Review: Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is tough to read right now in this Age of Trump and McConnell.

On the one hand, it gives us Franco’s Spanish Nationalists as evident “bad guys,” as characters who are simply wrong. They were barbarous in their methods and execrable in their philosophy. Adam Hochschild says at one point that scholars quibble over whether Franco was an outright fascist, but it’s hard to think the difference matters much. He walked like a fascist, talked like a fascist, and slaughtered his “enemies of the state” like a fascist.

And, most chillingly of all, he won. His death didn’t come until the dawn of my own near adult understanding of politics, and I remember – from when it first appeared as a Saturday Night Live joke – Chevy Chase declaring, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” Yeah, we laughed, and yeah, I didn’t get it. But, still, part of the joke was the uncomfortable notion that, into the 1970s, he was the embodiment of what we thought we’d destroyed in World War II.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know about the Republicans. I am confident I’d have sympathized with them, and even decades later I still wish they’d won. They spoke of equality. They were two generations ahead of most of the world on women’s rights. They had a sense of economic justice. And they had, in Lorca and others, a kind of poetry that the fascists could never have understood.

But, were they good guys or simply less-bad guys opposing the bad guys? Hochschild plays it both ways here. He finds elements of the Republicans – especially the anarchist POUF that attracted, among others the young George Orwell – the kind of idealists whose vision holds up. Other elements, though, were different. I cannot forgive the Republicans for killing an estimated 50,000 of their own “enemies.” (For perspective, the Nationalists are estimated to have killed three times as many during the Spanish Civil War and then many others after they won.) I also can’t forgive the slaughter of so many of the priests who, even if they’d given comfort to the authoritarian tendencies of some Nationalist supporters, were still fundamentally non-violent participants in the conflict.

Hochschild reminds us that the Republicans certainly lost in large part because the U.S. and others insisted on a neutrality that extended to an international arms embargo. The Republicans had the money to buy arms, but no one would sell to them. The Nationalists had no trouble getting things from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, though.

That left only the USSR to outfit the Republicans, and that imbalance gave ever greater power to the worst elements of the Republic, to the would-be Stalinists rather than to the more idealistic POUFs and other groups.

It’s in that midst that Hochschild studies the experiences of some of the Americans who were there. He talks at length about Bob and Marion Merriman. It’s a moving story, and he even implies that Bob is one model for Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Bob was an academic, an economist, who – after a stint studying Soviet economic models – decided he needed to pick up a gun and defend the Republic.

What’s fascinating is that, at the same time as he experiences a love story with Marion, Bob finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into conflict. And, as he does so, he in particular is ever more beholden to the Soviets.

The result is that Bob, and the handful of others Hochschild explores most fully, were betrayed by the philosophies they most admire. The Soviets imported a cruelty to the experience that hardened it; the Americans, playing an awkward game of international and national politics, refused to enter the fight, which tipped it the wrong way.

So, to end where I began, what makes this hard to read right now is the sense that, faced with a clear wrong, there may not have been a right way to fight it. Franco and his allies were, at the beginning, a minority, and their philosophy was an ugly one that could have won supporters only through violence.

But the Republic, and the brave and admirable Americans who went to fight for it, was flawed as well. Heroic as the subjects of this book are, they lost, and their loss was prelude to the World War that would follow.

All of that is simply too hard to think about right now.


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Review: The Minuteman

The Minuteman by Greg Donahue
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is so up my alley (or, as the case may be, down my dark alley) that I can’t be neutral about it.

In this case, that’s a good thing. I could easily get irritated with someone who didn’t know what he was doing in narrating a history of a Jewish boxer/gangster who set out to attack Nazi Bundists in the 1930s. Instead, Greg Donahue does this with a real flair for narrative and without the can-you-believe-there-were-tough-Jews tone that many lesser writers might have brought.

The result here is the riveting story of Nat Arno, a Longy Zwillman tough guy charged with leading the Minutemen, a group of Jewish shtarkers who broke up Bund meetings throughout Newark, NJ and greater New York City area.

The idea of such characters isn’t new – Robert Rockaway wrote about many of them from across the country in his But – He was Good to His Mother years ago. But this book (or long booklet) is a valuable addition to that history. I knew that Zwillman contributed a lot to anti-Bundist work, but I’d never heard of Arno, and I’d certainly never seen his story so focused.

In addition to recounting a battle after battle chronicle of Arno’s life, Donahue raises some intriguing questions about the nature of Jewish self-defense. The nature of the story inclines him to see it as a good thing – he appreciatively quotes Jewish gangster authority Myron Sugarman saying that, if Jews had always defended themselves in such a way there’d be no anti-Semitism – but Donahue does raise the opposite perspective. There are many in the Jewish community who continue to believe that anti-anti-Semitic violence does more harm than good.

In a compelling wrap-up, Donahue reflects on how long it took for the Jewish community to acknowledge Arno’s accomplishments, and he sees it as a reflection of the deep ambivalence about his approach.

This one is short, probably too short to raise those larger questions in full, but it’s perhaps the finest I have read of the free books Audible gives out each month for members. An impressive job, and a good way to glimpse a larger history that I’ve worked to tell myself.


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Review: Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA

Hard Labor: The Battle That Birthed the Billion-Dollar NBA by Sam Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sam Smith is my favorite sportswriter, period. He also answers my fan mail, and he considerately inscribed this copy to me and included a thoughtful, handwritten note. So, while I can’t claim him as a friend, I also can’t pretend to be unbiased here.

Still, I’m impressed with Smith’s ambition and narrative solution here. If you know your baseball, you know that the notorious reserve clause – the system that prevented players from exercising their free agent rights – was broken when Curt Flood refused to sign the contract he was offered and took his case to court. Flood eventually won, but it came at the price of his career. Fingers crossed, Flood will get into the baseball Hall of Fame in the current old-timers reconsideration; he was a hero, and subsequent players have come to recognize that.

The story in basketball is more complicated and, as a result, I’m not aware of anyone who’s managed to tell it before. There, Oscar Robertson – who was one of the two best players in the world (alongside Wilt Chamberlain) – agreed to become the lead plaintiff in a case that would do away with the basketball analogue of the reserve clause.

Robertson is at the heart of this book, then, but there’s more to it than that. Unlike Flood, Robertson didn’t suffer professionally for his leadership – or, at least, he didn’t suffer any more than he already did given that, despite averaging a triple double for a season (and doing so cumulatively over the first five years of his career), he could not negotiate even a $10,000 raise for himself.

So, as it unfolds, this book is a collective biography of the players who challenged the league and eventually opened up the system of free agency that’s produced arguably the most successful sports league in the world.

We get capsule biographies of Robertson, Chamberlain, Bill Bradley, Wes Unseld, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Archie Clark, Tom Meschery, Chet Walker, and others whose names I’d heard (or sometimes not) but whose careers I didn’t know all that well. As Smith sees it, that generation of players was as naturally talented as the one we see playing now, but limited television – and sometimes a tacit racism that kept Black players from being marketable – kept them from becoming either the household names they might have been or as present in the history of the game as they should be. There are some great stories about how they learned the game and about how they came to put their careers at risk to win the economic and personal freedom to become free agents.

As all of that suggests, Smith has long pushed against a collective sense that the NBA essentially “began” with the 1979 arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. (This narrative has been tweaked in recent weeks as various tributes to long-time commissioner David Stern have underscored the role that he played in the same era.) Instead, Smith has long argued that we ought to be aware of what the various non-Celtic greats of an earlier era represented.

No one is bigger in that version than Robertson – a staggeringly talented player who labored under bad management and alongside sub-par teammates – but Chamberlain, Baylor, West, and many others matter who are largely forgotten when we consider the history of the league. It was, Smith tells us in his easygoing and anecdotal way, their “hard labor” on the court and off that created the platform that Bird, Magic, and Michael Jordan used to build the league we know today. And notice what is perhaps not a coincidence: the league exploded in the early 1980s, just a few years after the courts decided in favor of Robertson and the players association.

In any case, I am always glad to read Smith whether he is writing a game report or answering his mailbag inquiries. He’s funny and, without losing the perspective that he’s writing about a game, thoughtful and insightful. I went into this with him as my favorite sportswriter, and I walk out of it the same way.


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Review: Capone May Go Free: Book I, A Society of Power

Capone May Go Free: Book I, A Society of Power by Knowledge Network
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Donnie Parrillo was the alderman for Chicago’s First Ward for much of the 1960s. If you know your Chicago gangster history at all, you know that “First Ward” was, more or less, a synonym for “Outfit” or “mob,” so it figures he’d have a lot of insider stories to tell. Also, his father was a mob lawyer going back to the 1930s, so you figure on a fair number of second-hand stories too.

Instead, what we get here are the rambling reminiscences of a guy who grew up in Little Italy, a guy who sings the virtues of “Taylor Street justice” as the killing of guys who break one or another understood policies of the Old World ethics.

Parrillo has a handful of colorful stories. It’s something that, after his father got sent a Black Hand note threatening him and his mother, no less a personage than future Outfit boss Milwaukee Phil Alderisio came to “play” with him until the threat passed. It’s also something that he knew Sam Giancana as a kid and that Giancana handpicked him to run for alderman.

It’s also something, I suppose, to have written down the Taylor Street legend that Al Capone contracted syphilis from actress Jean Harlow, whose own early death – says this legend – was from syphilis as well. I don’t buy the story; Harlow, among other things, was the bombshell who distracted James Cagney in Public Enemy, so she was already associated in the public imagination with the gangster moll ideal. That doesn’t sound like Capone’s style from the various biographies out there. (Neither of the major recent ones mentions her.)

But, for too much of this we get a get-off-my-lawn series of complaints about the way contemporary standards have slipped. Like a lot of people who spend time reflecting on the gangster world, he starts to valorize some of them, complaining that the government is every bit as corrupt as the Outfit without the attendant hypocrisy.

I picked this up because I hoped there’d be an angle on the politics of the era that we have not yet heard. Sorry to say that, at least in this volume, there isn’t. I’d like to know what it was like on City Council when he was expected to vote the way Giancana told him, but we don’t hear about a single vote or motion. (OK, one. Mayor Daley once pissed him off by not notifying about an ordinance that would have affected the First Ward, but we don’t get any substance to the story, just a tough-guy account of his showdown with Daley.)

Parrillo is a raconteur, so the book has that going for it, but it’s misleading in its premise. Despite his claim to know more about the history of the mob than the assembled “Merry Gangsters Literary Society” (some of my old pals from Chicago), he comes across less as an insider from the “golden days” of the mob than as an old guy who simply grew up in the middle of a lot of stories from the neighborhood.


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Review: The Best American Essays 2019

The Best American Essays 2019 by Rebecca Solnit
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a long-time annual reader of this collection, I could tell something would be different this year from the very beginning. Series editor Robert Atwan – whom, I am happy to boast is an acquaintance who’s been warm and supportive in the decade or so I’ve known him – opens this year with reflections not on his go-to essay/definer in Montaigne but instead on George Orwell.

That’s a crucial difference since Montaigne represents a tradition of the essay concerned with the self, the self working outward to understand the world, while Orwell represents the political essay, the essay that explores some changing aspect of the cultural or partisan political world as it affects the self.

That difference is even more fully underlined in Rebecca Solnit’s powerful introduction. As she puts it thoughtfully and articulately, “I was assigned to pick out the best of the very good essays we gathered, and for me that meant not only the integrity of the writing and the writers’ visions, but essays that engaged with the most important and conflicted stuff of our time.”

The result, then, is that the “best essays” selected here are overwhelmingly direct and political in their focus. Solnit justifies that by arguing that our moment is so partisan, so conflicted, that writing that fails to take a direct stand against what we might call, for short-hand, Trumpism is somehow complicit in pretending that things aren’t so riven.

So, I do hear the justification, and I can’t help but be persuaded by some of it. In such a context, an annual event like the Best American Essays ought to be a forum for amplifying some of the powerful voices plumbing the socio-political crisis of the moment.

And yet…I admit that I come to this series for a particular aesthetic experience. I have never yet tired of Montaigne and all he represents. There is something fragile in the personal essay, something that allows a particular human to give the rest of us a sense of her or his or their self as it opens into the larger world. Hearing Solnit’s rationale, I can’t argue otherwise, but I do miss the personal-essay-centered approach of my favorite iterations of this series.

Put differently, I am not asking for an escape from the political; even if I were that naïve, I couldn’t continue to be so after reading Solnit’s introduction. Instead, I believe there is a subtler politics that grows out of allowing artists to explore their experience without the initial insistence that they wrestle with the ills we all (or all of us at all likely to pick up such a volume) already recognize.


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Review: City of Bohane

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can’t help feeling as if Kevin Barry wrote this novel expressly for me. It’s a dystopic future in a small city of the west of Ireland where gangsters fight block by block for control. There are elements of the fantastic running throughout it, and there’s a vague critique of our own world for allowing the animal impulse to overwhelm what was once a seemingly civilized world.

Above all, though, this is an experiment in language and form. I’m not convinced it’s written in English, and that’s its ultimate magic. It comes at us with rhythms entirely its own. Years ago, a friend handed me the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian. My French was still pretty strong in those day, but I knew no Italian. Somehow, though, word by word, I found I understood what was before me.

This book gives that same feeling throughout. It’s never clear, for instance, whether Sweet Baba Jay is a new religious faith or simply a bastardized way of referring to Sweet Baby Jesus. At some point, though, it doesn’t matter. The rhythm of the phrase – occasionally abbreviated as SBJ – is sufficient to tell us what we need to know of the place it has in this Mad Max like world.

And that holds true sentence by sentence as well. You know enough of that’s going on to piece the full meaning together, and yet it never feels as if we are getting anything in conventional English – or even conventional Gael-English. It’s always original, always striking, and always intelligible.

Our main character is Logan, the albino boss of Hartnett’s Fancy, the dominant gang in most of the city of Bohane. He’s vicious but aging, and he faces an invasion by an eight-family alliance from a semi-suburban area as well as the return of an old rival, the Gant. What’s more, his beloved wife, Macu, may have fallen out of love with him, and there are young men itching to shoulder their way into greater authority.

Things do happen – the battle with the Cusack forces is ultimately compelling and nauseating – but much of the novel is descriptive. (Even that battle we get, cleverly, not through narrative but through a description of the photographs the leading newspaper photographer has taken and developed in his dark room.) There’s always something new for us to be told, and then there’s the adventure of the language in telling it.

It pains me to admit that, by the end, Barry seems to me to fall a bit short. [SPOILER: I’m especially disappointed to feel misled at the end when it turns out the Gant has returned not as a rival but as a secret ally who’s testing the loyalty of the young who might be challenging Logan. Plus, it’s no real surprise that Jenni emerges as the handpicked successor; she’s been the smartest and best positioned all along, so that reveal hardly seems compelling enough as a conclusion.]

Still, this one is worth it for the language and sense of dystopian wonder. I laughed routinely not so much at what happened nor at one-liners but at the audacious nature of the words that Barry makes dance for us.

One final reason to read this: I’d argue that Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier is probably the best novel – and certainly the best new novel – I read last year. This shows him testing what he can get away with on a creative but flawed canvas. By the time he moved on to Night Boat, he was a world-class writer. And, young as he is, I’m hoping there’s much more to come.


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Review: We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First and Last Works

We Are What We Pretend To Be: The First and Last Works by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’m a big enough Kurt Vonnegut admirer that I’m willing to read most of what he wrote. I confess that I have only limited patience for his later work, though, and this one does not change my opinion.

The second of the two novellas included here, If God Were Alive Today, has a good title and…that’s more or less it. It’s purportedly the last thing he ever wrote, and it tells me we got all the good stuff years before.

The premise is that our protagonist, Gil Berman, is a stand-up comedian who – as he nears a more or less sudden death – finds a kind of honesty in his performances. David Grossman took that same premise and created a contemporary masterpiece in Horse Walks Into a Bar. Here, though, Vonnegut fails in the first obligation for writing about a stand-up comedian: be funny. (Think how disappointing the genuinely marvelous Marvelous Mrs. Maisel would be if, after all its other excellences, the standup routines weren’t also so well written.)

Berman is not just unfunny, but he’s out of touch, and it’s painful to see Vonnegut as off his game as he is. Berman reflects – awkwardly and, ultimately, cowardly – on elements of political correctness bashing, and he seems out of touch with his culture. By extension, Vonnegut seems so as well.

There’s a thin narrative that develops, but it’s mostly a mood piece, and a weak one at that. There’s a clear reason he never published it in his lifetime, and it isn’t a favor to have had it published now.

The other novella here, Basic Training, is arguably the first thing he ever wrote. There’s evidence he tried to get it published when he was younger, but he failed and should probably be grateful that he did.

This piece has the virtue of some nice pastoral elements to it. Haley Brandon is a young man who, having lost his parents in an accident, winds up at his uncle’s farm where he falls in love with a cousin and has an adventure or two involving an “off” farm hand. The uncle is known affectionately as “the General” because he is a World War I veteran and a committed disciplinarian on the farm.

It’s striking here to see how much nostalgia Vonnegut gives to his portrait of the old General. My own interest in Vonnegut has to do with the way he gradually addresses the trauma of his time in World War II. It takes him five published novels – up to Slaughterhouse Five – before he can really address it. Still, in the published work we see his contempt for all things military and ordered. Here, though, the General – while inflexible and judgmental – is ultimately a sweet guy.

Most surprisingly, there’s a final, almost-violent climax where Haley rescues the General from the murderous farm hand, and it ends happily. In other words, this is Vonnegut, and someone comes out enriched and unironically virtuous for showing bravery in a tight spot.

The story itself is fairly weak, but it’s interesting to see Vonnegut playing with form. For that, it has historical interest.

There’s also a troubling introduction here by Vonnegut’s daughter who at one point seems quite angry with her step-mother. My sense is that Nanette Vonnegut, while otherwise disconnected from the literary executorship, had some claim to these manuscripts because they were in her possession. The result seems to be that she had to the opportunity to sell them (to Da Capo Press) on her own rather than as part of Vonnegut’s larger work.

If you love Vonnegut, there’s really nothing to see here. If you’re curious, read “Basic Training” and then give yourself just one chapter of If God Were Alive Today.


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