Christopher Buckley: Funny ha-ha, and funny strange

A review of No Way To Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Humor is a funny  thing. Not long ago I introduced Christopher Buckley to an audience of about 100 people in Berkeley. (No, I didn’t go to Yale with him. This was solely on the strength of having given favorable reviews to several of his novels.) Buckley spoke off the cuff rather than read from his writing, and I found him hilarious. So did about half the audience. Some seemed to be on the verge of falling off their chairs from time to time. But the other half of the audience sat stone-faced, often with arms crossed and eyes darting right and left, apparently waiting for a chance to sneak out of the room.

All this is to say that I read No Way to Treat a First Lady, laughing all the way — and maybe you won’t. Whenever as a child I told my mother that something was funny, she would ask, “Funny ha-ha, or funny strange?” Well, this one is a little of both. No Way to Treat a First Lady tells the tale of a philandering President and a long-suffering wife who has, apparently, murdered him in his sleep. See what I mean?

Christopher Buckley’s humor is grounded in such situations, not too many steps removed from reality. Don’t get me wrong. The leading characters in this novel in no way resemble two recent residents of the White House. And the supporting cast would be a better fit in a Marx Brothers film than in today’s Washington, DC: the best criminal defense lawyer money can buy, who incidentally was the jilted law-school lover of the First Lady; a blonde Court TV superstar, who is the current, much-younger squeeze of the self-important defense lawyer; bumbling rival trial attorneys; and a motley assortment of FBI and Secret Service agents and White House hangers-on. Even so, you can practically see them behind today’s headlines.

I won’t spoil the story by summarizing the plot, which is deliciously complex and as full of surprises as a best-selling thriller. You deserve the chance to discover it on your own.

Forewarned, then, that I think Christopher Buckley is one of the funniest writers currently walking the planet, I commend you to my previous reviews of his books: Little Green Men, Florence of Arabia, The White House Mess, and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? If you read (or have read) these reviews, you know that I don’t think they’re all equally good — Florence of Arabia, for example, was just a little too real for me.

Pretty soon I’m going to run out of Buckley’s books, and I’ll just have to start reading them all over again.

About that Mormon candidate on his way to the White House (no, not that one)

A review of The Mormon Candidate, by Avraham Azrieli

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Somebody had to do it, and Avraham Azrieli couldn’t resist. An author of several previous novels of intrigue and suspense, Azrieli decided to write a thriller in 2012 about — you guessed it! — a Mormon candidate for President of the U.S. One who, by the way, had a long and successful career in business as the head of an investment banking firm and served as governor of a state beginning with the letter M (Maryland, of course; what did you think?).

Naturally, this being a thriller, something awful happens to set the plot in motion: an ex-Marine loses control of his motorcycle on a treacherous mountain path above Camp David and is tossed to his death on the rocks below. Conveniently, Azrieli’s protagonist, a freelance journalist named Ben Teller, witnesses the tragedy, and he alone seems to know that the veteran’s death was no accident. Teller’s search for the killer — a mysterious white-clad biker on a white Ducati, whom everyone calls a “ghost” — soon leads him into conflict with the Mormon Church and (you guessed it again) the Mormon candidate himself, Joe Morgan.

Azrieli’s writing style is workmanlike though unexciting. Unfortunately, his skill at plotting isn’t even up to that modest level: the incident on which the plot turns — an incident that threatens Joe Morgan’s candidacy — is hard to take seriously because it seems so trivial, and the climactic plot twist that’s supposed to surprise the reader is obvious less than halfway through the book. As a thriller, then, The Mormon Candidate is not up to snuff.

However, it seems that Azrieli is far less concerned about the integrity of his fiction than he is about the accuracy of his research and reporting. That’s what makes The Mormon Candidate worth reading. For a reader (in this case, myself) who knows next to nothing about the Church of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) and its beliefs, the book is a (pardon the pun) revelation. I always wondered what went on inside those gleaming white temples! I think I have a fair idea now.

Through much of the book, Azrieli appears to be building up to a broad denunciation of the LDS church. For example, Ben Teller is finding it difficult to understand why people make such a fuss about Mormonism. From his perspective, that of a non-observant Jew, one religion is about the same as any other. An ex-Mormon tries to explain: “‘Look around you! Mormons control huge corporations, banks, the media, even Congress.'”

“‘That’s the same ugly stuff bigots say about Jews,’ Teller says.

“‘Jews are nothing compared to us. Jews have no central authority, no hierarchical structure, no single strategy they must follow. Jews are individual entrepreneurs. Jews go after personal goals, their own ideas and opinions. Latter-Day Saints can’t do that. We’re told to obey our bishop. The Mormon Church is like an army with a clear chain of command and an army of loyal soldiers.'”

Despite the build-up, however, The Mormon Candidate presents a surprisingly well-balanced view of a minority religion that has assumed far greater importance — politically, economically, and socially — than its limited numbers would suggest.

Robert Caro’s masterful portrait of Lyndon Johnson’s early days as President

A review of The Passage of Power, by Robert A. Caro

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

There are very few figures in history worthy of multi-volume biographies, much less one that runs to five books, the first four of which alone total nearly 3,600 pages. However, Robert Caro proves conclusively that his subject, President Lyndon Johnson, is fully deserving of the attention. One of the towering figures of the 20th Century, Johnson’s extraordinarily complex personality and the indelible imprint he left on American history literally require years of intensive research and thousands of pages to unravel.

It may be difficult for one who didn’t experience the 1960s as an adult to appreciate the consequential impact of Johnson’s career, both for good and for bad.

Before his ascension to the leadership of the U.S. Senate in 1953 — just five years after his first election to the body, and still in his first term — the Senate was effectively dysfunctional from the perspective of anyone who felt that action was needed to solve the country’s most pressing social and economic problems. During Johnson’s six years as Majority Leader (1955-61), his unrivaled legislative and political skills permitted him to change that dramatically, passing the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction nearly a century earlier and guiding the legislative process as smoothly as could ever be expected of a two-century-old institution hobbled by obscure rules designed to forestall any action.

Later, as President (1963-69), Johnson achieved victories almost universally deemed impossible when he acceded to the office upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy: “his great personal victory in the 1964 election, and his great victories for legislation that are the legislative embodiment of the liberal spirit in all its nobility. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. Medicare and Medicaid; Head Start; Model Cities. Government’s hand to help people caught in ‘the tentacles of circumstance.'”

But Johnson’s tenure in the White House was equally dramatic in tragic ways as well. “‘We Shall Overcome’ were not the only words by which it will be remembered. ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?'” was the other side of the coin. No one who experienced those times can possibly forget either of these emblematic statements.

The picture of Lyndon Johnson that emerges from the pages of this book is, on balance, one of greatness — but greatness alloyed with weaknesses and character flaws reminiscent of the tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides. Johnson, who grew up desperately poor, was venal to an extreme. He built a fortune over his decades in the Senate and the White House by breaking numerous laws and exercising the most heavy-handed of business tactics. His political conduct was equally heavy-handed, alternating between fawning respect for people whose support he craved and transparent scorn for others that sometimes took the form of deliberate public humiliation. Although Caro makes clear that he exercised admirable restraint during the months immediately following his swearing-in as President, Johnson typically treated his staff with extraordinary contempt, screaming at high volume, waving his arms, and subjecting them to insulting demands. He was, as Bobby Kennedy regarded him, a very “nasty man.”

The Passage of Power tells the story of Lyndon Johnson from his first explorations of a possible race for President in the mid-1950s until the middle of 1964, which saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act that confirmed his political genius. But the book focuses most tightly on the four days beginning November 22, 1963, when JFK was killed, “and the rest of the transition period — the period, forty-seven days, just short of seven weeks, between the moment . . .  when [Kennedy intimate] Ken O’Donnell said ‘He’s gone’ and the State of the Union speech on January 8, 1964” — a speech that. given its almost universally exuberant reception may well have been one of the greatest (and certainly one of the most consequential) orations in history.

If, a century from now, historians are still practicing their craft, and people are still reading books, The Passage of Power will stand out as a worthy contribution to the understanding of the contradictions in the American character.

The Passage of Power is the fourth of the five projected volumes of Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson. To date, Caro has devoted thirty years of his life to the project, and his wife Ina, his principal researcher, nearly as much. He estimates that the fifth volume will require another two to three years to write.

North Korea, Afghanistan, China, Iran: they all come together in a superb spy novel

A review of The Ghost War, by Alex Berenson

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Contemporary novels about espionage tend to focus on the rise of China, North Korea, Iran, or Middle Eastern terrorism. The Ghost War, the second of Alex Berenson’s six spy thrillers, brings all four of those themes to the fore in a heart-pounding story that thrusts the CIA ‘s preeminent soldier-spy, John Wells, into circumstances that threaten not just his life but also the beginning of war between China and the U.S.

The Ghost War opens on the coast of North Korea, where the CIA fumbles the extraction of their most valuable informer within the country. Soon afterwards, Wells is dispatched on a seemingly unrelated mission to Afghanistan, while his lover, Jennifer Exley, pursues the search for a mole within the CIA. As the story unfolds, these three threads — and more — become intricately intertwined, and the suspense builds toward a powerful climax in the vicinity of where the novel opened.

The Ghost War can be read alone but is likely to be more enjoyable if taken up after reading The Faithful Spy, the first of his novels about John Wells. The Ghost War picks up Wells’ career after the heroic role he played in the earlier novel, for which he has gained considerable fame.

With The Faithful Spy, published in 2006, Alex Berenson won the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list as well as an Edgar Award for best first novel. However, he left his job as an investigative reporter for the Times only in 2010, after more than a decade there. Berenson’s reporting skills, honed in reporting from Baghdad and probing the Bernie Madoff scandal, serve him well in his new profession. They’re reflected in the depth and technical detail of the story and the realistic scenarios he paints. He also writes well, and he has mastered the twin skills of plotting and characterization. The Ghost War is, simply, outstanding,

A great story of international intrigue that could have been better told

A review of Tribe, by James Bruno

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Harry Brennan is a veteran CIA field agent, equally skilled in recruiting informants and in front-line combat, but he has little respect for his superiors in the agency and poor insight into the finer points of the high-stakes office politics that threatens to sideline him. Following a botched mission to Afghanistan, he comes to believe that someone in the agency tried to have him killed in the field to conceal a plot to shift U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of Big Oil. The stakes in this latter-day version of the Great Game couldn’t be higher: $25 trillion in oil reserves, a brokered peace between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and the election of a President — not to mention Harry’s life and the life of his college-age daughter.

Tribe might have been an outstanding book. The backdrop shifts from Afghanistan, where espionage, major power rivalries, and the outsized ambitions of commerce so often converge, to the Georgetown cocktail circuit, the White House, and the CIA. Harry Brennan is a satisfyingly complex figure. Descriptions of life and work in the CIA, the White House, and on the front line in Afghanistan ring with credibility. The story itself is powerful and almost plausible. And James Bruno’s writing style is evocative.

Unfortunately, Bruno hasn’t produced the book that could have been crafted by a more experienced writer steeped in the principles of narrative technique. Time contracts and expands with no apparent logic: a span of minutes may occupy pages, while the passage of weeks or months is dispensed with in a phrase. Scenes shift without warning, in the absence of even the most rudimentary transitions.

James Bruno is a former diplomat, military intelligence analyst, and journalist who clearly possesses a wide range of knowledge about the themes touched on in Tribe. However, this is his third novel. Here’s hoping he’ll study narrative techniques before he writes the fourth.

The Bridge, by David Remnick

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

The White House has been home to many colorful characters in the more than two centuries since it was first occupied in 1800–think of the polymath Thomas Jefferson, the swashbuckling Andrew Jackson, and the big game hunter and peacemaker Teddy Roosevelt–but Barack Obama is at least their equal. With a life story no Hollywood screenwriter would dare concoct, President Obama is the avatar of multicultural America. In David Remnick’s formulation, he is “the bridge” between white and black, the elite and the street, and–equally important–between the generation of African-Americans who followed Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis in the civil rights movement, and those who were born too late to have experienced its pains and joys directly.

This is familiar territory to anyone who has dipped even briefly into the flood of writing about Barack Obama, much of it essentially biographical, and Remnick brings few new insights to the story. However, what he brings is the fruit of hundreds of interviews with Obama himself, his closest aides and advisers, as well as others in the media and academia who can help cast light on the workings of the President’s mind.

The special emphasis in this book is race. Remnick follows the threads of Obama’s own journey of self-discovery and his sometimes-troubled interaction with others, especially older leaders, in Chicago’s African-American populous diaspora, and he puts Obama’s rise to the presidency in historical perspective as an expression of the black community’s centuries-long struggle for equality in America. To Remnick, Dr. King and his colleagues represented the “Moses generation,” destined to approach the walls of Jericho but never to enter the promised land beyond. Obama embodies the “Joshua generation” that stands on the shoulders of its parents and now seeks to claim the fruits of this historic struggle.

David Remnick is best known now as editor of The New Yorker for the past dozen years, but in his relatively short life–he’s just a few years older than his subject in The Bridge–he distinguished himself as a reporter, first for the Washington Post and later for the New York Times. He won a Pulitzer for Lenin’s Tomb, the 1993 book based on his years as Moscow correspondent for the Post.