THE REVERSAL by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly's newest book, The Reversal, is hot off the press, and—no surprise—it's another stunner. Jason Jessup is about to be retried after serving 24 years for murdering a 12-year-old girl. DNA traces taken from the body, it turns out, did not belong to him, and now the public is clamoring for his exoneration. LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch and attorney Michael Haller are convinced, however, that Jessup is guilty as charged—and extremely dangerous.

That's the first paragraph of my review, "Beyond Hardboiled: Michael Connelly's Dark but Hopeful World," in today's online edition of Books and Culture.

To read more about Connelly's 22nd crime novel, or to learn why it's OK for people with literary tastes to read this bestselling author, or for ideas on where to plunge in to his prodigious oeuvre - click the link.

Related post: I reviewed The Lincoln Lawyer (Connelly's 16th novel) here.

Which party is more likely to be in bed with Wall Street? or, A plague on both your houses

Are Barack Obama's policies ruining business? Some of my Republican friends think so. So I was interested to learn about financial reporter Charles Gasparino's newly published book, Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street. I haven't read the book, and I'm neither analyzing nor recommending it. Its thesis interests me, however. A few lines from Amazon's product review show where it's going:

Gasparino draws on interviews with dozens of key CEOs and political players to trace the roots of Wall Street's twisted love affair with one of the most liberal presidents in American history. He shows how, for decades, big banks and big business have colluded with big government, thereby laying the groundwork for today's shady dealings, and how the same bankers Obama now publicly reprimands have supported him--not because he promises change, but because he promises business.

That's scary, especially when read alongside a recent New York Times article about Republican Congressman John Boehner, likely to be the next Speaker of the House. In "A GOP Leader Tightly Bound to Lobbyists", Eric Lipton writes that Boehner

maintains especially tight ties with a circle of lobbyists and former aides representing some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R. J. Reynolds, MillerCoors and UPS.They have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns, provided him with rides on their corporate jets, socialized with him at luxury golf resorts and waterfront bashes and are now leading fund-raising efforts for his Boehner for Speaker campaign, which is soliciting checks of up to $37,800 each, the maximum allowed.

So who's helping business more, Democrats or Republicans? Seems to me that elected representatives of both parties need to wear the full-disclosure T-shirts I recommended last month.

Perhaps the answer is found not in PAC donations and lobbyists' influence, but in how individual states are faring. If a state is hospitable to business, won't that result in improved finances, better incomes, lower unemployment? And if so, shouldn't a state's political leanings have something to do with its financial soundness?

Yesterday the website 24/7 Wall Street published "The Best and Worst Run States in America: A Survey of All Fifty." The report's authors noted that "well-run states have a great deal in common with well-run corporations. Books are kept balanced. Investment is prudent. Debt is sustainable. Innovation is prized. Workers are well-chosen and well-trained. Executives are picked based on merit and not 'politics.'” Taking data from a host of surveys, they came up with a formula that ranked each state "giving weight to metrics that are most important to prudent governance."

In a wonky mood, I made myself an Excel chart showing the states' ranks. I then added columns listing each state's choice of presidential candidate in 2008, the party affiliation of each state's governor, and the party affiliations of each state's two senators. What I found is that a well-run state can be Democratic, Republican, or a mix. So can a poorly run state. Though it appears that Democrats may have a slight edge over Republicans in good governance, we who live in Illinois--solidly Democratic and #43 on the list--must be careful about throwing stones.

Next month's primary elections will likely shift power in the direction of the Republican party. Will a Republican win rescue business from destruction at the hands of Democrats?--or, looked at another way, will it sell a defenseless populace to greedy Wall Street types?

The answer to both questions is that the elections will probably make little difference, since Democrats seem to be in bed with business just as much as Republicans are. Will a power shift help to put the states on a more solid financial footing? Again, probably not, since party affiliation doesn't seem to have a lot to do with a state's financial soundness.

“We basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country,” says Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond. Thomas Friedman quotes him in a recent op-ed piece, "Third Party Rising." Here is Friedman's proposal:

We need a third party on the stage of the next presidential debate to look Americans in the eye and say: “These two parties are lying to you. They can’t tell you the truth because they are each trapped in decades of special interests. I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world’s leaders, not the new Romans.

Hear, hear.

LET'S TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME by Gail Caldwell

One of my favorite memoirs is Caroline Knapp's Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs. It's also one of my favorite books about dogs, because Knapp, who knew how memoir should be written, tells us as much about dogs as about herself. The book is not self-indulgent, even though Lucille, her rescued German shepherd mix, in turn helped her come to terms with a series of devastating losses.

Pack of Two was published in 1998. In 2002, Knapp was diagnosed with lung cancer. Less than two months later, she died. She was 42 years old.

Gail Caldwell was Knapp's best friend. A memoirist and Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, she and Knapp met at a literary gathering, but they bonded several years later near a duck pond where they had brought their rambunctious dogs. Both women enjoyed rowing and swimming. Both were recovering alcoholics. Both were driven introverts. They could talk for hours.

Let's Take the Long Way Home is the story of their friendship, their dogs, their personal struggles, and - eventually - Knapp's death. It is a nostalgic book, as memoirs often are, but it is not a downer. I recommend it to other bookish, dog-loving introverts who care deeply about their friends.

THRIFT STORE SAINTS by Jane Knuth

Publishers will tell you that it's hard to interest people in books about social justice. Most of us feel guilty enough already. Besides, let's face it - so many books in that category are not only guilt-producing, they're mind-numbingly dull. Phrases like "the preferential option for the poor" do not roll trippingly off the tongue.

Thrift Store Saints, however, is one book about helping the poor that won't make you feel bad about yourself and won't put you to sleep. In fact, it may make you chuckle, if you're the chuckling sort. And if you'd like to get involved with serving the poor but don't have a clue where to start, this is the book for you.

Some 15 years ago, while looking for a rosary for her daughter's First Communion, Jane Knuth somehow ended up at a St. Vincent de Paul store. Noticing the mixture of used merchandise and holy hardware - "as if someone set up a chapel inside a garage sale" - she briefly wondered if the store was "a front for illegal activity."

After waiting an eternity while a small, elderly clerk dealt with a gigantic, stinking drunk, Knuth discovered that St. Vincent de Paul didn't accept credit cards. The clerk cheerfully offered to let her take the rosary anyway and pay later - and then asked if she'd consider volunteering to work at the store. Amazed, Knuth agreed, and then immediately regretted her words.

"Being Catholic," she writes, "I'm all for martyrs, but not as a personal vocation." But she went ahead, reluctant and ill at ease, and that is how Knuth's long involvement with the poor of Kalamazoo began.

The rest of the book covers what she learned from working with the poor (and with other volunteers, which could be even more challenging), but it's not your typical social justice book. Most books about poverty present a lot of facts, data, theory, and theology, interspersing the sober exposition with occasional anecdotes in hopes of keeping the reader's attention. This book turns that approach inside out. Knuth tells story after story, only occasionally supplementing her tales with commentary, as she gently and with self-deprecating humor leads readers into a new way of seeing.

The book, says its author, is "about recognizing God among us when the language is rough, the labor seems mindless, and everybody is wearing old clothes." An engaging storyteller, Knuth invites us to come inside with the customers, learn about their lives, and be changed.

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Disclaimer: I used to work for Loyola Press, and Jane Knuth graciously included my name among the acknowledgments. However, I was not involved with editing the book, I have no financial interest in it, and Loyola didn't ask me to promote it. I just think it's an unusually winsome introduction to volunteer ministry. See for yourself - you can read the first two chapters here.

California tax cuts - a cautionary tale

I'm a California girl and proud of it. My cell phone's ring tone is "California Dreamin'," and when winter comes to Chicago I start humming "Maid of Constant Sorrow" ("I'm goin' back to California, place where I was partly raised"). So I was interested in David Brooks's commentary yesterday about why the state that once "enjoyed the highest living standards in the country" - during most of the years I lived there, in fact - now "has all the dysfunctions that mark national government, but at a more advanced stage."

Brooks says the blame comes from both sides of the ideological spectrum. In the 70s, labor lobbied for better salaries and pensions, and governors shorted infrastructure in order to meet their demands. Environmental regulations discouraged small businesses (Brooks says, but does not give examples). Tax policy cut off badly needed revenue.

The result? California is one of two U.S. states on the international list of 10 states most likely to default (the other one being my current home state, Illinois, whose woes you can read about here).

Who's to blame?
Brooks does not say exactly when California's fortunes began to turn around, but he implies that problems began in the late 60s or early 70s. The last of the pro-market, pro-business, but progressive governors he lists is Edmund "Pat" Brown, who finished his term in January 1967. Brooks does not mention that Ronald Reagan was governor of California from 1967 through 1974, and I don't know if he thinks the decline began with Reagan (who, by the way, actually raised taxes) or with his successor, Jerry Brown (Pat's son).

He does, however, mention a seminal event in California's troubled financial history: the 1978 passage of Proposition 13, the property tax-cutting brainchild of Republican lobbyist Howard Jarvis. "With Proposition 13 and other measures that cut taxes," Brooks writes, "they cut off revenue and pushed through structural reforms, making it hard for future administrations to raise funds."

For 30 years, wrote Kevin O'Leary in Time magazine last year, California's leaders tried to "live with Proposition 13 while continuing to provide the state services Californians expect — freeways, higher education, prisons, assistance to needy families and, very important, essential funding to local government and school districts that vanished after the antitax measure passed." Eventually their efforts collapsed. California, the state that has led the way in education, technology, pop culture, and wine growing, is now leading the way in financial ruin.

Predictably, the conservative Cato Institute thinks Proposition 13 was just fine, inexplicably linking it to the economic surge beginning in the 1980s (remember Silicon Valley and the dot com bubble?) Their description of its influence, however, is right on:

Proposition 13 was a political earthquake whose jolt was felt not just in Sacramento but all across the nation, including Washington, D.C. Jarvis's initiative to cut California's notoriously high property taxes by 30 percent and then cap the rate of increase in the future was the prelude to the Reagan income tax cuts in 1981. It also incited a nationwide tax revolt at the state and local levels. Within five years of Proposition 13's passage, nearly half the states strapped a similar straitjacket on politicians' tax-raising capabilities. Almost all of those tax limitation measures remain the law of the land today.

Taxing and spending
Hey, if you try to take care of your maxed-out credit cards by lowering your income, you should love the results of our state and national tax revolts. Prosperity all around, right? No wonder politicians are calling for still more tax reductions.

Ah, but they are also calling for massive spending cuts. Well, yes, it would be great if the government would reduce spending (unless, of course, it reduces spending on something that affects me). Oddly, every president in the last 40 years has increased spending, including Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush.

Beginning in the early 80s and continuing to the present (except for a few years under President Clinton), the gap between federal revenue and federal spending has also increased. The only thing trickling - and now flooding - down is massive debt. How long can we keep this up?

I don't much like to pay taxes - federal, state, or local. I would rather live in a world where interstate highways, health care, education, old-age pensions, prisons, city transportation systems, fire departments, police departments, bridges, food safety inspections, and libraries appeared by magic. I would much rather live in a world without war and therefore with no need for a military. I just don't know where that magical world might be.

Alas, even California's Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown had no fairy dust at his disposal when Howard Jarvis pulled the plug on a major source of California's funding.

It's said that "as California goes, so goes the nation." Nation, watch out. Cut taxes, raise debt, cut services, lose credit ... what's next?

THE SHALLOWS by Nicholas Carr

Three months ago I commented briefly on The Shallows, a then-hot-off-the-press warning that the Internet could lead to "a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization." At the same time I e-mailed a review of the book to The Christian Century magazine. You can finally read my review here.

Ironically, thanks to the Internet, The Shallows is already old news. Numerous commentaries on the controversial book have been published during the three months required to get my review into print. (This is not the Century's fault, by the way; it's just how print publication works.)

What's more, the print version isn't even as helpful as an online version could have been. If I'd posted my review on my blog, you would have been able to click through to Carr's original article in The Atlantic as well as to more info on Carr's other books.

Clearly print publication has some major limitations.

If Carr's thesis about the Internet is right, however, our minds are already too fried to read an entire magazine article anyway. Chances are, if I'd posted it online, readers would have clicked the first link and stopped reading the review. So I'm not going to write more about The Shallows here--Carr would suggest that this 246-word post may already be testing the limits of your attention span. But since (according to Carr) you really enjoy clicking links, let me encourage you to check out my complete review--"How Our Minds Have Changed"--here.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO by Stieg Larsson

First, let's get the amazing statistics out of the way. As of a month ago, over 40 million copies of the late Stieg Larsson's trilogy had sold worldwide in over 40 languages. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the first book ever to sell over a million copies in the Kindle edition. Subtitled Swedish-language films of the first two books have been playing in the United States this year, and the third installment is scheduled for release in about six weeks. At the end of 2011 Columbia Pictures plans to release a U.S. version of Dragon, with the others to follow.

I finally succumbed to massive cultural pressure and the urging of my friends: I put The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on hold at the library (I was number 68 in line). While I was checking it out last week, the woman who scanned my card advised me, "Read 100 pages before forming any judgment about the book. It has a slow start."

Yesterday afternoon I finished all 590 pages, and I can now say that she was right. What she didn't tell me was that it has a slow ending too. For the last 100 pages or so I kept thinking of the time I flew into Boston at night under heavy fog. The plane had descended for several minutes when suddenly  it leaped upward. We flew for a while longer, descended again, leaped upward again. The pilot took the microphone and said, "I could have sworn there was a runway down there."

In the middle of the book, though, there was plenty of suspense, violence, sex, international money laundering, gadgets, psychopaths, computer hacking, organized crime, sadism, and Swedish scenery.

If you are one of the three people in the world who has not yet read any books by Larsson, and if you think that maybe you don't want to bother, Janet Potter's kick-ass September 10 review, Stieg Larsson: Swedish Narcissus, will give you plenty of reasons to avoid them. Her comments on Larsson's writing style are perceptive, though I'm willing to allow a writer of thrillers a lot of editorial leeway. At the end of her review, however, she raises an objection that troubled me more and more the further I got into the book: Michael is not as nice to female characters as he thinks he is.

On the one hand, Mikael is a kind man who sees women as equal human beings and treats them with dignity. At least that's what Stieg Larsson tells us, and the description seems important to him. After all, the name of the book's Swedish edition is Men Who Hate Women, and every section of the book features a statistical epigraph on the topic ("Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man"). I don't think it's a spoiler to say that revenge against women-haters is the book's major theme.

On the other hand Mikael, though he apparently is never physically violent with women, is known as a womanizer. His wife divorced him because of a long-standing affair he was carrying on while married to her, so he rarely sees his daughter, now a teenager (he admits he's a lousy father). The marriage-breaking affair is with a married woman whose husband does not seem to object, though the woman can get a bit huffy when she walks in on Mikael in bed with yet another woman. While engaged in investigative journalism / detection, Mikael beds a lonely woman who is part of the group he's investigating, and their short affair seems to leave her shaken and bereft. He also beds the young woman who works for him, while admitting he's old enough to be her father. She gives him her heart, and he apparently breaks it.

Is this how a defender of the female gender behaves?

Unless I am suddenly faced with a very long airplane trip, I don't think I'll read the other two books. I'd like to know what happens to the spunky revenge princess Liz Salander, but I've had about enough of Mikael.