Matt Bai breaks down the Democrats’ rebuilding after the 2004 defeat in The Argument.

 

Matt Bai chronicles the Democrats' return to political dominance in The Argument.

 

 

Life is good for the Democratic Party these days.

In firm control of all three branches of government for the first time in more than a generation, the Democrats have seen their ranks swell with the recent defection of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

Specter’s switch gave the Democrats a near filibuster-proof majority of 59 senators-something that may come in handy during the upcoming nomination process of Sonia Sotomayor, who President Barack Obama recently put forward to be the next U.S. Supreme Court Justice and the first Latina in the nation’s history to serve on the court. 

The Democrats have had a string of successes since Obama’s inauguration in January, overseeing the passage of a $787 billion stimulus plan, starting to implement a withdrawal time line and process for the war in Iraq and moving both to close Guantanamo prison camp and repudiating the Bush Administration’s interrogation policies that many described as torture.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are struggling.  Mightily.

Each week seems to bring new headlines that suggest a party in disarray,  with an unclear voice, hierarchy or direction.  One week it’s Rush Limbaugh saying that Colin Powell is not actually a Republican. Another it’s Meghan McCain, daughter of the defeated presidential candidate, slamming conservative pundit Ann Coulter.  

In this climate, it can be easy to forget that the political scene was completely reversed less than five years ago.

After Bush soundly defeated John Kerry in the November 2004 presidential election, the Democrats seemed to some to be poised on the brink of irrelevance, or, even worse, obscurity.  Bush’s victory,  which gave him the opportunity to later appoint two Supreme Court justices, was the seventh by a Republican in the previous 10 presidential contests.  Continued majorities in both the House and Senate accompanied his triumph.  

New York Times Magazine political reporter Matt Bai remembers this dry period in the Democrats’ history.

He traces the party’s path back from the political netherlands to reclaiming the House, the Senate and the majority of governorships, in The Argument: Inside the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.

The road to political redemption was a twisted one, with many engaging characters and twists along the way.

Bai begins the book with Kerry’s crushing, and apparently surprising defeat in 2004 (I had had a strong feeling about the race’s outcome from the point that he did not respond forcefully to the Swift Boat attacks in August and thus did not share the surprise of some of the sources Bai interviewed.  If anything, Kerry’s lack of response reminded me strongly of Michael Dukakis‘ failure to counter the Lee Atwater-conceived Willie Horton ads that had such a devastating effect on his candidacy.).

From the loss, Bai moves to explore the different level of change in party operation and vision that Democratic strategists and members felt were necessary.  Democracy Alliance founder Rob Stein is shown as playing a key role in raising party awareness about the degree of organization the Republicans had fostered, thereby helping people understand what they confronted. 

Bai spends a lot of time in the book talking about the ascending role of technology-a development that led to the surprisingly successful candidacy of Howard Dean and his later selection as party chairman, the emerging power of organizations like Eli Pariser’s MoveOn.org and the potency of bloggers like Markos Zuniga, creator of the wildly popular DailyKos.

Technology also is a lense through which one sees some of the major conflicts between, on the one hand, the 1990s, Clinton-era establishment, who modernized and moved the party toward the political center and who fashioned two presidential victories by traditional methods of fundraising and politicking, and, on the other hand, the more progressive and technologically oriented new guard embodied by Zuniga and Pariser.   

The resulting conflicts are often messy. 

At one party gathering, the former president loses his temper when questioned about his wife Hillary’s vote to go to war in Iraq, and proceeds to rant about all kinds of right-leaning policies and directions he says were ascribed to him.  Bai also shows the ongoing and occasionally public struggles between current White House majorduomo Rahm Emanuel and then-party chairman about Dean’s 50-state strategy-an approach, which Emanuel felt diverted valuable resources from battleground states. 

In the end, the Democrats swept to victory, and each of the groups and people listed above, and a host of others could claim some share of the triumph, if not the spoils. 

The question about the argument was less clearly answered.  Bai ends the book with a lion in winter-like address from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who reminds the exultant Democrats that, despite their smashing electoral victories, they still “have no big idea.” 

The Argument has a number of the strengths and weaknesses that characterize much of his work that appears in The New York Times magazine.  His intelligence, writing skills and thorough reporting are apparent throughout the work, and yet one often leaves his pieces, and, in this case, the book, feeling like you’ve not actually learned much new or different. 

The Democrats’ need to articulate a vision greater than “We are not the Republicans” has been known for a long time. So, too, has the Republicans’ superior ground level organizational capacity, forged during the late 70s and 80s by people like Richard Viguerie, strategist Grover Norquist and strengthened in the 90s by Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed.  His explanation of the rise of blogging is engaging and not particularly informative to the tens of millions of people who have clicked onto DailyKos during the past decade.   

Bai does not explore the mixed legacy of the Clinton presidency as fully as he could, and Ned Lamont’s primary victory over Joe Lieberman, which Bai seems to herald, as the triumph of the new way, seems a bit hollow given Lieberman’s ultimate triumph.  

One gets the sense while reading The Argument that Bai’s is writing for those people who were among Rob Stein’s target audience-Democrats who did not get why their party was being consistently clobbered in elections, yet did not think that drastic action or rethinking needed to be taken to stop the slide.  

Which brings us back to Obama and the Democrats’ current strong position. 

Obama appears in The Argument as a skilled writer who unsurprisingly adopts a both/and position toward traditional party stalwarts and the emerging online progressive movement.  He contributes a spirited articulation of his position in a lengthy blog which he urges people not to demonize Republican, affirms the establishment’s importance and uses available technology to share his views.  

Bai writes the afterword during the throes of Obama and Clinton’s fight for the Democratic nomination. The section includes the following somewhat prescient thought: 

“Should Obama win the nomination, though, and perhaps even the White House, he will face a choice where the powerful progressives in his party are concerned: whether to attempt, through the power of his personality and argument, to lead the new movement away from the limited politics of hostility and toward some modern vision of liberalism, or whether to become, like so many political leaders before him, a reflection of the movement he inherits.  If Obama can’t change the trajectory of the new progressive movement, then the movement will very likely change him.” 

Obama has not been president long enough to definitively answer the questions Bai or Cuomo pose, and the answers to those questions may go a long toward predicting whether his victory is a blip on the screen of Republican dominance or augurs a new era in liberal thinking. 

For posing those questions, and for providing an enjoyable read along the way, Bai deserves credit, even if The Argument does have a number of flaws.

Are the Republicans on the verge of obscurity?

Have the Democrats made a compelling new argument?

Is Obama moving the country away from hostility and polarization?

Phil and Kobe return to the NBA Finals, Russ and Red’s friendship.

 

Bill Russell pays tribute to his coach, mentor and friend in this book.

 

 

 

They’re back.

Just one year after losing Game 6 to the Boston Celtics by the largest margin in NBA Finals history, the Los Angeles Lakers returned to the finals last night by routing the Denver Nuggets, 119-92, on Denver’s home court. 

The Lakers put on an impressive display of team basketball.  

Center Pau Gasol put the full range of his considerable skills on display last night, dropping in left handed hooks and bank shots to the right, hitting outside jumpers and making probing passes to the healed and bulked up Andrew Bynum. Trevor Ariza continued his impressive playoff run, getting the Lakers off to a strong start with 10 first quarter points and dropping in wide open trifectas.  Lamar Odom was stroking the ball from inside and outside, and Luke Walton maintained his strong play off the bench.

Then there was Kobe. 

The ruthless, driven remarkably talented Bryant poured in 35 points on 12 of 20 shooting, driving, hitting outside shots with defenders draped on him and generally directing his team. 

This will be Bryant’s sixth trip to the finals, and Phil Jackson has been on the bench for all of them.

The nattily dressed Zen Master will be trying for the third time to break Red Auerbach’s record of nine NBA titles.  He and Bryant appeared to have ironed out the problems that existed during the tumultuous Kobe-Shaq era, which culminated in the 2004 defeat in the finals at the hands of the Detroit Pistons, whose triumph was heralded by many as teamwork trumping superstar talent. 

Jackson chronicled what was then his last year with the Lakers in The Last Season: A Team In Search of Its Soul, and the picture he painted of Bryant was not a pretty one.  While Jackson does show that he believes the conflict between his two megastars was unnecessary and drained the team’s effectiveness, he leaves little doubt that his sympathies were with his big man.

At one point, in fact, he tried to have Bryant traded to the New Jersey Nets for point guard Jason Kidd. 

Still, time off, winning and Bryant’s assuming full control of the team on the floor after Shaq’s departure does appear to have healed those wounds and differences, and Bryant and Jackson appear to be operating harmoniously together. 

If the Lakers defeat the winner of the Cavs/Magic series-NBA executives have probably secretly hoping for, and advertisers have been hyping, a LeBron/Kobe finals matchup for months-Bryant will have four titles. 

The man atop the championship summit, and arguably the greatest winner in American team sports history, is Bill Russell. 

Russell’s University of San Francisco teams won 55 consecutive and back to back NCAA titles before he joined the gold medal-winning Olympic team in Melbourne and then lead the Celtics to an unprecedented and unmatched 11 titles in 13 seasons.

 Auerbach was involved in all of them, either as a coach or an executive. 

Russell writes about Auerbach in Red and Me: My Coach, My Lifelong Friend, a slender and heartfelt meditation on the bond that grew between these two fiercely proud and competitive men. 

Visually, the two made an unlikely pair.  But the lean, proud Russell, who hailed from Louisiana, and the short, feisty Jewish coach from Brooklyn were an enormously effective tandem on the court.  

Russell makes it clear that the bonds were not forged instantly, but rather they took years to build.  He acknowledges that he did not instantly trust Auerbach and that the two had to figure out how best to work with each other and their teammates.  Russell writes forthrightly about times when he disobeyed his coach’s instructions, yet part of Auerbach’s genius was that he could maintain one set of rules for his center, another for the rest of the team, and maintain team cohesion.

The trust that became the bedrock of the friendship was forged through adversity.  During one memorable brawl against the Philadelphia 76ers, behemoth center and Russell archrival Wilt Chamberlain threatened Auerbach.  

Russell had Red’s back. 

Readers of many basketball books, including John Taylor’s The Rivalry, which I blogged about in December, will recognize much of the on court material. 

Red and Me is about more than basketball, though.  

Russell says that he and Auerbach left things unsaid between them, but is confident that the deep respect and love he felt were mutual.  He shares how touched he was that one of Auerbach’s daughters phoned him shortly after his death in 2006 so that he wouldn’t learn of it through the media.  

And he talks about the people who formed his strong sense of self, of his gun-toting grandfather who refused to kowtow to white men in the Jim Crow South, of his father, who he knew only as “Mister Charlie,” and of his mother, who taught him never to back away from who he was and what he wanted. 

There are tender moments, too.  

Russell shares that Auerbach felt demeaned and stripped on his entree to returned phone call during the ill-fated Rick Pitino era when his title of president was removed.

In the end, the two men connected by watching the game that had brought them together and provided the basis for their bone deep friendship.  The book’s final photograph shows Russell sitting a row behind Auerbach in the stands as they take in a game. 

I wrote yesterday about my father turning 75 years old.  Russell, too, was born in 1934, hitting the same milestone in February.  One can sense in the book an impulse toward reflection and sorting out his life journey-forces that have motivated him to pay tribute to the man who influenced him mightily on and off the court. 

As great as Kobe’s skills are, and to whatever degree his relationship with Jackson has healed, it’s almost impossible to picture him writing a book like that. 

Will the Lakers win the championship?

Is Jackson a greater coach than Auerbach? 

Was Russell a greater player than Michael Jordan because of his 11 championship rings?

Happy 75th Birthday, Ed Lowenstein/Dad

Today's post goes out to Dad, who turns 75 today.

My father, Ed Lowenstein, turns 75 today. 

In many ways, he has lived a remarkable life.  I will be communicating my thoughts to him personally and thus will focus this post on his professional life.

Separated from his parents when he was not even 5 years old, he and my uncle were part of the Kindertransport, a British government that gave refuge to 10,000 German, Austrian, Czech and Polish Jewish children during the Nazi era.  

Very fortunately, Dad and Ralph were reunited with their parents in the United States after the war began.

After growing up in Cincinnati, Dad attended the University of Michigan Medical School, graduating 50 years ago next month, and then starting what has become nearly a half-century career as a cardiac anesthetist based primarily at Massachusetts General Hospital.  

For his research contributions, Dad is known as the “Father of Cardiac Anesthesia.”   But he is also known for the hundreds of residents he helped train and whose careers he helped advance.  Among his most illustrious former mentees are some of his closest friends like Warren Zapol, former chairman of Mass. General’s anesthesia department and a highly renowned researcher in his own right.

Dad’s accomplishments have been recognized both by his being named the Henry Isaiah Dorr Professor of Anesthesia and by having a chair named after him at Harvard Medical School.

During the past few years, he has started to look back on his illustrious career, on the history of the department, and at the life and accomplishments of Dr. Henry Beecher, the man who initially recruited Dad to come to Mass. General.

Two anthologies that Dad has co-edited and contributed several chapters to have resulted.  

The first, This Is No Humbug: Reminiscences of the Department of Anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital, chronicles the department’s activities, accomplishments and shortcomings of the department to which Dad belonged for many years. 

The second, Enduring Contributions of Henry K. Beecher to Medicine, Science, and Society, takes stock of the man who recruited Dad and many others to Mass. General and who made major contributions to the understanding of pain, to medical ethics and as an administrator.

A major point in This Is No Humbug that the department had a period of enormous productivity, innovation and groundbreaking accomplishment in the area of cardiac anesthesia under the dynamic and freewheeling leadership of Myron Laver. 

To its credit, the collection does note that gender made a difference; many women felt they had to produce more evidence of a project’s ultimate success before getting approval to move forward than their male colleagues.

The anthology also notes that the department’s quality and output seemed to decline after Laver’s departure for Switzerland in the 70s. 

The second collection has section on Beecher’s personal history, his contributions to the areas mentioned above and an assessment of his life’s work.   In addition to his tremendous administrative skills, Beecher is impressive for having made a dent in several distinct areas as well as for having figured out how to simultaneously within and critique the system. 

The book has poignant moments, too. 

A boy from the heartland who got the high-society girl, Beecher was a festive soul who relished being chairman-Dad still talks about the hangover he had after their first meeting-and wilted in his latter years when not serving in that capacity.  

The entries in both works vary in length, depth and quality.  Some are more personal, while others are more professional in character. 

All in all, though, the works are useful both as a collection of perspectives on a noteworthy time during an historic department as well as an insight into one of the men who played a key role in that change.   Reading them helped me understand the passion that Dad brought to his work while my brothers and I were growing up, too. 

Happy 75th Birthday, Dad!

Bernard Girard shares the Google Way.

Bernard Girard explores Google's explosive growth and future prospects.

 

It happens millions of times a day.

A person is working on a computer.  She wants information, but does not have the answer.  

As Ray Parker, Jr. of Ghostbusters fame would ask, “Who’s she gonna call?” 

The answer for people around the globe: Google. 

Google’s domination of the search engine market and its seemingly endless stream of cool, new  and free applications have become the stuff of Internet legend and an imbedded part of our culture.  The very fact that the company name has become a verb is testament to its scope and influence.

Opinions about the company vary widely.  

For some, the company’s global ambitions and power represent the possibility of an ominous and dangerous monopoly.  For others, the company’s innovative management structure–Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt form a triumvirate-commitment to staff innovation and openness to customers are an international model worthy of study, if not replication. 

Author Bernard Girard has followed the company for more than a decade and has written The Google Way: How One Company Is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It, a largely admiring, occasionally bracing look at Google’s origins, the elements that make it so successful and its future prospects. 

As readers of Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, know, timing matters.  

What Gladwell talks about as circumstance, Girard describes as Brin and Page’s fortune to be starting the company during the dotcom boom of the 90s, when financial support for technological advances was flowing freely.  

In the book’s opening section, Girard cites the founders’ “undeniable talent,” but goes on to discuss the American federal commitment to research and development and a brief look at pre-Google search engine efforts.  That said, he notes with approval the founders’ decision to go public in a way that retained their independence.

The guts of the book focus on Google’s management techniques. Girard places the Mountain View giant within a tradition of management breakthroughs that includes Henry Ford and the creation of the Model T and Toyota’s implementation of quality control and continuous improvement.  

Several elements lead to this success, including the automation of advertising, the cost-per-click advertising model, the hiring of highly intelligent and motivated people, the instruction for these employees to spend 20 percent of their time working on their own projects, the creation of small working teams, and a relentless practice of data analysis.  

Most fundamentally, Girard argues, Google has also had a clear vision of continually aligning its products with the customer’s desires.  In marked contrast with Microsoft, which forged a market but in some ways alienated users through its heaping on off little-used and memory-consuming applications in their operating system, Google continually draws on customer feedback and provides resources without charge to them.  

The company’s metaphor for its vision: a Swiss Army Knife.  

The book’s front cover has an picture of one, while the back cover contains a quote from Vice-President Marissa Mayer saying that Google should be like a Swiss Army Knife: “clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere.” 

In many ways, the company has become that knife that Mayer described, but a host of challenges loom for the behemoth.  

Among others, Girard discusses the difficulties of click fraud and spam, the possibility of conformity settling in as the company continues to grow, the global recession, privacy concerns, and potential cultural resistance to the company’s ongoing and seemingly unstoppable advances.  

Girard discusses the company’s acquiescence to search limits by the Chinese government-a move that many said was endorsing censorship in the name of profit-and does credit the company’s leadership for discussing the issues openly and later admitting error. 

To me, the most interesting was Girard’s description of the inherent challenge that nearly all companies working in this open-source era confront: that the very provision of the free products people love and come to expect at some point will impact the company’s ability to make money.   

This may be the company’s ultimate undoing.  

If it is to come, that downfall does not appear to be imminent, according to Girard.  

He ends the book with both a cautiously optimistic if somewhat bland assessment of Google’s ability to weather the current economic storm and retool for the future as well as an endorsement of their customer-centered, employee-supporting, data-analyzing practices.

The Google Way is a brisk read with a clear structure, sense of history-some readers will smile at the section on Frederick Taylor, for example-and relatively clear-eyed assessment of the company’s strength and pitfalls.  A stronger conclusion would have helped, and Girard’s statement that few other companies can replicate Google’s methods is a bit surprising, given that he has just spent more than 200 pages explaining them.  

Still, whether in need of a Swiss Army Knife, the name of the artist who sang Ghostbusters, or the title of Girard’s book, Google is the destination of choice and readers will learn from this book.

What other search engines do you use besides Google?

Is the company becoming too unfocused or is it indeed on the path to world domination?  If so, how long will its reign last?

Can Google’s management techniques be successfully exported?

Brendan Koerner’s Sprawling, Engaging Tale of Herman Perry and Hell Starting.

Brendan Koerner tells the fascinating story of Herman Perry's flight into the Burmese jungle in Now the Hell Will Start.

I posted yesterday about Memorial Day reading recommendations.

For those interested in more books on the same topic, try Brendan I. Koerner’s Now The Hell Will Start: One Soldier’s Flight From the Greatest Manhunt of World War II, a rich, sprawling and generally rewarding book for which Spike Lee has purchased the movie rights.

Now the Hell Will Start tells the story of Herman Perry, an African-American soldier in the segregated army-President Harry Truman ended this policy with an executive order in 1948-assigned to participated in building the Ledo Road. 

The road was about 465 miles long crossing through jungle and swampy land stretching from India across Burma and to the Chinese border.  The stated purpose was to help Chinese dictator Chiang Kai-Shek fend off pesky Communist rebel Mao Zedung, and Koerner twice quotes Winston Churchill’s assessment that it was an “immense, laborious task, unlikely to be finished before the need for it has passed.”

Perry is the book’s protagonist, but just one of its many characters.  His murder of Harold Cady, an abusive white lieutenant, flight into the jungle, capture, escape, recapture and execution constitute the book’s narrative trajectory.

One of three brothers from North Carolina, Perry was in an altered state when he pulled the trigger.  Like many black soldiers far from home, disconnected to the purpose of what they were doing, and bitterly aware of the substandard treatment they were being subjected to in the name of fighting for democracy, he turned to opium and marijuana to sedate himself and make it through his time. 

Like many of his contemporaries, Perry received consequences for expressing his displeasure with the conditions they were forced to endure.  According to Koerner, a contriubting editor for Wired Magazine, Perry’s previous punishment was part of why he did not want to face a court martial during his confrontation with Cady.

Perry flees into the jungle, where he eventually meets with members of the Naga tribe that had not been subject to British colonial influence.  In short order, he gains the confidence of the tribe’s leaders by securing goods for them, marries one of the leaders’ 14-year-old daughter, impregnates her and spends his days smoking opium and marijuana.

In short, Koerner says, he became the world’s first hippie.

His time as the original hippie is relatively short lived, though. 

Perry is captured, but manages to escape and elude a massive manhunt for weeks before eventually being caught a second time.  This time, his days are numbered and he eventually is hanged after a military trial and appeal.

Now the Hell will start contains far more than the individual story of Herman Perry.  Koerner spend close to five years researching the work and has extensive descriptions of the Ledo Road’s stifling conditions, complete with amoebic dysentary, Bengal tigers,  and oppressive heat.  The black soldiers’ treatment gets lots of attention, too, as does the plight of African Americans in the Jim Crow South, Perry’s brother Aaron, an impressive young boxer who at one point fought Henry Armstrong. 

Koerner also devotes a lot of space to the relationship and maneuverings between Shek and American commander “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who oversee the construction of the Ledo Road.

Koerner deserves credit for uncovering this little known story and using it as a tableau on which to paint a wide ranging tale with a complicated protagonist and plenty of conflict and context.   A writer with obvious talent, he alternates the tone from somewhat formal to downright colloquial at times, which can be a bit jarring.  The ending trails off a little bit, but that mostly serves to underscore the depth and caliber of what has come before.

Memorial Day celebrations generally honor veterans’ service in an uncomplicated way, presenting the warriors’ stints in the armed forces as an undiluted good.  One of the many values of Koerner’s work is that, through its engaging story, it provides the basis for a more historically accurate assessment of the conditions under which black soldiers served, and, in this case, snapped. 

Lee’s purchase of  the movie rights only ensures that the story, and the issues in it, are likely to receive wider distribution and, hopefully, consideration.

Memorial Day Reading Recommendations

Jonathan Shay has written a gripping book that links the experience with Vietnam veterans of the Iliad.

It’s early afternoon on Memorial Day and Dunreith is out shopping for food for our afternoon barbeque.  Thunder clouds are starting to gather ominously overhead, and we are looking forward to having friends and family over for what traditionall has marked the beginning of summer in Chicago.

Of course, for hundreds of thousands of American families throughout our history, Memorial Day has not been a day of celebration, but of solemn remembrance and honoring of the men and women who gave their lives in the service of our country.

President Obama called for Americans to take a silent moment at 3:00 p.m. today and reflect about the valiant sacrifice of our nation’s veterans.

Here are a couple of books that chronicle veterans’ struggles that might be useful during these times of honor and memory:

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, by Jonathan Shay.  A MacArthur Award winner,  Shay is not trained classics scholar, but explored The Iliad and found direct parallels between Homer’s tale and the experiences of the Vietnam veterans he counseled in his clinical psychiatric practice.  Others like Danielle Allen have linked the classics to contemporary life, and Shay’s work stands out both for its connection to the Iliad’s narrative arc and the questions of right and wrong the soldiers in the story and his patients confronted.

Fortunate Son: The Autobiography of Lewis B. Puller, Jr. , by Lewis B. Puller, Jr. This Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir tells the story of a scion of a Southern military family attempting to rebuild his life after becoming wheelchair bound in Vietnam.  That Puller eventually killed himself lends the work an additional layer of poignance.

What books, movies or art about war and veterans have impacted you?

How should we best remember their service?

Bill Reynolds takes on 1978 Boston and the Red Sox/Yankees playoff.

Bill Reynolds brings back searing sports and race memories in this engrossing book.

It was a hurt that took a quarter century to undo.

I was 12 years old in Oxford, England when I heard the news that the New York Yankees had defeated my beloved Boston Red Sox, 5-4, in a one-game playoff on October 2, 1978 to win the American East divisional championship. 

Light hitting shortstop Bucky Dent had dealt the critical blow, hitting a three-run shot that had carried into the net above the Green Monster, controversial superstar Reggie Jackson had extended the lead and fireballing reliever Rich “Goose” Gossage had gotten Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski to pop up to third baseman Graig Nettles for the final out.

The collapse was complete.

Just three months earlier, my brothers and I had been exulting over the Sox’s 14-game lead over the Yankees and inevitable divisional victory.

Mom issued a cautionary note, telling us, in essence, that anything could happen.

Addicts of the volumes of statistics contained in Boston Globe  sports pages, we knew that Mom could talk with authority about poetry, but were notbout to hear her dire predictions.   Our mockery violated the rule that you should listen to your mother.

We also didn’t realize that Mom had some experience of her own. 

She had been just a little older than us when her childhood team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, had blown an almost identical lead in 1951 before losing the final frame of a three-game series when Bobby Thomson took Ralph Branca deep while Willie Mays waited on deck in a blow instantly known as “The Shot Heard Round the World.”

Unfortunately, Mom was right.

Award-winning sportswriter Bill Reynolds recreates the single-game playoff between the bitter American League rivals and delves into Boston’s tense racial scene at time in an engrossing book,  ’78: The Boston Red Sox,  A Historic Game, and a Divided City.

Reynolds opens the action with the games before the game, in which the much-loved Cuban pitcher Luis Tiant had pitched a complete game gem over the expansion Toronto Blue Jays while Rick Waits and the Cleveland Indians had triumphed over the Yankees.  The victory, Boston’s seventh in a row, completed its comeback from a 2 .5 game deficit in the final week and set up the playoff.

From there, Reynolds alternates between the playoff game’s progression, into which he intersperses descriptions of both team’s history, players, owners and managers, and Boston’s tense racial relations at the time.

Drawing heavily on the seminal work about busing in Boston,  J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground, as well as Michael Patrick’s MacDonald’s haunting memoir All Souls: A Family Story from Southie, Reynolds shows how Boston in the late 70s was very much a divided city in which the antibusing movement was losing steam after years of protest, but still had plenty of emotional supporters behind it like School Committe member Elvira “Pixie” Palladino. 

Reynolds takes the reader through the violence in South Boston in 1974, its continuation in Charlestown in 1975 and the uneasy truce that existed during the time the game was played.

To his credit, Reynolds links sports and race by writing about the Red Sox’s troubled racial history-late owner Thomas Yawkey was considered by many to be a racist and the Red Sox were the last team in all of baseball to integrate their squad-and the incomplete way the presence of black players like George ‘Boomer’ Scott, Tiant and 1978 MVP Jim Rice united the city. 

Reynolds also includes a shorter, less developed exploration of the waning years of what author Tom Wolfe called the ‘Me Decade’ and a paean to the 1970s Boston Globe sports writing team, which included local legends like Ray Fitzgerald, my childhood favorite, and also people who went onto national prominence like Peter Gammons, Bob Ryan and Leigh Montville. 

Of course, the game ended with Nettles squeezing the ball Yaz popped up and a 45-second silence that Reynolds describes beautifully.  Reynolds gives a brief postscript about the team’s deterioration the following year and redemption not arriving until 2004, when the Red Sox made history by overcoming a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees and sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals to win their first championship in 86 years. 

Reynolds’ book is a useful snapshot of a troubled time in an historic American city.  There are a few factual errors-Brown v. Board  of Education was a court case, not a piece of legislation, for example-he does not introduce much new material about race relations, and his description of the decadent 70s is a bit thin.  Still, for those members of Red Sox Nation who want a dose of tetrospective Memorial Day machocism, ’78 might just be the one for you.

What do you remember about the ’78 Red Sox?

Has Boston changed in any meaningful way?

Does Jim Rice deserve to be in the Hall of Fame?

Jay Mathews’ tribute to KIPP Founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin.

Jay Mathews has written a glowing account of KIPP founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg.

It’s the first day of Memorial Day weekend, and across the country school is winding down for millions of grateful youth and their teachers.

Our son Aidan, a sophomore at Evanston Township High School, has just a couple of weeks of classes left and a few days of exams and projects before reaching the point where, in the words of the inimitable Alice Cooper, “School’s out for summer.”

But in more than five dozen schools throughout America that will not be the case.

These are the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools that work almost exclusively with poor children of color. For these students, summer vacation for other students simply means time to go back to work.

KIPP students attend school six days per week, arriving at 8:00 a.m. and staying at least until 5:00 p.m. five days per week and about half that amount on Saturdays. Summer vacations are shorter than in other schools and the expectation of extensive parental involvement in their child’s education is clear.

KIPP students have achieved at far higher levels of standardized tests than many of their peers-a fact that has not escaped the notice of Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews.

The author of a half-dozen other books, including a biography of Jaime Escalante of Stand and Deliver Fame, Mathews has written a hagiographic account of KIPP founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, Work Hard. Be Nice. How Two Inspired Teachers Created The Most Promising Schools in America.

Mathews structures the book like a school day, beginning with an orientation before moving to first, second, third and fourth periods, with ‘study hall’ descriptions of a current KIPP student’s progress under the program. The book ends with a commencement and what are usually called acknowledgments are instead listed as the “Honor Roll.”

The Ivy League-educated Levin and Feinberg-the former went to Yale, the latter to the University of Pennsylvania-are the book’s protagonists. Mathews shows the beginning of their commitment to urban education with their service in Teach for America, their connection with mentors and master teachers Harriet Ball and, later, Rafe Esquith, and their creation, and then replication of, KIPP schools throughout the country.

Both 6’3″, the young men share similarities of relentless tenacity, a willingness to go outside conventional channels and an unwavering dedication to their work. Mathews shows enough of their differences-they compare themselves to two of the main characters in novelist Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove-and enough of their flaws to emphasize their heroic nature.

Mathews writes in the book’s postscript, “It has been my mission … to find the schools and teachers who have done the most to overcome poverty, apathy, and racial and class bias and raise their students to new heights of achievement. The KIPP schools created by Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg are the most promising and the best I have found, judged on those terms. That is why I wrote this book.”

Mathews’ admiration for the school’s founder and their impressive accomplishments overrides a close examination of the KIPP program and criticism of it. He does have a brief section about a report co-authored by former New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein in which Rothstein is depicted as inaccurately reporting that KIPP students’ parents were more motivated than other urban parents, but that’s about as far as it goes.

The positive reports about KIPP aside, I have heard from a number of people that the organization does have an emphasis on test scores that can often get in the way of a deeper examination of issues. I also have heard a number of reports that, much like Teach for America, the program has very high levels of teacher turnover and burnout due to the extreme demands placed on the staff.

Others have said that the speed at which KIPP schools have been replicated is a reflection of the program’s accomplishments, the overwhelming need of the students and the absence of other viable solutions. Finally, while Mathews praises the program’s work with poor children of color, he describes Feinberg and Levin almost as if the dynamics of race and class do not affect them on either personal or professional levels.

While including some of these details and addressing these issues would have led to a more balanced and credible consideration of the program, that did not appear to be Mathews’ purpose. He instead is intent on bringing to a wider audience the remarkable accomplishments of these two young men and their crusade to improve urban education. I would recommend the book with the understanding that you would need to dig deeper and read more to get the whole story about the program they have created and spread so far and wide.

Peter Laufer talks about butterflies in the first author interview.

Author Peter Laufer talks about his recently published book on butterflies in the blog's first author interview. Photo source: http://www.peterlaufer.com

 

This is the first in a regular series of author interviews. 

I begin with an edited version of my conversation with award-winning author and activist Peter Laufer, whose most recent book is The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors and Conservationists

You open with the book with the story of how this book got started.  Could you tell me what happened?

It came about serendipitously.  I had no intent to immerse myself in butterflies.

My last book had been about U.S. soldiers who refused to deploy to Iraq.  I was making a speech at a fine independent book store in Bellingham, Washington.  It was summer time, there was no air conditioning.  It was hot and crowded.   

I figured enough was enough after talking for an hour.  Talking about the research for that book was burdensome.

So, almost always in a speech like that, somebody raises their hand saying,  “What’s your next book about?”

From somewhere, I don’t know where, I said my next book was going to be about butterflies.

I received an avalanche of email.  In the midst of it, there was one from an American expat in Granada, Nicaragua.  She said, “You were making a joke.  We invite you to meet with us.”  

What does it say about you that even when you are looking for something light, you found many of the same subjects you often write about, and what does it say about the world of butterflies.

You are right that this was familiar territory.  It’s the territory of journalism, of story, of the human condition, of conflict.  It’s a reminder that there is story everywhere.

It’s a reminder that, as I used to tell my staff when I was a news director, there are not slow news days, there are only slow news reporters.

You and I first connected around the tragedy of the shooting at the BART station that was obvious.  There seemed to be good guys and bad guys.  We try to sort it out and try to move the society forward by advocating correction. 

 With butterflies, I found that many of the same dynamics exist in that which I stereotypically thought was about peace and love. 

You talk about journalism, but there’s a strong cultural element in the story, too, as you talk about butterflies in literature and art and science.  Talk a little bit about that.

Across culture, in time, butterflies are ubiquitous.  They connote rebirth, the soul, the magic, the metamorphosis for making oneself.  The intrinsic beauty of this beast, the colors, the patterns, along with the fact that they are casual pollinators and periodic food for other animals-they are not critical pollinators and not critical food for animals that others need to exist—[means that] perhaps they’re just there because they’re so beautiful.

 What did you know before you started the project?

 I came at it naïve, and ignorant-

 As a boy, I had done a Cub Scout project for a merit badge of sticking pins in butterflies and putting them on a board.  As I started to immerse myself, I realized how little I know about the science, about the dynamics of flight, about the process of metamorphosis, let along the conflicts between those who breed butterflies and those who are in the hobby of watching and who don’t take kindly to commercialization. 

 What I tried to do, was, [rather than] looking for those bad guys and those good guys, I tried hard not to be judgmental and to get an understanding of what the motivations were of all of the characters, and they are all right out of central casting

This includes everyone from the chief proponent of the butterfly watchers who is apoplectic about commercialization, to the breeders who feel so strongly that the market they’ve developed is in danger of being overregulated and that what they do add joys to people’s lives,  to the biologist who bringing butterflies back  from the brink of extinction by dong captive breeding processes and rereleases into wild habitats, to the  U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents who are engaged in chasing people doing illegal trafficking and yet there are who observe those criminals and say they couldn’t do what they do if they didn’t love the butterflies.   

All of these characters resonated with me.  I made an effort to get to know them.  I have my own feelings but I try to present them fairly.

Has the ‘soft’ way you approached this book changed how you will look at other assignments?

 It has helped me appreciated something I’ve been leaning to-to embrace hard journalism, or rather to say that it’s all hard journalism.

 What I hope comes out of this books is that the muse is gracious enough to touch me with another of these initially obscure seeming assignments so that I can continue to evade wars and earthquakes and fires and man made and natural disasters that have so often been my assignment.

I like how you dedicated the book to your wife Sheila and called her butterfly in many different languages. 

One of the things that was so intriguing was that there are so few cognates for the word butterfly in other languages.

 You can look at Germanic language, and [in many cases] a word would be recognizable across the group.  But shortly after I started this project, I realized this is not the case with butterfly. I wanted to see them all on the page.

 Do any of the many characters stand out for you?

Jana Johnson, who stars in the last chapter, is biologist who has successfully repopulated the Palos Verdes Blue, which was declared extinct, is one.   

Ed Newcomer, the special agent who is an intrepid, romantic figure, and who is driven to protect those that he considers defenseless, is another. 

Those two are two of my favorite characters, but I’d hard pressed to isolate them.  Each of them who show up in the book has their own appeal, even the criminals.

It seemed like Ed Newcomer had an understanding of where the criminals were coming from.

That’s why he is so successful with his undercover work. It requires him to penetrate their communities.  He couldn’t do that if he didn’t have that understanding.

 What haven’t I asked you?

Blessedly, you haven’t asked me what my next book is. I was most appreciative to be invited onto Talk of the Nation, where Neal Conan talked for a spell with me and did end with that question.

From somewhere, I don’t know where, I said ‘NASCAR.’ I’m hoping that you and others will disabuse me of that.

Gourevitch returns to Rwanda, five books about the genocide.

These Rwandan children represent the hope of the country 15 years after the genocide. Photograph by Jon Gosier.

Paris Review editor and longtime New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevitch recently wrote and talked about returning to Rwanda 15 years after the 100-day genocide that led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and some Hutu. 

His report was remarkably favorable.

Led by the forceful but democratic president Paul Kagame, Rwanda is one of the most peaceful and orderly societies in the troubled continent of Africa.  The country has one of the highest, if not the highest, percentage of female legislators in the world. And Kagame has widely instituted the system of gacaca, an open air form of confrontation and reconciliation that has led to the emptying of jails and to Hutu and Tutsi again living cheek by jowl. 

Troubles remain, Gourevitch says, and for the first time in many years there is near universal agreement about the possibility of enduring peace with its neighbors.

Some have taken issue with Gourevitch’s piece, saying that the optimistic portrayal is over done and adding further that Gourevitch is in Kagame’s pocket. 

Whatever one thinks about the contents of Gourevitch’s article, it is undeniable that he has written one of the most important books about the genocide.

Five Books About the Genocide

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is an utterly chilling look after the fact at what happened.  The descendant of Eastern European Jewish refugees, Gourevitch arrives in the country for the first time on the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day.  The product of reporting he did during the following several years for The New Yorker, We Wish to Inform You includes a history of Rwanda, a revisiting of those horrific days and their legacy, and conversations with survivors and genocide architects.

It’s an essential read, but not the only one.

An Ordinary Man is the memoir written by Paul Rusesabagina, the assistant manager who sheltered more than 1,200 refugees in the Hotel Milles des Collines during the genocide and whose story inspired the movie, “Hotel Rwanda.”

 Rusesabagina combines his own story and early habit of negotiating in all situations with some historical information about the country and reflections about man’s inhumanity to man.

Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda  is Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire’s first hand account of unsuccesfully trying to prevent the slaughter.  A long time United Nations soldier, Dallaire refused to leave the country when his employer pulled its people out of the country; his story is a gripping telling of his valiant efforts to counter the Hutu extremists. 

The failure took its toll. 

In a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article, Samantha Power wrote movingly of American indifference to the genocide and Dallaire’s post-genocidal despair.  After an extensive period of depression and even suicidal impulses, Dallaire has found meaning in talking about his experiences to younger people and in working to prevent further such occurrences.

Power has written a Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which looks at America’s pattern of torpid responses to genocides throughout the 20th century.  While the argument can be successfully made that a large difference exists between the America of 1915, when the Armenian genocide broke out, and the America of 1994 that refused to intervene in the massacres in Rwanda, the moral failing remains the same.

Last, but by no means least, French journalist Jean Hatzfeld talked with imprisoned killers in Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak.  Their honesty, directness and the bleakness of their answers are some of the most depressing, powerful and haunting passages I’ve ever read.

What have you read or seen about the Rwandan genocide?
Which work has made the largest impact on you and why?

Is Gourevitch’s account of present-day Rwanda too favorable, or has the country managed to raise itself from the ashes?