September 2019 Acquisitions

Books:
Ed Brubaker et al, Batman: Bruce Wayne--Fugitive, Vol. 2, 2003.
Walter Carter, The Epiphone Guitar Book, 2012.
Max Allan Collins, Quarry's War, 2018.
Joshua Dysart, Goodnight Paradise, 2018.
Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, 2018.
Antonio Mendez et al, The Moscow Rules, 2019.
Richard B. Rice et al, The Elusive Eden: A New History of California, Fifth Edition, 2020.

Movies:
All Together Now, 2008.
The Hero, 1966.
The Nightmare Before Christmas, 1993.

Music:
Can, Monster Movie, 1969.
Van Morrison, Bang Masters, 1991.
Nada Surf, High/Low, 1996.
Yola, Walk Through Fire, 2019.
Various, Super Hits of the '70s: Have a Nice Day Sampler, 1990.
Various, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Original Soundtrack, 1996.

Gonna Make Your Life So Sweet

"Kim says he was 'really, really blown away' when it was announced as the No. 1 song of 1969. 'The year of Woodstock, the year that we landed on the moon, the year everyone was talking about Charles Manson and The Beatles were breaking up and they had that concert on the roof,' he says. 'There was this song that just showed up.'"

Ashley Westerman at NPR's Morning Edition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar."

"Can Anyone Imagine FDR Uttering Such Words?"

"If in the 1980s, as Alan Ehrenhalt wrote, Democrats 'lost the agenda to President Reagan just as surely as Republicans lost it to Roosevelt in the 1930s,' part of the reason had to with their backing off of their vision of governance and public spending as positive goods. It was not just conservatives such as Reagan, but high-profile Democrats who, as Pat Buchanan wrote in 1983, maintained 'that the ideas of the New Deal do not apply to the 1980s.' In foreswearing the relevance of the New Deal tradition, Democrats made a fatal error. Not only did they underestimate the ways in which that tradition remained relevant. Just as importantly, they conceded that what Muskie called 'common sense criticism of government' meant suspicion of the basic functions of the state. The Democrats had good reason to examine and critique the liberal tradition, which brought them defeat in 1968 and 1972."

Lawrence B. Glickman at Boston Review criticizes 1970s Democrats who weakened "their connection to government as an enabler of liberty [and] helped normalize conservative political rhetoric."

"Cohn's Impression on Trump Was Indelible"

"For Trump, litigation became a way of life, a tool to get attention, to bring his enemies to book, and to achieve strategic advantage. The flaw in the American system is that, if you are willing to spend the money, scorched-earth tactics often work. In short, he abused the process of a lawsuit, making it into something it was never intended to be—a way to win out against whomever he considered to be his adversary."

Slate runs an excerpt from James D. Zirin's Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits.

And Nathan Taylor Pemberton at The Baffler watches the Where's My Roy Cohn? documentary.

"Bill's a Bully"

"Buccola is less interested in who won the debate (according to the audience, Baldwin trounced Buckley by a three-to-one margin) than in what the event signified politically and culturally. Each man had 'reached the height of their prominence at nearly the same moment,' Buccola says, and both had a major impact shaping popular attitudes about the civil rights movement. By studying how the two men got to share a stage, we can learn something more profound about the struggle for black equality and the origins of the modern conservative movement—two legacies that remain with us today."

Robert L. Tsai at Boston Review reviews Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley, Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America.

"What Would It Sound Like If Someone Proposed the Electoral College for the First Time Today?"

"Two hundred years ago, the Founding Fathers made a mistake. They decided that the president of the United States should be elected by a popular vote held among the entire country's citizens. The results of this flawed system speak for themselves. Under the popular vote, Americans have endured two centuries of elections where the presidential candidate who receives the most votes is also the winner.
"This is simply too much democracy."

Matt Ford at The New Republic makes "The Case Against the Popular Vote."

"The Unwritten Rules Aren't Cutting It Anymore"

"For the company's founders and the residents of New England, the text of the corporate charter served a dual purpose: as a consensual source of sovereign authority that safeguarded them from English rule and as a constitution of their civil government. The charter gave the corporation 'full and Absolute power and Authoritie to correct, punishe, pardon, governe, and rule' all New England residents, granted the authority to pass 'Lawes and Ordinances,' and bestowed upon British residents in the colonies 'all liberties and immunities of free and naturall Subjects … as if they and everie of them were borne within the Realme of England.' As the colonists faced greater threats of dissolution from the crown, the 'Charter Constitution' gained increasing importance in the social and political culture of New England. And although the Massachusetts Bay Company charter was unique in its independence from the crown, by the 1760s, almost all the colonies were governed by 'charter governments.' Bowie shows that these charters provided the templates for America's first written state constitutions, and the modern U.S. Constitution as it exists today."

Danny Li at Slate argues that Britain needs a written constitution.

Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of

"What they all understand—and what liberals like Beauchamp elide—is that this is really about power. They believe that the conservative movement can no longer achieve its ends within a liberal framework. Rather than abandoning these goals, or engaging in the hard work of democracy to persuade others to accept them, they have opted to quit that framework entirely. This sense of persecution may seem bizarre given that social conservatives currently control the White House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. But they seem to implicitly understand that they now owe their power to illiberal flaws in the system rather than any sort of genuine democratic mandate."

Matt Ford at The New Republic explores "the 'anti-liberal moment.'"

"Could Warn Against the Hubris of the Present"

"If a Gen Xer doesn't win in 2020, there will be another chance in 2024. But by that time the field may be crowded with Millennials—born from 1981 to 1996—whose ranks include Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and rising Republican stars such as Representatives Dan Crenshaw and Matt Gaetz. Sandwiched between two larger and more politically consequential generations—Boomers and Millennials—Generation X may never produce a president at all."

In The Atlantic, Peter Beinart laments the fate of middle-aged politicians.

"It Concerns Us All"

"The main exhibition took eight years to put together. The American historian Timothy Snyder called the project a 'civilisational achievement' and 'perhaps the most ambitious museum devoted to the second world war in any country'.
"But the populists who had come to power in Poland's elections two years earlier found this unbearable, preferring to promote a version of events that would airbrush real history and glorify the nation instead."

Estera Flieger at The Guardian criticizes changes at Poland's Gdańsk Museum of the Second World War.

"The Room Where It Happens"

"One of the most painful chapters of the book concerns a tragic incident in which a car in Power's motorcade struck and killed a young boy in Cameroon while she was on a tour to highlight the atrocities of Boko Haram. As a metaphor, the incident is almost sickeningly apt: the U.S. secure in its military might and moral righteousness, taking innocent lives as collateral damage in its wake. 'Even when we try to do right, we invariably end up making situations worse,' she reflects at a low point following the accident."

Joshua Keating at Slate reviews Samantha Power's The Education of an Idealist.

"It Might Be the Best General-Election Appeal Any of the Candidates Has Devised Yet"

"Democrats have been racing haphazardly to the left, with Warren often in the lead. Some of their ideas, like moving everybody off employer-sponsored insurance and onto a public plan, are toxic to general-election voters. But some ideas have appeal to the left and to swing voters. This is one of them."

Jonathan Chait at New York praises Elizabeth Warren's plan to increase Social Security benefits.

"A Sonic Blueprint That Permeated Everything From Alt-Rock to Mainstream Pop"

"By the time the Cars formed, he had been around the block: already in his mid-30s and a father of four, he'd spent the early 70s in a Crosby Stills and Nash-esque acoustic trio called Milkwood. He loved straightforward pop music, but he loved what he called 'the left side of the music brain', too: 'My taste was to always go for that mix, even back in the 60s,' he said. 'I loved the Velvet Underground and the Carpenters'."

Alexis Petridis at The Guardian writes an appreciation for Ric Ocasek and the Cars.

As does Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone.

"We Need Some Help From You, Now"

"Towards the end of a decade marked by chaotic cultural shifts, mounting tensions, and mass violence, Scooby Doo insists that there is always an underlying solution that may be achieved through calm investigation. They are all automatically united, against their archetypal differences, in pursuit of sanity and normalcy, debunking the extreme situations that have disturbed local everyday life, through patience and pragmatism. In this way, Scooby Doo suggests to the youth of America an alternative path for resistance against a greedy grown-up world, one achieved by outsmarting the enemy, rather than either fighting it or protesting it."

Olivia Rutigliano at CrimeReads marks fifty years of Scooby-Doo.

"The Sad Genius of American Photography"

"Yet we do remember–and revere–what he saw and what he achieved with The Americans. Through his deep looking, he taught us how to see the world anew, without sentiment or illusion. His alert and unforgiving gaze showed many Americans what was right under their noses yet invisible to them. It was, in retrospect, a wake-up call but, more than that, a beautiful, if bleakly poetic, vision of modern America, as evocative and unrelenting in its way as any novel or poem by Philip Roth or Saul Bellow."

Sean O'Hagan at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Robert Frank.

"A Knack for Summarizing Complex Ideas in a Few Pithy Words"

"'What are public intellectuals supposed to do? We're not supposed to be cheerleaders. We're supposed to be prodding those with power to think through what they're doing that will affect us all.'"

At the Portland Press Herald, Matt Schudel writes an obituary for Leslie Gelb.

"It Isn't a Failing Economy That's Putting Residents Out on the Streets, Though. It's a Booming One"

"It's unusual for the head of one committee to single-handedly spike a piece of legislation, especially if it's the top priority of another committee head in your own party. To Lane and others, Portantino's decision signified something more than Democrat-on-Democrat violence. It was emblematic of a kind of generational warfare that pits the 'younger and more diverse population in California,' says Lane, 'who have lots of student debt, are trying to rent an apartment, need to be in an urban environment near jobs, and are unable to find housing' against 'an older generation of boomers who own their homes and resist multifamily housing, upzoning, and . . . are still a powerful force' in California politics."

Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone asks, "Why Can't California Solve Its Housing Crisis?"