Dave is Headed for a Book Binge

I read Don Winslow's tour-de-force drug cartel novel The Power of the Dog over the summer, and I just finished his surfing/crime thriller The Dawn Patrol, and it was so good that I am going to keep going and read all of Winslow's books-- next on my list is The Winter of Frankie Machine . . . Winslow combines elements from two of my favorite writers: Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy (and since Elmore Leonard is dead and James Ellroy takes a long time to write his books, I'm very happy to have discovered Don Winslow).

Hey Jazz Dogs! It's The War and Peace of Dope War Books!

Once again, while my family was enjoying the sun and sand, I read about drug wars and torture: The Cartel is part two of Don Winslow's magnum opus on the Mexican drug trade; when I reviewed The Power of the Dog (part one), I described Winslow's writing as "Ellroy-esque," and now, on the back cover, Ellroy himself pays Winslow the highest of compliments . . . he calls the novel "The War and Peace of dope-war books" and then he goes on to say, "it's got the jazz dog feel of a shot of pure meth!" and while that quotation is certainly Ellroy-esque . . . and I'm not sure what a "jazz dog" is, I highly recommend this book (though you should read Power of the Dog first) and while I admit that it's an undertaking, it is worth it-- there's plenty of action and there's even a map, so that finally --after reading five or six books about the Mexican drug wars-- I am starting to understand the how the cartography and the politics fit together . . . and at least it's a real map of actual Mexican states, not a fictional map, like at the start of Lord of the Rings . . . so that when reality mirrors fiction and the real person after whom Adan Barrerra is modeled: "El Chapo" Guzman, escapes once again, you know where he is headed to hide-out (Sinaloa) and while I am always suspect of fiction that requires a map, Game of Thrones has made me change my tune on this rule of thumb, and I am always grateful when non-fiction includes a map because I am spatially challenged.

Savages Lives Up to Its Title

Even for Don Winslow, Savages is especially brutal: two hydroponic marijuana growers take on the Baja Cartel, there is an abduction, and much collateral damage (and I'm taking a break from my Winslow book-binge, after consecutively reading Dawn Patrol, The Winter of Frankie Machine, and Savages, but after I finish the newish translation of Brothers Karamazov, I'm sure I'll be ready for some clipped prose and hip dialogue and get right back to him).

Sometimes Ignorance is Bliss

If you like your novels with extra torture, then read Don Winslow's fantastic, Ellroy-esque tale of Mexican drug cartels, DEA agents, and all the players in between them . . . The Power of the Dog will immerse you in a world you wish did not exist . . . and probably make you think legalizing drugs is a better option than what happened (or may have happened-- like James Ellroy, Winslow translates his hypotheses into prose with the verisimilitude of fact).

The Significance of #47

Having this blog has made it easy to keep track of the important things in my life, such as the number of tacos I ate in 2011 (200!) and the number of books I read in 2013 (22) and I am very proud to say that this year I more than doubled last year's book count (mainly because I read a lot of quick reads: crime-fiction and travelogues and slick non-fiction) and I just finished my fifth Don Winslow novel of the year (The Gentlemen's Hour . . . plenty of surfing, corruption, torture, and murder . . . plus some big Serial type issues, such as how the prosecution and police often "massage" eyewitness reports and confessions in order to get what they need for a conviction-- whether it's the right guy or not) and that's book number 47; for the entire list and my seven favorites, head over to Gheorghe: The Blog. 

Book List 2022

Here are the books I finished (possibly with some skimming) this year . . . I started plenty of others and quit them because . . . well because I wanted to . . . that's what's great about reading-- if you've got access to a library, you aren't beholden to any particular book:

1) Depth of Winter by Craig Johnson

2) Lazarus Volumes 1-6

3) Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

4) Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson

5) The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul

6) The Given Day by Dennis LeHane

7) Live by Night by Dennis LeHane

8) A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich

9) Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

10) Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

11) Caliban's War by James A. Corey

12) Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

13) The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

14) Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath

15) We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

16) Abbadon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

17) The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart

18) The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

19) One-Shot Harry by Gary Philips

20) The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer

21) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

22) Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey

23) The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

24) Harrow by Joy Williams

25) The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

26) Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

27) The Foundling  by Ann Leary

28) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

29) Fugitive Telemetry: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

30) Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

31) Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit by Mark Leyner

32) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

33) Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

34) Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

35) Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey

36) The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

37) The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

38) City on Fire by Don Winslow

39) Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

40) what if? SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC ANSWERS to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe

41) Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Stephen Johnson

42) The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

43) The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race For a Gun, and The Community United to Save Them by Sudhir Venkatesh

44) Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

45) A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

46) Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

47) Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

48) Liberation Day by George Saunders

49) Upgrade by Blake Crouch

50) Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

51) Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway

52) Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

53) Pines by Blake Crouch

54) The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte

55) Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

56) Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson

57) Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross

Non-Fiction/Fiction/Non-fiction Drug War Sandwich

I was so enthralled by Don Winslow's brutal and intense semi-fictional account of America's war on drugs (Power of the Dog) that I decided to read some non-fiction on the subject; after a bit of research I decided to purchase the Kindle version of Ioan Grillo's El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency . . . and a few pages into it, one of the anecdotes sounded familiar, and so I checked this blog and it turns out I read Grillo's book exactly two years ago . . . but even though I felt like an idiot for purchasing a book that I once borrowed from the library, now the story makes a lot more sense -- I know which characters are real, which are fictional, and which are fictionalized versions of real people: I highly recommend both of these books, and there is one more book on this topic that I want to tackle-- because I've heard such great things about it-- a non-fiction account by Elaine Shannon called Desperados: Latin Druglords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can't Win. 

Enough of That . . . Or Is It?

I finished Dana Goldstein's book The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession and while there's certainly fascinating stuff in there (the reason, in the1800's, politicians embraced females invading a traditionally male job was because they would work on the cheap) and the book lays out, in a comprehensive and unbiased manner, the history of teachers and unions, education and desegregation, the various attempts to use testing and teacher evaluation to improve schools, the political and moral panic that often resulted in teachers being persecuted for reasons other than incompetence, the charter school movement, Teach for America, the Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and all sorts of other things that I knew only passing information about, but for the layperson the interesting part of the book is the epilogue, where she makes some recommendations based on all her research, and these are logical and worth taking a look at; but for those of you who don't feel like it, which I totally understand (you could be reading a Don Winslow book) here is a short summary:

1) teacher pay matters and while teachers aren't paid poorly in America, they aren't paid nearly as much as in countries with very successful education systems,  such as Finland, South Korea, and Japan-- if teaching jobs aren't coveted, and if teachers aren't as respected as doctors and engineers, then you won't be able to attract excellent candidates;

2) we need to focus on using good teachers as models and creating communities of excellent practice, rather than creating systems of evaluation purely to ferret out the bad teachers-- as these systems always fail because of the insane amounts of paperwork and data they create;

3) tests need to return to their rightful role as diagnostic tools, not as methods to achieve high stakes funding-- which resulted in teaching to the test, gaming the system, and all sorts of illustrations of Campbell's Law;

4) the principal matters as much as the teachers-- exceptional leadership improves the bottom third of teachers and the top third of teachers-- not excess evaluation paperwork;

5) star teachers were not necessarily the best students--so simply hiring people with higher math SAT scores isn't necessarily going to improve American education-- research shows you're better off hiring someone with excellent communication skills, who adeptly uses a large vocabulary, and can explain things well-- even if they once struggled to learn them in the past (and I agree with this, because I was a horrible and disorganized student, and so I know how to contend with this in class);

6) teachers benefit from watching each other work-- but there's usually no time for this (although since I started teaching Serial, a number of my colleagues have observed my class, and it's great-- they're not administrators filling out paperwork while I teach-- so there's no pressure-- and I can ask them for suggestions during the lesson or afterwards);

7) end outdated union protections-- there needs to be a faster way to fire incompetent veteran teachers, and a streamlined way for the teacher to appeal being fired (because teacher appointments and terminations have certainly succumbed to political whims in the past);

8) we are not as homogenous as Finland and there are limitations to our educational system, which is very decentralized, so it's near impossible to use top-down reform to improve our schools-- there's no federal body to check how schools are implementing federal standards, and federal funding is fairly minimal (compared to state and town funding) and we have schools in America with incredibly different study bodies and educational problems, so every school might need a slightly different plan to improve;

and finally, if you want to hear something more condensed on these issues, which features an interview with Dana Goldstein, then listen to this week's episode of Freakonomics: "Is America's Education Problem Really Just a Teacher Problem?"

Mafia Redux

If you're looking for a well-written organized crime tale in a different setting than usual (Providence! Like Crimetown!) then check out Don Winslow's new one. City on Fire . . . it's got all the mob tropes-- I'm cataloging them now for my next episode of We Defy Augury . . . but if you're looking for something a little different, try the Italian mobster film Gomorra . . . it's cycles between the quotidian and extreme violence: the ins and outs of illegal toxic waste disposal and trying to make it as a mobbed up tailor and the assassinations and terror that occurred in Italy during the Scampia Feud . . . there's not the romance and drama and fun of Goodfellas and The Godfather, just daily life in the criminal underworld.

This One Goes to 11

 

Episode 11 of my podcast We Defy Augury is up . . . while it's inspired by the new Don Winslow novel "City on Fire," it's more of a clip show-- I run through all the mob tropes in the novel and provide audio examples from famous films.