First of all, my apologies to the person who has a hold upon Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks [check catalog]. Yes, I am the selfish person who has kept it overdue, but as you can now see, I had a defensible reason: I was waiting for my hold on Eric Weiner’s new book The Geography of Bliss [check catalog] to trigger so that I could compose this totally indulgent post with both books in hand.

I don’t often get into my personal life on this blog as a matter of self-imposed policy. For one thing, I’m not that interesting, but for another thing, you never really know who is reading. That sounds paranoid, doesn’t it? It is unavoidable now, however, owing to the fact that I have chosen to do a post on two books describing the Moldovan people, that I must reveal at least this small fact: my wife is Moldovan.

You will be forgiven if you haven’t heard of this small slice of a country of roughly four million souls wedged between Romania on the West and Ukraine on the North, East, and South. For the vital statistics, I encourage you to check out the CIA World Factbook, or for a little more, take a look at the BBC Country Profile. The truth of the matter is that when I first learned she was from Moldova, I hadn’t heard of it either, though of course, I researched it and then pretended I had known all along. I can admit this now as a matter of historic record because she’s well aware of my sly ways. Let me give you a short rundown of the relevant details.

The Moldovan people are ethnically Romanian. If you want to go all the way back to the tribes, they were Dacians, Dacia being a province, in the area of the Carpathian Mountains, of the long-forgotten Indo-European Thracian tribes who hung out mostly in Southeastern Europe. Modern Romanians probably owe some of their ancestral blood and cultural heritage as well to the Romans who were fond of pitting their armies against the Dacian people whenever they felt randy for a little wanton rape and pillaging. Well, there’s a bit of simplification in that, but it isn’t as though I’m in danger of being sued for libel by the Roman Empire’s military lawyers, so we’ll just let it stand.

The Emperor Trajan was particularly keen on sticking it to the Dacians; he finally crushed them ‘neath his boot heel around the start of the second century. The comings and goings of those who would plague the peoples inhabiting these lands reads almost like a laundry list of history’s greatest plunderers, starting with the Goths, who forced the Roman troops out around 275, leading through the Ottoman Turks (the Turks were so routinely brutal to the people in this region that Vlad the Impaler actually looked like a good guy by comparison, so what does that tell you?), and eventually the Russian Empire.

The Russians were the ones responsible for breaking off the piece of what was then the principality of Moldavia roughly between the Prut and the Dniester rivers. They called this region Bessarabia; the other half of Moldavia eventually made nice with the Transylvanians and the Walachians in order to form modern Romania. Bessarabia/Moldova was briefly occupied and conditionally unified with the greater Romanian kingdom after the fall of the Russian Empire, though was again annexed by Russia, now the USSR, following World War II.

That is the “for dummies” version of Moldovan history. Moldova has been an independent nation since 1991, though Russia still maintains an ominous troop presence in the region East of the Dniester, despite all international efforts to kick them out. Yes, Russia is occupying territory in a sovereign nation based upon the premise that the Transnistrian region contains a significant concentration of Russians who were left behind with the dissolution of the USSR. Think about that. Try to imagine Russia driving its tanks into Brighton Beach, New York. Darn right we wouldn’t stand for that.

To some of you it may come as a surprise that stuff like that still happens. You just don’t hear about it because nobody really pays attention to places like Moldova. And if you have read The Geography of Bliss, you may be wondering why anybody would want to pay attention.

The Geography of Bliss details chapter-by-chapter Eric Weiner’s journey from country to country as an exploration of the nature of happiness. By Chapter 6, his wanderings have led him to Moldova in an entry he subtitles “Happiness is Somewhere Else”.

Listen, there is a truth in this that cannot be denied: Moldovans have had it rough, and the post-Soviet period has been no picnic even though, as Americans, we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that anything would be an improvement over Communism. The truth is, of course, more subtly colored, though on the whole, independence was—I can probably say—well favored. Of course, those were the days when anything seemed possible, even a long-dreamt of reunification with Romanian Moldova. Most of those hopes died early on the vine of potential reality.

The CIA estimates the percentage of population below the poverty line at close to 30%. Like most ex-Soviet nations, the fall of Communism meant that as everything was once again privatized, a few wily robber barons pretty much made off with everything but the kitchen sink, leaving a gaping inequality between the obscenely, corrupt wealthy and…well, everybody else. Some 40% of the people still toil in agriculture for lack of any other real natural resources, and the average Moldovan earns some $880 a year—gross income according to the World Bank. So yeah, it probably isn’t the most fun place that you could be right now.

And yet, Weiner’s attitude going in still bothers me.

Yes, I need to travel to the dark side of the planet, some place not merely a bit blue, a bit down in the dumps, but truly and deeply miserable. But where?

[...]

Then it occurs to me: Moldova. Of course. The former Soviet republic is, according to Ruut Veenhoven’s data, the least happy nation on the planet. Even the name sounds melancholy. Moldoooova. Try it. Notice how your jaw droops reflexively and your shoulders slouch. Eeyore-like. [...] I can even imagine the word “Moldova” doubling as a synonym for generic disquiet.

I know that he is attempting to be entertaining here, but come on—even the name sounds melancholy? I could similarly say something about his last name, couldn’t I? Weiiiiiiner. Just let that play out along your tongue. Doesn’t it sound like somebody who, I don’t know, maybe whiiiiines.

Look, if you travel to a place expecting to find the darkest depths of unhappiness, you will find the darkest depths of unhappiness. Unsurprisingly, Weiner’s journey leads to observations such as the following:

All around me, I see misery. A blind man with sunglasses and a cane, like some caricature of a blind man, hobbling down the street. An old woman hunched over so far that her torso is nearly parallel to the ground. I hear someone sobbing behind me, and turn to see a middle-aged woman with dark hair, her eyes red from crying.

At which point the author questions if he might be experiencing confirmation bias—and this is a good question in that he has described his experiences here as though he had accidentally happened upon one of the lower circles of hell—though he quickly discards that possibility.

On my way back to Luba’s apartment, the bus suddenly stops. The driver makes an announcement—apparently there’s a mechanical problem—and everyone starts to get off. What strikes me is the resignation. No grumbling, no sighing, not a word or a sound. It’s tempting to conclude that the Moldovans are accepting of their lot in life and have achieved a Buddha-like acceptance. I don’t think that’s the case, though. I suspect something more is going on here.

Weiner compares Moldovans to “the poor man in a rich neighborhood”, and so after chronicling what he assumes to be rampant yet joyless alcoholism, a total unfamiliarity with the notion of altruism, stomach-turning cuisine, and even taking a moment to disparage the one export for which Moldova is fondly known—their wine—he sums the Moldovans up as follows:

The seeds of Moldovan unhappiness are planted in their culture. A culture that belittles the value of trust and friendship. A culture that rewards mean-spiritedness and deceit. A culture that carves out no space for unrequited kindness, no space for what St. Augustine called (long before Bill Clinton came along) “the happiness of hope.” Or as the ancient Indiant text the Mahabharata says: “Hope is the sheet anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows, which is almost equal to death itself.”

No, there is nothing I will miss about Moldova. Nothing.

To an extent, this is fair enough. Even the Moldovan people are migrating out at a rate of more than 1 per 1,000 people per year, which probably doesn’t take into account the scads living and working abroad in menial positions in order to provide for their families, many of them undocumented. But still…I am going to go on the record here and say that Eric Weiner is a bit of a prat.

And so as an antidote to Weiner’s negativity, I offer you instead Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by the British comedian Tony Hawks. The plot, in a nutshell:

Hawks has played some tennis, never quite getting anywhere with it, though he did earn “a medal for winning the British Actors’ Equity tennis championship. (Most of the entrants hadn’t been any good, and hadn’t even acted like they were.)” and some other minor accomplishments. So when a friend vexes him by asserting that any natural athlete, such as the ill-fated Moldovan footballers (that’s soccer for most of you) that were in the process of losing to the England team, could probably pick up a racket and give him a beating in tennis, Hawks takes that bet and dashes off to Moldova in order to defeat every member of the Moldovan World Cup team.

Yes, it’s a gimmick, and Hawks is—as reviewers will quickly point out—a humourist and emphatically not a sociologist, and yet, I actually found Playing the Moldovans at Tennis to be the far more perceptive of the two books dealing with Moldova. In part, it may simply come down to the fact that Hawks, himself, spent much more time with typical Moldovan people, whereas Eric Weiner took most of his non-observational information from American Peace Corps volunteers and Moldovan citizens whom he already knew to be angrily discontented, such as an acerbic blogger named Vatalie.

But it also has to do, I think, with the fact that Hawks isn’t particularly looking to prove or disprove anything except that he can beat the Moldovan World Cup team in tennis. He calls it “kind of like a scientific experiment to prove that optimism produces results.” He elaborates in this discussion with Adrian, the teenage son in the family with which he is staying:

‘I am interested by what you are doing in our country,’ he said at one point, grabbing my arm and leading me in a wide arc, presumably to lessen the chances of my falling down a manwhole, ‘but I do not see how you will succeed.’

‘Why not?’

‘I do not think that the players will agree to play you.’

‘Oh I think that they will.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I can’t be sure. We can’t be sure of anything,’ I averred, immediately adding, ‘And I’m not even sure of that.’

‘So, why are you doing this? It is a big risk.’

‘Because I want to win my bet and I want to prove my point. The risk doesn’t bother me. I’m a risk taker.’

‘This is bad — to take risks.’

‘Oh I don’t agree Adrian. Not to risk anything is to risk everything.’

‘And what does that mean?’

I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask that. Profound remarks carry so much more weight when left unchallenged.

I won’t spoil any of the book, though I will tell you that it is very funny, and it had both me and my beautiful Moldovan bride in stitches at many parts. Suffice it to say that his whimsical risk brings him into contact with all manner of both colorful and colorless characters alike, including:

• The kind-hearted doctor and patriarch of his host family, who applies his trade for pennies while corrupt goons with idiosyncratic names like “The Television” splash mud upon him as they wrecklessly careen about in their flashy European cars. Though he speaks almost no English, he nevertheless shares a warm kind of friendship with Hawks;
• The mother of the gypsy king, Arthur, to whom Hawks delivers a cheap, plastic round table (this is a rather light-hearted encounter, as she, bizarrely, trades him a pair of underwear in exchange for the table, but in fairness, Hawks tends to trivialize the gypsy royalty, whose riches most probably derive from some rather unsavory practices, such as human trafficking);
• And the absurdly egotistical Russian owner of a Transnistrian football club who paid 25 pounds for a sandwich in Manchester and thinks all British are millionaires, whom Hawks cajoles by claiming an interest in a business partnership to bring a tourist trade to what I believe Hawks at one point calls the worst place on Earth (i.e. the contended and dangerous Transnistria region in which those of Moldovan ethnicity are persecuted inside their own country).

Hawks, himself, eventually leaves the country somewhat ambivalent about it, as an Air Moldova official manages to scam him out of his last fifty dollars as a result of his baggage being overweight.

So far as I was concerned it was a scam, but at least my rather brazen actions had got the price down to an acceptable level. Now when I got home, I could make use of one of the bottles in my luggage to drink two toasts to Moldova — one to some of the beautiful people I had met, and one to the relief of finally being out of the place.

In the interests of full disclosure, I haven’t yet been to Moldova, though I’ve got a pretty good idea about it. If you ask my wife or one of her Moldovan friends, none of them is going to spin a fairy tale yarn for you about their country. But I’ve heard the other side of the discussion, as well, and I don’t think that hopelessness and disregard or even envy for the good fortune of their own countrypeople is somehow programmed into the Moldovan DNA, as Eric Weiner seems to believe. Which is why I am inclined to say that Tony Hawks’s observations are the more accurate of the two, if only because Hawks sees the glimmer of optimism in his dealings with the Moldovan people—an optimism that has merely been beaten down by literally millennia of serving as the red-headed stepchild of Southern Europe. It’s a bit of a revelation for Hawks when he begins to notice it:

It wasn’t until much later, when I finally stumbled into bed, that I was struck by the full significance of what had happened that night. Not only had the family’s plan set my task back on track, but it had been the first time in my entire stay that anyone from Moldova had been anything other than reactive. Up until now I had always been the one making the suggestions, inventing hairbrain schemes or pushing for this or that. Finally someone else had come up with something, and bloody good it was too. It seemed odd that this moment hadn’t arrived until I’d actually given up on things. Maybe it was because this was the first time that I’d appeared vulnerable and really in need, and this was something with which Moldovans could empathise. Or maybe the help arrived because they didn’t want me to fail, and they didn’t want me to fail because they cared.

In the end, it is debatable whether Tony Hawks has anything of great import to say on the character of the Moldovan people, but then again, that was never his intention, and he wisely makes no pretense of having anything other than a comedian’s acute though skewed observations to show for his journey. He more or less ends his journey with the conclusion that “Moldovan footballers are a nice bunch,” a phrase he spells out in all caps as though it is meant to be Playing the Moldovans at Tennis’s take-away mantra, for better or for worse. And as a mantra, it’s not a bad one for a guy like Eric Weiner, I’d venture to say.

I tend to watch a lot of incidental television lately; that is, if the TV just kinda happens to be on,¹ I’m watching it. I’m loath to fixate my passive eyeballs upon anything that requires a serious commitment of time from me as a viewer. So like many people this year, I’ve been tuning in to an amount of primary elections coverage that probably constitutes “unhealthy” by most psychiatric standards.

By the way, is it just me or is Wolf Blitzer more or less begging for somebody to devise a drinking game around this whole “best political team on television” thing? Something like, “If Wolf says ‘best political team on television’ twice in one sentence, take three shots of tequila!” Seriously, how many stumbling drunk Americans would there be if that game existed?

Thousands dead of “Situation Room”-related alcohol poisoning. A nation mourns and a beset medical community asks, “How long before Blitzer stops?”

It would be like a national collective bender right on through the Emmy Awards Ceremony that will eventually strip that distinction away from CNN and confer it upon some other news channel so that a new political team can have their chance at beating you over the head with it.

Funnily enough, however, CNN does have a decent political news team, and so I’ve often spent the night with all 360 degrees of Anderson Cooper (to be the subject of my next tell-all memoir The Anchorman Always Rings Twice) and friends.

On Friday, March 7, 2008 (viz. last night), the University of Arkansas hosted a lecture followed by Q&A with Cooper as part of its “Distinguished Lecture” series, so I braved weather that can literally freeze a man’s brain inside of his skull in order to get over to Barnhill Arena.

I’ve got a lot of admiration for the Anderson Coopers of the world, because, man…you wouldn’t ever find me in places like Somalia, where teenage gunmen extort locals and aid workers alike and malnutrition exceeds emergency levels by whole percentage points, or Congo, where one in four children dies before the age of five. That’s why Cooper gets to write a book called Dispatches from the Edge [check catalog] and all I get to write is a blog post called “Dispatches from the reference desk.” For the safety of my life and limb, I think that’s a fair trade-off.

I think the one element of what he had to say last night that most impressed itself upon me is how spotty the record of the suffering is in these war-ravaged and often forgotten nations, even for the people who do most of the suffering within them. Children desiccated by famine—bodies destroyed by rampant disease—and lost to families who haven’t got even a photograph by which to remember them. Sometimes even their names are lost to grandparents who suffer the deaths of more grandchildren than they have fingers to count them upon. Cooper talks of preserving their memories through stories, and really, thank god somebody is willing to take that on. He’s quite a good storyteller, to be sure.

I just got through helping a couple of college kids at the reference desk; one of the young women noticed that I had a library copy of his book sitting in front of me. “He’s so humble,” she said. It’s true—there isn’t anything particularly self-aggrandizing about the man, except to the extent that you sort of have to be in order to become an anchor on a cable news channel, and that’s refreshing.

He is also adept with a sly turn of phrase, which is at least part of the reason why he seems to have won over last night’s crowd, even including the latter-day Holden Caulfields of the University scene whose cynical outrage sometimes swallows the questions they mean to form.

Just for the heck of it, I am going to quote a bit from Dispatches from the Edge and encourage anybody reading this to come and grab one of the two copies of the book owned by FPL. This comes from Cooper’s chapter on Niger:

I close my eyes, pretend to sleep. Maybe I am sleeping. In Africa it’s hard to tell. Coiled in a dirty sheet, sweat-soaked, my hair matted with the day’s dust and grains of sand in my mouth, I dream about work, storylines, plots; I edit pictures in my head. I wake gasping for breath, unsure where I am. Niger. Rwanda. Somalia.

In Africa there are too many pictures, too many contrasts. You can’t catch them all. It’s like sticking your head out of a fast-moving car—you suffocate; it’s too much to take in. Amputations. Executions. Empty beds. Shuttered stores. Crippled kids. Wild-eyed gunmen. Stripped-down corpses. Crashed cars. Mass graves. Hand-made tombstones. Scattered ammo. Half-starved dogs. Sniper warnings posted like billboards. Buses and boxcars stacked at intersections. Old men in boxy suits walking to jobs that don’t exist in offices that aren’t there. It all blurs together. Desert. Mountain. Rice paddy. Field. Farmers bent over. Heads rise as you pass. Eyes follow eyes. Little kids run to the road, stand frozen, not sure if they should be happy or scared. They keep their weight on their heels so they can run back at the lurch of a car, the crack of a shot. Houses, whole towns, nothing but rubble—roofs blown off, walls burnt out, crumbled. Desiccated, eviscerated, gutted, and flayed.

At some point, though, the disorientation fades. You put it behind you; go on. This is an adventure waiting. Life happening. It’s not your life, but it’s as close as you’ll get. You want to see it all.

One minute you’re there—in it, stuck, stewing in the sadness, the loss, your shirt plastered to your back, your neck burned from the sun—then you’re gone, seatbelt buckled, cool air cascading down, ice in the glass. You are gliding above the earth, laughing.

That bit’s got sort of a beat poetry thing going on that some cats might not dig, but in any case, it gives you a compressed version of what it’s like to look through the eyes of Anderson Cooper.

Anyway, if he isn’t quite your speed, but you are fond of the idea of checking out a memoir from a life in news reporting, here are a few other biographies written by television journalists.

• A Life on the Road by Charles Kuralt [check catalog]. Kuralt was the anchor of CBS’s “Sunday Morning”, but was well known before that for his “On the Road” series, which ran on the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”. “On the Road” explored the United States just off the beaten path as Kuralt took the scenic route around the country in a motor home.

• David Brinkley: 11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on Television by David Brinkley [check catalog]. Apart from being the designer of the world’s longest subtitle, David Brinkley was a long-time news commentator for NBC. “The Huntley-Brinkley Report”, which aired from 1956 to 1970, pioneered early television documentary techniques, though he is probably most famous for his news panel show, “This Week with David Brinkley”, done for ABC from 1981 through 1996.

• A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland by Tom Brokaw [check catalog]. Tom Brokaw is, amongst other things, known for his coverage of the Watergate scandal during his term as NBC Washington correspondent, and then later for his gig as host of the “NBC Nightly News”. He’s still around and writing books for crotchety members of what I like to term the “sandwiched generation”—you know, those sort of difficult-to-define people who didn’t fight in World War II yet aren’t baby boomers, so they’re kind of in awe of the former and a little ticked off by the latter. His most recent is Boom!: Voices of the Sixties : Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today [check catalog] which features such chapters as “A loss of innocence”, “The fracture of 1968: the noisy masses versus the silent majority”, and “A dream fulfilled and a dream deferred”. Still a strong voice in the United States media, despite his inability to pronounce the letter “l”.

• Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life [check catalog]. Published posthumously, the content is apparently culled from interviews given by Jennings in the years before his death in 2005. I would venture to say that Jennings is best known as anchor of ABC’s “World News Tonight” from 1982 to 2003, though he had his start with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. He was plucked from the CBC in 1965 when he was still a young stud of 26, and ABC made him the youngest network news anchor ever.

For those of you who would like to know about movies that were based upon books without having to wade through my voluminous prose, the Mid-Continent Public Library over in Independence, Missouri has put together a web resource for this purpose as part of their online Reader’s Advisory service.

They call it, simply enough, “Based on the Book”. Their data, which is culled from the Internet Movie Database, can be browsed by Movie Title, Movie Release Year, Book Title, and Book Author.

Bear with me a second. I’ve got a point here, but I fully intend to ramble my way to it.

Back in 2000 there was a television show called “Son of the Beach”, and I can say without a shred of hesitation that it was just about the worst thing ever conceived by Homo sapiens (this latter term being an erroneous designation, surely). In concept, it was supposed to be a “Baywatch” parody.

Let that sink in a minute.

It was a parody of a show that was, itself, self-parody. But “Son of the Beach” was actually worse than even its schlocky premise would imply—it was sort of like the most groan-inducing moments from every by-the-numbers, bomb-tastic teen movie (you know, the ones that come out like clockwork every year) rolled up into one gloriously intentional small-screen throw-away.

And yet, “Son of the Beach” season one (mercifully, there only was one season of this program) rates 4.5 stars out of 5 on Amazon.com based upon 28 user reviews. You’ll find a single one-star rating there. That’s mine. Three of 61 people found my comment helpful. Fair enough.

My point is that people are stupid.

What? Too harsh? Let me put it this way: some people don’t know…uh…Shinola from something that isn’t Shinola. In any event, I know that was a pretty long preamble to such a simple conclusion, but there you go. I assure you that once you’ve read the remainder of this post, you will find yourself even further confused as to why I chose to relate that to you.

I just wanted to share.

That being said, I still feel that the range style of voting is probably one of the more helpful rating systems currently in use. It is, of course, deceptive when the only people voting upon a thing are roundly demented, but provided a large, representative sample size, it bears out pretty well for neutralizing the skewing factor intrinsic to single winner plurality voting. Which brings me to this:

The Math Behind the Vote
by THERESA BRADLEY, Associated Press Writer

“Gaming the Vote: Why Elections Aren’t Fair (and What We Can Do About It)” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 352 pages, $25), by William Poundstone: Most analysts doubt Ralph Nader’s bid for the White House will divide Democrats and tip the presidency to Republicans in 2008. After all, he received less than 0.4 percent of the vote in 2004, down from nearly 3 percent in 2000.

But according to William Poundstone’s new book on voting, tipping the vote is exactly what Nader has sought to do.

[...]

But spoilers are nothing new, having determined at least five presidential elections since popular voting for the White House widely began in 1828, Poundstone argues. [...]

The problem, it turns out, is that neither plurality voting, nor any other known method, is entirely fair. This depressing notion was proved in 1948 by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow, whose “impossibility theorem” showed that when three or more candidates compete, no voting system yields truly representative results.

[...]

In an avalanche of quirky anecdotes, Poundstone surveys their alternatives: The so-called “Borda count” lets voters rank choices on a ballot, while “Condorcet voting” pairs every possible combination of candidates in a one-on-one duel. “Approval voting” allows voters to give a thumbs up or down to multiple candidates, while an “instant runoff” redistributes losing votes to stronger, second choice contenders.

All alternatives are flawed, but Poundstone suggests that one method, “range voting” — an internet favorite used, for example, to rate books on Amazon.com — is actually the best among imperfect options, because it allows voters to express their degree of preference with a numerical score, rather than a simple yes or no.

At the moment, we haven’t got Poundstone’s book in our collection, though I fully intend to twist the arm of the librarian responsible for purchasing in this area (you heard me—make it so, Susie!).

Now here’s where I pander to the 21 million Americans who watch American Idol.

Remember this guy? Well, if you don’t, you can visit Sanjaya Malakar’s Wikipedia page. Surely a bit of trivia that we don’t need cluttering up our brains, but then again, what’s one more piece of pop culture refuse up there amongst so much trash?

This guy was alternately either idolized or vilified depending upon to whom you were talking. In essence, Sanjaya was a likable enough kid who just happened to be a pretty poor singer, but regardless, he unseated contestant after contestant who should have, by any objective standards, been favorites to advance to the next round.

Against my better judgment, I know, but this riled me up at the time just the same. The problem was and is obvious. You can vote for your favorite, but you can’t vote against the contestant that you most revile. Given any sort of voting system that took into consideration voter preference amongst the entire slate, it is a virtual certainty that Sanjaya Malakar would have plunged at least nearly to the bottom of the barrel every time. Though maybe that is just wishful thinking.

In an interesting response to Poundstone’s book, Farhad Manjoo over at Salon.com ran a range voting analysis based upon the contentious Florida poll results of the 2000 Presidential election. Here is how he set it up.

10-point scale (0 through 9). Voters behind George W. Bush rate him a 9 and Al Gore a 0. For Gore voters, you can reverse those numbers. Naderites assign their man a 9, Gore a 1, and Bush a 0.

Realistic? Well, I make no claims in this regard. Manjoo calls this “being conservative”, though, honestly…who knows? I feel that he probably puts too much stock in the tendency of voters to be predictably antithetical; possibly, in the hard schism assumed by his hypothesis, he implies an acrimony that actually came about later on, once Democratic voters got to know their President a bit better. But perhaps it’s all the same in the end.

Look, let’s be honest—the whole thing is flawed almost from the get-go given the tendency of some voters towards a black or white dichotomy in their political selections, and others towards more nuanced levels of acceptance. A political scientist can have a field day explaining why a scaled voting system might provide a bias to one candidate or the other. And though I’ve studied public policy, I am emphatically not a political scientist—to say nothing of that level of analysis being well beyond the scope of this stupid post. So we’ll just leave it at that and get back to Manjoo.

Here are his results:

• Bush: 4.43
• Nader: 0.64
• Gore: 4.44

Make of that what you will.

Steven Levy picks up this conversation over at Newsweek and I’ll wrap up this discussion with a generous snippet from his review.

Poundstone’s choice aligns him with a mathematician from Cleveland named Warren Smith, who stands as the most passionate advocate of range voting. Smith, 43, who runs an information-packed Web site on the subject, has used all his mathematical chops to compare systems and claims that range voting is demonstrably superior-he’s quoted as saying that a switch the system would “be a larger improvement to ‘democracy’ than the entire invention of democracy.”¹ What’s more, he insisted to me, it’s totally constitutional, and our current voting machines can be altered to handle the new system. Smith thinks that range voting can be particularly effective in primaries, when voters must choose among a long slate of candidates. “It’s in the party’s own interest to switch to range voting,” he says. “There would be a much better chance that the best candidate would win, and then the party would do better in the general election.” Plus, the popularity of range voting on the Internet-not just Hot or Not but innumerable sites that ask people to rate restaurants, movies and books-has made people comfortable with the idea.

Will we ever change from plurality voting? Some groups are working hard to come up with alternatives. Advocates of a system called instant-runoff voting (IRV) have gotten some municipalities (San Francisco) to adopt their system, which asks voters to select, in addition to their preferred choice, their second and even third favorites, which can be used in case no candidate wins a majority. (Poundstone’s book notes flaws in IRV, notably a scenario in which the least-preferred candidate among three could win the election.) As for the possibility of range voting being adopted, I’m not so sure that citizens will necessarily think that effectiveness in choosing hunks and hotties will tilt them toward choosing leaders in the same way. Poundstone, though, is optimistic about the long run. A switch to range voting in, say 50 years, “is something I would say is conceivable,” he says.

In a sense, the battle between those defending our current systems and those who are urging change is emblematic of many problems that have proved intransigent. Those who seek provable, data-driven solutions are frustrated by a resistance to change-and the inertia bolstered by special interests that feast on the dysfunction. It’s enough to drive a mathematician insane. “I find it maddening when people say that Nader was an evil man for running against Gore,” says Warren Smith. “What’s evil is the voting system. It just drives me nuts.” Poundstone’s book raises a big question: how mad do the rest of us have to get before we change a system that just isn’t working?

A customer was in the building yesterday inquiring about some autobiographical stuff that the author Jeffrey Archer [check catalog] wrote concerning his term in prison. Archer did a two-year stint between 2001 and 2003 for perjury and perverting the course of justice (four-year sentence, but paroled at half-time). Don’t ask me to explain it. Something to do with a faked alibi and a romantic tryst with a call girl. There was also some convoluted business about the laxity of his imprisonment that got Archer and some others into a further spot of bother, but frankly, it is all a bit difficult to unravel and I haven’t got the attention span for it.

In any event, this customer query reminded me that I’m currently sort of vexed with Jeffrey Archer after reading a Publishers Weekly Q&A with him in the January 21, 2008 issue. His new book, A Prisoner of Birth, is, apparently, an homage to Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo [check catalog], so when PW asked him to discuss any new impressions he gained from rereading Dumas’s classic (while in the slammer, which was probably nothing like the Château d’If), Archer said:

When I read the story a second time, I realized the whole secret rested on (a) Dantes’s escape from jail, and (b) having escaped, aware that in a cave on Monte Cristo was a treasure trove unequaled in the world. Such a convenient ploy may have been acceptable in 1844, but surely not today, so I was aware that it would be necessary to have an original escape and an original way of becoming wealthy before one could set about writing the opening paragraph. The process took about three months of intense thought before I came up with a solution to both problems.

Let me first say that I think Archer has expressed himself ambiguously here, and I am not certain that I fully take his meaning. Ambiguity notwithstanding…I don’t know…that bit bothered me.

Maybe there’s some point of truth in it, but you could just as easily reduce any adventure novel to two or three whimsical plot points on which the rest of the story’s fabric hangs (and I’m not even sure I can get behind Archer’s implied assertion that “a” and “b”, as he pulls them out, are terribly arbitrary). Aren’t plot contrivances sort of intrinsic to the structure of an adventure book?

I suppose I simply disagree that Dumas’s story would be dismissed on the quaintness of its narrative vagaries if it were written today. What Archer perceives as a quality of triteness, I would argue is simply familiarity. There is probably little doubt that Monte Cristo is outlandish, but isn’t that simply the nature of the beast with this sort of book. At least Dumas deals in some rather weighty themes, such as greed, vengeance, and redemption.

Lincoln…Abe Lincoln

If you can imagine a book award, chances are that somebody else thought of it first.

The Lincoln Prize at Gettysburg College shall be awarded annually by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute for the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, or the American Civil War soldier, or a subject relating to their era…

The Prize is intended chiefly to encourage outstanding new scholarship, but a lifetime contribution to the study of Lincoln, or the American Civil War soldier, may qualify for the award.

From the Gettysburg College Lincoln Prize page.

In the interest of total disclosure, I will tell you that you might find the winning book, Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters [check catalog], to be sorely lacking in its “About Lincoln” to “Not about Lincoln” content ratio.

But you can relax, Lincolnamaniacs—no need to commence another online petition, because Lincoln took the other half of the prize with The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics by James Oakes [check catalog].

That’s right—in 2008, if I am understanding this article correctly, the world witnessed a stunning draw for top prize. And nothing was ever the same afterward…

Facetiousness aside, it strikes me that one hundred forty-three years post mortem, readers still can’t get quite enough Lincoln. One would think that after all this time, the well of Lincoln scholarship might have dried, or at least gone stagnant—and yet 2007 birthed a virtual glut of Lincoln-related books, and the following list contains only the titles that FPL acquired.

• Lincoln Revisited : New Insights from the Lincoln Forum by John Y. Simon [check catalog]
• President Lincoln : The Duty of a Statesman by William Lee Miller [check catalog]
• Land of Lincoln : Adventures in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson [check catalog]
• One man great enough : Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War by John C. Waugh [check catalog]
• Case of Abraham Lincoln : A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President by J. M. Fenster [check catalog]
• House of Abraham : Lincoln and the Todds, a Family Divided by War by Stephen William Berry [check catalog]
• Stealing Lincoln’s Body by Thomas J. Craughwell [check catalog]
• The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton [check catalog]
• Lincoln Legends : Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President by Edward Steers [check catalog]
• Lincoln the Lawyer by Brian R. Dirck [check catalog]
• Americanism : The Fourth Great Western Religion by David Hillel Gelernter [check catalog]

See? This is what happens when you award prize money for something!

Well, that last one is only tangentially a Lincoln book, but you get the idea. I didn’t even include the youth titles.

I’m not totally certain why Abraham Lincoln still rates a continuous stream of scholarship more than seven score years later, but I can almost guarantee you that we won’t see the end of this trend any time soon. There seems to be a sort of ongoing tug of war between the faction of authors attempting to dymythologize our sixteenth president and the faction whose interests reside primarily in placing him back upon the pedestal each time he slips.

Both a man and an icon, Lincoln seems to lend himself to dichotomy. A great man, surely, but in many ways, an even greater enigma. It will be a while yet before anybody willingly gives up the last word on the topic.

That all being said, I’d like to see more future Lincoln scholarship delve into finally investigating the Abe who fought alongside Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek episode “The Savage Curtain”. That’s a real untapped well.

I mean, who was he? Was that the actual Lincoln, or just some alien who took his form after scanning Kirk’s mind and discovering that Lincoln was the Captain’s historical hero? I want to know, and I am absolutely positive that I can’t be the only one. Right?

I’ve just now gotten off the phone with a customer who requested a three volume set of the classical Greek tragedies [check catalog], in addition to whatever old, scholarly histories of the Greeks we had on hand. Serious stuff, and no mean feat to slog through, though I admire that brand of ambition, even if it isn’t my brand. So it is with a certain chagrin that I even broach the topic that I am about to broach; but for the matter of that, it is widely known that I have no shame, so let’s just press ahead, shall we?

I think that there are probably two major families of readers in this world: the first, those who read and then talk about what they read; and the second, those who simply read. As the alleged discussion leader of a library book club, I’m supposed to fall somewhere into that first family. And I guess I do. But though I’ve done the full-on scholarly critique thing more than a few times, merely discussing the major concepts is really more my speed. And I’m not particularly ashamed of that.

Not being an author, myself, I’m more or less in the dark as to how the authors, themselves, would elect to have me approach their works (I’m speaking, mainly, of fiction here).¹ If they are hoping that I should report to my friends and family members upon their skillful use of foreshadowing, or how adeptly they weave intertextual materials and themes throughout their narrative, and other subtextual critiques at this level of analysis…well, it probably isn’t going to happen. On a certain level I have been trained to notice these things and to appreciate them, though in the end, my major concern is only that it told a good story or didn’t.

Which brings me to this:

The Booklist Online Book Blog, Likely Stories, recently ran a brief post, “How to Read Books”, in which Keir Graff (Booklist Online’s senior editor) runs down a handful of semi-recently published titles dealing with…well, how to read books. You probably figured that out on your own.

Graff’s post is actually a minor elaboration upon a recent book review of How Fiction Works,² by James Woods, run in The Independent. In fairness, How Fiction Works is, I believe, meant to be a sort of handbook for authors rather than a didactic primer for pleasure readers who are too dense or ignorant to comprehend what they are missing by merely absorbing a novel at its top-most level.

An excerpt from the Independent article:

The mark of Wood’s dexterity, as chapters on Detail, Character, Language and Dialogue rapidly succeed one another, all broken up into a series of daintily numbered paragraphs, is his ability to extract useful lessons from the sight of a major-league talent getting it wrong. A closely inspected passage from Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, in which he demonstrates how the authorial gaze oscillates between Maisie, the wider community in which Maisie operates and the writer himself, is made easier by James’s mastery of the point of view. Even better, consequently, is Wood’s dissection of an extract from John Updike’s Terrorist, in which he convicts Updike of stuffing in so much character-forming detail that he ends up playing his creation false.

Supposedly intended for “writers, readers and anyone interested in what happens on the page”, How Fiction Works belongs to the upper shelf of what is turning into a very considerable critical sub-genre: the literary user’s manual. Professor John Sutherland got in first with his The Novel: A user’s guide (2006), closely followed by Professor John Mullan’s How Novels Work. Verse, meanwhile, was covered by Ruth Padel’s Fifty-Two Ways to Read a Poem.

I suppose that this is all well and good, but this article and then Graff’s post about it actually incited me to rush off in the opposite direction, attempting to recall a title published last year that was sort of the anti-”How to Read a Book” book. After a good deal of stumbling, I eventually found mention of it at The New York Times book page: “Read It? No, but You Can Skim a Few Pages and Fake It”.

If you haven’t got a log-in at NYT, you may not be able to read that, so I’ll give you the low-down. The article reviews a book by Pierre Bayard called How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read [check catalog], and in the spirit of Bayard’s book, I’m going to talk about it without having read it. Here’s what Alan Riding had to say in his review:

Of course, many people don’t get through these books, either, and too embarrassed to admit it, they worry constantly about being exposed as philistines.

Now Pierre Bayard, a Paris University literature professor, has come to their rescue with a survivor’s guide to life in the chattering classes. And it is evidently much in need…

“I am surprised because I hadn’t imagined how guilty nonreaders feel,” Mr. Bayard, 52, said in an interview. “With this book, they can shake off their guilt without psychoanalysis, so it’s much cheaper.”

…

Students, he noted from experience, are skilled at opining about books they have not read, building on elements he may have provided in a lecture. This approach can also work in the more exposed arena of social gatherings: the book’s cover, reviews and other public reaction to it, gossip about the author and even the current conversation can all provide food for sounding informed.

One alternative, he said, is to try to change the subject. Another is to admit not knowing a particular book while suggesting knowledge of the so-called “collective library” into which the book fits.

…

With his new book, he is also a tad subversive because “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read?” is not really what it appears to be. “It is told by a fictional personality who boasts about not reading and is obviously not me,” he explained. “This is not a book written by a nonreader.”

But he chose this device, he said, because he wanted to help people conquer their fear of culture by challenging the way that literature is presented to students and the public in France.

“We are taught one way of reading,” he said. “Students are told to read the book, then to fill out a form detailing everything they have read. It’s a linear approach that serves to enshrine books. People now come up to me to describe the cultural wounds they suffered at school. ‘You have to read all of Proust.’ They were traumatized.”

…

So, yes, he conceded, his true aim is to make people read more — but with more freedom. “I want people to learn to live with books,” he said. “I want to help people organize their own paths through culture. Also those outside the written word, those who are so attached to the image that it’s difficult to bring them back.”

Liberally clipped, but that’s probably about all that I can get away with within the bounds of fair use.³

So as you can see, it’s all very tongue-in-cheek, but I think there’s a truth in Bayard’s general premise that reading is a personal pursuit and shouldn’t be made to conform to a linear, analytical approach. Read for your own reasons, is what I say. You don’t need to tell me about it if you don’t want to or simply have nothing to say.

At least once in our lives, we’ve all pretended to be knowledgeable about a book that we never, honestly, read. Let’s collectively own up to it.

I’ll end with a slight digression: a Listmania! list that I discovered on Amazon.com—“Books you should pretend you’ve read in order to gain social appeal”

Too true.

While flipping through Chase’s Calendar of Events (today is National Inane Answering Message Day, by the way—the day when we’re all supposed to purge and replace our played out and overlong outgoing messages), I noticed that tomorrow, January 31, is Zane Grey’s [check catalog] birthday. Or at least…it would be if Zane Grey were not long dead. He would be 136 were he alive.

Grey is well known even today as a prolific author of (some would say, “disposable”) Western novels. A quick search of the library catalog finds us 105 results. Some of these, admittedly, are alternate format records (for example, the library owns a mammoth collection of large print titles by Grey), and it is worth mentioning that Grey seems to have made the leap to the 21st Century, as we have got five of his books available in downloadable audio through NetLibrary.

Zane Grey is largely appreciated historically—if he is appreciated at all—as a chronicler of the American West, since much of what he wrote about derived, at least in the setting, from his own travels through the American West during the early part of 20th Century. As a literary figure, critics have always been sparing with their kindness for the author. The Oxford Companion to American Literature [check catalog] places Grey’s oeuvre firmly into the realm of the dime novel, or at least the “20th-century heir to the dime novel”: massively popular at the time, though of a workmanlike design and style.

I am not in a position to offer an opinion on this one way or the other, having never opened a Zane Grey novel in my life. Perhaps somebody with some personal knowledge of the subject can weigh in within the comment section below. I was surprised, however, to discover that Zane Grey was originally a dentist by trade. I’d always pictured him as some sort of born-in-the-saddle cowboy, but it turns out he was from Ohio. Who knew?

Of the reference works at the library offering historical literary biographies, I found the best of the Zane Grey write-ups in Twentieth-Century Western Writers [check catalog]. I’ll recount a few of the highlights here:

During his prolific 30-year career as a western writer, Zane Grey wrote on just about every aspect of the American West—the railroad, the telegraph, the cattle drive, the mountains, the range, the canyons, the desert, cowboys, outlaws, gunmen, Indians, Mexicans, Mormons, buffaloes, wild horses, range wars between cattlemen, and the timeless feud between cattlemen and sheepherders. Much of his knowledge was gained first-hand through trips in the regions he wrote about; in addition, he performed diligent historical research…

Although he came by much of his material originally, his literary method was derivative… He is often and justly criticized for his use of language, for he adopted the idiom of 19th-century romance without rejuvenating it.

The mass audience, nevertheless, has continued to read his books…

Riders of the Purple Sage has been his best-known novel…distinguished by an urgent evocation of the landscape… It succeeds as entertainment fiction through strong suspense and mystery, application of moral relativity rather than absolute law, and vicarious wish-fulfillment through definite problem-solving and domestic happiness. Simultaneously, it is marred by frequent overly lavish landscape descriptions…unrefined bigotry in its anti-Mormon sentiment, and an uncertain and sometimes puerile depiction of erotic attraction.

The U.P. Trail has earned its fame by virtue of its sound historical detail about the building of the transcontinental railroad…

The Vanishing American was the novel Grey wished to be remembered by… It successfully elicits sympathy for the Indians’ mistreatment at the hands of government administrators, but it often degenerates into a bombastic panegyric to the noble and dispossessed savage…

Grey’s novels have enjoyed perpetual popularity because, like the most popular Westerns by any author, they articulate problems clearly (albeit simply and often verbosely) for the common reader, and they provide safe, comfortable, reassuring answers… In an obituary notice in the Saturday Review, Burton Rascoe…predicted that Grey would fade into obscurity because “each generation produces its own Zane Greys.” Although Grey has suffered at the hands of literary scholars, he has continued to find new readers in successive generations…

I’ve clipped much of this article, but if you wish to read the entire thing, just ask at the adult reference desk. The article author, John D. Nesbitt, mostly goes on in this vein of crediting Grey with some minor accomplishment and then savaging his work in all other respects. Maybe he has a point—again, I’m not the one to say. But it must be worth something that over 70 years after his final novel, we still remember who Zane Grey was, let alone celebrate his birthday.

For more information about Zane Grey, the library has in its collection the following biographical titles:

• Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women by Thomas H. Pauly [check catalog].
• Zane Grey: A Biography by Frank Gruber [check catalog].

This information is a couple of weeks old at this point, but unless you religiously follow National Book Critics Circle related news, you may have missed it. On January 12 the NBCC announced their 2007 finalists. Winners are announced March 6.

To save you a trip off-site, I will go ahead and reproduce the nominees here.

Autobiography

• Joshua Clark, Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone [check catalog]
• Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying [check catalog]
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982 [check catalog]
• Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence [check catalog]
• Anna Politkovskaya, Russian Diary: A Journalist’s Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin’s Russia

Nonfiction

• Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism [check catalog]
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848 [check catalog]
• Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present [check catalog]
• Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA [check catalog]
• Alan Weisman, The World Without Us [check catalog]

Fiction

• Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games [check catalog]
• Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao [check catalog]
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men [check catalog]
• Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger’s Daughter [check catalog]
• Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher [check catalog]

Biography

• Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer [check catalog]
• Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton [check catalog]
• Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison [check catalog]
• John Richardson, The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 [check catalog]
• Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy [check catalog]

Poetry

• Mary Jo Bang, Elegy [check catalog]
• Matthea Harvey, Modern Life [check catalog]
• Michael O’Brien, Sleeping and Waking
• Tom Pickard, The Ballad of Jamie Allan
• Tadeusz Rozewicz, New Poems

Criticism

• Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints [check catalog]
• Julia Alvarez, Once Upon a Quinceanera [check catalog]
• Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream [check catalog]
• Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound [check catalog]
• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century [check catalog]

From the NBCC website:

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, is a non-profit organization consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns.

The 1977 appearance of Marcia Muller’s character Sharon McCone was the first time a female was given a gritty, “hard-boiled” role in detective fiction. In 1982, Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski [check catalog] and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone [check catalog] debuted, ushering in what some call the “Second Golden Age” of the mystery novel.

The original “Golden Age” is generally considered to have occurred 1925-1945—the age of Agatha Christie [check catalog], Rex Stout [check catalog], G. K. Chesterton [check catalog], Erle Stanley Gardner [check catalog], and others. During that period, the female sleuth was always an amateur sidekick to the “real” detective. A secretary, busybody neighbor, or girlfriend would get involved in a case, but often had to be rescued or bailed out of trouble by the lead protagonist—the male lawyer, sleuth or detective.

A husband and wife pair was also common, with the wife leading the pair into trouble and the husband solving it. Some key examples of the sidekick role are Della Street (Perry Mason’s secretary) created by Gardner; Nora Charles (Nick Charles’s wife) created by Dashiell Hammett [check catalog]; Nikki Porter (Ellery Queen’s sassy secretary) created by Ellery Queen [check catalog];¹ and Harriet Vane (Lord Peter Wimsey series) created by Dorothy L. Sayers [check catalog], who is often credited for inventing the convention of a female sidekick to a male investigator starting with Unnatural Death [check catalog] in 1927.

We’ve come a long way, baby!

1. Ellery Queen was a pseudonym used by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, in addition to being the protagonist of the detective books they wrote.