For the first time in my life, I read a book because of a coin flip.

I had “The Help” in my Netflix queue for roughly 328947 months with the vague idea I might want to read the book before seeing the movie.  I also thought AV had taken that path, so I asked her if I should bother doing the book-before-movie route.

Turned out she hadn’t read the book, but was ready to help me decide.

“Soooo I’ll flip a coin?  And then tell you?”  Heads was book-first.  It was heads.

As is usually the case, if you’re even thinking about doing both the book and the movie, reading before watching was definitely the way to go.  Even the longest movie leaves out important pieces that give contextual weight to scenes that otherwise really miss something.  And with a book criticized for being a reductionist “whitewashing,” paring down the elements even more certainly did it no favors.

I won’t begin to delve into all of those pieces since seemingly everyone else weighed in a year ago.  But I can certainly see the argument that the story is about a young white woman who heroically used her words to upend the oppressive social structure of this town and lift the black maids from a state of helplessness.  The movie version — much more than the book — vastly understates the conditions in the Jim Crow South, making it seem like one woman in this town was responsible for prolonging segregation and discrimination, and that neither is so bad.  The depth of dehumanization is not there.

One example of how I think the movie story really gave critics some ammo comes at the end, when one of the maids, Minny, is treated to a meal by her employers.   A short time earlier, there is a brief allusion to the fact that she may be facing violence from her husband, Leroy, but nothing is explicitly explained.  When she sits down at this table of food, the maid who narrates the story says it “gave Minny the strength she needed — she took her babies out from under Leroy and never went back.”

But in the book, Minny doesn’t leave Leroy because a white couple made her dinner.  She faces pervasive abuse throughout the book, staying strong in the face of such abuse for the sake of her kids and needing Leroy’s salary to help provide for them.  In the fallout from the book of maids’ stories being published, Leroy loses his job and attacks Minny in a rage.  At her limit, and with some money from the book, she leaves:  “I done took this long enough…God help him, but Leroy don’t know what Minny Jackson about to become.”

The power in those scenes is entirely different.  “Thanks for the mashed potatoes” is not the same as “ENOUGH.”

Despite the oversights, I did like both the book and the movie.  The book is well-written and develops a host of characters that show there is no stereotypical perspective of a black maid just as there is no one white employer.  It’s a range, just as in today’s world in which discrimination lives on in many forms.

“The Help” is a good story — just an incomplete one.  I think the last paragraph of this New York Times review sums it up well:

“At one point Skeeter [main, white character played in the movie by Emma Stone] hears a strange new guy, Bob Dylan, singing a strange new song, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ and finds herself full of optimism. Had she heard the same Bob Dylan singing ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,’ his accusatory song about the fatal caning of a 51-year-old black barmaid by a young white patrician, ‘The Help’ might have ventured outside its harsh yet still comfortable, reader-friendly world.

It’s been a while since I read a legit page-turner, but “The Hunger Games” certainly fits that description.

It’s also a rare read in that I didn’t have the burden/luxury (depending on how you look at it) of picturing the main character in my head.  The movie version of the story comes out in a few weeks, so I’ve been aware for a while that actress Jennifer Lawrence plays the lead role, Katniss.

I’ve only seen her in the 2010 film “Winter’s Bone” for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, but clearly know what she looks like.  The movie itself was also nominated for Best Picture, and was actually one of my favorites from the category.  (Netflix peeps — it’s available for instant streaming right now!  Go watch it!)  I’ll even go as far as the potentially blasphemous statement that I enjoyed it far more than “The King’s Speech.”

In “The Hunger Games” you can almost see Lawrence’s character from “Winter’s Bone,” the same kind of hard-scrabble kid doing whatever is necessary to take care of her family.  They face enormous challenges growing up in tough areas and have a father who in one way or another disappears from their life.  What follows is a test few would ever expect to face, one that requires them to fight with everything they’ve got.

It’s a character you root for.  You have to.  Sure, she can seem a bit cool and standoffish at times, but who goes through life peppy and outgoing at every moment?  As she prepares for the big challenge, she has a team of people helping her.  Her main adviser chides her for her attitude, but another she is more naturally open to says, “No one can help but admire [your] spirit.”

“My spirit,” Katniss says.  “This is a new thought.  I’m not sure exactly what it means, but it suggests I’m a fighter.  In sort of a brave way.  It’s not as if I’m never friendly.  Okay, maybe I don’t go around loving everybody I meet, maybe my smiles are hard to come by, but I do care for some people.”

The beautiful thing about this book is that it even subtly appeals for grammar nerds to get behind Katniss.  She’s from a poor district lorded over by a totalitarian government, which is seated in the “far-off city called the Capitol.” 

Who doesn’t want to fight an atrocity like that?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to plow through the remaining books in this series.

There are pieces of history we know, ones for which the broad strokes are considered common knowledge.  But then there are the intricacies, the different angles and depths that give us a different view, or at least a different lens with which to view those events.

Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts” is one of those stories.

It’s an account of Hitler’s rise in Germany, focusing on the period of roughly 1933-37, told through the experience of William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Berlin.  Larson is the author “Devil in the White City,” which I described as an “info-dense” book.  This one is no different.

Larson gives you a sense of what it’s like to walk the city’s streets at different points as Hitler’s regime takes hold of Germany.  He uses a boatload of primary documents to reveal the inner workings of the Western diplomatic corps, showing how a few people sounded alarms along the way, but no consensus for taking action against Hitler formed until it was much too late.  (You can listen here to Larson talk about the book with NPR’s Terry Gross.)

It’s easy to judge the notes that in the moment said things aren’t as bad as people are making them out to be, but of course as readers now we have the incredible advantage of knowing what was to come.  It’s hard to fault to anyone for not foreseeing such atrocities.

The U.S. consul general in Berlin, George Messersmith, was one of those putting up red flags.  Larson writes that Messersmith warned Hiter’s government “could not be viewed as a rational entity.”

“There are so many pathological cases involved that it would be impossible to tell from day to day what will happen any more than the keeper of a madhouse is able to tell what his inmates will do in the next hour or during the next day.”

Larson writes about U.S. Senator Millard Tydings, who proposed a resolution calling on President Roosevelt to express the “surprise” and “pain” of the American people upon hearing about the persecution of Jews in Germany.

But we can’t whitewash our own history, either.  Larson presents a response to Tydings’ resolution, written by Assistant Secretary of State R. Walton Moore.  Moore points out the resolution could lead to Germany asking “why the negroes of this country do not fully enjoy the right of suffrage; why the lynching of negroes in Senator Tydings’ State [Maryland] and other States is not prevented or severely punished; and how the anti-Semitic feeling in the United States, which unfortunately seems to be growing, is not checked.”

Reading this book, it’s hard not to draw parallels between the tactics of Hitler’s government and other oppressive regimes we have seen since.  Even now, as we have seen peoples in the Middle East and North Africa launch revolutions against people like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Moammar Gadhafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  That’s not to say what they did was equal to the evils of Nazi Germany, but that doesn’t mean horrific acts haven’t taken place.

What stands out is the rhetoric.  These governments make the same kinds of statements, blaming others for their problems and attempting to restrict the flow of information in order to maintain the illusions they spin.

In his famous 1934 “Marburg speech,” Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen was critical of the Nazi regime, but those in charge of stifling expression blocked it from being broadcast and banned his words from being printed in newspapers.

Another striking attribute of these tactics is the arrogance with which they are carried out.  The leaders have no sense of their own fallacy.  In response to the Marburg speech, Hitler says, “all these little dwarfs who think they have something to say against our idea will be swept away by its collective strength.”
After the “Night of Long Knives” in which hundreds were killed as Hitler consolidated his power, Herman Göring, a top Nazi official, said a “foreign power” was involved in plotting against the state.

In the current situation in Syria, the government has often blamed foreign powers — along with “armed terrorists” — for stoking what is now a year-long opposition uprising.

Larson writes that the purge in Germany “in time would be considered one of the most important episodes in [Hitler’s] ascent, the first act in the great tragedy of appeasement.  Initially, however, its significance was lost.  No government recalled its ambassador or filed a protest; the populace did not rise in revulsion.”

It’s not easy to know what the right response is to these situations.  After all, these are sovereign nations, and we certainly wouldn’t be happy with the international community dictating our internal affairs.  But at some point, the world has to have a voice in speaking up against evil.

Larson writes that in September 1936, about a year before his tenure in Berlin ended, Dodd wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “What mistakes and blunders since 1917, and especially during the past twelve months — and no democratic people do anything, economic or moral penalties, to halt the process!”

All of this perspective is just a small sampling of the narrative Larson is able to weave together in this book.  There are other fascinating strands — most notably the life of Dodd’s daughter, Martha.  I could not recommend this book enough, even with the underlying horror it depicts.

I’ve never been the type of person to have a five-year plan or a list of 1,001 things to do before I die.

It’s not that there aren’t some things I’d like to do.  Rather, I think seeing the utterly unpredictable way in which life played out as those five-year periods passed has made me less prone to trying to plan out what’s coming next.

To some people, like AV, that makes no sense.  She has 387 life goals (and counting) and they’re all good ones.  I was talking to her about those one day and she naturally asked for mine, and after a lot of thought I reluctantly named my writing project.  I say reluctantly because it’s not like I have ever written down that I want to write a book and get it published.  I thought of it more as something that would be cool if it happened someday.

But now, you can count it as an official goal because of something AV told me (which I believe her mom told her): A goal is a dream with a deadline.  This may be her new favorite thing to tell me.  Repeatedly.  But that’s a good thing.  I have a dream, it’s getting a deadline, so now it counts as a goal.

There may be some others joining it, because again, the list didn’t exist at all before now.  Part of what I like about the writing project is that it’s a creative expression, like what I write here, which is far outside the newswriting I do professionally.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a totally committed journalist, but there are lots of times I think I should be doing something more creative with my career.

Enter Mindy Kaling’s book, “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?”  If you’re not familiar with her, Kaling plays Kelly Kapoor on the NBC show “The Office” and also serves as one of the show’s writers.  She is really funny and one of those people who seem to excel at anything.

In the book, Kaling talks candidly about her childhood and the kinds of kids she spent time with growing up.  She describes forming bonds with creative people and the process of realizing the types of personalities she has no interest in being around.  This, of course, is something we all do, but a lot of her path felt very similar in that regard to my own trek through high school, college and beyond.

There’s something really fun and inspiring about being around people who are into creating things — in whatever format — those who can be a little less linear in their thinking and indulge in silliness at appropriate times without worrying about being judged.

Kaling got noticed when she and her friend wrote and acted in a play about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon having the script for “Good Will Hunting” literally fall from the ceiling in front of them.  That is, the two women played Affleck and Damon themselves, with a story that has no basis in reality.  But it was a hit.  They sold out shows and eventually she got the offer to write for “The Office.”

I’m always fascinated by how others approach the creative process and encouraged when I read or hear things that sound very familiar.  Kaling says she has found her “productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven.  So, for every eight-hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done.”  The rest of the time is taken up by things that are in no way important in a to-do list kind of way, but who knows how vital watching YouTube videos of babies dancing is to her final product.

I’m very much the same way, but my procrastination involves things like reading my old blog posts, thinking about going for a run, deciding not to run, updating my Netflix queue and wondering how many more bowls of Cocoa Puffs I can squeeze out of my current box.  But whatever, distractions happen.  Kaling is proof that in your spare time you can create something great that takes you in a fulfilling direction.

Other things we share:

-Inability to reliably throw a frisbee with any skill
-History of quoting comedic works to our head-shaking mothers
-Diplomas from small-town colleges — “If you’re a kid who was not especially a star in your high school, I recommend going to a college in the middle of nowhere.”
-(Related) Finding your own way as life progresses –“What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also a big star later in life.  For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.”

She even supports my one-time life plans involving Natalie Portman: “That’s nice.  You can have that.  That’s not hurting anybody.”

Thanks, Mindy.

After reading a few books that were far too close in tone to the project I’m working on, thankfully I stumbled into one that is unlike any I’ve read in a long time.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” or “High Fidelity,” they just muddled my thoughts a bit and complicated what I was doing.  Enter “Leviathan,” the third book I’ve read by the underrated Paul Auster.

It follows the usually enjoyable setup of “I’m telling you something about the end of this saga, but in order to understand the situation fully, let me now start at the beginning.”  The narrator learns that a man has blown himself up in northern Wisconsin, and after reading about it in the newspaper and getting a call from the FBI, he figures it is his friend.  He then tells the story of how they each made it to that point, a story of interwoven decisions and fates that build on one another until the final outcome is like two locomotives speeding toward one another.

Auster’s style, unlike that of say, Nick Hornby, relies much less on long stretches of quoted interactions.  If you’re not looking for it, it’s easy to miss, but I found myself at various times looking back and finding stretches of pages without a single piece of dialogue.  Just shows there are lots of ways to tell a story.

The man who blows himself up is a writer named Sachs, whose brain is always running with whatever he is working on consuming his thoughts.  The narrator describes him by saying, “The wall between work and idleness had crumbled to such a degree for him that he scarcely noticed it was there.  This helped him as a writer, I think, since his best ideas seemed to come to him when he was away from his desk.”

I can’t even remotely tell you how many blog posts can be directly attributed to that notion.  I never sit down and say, “OK, let’s post something.”  Often what happens is I’ll wake up at some ridiculous hour thinking about something random, and know that I’ll continue thinking about it until I just bite the bullet and get up to write it all down.  Of course, then getting back to sleep afterward is a different challenge.

Sachs also deals with struggles that a lot of creative people go through with uncertainty about accurately evaluating their own work.  Author Bill Carter talked about this “imposter syndrome” in his book “The War for Latenight” – the feeling that no matter how good you are, someone’s going to eventually expose that you’re not.  In Sachs’ case, he asks the narrator to read the first third of a novel he is working on:

“I’ve reached a stage where I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he said.  “I can’t tell if it’s good or bad.  I can’t tell if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done or a pile of garbage.”

Part of my lack of posts lately has been due to hitting this point with my own work.  I know I’ve said about 37 times that I’m going to do a proper update on what’s been going on, but I really do intend (possibly in the next week or so) to follow through on that.  Thankfully I feel like I’m through a really rough patch, thanks to consultant/editor/consigliere AV’s push, echoed by the narrator in this story, to “just keep writing.”

For anyone who insists that growing a beard is a good idea, I’m going to use Sachs’ wisdom as my excuse for not letting it grow.  After spending some time in the hospital, he rocks a beard for a while before snapping out of that phase for the sake of the country:

“He wanted to do his bit for capitalism.  By shaving three or four times a week, he would be helping keep the razorblade companies in business, which meant that he would be contributing to the good of the American economy, to the health and prosperity of all.”

So remember that next time you suggest I let the beard grow.  As much as I enjoy ditching the beard, I get even greater satisfaction out of seeing random references I understand from having read other books.  In this case my knowledge was thanks to Ralph Keyes and his book “I Love it When You Talk Retro.”  It’s only because of him that this made any sense:

“You always dressed me up when we went out, and I hated it.  I felt like a sissy in those clothes, a Fauntleroy in full regalia.”

Fauntleroy, Keyes writes, is Little Lord Fauntleroy, who first appeared in literary works in 1886.  “As much as the text itself, detailed drawings of Little Lord Fauntleroy in a dark velvet suit with a scalloped white collar created an indelible image of this idealized child.  They inspired a type of formal (some would say prissy) boys’ wear.”

And I don’t have anything else to add to this, but I loved this quote too much not to share.  It’s from Sachs’ wife, Fanny:

“You don’t want to get stuck in the past.  Life is too interesting for that.