Never tell our business to strangers

America loves crime stories. If you ask people which is the finest movie ever made, they are likely include the Godfather as a contender. Crime novels are well represented in the 2009 bestseller list as well. I don't think that America likes criminals as a group, but, as Walter McDougall argues in Freedom Just Around the Corner, America does like hustlers. The sorts of people who bend the rules to make a buck. Whether a criminal is appealing depends on the crime. An artful theft excites many, and so does vigilante justice.

In her memoir, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers, New York Times writer Jennifer Mascia talks about coming to terms with her family's criminal background. Her family moved a lot and she had a vague sense of what her father. He eventually went to jail, and she learns that he was involved in both the drug trade and in killing for the Mob.

The parts I liked best where those where she wrestled with who her parents were. How her mother could stay with someone who she knew was involved in terrible crimes. Her mom, by the way, like others used the Schwarzenegger defense, he only killed bad people. The main thrust of the book is how she finds her path to reconciling her love for her parents with her own moral code.

On the downside, the book is a little long and those who aren't looking for family stories to go with their crime will need to be patient. Thanks to Blue Dot Literary for giving me the chance to read it.

This is a writer's life

I suspect that many of us envy the idea of a writing life. Lots of contemplation, musings, and being one's own boss. The ultimate life of thinking leisure. Mine would involve sipping sloe gin fizzes and Pimm's Cup while resting at the Lodge at Torrey Pines.

The reality of course is often far different. For many it means taking a series of soulless jobs, facing years of rejection and living with an odd mix of relationships. In Beg, Borrow or Steal, novelist Michael Greenberg describes his writers life from his early, striving and starving days to his recent successful ones.

The book consists of a series of short essays, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, built around an anecdote from his life. They range from the tense, as when he and his wife have a run-in with the military government of Argentina, to the comic, as in his failed attempts to pay the bills working as a waiter and his visit to a polyamory group. While the subject matter varies, there is a calm sense of reflection about them that makes each of them a great pleasure to read.

Greenberg has spent most of his life in New York City and its environs so much of the stories focus on the City. You'll learn for example about the giant potter's field located not far from LaGuardia and as well as the "Negros Burial Ground," the earliest known African-American cemetery in the United States. Greenberg also writes about Jewish life, including the role of circumcision. His principal subject, though, is writing, including the perils of screen-writing and the role his writer friends and mentors have played in his life.

The essays here are remarkably concise, but are still meaningful. They are strong stories well worth reading.

Who invented cartoons, I'd like to shake his hand

I've spent the past few weeks working my way through Neal Gabler's massive Walt Disney biography. It took this long not because it was boring or too dense, but because it deserved close reading. The book tells the story of Walt from his ancestors up to his death from lung cancer.

Although I considered myself familiar with the story of the studio, I really wasn't. I thought it was an upward trend of success from day one. In reality the studio teetered on the edge of disaster for much of its earlier years. The creative drive of Walt and the business acumen and diplomacy of Roy Disney kept the studio alive.

Gabler portrays Walt as the sort of person that most technology executives that I have met think they are. They bear the burden of his negative attributes without the countervailing positive attributes. Disney was monomanical, tough on employees, paranoid and given to ignoring any viewpoint other than his own. On the other hand, he was truly a creative genius completely dedicated to creating new popular art. I've tended to see him only as an overseer and while he was a visionary he also developed new technologies, stories and key scenes for the movies. Some companies would have turned out the same with different leaders. Not Disney.

The book has me digging up all sorts of Disney movies I haven't seen. There is for example, Make Mine Music, a sequel of sorts to Fantasia. This one came out just after World War 2, when the company was trying to rebuild itself after years as a government film factory. Rather than the cohesive work that is Fantasia, this one was cobbled together from bits and pieces. It would take a number of years before the company found its footing again.

As much as I liked the book, I can only recommend it to those with a strong interest in movies, pop culture or Disney himself. It is a long read for those with a tepid interest.

I'll teach you to burn

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's Pulitzer Prize winning American Prometheus is an excellent example of how a biography should be written. The authors focus on how Robert Oppenheimer's upbringing, academic experiences and personality shaped his approach to his successes in teaching and managing the Manhattan project as well as his failures as a politically engaged public intellectual. While it does not replace Rhodes' book as the leading book of the bomb, it is certainly the leading book on this monumental figure.

Oppenheimer was extremely driven and like a tragic play, many of his early actions comes to haunt him in his later years. His participation with leftist causes in the 30s and his relationships with communist party members nearly cost him his role in the Manhattan project and did cost him involvement in the national security structure during the Eisenhower years. Unfortunately, it was Oppenheimer's ways of alienating people, including President Truman and even worse Lewis Strauss that ultimately crushed him.

There is so much to like about this book. For one, Oppenheimer was an amazing person, conversant in multiple disciplines, although his detractors might instead say he was unfocused and uncommitted to deep study of physics. The book also conveys the turbulent 30s with prominent Americans flirting with hard left politics and then the anti-communist back lash of the late 40s and early 50s. For those who don't desire to read an entire book about the Manhattan project, the book manages to cover that reasonably well. The authors, over the course of decades, conducted dozens of interviews with those familiar with Oppenheimer and the detail is incredible.

The outstanding question about Oppenheimer was not whether he was a spy, but whether he was ever a communist. The authors say no, and provide as much proof as is likely. This makes the witch hunt and hearing all the more reprehensible. The section in which he is effectively tried in a show trial goes on a bit long, but is still worth the read.

Biographies

I am in the middle of a stellar biography of Robert Oppenheimer, called American Prometheus. While I adore this book, I tend not to read biographies, although I have never thought why not. In a post about biographies as a genre, Matthew Yglesias discusses the problem with biographies.