The Hobbledehoy love to bring a new book to the beach, and with August vacation plans on Old Cape Cod approaching, we may spend more time on our screened-in porch with a good read than swimming with the sharks, hiking with the ticks, or dining out with the mosquitos. Damn you, Climate Change! And you too, Patti Page!
Two new books we highly recommended for Summer reading!
“The Book of Norman” by Wayne Cresser
As a kid, Norman Winters aspired to be good at something, baseball, canoe-racing, anything at all. As an adult he wants to teach eager minds and keep his house free of smoke and frauds. And in his old age, he just wants to burn the money and hold on to the clams. Does Mr. Winters want all these things too much?
Readers will wonder as they follow him over the course of a life, loosely chronicled in a fresh collection of interconnected short stories by author, broadcaster, and teacher Wayne Cresser.
The Book of Norman deals with such topics as sibling rivalry, bullying, forgiveness, mercy, and love at first sight and promises readers, to paraphrase the great comic, many “a laugh and a tear.”
Mr. Cresser authors the excellent Just Between You and Me blog, and has contributed to The Hobbledehoy. His weekly radio program Picture This is must-listening for fans of great film composers like Bernard Herman, Ennio Morricone, and Elmer Bernstein, as well as classic soundtracks from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Fantastic Mr. Fox. His recent show on the beloved American lyricist Johnny Mercer was, as the poet wrote, “too marvelous for words.”
“The Book of Norman” is available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.
“The Last American Road Trip” by Sarah Kendzior
In 2016, Kendzior wrote about similarities between Donald Trump and the authoritarian leaders she had studied given Trump’s admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin before there was widespread public awareness of Russia’s interference in the US election:
Today is November 18, 2016. I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured.
Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.
Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.
Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.
Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.
It is increasingly clear, as Donald Trump appoints his cabinet of white supremacists and war-mongers, as hate crimes rise, as the institutions that are supposed to protect us cower, as international norms are shattered, that his ascendency to power is not normal.”
Kendzior co-hosted the podcast Gaslit Nation, with filmmaker Andrea Chalupa. Psychology Today stated that the podcast “frequently reminds listeners that the Trump administration is part of a ‘transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government'”, stating that the podcast’s title, Gaslit Nation, refers to their assertion that the Trump administration is “gaslighting” America in precisely the way that Arendt, Orwell, and Pomerantzev have described, by repeatedly contradicting the facts and claiming that black is white.”
It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland — and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road — again and again.
Starting from Missouri, the family drives across America in every direction as cataclysmic events – the rise of autocracy, political and technological chaos, and the pandemic – reshape American life. They explore Route 66, national parks, historical sites, and Americana icons as Kendzior contemplates love for country in a broken heartland. Together, the family watches the landscape of the United States – physical, environmental, social, political -transform through the car window.
Part memoir, part political history, The Last American Road Trip is one mother’s promise to her children that their country will be there for them in the future – even though at times she struggles to believe it herself.
Sarah Kendzior is writing. It’s March 29, and the St. Louis-based scholar of despots and demagogues is absorbed in her notebook. A tumble of dark blonde hair rests in a pile on her shoulder, stirring with the motion of her pen as she jots down a response to a speech she hasn’t heard yet. Around her, the conference room stirs with coffee-powered chatter from the sort of people who attend a 7 a.m. symposium to hear two pundits talk about Donald Trump.
One pundit is Kendzior, and, by now, there are things an audience is virtually guaranteed to hear in a Kendzior speech: that Robert Mueller isn’t going to save the country. That democracy is threatened by the “normalization” of propaganda and corruption. That Donald Trump is turning the White House into the headquarters for a “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
But Kendzior doesn’t have top billing at today’s Seventh Annual Public Values Symposium, advertised with the tagline “Being a change agent in a divided nation.” The keynote speaker at this event, held on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is commentator Bill Kristol, who helped shape three decades of Republican politics before he struck out as a leader of the “Never Trumpers,” the gang of conservatives who attempted to stop their own party’s nominee in 2016. Having failed, Kristol often plays the conservative role on liberal favorite MSNBC. For the most part, when he talks, it’s not conservatives who are listening.
Instead, the liberals he’s speaking to take their cues from Kendzior. It’s not just her nearly 500,000 followers on Twitter. A regular on MSNBC’s weekend morning show AM Joy, she is also the author of a best-selling essay collection and co-host of a hit political podcast. Her essays become viral posts, her words transplanted into memes and hashtags.
It wasn’t always so; there was a time when Kendzior’s apocalyptic warnings about Trump were written off as over-the-top conspiracy mongering. Then Trump won, and his government started locking up kids on the border. No one swooped in to save the day. He wasn’t checked or balanced. Kendzior warned that we were halfway to an authoritarian state, and a swath of the country didn’t just applaud. They donated money to Kendzior. They bought her book. They invited her to speak at symposia.
In his keynote address, Kristol, who once served as an adviser and chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, is unfailingly reasonable. The nation may be divided, he remarks, but he remains confident in the survival of the system. “One of the big stories of the Trump years, for me, is the strength of American institutions,” he says.
DANNY WICENTOWSKI
Kendzior and conservative pundit Bill Kristol represent vastly different versions of opposition to Donald Trump.
For a moment, the remark disengages Kendzior from her notebook. She spares a glance at Kristol as he praises the “massive infrastructure” of American institutions “that check the damage a demagogic president can do.”
“We are not Hungary,” he continues reassuringly. “We are not Venezuela. We are not a place where, if you get a bad president, he can corrupt half the judiciary, take over half the media, tell the universities what to teach.”
It’s a perfect example of the sort of patriotic trust that, in Kendzior’s view, is hastening America’s fall to brutalism and autocracy. When she takes the podium after Kristol, she is biting in her opinion of America’s institutions, presented by Kristol as a bulwark in a nation momentarily weakened.
To Kendzior, that perspective is a mirage, and worse. She tells the crowd, “Belief in American exceptionalism is what got us here.”
To agree with Kendzior is to accept a very unpatriotic idea: that America’s exceptional past stopped offering reassurance the moment Trump took office. It is this American present that Kendzior tried to warn the world about, a place where values are fungible, truth is marketable and despotism is a shadow creeping across the landscape.
Sarah Kendzior is writing. It’s March 29, and the St. Louis-based scholar of despots and demagogues is absorbed in her notebook. A tumble of dark blonde hair rests in a pile on her shoulder, stirring with the motion of her pen as she jots down a response to a speech she hasn’t heard yet. Around her, the conference room stirs with coffee-powered chatter from the sort of people who attend a 7 a.m. symposium to hear two pundits talk about Donald Trump.
One pundit is Kendzior, and, by now, there are things an audience is virtually guaranteed to hear in a Kendzior speech: that Robert Mueller isn’t going to save the country. That democracy is threatened by the “normalization” of propaganda and corruption. That Donald Trump is turning the White House into the headquarters for a “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”
But Kendzior doesn’t have top billing at today’s Seventh Annual Public Values Symposium, advertised with the tagline “Being a change agent in a divided nation.” The keynote speaker at this event, held on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, is commentator Bill Kristol, who helped shape three decades of Republican politics before he struck out as a leader of the “Never Trumpers,” the gang of conservatives who attempted to stop their own party’s nominee in 2016. Having failed, Kristol often plays the conservative role on liberal favorite MSNBC. For the most part, when he talks, it’s not conservatives who are listening.
Instead, the liberals he’s speaking to take their cues from Kendzior. It’s not just her nearly 500,000 followers on Twitter. A regular on MSNBC’s weekend morning show AM Joy, she is also the author of a best-selling essay collection and co-host of a hit political podcast. Her essays become viral posts, her words transplanted into memes and hashtags.
It wasn’t always so; there was a time when Kendzior’s apocalyptic warnings about Trump were written off as over-the-top conspiracy mongering. Then Trump won, and his government started locking up kids on the border. No one swooped in to save the day. He wasn’t checked or balanced. Kendzior warned that we were halfway to an authoritarian state, and a swath of the country didn’t just applaud. They donated money to Kendzior. They bought her book. They invited her to speak at symposia.
In his keynote address, Kristol, who once served as an adviser and chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, is unfailingly reasonable. The nation may be divided, he remarks, but he remains confident in the survival of the system. “One of the big stories of the Trump years, for me, is the strength of American institutions,” he says.
DANNY WICENTOWSKI
Kendzior and conservative pundit Bill Kristol represent vastly different versions of opposition to Donald Trump.
For a moment, the remark disengages Kendzior from her notebook. She spares a glance at Kristol as he praises the “massive infrastructure” of American institutions “that check the damage a demagogic president can do.”
“We are not Hungary,” he continues reassuringly. “We are not Venezuela. We are not a place where, if you get a bad president, he can corrupt half the judiciary, take over half the media, tell the universities what to teach.”
It’s a perfect example of the sort of patriotic trust that, in Kendzior’s view, is hastening America’s fall to brutalism and autocracy. When she takes the podium after Kristol, she is biting in her opinion of America’s institutions, presented by Kristol as a bulwark in a nation momentarily weakened.
To Kendzior, that perspective is a mirage, and worse. She tells the crowd, “Belief in American exceptionalism is what got us here.”
To agree with Kendzior is to accept a very unpatriotic idea: that America’s exceptional past stopped offering reassurance the moment Trump took office. It is this American present that Kendzior tried to warn the world about, a place where values are fungible, truth is marketable and despotism is a shadow creeping across the landscape.
The Democrats have taken the House, the Senate, and the Presidency – yet they are still claiming that they can’t pass the policies Americans desperately need. What’s stopping them? The filibuster – a weapon of white supremacy used by Southern states to block progress on civil rights. Sound familiar? In this interview, Adam Jentleson — an expert on Senate procedure and the author of the book Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy — explains what the filibuster is, how the Senate is using it to hold Americans down, and how to get rid of it.
GASLIT NATION WITH ANDREA CHALUPA AND SARAH KENDZIOR
