Posts published in “review”

Beautiful Nate/Dennis Mansfield Howard Books

Beautiful Nate: A Memoir of a Family's Love, a Life Lost, and Heaven's Promises, written by Idahoan Dennis Mansfield about the son who died four years ago, is as much as anything else about finding the beauty within a mess. Mansfield does, although doing that has meant rethinking much of what he once thought he knew.

Those who got to know Mansfield when he first moved to Idaho a bit over 20 years ago, when he emerged as a state leader of Focus on the Family and maybe the state's most visible social conservative, encountered a person of near-total certitude. An activist on the abortion and gay rights fronts, and tightly connected through much of the Idaho (and national) evangelical community, he seemed easily defined by stereotype. In his personal life too, he writes, he had a definitive take on among other things how to raise children.

Then Nate happened, and if what followed didn't upend everything in Mansfield's world, it changed a great deal.

He still is a highly active evangelical Christian and a political conservative, and his faith runs through a book which feels written more for an evangelical audience, or at least within that framework, than for people of other persuasions. But it's well worth reading for non-evangelicals too, partly for the insights Mansfield offers here into the mindset, and partly because the story at the heart of the book, Nate's, is at its core a human tale of tragedy and hope, running well beyond limitations of religion or politics, a sequence of events that could happen to anyone and has happened to many.

We're all of us complex people, but Nate Mansfield, Dennis' eldest son, may have been more obviously so than most. A political conservative and an evangelical Christian - he evidently shared those things with his father, to some degree at least to the end - was both gifted and capable on a number of fronts (as a teenaged campaign manager, for example) but also rebellious, ferociously angry and driven toward drug abuse. The roots of this aren't completely spelled out (Mansfield may here be telling as much as he knows about those origins), but before Nate left high school he had been arrested - creating a problem for Mansfield's 2000 congressional campaign - and would be arrested repeatedly in the years to come. Periodically addicted to substances both legal and not, heroin among them, Nate died in 2009 of a drug interaction.

The story of how Nate and his parents related uneasily over the years to come is unfortunately not an altogether new tale these days. There is a notably breathtaking and wrenching section here where Mansfield and his wife have to decide whether to allow a then-imprisoned Nate out from behind bars and back into their house, and decide against. You can feel the pain on the page.

The background is distinctive, however, because Mansfield had come into parenting and into much of his early activist work out of certainty that he knew the right way to raise a child - he describes in some detail what that was, where it came from, how he tried to put it into effect and how it periodically smashed into practical application - and was thrown when it didn't work out. (In Nate's case, that is: We aren't told quite enough about the other two children in the house, but their lives apparently proceeded on less eventful and markedly smoother tracks to adulthood.) (more…)

Two subjects here. One is the long-time Washington Senator Henry Jackson, one of the most impactful the region has ever had, and his work with one of his staffers, Forrest Gerard - and we should note here that a lot of the work credited to members of Congress actually gets done by staffers, so that's a worthy story on its own merits.

The other is the issue at hand: "Termination," as applied to Indian reservations. As the glossary puts it, termination in the context of Indian reservations means "an end to the special relationship between tribes and the federal government. The idea was to settle claims with tribal governments and then terminate the federal government’s role on reservations. American Indians would then become subject to state laws."

For someone who likes clear and clean lines of government, the federally-recognized tribes and their reservations are an inconvenience. They fit nowhere in the nation's federal system, but they're not - terms of language notwithstanding - realistically independent nations either. (Independent nations controlled by a bureau of the federal government?) A wide range of people have bought into the idea of termination over the years. Of course, if that approach had become law, Indian country would look a lot different now, and surely a lot less prosperous.

Once, Jackson was one of them. He changed his mind, and his work with Gerrard was one of the key levers in that change.

So the new book Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars, written by former Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editorial Page Editor Mark Trahant (and, much further back, former Sho-Ban News editor), tells a story about how a policy - against termination - came to be put in place after an unsteady run through the years, and a story about how Washington works. It's a solid slice of political storytelling.

It isn't an entirely dispassionate look at the subject; Trahant is clearly anti-termination. His argument, and compelling, is that ending the federal relationship with the tribes would effectively end their governing structure, and over time - maybe not long time - that would effectively destroy the tribes and native culture. Now, he writes that tribal self-government "is no longer in question. Every tribe, state and federal leader now accepts that framework as a given."

Wasn't always that way. Trahant recounts how Congress formally adopted a termination resolution in 1958.

Jackson is one of the main personal reasons for that transition, along with Gerard. For those of us who don't track Indian issues in Congress closely, it's an obscure story. This book shows why it should not be.

Some of the reads enjoyed here over the last year, and recommended to you, from Ridenbaugh Press. Let us know what you think - and what else we should be reading . . .

Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee (Bloomsbury, 2007). The counter-intuitive title pretty much says it. Yes, the lack of health insurance is an enormous problem; the lack of affordable health care generally is even bigger. But a key part of the problem has to do with some of the reasons that hideously expensive system is so expensive, and it includes a lot of treatment that shouldn't be. This is a subject this space will return to in the months ahead, and health care reform is highly likely to be a major theme of the months ahead; and this investigative book is excellent reading meantime about what should be an important part of all that. A whole lot of what is done in the name of our health isn't making us healthier, and we nationally need to come to grips with that. Soon.

The Appeal by John Grisham (Delta, 2008). It's one of his legal potboilers (which tend to be not quite as well written as his off-track books), but few books this year hit harder politically. Few overt polemics made the case so well; this is a classic case of using fictional characters to lay out a story that has the full ring of truth, the kind of function that has a long (even honored) history. It may be a thriller, but it's also one of the best political books of the year, and you need look nowhere further than the recent history of the contests for the Washington Supreme Court to see why. Grisham here is angry - he lets no one off the hook, most especially voters who too often don't know enough about what they're doing.

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson (Vintage, 1995). Yes, this novel has been around for years, and yes, it's already gotten lots of kudos. But we just got around to it this year, and glad for it. The story is well told, the characters thoughtfully deepened and rounded, but what sticks most are the atmosphere and the feelings. Set in the Northwest (mostly in the San Juan islands), it has a lot to say about this region, without explicitly going there - it has a well-drawn background, but that's not its core subject. Its take on community relations, and how even the islands among our communities are globally linked, are both timeless and timely. This can be one of those books that changes the way you look at the world, and (maybe more than that) your neighbors.

Have a Nice Doomsday by Nicholas Guyatt (Harper Perennial, 2007). The back cover notes: "50 million Americans have come to believe that the apocalypse will take place in their lifetime." The background of that, and the myriad implications how this country is run, unspool in this book, written with a light touch - it isn't the slash job you might expect. There's humor scattered throughout, and Guyatt's tone is a little bemused (he's no true believer, just a student of those who are), but he plays fair. This book is about a whole large part of the country the traditional mass media rarely treat, and rarely know how. They (and the blogosphere, for that matter) could take a few lessons from Guyatt's approach.

Lincoln, President-Elect by Harold Holzer (Simon & Schuster, 2008). The subtitle is, "Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-61," and that's what it covers - and argues about. There's been a strain of historical thought, starting contemporaneous with Lincoln, that he mishandled, dealt too loosely, with the secession crisis during the months between his election and inauguration. This book, by a writer of numerous Civil War era histories and researched to intricate detail, makes an excellent case that Lincoln played the few cards available to him far better than most people thought, or still do think. This book, surprisingly timely, might be therapeutic for the currently hyperventilating among us.

The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman (WW Norton, 2008). This came out some months before Krugman won the Nobel, and his subject is mostly politics, not economics, though Krugman expertly weaves the two of them, and makes the (academic, without getting abstruse or pedantic) case for how economic and politics have had a direct effect on each other. You needn't agree with everything he says to find the book useful. More than any other of the year (that we've read), this one outlines the world view and the case for the governing just now coming into power, his early 2008 squabbles with Barack Obama notwithstanding. You'll pick up some useful history, some useful economics, a statistics lesson or two, and more along the way.

Obama: From Promise to Power by David Mendell (Amistad, 2007). The two self-penned Obama books are worth the read (for different reasons), but if you want an informed outsider's take on the man, this is a good option. Mendell was a Chicago Tribune reporter from 1998 to 2004, and covered Obama closely during most of that time; he's familiar with the background, and he knew the man pre-fame. The book dishes little real dirt, although it amply covered almost everything that came out this year about Jeremiah Wright and other Chicago hot spots - none of those came as a surprise to anyone who read this early in the year. But it feels well grounded. There's a little too much self-referential press material in it, and the book ends just before the '08 presidential really kicked in. But this one may stand for a while as a solid backgrounder on the next president.

1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign That Forged Three Presidencies by David Pietrusza (Union Square Press, 2008). This doesn't seem quite like the definitive take on the subject that it might have been, that Theodore White's once seemed to be. But it covers such a mass of detail, full of so many neatly-observed pieces, that it belongs in the upper ranks of campaign books. Reading it this fall, as the presidential campaign hit its mid stages, it seemed especially appropos - the linkages kept popping up. Good history almost always repays reading; you never know where the lessons will reapply.

McClure of Idaho, by William L. Smallwood, Caxton Press, Caldwell ID (2007).

In thinking back on James McClure, who was a senator from Idaho for 18 years through 1990 and a U.S. representative six years before that, you don't recall either an overwhelming personality or riotous controversy; the mental picture can seem a little blurred, some of the normal shorthand - that he was a "conservative Republican" - doesn't quite seem to cut it, especially for what the terms mean in this decade.

The new - release is set for September 1 - biography, McClure of Idaho, brings some focus. Get hold of two basic points and you have a fair sense of this guy who, improbably in some ways, has been one of Idaho's most successful politicians.

One is this: He never really left the small, socially conservative, rural town of Payette where he grew up and established himself professionally. Politicians like to say such things about themselves, but in McClure's case it seems generally true, generating the range of positives and negative you get from that background.

The other, less obvious to most of the public but clear to those who worked around or across from him, is implied by this passage: "You need to know that Jim McClure fancies himself as the consummate do-it-yourselfer. He did all the wiring and plumbing and heating installations in his Payette house during the years when it was undergoing remodeling, and he did the same thing in his cabin on Payette Lake outside of McCall. There isn't anything around a house that he thinks he can't install or repair." McClure was (is presumably), to a degree unusual for a legislator, a highly focused detail man, happier working on the precise language of legislation or on a stubborn electrical wiring job, than in blasting off on the ills of the world.

Put the two pieces together, and you have a basis for evaluating McClure. This book, too - in an analogous sense, it too has these qualities. It is very much an "authorized" biography, and its mood and attitude is suffused by McClure's and the community of family, friends and associates around him. But its 485 pages are also packed with loads of detail, and it's an easy recommended read for anyone interested in one of Idaho's leading political figures and the impact - considerable - he has had on the state.

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Abit off-topic for this Northwest site, but not by too much: Herewith, a quick review of 10 books we read over the last year (all of these published in 2006, or shortly before) which gave us useful insight in a number of areas . . . including the great Northwest.

Even though only one of these books was explicitly about the region.

To be clear, we're not suggesting this as any kind of "10 best" list (and we'll list them in alpabetical order by author). Some are national sellers, but most are lesser known, and one a relatively obscure regional academic books. Just two are specifically "Northwest" books. But all of them have, in their various ways, fresh and useful ideas and information useful to anyone trying to better understand politics and society. They are all highly useful. And between them, they suggest some of the many ways books can help us understand our neighbors as well as people who live somewhat further away.

The only descriptive word we can think of that all have in common is, "provocative" - they will make you think. At least, they made us think.

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