You Speak for Me Now

 By Sandy Graham

Kindle Direct     2021

292 pages     Fiction

The Shortlist

You Speak for Me Now is an up-to-the-minute fictional look at the state of American politics through the eyes of a couple and their young son. John and Emma were high school sweethearts, overcoming many odds, including race and disability, to marry and develop a successful business. John becomes enamored with the possibility of becoming a politician, causing a great deal of anxiety to their relationship. Ultimately, John becomes a liberal media sensation, and the target of a conservative commentator. Their home is attacked, and Emma takes their toddler son, Peter, to Canada in order to be safe.

The summary continues: “Keeping the tension mounting, You Speak for Me Now follows John and Emma through a painful separation and vicious assaults. Undaunted by death threats, a critical injury, and coming face-to-face with gunfire, the couple continues to speak, write, and sing the truth—until their message finally gets heard and acted on.”

Through the eyes of this young couple, Graham shares his own ideological convictions and deep concerns about the current state of the country. The couple has to deal with conspiracy theories, alternative facts, social media,  vigilante groups, and systemic racism, all while espousing their own political viewpoint.

Interestingly, the story is told almost entirely through dialogue, which I discovered was a little difficult to wade through. I found myself getting lost in the dialogue in much the same way that I can get lost in too much background description.

Ultimately, You Speak for Me Now is a polemic disguised as a novel. While I agreed with most of John’s political aspirations and political viewpoints, the book ended up being too tedious for me. Specific readers, however, will probably be satisfied with Graham’s work.

I am intrigued with the author, Sandy Graham, and his journey to express his political viewpoints through his novels. Here is his website. Also an interview with reviewer, Norm Goldman. I was sent the book via his publicist. I admire Graham’s initiative and the enjoyment he gets from his writings.

Young Jane Young

By Gabrielle Zevin

Algonquin Books     2017

294 pages     Literary

A couple of weeks ago, I watched an interview with Monica Lewinski, and as I was watching, I kept thinking, “How can someone survive such a scandal, put on a brave face, and come back out into the light again?” Gabrielle Zevin tries to answer that question with her novel, Young Jane Young, which is the story of a young woman, Aviva Grossman, who suffers through a scandal, similar to the Lewinski/Clinton scandal, and survives by changing her name to Jane Young, reinventing herself, and moving half a country away—from Florida to Maine.

The brilliance of the novel is not just the story line, which moves along rapidly, but also the way it is presented. As my sister said, “We haven’t read this book before.” The book is divided into five sections, each with a woman telling the story from her perspective, at different times, and in different formats. Rachel, Aviva’s mother begins the story by telling most of the background to the scandal in a traditional manner. This is followed by Jane Young narrating her life as an event planner in small-town Maine, a single mother, raising her elementary school-age daughter, Ruby. Ruby’s section of the book consists of emails to a pen pal in Indonesia. At this point, the book really gets interesting as Ruby tells her story in email messages. Up until now, Ruby has no notion about who her father is or that her mother has completely reinvented herself. Ruby is very smart and  with the help of the Internet, and a few misplaced words that become clues, she decides that her father must be Congressman Levin, and she sets off for Florida to confront the congressman, using all the tools she has developed as her mother’s business assistant. The most surprising section of the book is narrated by Embeth, the wife of Congressman Levin. Told in the third person, Embeth is much more feisty and humorous than you would expect; her narration enhances the story dramatically. Finally, Aviva tells her own story in a “choose your own adventure” style. This is an utterly delightful way to describes the choices she made and why she made them.

The “choose your own adventure” narration describes to perfection the choices that people make as they embark on their lives, and how each choice—good and bad—plays a role in the next choice that has to be made. Told completely from the woman’s perspective, we totally understand how men generally get away with more crass behavior than women can. Embeth, for example, talks about how she had to choose exactly the right suit to wear when her husband is confronted by the press regarding his affair with Aviva, so she can stand beside him like the dutiful wife. Of course, the congressman is affected not at all. Additionally, we have become so impacted by technology, and Young Jane Young shows the impact that the Internet and social media plays in every aspect of our lives.

Initially, Young Jane Young reads like a typical woman’s fiction beach read, but as the story develops, we are invited to delve much deeper in our thinking about women’s roles and how life evolves. I am sure we will have a great discussion at book group tonight.

Zevin is the author of another favorite book of mine, The Storied Life of AJ Fickry. When Young Jane Young was released in 2017, NPR had an excellent interview with Gabrielle Zevin.

Recently my 7-year-old granddaughter told her parents that her teacher looked just like one of the “chicks” in the Avengers movies. Her dad questioned, “Chicks?” “Yes,” she responded. “I refuse to say the word, ‘woman’ because it has ‘man’ in it.” At some point they will have to discuss the use of the word, “chick,” but it looks like there’s another Ruby in the making.

From the Corner of the Oval

By Beck Dorey-Stein

Spiegel & Grau     2018

352 pages     Memoir

“This place. This place. This place could break your heart.” With this poignant reminder, Beck Dorey-Stein begins her memoir of the five years (2012-2016) she spent as a stenographer in President Barack Obama’s White House. Beck, short for Rebecca, got the job through a rather unimaginable way. She had been working as a tutor and teacher at the Sidwell School, where the Obama girls went to school, but in an attempt to move on, she answered a Craigslist ad for a stenographer at a Washington law firm. Surprising, she finds during the second interview that it isn’t a job at a law firm at all, but a job transcribing notes “from the corner of the oval” office. Over the ensuing years, she kept meticulous notes of this incredible experience, fully aware that she was part of history in the making.

At once extremely funny and gut-wrenching, Dorey-Stein describes the men she dated (and bedded), the places she was privileged to visit, and the great friends she made among the White House staff. Once she is confident in her position and her gift for writing, she shares her reflections with White House staffers, and they all encourage her to become an author.  While she is critical of the “ladder-climbing bobbleheads” that make up a great deal of the Washington young adults, she is clear-eyed about her own experiences among those bobbleheads.

I stopped counting the number of times that Jason, the scoundrel, came to Beck’s hotel room on Presidential trips. And I laughed aloud when she was afraid that Jay Carney thought her hair straightening machine was a vibrator or the time she forgot her underwear and mentioned, “Today I’ll be traveling commando with the commander in chief.” Throughout, you never forget that Dorey-Stein is a young woman who parties a lot, drinks too much, and is far too critical of herself and her failings.

I was already feeling tremendously nostalgic for a president of integrity, grace, and humor when I opened From The Corner of the Oval. This account of Obama’s second term from the eyes of his stenographer just made watching Omarosa expose details about the Trump White House all the more painful. Dorey-Stein witnessed some of the greatest moments in the Obama years. I almost cried when she told about watching the speech after the church shootings in Charleston when Obama broke into singing “Amazing Grace.” I was touched when on Dorey-Stein’s birthday, her friends got her a ride on the Presidential helicopter and the President told her about how he met Michelle. Ah—the humanity of the man, and the humility with which he faced his job.

The most interesting review came from Paul Begala who calls it “equal parts C-Span and ‘Sex and the City.’” Other former White House staffers have expressed their impressions of this memoir, but as Begala says, you just keep rooting for Beck to succeed, become a writer (which, of course, she has) and find love. This is not a book about Obama policy or Obama wins and losses, but it  charmingly relates the brief interactions Dorey-Stein had with a wonderful man. The reader ends up being sad that the presidency is currently a laughing stock and longing, like Dorey-Stein does, for those glory days when a beautiful family brought honor to the office of President of the United States.

Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Senator Al Franken

 Twelve 2017

416 pages     Nonfiction/Memoir/Humor

Audio Book

As we were planning our long road trip earlier this summer, I asked my husband what book he would like to listen to in the car. My regular readers know that my husband is a lifelong Republican (albeit currently a very disillusioned Republican). He suggested Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. Not surprisingly, that was the book I was thinking about, so I jumped at the chance to add it to our audio collection. Might I suggest that this is the perfect book for audio, because Franken reads it himself and is able to add all the nuances that make it both incredibly effective and incredibly ironic—irony being his comedic modus operandi.

These are his words to introduce the book: "Senator Al Franken has represented Minnesota in the United States Senate since 2009. Before entering politics, he was an award-winning comedy writer, author, and radio talk show host. He's been married to his wife, Franni, for 41 years — many of them happy. They have two children, Thomasin and Joe, and three grandchildren. Senator Franken graduated from Harvard College and received his doctorate in right-wing megalomania studies from Trump University." Admittedly, the book was written just as the election was decided, so his comments about Trump are only a small part of the narrative.

Primarily a memoir, Franken tells the story of how he got to where he currently is—a two-term Democrat Senator from Minnesota. His first career, of course, was as a comedy writer, for Saturday Night Live and the movies. When he decided to run for the Senate in his home state of Minnesota, he found that his constituents were not interested in having a comedian for a Senator. After all, they had already lived through a wrestler as a governor. So, in order to be elected, he had to work extra hard at being serious, all the while repressing joke after joke in his brain. He says that it was the hardest thing he ever had to do. His brain bleeds humor, such as the time he got in trouble for rolling his eyes at Mitch McConnell. His staff monitored his comments for the entire first term in office.

Now, well into his second term, he is able to let it all out. Al Franken, Giant of the Senate is funny but also very true. During his first campaign, his opponents mined material from his career to attack him. At first he was offended because the offensive remarks they were using had been his job, and he felt that to have to apologize for work he had done as a comedy writer was to sell out his career. Eventually, however, he was able to show Minnesotans that he was very serious and after an extremely close election and months of recounts, he was able to take his seat in the Senate.

Besides being funny, the book also shows Franken to be very serious about his work and extremely well-prepared. I was impressed by that, but I was also impressed by Franken's understanding of the value of humor in political discourse. He discusses which members of the Senate have a sense of humor, and which do not. He says, for example, that Lindsey Graham has the best sense of humor in the Senate and Ted Cruz has the least. He believes that a well-placed quip can ease tension in any room, and now that he has been in the Senate for 10 years, he can occasionally add a note of humor to a discussion. There is some talk of Franken running for President in 2020. Imagine that—someone who could make (and take) a joke.

My husband and I really enjoyed our time with Al Franken, and we heartily recommend the book. We have read several political books, including Being Nixon: A Man Divided and books about the Obamas, and Orrin Hatch. None of these had any laugh lines in them, so Al Franken, Giant of the Senate was refreshing in its candidness. The reviewer in the New York Times thinks that there is a lot of "stale recitations of liberal talking points" throughout the book, but that as political memoirs go, it's a "whole lot funnier" than most. 

You will find Franken's interview with Stephen Colbert about his book interesting.

Books for the Inauguration

My five-year-old granddaughter said to me the other day, "I watched Donald Trump on television when my mommy wasn't looking." Like she was watching porn or something!. This is an extremely sad state of affairs when a five-year-old isn't in awe of the president-elect or respectful of the office.

In this inauguration week, I want to highlight two new books I received from the publishers that speak to what I am feeling and what many in this country appear to be feeling. 

What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump's America

Edited by Dennis Johnson and Valarie Merians

Melville House   2017

224 pages     Nonfiction/Politics

Leading liberal and progressive voices speak to the chaos brought about by the election and now the inauguration of Donald Trump in the book of essays, What We Do Now. For example, in one essay,  David Cole, the legal counsel for the ACLU asserts that because Trump was elected, we must now hold him accountable. He says, "But if we now and for the next four years insist that he honor our most fundamental constitutional values, including equality, human dignity, fair process, privacy, and the rule of law, and if we organize and advocate in defense of these principles, he can and will be contained." 

There are essays by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Gloria Steinem, Dave Eggers, Cornell Brooks and many others, each essay discussing some aspect of American freedom and a blueprint for how to move forward. Progressivism, as we well know, has been dealt a huge blow, and progressives all over the country are still stunned two months after the election. These essays provide tremendous food for thought on how we can and must proceed.

  

My favorite is an essay by author George Saunders called The Braindead Megaphone, which comes from a book by the same name. (By the way, many of the pieces in the book have been published elsewhere.) He says,

"Then a guy walks in with a megaphone. He's not the smartest person at the party, or the most experienced, or the most articulate. But he's got that megaphone." And people listen.

Every essay is appropriate and thought provoking.

The Trump  Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living Through What You

Hoped Would Never Happen.

by Gene Stone

Day Street Books     2017

208 pages     Nonfiction/Politics

In The Trump Survival Guide, Gene Stone gives liberals and progressives a call to action for the next four years. He begins with an historical guide to the actions of ineffective presidents of the past, and offers concrete solutions to  help those of us in despair to find ways in which we can actively be watchdogs to hold Trump and his administration accountable for the decisions that will be made in the next four years.

Stone looks at important policies of the country through several lenses—the history of the policy, what President Obama did regarding the policy, what President Trump might do, and what the average citizen can do to support, and in some cases save,  the policies that are important to them. He discusses civil rights, the economy, education, women's rights, immigration, the environment and several others. The chapters that interested me the most personally were the chapters on education, immigration, and women's rights. I particularly liked all the contact information that individuals can use to become active advocates for the policies that are most important to them. 

As for me, I am going to continue to be actively involved in immigration reform and women's rights. My little five-year-old granddaughter and her mother are going with me to the rally in Lansing, Michigan on the day after the election. My daughter, step-daughter and teenage granddaughters will be in Washington. We cannot remain silent.

Domestic Affairs

by Bridget Siegel

Weinstein Books  2012

312 pages     Fiction

Olivia and Jacob are good friends who work on political campaigns, moving up the ladder of campaigns from state races to national races. Jacob has begun working for Landon Taylor's Democratic presidential run. He suggests to Taylor that he might consider Olivia for the position of fundraiser. When Taylor hires Olivia to be his head fundraiser, she becomes the youngest head fundraiser in history. Olivia is smart and pretty, and quickly becomes dedicated to the values Taylor appears to stand for, but soon, she blindly becomes dedicated to the personal charms of the charismatic Taylor. 

Told through the alternating experiences of Jacob and Olivia, the story moves through the beginning days of the campaign until just before the Iowa caucuses when the scene begins to unravel. Olivia is swept along with both the campaign and her love for Taylor, who shows himself again and again to be a cad. In the end, when he attempts for the umpteenth time to win her favor, Olivia looks at him honestly "wondering for the first time if she ever really did love him, or if she had just loved what he represented, what he pretended to believe." Facing up to her own personal dishonesty, she follows Jacob who has already gotten out of the campaign.

The question of Domestic Affairs is "Which political campaign is this book about?" The book's author, Bridget Siegel, worked on several political campaigns, including the John Edwards campaign. We have to assume that much of her experience and the resulting novel came from the Edwards campaign. One reviewer said: "It would be a better book if the events weren’t so close to what happened in the Edwards’ campaign, which ruined numerous lives in the real world. In the fictional world offered by the author, everyone moves on and nobody is hurt." And indeed, in the novel, Olivia and Jacob move on to the next campaign after their complete disillusionment with Landon Taylor. Will the next candidate disillusion them again, or are they older, wiser, and more realistic?

What Domestic Affairs successfully does is give a hard look at two aspects of politics that continue to baffle me: What motivates someone to choose politics as a life's work? and What is there in the personality of a candidate that makes him/her seek power? My husband's question would be: Does the personal life of a candidate matter if he/she can deliver the goods politically? I guess that we have seen this at work in the campaign of the formerly disgraced South Carolina governor, Mark Sanford. The electorate seems to think that he can deliver the goods despite his personal life. 

Most political novels are seen through the eyes of male protagonists. In Domestic Affairs, we see the campaign through the eyes of a woman. Siegel says that many of her experiences were used in the book, but her experiences were not unique. The events in the book were "a compilation of many campaign workers' struggles and surprises."

The review on Blog Critics: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-domestic-affairs-by-bridget/

Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class

By Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

New York, Simon and Schuster, 2010

340 pages (with index)     Nonfiction

 Winner-Take-All Politics written by political science professors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson is a history of how the United States got in the economic mess it is in right now—the rich having so much, the poor having nothing, and the middle class losing ground at every turn. It is a clear-eyed, non-partisan look at the deregulation, taxes, tax-cuts, political maneuvering, lobbying, and stupidity that allowed this to happen.

The authors say that “Who are those guys?” is the underlying question behind their book. In one sentence, they explain their premise:  The rich got richer and the middle class was abandoned “because of the relentless effectiveness of modern, efficient organizations operating in a much less modern and efficient political system.”

  They begin in the 1970s when the “unexpected liberalism of Nixonland turned into the unexpected conservatism of Carterland.”  Step by step, administration by administration they explain the challenges the country faced and how an increasingly efficient business machine and its lobbyists began to deregulate business in every way possible, from the way in which business exerted its power to the way that congress became increasingly respectful and beholden to business. The absolute epitome of this power was, of course, the Citizens United case that was decided by the Supreme Court in 2010. 

But there is more. Here are some of the things that I learned from this book and I have used these ideas frequently in political discussions since we read Winner Take All Politics:

• ·         The Republicans have a much more unified message than the Democrats do. The Democrats are all over the place. As Senator Al Franken says: “Their bumper sticker . . . it’s one word: ‘No.’ . . . Our bumper sticker has — it’s just way too many words. And it says, ‘Continued on next bumper ­sticker.’ ”

• ·         The Republicans co-opted the Christian conservative movement and joined it to the fiscal conservative movement in a very methodical way (some would say, disingenuous way), making the Christian conservatives believe that their social message was the Republican message.

• ·         Democrats began to lose their clout when the unions began to lose clout. The lower middle class people who once made up the Democratic Party turned increasingly to the Republican Party, mostly because of religion and race. This, of course, was exacerbated by the defection of the Southern Democrats to the Republican Party. And Lyndon Johnson knew that this was going to happen when he signed the Civil Rights legislation. He turned to an aide and said, “We just lost the South.”

• ·         “The economy has performed notably better under Democratic presidents than under Republican ones.” But the simple consistent message of tax cuts presented by the Republicans makes it appear that they perform better.

The biggest revelation of the book, as far as I was concerned personally, was the concept of the “super majority,” which, in case you haven’t been paying attention, is the need for 60 votes on almost every bill presented to the Senate. Shockingly, the 60 vote or “super majority” rule was never voted on; it just sort of got slid into place. This super majority has caused gridlock for the Senate and the country.

Although the authors present some analysis and final words after their political history lesson, the majority of the education happens within each chapter. My husband and I read with awe the political history of our adult lives and shook our heads in disbelief at all the things we sat on the sidelines and watched happen.

You need to know that we live in a divided household. I am a rabid Minnesota liberal, and my husband an old-school middle-of-the road Republican. Therein is the beauty of the book. Hacker and Pierson spread the blame equally among and between the parties. One reviewer called it... “the clearest explanation yet of the forces that converged over the past three decades or so to undermine the economic well-being of ordinary Americans.” So we both can answer the political question “Are you better off than you were before _____ was elected?” with a resounding NO!

We learned of this book from my Republican husband’s favorite liberal television show, Bill Moyers and Company. Here is the link to the video of that show’s segment on Winner Take All Politics: http://billmoyers.com/segment/jacob-hacker-paul-pierson-on-engineered-inequality/

A New York Times review of Winner Take All Politics: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/opinion/02herbert.html