Today I came across this article by Malcolm Gladwell on Atticus Finch: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/10/090810fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all. In the following paragraphs, I’ll explain why I disagree with Gladwell’s analysis of Atticus and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Let me qualify my statements by saying I’m working in rural Maine right now, and I have no access to a To Kill a Mockingbird book. I did teach the novel a year-and-a-half ago to ninth graders, however, so I do remember the passages I’ll reference here.

Gladwell spends the first third of his article describing Jim Folsom, an Alabaman governor of the 1950’s–who had a “gradual and paternalistic” view toward bringing about racial justice, “a prodigious drinker, and a brilliant campaigner,” and a man who said “All men are just alike.” And then Gladwell claims that Harper Lee based Atticus Finch’s character off Jim Folsom, that Atticus was an “Old-style Southern liberalist” instead of a Civil Right’s activist, and that, therefore, Atticus shouldn’t be toted as a such a hero, since he wasn’t radical enough.

Although Atticus wasn’t a large scale Civil Right’s activist, he also was not the passive, stuck-in-social-mores “Old-style Southern liberalist” that Malcolm Gladwell claims. I’ll take a closer look at the To Kill a Mockingbird passages Gladwell cites in order to debunk Gladwell’s claims.

Gladwell says the scene in which Atticus quietly leaves court after the jury pronounces Tom Robinson guilty shows Atticus couldn’t be a Civil Right’s hero. “If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds.”

Why must Gladwell write in dichotomies? To him, if Atticus isn’t Thurgood Marshall then he must be Jim Folsom. But does Gladwell forget that Atticus doesn’t bow under the jury’s verdict? As Atticus says, he knew the jury would convict Tom Robinson; only Jem, Atticus’s son, in his naivete and youthful inexperience with racism, thinks Atticus stood a chance. Even before he lost, Atticus planned to take the case to a higher court, and he has hope to win in that court. But then Tom Robinson escapes, and is shot and killed, and Atticus’s work abruptly ends. He would have taken his case further if he had the chance; he doesn’t have the chance, so he continues his work as a small-town lawyer. Lee didn’t portray a governor like Folson or a big-time Civil Rights activist; she portrayed a small-town lawyer who did his best against racial prejudices.

At the end of this same section Gladwell writes that, “All men [Atticus] believes, are just alike.” Atticus never says or implies he believes all men are alike; his closing speech in court suggests this simple statement is ludicrous. All people are not or never will be equal in ability, he says, but everyone should be equal before the law. I wish I had before me this excellent speech–to which Gladwell never even mentions. Here, Atticus appeals to Tom Robinson’s innocence before the law, not just the “hearts-and-minds” approach for which Gladwell derides Atticus. Atticus doesn’t tell the jury to let Robinson off because they’re good people, Atticus tells the jury to let Tom Robinson off because he has proved Tom innocent, so it’s their duty before the law.

Gladwell, amazingly, admits that Atticus stands up to racism. Yet he qualifies this praise by citing instances where Atticus admits that some men who are racists also have good traits. Gladwell also qualifies this praise by saying “What [Atticus] will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama. Folsom was the same way.”

To Kill a Mockingbird is a good novel, and a good novel has complex characters. Thus, Atticus can applaud how Walter Cunningham lives independently of WPA handouts and rebuke him for leading a potential lynch mob. Atticus’ attitude doesn’t mean he applauds Cunningham’s racism; it just shows how any human being, with some admirable qualities, can also be racist. Gladwell ignores one of the excellent messages in Lee’s novel–that a racist can lurk within even the best of us–and complains that Lee didn’t go far enough in her condemnation.

Folsom was a governor; if he only looked at one town he wouldn’t have been doing his duty. But Atticus was a lawyer in one town whose first priority was that town. Plus, he would have looked beyond that town if he’d had a chance to take his case higher. Gladwell argues that Folsom (and by a weak extension, Atticus) couldn’t see that “racism had a structural dimension,” that it must be changed at a political, not just personal level. Atticus started with the personal level, but he also worked in the political realm. He worked for justice among his neighbors and then in the courts, leading to the larger world.

Next, Gladwell argues that Atticus wants the jurors to “swap one of their prejudices for another,” i.e. Atticus wants the jurors to be prejudiced against the white trash Ewells whereas they would usually be prejudiced against a black man. Yes, the Ewells are white trash, but in the courtroom Atticus never once refers to, let alone derides, the Ewell’s social class. He sticks strictly to facts of the case, and he gains no pleasure–personally or in the context of his case–in humiliating the girl Mayella, who says Robinson raped her but was in actuality raped or beaten by her father. Galdwell cites other cases of the time period that use class as a way to argue for guilt or innocence, but he uses no evidence of Atticus doing so in To Kill A Mockingbird’s court case.

And lastly, when I was sick of Gladwell picking apart the novel for his own argument, he completely misconstrues the book’s ending. A kind, eccentric neighborhood recluse, Boo Radley, kills Bob Ewell when Ewell is trying to hurt, or even kill, Scout and Jem, Atticus’ kids. The Sheriff and Atticus decide not to bring the events to the limelight. Gladwell claims that this final event means, “Maycomb would go back to the way it had always been,” that the Sheriff and Atticus have “cut their little side deal” and “decided to obstruct justice in the name of saving their beloved neighbor (ie. Boo Radley) the burden of angel-food cake.” This conclusion may be cute word choice yet it’s untrue to the novel and the characters’ motivations.

If they took Boo to court, he’d get off in self-defense, but they decide he should be left alone. Boo Radley’s character is a parallel to Tom Robinson’s character. Both men have quietly done good to others and deserve to be left alone. Robinson is brought to the spotlight and convicted of a crime he didn’t commit; Boo would be brought to the spotlight and acquitted of an act of self-defense. The Sheriff and Atticus want to spare him of this exposure to which they couldn’t spare Tom Robinson. Furthermore, Maycomb can’t revert to the way it has been, because it never changed in the first place. It still doesn’t understand the best citizens among it, and it still needs people like Atticus and the Sheriff (who asked Atticus to take Tom Robinson’s case) to defend its  falsely accused and misunderstood people.

Gladwell’s last two sentences say that Atticus adopts “one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell. A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism in Maycomb, Alabama.” I’ll discuss each sentence separately.

Let me reiterate that Atticus never acts on social conventions; he looks at peoples’ actions and characters. Ewell both raped or beat his own daughter as well as tried to killed Atticus’ children. Boo Radley saved Atticus’ children’s life. Their social class was completely incidental to his views of the people. And who thought Boo Radley was a respectable white anyway? The whole town except Atticus wanted Boo thrown in an asylum and said that he sliced his own father’s leg open with scissors. Boo Radley is only deemed “respectable” in order to fit Gladwell’s argument.

And that last sentence–meant to be revelatory and stunning–doesn’t make sense. The first and the second potential functions of the book aren’t mutually exclusive. Even if the book did only tell us about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism, wouldn’t that be a way of “instructing us about the world?” (A very vague phrase, by the way.) The world of Alabama, in the fifties, placed limits on Jim Crow liberalism, and To Kill a Mockingbird, through specific characters and situations, could show these limits so that political reformers and others could make things how they should be. Although, as I’ve proved, Atticus wasn’t the passive man, ignorant of the outside world, that Gladwell thinks.

So, why was Atticus a hero? It would take someone more learned than I to scratch the surface of that complex character. But, as a teacher, I taught him as an admirable character because he treats people the same despite their race, social class, or differing viewpoints. Atticus has progressive views and hidden talents and yet, unlike Gladwell’s description of Folsom, Atticus uses these views and talents only when occasion arises, not vainly, nor superfluously. He is a man who works for family justice all the time and neighborhood and community justice and national justice when occasion arises. I could give multiple examples which prove these traits, but I’ll spare you here. Other real Civil Right’s heroes could have had different, maybe better, qualities, but these are Atticus’ fictional ones.

This complex, classic novel and novel’s hero deserves a more nuanced perspective than this article gives it and him.

Last Saturday, May 16th, my bookstore sold books at a Michael Pollan event in the Central Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland. Over 1,100 people showed up for this question and answer session with the author of (most recently) In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’ve only read an earlier book of his, A Place of My Own, but since I’ve been studying his precursor, Wendell Berry, it’s only a matter of time before I get to his other work. I’m always behind on the latest trends.

Tony Geraci, the new Baltimore City Head of School Lunches, interviewed Michael Pollan. I didn’t take these questions and answers down verbatim, so these are not direct quotes by Michael Pollan, but they are the content of what he said.

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The Melon’s current discussion topic gives me a chance to write about Wendell Berry, an author I’ve loved for a while. Berry is a prolific non-fiction, short story, novel, and poetry writer, so I’m never sure how to discuss his various themes, but since The Melon wants different perspectives on the family, I’ll discuss Berry’s views, most with which I agree.

Of all the structures in society, the nuclear family is the one to which Berry thinks people owe the most responsibility. By default, average American adults must interact with at least a handful of structures: the government, their workplace, their local community, and their family (to name a few). An individual’s responsibilities to these groups inevitably, at some point, come into conflict with each another. “Fidelity” is the story in which Berry most clearly describes his view on the family as the paramount structure in society. In this story, Danny’s father, an old man named Burley, is in the hospital, in a coma. The hospital staff says he may still be cured, but Danny knows that Burley is old and dying and would want to die on his own land near his family. So Danny steals Burley from the hospital, takes him home, is with him when he dies, then buries him. The state puts a detective on the case who wants to find evidence of the “kidnapping,” so he can prosecute the family for acting against the hospital’s wishes. But Burley’s family and a few of his close friends confront the detective, and their comments make him question the legitimacy of his investigation. These two examples show the two different perspectives:

“And you, [Detective Bode], are here now to tell us that a person who is sick and unconscious, or even a person who is conscious and well, is ultimately a property of the organizations and the state. Aren’t you?”

“It wasn’t authorized. He asked nobody’s permission. He told nobody. He signed no papers. It was a crime. You can’t let people just walk around an do what they want to like that. He didn’t even pay the bill.”

“Some of us think people belong to each other and to God.”

In that scene, Berry poses a dilemma: To whom does an individual ultimately belong? To the government or to the people who love him? The characters who speak for Berry argue the later, although Bode does have a point that a family shouldn’t be able to get away with just anything, just because they’re family.

And later:

“A fellow would need [the hospital’s] permission to get in. If he needs their permission to get out, he’s in jail. Would you grant a proprietary right, or even a guardianship, to a hospital that you would not grant to a man’s own son? I would oppose that, whatever the law said.”

“Well, anyway,” Detective Bode said, “all I know is that the law has been broken, and I am here to serve the law.”

“But, my dear boy, you don’t eat or drink the law, or sit in its shade or warm yourself by it, or wear it, or have your being in it. The law exists only to serve.”

“Serve what?”

“Why, all the many things that are above it. Love.”

Every time I read this passage (I wish I could quote the whole thing), I have an aha moment. The law should not simply legislate indifferently, it should serve. The state deals indirectly, not directly, with eating and drinking and warming and clothing. The government, an abstract entity, should give deference to individuals. (More on that later.) This principle, as most principles, looks different in different situations, but I would rather the state be in allegiance to the family than the family be in allegiance to the state. (As a student of Russia, the Soviet structure comes to mind as a system in which the family had to make allegiance to the state their priority.)

Berry is not an anarchist; he is a tax-paying, voting citizen, active and vocal in his community and the nation, especially in matters of farming and food production (He’s had a large influence on the writer Michael Pollan). But he knows that the other societal structures exist only to serve the family, whereas many live, maybe unconsciously, that the family is secondary to their obligations to other groups in society.

Berry thinks government can hinder or break apart the family; he also thinks higher education can potentially have the same negative impact. When a young person leaves for college, she often breaks apart from her family and community, often never to return. Berry thinks colleges have become isolated centers of learning instead of entities which prepare locals to interact with their community, the initial impetus of many colleges.

In Berry’s novel, Hannah Coulter, an elderly Hannah laments that her two sons and a daughter are spread out across the country, and she attributes their location to her insistence that they pursue higher education. She then compares her and her husband’s attitude toward education to her neighbor family’s attitude:

After Inauguration, people will go home. The massive tourist crowds which are expected to swell Washington D.C. to near bursting will dissolve. The politicians and bureaucrats will get back to business. And, after taking Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday and Tuesday for the Inauguration, the Supreme Court will be back in session on Wednesday. Then, they will hear cases whose lawyers have worked almost as long as President Elect Barack Obama to be heard. If any of you Inauguration goers have flights which leave on Wednesday afternoon, you should spend the morning at the Supreme Court, since the oral arguments are open to the public.

People need to take the time to listen to these judges, because the nine people on the Supreme Court make decisions which affect a nation. Yes, they are checked by other governmental branches, but they still orchestrate an enormous amount of power. Whether or not you agree with the extent of their power or how they interpret the law, it’s commendable that the Supreme Court’s arguments are open to the public. For only when the general  public is involved (even as observers), do we begin to understand and discuss and care about the issues and the legal system.

I knew very little about the legal system or the Supreme Court until I took Constitutional Law in high school. I didn’t go to law school, nor do I have plans to do so, but that course ended up being my favorite class. For homework each evening, we were assigned one or two Supreme Court cases and then the teacher lectured on them during the following class period. My teacher and the cases opened my eyes to the judicial branch of our federal government in a way that nothing else has before or since. Even these days, I sometimes read recent Supreme Court cases from Cornell law school’s online Supreme Court collection, just for fun. Since moving to Baltimore, I’ve taken advantage of the fact that you can go listen to and watch Supreme Court oral arguments. The judges’ specific questions to lawyers aren’t as moving as a general, charismatic inauguration speech, but the cases’ outcomes do change laws and lives at federal, state, and local levels.

A book which succinctly charts the main effects of certain Supreme Court rulings is The Supremes’ Greatest Hits. Its subtitle is “The 34 Supreme Court Cases Which Most Directly Affect Your Life,” and the book does well the necessary job of outlining Supreme Court cases for a lay audience. By focusing on the judges’ personalities and politics, Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Nine has also been successful in attracting an audience who may not usually be interested in the Supreme Court. And by having its oral cases open to the public, the Supreme Court also tries to attract a lay audience, though I imagine less people know about this opportunity than other Washington DC attractions, since the court doesn’t hear cases during the main tourist months.

If you are in Washington DC in the tourist off-season, and you do plan to listen to the oral arguments, arrive at the court very early, as they only allow a limited number of people inside. Last year my parents and I got in line at 7:30, hoping to listen to the ten o’clock and eleven o’clock arguments. We didn’t make it for the ten o’clock criminal case but we did make it inside for the eleven o’clock business case. If you actually want to know what the lawyers and judges are talking about, read the merit briefs–the respondents’ and petitioners’ cases–which are provided on the Supreme Court’s website. And if you can’t make it the day after Inauguration, that’s okay, because the Supreme Court hears oral arguments one to three days a week from October to April, year in year out. Maybe a while after this current ruckus, you’ll have a chance to go and hear this quiet, intelligent, and intense part of history being made.

As a sophomore in college, I tried to read Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) over spring break. By the fifteenth page I put it down in disgust. I couldn’t handle the gore. But when I saw the No Country for Old Men movie trailer in 2007, I wanted to see the movie and read the book. I wanted to try McCarthy again. This time around, the Sheriff narrator in No Country for Old Men (2005) caught my interest, as did McCarthy’s knowledge of and talent in writing about mechanical details. I read the book in two sittings, then saw the movie, which closely followed the novel. I was hooked.

Since then, I’ve read seven of McCarthy’s ten novels. Currently my favorite book of his is Cities of the Plain, the third book in his border trilogy. The protagonist John Grady Cole made me sob–a feat no character has accomplished since Owen Meany. If I care about a character as much–or more–as I care about real live people, the author’s done at least part of his work well.

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Antietam

As the sun rises

soldiers stifle breath

Fog encloses

a church hiding sharpshooters

Under the sun’s glare

three-thousand fall in twenty minutes

At noon

dead lie “like the ties of a railroad”

As the sun lowers

over twenty-thousand groan or speak no more

At night

men stare into the fire-

yet another force which destroys with little warning, no regret

So, this is war, they think,

if they hadn’t thought so before

Gettysburg

“We cannot consecrate this ground.”

But we try:

a thousand statues sculpted

by the most skilled men in our age,

a dozen glass cases with the weapons,

a guided tour of the grounds

where fifty-thousand men died.

Fifty-thousand.

In three days.

In this small space.

Bodies must have been stacked

like decks of cards

on roads where we’re now bumper to bumper.

Maybe through our presence

in recognition of their absence

we’ll see the atrocities of war.

But probably not.

While other cultural and historical places light up Christmas trees, Antietam lights up a battlefield. Saturday, December 6, 2008 was the 20th Annual Memorial Illumination Ceremony in which 23,110 lighted candles graced Antietam’s battlefield, one candle for each soldier killed, wounded, or missing during battle.

The battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest one-day battle during the Civil War, the bloodiest day in America’s history. (Gettysburg was the bloodiest battle but it lasted three days.) The Yankees kicked back the Confederate army south of the Potomac, though President Lincoln wasn’t happy that General George McClellan didn’t follow the retreat and destroy the Confederate army, as Lincoln had instructed. McClellan’s reticence cost him his generalship; following orders could have potentially averted many subsequent deaths during the next three years of the Civil War.

I wasn’t able to visit the illumination this year, but I did drive down to Antietam a couple weeks ago. I grabbed a guide from the visitor’s center and rode my bike along the pathway, while visitors in heated cars looked at me askance. It was cold, but I’d learned at the Gettysburg battlefield that driving a car was a hindrance, since I wanted to get out every fifty yards to read the plaques, monuments, and guideposts. At Antietam, I stared into the West Woods where over 2,200 Union soldiers were killed or wounded during a twenty minute period; I walked along Bloody Lane, a farm lane which had became an open grave after three hours of slaughter. “[The dead] were laying in the road like the ties of a railroad,” one soldier said. When I got home I wrote a poem to organize my thoughts and emotions, as I’d needed to after visiting Gettysburg for the first time.

A while back I heard the documentarist Ken Burns speak. He’s intelligent and engaging, and I listened closely to his presentation, but now I can only remember two things he said: his documentary on the National Parks will come out in fall 2009, and far too many Americans have never heard of Antietam. Burns told about when he went out to lunch with a young professional woman who had grown up in Maryland and worked in Washington DC. When Burns told her he was headed to Antietam after their meeting, she gave him a blank look. When he described the battle and noted the casualties, she was astounded. “That happened here?” she asked. So many men died?

His story only sort of surprised me. I mean, I do have a student who swears the Holocaust is a myth, and when I mentioned Antietam to a couple people in a writing group, one asked if that battle was the end or beginning of the Civil War. After I told them the number of casualties, another asked if we had lost that many in any battle in Iraq. We haven’t suffered many more casualties in the whole Iraq war, I replied. (A comment which wasn’t meant to downplay the number of American casualties in Iraq, only to remind her of the many, often forgotten, Civil War casualties.)

At an Antietam cemetery, as I stood by gravestones on which were written the names of multiple people from the same family who died in the Civil War, I realized that the majority of Americans can’t comprehend the enormous grief which encapsulated families and the entire nation during 1861-1865. If you didn’t have a family member killed or wounded, it was only a matter of time. When placing myself in their shoes, I’m thankful that my immediate family can be together over the holidays, and I sympathize with friends and relatives who have family members fighting on the other side of the world. Antietam’s lights add sobriety to the holiday season, a sobriety which prompts healthy reflection.

photo credit to http://www.lindsayfincher.com

Sometime in September I called my dad. “Can you tell me what’s going on with the economy?” I asked. “Because I really, really don’t understand.” A commercial real estate broker for years, he has daily felt the nation’s economic pulse. As a one-time double English Literature and Russian major now turned educator, I hadn’t cared about such “details” before.  My dad spent the next half-hour explaining the credit crisis, I sort of understood. After I read articles which he e-mailed me, I was about a notch higher in my understanding. Which meant I still knew very little.

I went to my dad for an explanation which fit my economic intelligence, but where do established businessmen like him go to find a more detailed analysis of the situation? After searching for current books on the topic, I found the ones I’ve outlined below. If you need a Christmas present for an economically-astute friend/coworker/ relative (or if you yourself claim such knowledge), these books should give her/him/you a more in-depth analysis than the daily papers.

1.) The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives by Michael Heller (Perseus, 2008)

This book’s not really against ownership per se. Heller gives the example of parents who leave a house to their children. Because each child wants to do something different with the house, the house remains as is, no one benefits, and this fragmented ownership creates a “gridlock” situation. He cites similar historical examples like the robber barons or contemporary examples like music or drugs: “Just as boatmen on the Rhine had to pay each baron’s toll, the company developing Compound X needed to pay every owner of a patent relevant to its testing” (5). A description of Russia’s continued transition from complete state ownership of land and buildings during the Soviet Union to contemporary private ownership occupies an entire chapter, and Heller points out ways in which Russia has fallen into or avoided gridlock. The last chapter offers ways in which Americans can avoid, uncover, or get out of gridlock, many of them basic commonsense. I enjoyed this book mainly for its historical discussion of ownership, though if I were personally involved in a gridlock situation or had enough influence to eliminate gridlocks in the economy, I might find its suggestions more immediately useful.

2.) The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 by Paul Krugman (Norton, 2009)

Nobel Prize Winner Krugman wrote the first edition of this book in 1999, but he’s updated it in the midst of our current crisis. At 180 pages, this is the shortest and most straightforward of these five books. At the beginning, Krugman explains why many Americans thought we were not in danger of an economic crisis. In his following chapters, he describes why Latin American, Japanese, and Asian economies should have made the United States decision makers more wary. In his final chapters, he explains the necessity for the original depression-era remedies: because of the banking crisis in the 1930s, tighter regulations were imposed. Now that non-bank institutions have created problems similar to those which banks created in the 1930s, these non-bank institutions likely need stricter regulations. Very accessible for the layman. Even me.

3.) Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and The Global Crisis of American Capitalism by Kevin Phillips (Viking, 2008).

Bad Money is packed full of statistics, graphs, and charts, some of which are informative, some of which cloud Phillips’ otherwise clear prose. In the first part of the book, Phillips discusses the United States financial markets, in the second half, he discusses politicians’ role in these finances, and in the final chapter he unites these topics to discuss “The Global Crisis of American Capitalism.” Regarding finance, I found interesting the details of how financial markets have grown while manufacturing has decreased. Phillips also echoes other writers (ie. Krugman, Smick) when he shows how the financial gurus know less about what they’re doing than the public assumes. Regarding politics, I found interesting how the “dynasties” of Bush and Clinton (the presidential primaries hadn’t taken place at this book’s writing) have perpetuated inappropriate financial policies. While studying the “Great American Debt Bubble,” I found eerie the similarly-shaped peeks now and during the depression, and while studying other charts, I thought the increase in the top executive’s salaries absurd in the fullest sense of the word (7, 67). Bad Money focuses more on the current economy than either of Phillips’ earlier works–American Theocracy or American Dynasty–but the themes in this book are a natural continuation of those in his previous two.

4.) The Great Inflation And Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence by Robert J. Samuelson (Random House, 2008)

Samuelson’s title refers to the inflation in the 1960’s-1970’s, an event which he argues is historically more significant than Vietnam or Watergate, since inflation affected more people. Samuelson states that the Fed has only made two major blunders: “the first was permitting the Great Depression; the second was fostering the Great Inflation” (101). In the former, the Feds were too reticent with putting money and credit into the economy; in the latter, they put too much money and credit into the economy in hoping to prolong high employment and general prosperity. In Samuelson’s final chapters, he makes parallels between policies which led to inflation and current policies, ending with excellent advice on how to proceed in these times. I appreciate that Samuelson attempts to write for the general reader and that he includes a glossary of terms and graphs in the back of his book, but I did find his prose very dry. Much of it reads like a history book, which simply may mean Samuelson is more concerned with informing than entertaining, and I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the history and effect of inflation.

5.) The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy by David M. Smick (Penguin, 2008)

If I could read two of these five books from cover to cover (confession: I only read select portions for this article), I would read The Return of Depression Economics and The World is Curved, because I think they most directly relate to this crisis. The latter is well-written and contains wonderful–if outrageous–metaphors (“…the world today lacks a financial doctrine…for establishing order in a financial crisis. Instead, we have to grope and manage incrementally, like trying to perform delicate brain surgery with one hand tied behind our back and the other wearing an ill-fitting boxing glove” (6).) The title’s a spin off from Thomas Friedman’s book’s title The World is Flat–a description of how globalization in commerce shortens distances between countries and gives some countries advantages they hadn’t had before. Smick insists that “for financial markets the world is curved” (2) and that “today’s policymakers and market traders must depend more and more on their gut instinct” (3). He presents the negative side of globalization, arguing that the global financial market is precarious: “global financial markets are a bit like a rich, generous, but occasionally deeply-paranoid great uncle” (ah, the metaphors) (14). Instead of assuming that capital flow has always been internationalized–the mindset of many my age or younger–he traces the history of how and why it became internationalized and the positives and negatives of such internationalization. One chapter describes China’s economy and power and why the United States must work with China, the next chapter uses Japan as a case study to show what can happen to countries (ie. America) entrenched in debt. The later chapters discuss how federal fiscal policies has affected, is affecting and could affect both domestic welfare and globalization.

First in the prologue, then throughout the book, Smick laments that many Americans lack historical perspective since the majority have been adults when American’s economy was productive. If anything, it’s reasonable to hope that the current crisis has been a wake-up call to Americans, a wake-up call that makes us thankful for our country’s affluence but also aware that financial positioning is always precarious and that maybe, just maybe, we might benefit as individuals and as a country by making more financially circumspect choices. Smick doesn’t deny these decisions are simple–if anything, he points out their complexity–but he, as well as all the other authors reviewed here, provide excellent analysis for economists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and the occasional “general audience” reader. Their books are certain to encourage informed dialogue, a necessary step before action.