In the summer of 2017 when all things are seen through the prism of Trump and a divided America hurls insults and snap judgments back and forth, here are three books worth revisiting that put things in perspective.
Bear with me a few minutes; there really is a connection, I promise.
Not once does Paul Theroux mention Donald Trump in Deep South, published in 2015 and based on the author’s multiple months-long road trips in 2013 and 2014, but it still reads like a prophecy. The novelist and global traveler takes the back roads to gun shows, dying towns, cheap motels, and country churches in Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina. Hardly anyone he talks to has ever heard of him — he’s “Mr. Thorax” — which is fine with him.
Theroux talks with Americans who have been left behind by globalization and untouched by philanthropy. How he gets strangers to open up to him, notebook in hand, is a marvel to anyone who has ever tried to do just that. Theroux is a phenomenal listener, observer, and thinker. Some of his sharpest comments are aimed at The Clinton Foundation, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fight poverty in the Third World while somehow ignoring Bill Clinton’s home state. No matter how many news stories you have seen since last November, if you read this deeply reported book you’ll have a better understanding of how and why Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost.
William Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War, published in 1979, describes his visits three decades after World War II to the islands where so many of his fellow Marines died, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. He died in 2004. Sadly, his reputation was tarnished this year when The American Spectator reported, accurately, that some of his personal combat stories were fiction — a timely warning in this day of “fake news” and an important sequel to the book.
But this is the paragraph that jumped out at me: “To fight World War II you had to have been tempered and strengthened in the 1930s Depression by a struggle for survival. And you had to know that your whole generation, unlike the Vietnam generation, was in this together, that no strings were being pulled for anybody; the four Roosevelt brothers were in uniform, and the sons of both FDR’s closest adviser and [the son of] one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate served in the Marine Corps as enlisted men and were killed in action. But devotion overarched all this.”
And this one about his fellow Raggedy Ass Marines, as he proudly calls them: “Without having the slightest idea of what combat would be, we wanted, in a phrase which sounds quaint today, to fight for our country. Subsequent generations have lost that blazing patriotism and speak of it, if at all, patronizingly. They cannot grasp how proud we were to be Americans.”
My third choice is Frank Deford, who died in May. He was arguably the best sports writer and commentator in America for 50 years, mostly with Sports Illustrated and NPR. The Best of Frank Deford: I’m Just Getting Started was published in 2000 when he was making the transition from print to broadcasting. He inspired generations of magazine, newspaper, broadcast journalists, and devout readers with his long stories about people who were both famous and famously hard to get along with. The list included Bob Knight, Bill Russell, Muhammad Ali, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jimmy Connors. Deford always pried something out of his subjects that you didn’t know.
A graduate of Princeton, Deford could be prickly himself. A female friend of mine who met him a couple of times when she was a columnist insisted that he was an aloof male chauvinist. But he found the humanity in protective people, and he made you read, listen, smile, and reconsider. Plus, you have to like a guy who described wrecks at the Indy 500 as “sheet time” and called blogging “the pole dancing of sports journalism.” If you’re going to be snarky, do it with style.
Paul Theroux, William Manchester, and Frank Deford. Not a Tweeter among them. Three prolific authors who rejected the easy life to get close to real people, listen to them, dig deeper, work harder, and share stories that can help us better understand these troubled times.
