Books Reading Tonight
posted by on August 11 at 10:12 AM
One open mic and two readings tonight.
Out at Elliott Bay Book Company, Sadia Shepard reads from The Girl from Foreign, which is a book about Shepard’s discovery that her devout Muslim grandmother was originally a Jew.
Up at the University Book Store, Thomas Frank is reading. Frank wrote What’s the Matter With Kansas?, which is a book whose title always angered me. I was working in a bookstore when it came out, and I recall dozens of tourists from red states who would see the book and storm off in a huff. Granted, there is a certain pleasure in annoying tourists from square states, but the fact that that book became a bestseller in the wake of the 2004 election only added to the “those blue state liberals have their heads so far up their asses that they think there’s a problem with us” vibe. Anyway, Frank’s in town with his new book, The Wrecking Crew, which is a study of exactly how fucked up Washington D.C. is, and how the bloated government we have now is the antithesis of what the conservative revolution was supposed to be. Despite my problem with the earlier title cashing in on America’s divisiveness, this is obviously the reading of the night.
The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here.
Book punditry always seems especially odious in election years. The ideas they present always seem opportunistic, pointless, and guaranteed obsolete within 6 months (or, in some cases, 6 days).
Andrew Gelman, one of the premier statisticians of the day, has a book coming out soon that debunks a lot of Thomas Franks's book. Check it out.
The problem always was with those rural idiots, Paul. Still is.
On a side note, I'm beginning to lose sympathy for the many, many crosses you had to bear while working in retail.
The real problem with that book was that he never answered the question what is the matter with Kansas? That is, he never really came up with a good answer for why they vote the way they do. The entire book was sort of an exercise in bemused head shaking: What is up with these yahoos?
George Lakoff does a much better job of answering that question in his work, especially Don't Think of an Elephant.
A good review of Frank's book (and one that challenges his basic assumptions) is in the current New Yorker. Click here.
Paul, I understand being annoyed at the title, but 1)it's a specific historical reference to an article decrying the populist rebellion taking place in kansas 2)anyone who bothered to crack the book would find that Frank, a Kansan himself, has nothing but affection for the people of his home state.
exelizabeth: did you read the same book? I can tell you frank's thesis in a sentence: Kansans vote republican because a bogus class-encoded culture war narrative has displaced substantive discussion of economics, and this was enabled by the democrats moving away from their traditional platform of economic populism.
@6: That and the Civil Rights Act.
Comments Closed
Comments are closed on this post.