predetermined. The breakup of the Democratic party convention was the real contest, which this book goes into. The election of a Republican president seems to have been the desired result brought about by pro-secession Southerners who, by breaking up the Democratic party, made it impossible for a Democrat to win the electoral college. Douglas's hopes for becoming president relied on no candidate receiving a majority and himself being the compromise choice by the House of Representatives.

3) it's an interesting counterfactual to think about what role Douglas might have played during the War if he hadn't dropped dead only a few months into Lincoln's term. Would he have “grown” in the direction Lincoln did? His life and politics were not very praiseworthy until the very last moment, so who knows. He narrowly missed some interesting times.

An excellent introduction to abolitionism. Rigorous but accessible, and brief.

I was kind of stunned by how little of the show is present here except for a bare skeleton. I knew it would only roughly map onto the first season, but it's quite an illustration with hindsight about how much can be added through a writers room, I guess.