Recent Readings and a Pew Research Study About Who Does Not Read Books in America

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
--Ray Bradbury.

This past week I read an article on Medium about reading books and how women are reading more than men now. Not only that, but that more women are enrolled in college than men, which at one time was heavily skewed toward males.

I intended this post to be a list of my recent readings with summaries of the books I'd read, but then I decided instead to begin by drawing attention to some findings from a Pew Research study on who doesn't read books in America. Since there are many studies showing a correlation between reading,  education and wealth generation (or career empowerment), it seems that a primary aim of good parenting should go beyond making sure kids have food, shelter and a safe place to live, but should very definitely include reading, writing and 'rithmetic as basic foundation stones for a successful life, just as it was in grandma's day.  (Good social skills can be added here, too.)

All that to say, here were a few numbers from the Pew study. And again, the interesting feature here is not "who" is reading, but who is not reading.

24% of Americans have not read a book in whole or in part in the past year. In other words, reading books doesn't appear to enter their minds as something having value.

They assessed reading habits by age, income, gender, level of education attained and race. In most cases there were few surprises. More men have not read a book (25%) than women (22%), fewer whites have not read a book as compared to blacks and Hispanics. People in the lowest income bracket (under 30K/year) are three times more likely to not have read a book the previous year.

When compared to a 2016 study regarding libraries, "the same demographic traits that characterize non-book readers also often apply to those who have never been to a library." Sad.

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My apologies if it sounds like I was ranting. No doubt if you've gotten this far you are a reader, so I'd best move on.

My reading list is always longer than my available ti
me, which is probably the challenge for all avid readers and lovers of books. Here are a handful of books I've completed recently, followed by a few others that I am in the process of reading.

The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace
Paul Thomas Chamberlin

I read the HarperCollins audio version of this book, which was so powerful I bought the hardback and am reading it again. The audiobook is read by Grover Gardner. While reading it I kept feeling like this was the saddest book I'd ever read. My reason for this was two-fold. First, it is heartbreaking how the superpowers (Soviet Union, China, USA) are playing this global power game but the people in power moving armaments and making decisions seem unharmed by any of it while literally millions of innocent civilians are being killed, wounded, displaced. The litany of horrors committed during this "time of peace" after the last world war is mind-boggling. Second, the degree to which our own country (U.S.) was complicit in generating all this human suffering just makes one ashamed.

I strongly recommend the book because it is the first and best book that I've seen or know of that connects on the dots regarding the miscellaneous and seemingly unrelated conflicts in various parts of the world during the Cold War.

We Die Alone
David Howarth

This is another audiobook I read. (See my review of the Untold Story of the History of Talking Books) The story was originally published in 1955. It is literally an amazing story of survival in the most harrowing Arctic circumstances. It is the story of Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian who ends up in Britain to return as part of the resistance. A boat with 12 men come into the fjords on a mission, but are thwarted by the Nazis. All are captured or killed except Baalsrud, whose toe is shot off. He escapes, and must now survive.

All that (above) occurs in the very beginning of the story The rest is one challenge after another including frostbitten feet, and an assortment of other complications The writing is totally compelling. One reason I wanted to read this is that I also have a compelling survival/escape novella that I have written about a young man with a withered leg who escapes from Estonia as the Red Army is heading West at the end of WW2. 10% of the population of Estonia fled in a single wave, whic should tell you something about life under Stalin from 1940-42. If I can tell Ralph's story (Uprooted) half as well as David Howarth tells Jan Baalsrud's, then I will be happy.

Don't Quit Your Day Job
Michael Fedo

The full title is Don’t Quit Your Day Job: The Adventures of a Midlist Author.  s a memoir recounting the five-decade writing career of Michael Fedo, whose books have not attained best-seller status, despite receiving mostly favorable reviews in publications such as The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, among others. What follows here are a few excerpts from my review of the book on Amazon.

The book is essentially an overview of Mr. Fedo’s life as a writer, but it’s written in such a way as to provide good lessons all along the way. Each story has a purpose and though it is a book for writers, it would be useful for many other careers in the creative arts.

His first chapter, Authorities and Experts May Be Wrong, is a lesson I learned myself and have written about more than once. “Who Are Your Experts?” is something everyone has to address at various points in a career. We are shaped by those whom we listen to, and sometimes we don’t have enough experience to recognize the difference between good and bad advice.

Though primarily a book for writers, each chapters contains lessons for writers, I think others might enjoy reading about his life in the writing biz. He writes in an easy-going style that would make this book worth reading the most valuable one being to make sure you can pay your bills before you launch into the deep. It's a memoir designed to be both entertaining and instructive.

Read my blog post about his writing workshop and the reading he gave from this book.

The Year of Less
Cait Flanders

Amazon version has livelier cover.

The full title is actually, The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store.
It's a short book with a promising title, related to several other book I've read about simplifying one's life and reducing clutter. Unfortunately, I didn't care that much for the reader. (The author.) She's a blogger whose primary theme seems to be her self. The book essentially documents her efforts to live on less and the lessons she learns along the way. One reviewer on Amazon (who liked the book) wrote, "This book isn't about minimalism or decluttering (although it will inspire you to pursue those goals!), it's about living with less, consuming less, and ultimately needing less." Another wrote, "To the uninitiated: trust your instinct to "buy less" and pass on this." I almost quit the book two or three times, but plowed through anyways.

My biggest problem was that I was unable to relate to a person who "buys things" to make herself feel better while racking up massive credit card debt. By shopping to make oneself happy, I am referring to replacing all the furniture in the living room, clothes, etc to the tune of $30,000. There were a few good insights early on and I thought there would be more. As a blogger she has built a following who apparently enjoys her transparency and candor. For the wider public, it should have been an article in a magazine.

CURRENTLY READING
I have a number books in mid-stream. Some I will write about in the future, one I already wrote about but need to finish.

The Unexpected Gambler
Robert Asiel

This book and the next are about guys who learned how to win by cheating, as in power or dice games. Asiel went to Las Vegas as a 17-year-old and became a poker dealer at a casino at which time he learned that the casinos were also crooked. (EdNote: It's my understanding that things have changed because the odds already favor the casinos and they do not have to cheat to rake in the dough.) Asiel subtitled his book, A History of Casinos Cheating the Public and One Gambler's Revenge. It sounds like a self-rationalization to me, but most of us spend a lifetime justifying one form of bad behavior or another.

Robert Asiel went to Vegas in the 60s, while the casinos were still mob run. Later in life he was all over the country and did a lot of cruise ship hustling as gambling opened up everywhere. In the end he was wanted by the FBI, but not before he'd lived a life of adventure. Like Fast Jack (below) he did finally get nailed and spent time in the pen. The book will likely surprise you at the games people play.

Fast Jack: The Last Hustler
John Farrell

One of the more interesting places to hear good stories is from the cab drivers in Las Vegas. On my first trip the Las Vegas our cabby told about how far downhill Vegas had gone since the corporates took over and the mob no longer ran the casinos. We asked for an explanation and he said in the old days you lose all your money at the gaming tables and the casino would put you up for the night and pay for your ticket to get home. "Not any more," he said You lose all your money and the send you packing.

Fast Jack was born in 1937 so he came of age in the Fifties. He learned all the tricks of the hustler's trade and then took them to another level. As a card and dice mechanic is also learned the risks involved, including being beat up, shot at and doing time. He wrote his memoir because the world has changed. In the old days most gambling was a private matter. The hustlers knew where the action was. Nowadays, casinos, riverboats and cruise ships are everywhere.
At age 80, Jack's dice moves are still astonishing. Here's a video with no special effects showing off some Fast Jack dice mechanics.
Here's a podcast of Fast Jack being interviewed on Maria Konnikova's show Grift.

An End to Upside Down Thinking
Mark Gober

The subtitle of this book is Dispelling the Myth That the Brain Produces Consciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life.  Gober's book is essentially an assault on the arrogant assumptions of science, specifically as it pertains to materialism. The notion that consciousness could evolve from matter did not make sense and he began to explore this problem in greater detail. He learned that this area of science is one of the biggest stumbling blocks and is still not yet resolved.

Though I'd not finished the book yet, I wrote a review earlier this month and interviewed the author afterward.

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Aren't books amazing? There are so many varieties of books, and so many stories still to be told.

What have you been reading lately? I hope it's good.

Killing Fields: New Book Proposes that the Cold War Wasn't Really Cold, It Was Just Different

This past ten days I've been reading Paul Thomas Chamberlin's The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace. Chamberlin attempts to connect the dots regarding what was happening in the world during the cold war for the purpose of seeing it as it actually was rather than as mediated to us through the media. The book has been meticulously researched and for myself has been exceedingly compelling.

One reason Chamberlin wrote the book is because most of us have received our history by means of mediators who put a spin on events that, in our case, favors an American perspective. For example, when the My Lai massacre came to light it was treated as a shocking anomaly in the Cold War. What Chamberlin points out is that from the end of World War Two till the end of the Cold War, the casualties to civilians who were not involved militarily would have been equivalent to a My Lai EVERY DAY from 1945 thru 1990, many of these directly by American aggression or American armaments.* In other words, though there was no official world war, it was never a time of peace.

The audiobook I've been listening to is read aloud by Grover Gardner. It's always a pleasure to begin an audiobook where I discover that Gardner is the reader. In this case, there was no mention on the cover, though I eventually learned that his name appears on each disc of this Harper Collins Audio.

The book itself is filled with so many fresh insights about this period of history that I've now ordered a copy in print so I can review sections of the narrative. Everything is documented, sadly.

KIRKUS REVIEW summarizes the book in this manner: The traditional historical narrative of the Cold War is that it was a bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during which proxy conflicts occasionally flared, and in which tensions were at times almost unimaginably fraught, but where the two antagonists avoided a hot war. However, as Chamberlin (History/Columbia Univ.; The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post–Cold War Order, 2012) shows in this ambitious, important book, while the two nuclear powers never engaged in a shooting war, the era from 1945 to 1990 was hardly the “Long Peace” of legend. The author explores a vast swath of geographical territory and shows how, at the time, these “bloodlands” were engulfed in myriad devastating conflicts, sometimes as Cold War proxies but often as combatants in internecine struggles tied into Cold War politics but not always bound to the major powers. The result was some 14 million deaths, the majority of which were civilians; for them, the war was anything but cold.

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An Amazon.com read wrote this review:
The conventional wisdom has always held that the Cold War was an era of uneasy peace because the United States and Soviet Union had their nuclear weapons pointed at each other and the threat of mutually assured destruction largely prevented the two countries from engaging in combat.

Paul Thomas Chamberlin in The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace throws the conventional wisdom on its head. The Cold War was actually a bloodbath, but only for peoples throughout the developing world who were involved in wars seeking independence and freedom from colonial control. And sadly for most people in the US and Soviet Union these conflicts had an out-of-sight out-of-mind feeling, with notable exceptions.

Chamberlin’s work takes the listener from Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran among others to illustrate that the proxy warfare brought on by Cold War strategic calculations actually led to hundreds of thousands of deaths among native populations and gave rise to a new breed of Islamic conflict that the world is still fighting today. 

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I began writing this blog post after having read the first years after WW2 up through the Korean War. It's scary to think that even with such a marginal conflict there were discussions in Washington regarding the use of an atomic bomb. Instead of seeing conflicts within countries as internal struggles for power after the eviction of Colonialists, the American interpretation always escalated matters into a global good guys and bad guys struggle between us and them (meaning the Communists.)

When the American forces landed in Korea, they brought an American arrogance that led them to believe this was going to be a quick operation like mopping up a kitchen floor. When we pushed them back to the 38th Parallel, Chamberlin shows how this arrogance had a near devastating outcome. Chamberlin states that the North Koreans retreated purposely, making the American army believe North Korean forces were weak, thereby stirring up American arrogance another notch, which was already excessive, and turning our soldiers into sitting ducks spread out and far from where they were supposed to be.

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TODA\Y I'm two-thirds through the audiobook and awaiting my own print copy so I can cite some of the shocking statistics from this under-reported recent history. At this point Nixon and Kissinger are debating how to withdraw from Vietnam. Both know we lost, but Nixon wants to leave South Vietnam in a manner that looks like we have handed power over to the South Vietnamese so when Hanoi overruns the South, America didn't lose, but rather the South Vietnamese, whom we armed and trained, were the ones who blew it. Such stupidity and posturing is the whole game in Washington, and so transparent. And clueless leaders wonder why the general public has lost respect.

It's unbelievable how much suffering has been caused, in every corner of the world, by the weapons American arms-makers have produced. The massive quantities of bombs we've dropped (or that our "friends" have dropped) makes Guernica look like a raindrop. American bombs have produced more devastation in more places than most of us were really aware of. When we think of the wars we've been in, we only think about American casualties. Yes, we're losing fewer troops these days, but we're still blowing up multitudes of innocents.

I'm not suggesting that we are the only bad guys. Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was a costly tragedy. And the Pol Pot's Cambodian experiment, a greater stupidity still.

If you're my age consider this: These things have happened in our lifetimes. Why didn't we weep? Partly because we were left in the dark.

The book is important because, as the saying goes, if we don't know our history we're bound to repeat it. Paul Chamberlin's book makes an important contribution to our understanding.

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* Our Republic of Korea (South Korea) allies slaughtered innumerable quantities of peoples with "Communist" sentiments. After shooting hundreds of villagers on one occasion, the South Korean army said, "O.K. if you are not dead you can stand up and go home." Then they shot all these as well. The author cites another example of U.S. soldiers rounding up unarmed villagers and gathering them into a mass of 400 or so beneath a bridge, then taking turns firing machine guns into the crowd until there were none left alive. In all, Chamberlin states that there were more than 1200 instances of mass killings of civilians by U.S. and South Korea troops in the Korean War.

** NSC 68. United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, better known as NSC 68, was a 66-page top secret National Security Council (NSC) policy paper drafted by the Department of State and Department of Defense and presented to President Harry S. Truman on 7 April 1950. It was one of the most important American policy statements of the Cold War. In the words of scholar Ernest R. May, NSC 68 "provided the blueprint for the militarization of the Cold War from 1950 to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s." NSC 68 and its subsequent amplifications advocated a large expansion in the military budget of the United States, the development of a hydrogen bomb, and increased military aid to allies of the United States. It made the rollback of global Communist expansion a high priority. NSC 68 rejected the alternative policies of friendly détente and containment of the Soviet Union.

While NSC 68 did not make any specific recommendations regarding the proposed increase in defense expenditures, the Truman Administration almost tripled defense spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product between 1950 and 1953 (from 5 to 14.2 percent).
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSC_68