Michael Patrick Brady

My review of Edna O’Brien’s James Joyce: A Life ran today at PopMatters.

A few years ago, I picked up Richard Ellmann’s massive biography of Joyce, which is considered to be the best literary biography ever written. I still haven’t read it. It’s so big, so imposing, I’ve yet to find an opportunity to fit it into my life. Someday.

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For now, Edna O’Brien’s compact, 179-page biography will be just fine. O’Brien’s slim book manages to traverse the entire life of this complicated, brilliant man, detailing his adolescent struggles, creative breakthroughs, and personal relationships, in particular his rocky marriage with Nora Barnacle. O’Brien sets out to help the reader understand and appreciate Joyce’s difficult, rewarding body of work, and does an admirable job of making Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake seem approachable without spoiling the mystique that surrounds and enhances them.

It’s a nice survey, slight but elevated by O’Brien’s fun, playful prose style. For a more specific look into Joyce, I’d recommend checking out Ulysses and Us, which is a great, down-to-earth walkthrough of Joyce’s magnum opus.

My review of Lou Beach’s 420 Characters ran today in the Boston Globe.

The book is a collection of short, micro fiction that Beach wrote as Facebook status updates back when the maximum character count for updates was 420. It was later raised to 500 and today it’s 5,000. While there were some fun moments in his stories, overall it seemed like a rather weak experiment. The stories make no use of Facebook’s unique social features; I would’ve liked to have seen Beach examine how instant publishing, instant feedback, and a direct, one-on-one relationship between and author and their audience affected his writing or shaped the project. There’s really nothing to distinguish the stories in 420 Characters from any other flash fiction project. It seems like a big missed opportunity, and the resulting stories just aren’t strong enough in total to stand on their own.

My review of Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst ran today in the Boston Globe.

Douglas-Fairhurst does an excellent job portraying the world young Charles Dickens grew up in, showing how the “novel” aspects of the Victorian era enabled the artistic and commercial viability of the literary novel, and thus provided an outlet for Dickens’s genius.

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The economic expansion of that time created an upwardly-mobile middle class, which gave poor kids like Dickens an opportunity to raise his station in life. Art was no longer the province of the wealthy or those lucky enough to secure patrons. The new, middle-class jobs of the Victorian economy provided a respite from energy-sapping, working-class vocations like factory work; as a clerk, Dickens had free time to pursue his hobbies, a comfortable, adequate salary, and connections to people who could aid or facilitate his career as a writer.

Becoming Dickens shows that talent is not enough to achieve success. A stroke of bad luck like, say, having been born into a world with a shrinking economy where the divide between rich and poor is widening, could have destroyed any hope of young Dickens being able to put his talent to use.

My review of Saladin by Anne Marie Eddé ran today in the Boston Globe.

I’ve been looking for a good biography of Saladin ever since I read Richard and John: Kings at War. This one, however, did not really do it for me. Eddé deconstructs the very nature of biography, untangling fact from fiction and asking whether we can truly know or understand figures of the past. It’s an intriguing premise, and the work she does in detailing how the “legend” of Saladin was cultivated by the sultan himself, and then modified by subsequent generations (both Arab and European), is enlightening. But the disjointed, fractured nature of the book was frustrating. There was just no excitement, no sense of narrative. Saladin is dry, academic, and while full of fascinating detail, it’s not tied together in an entertaining manner.

My review of Broken Irish by Edward J. Delaney ran today in the Boston Globe.

I was very pleased that Delaney managed to write a South Boston tragedy that didn’t lean too heavily on the genre-fiction standbys of organized crime or drug abuse. It’s not that those topics aren’t important or very real parts of South Boston’s history, it’s that writers and filmmakers seem disinterested in the actual human stories behind them and instead rely on them for cheap, lazy sensationalism. Really, after The Departed, what more is there to say about the South Boston mob in fiction?

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He also doesn’t romanticize the struggles that poor Southie residents endured. I haven’t seen Good People, the Tony-award winning Broadway play about a struggling, South Boston single mother confronting a successful ex-boyfriend who made it out of the neighborhood, but the description alone gives me pause. There’s a habit in fiction of conflating deprivation with virtue, casting the poor as modern-day noble savages whose purpose is to teach more affluent, successful characters the important life lessons that their comfortable lifestyles have blinded them to. It’s patronizing and, again, lazy.

Broken Irish has enough respect for its characters that it’s willing to let them fail, and be stupid, and make bad choices. It’s willing to let them be real people, whose troubles have depth and are fraught with emotion. Delaney charts a bold course that addresses the issues of class, power, family, trust, and sexual exploitation, but never opts for the easy path, indulges in cliche, or does anything that leads the reader to believe he has no regard for his characters.

My review of Ben Loory’s Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day ran today in the Boston Globe.

It’s a lightweight collection of short stories, and a lot of fun. Loory’s writing is very spare, but loaded with meaning and portent. He’s a writer of crisp, surreal fables, each of which has a distinct undercurrent of dread just lurking beneath the surface. In the review, I call Loory a mix of Lydia Davis and H.P. Lovecraft, but he has a strong, humorous voice that is entirely his own. I think it’s telling that one of the laudatory blurbs on the back of the book comes from Edward Packard, creator of the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. I’m part of the generation that grew up reading those books, and I think that, to some extent, they probably shaped my expectations of literature and what I think is possible in writing: experimentation with form, structure, and the active engagement of the reader. Loory is smart to associate himself with Packard and his series, both for the cute nostalgia it evokes and the implications it makes about his own work.

My review of Heretics: The Creation of Christianity from the Gnostics to the Modern Church by Jonathan Wright ran today at PopMatters.

Heretics is a fine, focused survey of the religion’s history for readers who might find Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years too daunting. Wright employs a novel approach, telling the story of Christianity by highlighting pivotal moments in which it was challenged by potential offshoots. He shows how the reaction to these “heretics” clarified orthodoxy and, at times, paradoxically made Christianity a more open and inclusive religion. He also explores the origin and application of the title “heretic,” and how it was used, abused, and changed over the centuries. It’s not a comprehensive book, and at times can be a little ponderous, but the history is entertaining.

A few months back, in my post about John Nichols’s The S Word, I mentioned a brief, formal correspondence between Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx that the author had made reference to. I found the idea of these two men interacting to be fascinating, and was a little disappointed that Nichols didn’t explore it more in depth. Thankfully, author Robin Blackburn has it covered. His An Unfinished Revolution is entirely about the relationship (largely indirect) between Marx and Lincoln, particularly how they shared similar, if not exactly complimentary, views on the place of labor in society and the importance of abolishing slavery as a means to enriching the lives of all working people, white and black. My review of the book was published today at PopMatters.

Blackburn’s book is comprised of an original, 100-page analysis and an appendix, containing several excerpts from primary sources that are intended to give readers a deeper understanding of the characters involved and the times they lived in. The prose is crisp and entertaining yet still manages to pack in an amazing amount of high-quality, insightful information. As someone who’s recently done a lot of reading on both the Civil War and Marx, I was happy to find that An Unfinished Revolution never felt stale or overly familiar. Blackburn has produced a unique and powerful take on these well-worn subjects.

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“In the city there’s a thousand things I wanna say to you…”

When I saw the breathless news reports that nearly a thousand people were involved in gang violence on Carson Beach this past Monday, I was skeptical. It looks like I was right to be. The Boston Police is now disputing the State Police report, saying there was no evidence of gang activity.

In a story that makes more sense as viral marketing for the upcoming production of West Side Story at the Colonial Theater, the State Police originally claimed that rival gangs used Facebook and Twitter to organize a rumble on Carson Beach. Right next door to the State Police barracks.

WHDH, WBZ, and the Globe immediately reported this story uncritically, and the idea of urban youths turning a public beach into a warzone caught the fevered imagination of disgraceful outlets like The Drudge Report and England’s Daily Mail. Comment sections at the Globe were full of ignorant, racist invective aimed at urban teens from people whose worst prejudices were seemingly confirmed by the sensational narrative.

Never mind that only a handful were arrested (and subsequently released) at Carson Beach that day, that no injuries were reported, and that it was never explained how State Police happened to determine that actual gangs were involved in an incident that took them by surprise and that they immediately dispersed.

“In the city there’s a thousand faces all shining bright / and those golden faces are under 25…”

Thankfully, WBUR decided to do some actual reporting and talk to some of the kids who were on the beach that day.

No that’s not true, there’s no gangs,” said Amanda Murphy, 17, of Hyde Park.

“‘Cause I guarantee you, if it was some gang stuff, 30 people would have been dead,” said Murphy’s friend, 17-year-old Samantha Louis.

Murphy and Louis are, of course, entirely correct. Boston does have a gang problem, largely confined to West Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, as evidenced by the recent rash of shooting deaths in those neighborhoods. But even 17-year-olds know that gangs don’t fist fight. They don’t start Facebook groups to announce their battles or attract audiences using a #gangfight hashtag. Confronted with such common-sense questioning, the State Police makes only vague references to “intelligence” that led them to their conclusion, but offers no concrete evidence.

The truth of the matter is that Boston teens used Facebook and Twitter to get their friends to join them on Carson Beach for Memorial Day weekend because, as a teen in the WBUR article said, “Everybody wanted to, like, hang out, and [the] beach is the only place you can hang out and it doesn’t cost you money.” Now, it’s no surprise that a large group of teens getting together on a hot day in close quarters might end up in a few scuffles or fist fights. But the idea that this was an orchestrated gang event attended by 1,000 enthusiastic participants is ludicrous, and evidence of a deeper prejudice against urban teens by our media and authorities.

The message this incident sends is that kids who live in the city, particularly in the working class, urban communities of South Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Roslindale, and Hyde Park, are always suspects. You only have to browse the comment sections in the Globe article to discover that there are large numbers of people who believe that being born into one of these communities means you are invariably a criminal, and that you are unworthy of respect or empathy. Violence must be dealt with, and the fighting at Carson Beach cannot be tolerated, but the media reaction to this story transformed a large number of casual, innocent beachgoers into accomplices and accessories to a crime they had nothing to do with, and reinforced the unfortunate belief that city living is rife with gangs and other existential threats. As a kid who grew up in Dorchester and who now lives in Southie as an adult, I find the tone of this narrative all too familiar, and just as wrong as it’s always been.

I’d like to believe that the local media will be as loud in their retractions or qualifications as they were in their initial stories, but that’s rarely the case.

“In the city there’s a thousand men in uniforms…”

In the previously linked article, this stood out to me in particular:

Menino was not specific about what tactics concerned him but two city officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the mayor was unsettled by images in the media that showed State Police wearing black gloves and wielding batons as they ordered the crowd to leave.

My wife and I were walking to Carson Beach at around 6 P.M. that night, roughly 30 minutes after the State Police cleared it out. There was a grey and blue State Police helicopter hovering very low over the baseball fields at Moakley Park. I didn’t know about what had transpired—I thought they were going to land to do a medivac flight for a car accident or something. I only found out about the events after checking Boston.com on my phone. The scene was quiet, calm, and the police presence was still strong. My wife and I enjoyed a very nice walk along Day Boulevard, toward Pleasure Bay, and saw lots of kids and families enjoying the warm weather and beautiful scenery.

And that’s what the majority of people herded off of Carson Beach earlier had been doing. It’s bad enough that a few scrappy kids had to ruin their day; they then had to endure a full-throated media onslaught that characterized them as thugs, gang members, and criminals.

As Adam Gaffin wrote, referencing The Warriors, “This isn’t 1979, and Carson Beach isn’t the Bronx.” It’s also not the Carson Beach or South Boston or Dorchester of 1979, either. The world has changed, but unfortunately our prejudices and stereotypes haven’t.

My review of the 150th anniversary edition of Ken Burns’s The Civil War ran today at PopMatters.

The Civil War is extraordinary, and of course, everybody already knows that. Rather than restate the obvious, I instead took on an interesting issue raised by the bonus features—outtake and subsequent interviews with Shelby Foote and Ken Burns. In them, Foote (both in 1987 and 2002) expresses his belief that slavery was not the prime, motivating factor in the Civil War, and in the latter interview, actually goes so far as to say that Burns erred in presenting it as such in the documentary, labeling it “propaganda.” Now, this isn’t an unsurprising view for a man born in Mississippi in 1916 to hold. It’s also apparently still a widely held belief in the American South. It is, however, utterly wrong.

Anyone who has studied early 19th-century U.S. politics, or read the exceptional books What Hath God Wrought and Battle Cry of Freedom, knows that slavery was not just the primary cause of the American Civil War, it was the main factor in nearly every political question the country had to deal with between 1789 and 1861. Every new state became a battleground between slavedrivers and abolitionists. The Dred Scott case was a cause célèbre. Slavery infected everything in the U.S. Ken Burns realized this, and rightly framed his documentary this way, despite the beliefs of Foote. Although Foote served as something of an anchor for the film, Burns never let him leave his areas of expertise—the personalizing anecdotes and battle descriptions that made the war feel so much more real and human.

Ta-Nehisi Coats at The Atlantic has done some amazing blogging about attempts to minimize slavery’s role in the American Civil War, and it’s worth combing through his archives.

My review of Confessions of a Young Novelist by Umberto Eco ran today at PopMatters.

I’m a huge fan of Eco’s novels, and I’d be inclined to name him as, perhaps, my favorite author. I appreciate his ability to weave high-minded, thoughtful ideas in with compelling narratives without coming off as (too) pretentious. The Name of the Rose and Baudolino are exquisite, and despite a disappointing ending, Foucault’s Pendulum is still provocative and illuminating. Confessions is a window into the author’s process, and he provides concrete examples from his works that fans will enjoy. Eco explains how he got into fiction after a long career in academia, how he formulates his novels, and how fiction to affect us as strongly as reality. The last chapter, which follows the same theme as his non-fiction The Infinity of Lists is a little tedious, but the book is a short, highly-readable exploration into one of literature’s most impressive minds.

My review of Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton ran today at PopMatters.

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I wrote this review before Rep. Paul Ryan’s insane budget proposal was announced, or else I would have referenced it. It’s a perfect example of class warfare, lowering the top marginal U.S. tax rate by 10% using “savings” generated by virtually eliminating Medicare, and slashing trillions from Medicaid, food stamps, and Pell Grants—essentially any kind of service that benefits the less fortunate. Nevermind that it seems to be based on completely bogus numbers.

A modern politician who proudly claimed to be a student and follower of Karl Marx would be considered virtually unelectable, and yet politicians like Ryan, who are very vocal about their love of the repugnant Ayn Rand are seen as serious and thoughtful wonks. In Why Marx Was Right, literary critic, Briton, and avowed Marxist Terry Eagleton tries to peel back the misconceptions that obscure Marx and his views, confronting what he believes are the ten most prominent criticisms of Marxism and posing some tough questions about why it is, in many venues, seen as an unbroachable subject. Eagleton doesn’t gloss over the downsides and pitfalls, but he wants people to understand the real limitations of Marxist thought, not the invented ones, knowing that only by creating a firm understanding of the reality of Marx’s views can one begin to espouse the positive aspects of his thought.

Eagleton is witty, incisive, and glib, and does his best to make the subject matter entertaining and readable. Never strident or angry, he presents his case in a casual, unencumbered tone that makes the book an easy read.

Continue reading…

My review of Blood Work by Holly Tucker ran today at PopMatters.

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This was a great story, one of those nonfiction tales that reads like fiction. It reminded me quite a bit of both London Rising and Duel at Dawn, as it concerned the early days of science in enlightenment France and England. Tucker tells the story of some of the earliest blood transfusion trials, as they were undertaken by the flamboyant, brash natural philosopher Jean-Baptiste Denis. His daring style and unapologetic arrogance infuriated the establishment he so desperately wished to join, and his scientific experiments scandalized Parisian society. Tucker explains how potentially life-saving science was hampered by the strict religious morals of the time, and shows how differences in class and politics motivated enemies of Denis to design a terrifying conspiracy that ended in murder. Blood Work asks readers to consider the relationship between science and the society it seeks to serve, and draws strong parallels between the 17th-century resistance to blood transfusion, which effectively sidelined the procedure for two centuries, and the ludicrous 21st-century battles over stem-cell research.

Ms. Tucker will be speaking at Harvard University on April 14th, 2011.