Ladies and Gentlemen Lenny Bruce!! by Albert Goldman (1974)

I've never read a book with two exclamation points in its title before!! ...Nor a biography with a picture of the subject portrayed in death on the cover. There's something a little sensationalistic about this book.

I'm not even all that interested in Lenny Bruce although I do like to listen to his records, not so much for the content but for the incantatory rhythms of his delivery. What I do like about this book is the way it describes the USA of the 1950s and early '60s focused through the magnifying lens of one of its sharpest critics.

In a way this makes me think of a tourist photograph where whoever is in the foreground is less interesting than what's going on behind them. I didn't expect to get caught up in this but it's held my attention for 300 pages so far. Goldman sometimes gets a little too caught up in the momentum of his prose but for the most part it's an exhilarating read with plenty of sex, drugs, and jazz to hold one's prurient interest.

Although Bruce himself doesn't come off in not the most flattering light as a person (a junkie who collaborated with the same narcs he criticized), the atmosphere of conformity, repression, and paranoia which is the fabric of the society described reminds this jaded shock-proof reader how revolutionary Lenny Bruce's accomplishments really were--burning holes in that fabric like so much casually dropped cigarette ash.

Get the hardcover dirt cheap at amazon.com. It has cool tiled end papers comprised of Lenny's mugshot.

E11even

Posted to craigslist on November 3, 2009

**Update: I have sold my copies of these books but you
can still find them via amazon.com by following links.**

I just returned from 7 weeks of traveling light and realize I don't need this stack of very nice books anymore. I was going to review them at thriftsellers.blogspot.com but realize now I don't have anything interesting to say about them. A nice variety of general interest reading to get you through some long damp Northwest nights.

Planes and Copters (1977-78 edition)
Pocket size manual of state of the art flying machines.

Ray Bradbury - Zen in the Art of Writing
Some useful truisms delivered in Bradbury's characteristic hyperbolic but endearing style.

Frank Norris - The Octopus
1901 muckraking novel in social realist vein. I didn't get too far into this tale of late 19th century railroad robber barons exploiting wheat growers in California. There was just too much plodding detail in parched narrative style to hold my interest. But you might like it.

Nick Jans - The Grizzly Maze
Timothy Treadwell was the subject of Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man--an eccentric Californian with a troubled past who found peace cavorting with Grizzly Bears in the Alaskan wilderness until he and his female companion were mauled to death. This is an even-handed attempt to uncover the nature of Treadwell's motives, actions, and impacts by an Alaskan journalist who is not sympathetic to Herzog's documentary.

Evan Morris - The Word Detective
Interesting etymologies explained in an overly earnest and almost twee manner as if the author were trying too hard to fill the shoes of his highly accomplished parents whose syndicated word origins newspaper column he inherited. Still, a pretty good book to sit on the toilet tank for a quick literary fix during a private moment.

Richard Hough - The Potemkin Mutiny
Russian sailors get sick of eating maggoty meat and mutiny on their 1905 battleship. I didn't get very far into this one, either, but it's got a pretty cover.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory - My Dinner with Andre
The film version of this seems so extemporaneous but the words were all scripted and they're all here in this slim edition. Some really wild passages which will certainly make northwest lefties with a paranoid streak cheer.

News of the Weird
Hundreds of bizarre coincidences, freak accidents, perversions, anomolies, and incredible incidents each described in a terse paragraph or two. The only thing I didn't like about this was the weighting of the selections towards pain and humiliation.

Paul Theroux - Riding the Iron Rooster
See: http://thriftsellers.blogspot.com/2009/09/riding-iron-rooster-by-paul-theroux.html


The Incredible Incas and Their Timeless Land
Nice hardback small coffeetable book published by National Geographic Society in 1975. Pretty interesting if you're into South American indigenous culture.

The Onion's Finest News Reporting - Volume One
If you loved Mad Magazine as a child, The Onion is perfect for the adult you. This best-of compilation (the first in what is by now an enormous series) published in 2000 recaptures some of the highlights of that wacky decade we call the '90s. Remember when Clinton deployed vowels to Bosnia?

Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux (1988)

It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame
the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

Mood is just what makes reading Paul Theroux so appealing. This is the second of his epic railway travelogues I've read (the other was The Old Patagonian Express) and I'd be ready to ride his train again.

Theroux is an exemplary traveler. He's quiet and attentive. He keeps a low profile. He's respectful and curious enough to learn the history, geography, and language of the places he visits. He gives himself ample time to soak in the ambience and does not put himself on a fixed itinerary, thereby allowing himself the flexibility to move fast when it suits him and stay put when he needs to regenerate and give his mood some time to regain its equilibrium. He does not travel with a camera. Rather, he focuses his keen and poetic observations into his writing, which is vivid, understated, and good-humored without being sugarcoated. One fellow Western traveler suspects he is a spy, a job for which Theroux might indeed be well-suited given his sharp eye and ability to pump locals for information. Bur far from spook-y, he comes across as someone who is fair-minded, empathetic, and sensible with a broad enough perspective on place and people to make his anecdotes, dialogues, and word-images hang together in such a way that a large, enlightening, and understanding portrait of a culture emerges.

In this case the culture is China in 1986/7. Mao's Cultural Revolution is an unpleasant memory, the traces of which have been all but erased from the landscape and consciousness of the people. The Chinese are shifting from the "one for all" edicts of Maoism and rushing to reconcile personal advancement using the tools of capitalism with inhabiting a nominally communist country. Individual ambition has supplanted ultracomformist dogma. Western styles of music and dress are creeping in and "import/export" is the mantra of an army of college business majors. It is also the time of the pro-democracy student protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere. It's a marked change from Theroux's previous visit a decade earlier to which he frequently refers for comparison and it is surely a far cry from what China must be like today in 2009 when it is rare to find a consumer good not stamped MADE IN CHINA.

Theroux takes his time wandering the eternally protean China. Riding slow and slower trains of varying quality he encounters a broad spectrum of Chinese, from stoic and disdainful Party apparatchiks in blue Mao suits to ebullient youth who take Anglicized nicknames and speak in streams of American idiom. These encounters are the most revealing aspect of the book. Theroux is knowledgeable enough about China then and now to make the conversations interesting for his interviewees, and while he is above all respectful he is not too shy to press for honest opinions about touchy subjects.

He can also be witheringly funny, as shown in this early scene when still in England embarking on the transcontinental rail journey just to get to China. He is with a large tour group from whom he is trying to withhold his identity as a famous travel writer: "When I looked around this train I realized that I was one of a large group and that I did not know any of these people. All I had to go on were their faces. But faces say a great deal. Theirs certainly did. The sight made me very apprehensive."

As someone who enjoys privacy and writing on trains, I can sympathize with this apprehension of being stuck with a bore. And I would hate to be that bore to Paul Theroux, so it's a great simple pleasure to be able to ride beside him vicariously. Perhaps even more than being someone I'd want to travel with, Theroux is the informed, observant, and laconic traveler I aspire to be.

*

Get it at your local library, bookstore, or, if all else fails, amazon.com

Cosmic Religion with other Opinions and Aphorisms by Albert Einstein (1931)

The ethical behavior of man is better based on sympathy, education, and social relationships and requires no support from religion. Man's plight would, indeed, be sad if he had to be kept in order through fear of punishment and hope of rewards after death.

I found this at an estate sale in the neighborhood. Some relative had been a physics professor and there were lots of first editions by physicists. This one lists for anywhere from $90 - $1,000+ but I've had it on ebay for a week and the high bid so far is 99 cents. So I'm one cent behind as I paid a dollar for it. So much for my fortune as a used-book scooper. [Update: My copy sold on ebay for about $30. I think someone got a deal.]

This is not a physics text but rather expresses Einstein's deepest convictions about spirituality, pacifism, and the desire for a Jewish homeland. His basic thesis is that what was needed was a new world religion based on observation rather than superstition. "I will call this the cosmic religious sense. This is hard to make clear to those who do not experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God[...]" (48). The cosmos is wondrous and sublime enough in its own right without having to drag a bunch of fictitious gods--made in the image of man--into the equation.

It is a sad irony that his clarion call for peace, tolerance and ethical inquiry came just before Hitler's rise to power which would soon make of Einstein a political refugee due to his being Jewish. With kooky sects such as Mormons and evangelical Christians on the rise, dogma still seems to have the upper hand 78 years later. Nazis, Mormons, Evangelicals and fundamentalists of other stripes would all find cause to burn this book--which is reason enough to read it.

*

Get the new edition from amazon.com.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."

The Fahrenheit scale of temperature is completely insane, yet somehow charming in its anthropocentric ordering of the cosmos. At 451 degrees F, paper combusts. Combustion is what this book is all about. Books, people, cities--all burn.

Do you like books? This is a book for book-likers.

Often lumped in with 1984 and Brave New World (not bad company to keep), the key difference is the villain is you and me; that is to say, the "everyperson" who prefers distraction to taking action. The denial of history brings about endless bloody repeats.

F451 offers a grim and despairing view of the American mind as one distracted to death by television and the continual pounding of vapid music through uncannily iPod-like "seashell" earbuds which keep the wearer tuned out from reality. I happened to read those passages while watching clueless Seattleites absentmindedly run their powerboats near lake swimmers of whom they were completely oblivious. The future Bradbury predicted is here now, minus the bookburning. But in a way Bradbury could not have anticipated, books are losing their sacred status as carriers of culture as people turn to the internet for information. That repository of trivia and unchecked facts leaves history open to endless revision which, as Orwell warned, makes it easy to manipulate the present.

Although it offers a sad view of the declining American intellect, the book's ending is hopeful in a destroy-to-create paradoxical way.

From Alcatraz to the White House by Nathan Glenn Williams (1991)

I didn't believe in heaven nor hell until I had finished the back-breaking labor on my first day on a road gang. By the day's end, I was half-Christian because I had at least experienced hell. I am still waiting for heaven.

I had my doubts about this one when I spotted it at Value Village on Capitol Hill. I'm leery of any book with Ronald Reagan on the cover and the endorsement from clergy on the back had me fearing this true crime memoir was bound to devolve into the moralizing parable of a rightwing born again Christian. But the fact that it had been self-published locally made me think it might not fit any simple category so I took a chance on it and I'm glad I did. It turns out the author was a Democrat and though involved with his local church there is no sermonizing or exhortations to instant salvation by accepting Christ as your savior. Whew.

Nathan Glenn Williams was born to apparently well-to-do and well-connected parents in the apple-growing community of Wenatchee, Washington in 1915. Despite his privileged upbringing, he turned to petty burglary at the age of 11 and was heisting banks at gunpoint by the time he was 17. He was in and out of various penal institutions, but as he reveals in hundreds of pages of wild stories, he was unable to go straight and always relapsed into incredibly reckless criminal ways. Robbing banks, taking hostages, forging checks, and impersonating an Army officer earned him a life sentence in a Washington State penitentiary at the age of 23, but after serving only a few years he was granted a full pardon by the governor which he attributed to a pay-off from his father. He married and had a daughter and tried to go straight but was tempted into one last bank robbery which ended with his getting sent up for 25 years after someone close to him ratted him out to the FBI. The state pen is bad enough, but when he is suddenly transferred to the notoriously cruel Alcatraz federal prison in San Francisco Bay, it is all he can do just to keep from going insane.

Williams has a distinctive voice and a flair for telling a gripping story. He displays the enhanced vocabulary of an autodidact, which is kind of endearing. At over 400 big small-print pages, it's quite a tome but it never flags as he vividly and with great sensitivity describes his audacious crimes, hellacious punishment, and ultimate redemption--not through finding God, but by devoting himself to aiding prisoners and their families and creating an organization to assist at-risk youth. The early part of the book provides an interesting snapshot of the outlaw life in Depression-era America and the author's later good works are an object lesson showing that even the most seemingly incorrigible criminals have the potential for turning their lives around if given some encouragement and a chance.

Rating: 19 years served out of a 20-year sentence.

Get it at amazon.com.

A Dynasty of Western Outlaws by Paul I. Wellman (1961)

This book, found along with a few others at Value Village in Ballard (Seattle), is the one which inspired me to start this blog. Before I stumbled upon it, I had no interest in outlaws or tales of the Old West. The book has a thesis, which is that there was a long continuous line of criminality spanning several generations starting with Civil War mercenary raiders in Missouri and leading all the way through bootlegging and bankrobbing gangsters of the 1930s. The basic idea is that a member of one gang would spin off to start a new gang, and so on down through the decades, creating a family tree of banditry. Often the reason for spinning off was that the old gang was wiped out either through shootouts or imprisonment. The history it traces includes such household names as Jesse James, Belle Star, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

Well, that's the thesis anyway, but it struck me that that was just an excuse to describe a score of robberies, gunfights, and manhunts in loving, minute detail. For the most part this book reads like an action adventure shoot-em-up which is made all the more arresting for being based in historical fact.

Rating: 5 out of 6 bullets.

Buy this book at amazon.com.