There’s usually a government conspiracy at the bottom in Stephen Hunter’s novels.  He’s that kind of thriller writer.  The conspiracies sometimes stretch over generations, something Hunter can pull off because the two main characters in his universe are father and son Swagger, shooting it out with the powers that be in their respective eras: The post-war years and the 1990’s present.  One novel had a timeline in Vietnam as well, making it three separate eras where the strings are pulled by the (same) men in black.  Now that’s a powerful conspiracy.

And then these badass Swagger characters come in and shoot it all up.  That’s so much fun.  I’ve described Hunter’s novels earlier as trash, and they are, in the positive sense of easily readable palate cleansers.  I don’t mean that they’re unimaginative.  That doesn’t work for me.  What I mean is that he’s found a sweet spot in the balance between being readable and being interesting.

So whenever I want to remind myself of why I love to read, I pick up a Stephen Hunter novel, and gobble it down like back when I had just discovered books and could think of nothing more wonderful than spending an evening in a chair reading some amazing adventure story.  And then I forget the story and move on.  But the experience – so much fun!

Oh, and the story: A 1950’s Mississippi penal colony for blacks is a modern heart of darkness.  There’s a conspiracy.  And lots of shooting and general badassery.

Out here in one of the American satellite cultures, the events that took place in the United States in the half-century between the 1930’s and the 1970’s are at least as much our history as those that actually took place in our own country.  Some Norwegians feel ambivalent about this, but it would be hard to deny it.

William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream covers this period in American history.  Published in 1975, it’s a subjective history, full of opinions – and the occasional historical myth.  The book not only observes this period, but is a product of it.  It’s a point of view.  I find that kind of historical writing really refreshing.  Later historians get more of the facts right, but there’s no substitute for the voices of the people who lived through it all.  Manchester falls somewhere between these roles.  This is not his personal story, but it is his personal history.

This is a massive book, 1400 pages, which is why I read it as a high-speed audiobook.  “Slow readers” do so at their peril.  (I guess there’s also a case to be made here for ebooks.)

But I’m not sure what could have been left out.  Manchester zooms in and out, from broad strokes to detailed accounts of interesting events.  He covers all the important events you can remember, putting them in perspective, which is what this sort of history is for.

And let me also remind you again of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which covers some of the same period.

Like with many books, there’s a great essay hiding within the 200 pages of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus.  You can read it here, or watch it as a presentation.  It’s about how television was the gin of the post-war decades, a way to make life with an abundance of spare time more endurable, but now the internet allows us to spend that time in ways that are much more useful and/or fun.

Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr are sort of mini-nemesises.  They throw little darts at each other in their books. I love that, because I’m a fan of both.  This new conversation on what the internet is doing to us is the most interesting one going on at the moment.  Shirky says the internet is liberating our spare time.  Carr responds that we’re actually watching more TV than ever.  Well, but Shirky is really talking about a potential, which is amazing even if still unrealized.  And so on.

So much for the essay, which is more or less the first chapter of the book.  The rest is .. the usual feel-good stuff about what nice thing some people did with social media once, and look at this Open Source thing, is that amazing or what?  It’s not wrong, it’s just old, and hastily thrown together.  Shirky is showing signs of being stuck in the 00’s.  I say we should take the decade’s good ideas with us, and move on.

But read the essay, definitely.  Go read it right now, there’s nothing more to see here.

It pains me to report that eventually my mother’s dabblings led her into a little bout with black magic. I wish I could deny this and prevent many of her descendants from being burned at the stake, but unfortunately she not only wrote and signed a small treatise on the subject under the influence of a sinister buffoon called Aleister Crowley, but she is also mentioned either under her true name or under an alias in all books about this rancid character.

At just about the time I was becoming acclimated to the Ecoles des Roches in Normandy, quite unaware, as usual, of what Mother was up to, Mother was in London acclimating herself to Aleister Crowley.

The practitioner and staunch defender of every form of vice historically known to man, generally accepted as one of the most depraved, vicious, and revolting humbugs who ever escaped from a nightmare or a lunatic asylum, universally despised and enthusiastically expelled from every country he ever tried to live in, Mr. Crowley nevertheless was considered by my mother to be not only the epitome of charm and good manners, but also the possessor of one of the very few genius-bathed brains she had been privileged to observe at work during her entire lifetime.  Ask me not why!  Much as I revered her, my mother was still a woman, one of that wondrous gender whose thought processes are not for male understanding.

- Preston Sturges, Preston Sturges