Read PopMatters on your Kindle

by PopMatters Staff

Picks in: NON-FICTION | FICTION

On reflection, book-wise, 2007 is going to be a hard one to put into easily digested perspective. Although it was the year that Oprah helped turbo-charge Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece The Road into mainstream immortality, the book had actually been released the previous fall.

As for other books of note, there were no real popular/critical breakouts whose success would ring down through the years. There was also, with James Frey rapidly receding into the distance and HarperCollins having already kicked Judith Regan to the curb, a disturbing paucity of controversies for the blogs to carp about. So what are we left with? A lot of lousy books, a number of good ones, and a very small number of great ones, which (sad to say) fit no real model.

The drop-off from great to mediocre was sharpest when it came to fiction in 2007. There were a refreshing number of foreign authors like the late Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives) finally getting their due with new English translations. And we saw a few audacious debuts (Steven Hall, for one) that should auger well for the future. J.R.R. Tolkien came back from the beyond with a surprise new novel that continued to plow the fertile fields of his pre-Lord of the Rings mythos.

Pros like Ian McEwan and Denis Johnson dashed off problematic but masterful works of fiction that will stand the test of time, for a few years, at least. And people like Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz showed, with dynamically thrilling books like The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, that they have more verve and imagination than any 20 novelists picked from the English-language ranks at random.

But after that, the year’s fictional output slides depressingly quickly from great to merely okay. Books like Adam Rapp’s The Year of Endless Sorrows, a fine enough novel, then get elevated in one’s estimation for the simple fact that it was good enough to be memorable at the end of the year. To put it in sporting terms: if their division hadn’t been so weak, a few of the novels mentioned below wouldn’t have made it to the playoffs.

One of the anomalies here is Brian Aldiss’ Harm, a classically unnerving piece of thoughtful sci-fi for the post-Patriot Act age that shows us, in no uncertain times, how our civilization will essentially end, by means of our own devising. A fine best-of choice for any year, it reminds us that worse things always loom around the corner, should good people fail to act.

Somehow, when put up against the apocalypse, everything else just seems to pale into insignificance. Whether we like it or not, that rule applies with just as much iron-clad power in the world of books as it does in the realm of the blockbuster film. So it was that a couple of the better non-fiction titles that hit the stacks in 2007 had to do with topics that, explicitly or not, dealt in some form with the end of Western civilization as we know it.

Sure, there could have been better books out there this year than the nightmare conjuring of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, but when faced with her overpoweringly convincing rendering of a modern world in which many democracies are a natural disaster or two away from being overtaken by ravening corporations, does it really matter?

A few months before Klein decided to do her best to keep us up at nights (who’s at the door? Free-market economists from the Milton Friedman school?), Alan Weisman took a much more benign approach to the end of everything in The World Without Us, simply conjecturing in what manner the natural order of things would reassert itself if the human race were to simply disappear, say, tomorrow.

How long would it take for vines to overgrow the cities? Would our dogs survive? Troubling in its own right, because one can’t read his descriptions of emptied suburbs and dead highways without wondering what could make them that way, this book is, for the most part, a classic piece of scientific conjecture with no real goal in mind but to play out the string of “What if”.

Not that such apocalyptic worries overrode everything else that was published in 2007. After all, one of the year’s most bracing non-fiction books, Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (horrible title, by the way), had nothing to do with the end of the world. Hitchens couldn’t be bothered to worry about such things, as he was too busy conjuring up abstruse literary constructs for assaulting the reason (or lack thereof) of the religious fundamentalists he has aligned himself against.

Years from now, Hitchens’ book could well be looked upon as the knockout punch of the modern American anti-religious backlash. Not that our countrymen are deserting churches in droves, but after Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris softened up the enemy’s fortifications with their crisp reasonings, Hitchens came in with his own brand of high-toned populist aggression and took the field. The battle wasn’t won but it was fought, and in a country where “atheist” is a word often spoken in the same tone of voice as “child molester” or “PBS watcher”, God is Not Great may be seen by future anti-religious forces as something of a turning point.

Up against the aforementioned hefty tomes, one could almost find oneself wishing for the books of the last couple years: Where were Woodward, Ricks, Chandrasekaran, Hersh, the Bush-bashers, and chroniclers of war gone bad? Well, they were around, but those stories had already been told, and new rocks had to be looked under.

Such rocks overturned, what was found were books like Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, a history of the Central Intelligence Agency that manages to be both broad-reaching and frustratingly incomplete. Broad-reaching, due to the author’s desire to create a one-stop history of when and how the CIA went wrong and failed to ever quite accomplish its mission; frustratingly incomplete because such a task would be impossible to pull all into a single book without skimping over quite a few of the agency’s more important debacles (so many to choose from ...).

It stood tall, however, as one of the year’s only heavy-duty policy books to seriously address one of the bedrock elements of the US national security apparatus, and it was the only such book to make any sort of dent on the national psyche. Granted, it wasn’t much of a dent compared to the dumptruck-sized ones left by The Secret and The Deathly Hallows, but it’s still nice to know that our countrymen can still at least occasionally crack a book of this kind.

In America, at least, the publishing cycle always leaves room for a number of memoirs detailing the authors’ astoundingly heartbreaking family histories, rife with abuse, addiction, neglect, tear-inducing loyalty, and barrels of stark weirdness; and even in the aftermath of James Frey and the betrayal its citizens were all supposed to have felt, 2007 was no exception.

From Edwidge Danticat’s harrowing memoir of immigrant loneliness and familial tragedy, Brother I’m Dying, to Steve Geng’s Thick as Thieves (a deeply felt account of a grifter’s life in the shadows of his brilliant sister New Yorker writer Veronica Geng), there was no end of closely-felt heartache.

Sure, one could also find any number of lighter takes on dysfunction, such as onetime Daily Show correspondent Stacey Grenrock Woods’ I, California, an epic of awful parenting and pinball-bouncing rootlessness that at least is not so soaked in that all-too-familiar brand of self-loathing ‘90s irony that it doesn’t register a frightening emotional pulse. In this case it might be a familial apocalypse, but the world is ending all the same. Here’s to the books of 2008, should we live to see it.

A couple of the better non-fiction titles that hit the stacks in 2007 had to do with topics that, explicitly or not, dealt in some form with the end of Western civilization as we know it.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism , by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)

Whether it’s New Orleans, Sri Lanka, Chile, or Iraq, there is money to be made by companies specializing in the fiendish mutation that agitprop hellraiser Naomi Klein terms “disaster capitalism.” The ideologies may change, but the implements of the shock ("elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations, and skeletal social spending") don’t ever seem to change, nor does the ever-yawning gulf between the wealthy few and the poor and powerless many.  Klein convincingly argues in this crushingly pessimistic but magisterial work that the future could well be a “cruel and ruthlessly divided” place where “money and race buy survival”.  Chris Barsanti

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA , by Tim Weiner (Random House)

Abandon any respect one might have had for the Central Intelligence Agency at the first page. Deep down, most of us probably know that the Central Intelligence Agency can’t be nearly as cool as our popular media would have us believe. But still, the picture presented in Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner’s exhaustive general history of the CIA, is nevertheless a crushing disappointment. Just because it was obvious to most people that the agency wasn’t full of suave and brilliant superspies—MIT mind in a GQ body—doesn’t make it any easier to realize that it is an expensive, cumbersome, out-dated, dangerous, and deeply dysfunctional organization that we’re likely better off without. Chris Barsanti

Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present , by Michael B. Oren (W.W. Norton)

Americans love the Middle East, until they hate it. Michael B. Oren’s tragicomic history of our country’s involvement in the Fertile Crescent would be funny if it weren’t, well, you know.  Oren states pretty early on that he wants to provide one single all-encompassing survey of the ties between America and the Middle East. To that end, he has absolutely succeeded, and not just because he uses about 800 pages to work through those skirmishes (ideological, mercantile and military), but because he’s done so with nary an ideological axe to grind. Given the amount of ideological baggage being hurled about by the main participants in this history—and especially the brittle kind of idealism that is continually disenchanted by the region’s harsh realities—that feat is even more impressive. Chris Barsanti

Kafka, by R. Crumb (Fantagraphics)

One of the greatest graphic art wits of our time vividly renders the life of one of the 20th century’s greatest novelists with a sort of sardonic majesty; one great misanthrope beholds another. Chris Barsanti

Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, by Rob Sheffield (Three Rivers)

Sheffield does a great job of explaining the peculiar obsession some people have with music, and what he calls the “human need” to share it with others. In his case, this mostly means sharing with the opposite sex. Renee takes center stage, but Sheffield spends ample pages discussing the intersection of music and women in general in his life, beginning with the lessons he learned when DJing his first school dance (the most important: “Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, enjoy music they can improve by making up filthy new lyrics"). Ben Rubenstein

The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman (Thomas Dunne)

Who hasn’t gazed around them, now and then, and fantisized the sudden demise of the entire human race? Whether impelled by a very foul mood—or the simple, apocolyptic speculation that forges every myth, fantasy, and society-binding religion—virtually every artistic expression has tangled with this concept, and we all know it at a primal level. Ironically, although Weisman will scare you enough to cause loss of sleep, at times, the overwhelming message is hope. One leaves this book with a greater appreciation for the preciousness of this world, and a deep desire to, in one’s own little way, leave the Earth in a little bit better shape, before one leaves it for good. Give this to the budding environmentalist, and the one who could use a bit of a nudge in that direction. Karen Zarker

God is Not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)

A fire-breathing polemicist in the grand tradition, the Hitch has spleen to spare and wastes none of it here when going after the godly. Although this tends to work better in his shorter works of journalism than in book-form, it’s still refreshing to witness the freewheeling energy with which he lashes about him. He’s the rare old white male who doesn’t utilize the mantle of political incorrectness merely as a shield for racism or sexism; this is a book that’s dying to offend those who are easily offended, partly for having been mollycoddled for so long. Hitchens also wins points by not coming at his subject with the aloof self-regard of some of the recent band of atheist populists (he makes a point of mocking the arrogant wishes of some atheists to be referred to instead as “brights"). That said, there’s something in this rambling text that could have used the starch rigor of a Sam Harris, whose End of Faith is as good an argument for religion-as-evil as one could ever ask for. Chris Barsanti

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb, by Mike Davis (Verso)

The doomsayer of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear moves beyond urban studies to examine in concise but learned detail the evolution of the car bomb into the paradigm-shifting, nation-toppling superweapon that it may well prove to be: the atomic warhead of the 21st century. Chris Barsanti

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)

While Edwidge Danticat was making a life for her young self in New York, her father’s brother, a much loved pastor, remains in a rapidly crumbling Haiti, not realizing it’s time to leave until it may be too late; an emotional and well-nigh incomparable family history. Chris Barsanti

Thick as Thieves: A Brother, a Sister--a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives, by Steve Geng (Henry Holt)

Another memoir in a year thick with them, Steve Geng’s account of his life as career thief and unrepentant dope fiend is given extra depth by the description of his troubled relationship with his sister, Victoria Geng, the brilliant, troubled New Yorker writer. Chris Barsanti

Picks in: NON-FICTION | FICTION