Dracula by Bram Stoker

Life is nothings; I heed him not.  But to fail here, is not mere life or death.  It is that we become as him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him--without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best.  To us for ever are the gates of heaven shut; for who shall open them to us again?  We go on for all time abhorred by all; a blot on the face of God's sunshine; an arrow in the side of Him who died for man.  But we are face to face with duty; and in such case must we shrink?  For me, I say, no; but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music, and his love, lie far behind.  You others are young.  Some have seen sorrow; but there are fair days yet in store.  What say you?

It is easy enough to give Bram Stoker credit for establishing the way we think about vampires.  Really, Dracula is the vampire, the unquestionable model for every cheap costume and bad CW show today.  But the early film adaptations, like F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, have as much to do with that conception as Stoker's novel, and the Dracula of Dracula is at times unrecognizable.  For every detail that Stoker popularized--a vampire's ability, for example, to turn into a bat, his lack of a reflection, or aversion to crucifixes and garlic--there's an aspect that has been forgotten, like Dracula's bestial hairiness, or his ability to climb down a wall like a lizard.  Stoker's Dracula walks around freely during the day--but he doesn't do any sparkling of note.

The first part of Dracula is a lot of fun.  Jonathan Harker, tasked with traveling to the Count's remote Transylvanian castle to oversee the sale of some English property, becomes the Count's prisoner.  He is almost eaten by Dracula's sexually aggressive wives; he discovers the Count sleeping in a coffin filled with dirt; he escapes but with a fair amount of psychological trauma.  The second part, in which Harker and a group of others, including his wife Mina and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, try to prevent Dracula from setting down roots in England, is regrettably more tedious.  The Count is mostly absent, save for one memorable scene in which he forces Mina to drink his own blood out of his chest wound (establishing a psychic connection between them, naturally).  The plot is mostly concerned with locating and destroying the boxes of Translyvanian earth the Count has brought with him, and where he must sleep.

There's a wearying earnestness to these chapters--which really pound in the goodness and sacrifice of the cadre of heroes--that belies the essential weirdness of the Dracula figure.  Dracula works best when the weirdness punctuates the stodgy heroism, like the half-mad foreign-y ramblings of Dr. Helsing, or scenes with totally mad Renfield, who helps to fulfill Dracula's nefarious schemes from inside a mental asylum, and eats a lot of bugs.

One thing I didn't expect from Dracula was its extreme conservativeness.  As a story of an Eastern European ruler trying to set up shop in England, it's a parable of the threat of foreign invasion.  (It's never clear to me why Dracula, who has difficulty passing over running water, would even want to travel to England instead of merely feasting on the blood of continental Europe.)  Vampirism becomes a stand-in both for the terrors of homosexuality and female sexuality.  Here's how the darling, chaste Lucy Westenra is described when she becomes the Undead:

My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as we recognized the features of Lucy Westenra.  Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed.  The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.  Van Helsing stepped out, and, obedient to his gesture, we all advanced too; the four of us ranged in a line before the door of the tomb.  Van Helsing raised his lantern and drew the slide; by the concentrated light that fell on Lucy's face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chin and stained the purity of her lawn death-robe.

In that short passage, Stoker uses the word "purity" twice to describe Lucy's former state, and emphasizes with the white robe which is daubed with blood--I don't think I'm reading too much into it to see in this description a loss of virginity, especially with her "voluptuous wantonness."  To make matters worse, Lucy's taken to preying on young children.

Much of the novel's tedious second half is concerned with protecting Mina, who is Dracula's next chosen victim (he works on one person at a time, apparently, not converting them until all of their blood is drained), and whose "purity" is threatened in turn.  Mina, of course, has no place in the heroes' schemes besides that of a talisman to be protected, and the final scene in which Dracula is defeated is described in her diary as she watches from hundreds of feet away.

Besides relegating its principal female character to the sidelines, this is a peculiar and anti-climactic way to end the novel.  We've been wanting to see Dracula again for a hundred pages or so, and the final "battle"--such as it is--is described at a safe remove which lacks intimacy and immediacy.  It's typical of Dracula, which I liked quite a bit, but wanted to like a lot more.

No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous by Trav S. D.

I love Vaudeville.

Not that I love every goofy, borscht belt joke or watch the 3 Stooges on a loop (I swear!), but there’s something so strange and appealing about the scene, Hollywood before Hollywood was a thing, a massive cultural phenomenon that, aside from the filmed work of some of it’s bigger stars, has been largely forgotten by the public.

Trav S. D., who apparently runs a modern Vaudeville revue of some sort, gives the whole movement a popular history that anyone could enjoy. Thoroughly sourced and pithily written, Trav spends time with not only the most well-known stars of the Vaudeville stage, such as the Stooges, the Marx Brothers, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and Buster Keaton, but he also turns his eye to lesser performers--sword swallowers, contortionists, freaks, weirdos and lunatics--and, in doing so, brings out what a strange, wonderful world Vaudeville really was.

I particularly enjoyed the first couple chapters, where Trav traces Vaudeville’s history back to the travelling minstrels and theater troupes  in the Middle Ages, and even further, to the wild bacchanals of ancient Rome. While it seems like a little bit of a stretch to view Caligula as an early P. T. Barnum, if the shoe fits... From these inauspacious beginnings, Vaudeville developed from “Men Only” burlesque beginnings to the biggest show on earth, and then, in the span of only about a decade, was completely wiped out by motion pictures.

Although it’s doubtful that most of us would trade, say, Scorcese’s output to watch a man set himself on fire onstage, there is something sad about the disappearance of Vaudeville. Nowdays, unless you live in a large city, you probably don’t have much access to live theater and you certainly can’t see the large variety of things present in the average Vaudeville program. Trav also makes a fairly convincing, if somewhat rose-colored, case for Vaudeville’s inclusiveness of minorities and women and posits the movement on the whole as a net positive. I’m inclined to agree. In many ways, the rise and fall of Vaudeville seems like a uniquely American event, one brief moment when the melting pot came together to watch the world’s fattest lady do... whatever she did.

Astonishing X-Men by Joss Whedon and John Cassaday

I’ve struggled with how to integrate comics into my fifty books almost since day one. I love reading comics and have for years, at least since I was in college. I mostly read superhero stuff, and, although I do pick up the occasional graphic novel or creator owned book, I find the range of stories within the superhero genre to be pretty amazing.

X-Men, however, I’ve never really been able to crack, because, as you know if you read monthlies, superheroes have loads of continuity and X-Men, with its constantly rotating cast, has lots and lots and lots of continuity. At any given time, there are probably 10-15 X-books on the market, all interlocking in some way. For a completist like me, that’s a big roadblock.

Fortunately, Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men is self-contained for the most part, and reads just wonderfully. I’m a big Joss fan as well--I think I’ve seen everything he’s done except Firefly--and I was excited to read some of his comics. I wasn’t disappointed. Astonishing X-Men reads exactly like a season of a Whedon TV show, with all the witty banter, surprising plot twists, and rich character development that entails.

The plot of Whedon’s arc, which spans 25 issues and around 600 pages, is too sprawling to really go into here, but, at its center, a small group of heroes, including Kitty Pryde, Cyclops, Emma Frost, and some others, must come together in spite of their differences to defeat a foe too powerful for any of them to handle alone. In short, it’s about people, as nearly all the best comic books are.

I think, like most niche things, comics are either something you enjoy or you don’t, and I don’t know if anyone else here reads them. But, if you do, read this. If you don’t like comics, but you do like Whedon, read this. And if you don’t like either, well... maybe Lukacs is more your speed?

Perfect by Rachel Joyce

It’s a lot easier to find good old books than good new ones. Old books have the benefit of hindsight--go back 50 years and the dross has mostly disappeared. Pick up a new release and you can’t be sure if you’re picking up the new David Foster Wallace or the new Dan Brown. So when I get a book like Perfect, which is moving, emotionally and structurally complex but easy to read, and is just that GOOD, it’s such a treat that I can’t wait to share it.

Perfect is only Joyce’s second novel, but it’s made me think I should seek out her first. Hinging on an insignificant event--two seconds added to the year in the 70s by the UK government--it is told with in split perspective, with chapters in the past, featuring Byron, an unusually sensitive child for whom the two seconds are a terrifying prospect, and chapters in the present, featuring a man named Jim who seems to be suffering from some extreme OCD disorder and is struggling to maintain both his job and his fragile grip on reality. However, there’s really no way to discuss Jim’s section without delving pretty deeply into spoiler territory, so I’ll focus on Byron here.

Byron is one of those protagonists who is simultaneously relatable and a little offputting. A grade schooler who’s frightened of everything, Byron’s security is built on two things: his relationship with his best friend, James, and his saintly mother, Diana. Something happens early in the novel that upends Byron’s world and he spends the rest of the novel trying to make sense of it. There’s no way to complete this review without the spoilers below, which occur within the first 30 or so pages of the book, so stop reading now if you want to go in blind like I did.

SPOILERS BELOW

On the way to school, in the fog, driving through a bad part of town, Diana hits a little girl on a bicycle and doesn’t notice due to the weather. Byron sees it happen but is afraid to say anything, to his mother or anyone else. This event sets into motion a slow motion trainwreck as Byron and James try to stop something that might be unstoppable.

Because this book has been out maybe a week, I don’t want to spoil any more of it. I will say, though, that Perfect is an unusually rewarding book. I read a lot of novels, and while I can appreciate the low-key epiphany of an ending, there’s something gratifying about a novel that manages such a strong emotional payoff while still leaving open some ambiguity. Some late novel twists and turns could have easily come off gimmicky, but Joyce’s attention to detail and sustained atmosphere of a slightly off-kilter fable keep the whole thing on the rails to the very end. She manages to communicate real tragedy without ever succumbing to miserablism, and, in the end, Perfect even manages to be uplifting in its own unique way.

Brent's Top Books - 2013 Edition

Better late than never, I suppose.

2013 was easily the worst year I’ve had on 50 Books since it started. I managed to make 50, barely, and most of them were good--but I’ve been MIA on my own blog, failing to review almost 2/3rds of the books I read this year. This is my chance to speak a little about the good stuff I read that I didn’t mention on here. So it goes, in no particular order.

Best Book by a Monk

Thoughts on Isolation - Thomas Merton

I picked this up on a whim, not expecting much, and got a wonderfully spare work of devotional literature, orthodox in theology but ecumenical in practice. Merton’s interest in Eastern religions produces a book that manages to exhibit the minimalism and quietness it teaches.

Best Book with a Best Man

The Member of the Wedding - Carson McCullers

I can’t believe I hadn’t read Carson McCullers before now. I read this and Ballad of the Sad Cafe this year, and both were amazing. Easier to read than Faulkner, less grotesque than O’Conner, she’s the most approachable author in the Southern Gothic tradition, and one of the best.

Best Book That the Author Doesn’t Seem to Have Read

Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card

Please don’t pay too much attention to the snotty categorization on this one--Speaker for the Dead is unbelievable good. Picking up Ender’s story one thousand years after Ender’s Game could’ve been a disaster or a rehash. Instead, it’s a beautiful, moving treatise on acceptance and what that really means, put into a sci-fi context it couldn’t work without. One of the relatively few books that has permanently impacted my life--I find myself saying, “Once you understand someone, you can’t hate them” about once a week.

Best Book for People Who Are Always Switching Books In the Middle

If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino

Although traveler is solidly within the pomo metafictional traditional, Calvino’s extremely rare second-person perspective novel follows you as you begin to read a book and it abruptly changes into another book. Such a concept could have been silly and weightless--instead, it’s only silly, with brief flashes of pathos and weight that make it something more than a gimmick.

Best Book I Actually Reviewed But Didn’t Post About

Deliverance - James Dickey

One of the books I read this year that unearthed ugly things inside myself, Deliverance was actually so intimately impactful that I wrote a review I didn’t have the guts to post. Sexual violence, the meaning of masculinity, and a ripping/terrifying adventure story all in a slim 250 pages. Highly recommended.

Best Book I Got for Free

The Panopticon - Jenny Fagan

I received this book from TLC Book Tours and the premise--a messed up teen is taken to an asylum where she has adventures--did not do the book justice. A searing and very raw coming of age story, it has more empathy for the down and out than anything else I read this year.

Best Non-Fiction Book That Wasn’t a Novel

The Rest Is Noise - Alex Ross

If you’re interested in modern classical music but find the prospect of actually listening to it daunting, this is your book. Well-researched, tightly written, and endlessly interesting, Ross’ book opened up worlds of complex, abstract music and revealed the beauty and craft hidden there. It’s also a history of Western civilization in the 20th century from the perspective of a music lover. Highly recommended.

Best Non-Fiction Novel

The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer

I understand that this book isn’t typical Mailer, but it’s a stunner. A doorstop of a novel, it doesn’t look like the laser-focused series of character studies it is. Mailer’s ability to tell such a long, fraught story without taking sides is a show of virtuosity no one else really matched this year.

Best Book That Made Me an Internet Star

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Reading Plath, along with Austen, changed my feelings about female authors. I wrote about at some length on the most popular blog post I’ve ever written, but I don’t want to give the novel itself the short shrift. The Catcher in the Rye is a great point of comparison, but The Bell Jar may hold even more weight given what we now know of Plath’s life. Highly recommended.

Best Book Chris Couldn’t Believe I Hadn’t Read

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

An audacious reimagining of religious history and Christianity, M&M is actually most notable for its insane cast of characters: Satan, Jesus, a talking cat, and a witch who actually flies on a broomstick all make appearances. It’s a really wonderful feat of imagination, told in a uniquely Russian way.

Bad Books

Worst Book Full of Incest and Stuff

The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan

Apparently McEwan wasn’t always so highbrow. This book, one of his earliest novels, starts off with an uncomfortably explicit scene of borderline underage incest and only gets weirder and creepier from there. Kinda wish I hadn’t finished.

Worst. Classic. Ever.

The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole

Somehow, this flimsy, dull, short book has become a classic. The critical asides were considerably more interesting than the novel itself, although it was the only book I read this year that opened with someone being crushed by a giant helmet. Not worth it unless you really, really love giant helmets.

Worst Book That Should Have Been Titled, “Wouldn’t It Be Cool If There Was, Like, a Perfect Drug?”

The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

Have you ever wanted to read 100 pages about how hallucinogens are the coolest things ever, and also you see a bunch of sweet colors and touch God? Then maybe read Brave New World instead.

And that’s a wrap! Here’s to a new year of books and reviews. Excelsior!

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature.  It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against this fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death.  Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

I have found diminishing returns with Hardy's novels, I think.  I really loved Far from the Madding Crowd, but The Mayor of Casterbridge exposed a lot of the artificiality and overwroughtness of Hardy's writing that I hadn't noticed in Crowd.  Jude the Obscure was very good, and as heart-rendingly bleak as its reputation, but suffered from the same flaws.  I didn't really enjoy The Return of the Native much at all, because Hardy's bloviating and melodrama seem discordant with such a cramped and narrow story.

Of course, cramped and narrow is half the point.  Eustacia Vye, the beautiful and tempestuous heroine, wants badly to leave Egdon Heath, the blandest and most barren stretch of the Wessex countryside and live life on a larger scale.  She thinks that she has found her ticket out in the figure of Clym Yeobright, the native of the title who has returned from studying in Paris.  They fall in love--there is a nice scene where Eustacia takes place in a Christmas masque, trying to spy on this intriguing newcomer without herself being scene, though Yeobright sees through her costume with the benefit of some sort of kismet--but after they marry, she becomes disillusioned.  Yeobright, for his part, only wants to found a provincial school in his homeland, not sweep his bride away to the Continent:

But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life--music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that are going on in the great arteries of the world?  That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it.  Yet I thought I saw the way to it in my Clym.

Complicating this story is Eustacia's former lover Damien Wildeve, who has recently married Yeobright's cousin Thomasin.  (I didn't know this was the female version of Thomas, but I like it.)  Typically, Wildeve's former passion for Eustacia is rekindled when she becomes attached to Yeobright, which causes all sorts of problems and misunderstandings.

The plot is confined mostly to this love-square, with Yeobright's disapproving mother added, and Diggory Venn the "reddleman," who has long been in love with Thomasin.  A reddleman travels around selling the pigment that is used for marking sheep, and consequently is often covered in red himself, and has a strange mystical presence because of it.  Venn himself is sort of otherworldly.  His love for Thomasin drives him, not to undermine her marriage to Wildeve, but to endeavor tirelessly to reconcile their relationship that she might be happy and not dishonored.  His inherent goodness is a contrast to the underhandedness of Wildeve, the self-absorption of Eustacia, and even to the well-intentioned foolishness of Yeobright.  He's the best part of the book, and an powerful reproach to the idea that "good" characters are boring and "evil" characters the most interesting or complex.  The Return of the Native could have used more of him.

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight by M.E. Thomas

While I don't think sociopaths have any sort of moral urge to do good things, I think they can and do act morally in the context of pursuing their own advantage  A good analogy would be a corporation.  There are a lot of corporations that do things that you like, maybe even good things, like produce vaccines or electric cars, although the primary motivation is to make a profit.  But just because you are trying to make a profit doesn't mean you can't do it by doing things you like, or that you are good at, or that comport with the way you see the world, or want the world to see you.

Ruining people.  I love the way the phrase rolls around on my tongue and inside my mouth.  Ruining people is delicious.  We're all hungry, empaths and sociopaths.  We want to consume.

M.E. Thomas spends this entire book talking about how great she is.  She also talks about how great sociopaths are.  According to her, sociopaths, uninhibited by emotions, are free to act rationally.  This cold calculation allows for maximizing desirable results.

It also means that sociopaths feel no moral reservations about manipulating the people around them.  So, the books describes in detail how the author manipulates the people around her.  She talks about ruining people, too.  She engages in such ruining for revenge or for sport.  Whatever suits her. 

She also claims that many successful people are sociopaths too.  I found this portion of the book to be a bit terrifying at first.  She describes sociopaths as having a unique aptitude for navigating institutional politics and working their way up.  Specifically, she claims, successful lawyers are likely to be sociopaths because the manipulation necessary to climb to the top is a skill sociopaths excel in.

This furthers Thomas's goal in describing how sociopaths are great for society and how we need them.  Yawn.  I would only recommend this book to someone interested about antisocial personality disorder and too lazy to read a real book about it.  Even then, though, I'd recommend the book with reservations because it goes on and on; it feels like the author is too self-congratulatory.

Hilariously, the book's author appears to have outed herself by appearing on Dr. Phil.

The Revenger's Tragedy by Thomas Middleton

...in which I take three weeks to get around to reviewing my final book from 2013.

The Revenger's Tragedy is a Shakespeare-era play by Thomas Middleton, and like pretty much all drama from that period--with a few exceptions (Volpone?)--it's a reminder of just how great Shakespeare was.  As a revenge tragedy, I might take it over Titus Andronicus, but it's a far cry from that other Shakespearean revenge play--I'm forgetting the name now...

Anyway, the plot is incredibly convoluted: Vindici is determined to revenge himself on Duke for poisoning his beloved before the play begins.  The Duke's son Lussurioso takes the disguised Vindici on as a pandar who will seduce Vindici's sister (remember, he's in disguise), providing him the perfect opportunity for vengeance.  A side plot involves the Duke's bastard, who is having an affair with his wife, and his stepsons, one of whom is accused of a brutal rape.  They have names like "Spurio" and "Ambitioso" and "Supervacuo" that help you keep them apart.  If you guessed that they all die in the end, you are correct.

The Revenger's Tragedy isn't very profound, but it is gleefully over the top.  I really enjoyed this scene, where Vindici dresses up the skull of his beloved in fine jewels and a fancy dress.  The skull's jaw is laced with poison so that Vindici can present it to Lussurioso as his sister:

HIPPOLITO
Brother, y'ave spoke that right.
Is this the form that living shone so bright?

VINDICI
The very same;
And now methinks I [could] e'en chide myself
For doting on her beauty, tho' her death
Shall be reveng'd after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways
And put his life between the judge's lips
To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?
Surely we're all mad people, and they
Whom we think are, are not; we mistake those:
'Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes. 

Hey, man!  That's no way to talk to your girlfriend!  The whole play, in fact, is steeped in pretty stark misogyny.  Vindici makes a lot of really bold pronouncements about the treachery of women that I'm pretty sure we're supposed to take at face value even though this is a story about a bunch of men who murder each other.

Once the play reached its final act (spoiler: a lot of people get stabbed) it became pretty tedious.  However, if you're interested, there's a recent film version starring Eddie Izzard and Christopher Eccleston that's probably a more fun two hours than the ones you'd spend reading the play.

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Life is short, he thought.  Art, or something not life, is long, stretching out endless, like concrete worm.  Flat, white, unsmoothed by any passage over or across it.  Here I stand.  But no longer.

It's the Sixties.  What was once the United States of America is now split into several states: In the west, the Pacific States of America, essentially a puppet state of the Japanese.  In the east, the United States and the Confederate States both, allied to Germany.  In the middle, the Rocky Mountains, serving as a sort of buffer between the two victorious powers, which are increasingly suspicious of each other.

As a vision of what America would be like had it lost World War II, The Man in the High Castle is fascinating.  The Germans, unsurprisingly, have moved on to conquering and destroying much of Africa.  Jews have gone into hiding all across the different Americas.  In the Pacific States, Yanks are second-class citizens.  I was especially impressed with the way Dick invents a Japanese-inflected dialect of English, which the American characters use only when speaking to their Japanese social superiors.  Just an example, from an American antiques dealer trying to make a sale to a Japanese businessman:

"Had you wished American traditional ethnic art objects as a gift?" Childan asked.  "Or to decorate perhaps a new apartment for your stay here?"

The story is full of political intrigue: The German Fuhrer has died, and a struggle to replace him as begun among the old Nazi guard, some of whom are in favor of aggressive action--dropping nucelar bombs--as a preemptive strike on their putative Japanese allies.  Much of Dick's story centers around a spy from a rebel German faction and his Japanese contacts in the Pacific States.

But all that is, somehow, really beside the point.  The Man in the High Castle revels in its thought experiment, but it has bigger and stranger topics to dwell on.  A seditious book called Heavy Lies the Grasshopper has become suddenly popular; it imagines a possible word where Japan and Germany did not win the war.  And this is where I think Dick shows how really unique he was among science fiction writers of the 20th century.  I can conceive of another writer coming up with this conceit, but their book-within-a-book would have told the story of our America.  Instead, Dick invents a third history--one in which Britain comes out of a post-war struggle with the United States as the world's sole superpower.

This is really unsettling.  The multiplicity of historical narratives forces us to question our own history in the way that a what-if story really doesn't, and, in a plot development I don't want to give away, Dick suggests that our history is as specious as the one of The Man in the High Castle.  Like VALIS, The Man in the High Castle explores the idea that our notion of reality is hopelessly limited and flawed.

A big portion of the plot centers, strangely, around ugly jewelry.  The jewelry, ineptly made, possesses wu, a Taoist concept that embodies effortless, unconscious doing and being.  I was taken by the idea that something with wu operates outside of history and historicity:

To have no historicity, and also no artistic, esthetic worth, and yet to partake of some ethereal value--that is a marvel.  Just precisely because this is a miserable, small, worthless-looking blob; that, Robert, contributes to it possessing wu.  For it is a fact that wu is customarily found in least imposing places, as in the Christian aphorism, 'stones rejected by the builder.'  One experiences awareness of wu in such trash as an old stick, or a rusty beer can by the side of the road.

I usually feel that I have a handle on even complex books; I feel like I have not understood even a little of what Dick was doing in this novel, and I am not even sure I have described it well.  I am not quite sure that I enjoyed it.  But like all of Dick's books, it has made me ponder quite a bit.

A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America by Evan Mandery

Certiorari was granted limited to the following question: Does the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty in these cases constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment?  The Court holds that the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty in these cases constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.  --Chief Justice Burger, reading the per curiam opinion of the court in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972).

We consider at the outset the basic contention that the punishment of death for the crime of murder is under all circumstances cruel and unusual in violation of the Constitution.  We reject that contention. --Justice Stewart, announcing the opinion in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976).

Since the foundation of the United States (and before), the government in this country has executed those accused of heinous crimes.  Because of this long-standing history, in the 1960s, everyone presumed the constitutionality of the death penalty..

This changed.  And then, it changed again.

Mandery takes the reader through the cultural shifts that lead to the end of the death penalty; he also takes the reader through the cultural shifts that brought it back.



This image was include in the NYT
review of the book, it was too
awesome for me not to include.

Pre-abolition: although the death penalty was presumed constitutional, it was also on its way out.  States were executing fewer and fewer people; other states were abolishing the death penalty altogether.  Why, then, should anyone interfere with the death penalty?  Mandery answers that Justice Goldberg was looking to make his mark on the liberal Warren court.  He included some language in an opinion indicating that in some circumstances the death penalty would be unconstitutional, (correctly) expecting civil rights lawyers to take the hint.

They did.  The Legal Defense Fund (associated with the NAACP) took up the cause (because the NAACP was concerned about the disproportionate number of African Americans being executed).  The litigation strategy was to show that society's standards for cruelty had evolved to the point that the death penalty was no longer moral.



Abolition: Mandery presents a compelling view of what was happening in the Justices' chambers.  He presents the Furman opinion as a compromise between the hard-abolitionists (who believed in complete abolition) and the soft-abolitionists (who believed, merely in abolishing the states' practices at the time).  This compromise would ultimately be defining because of what happened after Furman.

Public reaction to the decision was immediate and unequivocal: large segments of the population felt that the decision went too far with the Court's liberal agenda.  States immediately started re-drafting their statutes to conform to Furman and bring back the death penalty.  LDF began litigating against these new statutes.

To no avail: the Supreme Court brought the death penalty back.  Why?  The Court's members had changed.  More fundamentally, though, the Court was not ready for the backlash against Furman.  And, unlike the right to privacy decisions, the opinion was weak because it was only supported by a slim majority.  However, even the decisions upholding the death penalty were compromises.  So, instead of upholding all states' death statutes, the Court struck some down. 

Post-abolition: lawyers are left with the task of sorting through the decisions and trying to make them work.  They are a mess.  Importantly, Mandery describes how a number of the Justices involved in the decisions bring the death penalty back later regretted their decisions.  Notable is Justice Blackmun who eventually wrote:

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored--indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor.  Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

A few notes of particular interest:

I guess this is what the machinery of
death looks like.

(1)  Mandery's presentation makes it seem as though, left alone, the death penalty would have abolished itself over time.  Instead, the Supreme Court's interference invigorated a pro-death movement (a very similar criticism is often directed toward Roe v. Wade).  If true, this poses an interesting problem for an attorney who is against the death penalty: should he argue against the death penalty to save his client or do nothing for his client and wait for society to fix itself?  Of course, for a lawyer this question is easy because the ethics rule require zealous representation of the client...not social movements.  Nonetheless, from a moral standpoint, one wonders.

(2)  Mandery also presents an ethical issue confronted by LDF's main anti-death litigator, Tony Amsterdam.  Amsterdam was vehement that they argue against the death penalty in all cases; this position required him to abandon grading the different states and identifying some as being worse than others.  As a result, during the oral arguments about bringing the death penalty back, he did not provide any assistance to the Justices in determining which statutes were worse than others.  I can't help wondering if death penalty jurisprudence would be less messy if Amsterdam had taken a position on the comparative worth of states' statutes.

A good book for anyone interested in the death penalty or the Supreme Court.  It's a must-read for anyone interested in both.