I picked up Chelsea Manning’s new book README.txt: A Memoir at the library on a whim, and I’m glad I did, as I've found it a thoroughly enjoyable read. You probably know the basics of her story: while still living as a male in 2010, she used her position as an intelligence analyst in the US Army to download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic and military documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which she then shared with the world. She was caught, charged and convicted to 35 years in prison. At the beginning of her sentence, she came out as transgender and fought to be allowed to transition. In 2017, President Obama commuted her sentence.
With stolen documents and potential exposed secrets in the news, and as someone with a transgender granddaughter, the book called out to me.
She’s a good writer, and her account of her life before all this happened is engaging, especially as it intersects with some of the historical events of her youth. She grew up in Crescent, a small town just north of Oklahoma City, where she and her older sister had to deal with parents who drank, and a father who could be violent. She describes their politics, such as they were, as a sort of conservative libertarianism, suspicious of government, and her description of the roots of their thinking seemed to paint a direct line to the dangerous and deluded anti-government MAGA crowd of today:
What really bothered him, and a lot of people like him...was that the government had killed people, including women and children, in Waco, Texas, during their botched intervention there in 1993, when I was six. The words Waco, David Koresh, Janet Reno, and ATF left most of us with a bitter taste. Our community shared a pervasive fear of the feds coming in again and interfering in our lives, taking away our firearms, going from house to house and forcing a new way of life on conservative, working-class people. I don’t think people who are not from that part of the world understand just what a formative event the stand-off at Waco was, or that it still feels like recent, urgent history to many.
The following year, when she was seven, she heard a loud boom outside. It was the explosion, thirty miles away, of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, where rightwing terrorist Timothy McVeigh had set off an explosive mix of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other chemicals in a rented Ryder truck. 168 people died, including women and 19 children. Manning learned at a young age that violence could be random and could come from many sources.
She writes a lot about grappling with her sexuality in her childhood, sneaking into her older sister’s room to try makeup and clothing. In her early teens, she would steal makeup and women's clothing from local stores, bring them home to try them on, and then throw it all away to avoid getting caught. She was a computer geek and was soon engaging in the online chatrooms of AOL and elsewhere on the budding internet, where she was able to explore her sexuality more freely.
She was a short and slight young man. Her father was derisive of her for not being manly enough. She was teased in school, and once nearly expelled from school, as ‘homosexual sex’ was still a criminal offense in Oklahoma, and the rumors about her caused school officials to investigate.
But she was also tough. After high school she took off for Chicago to get away from her family, and there went through a bout of homelessness. Her exploring as a male of the gay scene there resulted in instances of trading sex for money or shelter, and of drug use. She managed to pull herself out of that situation through the help of an aunt in the Washington DC area, who took her in and helped her start attending college. But despite her considerable computer skills even at that age, she was struggling to find a career. The military ultimately seemed the answer, with a side benefit of a temporary rapprochement with her father, who was supportive of his ‘son’s’ efforts to man up and pull his life together.
Her success in the military led her (though still outwardly a him, and constrained by the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy of the era) to her position in Iraq as an intelligence analyst. It was there that she became increasingly angered and disillusioned by what she saw: a United States policy that had little to do with helping the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, and everything to do with trying to make it look like we were ‘winning.’ She once asked a press officer about the seemingly random way things were classified and declassified:
His reply—an honest, succinct one—has lingered in my mind: the classification system exists wholly in the interests of the US government, so if it’s in the interest of public affairs to declassify anything, we will. In other words, he seemed to say, the classification system doesn’t exist to keep secrets safe, it exists to control the media. I realized that not only did I not think this stuff needed to be secret, neither did the higher-ups, at least not when it suited them. In that instant, I began to consider whether the public deserved to have the same information that I did.
She came to believe that if the public could only see the truth about what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, it could make a huge difference in US policy.
All the stories in the book are told well: how she downloaded the documents and smuggled them back to the US; her race against a deadline to upload them using a Barnes & Noble free internet (and I can personally attest from my days working for B&N how slow and spotty the connection is!) before her flight back to Iraq; her trial and imprisonment; and her coming to grips with her identity as a woman and her journey to fulfill that truth.
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I wasn’t able to get an advance copy in time of one of today’s new books listed below: Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge, by Ted Conover, but I’m looking forward to reading it. He tells the stories of the various types of off-grid people who live in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, where the land is cheap and available if five acre lots. My very own father bought one of those lots back in the Seventies after seeing an ad for five acre ‘ranchettes’ in the TV Guide, of all places. I tried to visit the land in the late 1970s during one of my cross-country Greyhound adventures. Following an uneventful night in a San Luis jail cell and another night in a Fort Garland motel, I walked to the real estate office in Blanca...but it was closed. Alas, my mother sold the land in the 1990s, for pretty much the same price they paid in the 1970s, so I won’t be joining the off-gridders myself. I already own a copy of Secrets of the Mysterious Valley, by Christopher O'Brien, which relates an even wackier side of the San Luis Valley: “UFOs, ghosts, crypto-creatures, cattle mutilations, skinwalkers and sorcerers, along with portal areas, secret underground bases and covert military activity.”
My current promo at The Literate Lizard Online is SCARY/EVEN SCARIER, featuring 13 new horror titles for your Halloween scares, and 13 recent books on US politics and history for the even scarier election. All 26 books are 20% off through Election Day. I most likely will not post a diary on Election Night; our attention will be elsewhere!
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In publishing news, a federal judge blocked Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster, arguing that the combination of the two book business giants would illegally reduce competition.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation, by David Rothkopf. Each federal employee takes an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic," but none had imagined that enemy might be the Commander-in-Chief. With the presidency of Donald Trump, a fault line between the president and vital forces within his government was established. Those who honored their oath of office, their obligation to the Constitution, were wary of the president and they in turn were not trusted and occasionally fired and replaced with loyalists.
American Resistance is the first book to chronicle the unprecedented role so many in the government were forced to play and the consequences of their actions during the Trump administration.
- Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge, by Ted Conover. In May 2017, Ted Conover went to Colorado to explore firsthand a rural way of life that is about living cheaply, on your own land—and keeping clear of the mainstream. The failed subdivisions of the enormous San Luis Valley make this possible. Five-acre lots on the high prairie can be had for five thousand dollars, sometimes less. He encountered an unexpected diversity: veterans with PTSD, families homeschooling, addicts young and old, gay people, people of color, lovers of guns and marijuana, people with social anxiety—most of them spurning charity and aiming, and sometimes failing, to be self-sufficient. And more than a few predicting they’ll be the last ones standing when society collapses.
- Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants, by James Vincent. From the cubit to the kilogram, the humble inch to the speed of light, measurement is a powerful tool that humans invented to make sense of the world. In this revelatory work of science and social history, James Vincent dives into its hidden world, taking readers from ancient Egypt, where measuring the annual depth of the Nile was an essential task, to the intellectual origins of the metric system in the French Revolution, and from the surprisingly animated rivalry between metric and imperial, to our current age of the “quantified self.” At every turn, Vincent is keenly attuned to the political consequences of measurement, exploring how it has also been used as a tool for oppression and control.
- The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America, by H. W. Brands. The author follows the lives of General William Tecumseh Sherman and Apache war leader Geronimo to tell the story of the Indian Wars and the final fight for control of the American continent.
- The Island of Extraordinary Captives: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin. The remarkable untold story of a Jewish orphan who fled Nazi Germany for London, only to be arrested there by the British government and sent to an internment camp for suspected foreign agents on the Isle of Man, alongside a renowned group of refugee musicians, intellectuals, artists, and—possibly—genuine spies.
- The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth, by Jeremy Rifkin. Future generations, suggests Rifkin, will likely experience existence less as objects and structures and more as patterns and processes and come to understand that each of us is literally an ecosystem made up of the microorganisms and elements that comprise the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. The autonomous self of the Age of Progress is giving way to the ecological self of the Age of Resilience. The now worn scientific method that underwrote the Age of Progress is also falling by the wayside, making room for a new approach to science called Complex Adaptive Systems modeling. Likewise, detached reason is losing cachet while empathy and biophilia become the norm.
- The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World, by Malcolm Gaskill. A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology.
- Our Red Book: Intimate Histories of Periods, Growing & Changing, edited by Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. A people’s history of menstruation, told through an array of perspectives and identities that span the globe. Gathered over twenty years, the collection takes stock of our shifting relationships to family, cultural inheritance, gender, aging, and liberation.
- The Philosophy of Modern Song, by Bob Dylan. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny.
- Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, by Bono. As one of the music world’s most iconic artists and the cofounder of the organizations ONE and (RED), Bono’s career has been written about extensively. But in Surrender, it’s Bono who picks up the pen, writing for the first time about his remarkable life and those he has shared it with. In his unique voice, Bono takes us from his early days growing up in Dublin, including the sudden loss of his mother when he was fourteen, to U2’s unlikely journey to become one of the world’s most influential rock bands, to his more than twenty years of activism dedicated to the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. Writing with candor, self-reflection, and humor, Bono opens the aperture on his life—and the family, friends, and faith that have sustained, challenged, and shaped him.
- Mr. B: George Balanchine's 20th Century, by Jennifer Homans. After last week’s bio of Martha Graham, we have this first major biography of George Balanchine. His radical approach to choreography—and life—reinvented the art of ballet and made him a legend.
- Cinema Speculation, by Quentin Tarantino. In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. At once film criticism, film theory, a feat of reporting, and wonderful personal history, it is all written in the singular voice recognizable immediately as QT’s and with the rare perspective about cinema possible only from one of the greatest practitioners of the artform ever.
- Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night, by Jerry Saltz. Chronicling a period punctuated by dramatic turning points—from the cultural reset of 9/11 to the rolling social crises of today—Saltz traces how visionary artists have both documented and challenged the culture. Art Is Life offers Saltz’s eye-opening appraisals of trailblazers like Kara Walker, David Wojnarowicz, Hilma af Klint, and Jasper Johns; provocateurs like Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Marina Abramović; and visionaries like Jackson Pollock, Bill Traylor, and Willem de Kooning. Saltz celebrates landmarks like the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, writes searchingly about disturbing moments such as the Ankara gallery assassination, and offers surprising takes on figures from Thomas Kinkade to Kim Kardashian.
- Two artist biographies: The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World, by Paul Fisher. A bold new biography of legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. John Constable: A Portrait, by James Hamilton. A fresh and lively biography of the revolutionary landscape painter John Constable, who captured the landscapes and skies of southern England in a way never before seen on canvas.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
