Book Review - Men & Manners

If you define manners as David Coggins does, as “try[ing] to make the lives of people around you easier,” it is no surprise that his recently-released book, Men and Manners is a necessary addition to the niche etiquette market. Americans, and men in particular, are notoriously self-centered and narcissistic. The idea of putting the needs of others ahead of our own may have some valance when it comes to childrearing, but in our day-to-day lives, less so. Indeed, if you have spent any time in a men’s locker room, you also know we tend to be slovenly, unkempt, and show only the faintest interest in aiming for the toilet. Honestly, I wonder sometimes how we, as a species, survive.

Coggins is not the first to ruminate on the finer points of email correspondence, what to do when you forget someone’s name, or the importance of owning more than one set of sheets, but he is well-suited to share his advice on how to be a better man. An author of a prior book on men’s style and a contributor to publications that one might see in the waiting areas of upper crust offices that are clearly his target audience, this is someone who has given some thought to donning a tuxedo and picking up the tab at dinner. 

In brisk chapters on topics like public behavior, travel, and dating, Coggins rat-a-tat-tats through the basics - don’t ghost women you’ve gone out with or wear tracksuits in public (he’s obviously not spent any time in New Jersey), or hog the overhead bin, or wear an open-toed shoe anywhere, basically, other than the beach (feet are a REAL issue for Coggins). On the other hand, do learn a little bit about wine, provide a thoughtful gift when invited to a friend’s home, make friends with the hotel concierge, tip generously, and, if in doubt, overdress rather than underdress. 

So far, so good. And added to these morsels of information are little Q & A’s and essays by what you might think of as subject matter experts. I particularly liked the tips from Ted Harrington, the owner of a stationery print shop, who discussed the increasingly lost art of writing notes on actual paper with your name on it and Jon Birger, who has written about the unintended adverse consequence of there being more women graduating from college than men, resulting in worse behavior by the latter as they understand their relative scarcity for the former as eligible dating partners. Yes ladies, Birger essentially argues you are being punished for the sin of educating yourselves - either you expand your dating pool to include non-college-degreed men or you tolerate shitty behavior. 

All of these tips are well and good, but as I cruised through Manners I kept asking myself who it was written for. Are we simply adding it to the pile of gift options for college graduates and men obtaining their MBAs, JDs, and MDs? The all-thumbs crew who would not know a dust ruffle from a decanter, the former frat bros aimlessly making their way through their 20s swiping on Tinder and zealously avoiding anything approaching responsibility and adulthood? In this way, it felt like Manners is narrowly drawn. The good news is if you live in New York City, Coggins can recommend everything from a good tailor to a liquor store with an extensive wine selection. I am just not sure how that plays in Peoria.

Do not get me wrong, I think there is value in understanding these sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious (but ignored) social rules. Not every part of Manners seems targeted at a Flatiron District rooftop party, but I could not help but wonder what chance there is we will suddenly see a surge of men wearing sport coats on airplanes or a typo-free texting future, much less a rage-less commute to work (though I do agree with Coggins, better to yield to the right when some asshole is riding your ass than lose your life because they are in a bigger hurry than you are). 

For Coggins’s claim that the aim of his book is not to transport you back to a Mad Men era of taking your hat off when you enter a room, the book does have a retrograde vibe to it. Absent is a female perspective and, as best I can tell, the perspective of anyone other than heterosexual men. Which is fine, the book is, after all, directed at male behavior, but in doing so, the worldview is necessarily colored in a certain way while also excluding the voices and opinions of people who might have some thoughts on the subject. These were missed opportunities that could have improved on what is an otherwise entertaining exploration of social graces that includes a lot of good tips for people who do try to make the lives of others easier.

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Book Review - A Colony In A Nation

In 2000, a 21-year-old college student attended the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As he passed through the layers of security to enter the convention hall, about thirty dollars worth of marijuana was discovered in his backpack. Instead of confiscating the drugs and arresting the perpetrator, the police looked the other way, handing the bag (and the drugs) back to the stunned young man. Had Chris Hayes been black and not white, or traveling on I-95 instead of with his future father-in-law (who was a reporter covering the RNC), this story may have turned out differently. 

The thesis of Mr. Hayes’s second book, A Colony in a Nation, is that criminal justice policy, from policing to prosecution, the essential duty of maintaining law and order, is done much differently depending on your zip code and skin color. In the Nation, largely white, middle to upper-middle class, your interactions with the police are at worst a minor annoyance (being pulled over for speeding) but more commonly quite positive, as they quickly respond to any disturbance in your leafy suburban bubble of privilege. For inhabitants of the Colony, darker skinned and poorer, the opposite is true. Each interaction with the police is fraught with literal life and death consequences. 

As a card carrying member of the Nation - a white man educated at elite schools and with meaningful wealth, Hayes may seem like an odd vessel through which to frame our country as one that has elements of apartheid-era South Africa and a vague resemblance to the movie “District 9,” but his roots in social justice movements and his avowedly progressive viewpoint fit neatly with this inequitable view of society. Hayes has seen the tensest standoffs between citizens and police up close and personally and has a clear passion for his subject. 

But for all of Hayes’s insight, braininess, and clear interest in the subject, ACIAN too often felt like a survey course when what I wanted was a graduate-level seminar. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the book feels light. It is short (220 pages) but utilizes generous margins and spacing, giving it the feel of an overlong magazine article and not a full length examination of an important public policy issue. Much of the book is informed by Hayes’s own experiences - both as a child and teen growing up in New York City during (as he calls it) the “Crack Years” and as a journalist who covered the aftermath of high profile police-involved killings. But for someone who embraces rigor and evidence, focusing so much on the anecdotal and not the empirical was surprising. To be sure, there is some discussion of research - Hayes lays out some of the various theories on why crime has dropped so dramatically in our country, ultimately concluding that we don’t have one solid answer, but then skips right past a national spike in murders in 2015 with a quick parenthetical that they took place in a few large cities. Huh? 

Part of this is deciding where you want to focus your attention. It is already well-documented that there is a difference in outcomes for black and brown defendants as compared to white defendants for a variety of crimes and while skin color may play part of a role, so too does economics. Poor white people have no better access to legal representation than poor black or brown people, it is just that the concentration of what we consider “serious” crime is centered in smaller and smaller parts of the country. The irony is that the geographic “colony” continues to shrink, but the psychic area, the one that results in Skip Gates getting accosted at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, black students being harassed by college campus police, or your run-of-the-mill “driving while black” incidents is as large as ever. *That* question, of our basic racial prejudices, whether we are in a high-crime area of an inner city or a sheltered college campus, begs more attention and response. 

As Hayes notes, most crime is intra-racial and if we are most concerned about serious violent crime, we cannot ignore the fact it happens disproportionately in what Hayes calls the “colony.” Where I live, in Mercer County New Jersey, it would take a town like Princeton 20-30 years to match the number of murders that occur in Trenton in just one. Indeed, in any given year, 90 percent or more (sometimes all 100 percent) of murders that occur in Mercer County happen in Trenton. Should we ignore this? In fact, there are a handful of cities in New Jersey that account for almost every murder that occurs in our state. Law enforcement can only do so much - they are reacting to a host of socioeconomic factors that have been in play for decades, yet we expect them to strike a balance between effective policing and not being influenced by race. It is an almost impossible task yet most officers do it.  

While unequal policing, and particularly as it relates to low level, non- violent and other petty offenses, is well documented, the same does not extend to more serious crimes. As a Chicago native, I was surprised Hayes did not focus more of his attention on his home town, as it does, in miniature, reflect many of the achievements and failures of policing. On the one hand, large swaths of the city are safer now than they have been in decades, while small pockets are as dangerous as a war zone. And that is the thing - the dramatic reduction in violent crime since its apex in the late 1980s and early 1990s has shrunk the areas with significant problems considerably, but the concentration in those areas has become even more significant. 

Indeed, part of my problem with books of this ilk that attempt to contextualize policing is that they fail to take into account the other villains in the story - if you want to find near-complete-circle Venn diagrams, study areas of desperate poverty, high unemployment, low graduation rates, and yes, single parent households, you will find high levels of criminal activity as well. This has nothing to do with turning inner cities into some sort of District 9 segregation units, but rather, a broader failing of public policy. As Hayes rightly notes, we ask police to do a great number of other jobs they are ill-suited for, but that is because so many other institutions in society have failed. This in no way excuses the abhorrent treatment black and brown people often face, but at the same time, there are myriad examples of police doing the right thing, of going above and beyond, in service of the communities in which they work. 

There is also a schizophrenic aspect to Hayes’s writing. While he laments the ineffectiveness of internal investigations as a means of bringing rogue cops to heel, he also visits a police training academy to simulate real-world interactions between police and the community. Unsurprisingly, the latter results in Hayes’s appreciation for the difficult, split second decisions police officers have to make (in one simulation, Hayes is “killed” because he fails to see a man approaching him with a shotgun), but the sequencing is backwards in the book. The gee-those-guys-have-a-tough-job insight occurs early on, while the criticism of IA procedures is deep into the book. It also begs the question, what is the right number of officers disciplined for their actions? No one ever seems to have the answer to that, other than to highlight instances of particularly egregious behavior (Eric Garner comes to mind) that should rightly be prosecuted and punished. 

There was also a missed opportunity to highlight public policy that is trying to address some of these root causes. Hayes need only go from Brooklyn to Harlem to see the work of Geoff Canada or consider the expansion of his Harlem Children’s Zone model in communities throughout the country to see what works. A step further and the question of continued funding for such a program (dubbed “Promise Neighborhoods” at the federal level) under the Trump Administration would put the question in sharper relief and challenge policy makers who pay lip service to caring about the “colony” to put their money where their mouth is. And even as the parties squabble in Washington, Governor Cuomo recently announced a $1.4 billion initiative to revitalize areas of Brooklyn that will include increased access to health care, an anti-violence program and other prosocial efforts at community redevelopment. 

Similarly, the sea change that is occurring, literally before our eyes, in criminal justice policy could fill its own book. Juvenile justice reform has been championed in blood red Texas and bail reform just went into effect in deep blue New Jersey that releases most defendants from custody at their initial hearing. These ideas, along with recent shifts toward adopting more of a community policing model, are the green shoots that will one day sprout. For a journalist steeped in policy, it was surprising that these and other locally-led efforts did not merit acknowledgment in ACIAN. 

At the same time, what of the young boys and girls growing up in the “colony” who do not expect to live past 40, have missing family members who are deceased or incarcerated, and are educated in dilapidated schoolhouses by teachers who are doing their best to bail water out of a sinking ship? We could train an army of Officer Friendlys to walk the beat of every street corner in every dangerous neighborhood in America, but without the basic foundations that we think of as middle class life - economic opportunity, access to a good education, and health care - none of this matters. 

Interestingly, the last vignette Hayes shares is of observing a group of African-American teens harassing passers-by in Prospect Park. The needling shifts from annoying to criminal when one of the youths steals a man’s phone as he is pushing a baby stroller. Harmless? Maybe. Petty? Perhaps. But because it is impossible to know whether these youthful indiscretions are just that or nascent signs of a more serious criminal mentality is part of what makes enforcing the law, be it in the “nation” or the “colony” so challenging. 

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Book Review - Future Sex

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Book Review - The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City

The idea of a World’s Fair seems anachronistic today. These events, which showcase things like technology, science, and architecture, seem dated at a time when you can circumnavigate the globe in a day and the Internet can virtually take you to the ends of the earth. It was not always so. The Eifel Tower debuted at Paris’s World Fair in 1889 and the Space Needle in Seattle was unveiled during the 1962 World’s Fair. Erik Larson’s book about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair - The Devil in the White City, is a sort of Dark Side of the Moon of the literary world, sitting on the best seller list for more than a decade.

So it is no surprise that the 1901 World’s Fair held in Buffalo, New York, forever infamous for the assassination of President William McKinley, would get its own treatment. Margaret Creighton’s book, The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City, examines McKinley’s untimely demise along with the sometimes seedy world that emerged in the Queen City for six months at the turn-of-the-century. While the Buffalo World’s Fair is occasionally interesting, Creighton’s book is ultimately not worth the price of admission.

If people think of Buffalo these days, it is likely in connection with its eponymous chicken wings or maybe its long suffering football fans, but 116 years ago, Buffalo mattered in this country. It was one of the ten largest cities in our nation and a major hub for commerce. Town fathers were very keen on replicating the success of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition eight years prior and positioning Buffalo as a place of importance as the country climbed out of recession and emerged into the 20^th century.

Creighton offers a workmanlike account of the planning and implementation of this major event, but ultimately, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The McKinley assassination has been written about numerous times and nothing in Rainbow City sheds any new light on the incident. Part of what made Larson’s book such a phenomenon was his discovery of a lost piece of American history – that a serial killer lived among, and murdered people at, the Chicago World’s Fair – but there are no revelations of the sort here.

McKinley’s shooting and the nearly two week drama that followed before he finally succumbed act as the anchor for Rainbow City but because the story is already well-known, Creighton must lean on thinner material to fill the remainder of her 274 pages. She focuses primarily on several thrill seekers who go over Niagara Falls in wooden barrels (one dies, one survives) and Frank Bostock, the purveyor of an animal and human oddities exhibit who treats his four-legged troupe as poorly as he does Alice Cenda (aka Miss Chiquita), who, at two-feet tall, he bills as the world’s smallest woman. Bostock’s callous treatment of his menagerie (including Jumbo II, an elephant he attempts to electrocute publicly) made me cringe, while his de facto imprisonment of Cenda (keeping her from another performer she would ultimately marry) made me sad.

With enough human (and animal) suffering in the world, I am not particularly interested in reading about its historical antecedents. This extends to the exhibits featuring cultures from other countries (invariably portrayed as wild savages) and an antebellum display with a pro-slavery slant on pre-Civil War plantation life. And in a world where Jackass has lowered the common denominator for what amuses us, it was difficult to muster much interest in people doing a header over a 165-foot waterfall for the sake of public notoriety.  

One bright spot is the story of Mabel Barnes, a twenty-three year-old second grade teacher from Buffalo who kept a meticulous diary of her thirty-three visits to the fair. Barnes can almost be thought of as a blogger from another age (although her journaling took several years to complete) and imagine that had she lived in our time, her exploits would have been plastered all over social media. As a sort of tour guide for the common man, Barnes is more than able and her unabashed joy at the spectacles and sights she sees does lend the book a happy gloss.

Creighton does try to reach for some larger themes – while there is wanton animal cruelty, there are also SPCA workers monitoring the treatment of the animals. Racial attitudes at subsequent expositions were more nuanced and less rose-colored when it came to the treatment of slavery, and women’s suffrage would of course become a cause celebre, resulting in the passage of the 19^th Amendment less than two decades later. McKinley’s assassination sent shockwaves through the nation, but his successor’s advocacy for the environment, dislike of corporate trusts, and his muscular foreign policy were so profoundly influential TR is one of four Presidents honored on Mount Rushmore.

Ultimately, whatever “fall” Buffalo suffered had little to do with its ill-fated World’s Fair. The city continued to prosper for decades after, but began its decline when alternate sea routes opened and steel manufacturers shut down their plants and moved their production to other countries. But for McKinley’s assassination, the entire thing would have been a footnote in history, but as it is, not substantive enough for a book-length treatment.

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Book Review - Table Manners: How To Behave In The Modern World & Why Bother

It was not until the final page of Jeremiah Tower’s Table Manners: How To Behave In the Modern World And Why Bother that the need for this slim, but engaging book on etiquette was necessary. As Tower writes, “The more you think about those around you and the less you think about yourself, the more likely you are to behave well.” As a culture renowned for its self-centeredness and narcissism, and, at least in some quarters, its rudeness, Americans are particularly in need of basic rules of the road when it comes to the simple act of manners. 

Of course, we all understand what manners are, it is why we instinctively ask someone to pass the salt or pepper when it is out of reach (per Tower, whenever either is more than a forearm’s distance and will require you to extend your arm further; if the “passer,” send over both to avoid a second request) or bring a bottle of wine when invited to a friend’s house for dinner (a tradition Tower disfavors based on its simplicity and discomfort it gives the host, who must decide whether to serve, reserve, or discreetly regift at a later date). 

But because manners require that the interests of others be considered before our own, most Americans surely find these rules stilted and prescriptive. What Tower does is provide answers in nice little bite-sized portions, perfect for a culture now hooked on BuzzFeed “listicles” and articles that rarely extend past 500 words (admit it, you’re ready to bail already, right?) Be it dinner parties or nights out on the town, Tower has you covered - from how to graciously exit dull conversation (offer to get the group another round of drinks) to when requesting a doggie bag is appropriate (in all instances other than a formal or business dinner) and he does it all in a tidy 135 pages, most of which are spaced generously and can be read in large chunks without much effort. 

Of particular relevance is the chapter on technology. It is remarkable to think that 10 years ago, smart phones did not exist and today a whole lingua franca, not to mention set of rules have cropped up in their wake, but be it whether to Instagram your food (ok if done quickly and not with offense to others) or take a call at the table (a definite no no), these practical tips are themselves worth the price of admission.

You can imagine Tower is the kind of person whom you would want hosting a dinner party or attending as one of your guests. No, it is not because he knows how to devour an artichoke (leaves pulled off one-by-one and eaten by hand) or that he admonishes against acting like the grammar police in casual conversation (no one cares that you know whether “and I” or “and me” is correct), but because his writing reflects a bit of the raconteur - this is a man who can tell a great story *and* pick the right bottle of wine. His humor is droll and a bit ribald, the type of person who knows how to read a room and its sensibilities while enlivening it without offending. 

We should all aspire to this level of etiquette and civilization, but even if we cannot reach Tower’s level of sophistication, his book is a valuable guide and a recommended addition to your book collection.

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Things I Love - Paris 1919

Almost 100 years ago, world leaders met in France at the end of World War I to negotiate the terms of Germany’s surrender and create a new world order. What occurred over the next few months would not just define the order of the day, but redound decades into the future. Indeed, nearly a century after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, we are still living with those fateful decisions. To understand today’s geopolitical challenges, a book I love, Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919, is indispensable.

The primary fallout from the treaty negotiations is well known. Germany was saddled with the burden of paying massive reparations that crushed its economy and led to the rise of Hitler, sowing the seeds for the next world war the peace conference was set up to avoid. But what MacMillan does so effectively is suss out the rest of the story. While not wreaking the destruction of World War II, the countries carved out of the destruction of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires have been a source of unending trouble from Serbia to Saudi Arabia. 

Huddled in the background were future leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Ho Chi Minh, who would be the heirs to the decisions made by the Western powers. Countries were created out of whole cloth and spheres of influence adopted with little concern or understanding of their long-term ramifications. It would take decades for the British to reap the whirlwind of their Palestine Mandate, the French to fight a war in Algeria, and America to do whatever the fuck we did in Iraq, but all of these events flowed from the choices made during this fateful event.

Bestriding the Paris negotiations was a giant among men - President Woodrow Wilson. Heralded as a great peacemaker and greeted by adoring throngs when he arrived by ship to lead the U.S. delegation he ended up being the final casualty of the war, shriveled and mute less than a year later. Wilson’s decision to send American troops into the mix had given the Allies a decisive advantage but his cunning and cajoling could only take him so far. Wilson was squeezed in a classic pincers movement; his European partners had their own demands that ran counter to his beliefs and the U.S. Congress knee capped his attempt to form the League of Nations. As a final insult to injury, Wilson suffered the stroke that left him limp and lifeless while on an aggressive whistle-stop train tour of America trying to shame the U.S. Senate into approving the League of Nations.

It is a rare book that so aptly captures historical scope - McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, Lukas’s Big Trouble, Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem - but MacMillan’s work is in that league. It is an important book if you want to understand our world even if the events she writes about occurred just shy of a century ago.

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Book Review - Life Reimagined

Like middle children, life’s second act often gets ignored. That window between about 40 and 60 lacks the excitement of youth and young adulthood or the finality of one’s golden years. In Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Life Reimagined: The Science, Art & Opportunity of Midlife we get an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) survey of this often paradoxical phase in our lives. On the one hand, “middle age” is in many ways a sweet spot of life - you are old enough to have learned many of life’s lessons and young enough to apply them, to look around a few corners anticipating blind alleys and avoiding them or directing your focus to the things you love. You are fully formed, or at least mostly so, secure in who you are and what defines you as a person. You may be married or divorced, a parent or childless, but you are at the peak of your earning power and far removed from the Ramen noodle diet you subsisted on in college. On the other hand, the suicide rate has skyrocketed among the middle-aged, divorce rates are ticking up, and research shows that happiness in life is “U” shaped, with the nadir smack dab in the middle sandwiched between peaks at the beginning and end. 

It makes sense. Middle age has both the nostalgia for lost youth and the fear of death, of paths not taken or too late to be started, of the risks we take if we divert from our established path. And this is where Hagerty rolls up her sleeves in an attempt to reframe these years in ways that people can make more enjoyable, more meaningful, and more explicable. Her tone is breezy and conversational, a gal pal who bops in and out of research clinics and first-person stories to weave a tale that focuses on everything from honing your mental acuity to the benefits of close personal friendships. If there is a common theme in Life it is engagement - that as we age, the importance of remaining present in our lives, of not pulling the sheet over our head and tuning out the world, but instead, re-committing ourselves to our own well being, our own growth, and what we can do to make our (personal) world a better place are the strategies we should adopt if we want to flatten that deep trough. 

It is an important subject taken seriously by a reporter who shows her chops, but it is also has the air of so many “first world problems.” Hagerty comes off as a plucky overachiever with a penchant for humble bragging. And that is fine - the book's target audience is surely demographically similar to Hagerty herself - well educated, upper middle class, and with the kind of resources and financial stability to contemplate the existential questions posed by middle age. And while I can certainly relate to this framing, I also found myself wondering how people of lesser means would view this book. Hagerty suffers from inflamed vocal cords but has the ability to seek out the finest medical practitioners to aid in her recovery. She breaks her collarbone in a bike accident along MacArther Boulevard (a tony section of suburban Washington, D.C.) but quickly hires a graduate student to help her with book research, a stenographer to take down interview notes, and a doting husband who tends to her. How many middle or lower income Americans could relate to this? 

An extended story about her brother (who we are reminded at least a half-dozen times is the owner of The Atlantic magazine) aiding in the rescue of journalists kidnapped abroad is meant to show his selflessness but comes off as self-promotion. Hagerty is also unapologetic about walking away from her own volunteer effort when it no longer "felt" right. Points for honesty, but I did cringe at the sentiment. Similarly, in a chapter that examines making changes in middle age, Hagerty uses as an example a woman who holds a Ph.D and has a husband able to support them both on his salary. Surely, that makes her desire for mid-career change less risky, but how realistic is that for most people? It is not to diminish the woman’s decision, it is just to say it is one that is foreclosed (or at least an incredible gamble) for those without that safety net.

Hagerty sprinkles some personal crumbs along the way - her laser focus on career, her later-in-life marriage, and childlessness, but the apple polishing on her own life is far more prevelant. Her great vacation, wonderful dog, and rich and successful brother garner ample page space but there is a part of the story that seems missing. Hagerty hints at this in briefly mentioning turbulence early on in her own marriage, but quickly moves on without further comment. It would have been far more interesting to hear more about those issues than pivoting away from that to how a two-week vacation (again, who among us can afford such a luxury or have an employer who would offer us one?) cemented how much she appreciated her husband.

Further, so much of what Hagerty writes about has the feeling of the exception proving the rule. Her case studies invariably support her thesis but failure is in  short supply. While there are many tales of survival and thriving, of barriers overcome and second chances accepted and rewarded, I worry that some false promise is there too - affluence affords a person a certain cushion against failure that they may not fully appreciate.

The book is told in short bites but is also over long at nearly 400 pages, particularly since a two-page afterword encapsulates much of the book's vibe without the lengthy descriptions of research studies and first-person accounts. In short, be engaged in your life with people you value and who value you, be charitable in meaningful ways, understand your limitations but do not stop challenging yourself, and keep your mind nimble and active to ward off dementia. All well meaning and intentioned, I am just not sure we needed so much book to tell us this.  

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Book Review - The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova’s fascinating new book, The Confidence Game, examines how (and why) people fall for con jobs - be it the proverbial Nigerian prince spamming our email inbox, the mysterious stranger offering us a sure fire way to double our money or the fortune teller who can see our future. Of course, *you* would never fall for it - you are too smart, would get out before it got really bad, or suss out the scam and call the police. What Konnikova details, richly, and in exhaustive detail, is that it is precisely because people have too much faith in their own intelligence, ability to walk away from a bad situation or report things that make the con work. 

Like a wrestler who uses his opponent’s leverage against them, the con man uses our own assuredness, our own desire to trust others, and our need to believe that we are entitled to good things to manipulate us so severely that many victims not only defend the person who steals from them, they often provide the ideas that slit their own financial throat. And when the moment arrives when you realize you have been had, the fear of public shaming stops many people from ever reporting their victimization. Worse still, even after the con artist has been caught, some of their victims will still refuse to believe this person who they trusted could have wronged them. 

How is this done? Konnikova takes us step-by-step through the process, from the moment a grifter sizes up his prey (“mark”) through other steps like the “play” (gaining the mark’s trust) the “rope” (the pitch a grifter uses to lure his victim) and the “tale” (the inflection point when the mark has internalized the story) all the way to the “blow off” when a con man disappears into the ether with his mark either none the wiser or reluctant to admit they have been had. At each point, like an expert puppeteer, the con man pulls at the dupe’s emotional strings, leading him down a path that will lead to his (voluntary) ruin. 

The tales in The Confidence Game have an accident-in-slow-motion quality. There is the story of the Wall Street investment banker who walks into a fortune teller’s office while nursing a bad break up and, little by little, sees her life’s savings evaporate and her life completely upended. The lonely heart 60something college professor who strikes up an online romance with a 20something European bikini model who ends up being arrested in South America after he picks up a piece of what he thinks is her luggage and turns out to have several kilos of cocaine in it. Willful blindness? A lack of credulity? Sure, both, to a certain extent, but these and other stories just underscore the insidious ability of a con artist to ingratiate themselves into our lives when we are at our most vulnerable - when emotion trumps logic and we are susceptible to suggestion that a simple solution can bring order to chaos or a long-overdue reward is finally ours. 

The true danger in confidence games is that they work because they rely, at their core, in very basic beliefs we all share - in the trustworthiness and goodness of others, in our own inherent right to happiness, and our innate ability to see right from wrong. The closest analogy I could think of to those who have been conned is to the experience of falling in love - both require a massive leap of faith where we place our trust, total and complete, in another person, and when it fails, the fall out is devastating, yet we often do not see the end coming or understand how it happened. And that is what makes the con so alluring and so dangerous. Who does not want to feel good or happy or rich or wanted? Who does not want to be told that if you just suspend logic and reason easy money, a beautiful woman, or a priceless painting can be yours. Satisfying these basic needs can lead the smartest, most rational people to make incredibly foolish mistakes.

Finally, a word about Konnikova. She is a master story teller. The Confidence Game is the natural companion to her prior work, Mastermind, which used the stories of Sherlock Holmes to examine how the rational mind solves mysteries. If the latter is about the head, the former is about the heart, and together, these two books provide deep insight into what makes us tick. The Confidence Game will not fill you with pride in your fellow man (or woman). Over and over, the reader is slapped in the face with the fact that people can be truly despicable. And don’t get me wrong, I am a cynic by nature, but the sociopathic behavior of the con artists Konnikova spotlights even made *me* depressed.  

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Book Review - F*ck Feelings

Despite its provocative title, F*ck Feelings is a common sense, if somewhat contrarian self-help book written by Dr. Michael Bennett and his daughter Sarah (pseudonyms, we are told, and about which more later).

F*ck Feelings’s central conceit is that life is hard and a struggle to be managed, not a problem to be solved. The authors cast a skeptical eye that therapy can provide complete answers, but rather, should offer its patients coping skills and techniques to address their underlying issues – be those dicey familial relationships, difficulties at work, broken hearts, or just plain old capital “A” assholes we all have to deal with in our everyday lives. The book moves at a steady clip through a variety of topics while illustrating challenges through scenarios described by patients. I found some of these too pat – the women dating guys who deal drugs or the parents whose children refuse to leave the roost; however, they were useful in acting as a jumping off point for the authors to, as they put it, hope for but cannot have, what we can legitimately expect, and how to use move forward knowing this information.

If most self-help gurus pitch people on a better tomorrow if they simply change their habits or meditate or convince themselves of their own badassery, learn how to love themselves, or unclutter their homes, Dr. Bennett and Ms. Bennett encourage you to trim your sails and accept that life will deal you many harsh blows, often for no good reason and that self-improvement is certainly a goal one should aspire to, even if the benefits are temporary while the underlying problems are permanent. This is sound advice and whether it requires tip toeing around a toxic co-worker or objectively analyzing the behavior of a friend when you are in need, sweeping aside the magical unicorn thinking in favor of making emotion-free decisions about your course of action is refreshing (in the former, avoid engaging if at all possible, in the latter, cutting bait if it is clear the person is not capable of being there for you).

And if this sounds limiting to some, I found it realistic. The authors honor the fact that some people simply struggle more than others and encourage readers to reward (and applaud) themselves for getting through days or weeks of depressive fog even it means simply showing up to life and doing the bare minimum to get through the day. For others who cannot reconcile with difficult parents, get spouses to take co-ownership of their marriages, or seem to get through to a jerky boss, the authors encourage realism – people will not change simply because you want them to and pointing out a boss’s failings is likely to lead to defensiveness, not support. In other words, instead of tilting at these windmills, F*ck Feelings encourages the tactical retreat and the power of keeping your mouth shut.

My one complaint has to do with authors’ use of pseudonyms. While I understand the interest in confidentiality, the inability to verify is troubling. Of course, one assumes Simon & Schuster vetted the authors Bennett before signing them to a contract, but still, the reader’s inability to make their own judgment is a small black mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

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Book Review - The Wilderness

While flipping through McKay Coppins’s book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House it is easy to close your eyes and envision what the GOP’s Presidential nominating contest could have looked like: a telegenic young Florida Senator who had championed immigration reform debating with an ardent libertarian who supports privacy rights over foreign wars, a bilingual elder statesman lobbying for education reform and big tent conservatism squaring off against an Indian-American Governor of a blood-red state, a silver-tongued double Ivy graduate and former Supreme Court clerk voicing the frustrations of an electorate fed up with the Washington establishment dueling with a former tech CEO who was once one of the leading female executives in the country. 

That debate, a relatively sober, yet sharp conversation about the future of our country, how our money is spent, where we deploy our troops, how we help those in need and what we do about those in our country illegally would have elevated the discourse in a party that has lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections, but sadly, it was not meant to be. A tsunami of bile and invective spewed from the mouth of an all-id billionaire named Donald Trump consumed every molecule of oxygen available for months on end, leaving the best laid plans of party leaders in ruins and a reality TV star at the head of an army of discontented voters clamoring for high walls to keep out Mexicans, a ban on Muslims entering the country, and a visceral disdain for anything that vaguely smelled of the dreaded “establishment.” 

Surely, when Coppins signed a contract with Little, Brown in June 2013 to examine how the Republican party would attempt to reclaim the White House in 2016, neither he nor they foresaw Trump’s rise. After all, the GOP was just 8 months removed from getting its clock cleaned in the 2012 election, 3 months past the issuance of a report by a a blue ribbon panel of party elders that concluded Republicans needed to do more to attract the votes of African-Americans, Hispanics, and women, and President Obama had seemingly vanquished Trump from public life with a withering takedown at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. Against this backdrop, it certainly made sense for the writer to spend time with people like Bobby Jindal, who had noted that the GOP needed to stop being the “stupid” party, Paul Ryan, who emerged unscathed from the smoldering ruin of the Romney campaign, and Rand Paul, who TIME Magazine dubbed “the most interesting man in politics” in October 2014. 

Coppins’s research and effort is on display throughout his book, it just turned out to be largely beside the point. We get the deep dive into biographical minutiae like the exorcism Jindal participated in, Paul’s bizarre “Aqua Buddha” incident from college, the oppo research on Rubio that was never released (but that Coppins eagerly does), and Jeb Bush’s transformation from entitled rich boy to humbled public servant (eye roll). While the breadth of Coppins’s research is admirable (poor guy fished out Jindal’s Oxford thesis that supported a health care plan that looks suspiciously like Obamacare) his word choice suggests a penchant for playing favorites. Marco Rubio is described as having “unparalleled skill” as a communicator (debatable) while Paul Ryan is “genial” and “good natured.” Coppins seems particularly taken with the now House Speaker. He goes on for several chapters lauding Ryan’s  listening tour to learn about how ex-offenders and drug addicts access treatment in the community while giving a one paragraph blow off to the fact that the budgets and tax policies Ryan supported after this little policy jag bore no resemblance to the needs of these men and women. 

While it is understandable that some characters may be more compelling (or likable than others), I was more troubled by the absence of attribution throughout much of the book. The sourcing stems from Coppins’s interviews with the candidates or those around them reconstructed or summarized except where quotations are used; however, the book has no endnotes or footnotes and the sources are rarely identified by name, leaving the book with an impressionistic feel that permits thumb-on-the-scale descriptions by the author that poo poohs Ron Paul as a “kooky gadfly” but Jeb Bush as a sober elder statesman. It is this type of Acela Corridor thinking that created a blind spot in the media’s collective reporting on the GOP, dismissed Trump and refused to concede he had kneecapped Bush with a few strategic insults.  

Moreover, the book makes a few declarative statements that are at best misleading and at worst, flat wrong. A discussion of the government shutdown describes the fall-out as the government’s inability to pay its bills, which is not technically true; rather, it results in employees not being able to go to work. At another point, Coppins claims that Ryan was “a few hundred thousand swing state votes” from being elected Vice President. This is not only demonstrably false, but the predicate before it, of Ryan’s feeling self-conscious while visiting a church that helps those in need, is a perfect illustration of the attribution failure described above. Lastly, because the book had a delivery due date, it already feels outdated. Cruz, who has rocketed to second place to Trump and who none other than Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman has identified as the likely Republican nominee, is referred to as a “footnote” by Coppins and Governor Chris Christie, languishing in the polls when The Wilderness went to print, is now surging in New Hampshire. 

Ultimately, the main failing of Coppins’s book is the same one that has bedeviled the Republican party and the Beltway cognoscenti - their collective failure to anticipate Trump’s meteoric rise fueled by the deep antipathy many in the GOP feel toward their own leaders. To be sure, there were hints along the way that Coppins highlights - Cruz’s kamikaze government shutdown effort, Dave Brat’s out-of-nowhere takedown of Eric Cantor, even Trump’s appearance at an Iowa “cattle call” in early 2015 where he flatly stated the party could not nominate another member of the Bush family - but instead of focusing on these clues, much of the book lingers on also rans who never made an impact on the race. Bobby Jindal is portrayed as both a serious man of faith and one who blithely jettisoned his reputation for wonkishness when it was clear his message was not selling with the base. Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian tinged Republicanism is shaded in the Oedipal struggle he felt with his father, but ultimately, the “libertarian moment” that the pundit class keeps claiming is going to happen when a Paul family member runs for President never materialized. 

In this way, The Wilderness offers an interesting examination of a political party that does not actually exist while maintaining a blinkered view of what caused Trump’s rise. Indeed, but for a single chapter that probes into the darker recesses of right-wing thought and a couple of paragraphs at the end of the book that spotlight this phenomenon, The Wilderness is surprisingly light on what seems an axiomatic idea - that whatever humility Republicans felt after Obama’s re-election receded when the party suffered no political consequences for the 2013 government shutdown and gained seats in the 2014 Congressional elections. These results, coupled with the party’s massive gains at the state level during Obama’s time in the White House and the fall of both John Boehner and Eric Cantor, the top two Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, emboldened the right wing, not cowed it. While most GOP candidates for President were busy running the same establishment playbook, Trump upended the conventional wisdom and swooped into the chasm that exists between the most ardent Republican voters in the hinterlands and the party’s leadership in Washington. A book that told that story would have been a worthy addition to the nascent canon of 2016 reporting.

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Book Review - One Man Against The World

On April 17, 1973, FBI agents arrived at a private residence in Washington, D.C. to serve a subpoena. It was the kind of thing FBI agents have done thousands of times, but on that day, the residence they drove to was at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the subpoena they served was on the police officers who patrol the White House, demanding the names of visitors to the President's home on June 18, 1972. As chronicled in Tim Weiner's excellent new book, One Man Against The World, upon learning of the FBI's visit, the President had this remarkable exchange with his closest aide, H.R. Haldeman:

Nixon: I need somebody around here as counsel.

Haldeman: And Attorney General.

Nixon: I need a Director of the FBI.

Just months into his second term but well into a series of decisions that would ultimately force him from office, the Washington, D.C. that Nixon bestrode was crumbling around him. Weiner's depiction of Nixon's Presidency is a car crash in slow motion, a steady drip-drip of unwise choices, venality, and bald criminal conduct by the man who held the most powerful job on the planet and a cadre of willing staffers who engaged in everything from bribery to evidence tampering in an effort to hide their illegal activity. 

Nixon's conversation with Haldeman is of a piece with his attitude toward most of the government. He cared little about who he appointed to head Cabinet agencies, shuffling people around willy nilly. One "acting" FBI Director, William Ruckelhaus, served in that position for a whole 59 days before being appointed as Deputy Attorney General, the number two position within the Department of Justice and James Schlesinger had a cup of coffee as CIA Director (five months) before being appointed Secretary of Defense. Even those who appeared to have power, like Secretary of State William Rogers, were systematically cut out of the most sensitive and important decisions as Nixon consolidated power within the sprawling federal bureaucracy in the hands of just a few trusted aides. 

In page after page we see Nixon's internal struggle to elevate himself to greatness while lowering himself to achieve that goal. Indeed, even before he was elected, Nixon's penchant for underhanded behavior revealed itself. As Weiner argues, Nixon flirted with treason as he back channeled the South Vietnamese while still merely a candidate for President, encouraging them to walk away from negotiations and tacitly promising a better deal if he were elected. And once elected, Nixon took for himself and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger the job of ending the Vietnam War, and, more broadly, redefining our role in the world. But in doing so, Nixon usurped the traditional balancing of powers among the three branches of government and ran roughshod over elements of the federal government who could have provided valuable advice. 

Vietnam would consume all of Nixon's first term as he toggled between escalation and strategic withdrawal while pressure from anti-war activists and some members of Congress grew. And in Nixon's paranoia and obsession with secrecy, the seeds of what would become Watergate were sown. All of the things we now associate with Watergate - break-ins, secret recordings, and lying to the public, began well before that fateful evening in June 1972. Weiner mines what is now an extensive public record to lay bare the scope of Nixon's deception - falsifying flight records to cover up the bombing in Laos, forming the "Plumbers" unit to ferret out embarrassing leaks to the media, the warrantless wiretapping of National Security Council aides and reporters and on and on. In his obsession with his own place in history, Nixon never seemed to know when to drop the shovel and stop digging.

In reading Weiner's account, it is difficult to credit Nixon for grand strategic thinking whether it is in his opening with China or detente with the Soviets. Both were done in the service of trying to find an honorable end to the Vietnam War but both failed. Nixon's recognition of the People's Republic had great symbolic value, but it would be another generation before that country would fully re-enter the world stage. As Weiner notes, even as Nixon negotiated an arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, the United States was engaging in the greatest escalation of its nuclear firepower on record. In the Middle East, Nixon ignored warnings of an impending war, was caught flat footed (and half in the bag) when the Yom Kippur War started, and was unprepared for the oil embargo unleashed in its aftermath. 

The tacit parallel woven throughout the book is Nixon's strategy in Vietnam and in Watergate - continued escalation to break the will of the enemy. In Vietnam,  this strategy "succeeded" insofar as the final push to settle occurred after the Dresden-like bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong weeks after Nixon's re-election, but the ratcheting up of Watergate, from paying hush money to suborning perjury to the Saturday Night Massacre of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, and Special Prosecutor, had the opposite effect - it steeled the opposition and lost him the scattering of supporters who may have found the idea of removing the President from office a dangerous precedent. 

The subtext to Weiner's book is "The Tragedy of Richard Nixon," but I find that conclusion a bit facile. While he surely saw a larger diplomatic picture when it came to opening relations with China, his entreaties to the Soviet Union were of limited success and ultimately, neither country did the one thing that Nixon craved - helping end the war in Vietnam. Further, the scope of Nixon's mendacity was so deep and unremitting that it is impossible to think of his fall as anything but well deserved. Over and over, as Weiner highlights, Nixon had the opportunity to come clean on Watergate and instead doubled down on falsehoods and lies.  

In the balance, Nixon's "great man" theory of governing that placed him at the center of a constellation of competing interests and powers was delusional at best and criminal at worst. He believed in total warfare against all his enemies, which is fine so long as you are swinging the biggest stick, but when fear is the only tool at your disposal, your power is utterly diminished once the opposition decides to fight back. His behavior was abhorrent to the rule of law, he cavalierly used the gears of government in the service of destroying his political opponents, and sullied the highest office in the land. That behavior is many things, but tragedy is not one of them. 

But for all the sturm und drang that Watergate created, the real tragedy is how little it impacted the body politic. The President and his men got off relatively easily. Sure, Nixon had to resign his office, but as an unnamed co-conspirator, he was in real legal jeopardy until President Ford issued a blanket pardon. His aides got off with the legal equivalent of slaps on the wrist - Haldeman and Ehrlichman each served eighteen months in prison, while John Dean served just four. Other key figures also served mere months in prison, in the case of two, Egil Krogh and Herb Kalmbach, they had their licenses to practice law restored when it was all over, and most of the people who actually carried out the burglary at the Watergate went to prison for less than two years (the exceptions being E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, though the latter made out quite well for himself in a second act as a conservative radio talk show host). 

Indeed, it is arguable that the modest punishment these men received encouraged subsequent administrations to thumb their nose at the law. The Reagan Administration illegally sold arms to the Iranians and diverted those funds to pay rebels in Nicaragua, but the President skirted justice and those involved in that illegal conduct received Presidential pardons or had their convictions tossed on technicalities. George W. Bush's Administration flagrantly violated laws on torture, manufactured a casus belli for war in Iraq and flouted the Fourth Amendment by authorizing warrantless wiretapping, but no one was ever called to account for that conduct. Instead of prosecuting the men and women involved in these activities, they have basically been shrugged off as policy discrepancies. While there was much hand wringing as Watergate unfolded that failing to prosecute those who perpetrated that crime would subvert the rule of law, the actions of succeeding administrations did just that.

Ironically, Nixon has received a bit of a revisionist gloss thanks to loyal aides like Pat Buchanan and others who focus on Nixon's foreign policy achievements and sage (but discreet) counsel to his successors as evidence of his greatness; that Watergate, like Johnson's escalation in Vietnam, should be viewed as a flaw in his record, not a condemnation of it (or of the man himself). "Nixon Goes to China" is now shorthand for a counter-intuitive, but bold move by a politician, and Watergate itself is now viewed as mere skullduggery and not part of a pattern of illegal conduct that began well before the break-in. That is tragic. 

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