To be continued--

Last One to Kansas City Is a Hippie

Rick Hill has written a compelling (but hilarious!) narrative of the Great American Road Trip, a journey from Southern California to Kansas City by hitchhiking, train hopping, and automobile stealing. Fueled by copious amounts of liquor and marijuana, four men, led by Mac (a KC hipster trying to recapture his glory days in the 1940s), set off in 1970, determined to travel with such style and ease that they’re sure to impress the fairer sex. Along the way, however, they encounter mobsters, drug dealers, possible Charles Manson supporters, and cops, all of whom threaten their lives.

Last One to Kansas City Is a Hippie is told through competing points of view and through various stylistic devices, including flashbacks, but it never becomes confusing or seems “gimmicky.” Instead, the story is propelled forward as the four men have a series of adventures and encounters with bizarre people. One of the more outrageous escapades is when they hook up with two young women in Oklahoma City, never suspecting that they are the daughters of the local gambling and pornography kingpin. This low-rent mobster then swears to kill them and uses his private plane to chase their car.

Most of the story, including the “framing device” set in 1993, is told by Dan, a man whose life has fallen apart. When he remembers the greatest month of his life—the road trip to Kansas City 23 years earlier—he becomes determined to both recreate it and to write a screenplay for a movie in vein of Easy Riders. The novel then repeatedly shifts from 1970 to 1993 as we follow the young Danny and the alcoholic, melancholic Dan on their respective journeys to discover themselves. Both journeys are entertaining, absurdist romps, and I can say that I enjoyed every minute of them.

In conclusion, all I can say about this novel is, “Well done, Mr. Hill!”

Justifiable homicide?

Sounds justified to me. As a character says in a Graham Greene novel," I'm a prose man."

MOSCOW, January 29 (RIA Novosti) – Poetry can kill after all.

A former teacher was detained in Russia’s Urals after being accused of stabbing an acquaintance to death in a dispute about literary genres, investigators said Wednesday.

The 67-year-old victim insisted that “the only real literature is prose,” the Sverdlovsk Region’s branch of the Investigative Committee said.

The victim’s assertion outraged the 53-year-old suspect, who favored poetry, and the dispute ended with the ex-teacher stabbing his friend to death, investigators said.

Both of the men were purportedly drunk at the time.

The incident took place last week, but the suspect fled the scene and was not tracked down until days later.

The man, whose name has been withheld, was placed under arrest and charged with murder, punishable with up to 15 years in prison.

This is not the first time high-brow disputes have led to bloodshed in Russia. In September, a man was shot in a line for beer in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don after enraging a fellow beer drinker with his views about the work of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Honoring Ray Wheeler

Dickinson State University will honor Ray Wheeler tomorrow (Monday) evening with a reading from his collection of short stories. Details:

Having retired after more than four decades of teaching at Dickinson State University, L. Ray Wheeler is an Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy. For several years he chaired the Department of Language & Literature and was the founding editor of The Dickinson Review. Wheeler has published poetry and short stories, as well as had his original plays staged by college and university programs. He continues to reside in Dickinson, North Dakota. 

This program will feature current and former DSU faculty reading from Wheeler's recently published story collection, Bar Talk and Tall Tales, and offering anecdotes about their beloved colleague. The collection will be for sale during the reception that follows the presentation. 

For more information on this or other Heart River Writers' Circle events, contact Dr. Peter Grimes at peter.grimes@dickinsonstate.edu or 701-483-2142.

Mark Twain & Ambrose Bierce

The second of the special programs associated with Civil War 150 is this evening (7:00, Beck Auditorium) when I speak about the American authors Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. I’ll be drawing from my recent New York Times articles for this presentation.

Afterwards, we’ll serve refreshments, including authentic hardtack.

Attending your own funeral

Kevin Baker tells what it's like for an author to attend a book club scheduled to discuss his novel:

Soon someone cleared his throat, told us his name and said he was usually the club’s discussion moderator. But not tonight: “I just didn’t like this book that much, so it’s fine with me if somebody else wants to lead the discussion.”

Wait a minute. People were going to give it a thumbs up or down right from the beginning? Uh-oh. But so it went with the next person. And the next. And the next: “I didn’t really like it that much either.”

This was a disaster. And now it was my turn. I was embarrassed not only for myself but for the members of the club. How would they feel once they discovered the author they had just dissed was sitting right there? Everyone stared at me expectantly. I swallowed hard and did the only decent thing — I gave them the name of an old roommate. “I’m Richard Feeley,” I mumbled, eyes downcast, “and I rather liked it.”

In the Garden of Beasts

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is the third of Erik Larson's popular history books that I've read. Like the first two, The Devil in the White City (2003) and Thunderstruck (2006), Larson's latest book compellingly tells a true story that is "stranger than fiction."

This book centers on William Dodd, American Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, and his family, especially his daughter, Martha, as they live in Berlin while Adolf Hitler rises to power. Larson is curious how the Dodds reacted as they witnessed first hand the Nazi Party seize complete control of Germany. He especially wonders, for example, if the ambassador could have helped to prevent the horrors that were about to envelope Europe by insisting that President Franklin Roosevelt take a stronger stand against Hitler and the National Socialist Party.

In the summer of 1933, as FDR struggled to get a recalcitrant Congress to pass his economic proposals to combat the worsening Great Depression, at least four men passed on his invitation to be Ambassador to Germany. Roosevelt finally offered the position to a historian of modest renown, currently teaching at the University of Chicago, William Dodd, who reluctantly accepted what everyone in Washington knew would be an extremely difficult job. Dodd packed up his family, including his 24-year-old soon-to-be divorced daughter, and moved to Berlin.

That daughter, Martha, a literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, had had a number of tempestuous romantic relationships over the previous few years, including an affair with Carl Sandberg and a flirtation with Thornton Wilder, and her father hoped that life abroad would settle her into adulthood. But Martha, enchanted by the bright lights of Berlin, shrugged off as “rumors” the talk about concentration camps springing up to house communists and Jews and threw herself into the nightlife. She took a number of lovers, including at least one senior Nazi official as well as a Soviet spy. After the Night of the Long Knives, however, she, like her father, would resolve to work against the Nazi cause.

In addition to telling the story of the Dodds, Larson provides background to life in Germany at this time. For example, he explains why the laws restricting Jews from certain professions didn't matter to American tourists and why even many Jews thought that the threats made by Nazis were primarily bluster. He also details the origins of the ubiquitous Nazi salute, the mandatory sterilization of "defectives" laws, and invention of the deadly Zyklon B gas used in the concentration camps.

Larson's book, like the other two that I've read, is narrative history at its best, and I definitely recommend it.

Early American literature

Could we just admit that colonial American literature is terrible and stop pretending that it’s worth reading?

If you enjoy Puritan religious screeds about how people are condemned to Hell, regardless of their good works, or if you enjoy political tracts about how an enlightened government should function, then, without question, colonial American literature is for you. For most readers, though, it’s God-awful boring stuff.

The comparable period of English literature (1600-1800), which is the late Renaissance through the early Romantics, has such luminaries as Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Swift, Pope, Coleridge, and Shelley, among many others, who are certainly worthy of the 1,000 pages they take up in the Norton Anthologies, but the 1,000 pages of the Norton for the same years are devoted to the likes of Mather, Edwards, Jefferson, and Franklin. What’s going on?

Understand that I certainly recognize the genius of these colonial writers, and their works are well worth studying if you’re interested in religion or political thought. My argument is that they aren’t “literature.”

So what is literature?

Literature has an imaginative complexity and ambiguity that forces readers to think deeply about human nature, their relationships with others, and their place in the universe. By “imaginative,” I mean the opposite of “functional,” which is prose that has a utilitarian purpose. In other words, narratives (fiction or non-iction), poetry, and drama qualify as “literature.

By my definition, which is admittedly subjective, American literature begins with Washington Irving’s Sketchbook in 1820, but it doesn’t fully blossom for another couple of decades until Hawthorne and Poe began writing their stories. Poetry took another decade or two (believe me, you can skip Longfellow and Whittier!), but by the Civil War, Whitman and Dickinson began writing, and so America truly had some original poetic genius to claim as its own.

Perhaps it simply took a few hundred years for American literature to get grounded, or perhaps it took a traumatic event like the Civil War to kick it into a higher gear, or perhaps simply too many intelligent men and women were too busy establishing a new republic to focus on the production of literature, but maybe it’s time to admit the obvious: American literature really begins ca. 1820. We can skip what came before.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013) makes me feel conflicted, but not for the reasons that Mira Nair would like. In other words, I have no doubt that she wants the audience to feel conflicted by the film’s protagonist, the Pakistani youth Changez, who wavers between simply opting out of Western values and becoming a jihadi, and on this level, the film succeeds. But I doubt that Nair would like the audience to feel conflicted on whether or not the film itself is any good.

To start, I should say that Mira Nair is one of my favorite directors. I have seen nearly all of her films, from Salaam Bombay to The Namesake, and Monsoon Wedding is one of my all-time favorite films. I admire not just her stories but also her incredible visual sense, complemented by stunning music soundtracks. Moreover, her actors, many of them not professionals, usually give extraordinary performances. So what’s wrong with The Reluctant Fundamentalist?

First off, the lead actor, Riz Ahmed playing Changez, is exceptional as a brilliant Pakistani who attends Princeton and, determined to make a fortune, then takes a job on Wall Street as a financial analyst. He soon falls in love with Erica, a young, wealthy woman (played by Kate Hudson), and so he seems set for life in the adopted country that he has come to love, America.

9/11 changes everything.

Returning to New York after a business trip a week after the attacks, Changez is treated harshly by airport security officials, who strip search him with barely restrained brutality. Over the next few months, he is treated with scorn, if not outright hatred, by the people around him, including the co-workers who had been his friends just a month earlier and by strangers he meets in his day to day life. In response, Changez begins to speak positively about Islam and to grow a beard. Predictably, he then encounters even more hostility until he decides to resign his career to return to Lahore, where he becomes a college professor the government later accuses of radicalizing his students.

My problem with the film is that the Americans—from his love interest (played by the mediocre Hudson) to his boss (the wooden Kiefer Sutherland)—are cardboard figures that act in the most stereotypical ways. We’re to believe, for example, Erica would really mount an art exhibition around the theme “I Slept with a Pakistani” that she intends as an expression of her love for him. She’s baffled that Changez feels deeply insulted and exploited. This scene is simply unconvincing and irritating, as are most of the scenes with Changez and his venal, greedy boss.

It’s surprising (and disappointing) that Mira Nair goes for predictable conflict and easy politics in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I hope she back on track with her next film!

Enduring Love

Ian McEwan is one of the major novelists of contemporary literature. Although he's written a dozen novels—and many short stories, screenplays, and even librettos—he never gained much recognition outside of England until the film version of Atonement, which won a number of awards a few years ago. Since then, his novels have sold well in America, and some of his earlier works, such as Enduring Love (1997), are starting to gain more recognition, too.

Enduring Love begins with suspense, literally, as Jack Rose, enjoying a picnic with his wife, Clarissa, finds himself trying to grab a rope on a runaway helium balloon that has a terrified boy in its gondola. Five other men, including the balloon's captain, desperately grab the rope, too, but a sudden gust of wind, estimated later to be 70 mph, launches them into the air. Most of them hang suspended a few feet before they become frightened and let go and drop safely to the ground. One man, however, doesn't release and is then carried more than one hundred feet into the air before he loses his grip and plunges to his death.

Surprisingly, the rest of the novel doesn't really directly dwell on the aftermath of this bizarre accident but, instead, focuses on how one of the other men who released the rope, Jed, a fanatical Christian, begins to stalk Jack, who writes for popular science magazines and is scornful about religions. Jed will not accept that Jack has no belief in God and will never seek solace through prayer, and so, increasingly more frantic, he pursues Jack because he feels compelled to "save" him. These traumas—witnessing a death that he might have helped to prevent and then being stalked—have a terrible effect on Jack's emotional state and, consequently, on his marriage.

But what if Jed isn't stalking Joe? What if, in fact, Jed doesn't exist except as a figment of Joe's anxieties about his personal failures in life?

In addition to this disturbing plot, Enduring Love is a meditation on many themes, including the nature of time, the inter-complexities of human relationships, and the impact of science on the modern world. McEwan, for example, speculates about the limits of empirical knowledge and rational thought in the face of seemingly random, inexplicable tragedy.

I've read a half dozen of McEwan's novels, and although they all, like Enduring Love, wrestle with challenging philosophical questions, they are written in such lucid prose that they are accessible for general readers who want to read about interesting characters placed into compelling situations.

Bar Talk and Tall Tales

For years I’d heard stories about the stories of Ray Wheeler, so I was very happy to get a copy of Bar Talk and Tall Tales, a collection of eight of his originals, recently published by Buffalo Commons Press, so I could see for myself if the hype matches the reality. I can say, without reservation, that it does.

Ray’s narrative voice, whether he’s speaking or writing, has an absurdist quality to it that captures very well the absurdity of living in western North Dakota, where winter temperatures can plunge, seemingly within minutes, to -24 and you can freeze to death if you get lost in the sudden whiteout of a blizzard. Where the wind blows so hard that it seems like you should be able to “retract” your legs and then “ride a wave of it to another country.” Where talking bison—perhaps imaginary, perhaps not—wander through open spaces and suggest quietly that you let the prairie revert back to a “buffalo commons.”

Ray might originally be from Kansas City, but he’s been in western North Dakota long enough (going on 50 years) that he’s seen the oil booms and busts come and go. In one of his stories, “A Kind of Texas,” he spins the tale of Eddie and Lee, two locals who spend most of their time at a bar lamenting the influx of Texans into their community during the latest boom. These Texans, the only folks able to afford the skyrocketing rents, steal their women and cheat them at pool. Eddie, however, is something of a poet (like Ray himself), and so he gets his revenge with a bit of filthy doggerel, but then he pays the price, both in physical and in existential pain.

In fact, in many of these stories there is a price to be paid. In one of my favorites, “How They Spend the Cold Nights Up There,” a writer of western fiction, talking with a washed-up cowboy, Shorty, on a winter’s night at the bar, silently prays that a woman—any woman, so long as she has a warm body and most of her real teeth—will come into the bar. A kind-hearted God answers his prayer, and a woman with luscious lips, calling herself “Belle Starr,” strides into the bar and says that she wants a shot of Scotch and a story. Unfortunately, though, she loses interest in the writer, and in his story about a heroic cowboy named “Dallas Gates,” when she gets drunk and thinks that Shorty, bow legs and all, is the real Dallas Gates. At closing time, she leaves the bar with Shorty, and the writer, whose story doesn’t have an ending, finds himself without an ending, too, as he walks home through the early morning arctic air.

Ray had a bit of a reputation as a playwright back in the 1980s, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he greatly admires the work of Sam Shepard. One of the stories in this collection, “The Dakota Kid,” reminds me of Shepard’s plays, such as True West, in that we have a narrative, composed mostly of laconic dialogue, about two desperados who stop off at a bar in Amidon, population 14, to swap their getaway car for a clean car. Adding a note of gothic absurdity to this suspense is the bar owner’s retarded son, who perches on a stool, eating sunflower seeds (as efficiently as a chickadee) and saying nothing except “The world is everything there is.” Nothing good can come from a situation such as this one, and nothing does.

I certainly hope that you’ll pick up this collection of stories, for I think that you’ll find reading them the next best thing to actually drinking some beer with Ray at the local watering hole as he tells you stories that will make you laugh until you cry.

The book is $15 from Buffalo Commons Press, PO Box 15, St. Peter, MN 56082.

How many novelists in the United States?

Dominic Smith estimates that the United States has more than a million novelists, but that number pales on a per capita basis with Iceland, where approximately 10% of the population publishes a novel. Smith uses a number of intriguing statics to reach his estimate.

If only there were enough readers!

Crossing the Heart of Africa

Since I’d rather someone else risk his life so that I can then live vicariously in my armchair while I sip tea, I’m a sucker for adventure travel books. Consequently, I happily downloaded Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, by Julian Smith, and soon found myself in South Africa contemplating the challenges of traveling through some of the most dangerous territory in the world.

The book is divided into two parts, with chapters alternating between an account of Ewart Grogan’s attempt in 1898 to be the first person to transect Africa length-wise, from Cape Town to Cairo, and Smith’s attempt a few years ago to recreate the feat. Both attempts were inspired by love.

After dropping out of Cambridge University and then fighting in one of the many colonial wars of South Africa, Grogan decided to recuperate in New Zealand, where he soon met and fell in love with Gertrude Watt. She was from a wealthy background, however, and her protective stepfather didn’t have much use for this soldier of fortune from a middle-class background. Grogan said that would earn the stepdaughter’s hand by doing something magnificent, which ended up being an offer to the Royal Geographical Society to survey previously uncharted territory in central Africa, which would necessitate traveling, by foot mainly but by canoe on occasion, from South Africa to Egypt.

Accompanied part of the way by Gertrude’s uncle and large party of porters to carry equipment, Grogan encountered monumental obstacles, including fierce wildlife, disease, and warring tribes. The uncle, severely afflicted by malaria and dysentery, soon quit, as did most of the porters, but Grogan struggled on with just a few native guides until he completed the journey and won his future wife. After a triumphant lecture tour around England, the two then settled in Kenya, where Grogan became an influential plantation owner.

Flash forward to 2007, a little more than hundred years after Grogan’s successful trip, and Julian Smith, a struggling writer who’s afraid to commit to the woman he loves, reads about the feat and resolves to duplicate it. He offers a marriage proposal on the condition that his girlfriend will allow him to make the trip, which will be approximately 4,500 miles long and take a few months by train, car, and boat. She agrees.

These autobiographical chapters, which alternate with chapters describing Grogan’s trip, describe Smith’s adventures as he travels through modern-day South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Egypt (he skips Sudan because of its constant warfare). Although he faced few of the genuine dangers that Grogan faced, Smith has a few heart-stopping escapades along the way.

If, like me, you prefer to read about adventure travel instead of actually doing adventure travel, then Crossing the Heart of Africa is for you.

Why you should major in English

Gerald Howard, writing in the Times, makes a convincing argument for majoring in English. After convincing his bosses at Penguin to pay an advance to Alice Adams to publish two of her novels, he has an epiphany:

However, as I went back to my office I experienced an instance of what the French call “stair wit.” I thought, wait a minute, I am putting that $7,500 to work. It’s an investment. The chain of activity I am putting in motion will give work to printers and shippers. It will provide bookstores (there were still bookstores) with tangible goods to sell at a profit. The revenue from those sales will help to pay my salary, my colleagues’ salaries, even our C.F.O.’s salary. Alice Adams will have some thousands of dollars in her pocket — maybe to invest in a C.D. All this and a few thousand people fewer than I put down on the P. & L. (I’d lied, of course) will have bought and enjoyed two excellent novels that deserved to be in print.

Whereas if we’d just put that money in the hands of a bank, they would just ... well, I was pretty hazy on what a bank would actually do with that money, but my general sense was that it would sit there in a vault microbially propagating itself and what good would that do anybody? Economically I was putting my shoulder — or Penguin’s shoulder — to the wheel! I came away with the conviction that I wasn’t useless anymore.

Art makes you smart!

As this article in the Times reminds us, viewing and thinking about art will make you a better person:

Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum.

Ambrose Bierce in the Civil War

My most recent essay for the New York Times just came out. You can read about Ambrose Bierce and his service in the Civil War.

So you want to be a writer?

Are you ready to chuck your staid career to embark on a life as a novelist? Ready to switch your major from accounting to creative writing? Vanessa Barbara, writing in the Times, suggests that you understand what you're getting into:

Let me give you some personal numbers. I wrote a book in 2008 that won a literary prize and recently sold its 3,000th copy. The book retails for around $15, the author’s royalty rate is 5 percent, so I earned $0.75 from each copy. So for the book that took me one year to write and four more years to sell, I earned a total of around $2,250 (and a bout of depression). I’d have done better donating my body to science.

Although she is specifically describing her experience as a writer in Brazil, I can attest that circumstances are not much better for writers in America, so know what you're getting into if you'd like to be a writer!

Unfamiliar Fishes

Sarah Vowell is my kind of woman: sharp-witted and on the left politically, with a deadpan sense of humor and a possessor of a large vocabulary. I'm not much of a radio listener so I've rarely heard her commentaries on NPR, but I've enjoyed her appearances on The Daily Show and have found three of her books to be well-written and thoughtful critiques of America and its citizens.

For example, in The Wordy Shipmates (2008), which is about the Pilgrims and their Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell analyzes the irony implicit in a group of people fleeing England because of repression but then being so intolerant toward the natives of the New World and any Europeans who didn't believe what they believed. Similarly, in Assassination Vacation (2005), an eccentric sort of travelogue, Vowell visits sites associated with the presidents who have been killed while in office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy), which leads her to speculate about what makes America such a country of violence.

Vowell’s most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes (2011), describes a trip to Hawaii for a vacation. While there, she tours the royal palace, and, on that same day in December 2003, U.S. troops capture Saddam Hussein in Iraq. This coincidence makes her realize that America has always been in the business of "regime change." Her new book, as she says in her introduction, tells the story about how the U.S. spent seventy-eight years "Americanizing" Hawaii—from sending the first missionaries to "civilize" the islands in 1820 to formal annexation in 1898. (The latter year, of course, also represents the peak of American imperialism as the U.S. declared war on Spain and ended up seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam.) It's not a story that makes you proud to be an American.

Most of Unfamiliar Fishes is a detailed history of the American missionaries and whalers who began visiting the Sandwich Islands, as they were known until the 1850s, for religious and commercial reasons. These two groups, however, were rivals for the islands as the missionaries sought to convert the natives and the whalers sought some R&R while on shore leave. "Imagine, Vowell says, "if the Hawaii Convention Center in Waikiki hosted The Value Voters Summit and the Adult Entertainment Expo simultaneously—for forty years." As one could imagine, the two cannot possibly co-exist in harmony, and the only reason the conflict between them ended was the discovery, in the mid 19th century, that petroleum was a much cheaper alternative to whale oil, which led to the collapse of the whaling industry (the only reason, indeed, that the whales weren't hunted to extinction) and the triumph of missionary culture in Hawaii.

Although most Hawaiians appreciated how the missionaries contributed to a higher standard of living (particularly with their emphasis on public schools), they lamented the loss of independence that came with American annexation in 1898. Vowell, in fact, takes her title from a metaphor used by one 19^th-century Hawaiian writer to describe the situation of his native land: “If a big wave comes in, large and unfamiliar fishes will come in from the dark ocean, and when they see the small fishes of the shallows they will eat them up.”

Like her earlier books, Unfamiliar Fishes shines a light on a part of American history that is worth exploring, and, as such, I recommend Vowell’s book.

Stephen Fry

If you've never watched A Bit of Fry and Laurie or Jeeves & Wooster, then I don't know what to say. It's a crime if you're only familiar with Hugh Laurie from the American show House.

Unfortunately, Stephen Fry hasn't gotten quite the same recognition in the States as has his pal, Hugh. That's a shame. His movie Wilde is a quiet masterpiece, and his British television shows Last Chance to See and Stephen Fry in America are witty, urbane travel documentaries. His podcasts are among the most popular in Britain.

Here is one of Fry's podcasts, in which he expresses his irritation at overly punctilious grammarians.

This Town

Don't read This Town if you already have high blood pressure because, if you do, your head will start pounding and your eyes will start bulging. You've been warned!

You can't really call Mark Leibovich's book a political exposé because it simply confirms what most of us have already suspected, which is that Washington D.C. is a cesspool that exists simply to perpetuate itself. For example, while most of us want bipartisanship, Washington prefers gridlock because that's what pays. In fact, as Leibovich documents, again and again, today's status quo is perfect as senators and representatives go from being elected officials to lobbyists in order to "monetize" their public service.

Particular scorn is heaped upon those who claimed to be anti-Establishment while in office but are quick to jump on the gravy train after leaving. North Dakota's own Byron Dorgan is one such ex-Senator who was "contemptuously righteous" about lobbyists but then was quick to cash in. In fact, Dorgan didn't even delay the two-year period that office holders are supposed to wait before lobbying their former colleagues. Instead, he flouted that regulation by not officially registering as a "lobbyist" and joining a Washington law firm as a "senior policy adviser," one who just happens to oversee a staff of lobbyists.

Although the book is about Washington culture in general, much of it focuses on specific personalities—such as "super lawyer" Bob Barnett, Senators Harry Reid and Tom Coburn, the late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, and lobbyist Jack Quinn—to show just how morally bankrupt the current national political system is. Other individuals who come in for particular scrutiny are Darrell Issa, Dick Gephardt, Haley Barbour, and Richard Holbrooke, as well as dozens of staffers and assorted hangers on that you haven't heard of before. Even though This Town discusses literally hundred of people, there are no heroes in this story.

Washington media, usually more concerned about its own "branding" opportunities than about truly covering the news, also comes in for some scathing criticism. Leibovich cites, for example, how, in April 2010 after Justice John Paul Stevens retired, the website Politico asked why Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hadn't been mentioned as a possible replacement for the Supreme Court, which then started a frenzy of "trending" discussions on other websites before the White House, less than 24 hours later, announced that Clinton would not be nominated. In the meantime, page views of Politico multiplied, which undoubtedly pleased its advertisers and likely allowed Politico to increase its ad rates.

This Town is a thoroughly depressing and dispiriting book, and as such, it should be read by everybody, for only by understanding how far off the rails our political system has gone will we be able to reform it.

Unless, of course, you read the book and then just throw up your hands in despair, which was my reaction.