Tom Watson

The First of Human Qualities

A number of years ago, my Parliamentary namesake the well-known Labour MP Tom Watson from West Bromwich East was kindly giving me a tour behind the scenes of Whitehall, where he was then running the Cabinet Office at the very center of the British Government. As I recall, Tom's office overlooked Horse Guards Parade on one side and the back garden of 10 Downing Street, then tenanted by Gordon Brown, on the other. Catching my look of historical hankering as I gazed out his windows, he took me on a whirlwind look through the passageways until we ended up in Number 10 itself (it's really all one big, rambling connected complex - but perhaps that's a state secret I shouldn't divulge).

In any event, there we were looking around the grand staircase with its portraits, the white drawing room where Presidents are photographed with Prime Ministers, and the famed cabinet room. And just before we left the building - through the black No. 10 door itself, as it turned out - Tom pointed out a rather deflated old brown leather wing chair in the corner of the vestibule. That he said, with some historic flourish, is Winston Churchill's reading chair.

I was recalling this moment of history-related generosity on Mr. Watson's part - it was very cool - as I sailed through The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, the posthumous collaboration between the eminent Connecticut historian William Manchester and Paul Reid. Manchester, the most prominent Western  hemisphere Churchillian, was the author of two volumes of a planned three volume biography of Churchill, the last of which was published in 1988 left Churchill on the edge of the premiereship - and the Second World War - in 1940. Manchester's health failed him, though he compiled acres of notes and outlines for the final volume before he died in 2003.

Like many armchair historians, Manchester's writing was formative for me. Goodbye Darkness, his account of the war in the Pacific, in part a first-person narrative, is among the great war books ever written. Manchester had the knack for weaving large-scale events into ground-level stories that imparted both the global machinations of empires and lives of actual people. So when my friend Eric Goldberg, over some Italian wine at I Trulli, strongly recommended the Manchester-Reid book - and Eric has never steered me wrong on history - a download was imminent.

I'd read the somewhat mixed reviews last fall when the book was released, but was intrigued by how Reid, who met Manchester as a reporter for the Palm Beach Post, deciphered both the old man's notes and his intentions like a one-man Bletchley Park team and produced a long, final chapter. And I'm not disappointed. Indeed, I think Reid's journalistic skills serve him very well on the vast, global canvas that was the last quarter century of Churchill's life. And I'm struck with the real generosity and ambition of the book. Certainly, the world didn't demand another Churchill biography; the Roy Jenkins book could certainly have served as the last big 20th century summation of that giant's life. Yet Reid is sure to explain - and then to demonstrate in capturing the sweep of events that defined Manchester's first two works - that this is a Manchester book and worthy of that reputation. The bones of garden are Manchester; the walls and pathways are laid out and familiar and the soil well-tilled with a lifetime's research. The plants are mainly Reid's - but they're arranged in the way that Gertrude Jekyll gardens still are decades after the great gardener's death. The grand design is recognizable.

As to Churchill, such is the cartoonish reputation still that it's always refreshing to read an open-eyed biography - one that countenances weakness, failure, and (perhaps) the immorality and folly of empire itself. Nonetheless, courage really was contagious in Britain in 1941 - and Churchill's keen sense of the Cold War's rise remains an example of actual strategic thinking by a major political leader. I'm not saying Churchill's world view should be welcomed early in this new century as a tonic for our global problems, nor that Churchill's famously loopy tactical ideas are either. But that clarity? By all means.

Lucking Out

Bloggers are the bridge and tunnel kids of the modern media club scene. Sure, we pay the cover charge and provide the much-needed amplification for the really big voices (you know, the ones getting paid to riff on the digital stage) but too often we find we've been allowed past the ropes just so Lou Reed can drunkenly insult us at the bar.

In the Max's Kansas City of the left-leaning web - the actual Park Avenue premises of sainted memory being the scene of an ugly episode that a kid from Yonkers who bore a much skinnier resemblance to me endured at the pointy end of Mr. Reed's claws in 1979 - there's a gentle unpretentious fellow always leaning against the bar to welcome the teeming, blogging, linking masses from the precincts of deep Outer Blogosphere. To the authors and other "content creators" (a term that Jack Donaghy surely must have invented in some far off Liz Lemon day-dream) who have felt the critical sting of his blade over these last few decades at the Village Voice or Esquire or Vanity Fair, the name of this approachable blogging Bing Crosby  might come as a surprise.

For it is James Wolcott.

And before this post progresses too much farther, I urge you to hasten in the direction of the nearest bookshop, virtual or the kind with comfy chairs and cappuccino bars, and purchase his forthcoming 1970s memoir, Lucking Out, which I have been reading with real pleasure since the advance copy hit my mailbox last week.

To bloggers like me, and Lance Mannion, and Blue Girl, and Al Giordano, and Roy Edroso, Maud Newton, and M.A. Peel, and the Siren, and a legion of other fine voices, Wolcott's seminal Vanity Fair blog has often been the spigot that provides the attention and conversation that is the real currency we strive for in a world that undervalues both the written word and the earnest discussion. Indeed, he's served as a genial giant of the literary set, the indulgent rich uncle with a checkbook of links and kind words of encouragement.

God help the evil-doers of course. Birthers, neocons, hate-bloggers, Tea Party patsies, war-mongers, and every flavor of fake right-wing "everyman" Bill O'Reilly type known to man has suffered at the point of his pen - as the likes of Richard Ford and Jay McInerney famously have, the latter once splattered with this bloody buzz-killer: "Beware of a novel built upon a catch-phrase. A flip curl eventually loses its hold."

"I sometimes wince at the nasty incisions I inflicted on writers when I cross the line between cutup and cutthroat," Wolcott admits near the book's conclusion - knowing of course that his readers (and his editors) like a bit of blood in their dueling scenes. There are no regrets about his late political work, which has gored all manner of conservative blog wannabes; indeed the Wolcott blog drew so many of us to his virtual side in those gauzy early pre-Dean Scream days when DailyKos was in beta and everything seemed possible.

But this is a book about the 1970s, and there too, I came across James Wolcott. Well, the latter part of the 70s anyway - the dawn of the decade found me in late single digits. Actually, I barely caught the cultural wave that powers Lucking Out, the salty tsunami of music and grime that washed the florid ponderous rot out of rock and roll. But catch it I did, and the back pages of the Village Voice were where we pored over the black and white listings for Max's, CBGB, Hurrah, the Peppermint Lounge, Trax, Mudd Club, and the Ritz. Plans laid, bridges and tunnels thoroughly mapped, there might be time to read the articles and Wolcott's acerbic reviews often provided out-loud teenaged readings,  "Hey Maude, listen to this!" moments in the shotgun seat of the old Buick on the FDR Drive or the Broadway IRT.

There's a malign force closing in on Wolcott's black and white 1970s - you feel it throughout the book - and its color is  green. The 80s of Donald Trump (whose name doesn't stain this epic - no accident) ushered in a New York obsessed with real estate and wealth, and turned houses and apartments into the "outward constructs of your identity that required Hamlet-style agonizing for fear that at the root of your being, you might not be an 'uptown person.'" Money plays little role in the sweaty corners of CBGB or the back row of the screening rooms; all that matters is commitment to the written word and to a form of honest criticism that values the creation of art (widely defined) so highly that finely-sliced prose meant for reading is the only respectful way to respond. "Hanging tough is what divides the long-range dedicated from the dilettantes," writes Wolcott, recalling a ballsy and unbowed Patti Smith and her reaction to a serious career setback.

Patti is one of the many heroines in the rare I-was-there rock memoir that actually values women as real people, which discounts the studded leather jackets, sexual abuse, and back alley urination of typical 70s punk tales. Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth is another: "My crush on Tina was instantaneous. It was the only correct way to respond." And the stars of early mainstream porn are given their tender due as elegant actors in the grimy (but addictive) world of pre-Giuliani Times Square.

There are girlfriends, actresses and glammy femme rockers galore in Lucking Out, but there's only one true love affair. Jim creates a portrait of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael that is tender and deeply personal. Matt Haber asserts that "it's one of the dirtier tricks in Lucking Out that Wolcott uses Kael to voice some of the book's most dismissive asides," but I rather think Wolcott has another goal - a second, post-millennial public life for Kael's caustic wit and rock-solid view of what makes a good flick, and what doesn't. It's true that Kael has some of the book's best lines - "I didn't want him to think I was using his racist talk as an excuse to under-tip him" says Kael about an Archie Bunker cab driver - but she's more important as the guiding muse of criticism, as the person who constructed the right literary box for Wolcott to work his four-decade magic act. His long and, it must be said, vastly entertaining story about Kael and her crowd is more than an appreciation of one the decade's great critical voices. It's a public thank you note.

Lucking Out is not the story of the 1970s. There's a lot missing: Ed Koch, the Son of Sam, the Yankees (the Mets!), black people, the outer boroughs, disco and Nixon. But it captures the creative true grit of the small town that existed within a big city so beset and grimy that "entire neighborhoods were considered no-go areas where you never knew what the hell might fall from the fire escapes." There's a wistful quality that long-ago decade of my own adolescence, but Wolcott doesn't lay on the sentimentalism and it's unlikely that Lucking Out will add too much to popular 70s lore. Which is a good thing in my mind, because we live in a society where the thin veneer of the ever-widening "creative class" has created a manufactured version of alternative lifestyle and consumption that passes for critical thought; every hipster manque with 500 clams can grab an iPad and feel like a downtown denizen, both funky and chic. As Wolcott notes, "all that lore is what made CBGB's compelling long after it became a raucous shell, and what has kept the myth of the Algonquin Round Table alive, no matter how mid-range the achievements of Dorothy Parker, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley appear today."

There is much in Lucking Out of what made popular culture today, but it's not a guidebook. It's a story, Jim Wolcott's story. And it did take part of me back to where I once belonged.

Book of the Year: You Are Not A Gadget

"Think For Yourself" would have been an apt subtitle for Jaron Lanier's You Are Not A Gadget, my pick for non-fiction book of the year and the most important piece of writing on technology and communications to be published in 2010. Instead, Lanier and his publishers went with "A Manifesto" and it certainly is all of that - bright, opinionated, often meandering, occasionally pedantic, happily confrontational and in its totality a bold red stop sign in the path of wired society's long march toward a thin, common identity.

Not that I wanted to stop at that particular intersection.

My 2008 book CauseWired chronicled the rise of online social activism and presented a generally (but not entirely) rosy outlook for a socially-networked world with access to information and the digital tools needed to change society. I chose to focus on the development of positive, collaborative platforms like Kiva, Change.org, GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose and the creation of networks to fight poverty, disease and genocide. And I saw the ascendancy of vast social applications like Facebook and Twitter as generally benevolent to the movement for social change; greater participation could yield more democratic structures, more authentic power from below - and if more individuals could see a wider view of the injustice in the world, more of them would organize to fix it.

Yet I've never embraced techno-utopianism or served time as a social media triumphalist; back in the 90s Jason Chervokas and I would regularly rail in @NY against a form of cyber-libertarianism that argued for a self-regulated technology industry and no societal restraint on anything digital. Where some treated "information wants to be free" as a physicist's formula, we saw it as a political slogan. Chervokas and I recognized that that the "freedom" some technologists were arguing for was merely a cover for seeking power; in a new world ordered by technology, who would be in charge? Fast forward to the socially-networked Internet of 2010, and it's no surprise that a few powerful players now control vast amounts of our identities and our content.

Nonetheless, You Are Not a Gadget was a head-snapper for a me. And the intellectual whiplash was worth the collision.

The central tenet of Lanier's manifesto is the idea that humanistic values are too often lacking in widely-adopted digital technology - that in using online services driven by algorithms and marketing (and what's better for the programmer and the advertiser), users naturally adopt a less complex online personality, a less nuanced identity. In CauseWired, I relayed the wisdom of my then-16-year-old daughter, who explained that Facebook wasn't your actual self, it was "your best you."

Fitting neatly into a Facebook profile is reductive, argues Lanier, who wonders "whether people are becoming like MIDI notes - overly defined and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer." Twitter limits in another way, by placing severe strictures of the actual form of communications. With each message limited to 140 characters (much less with a link and a hashtag or two) it often removes the gray space. The big issues can be reduced to a half sentence and a link, really very little more than a click on the Facebook "like" button. It becomes a fantastic echo chamber, a vast din of repetition with easily-delineated sides like a soccer match. No wonder every single politician and celebrity gravitates to Twitter - the control over the messaging is fantastic (indeed, the comical early mistakes some pols made on Twitter were the exceptions that proved the rule). Marketers now understand the on/off MIDI-like notational quality of short messages - they're paying six-figures for so-called "promoted" tweets and trends, which are just a fancy and expensive method for Twitter to lie to the very userbase that built the service. Or as Lanier puts it in discussing social networks like Twitter: "Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am."

Lanier's point is that by reducing personality and the wide sweep of human thought into chunks that can fit easily into databases and digested through clever widely-popular front end designs, the possibility for horrific "crowd-sourced" activity is that much greater. To put it simply, the good guys don't always win. Throughout history, they've often been shouted down by crowds. While it's impossible to argue with the sunny opening lines of the introduction to Yochai Benkler's seminal Internet text The Wealth of Networks - "Information, knowledge and culture are central to human freedom and human development" - and to sympathize with a point of view that argues that great access to those qualities improves the lot of mankind, Lanier's warnings also seem in tune with the times.

It's not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly. I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasizes crowd aggregation, as is the current fad. Will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age?

That kind of thinking flies in the face of a more utopian view of free information, embodied in hacker philosopher Richard Stallman's famous '90s proclamation that when "information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving." I'd naturally ask "what does generally useful mean?" and Lanier goes a step further, noting that the free flow of information also brings large-scale vitriol to arguments between semi-anonymous actors on the Net. "What's to prevent the acrimony from scaling up? Unfortunately, history tells us that collectivist ideas can mushroom into large-scale social disasters."

Lanier's "digital Maoism" may be the intellectual equivalent of crying "fire!" in a crowded theater, especially one filled with venture capital-backed tech companies, media conglomerates and telecommunications outfits all mining profits from the social gold rush (not to mention the trade press that loves them). And Lanier's is a particularly well-aimed attack on geek culture: "The new twist in Silicon Valley is that some people - very influential people - believe they are hearing algorithms and crowds an other internet-supported nonhuman entities speak for themselves. I don't hear those voices though - and I believe those who do are fooling themselves."

You Are Not A Gadget also warns against an Internet-based democracy, a world of governing chaos in which "superenergized people would be struggling to shift the wording of the tax code on a frantic, never-ending basis." The remedy is our current actual democracy - "the slower processes of elections and court proceedings" - which are like calming bass waves in Lanier's musical metaphor. They reduce "the potential for the collective to suddenly jump into an overexcited state when too many rapid changes coincide in such a way that they don't cancel one another out." It's dull and it doesn't make a handy retweet. And it also argues against some of the aspects of the latest techie cause célèbre - Wikileaks, a secretive organization that claims it represents the interests of more open government but renounces public accountability. Three weeks ago, I wrote that I didn't think "Wikileaks advances the cause of more accessible government or international justice." And Lanier didn't win too many allies with his essay in The Atlantic last week that argued for more skepticism toward Julian Assange and his shadowy organization, while taking "nerd supremacy" to task for the near lock-step support of Wikileaks at the cost of traditional avenues of trust:

"The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren't hurt. But he's wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns:  low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other."

In a spirited Atlantic response to Lanier's piece, Zeynep Tufekci (who by chance I happened to sit next to on the stage for our panel at the Personal Democracy Forum's Wikileaks symposium on Dec. 11) argued that he "makes the fundamental conceptual mistake of conflating individual human beings and powerful institutions, like governments and corporations." In other words, those large organizations stand opposed to individual liberty - which the free flow of information can help to guarantee. And that idea also infused some of the criticism of You Are Not A Gadget, especially reactions to Lanier's dystopian view of a purely crowd-sourced social commons, his somewhat alarmist suggestion that "collectivist ideas can mushroom into large-scale social disasters."

Frankly, it's part of the deeply romantic view that so many technologists hold of the Internet (I'm not immune to this) and it's an especially American viewpoint. We tend to view corporations and big organizations and "the state" as monoliths, rather than collections of many individual humans working toward a loose common cause - and we tend to welcome the new frontier than disintermediation brings. In 1997, in a column for The New York Times, Chervokas and I wrote:

For more than 200 years Americans have been driven by the myth of the frontier, the feral, boundless space beyond known civilization where opportunities are infinite, where homesteaders can discard identities of birth and inhabit instead their own identities of mind, and where law is what you make it. This libertarian, romantic myth has informed a lot of the national discourse about the Internet -- America's new "freer, vast, electric world," to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman.

That "freer, vast, electric world" still holds tremendous promise, in my view. Questioning our direction does not mean losing that promise or ending the Internet experiment. Yet Lanier's point of tends to get lumped into naysayer's category. In a tweet today, NYU press watcher Jay Rosen posited that as they age, digital people tend toward the insight that "de-excites." Some keep going, he wrote, while others "become professional debunkers." Challenged by Jeff Jarvis, he named Jaron Lanier as one of the latter - but I think that's a bit off the mark. If you dig into You Are  Not A Gadget, the sense of wonderment at the possibilities of this digital age remains intact. Lanier is more than a professional debunker. And in my view, the very questioning of the impact of crowds and networks on the social commons is welcome.

"Next to the many problems the world faces today, debates about online culture may not seem that pressing," writes Lanier. "We need to address global warming, shift to a new energy cycle, avoid wars of mass destruction, support aging populations, figure out how to benefit from open markets without being disastrously vulnerable to their failures, and take care of other basic business. But digital culture and related topics like the future of privacy and copyrights concern the society we'll have if we can survive these challenges."

I agree. You Are Not A Gadget didn't change my thinking, but it made me a think a lot more. It's the book of the year for 2010.

In Kindlegarten

For the last month or so, my obsessive book-reading habit has taken on the glint of a platform shift. On the recommendation of other heavy-duty readers, I cut way back on print and paper in favor of a sleek new Kindle.

In truth, I was a reluctant convert for a simple reason: I love books. But the addiction was reaching the limits of our household budget and beyond; and the pile of books (most read once, then stacked) was clearly getting out of hand. Nonetheless, I was a hold-out - I use digital technology quite a bit, spend unseemly amounts of waking time in the wired state of connection, and always look forward each day to the darkened hours of print and paper and unplugged peace. Yeah, I'm an early adopter, but I'd opted out of the early Kindle craze.

So here's the quick review and a few thoughts on the business model.

The Kindle is for readers - This is not just a nice little device, and it's not (in my view) a multi-tasking platform for connected activities of all sorts. It shouldn't compete with smart phones and app stores; indeed, I view Amazon's plan to open the Kindle to developers with skepticism. The Kindle's simplicity is its strong suit - the best moments come when I forget I'm holding an electronic gadget at all, and am fully immersed in the 'book' I'm reading. This happens all the time.

So here's what I don't need the Kindle for: Internet surfing, email, texting, games, or social media. It's a book platform. It doesn't have an illuminated screen, and therefore, it relieves eye strain rather than adds to it. The grayish electronic ink system is beautiful in its "non-laptop" functionality.

Amazon should improve the Kindle store - Strangely, given how much it's invested in the Kindle universe, the online store linked the machine isn't particularly strong. In a month of usage and some pretty heavy browsing and purchasing, the store still hasn't changed its personal recommendations for books I should buy. And the categories aren't all that easy to get around; searching isn't intuitive. The store that appears on the Kindle screen is poorly laid out and non-intuitive.

Indeed, I've taken to using my laptop to research purchases. Amazon has done the integration between my longtime account and my new Kindle account quite well - so I shop on the regular website and specify delivery to my Kindle. Speaking of delivery: it's quite brilliant. Within a minute or two of buying a book, the file pops up on the Kindle's home screen. Even better - you can quickly download a sample of any book you're considering, to see whether it passes the "first chapter test" before buying. I find that I now read three or four first chapters for every book I buy.

Forget the Apple tablet as a Kindle-killer - Unless your eyes are as strong as Superman's, you're not going to read books on a regular basis on a backlit screen. The real competition in the e-book device niche comes from other e-ink devices like he Barnes and Noble Nook and Sony's readers. To my (tired) eye, this will always remain a real readers' niche - not a path to another big wired platform.

Publishers don't get it - I'm not sure why book publishers don't see the kindle as more of an opportunity, instead of a threat. Don't they understand that Kindle owners are the ones who buy the most books - the obsessive readers who don't have enough space on their shelves for more printed tomes? The current practice is to hold big new books back from the Kindle platform for a few weeks to give bookstores a head start on best-selling sales. This is patently insane. They should be releasing books on the Kindle first, for the hard-core readers. Now that I've got the Kindle, I'm perfectly happy to wait for a book like Game Change  to come out for the device. I'm not racing to get it in print. And if, by mid-February when the trashy political tell-all is finally due to be released for the Kindle, I just happen to forget to buy it - well, whose loss is that?

To my publishing friends, I have a message: I'm buying and reading more books now. You need to understand that, and start to aggressively market to the e-reader audience with loyalty programs and exclusives - rather than punishing Kindle readers. [As the Times pointed out today, some publishers do get it].

In any case, I'm a convert - I dig this little white machine for its ease of use and simplicity and for the amazingly quick access to a library of great books, many of which are free of charge (public domain classics are a huge Kindle segment).

Can the Kindle go social? I'll leave this with a question: wouldn't it be great if Kindle used its built-in connectivity to link readers to a system of mini-reviews and ratings via some simle social media tools - perhaps connecting reading lists to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the Amazon Kindle store? My guess is that's coming, and that social media-driven best-seller lists will begin to drive sales. Something else for 'print' publishers to pay attention to.

The Booklist: Eric Ambler's Noir

It's an addiction that I've never really fought, never even tried to battle in any sort of therapeutic way. I just give in and float downstream, and collateral continues to build. It's books, really. Piles of them. Dusty and finished and sitting by the bed, or in the small home office, or beside my chair in the living room. A dirty habit, if dust mites measure the effects of habituation. And it's an addiction that has me considering a methadone-like therapy this joyous holiday in the form a Kindle or a Nook or similar "e-reader" as these machines are known. (Recommendations welcome).

No, the piles must be reduced or I face a middle-aged future not all that dissimilar from the Collyer brothers, though I do get out quite a bit and the piles are only thigh-high at their worst. However, before the physical expulsion of allergen-filled material from my bed-chamber, some intellectual exercise may also prove beneficial and I find I am called upon to share my thoughts on reading with the readers of this wayward blog, book-list hungry hordes that you are. So in recognition of the shopping demands (personal and otherwise) of the above-mentioned joyous holiday season - or JHS™ - I've decided on a series of irregular posts on the books I can safely recommend from the past year's reading.

At the top of the stack lie four or five paperback reissues from the canon of Eric Ambler. Now, this choice should carry a bit of foreshadowing against future entries in the series: I fairly wallowed in detective and espionage noir this last year; I needed escape - or at minimum, brief transportation - from the difficulties of worry and creeping despair (I suspect I'm not alone in this) and what better way outside a pill bottle than dark mayhem in the alleys of, oh say, wartime London or the salons of Istanbul. There's a reason so many video games feature the thrill of machine-gunning vast squads of Nazi thugs - it brings such good cheer.

In any case, if you need an escape hatch from the sparkly holiday lights proclaiming "shop, for you must be happy!" then Ambler's the man for you - or that reader on your list.

Early this year, I read Ambler's best-known novel, his 1939 A Coffin for Dimitrios, later made into a film starring Peter Lorre. It features what became Ambler's favorite plot device - the innocent traveler caught in a web of espionage or crime. The writing is straightforward and the characters and settings always serve the plot. Ambler will sometimes allow some of his protagonists' inner struggles and fears to surface, but he also keeps things moving. Sometimes the reader understand more of the situation than the hapless, bumbling traveler - but sometimes the innocent improves his thinking and surges ahead, while the writer holds back the deduction. Ambler, an Englishman who died in 1998, inspired a generation of noteworthy noir writers, including Philip Kerr and Alan Furst.

This summer, I went  on an Ambler tear, plowing through Epitaph for a Spy, Journey of Fear, and The Schirmer Inheritance - visiting the south of France, Parish, Istanbul, Italy and Greece with a collection of unknowing Englishmen, shadowy assassins, bluster police officials, assorted femmes fatales and the odd ex-Nazi.

There is always a moment  in the Ambler novels when the dupe - a novelist, a salesman, a teacher and the like - realizes with sinking fear that they're not in a movie or an Agatha Christie tale; that the danger is real and outlook fairly grim. It seems formulaic (and it is ) but Ambler had the rare gift of lifting such tales with his spare writing. Here's that moment from A Coffin for Dimitrios:

Besides, here was real murder; not neat, tidy book-murder with corpse and clues and suspects and hangman, but murder over which a chief of police shrugged his shoulders, wiped his hands and consigned the stinking victim to a coffin. Yes, that was it. It was real. Dimitrios was or had been real. Here were no strutting paper figures, but tangible evocative men and women, as real as Proudhon, Montesquieu and Rosa Luxemburg.

Ambler was born in London in 1909 to music hall musicians and actors, and toured Europe quite a bit as a child. He uses those experiences well, and began his novels at a propitious time: as fascism was descending on the continent like acid rain. John LeCarre once referred to Ambler as 'the source on which we all draw' but I wasn't after the roots of literary noir when I fished out his novels - I was looking for a good read, and if I'm honest, a hide-away from these times. Ambler put me on a tramp steamer in an unfriendly port or on the overnight train across the Alps - and in a better place entirely.

Note: Here's the Amazon link. I particularly like the Vintage paperback covers.

The Death of Why

Every era has at least a few serious voices who openly question the new ways, the settled conventional wisdom around innovations in style, technology and social habits that change - at least on the surface - how society operates. As everybody else is celebrating the greatness of, well, themselves, these idoloclasts happily throw poison-tipped darts in a cultural clash with the totems of perceived progress.

Such a counter-programmer is my friend Andrea Batista Schlesinger, the 32-year-old New Yorker and progressive activist whose first book The Death of Why holds up a big, fat stop sign to those who would celebrate under the banner "all that is modern is good."

[Note: Andrea is the longtime executive director of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank on whose board of directors I've served since 2002. She's on leave from that position while working as a policy adviser to the reelection campaign of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.]

The Death of Why goes against the grain. It stands opposed to any triumphalist viewpoints regarding digital communications. You can easily read it as the diametric opposite of Jeff Jarvis's somewhat hagiographic What Would Google Do?, for example. Andrea doesn't believe the Internet in general - and Google specifically - has necessarily made us any smarter or more democratic as a society. While she praises the innovation of always-available information and the worldwide networked conversation made possible by the network of networks, she also strikes out at the idea of searching as knowledge, of linking as journalism or education.

And she uses one particular commentator's voice as a stalking horse for her arguments against the Internet-as-knowledge: mine. In the fourth chapter - In Google We Trust - Andrea posits that the "Internet responds to curiosity as much as it creates it" but argues that "searching for answers" isn't the same thing as answering questions. Then she quotes me: "Certainly we're in far better shape, in terms of tools and ability, for deep inquiry than we used to be."

Not so fast, argues Andrea. "When I survey the search engine landscape, I see conditions that are less than inspiring of 'deep inquiry' especially for our youngest. I see the formation of habits of mind characterized by a dangerous lack of discernment." And young people, she says, bounce around as guileless link and search-box addicts, mistaking the search-cut-paste process for deep inquiry.

This is undoubtedly true in many instances. I've seen it. But I'm not sure it's a bigger problem than the use of Cliff Notes or the Xerox machine by earlier generations.  In the end, I'm not sure young Americans really are less inquisitive. That may be because of the field I've worked in for the last decade - progressive causes and philanthropy - tends to attract young, enthusiastic professionals who won't take no for an answer and seem to question everything. Then too, the social entrepreneurs I profiled in my book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World were similarly driven to challenge every status quo they found - and to use digital technology to do so. Finally, my own three children are constantly questioning things that I tend to think of as settled subject matter, with no hesitation to challenge and probe and looks things up. They don't necessarily follow the leader.

Nonetheless, The Death of Why is an important book - and I think it's particularly timely, given the challenges that major American institutions (like big newspapers and Federal agencies) are facing in an increasingly crowd-sourced era. It's a great book for journalists concerned that the so-called "link economy" leaves serious inquiry out in the cold - and for e-government types who seek to go beyond merely making information available in vast databases but to actually encourage citizen involvement in our republic.

And this goes for newspapers, whose approaching demise the author mourns loudly. Currying no favor with the digerati, Andrea argues (and I agree) that the decline of news organizations is bad for democracy and that it's unlikely that blogs and online specialty sites will rise to replace the full gamut of professional journalism. "When you start the day with the newspaper," she writes, " you start with the recognition that you are a person in the world, with a need and responsibility to engage."

Throughout the book, Andrea decries the echo chamber of modern information and communications - the trend toward finding what you want (the viewpoint you already support) rather than coming across something you didn't know. That "self-segregation" does indeed permeate much of what we take as political dialogue for instance. Andrea decries the national political process in the modern age, panning the 2008 Presidential debates between Senators Obama and McCain as flimsy and personality-driven, and slyly pointing out that Hillary Clinton's campaign was rejuvenated when she came out of the bubble and started taking tough, unscripted questions. "The irony is that the candidates need not fear questioning," she says.

Perhaps the best quality of The Death of Why lies in its inherent skepticism toward what we've come to accept as the right way to approach learning, particularly public education. Andrea's a bit young for curmudgeon status, but her gruff and skeptical take on so-called "financial literacy" is welcome. So much of this kind of education is really marketing, priming the sales pump for future consumers. And if that passes for inquiry, we're in serious trouble. Writes Andrea: "Our democracy will suffer if the youngest among us grow up thinking that today's society and the economy that sustains it are working just as they should."

Living in Nixonland

When I was a cub scout back in 1971, our pack got a call from the regional headquarters. Big news. The biggest. President Nixon was due to come through town in his motorcade and dedicate the new veteran's memorial up on the Post Road. We would be part of the official honor guard, turned out in our blue uniforms and bearing the colors. It was a die-hard Republican town, and I remember quite vividly the massive turn-out for Nixon. I'd like to say I also recall how the people who waved their flags that day hated the war protests and the counter-culture movement, but that would be stretching a point: my nine-year-old powers of observation weren't so socially acute. What I saw was a great surging, adoring crowd that almost ran down a bunch of scouts in their zest to get closer to President Nixon.

And I remember is his gray, unsmiling face as he rose through the roof of his limousine - and how some hidden switch seemed to turns on the broad grin and raise both hands puppet-like in a that characteristic double V-for-victory pose. Then we were merely trampled underfoot.

Recalling Nixon through the rear-view mirror with Watergate stamped into the chrome, we tend to remember the defeated Final Days President, the broken man and his comeback on David Frost. But the Nixon I saw for that brief moment - and the Nixon portrayed in Rick Perlstein's terrific Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, was a vibrant politician at the pinnacle who connected with the masses, carving an electorally successful path between the feuding liberal Democrats and their crippling war and the growing right wing class anger of Goldwater and Reagan. That's the Nixon you see on the cover of Nixonland.

I'm about five chapters into Perlstein's satisfying reader, and he brings back all that feeling of Nixon's utter dominance of the political landscape from LBJ's sad sunset to his own long and dramatic tragedy. And along the way, the characters are dreamily compelling to this child (literally) of the 60s - and amazingly current as well. You'll find traces of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and John McCain in Nixonland, and you'll discover bits of this presidential race as well. The set pieces remain so very much the same on the stage of our cultural landscape - it's almost scary how little we've changed.

Built Ford Tough

A fortnight after I finished it, Richard Ford's trilogy-ending novel The Lay of the Land is still with me. And yet, I cannot tell you what happens in the book, what plot developments drive the last chapter in the saga of Frank Bascombe, what the story really is. There are some bits about a funeral, cancer treatment, real estate sales, and broken marriages. A lot of driving around New Jersey. And there's a violent ending that doesn't fit at all. But like a good cover of an old blues song, the latest Ford does not get by on what happens in its 800-plus pages, but how it makes you feel.

Here's how: thoughtful. Even more mortal. A little sad. But ultimately less cynical. A strange combination, and that's the book's brilliance.

It's been a long road for the failed sportswriter turned real estate agent, Frank Bascombe, a native of the south who finds himself in suburban New Jersey with two failed marriages, two wayward children and the memories of a third who died in childhood. He's old, has prostate cancer, and is aware that the country is going to hell. The time of the book is the Thanksgiving weekend of 2000 as the Florida recount saga drags on and Bush gets closer to his illegitimate Presidency. Bascombe leaves beach-front in a fictional Jersey shore town north of Barnegat Light and south of Asbury. He sells house and owns his own small agency.

And he faces the existential crisis of late middle age, which, in typical fashion, Ford dubs the Permanent Period. Age-wise, I'm always a period behind - I'm still in the Existence years. But the Permanent Period looms. For most of the book, Ford's inner voice tries to claim that it's not that bad, really. A lack of drive, the surrender of ambition, the acceptance of mortality are all good things - or so the protagonist thinks.

Then the crisis - first emotional, than physical (in a wacky Miami Vice sequence involving the Russian mob) and it's not all right. And Ford settles in the accept one thing and one thing only, to place it above all others: human love.

That will disappoint some of Ford's followers, who see him as the successor to the hopelessness of writers like Richard Yates, who is clearly a major influence. Yates found mainly hopelessness in modern American suburbia, an empty landscape. His followers may feel that leaving Frank Bascombe a happy man is like grafting a Disney ending onto Citizen Kane. But I think at the end of this major work - which included The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995) - Ford follows the other major influence, fellow southerner William Faulkner, who found light in august and hope against the odds.

Ford's Bascombe has never seemed to care, until he does. I'm not sure this is the novel Ford could have written at a younger age. But it's the one we have now. And with its 2000 mindset and foreshadowing of 9/11, it's most welcome indeed.

On the Road

A portion of my evening reading has been keeping me up deep into the night, placing me in the uncomfortable territory between sleep and thought, between the world of dreams and productive consciousness. It's not Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, a real reporter's book by Thomas Ricks, which painstakingly lays out the claim for utter incompetence in Iraq. Nor is it Plan of Attack, by the former reporter Bob Woodward, an insider who flips on his Administration sources and gets them to turn viciously on each other. Both books are chilling - horrific tales of a failed Presidency and an immoral foreign policy. But with those, I can take a sip, switch off the light, and slip into what Bob Dylan calls "a temporary death."

Not so with The Road.

Cormac McCarthy's brilliant portrait of humanity's winter is a short read, but a very, very long digestion. The story of a man and his son walking toward the sea after a cataclysm - nuclear? environmental? natural? we don't know and aren't told - is relentlessly bleak and pessimistic. Man has destroyed the planet; nothing grows. The only food surviving is years-old stores of goods as yet unfound by marauders and thin survivors - and other humans, hunted by gangs of killers.

A caution tale? I sensed none - just a tale, however horrible, however plausible. The ancient pull in the book is of a father's determination to see his child outlive him; to see another generation on its way, in whatever landscape it finds itself. Ash falls. But a few hearts still beat.

All this is in long introduction to a recent post by Glenn Greenwald entited American values. These too can be thrown away, leaving us on a wild and abandoned road. Maybe McCarthy is sending a warning after all - surely, contemporary literature reaches beyond the headlines to capture the truth. This is ours:

...by studying the torture methods used by America's enemies -- those uncivilized, evil regimes and groups we are always hearing about -- we learned how to torture people and then decided to copy their torture techniques. As always, the "rationale" of the Bush administration is that in order to defend our values and culture from the evil forces seeking to destroy us, we have to become as much like them as possible and copy their behavior....

... These extreme and vile techniques became standard operating procedure for how we interrogate detainees. Far worse, five years after September 11, the U.S. Congress -- right out in the open -- voted expressly to authorize the use of most if not all of these techniques and empower the President to use them at will. Put another way, our country, after five years of distance from 9/11 and after much debate and deliberation, decided to enshrine this behavior as legally authorized and reflective of our new national values.

Wallander's World

There's a distinct darkness on the edge of the old towns along the coast of southern Sweden in the dangerous world created by Henning Mankell and inhabited by his brilliant and reluctant police inspector Kurt Wallander.

I've ploughed through nearly all of the ten or so Wallander books in translation over the past three months, set in Skane just across the water from Copenhagen, an area of ancient villages, flat and barren landscape, farms and beaches. They're among the best detective books I've ever read, falling into the police procedural sub-genre; Mankel leads the reader matter-of-actly through the dogged, often mundane pursuit of criminals. But he has also created some of the most horrific killers ever to prowl a novelist's page, monsters who terrorize the farmsteads and quiet flats of Skane.

Mankel is a master of dramatic plot disclosure, spending most of his time traipsing along with Wallander, a puffy, late 40s divorcee who drinks too much, spends too much time alone, and worries incessantly about his grown daughter and aging father. Wallander's daily world is utterly mundane - lonely meals, long drives, flat tires, endless police bureaucracy. The detective is both the plodding, stubborn type but also possessing of a rare instinct; he's a man of cursory insight and strong powers of observation, even if the meaning of things takes a long while to unfold.

But now and again, Mankel moves from the familiar Wallander to the minds of his killers and the view is terrifying. These are damaged people, most have been abused or discarded. There is always a reason for their turn to violence, but Mankel is far from easily sympathetic. He explores the failure of their childhoods, or the political systems that spawned them, but he doesn't excuse the violence.

The Wallander series is a bit of a fin de siècle for old Sweden. The constant theme is a changing Swedish society, no longer quiet and stolid, but part of a wider and more violent world. Immigration is changing a homogeneous society. When violence strikes, Swedes immediately blame the outsiders. In truth, some of Mankel's killers are Swedish and some are foreigners; Mankel's comment seems to be about human congress in general, and he rejects a "Swedish way" while still publicly mourning the change.

Kurt Wallander has not been to television here in the United States yet, but his is a character that will certainly rival those on CSI or Law & Order. The series has been dramatized in Sweden in full, and by the BBC in part. The Wallander series is among the best-selling detective series in Europe, and it was recommended by my virtual buddy Pete Townshend. Indeed, there are Wallander-themed tours of the town of Ystad, where the series is based. Here in the U.S., Mankel hasn't cracked the top 1,000 on Amazon yet, but I think he may eventually. The plots are that good, the villains that nasty, and Kurt Wallander that good a character. Here's a small taste, from The Dogs of Riga, a typical understated bit of police station by-play.

Inspector Kurt Wallander sat in his office at the police station in Ystad and yawned. It was such a huge yawn that one of the muscles under his chin locked. The pain was excruciating. Wallander punched at the underside of his jaw with his right hand to free the muscle. Just as he was doing so, Martinsson, one of the younger officers, walked in. He paused in the doorway, puzzled. Wallander continued to massage his jaw until the pain subsided. Martinsson turned to leave.

"Come on in," Wallander said. "Haven't you ever yawned so wide that your jaw muscles locked?"

[snip]

Martinsson left, and Wallander stretched out in his chair. He could feel how tired he was. He'd been forced to answer emergency calls two nights in a row. The first night he'd led the hunt for a suspected rapist who'd barricaded himself in an empty summer cottage at Sandskogen. The man was drugged to the eyeballs and there was reason to think he could be armed, so they'd surrounded the place until 5 a.m., when he'd given himself up. The following night Wallander had been called out to a murder in the town centre. A birthday party had got out of hand, and the man whose birthday it was had been stabbed in the temple with a carving knife.

He got up from his chair and put on his fleece jacket. I've got to get some sleep, he thought. Somebody else can look after the snowstorm. When he left the station, the gusts of wind forced him to bend double. He unlocked his Peugeot and scrambled in. The snow that had settled on the windows gave him the feeling of being in a warm, cosy room. He started the engine, inserted a tape, and closed his eyes.