350-359: Mainly Military History and the Art of War

The whole point of this project was to read nonfiction in areas outside my natural interests, so I should have been happy when I got to the 350's. Definitely never read anything from this section before. Definitely never expect to again. So I kind of skated by, choosing a book that can be read out loud in a couple of hours, and at least I can now say I have read one book about military strategy.

Indeed, to hear some tell it, the ONLY book about military strategy. Or about strategy in any kind of adversarial situation. Forbes loves it--a lot. After all, as Mr. Wonderful from Shark Tank says,  "My attitude is business is war. You send out your soldiers every day in the form of your capital, and you want them to come home with prisoners. You want to salt the earth that your competitor is lurking on. You want to steal their market share. You want to destroy them and get their customers." Lifehacker.com loves it-- the enemy is that bad habit you are trying to break. Jessica Hagy turned it into charts (Forbes again!), seemingly applying every paragraph to a different peacetime challenge. My late pastor loved it, applying it to spiritual warfare against the world, the flesh and the devil. Even librarians love it! 

Well. I'm sorry, but for me it's simply a book about military strategy, specifically about how to overrun some other guy's territory and force him out of it, and I think this kind of thing:

Jessica Hagy for Forbes.com

is a stretch. But if you want to read this book devotionally, meditating on all the possible applications of each phrase to your daily life, knock yourself out. You'll be in good company.

340-349: Law. Out of Order, by Sandra Day O'Connor

There's real estate law and tax law and criminal law. There's the Constitution and courts, from the one downtown to that one in the marble hall in Washington DC. There are defense attorneys and prosecuting attorneys and defendants and convicts and prisons. And they are all found right here, in 340-349. I could have read any number of books about sensational trials or notorious attorneys, and, sadly, there was almost a whole shelf just for people who were convicted but later discovered to be innocent.

I brought home a book about the constitution called Me the People: One Man's Selfless Quest to Rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America by Kevin Bleyer, but it was very snarky and silly, so I didn't read it. I also brought home a book surveying cases that test the relationship between church and state, Holy Hullabaloos, by Jay Wexler, but it was also weirdly snarky, and in these troubled times, I didn't think I needed to be *more* cynical about our federal government. 


But Jay Wexler is not just a joke cracker-- he's also a number cruncher who, apparently, at one point combed through transcripts of Supreme Court hearings counting the incidents of Justices getting laughs (Scalia won). This factoid and a reference to it at Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing find their way into the book I actually did finish, Sandra Day O'Connor's Out of Order. The link will take you to a review so accurate that I will not repeat all the criticisms contained therein. I can only say in defense of this book that I did not read it as such. I got the audio, read by O'Connor herself. She is from Texas, and her reading voice reminds me very much of that of the highly intelligent, pioneering, professional women in my family, so it was very pleasant to let her tell me random stories while I drove to work. I do not think I could have finished this book on paper! 

However, I'm glad I did get through it, because it certainly was interesting to get some perspective on the history of the Court. The main thing I learned is that the role of the Supreme Court has really changed over the years, and that a few Justices have been pretty obviously incompetent-- highly partisan, possibly even corrupt-- and yet, the Republic has survived some kind of way. There is hope for us yet!

A Cheerful Take on Economics: How We Got to Now, by Steven Johnson

As Jerome K. Jerome said, "I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours." I concur and heartily recommend Steven Johnson's book based on the PBS show of the same name. How We Got to Now is an opportunity for you to watch other people work, with no obligation whatsoever to do anything yourself. After all, air conditioning and microscopes and the War on Poverty and sewers have all been invented already!

It was truly an unmitigated pleasure to listen to Johnson trace the development of, for example, the technology of glass from its accidental creation in the deserts of North Africa to the experiments involving crossbows that resulted in fiber optics. The ingenuity displayed, the hardships suffered, the sleepless nights and fortunes won and lost that enabled us to read small print and live in Arizona and not die of childbed fever and associate iced tea and lemonade with the summer even though there is no naturally occurring ice at that time... all this and more fits into one slim volume, seven CDs, or 6 episodes on PBS, and is a great relief from these anxious times.

330-339: Economics

Economics... famously called "The Dismal Science." Turns out it includes not only boring but important works by Alan Greenspan, but also lively personal finance authors like Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman.

And very entertaining books about human motivation, probably the most famous of which is Freakonomics. This book became a cultural nine days' wonder and the title of a website, blog, podcast and overall cash cow for its authors. They have names --Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner-- but they are really more of a rock duo like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. They eventually issued a book/audio "Greatest Hits" compilation from their blog, meaning that I can catch up with their latest thinking while driving. And did I mention they are VERY entertaining? After all, the book is called When to Rob a Bank.

Speaking of entertaining and audiobooks, memoirs and bios are also available in this section. Disrupted, by Dan Lyons, is sort of the anti-How Starbucks Saved My Life, by Michael Gates Gill. Older white-collar white guy gets the boot, ends up at an entry-level job surrounded by people younger than his children, has some kind of epiphany. Only where Gill's epiphany was that money isn't everything and young people work hard, Lyons' seems to be that startups are ridiculous and so are the young people who work at them. He gets 50 pages or one disc, and if he's too mean-spirited, I'm going to give him the boot as well.


Second-best to the stunt memoir is the sensational biography, and American Heiress, by Jeffrey Toobin, fits that bill. If you are one of Lyons' or Hill's young co-workers, you may not recognize the name "Patty Hearst," but us old folks can never forget that enigmatic photo.  

Patty Hearst

Hearst was the disconnected 19-year old daughter of a newspaper magnate when she was snatched from her apartment by a group of about 6 people calling themselves "the Symbionese Liberation Army." She accompanied them on some bank robberies and eventually released this picture and a statement to the effect that it was her choice to join the group and that she believed in their goals (whatever they were). She changed her name to Tania. She went on the run, but eventually was captured by the FBI (I guess she should have read the Freakonomics book and timed her exploits better). She was tried and convicted, but her sentence was commuted by Carter, and she was pardoned by Clinton. If you're confused by now, you are in good company-- as this story unfolded on the national news, no one could figure out what in the world was going on! 

And who said economics was boring?

Advocacy 101: Citizens in Action, by Stephanie Vance

The first legislator I ever met with was a United States Congressman. We had expected him to be friendly to our cause, but the meeting was not going well. He seemed to be impatient with my teammate's attempts to remind him of their previous connections through a mutual friend. He had questions about our seemingly innocuous bill--questions we had not anticipated and could not answer. He was offended that we were not aware of his previous efforts on the same issue. And, if I remember correctly, the bill was not even up for a vote at that time, so he couldn't vote for it as we asked.

And then I handed him a stack of postcards signed by members of our advocacy group-- 50 or 60 sort of virtual attendees of our meeting. Surely that sheer volume of interest would convince him to support our bill when it did come to the floor! But as we prepared to leave, he said something that made my heart sink:

"I look forward to reading these."

Why was that the most ominous sentence of the whole meeting? Because I knew, and he was about to find out, that every single one of those postcards was identical except for the name and address on one side. There was nothing to read-- just the prefabricated message of a group that had, in the process of trying to make it easy for us, actually made our task almost impossible.

Stephanie Vance bills herself as the Advocacy Guru. Her central message is that elected officials run on constituent service. They want to know what we want from them! And I myself have seen that persistent, personal, relevant communication, with clear "asks" and consistent follow-up, can change the direction of individual legislators and create unstoppable momentum on whole issues. But that first postcard campaign and in-district meeting certainly had none of those components. We were asking the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong thing in the wrong way!

The first step is to make sure we are reaching out to the right branch and level of government at the right time. Do we want a local ordinance, a state law, a Federal law, a favorable judicial ruling, a zoning variance, a veto from the Governor or President, or what? Once we've determined that we are contacting the right person, we still should pay attention to the strategic moments in a piece of legislation. It's not very helpful to contact our lawmakers asking them to vote for a bill that hasn't been introduced yet, or asking the President to veto a bill that hasn't even passed.

Then we must know what we want. The Bible tells us that "we have not because we ask not," and indeed, if we just contact our legislators with a message for or against an issue without a specific action point, we can hardly blame them for doing nothing. After all, nothing was what we asked for!

According to Vance, effective lobbying is NOT, surprisingly, driven by facts and logic. Legislators get inundated with facts every day, and, as we have all been learning on social media during this nightmare election of 2016, facts can be arranged and edited to tell any story. Anecdotal evidence has to frame --or maybe even replace-- whatever facts or statistics we want to present. If this makes our legislators sound like shallow thinkers, consider that many studies show this is actually how all humans are wired to think. So, contrary to what so many "Action Alerts" have led us to believe, our best bet is not to inundate our lawmakers with facts and figures about why they should vote our way, but to tell a story about how we constituents have been personally affected. And if we can connect our stories to our lawmakers' stories, so much the better.

Icing that cake would require us to actually know something about our lawmakers, though. Even when they belong  to the opposing party, they are, after all, human beings. They probably have families. They may have pets. They may have professional backgrounds in a field that pertains to our concerns. They are originally from some specific part of the state. They come to this party with areas of interest and expertise, and if we understand what those are, we can better help them understand our interests!

More shocking still, Congressional staffers are also actual human beings and not androids! Time and again Vance encourages us not to underestimate the value and power of a legislator's staff. They are accessible, they certainly have their employer's ear, and they may even be members of our own community. Many constituents tend to treat them like obstacles to the ultimate goal, but if the goal is to win the legislator's vote, they might actually be the most effective path to success.

We should also do these poor public servants the courtesy of knowing where they stand on our issue; after all, if the legislator wrote the bill, he doesn't really need five paragraphs encouraging him to vote for it. If the President has already vowed to veto the bill if it passes, our message should reflect that! In the age of search engines, there's really no reason not to have this information.

The most challenging part of the book for me was the discussion of follow-up. As a Shy Person, I am the opposite of a marketer. Just to ask strangers for something is painful; to actually follow up and see if they did it is almost unthinkable. Yet, like the children we told to clean their rooms, legislators juggling many priorities probably won't do what we expect but only what we inspect. So if I am going to drop off a handful of postcards --each one containing a different, personal, relevant message, of course-- I should put a note in my calendar to follow up with a quick phone call in a month or so.

The purpose of the legislative branch, as Vance points out, is actually not to just churn out legislation. It's not like a fudge factory! It is called a deliberative body for a reason-- its purpose is to "deliberate," that is, discuss and weigh the pros and cons of various courses of action. For that reason, the "gridlock" we all like to complain about is not a bug, it's a feature.

Oh, and that Federal bill we were advocating for? It never did pass, but with the help of some of the strategies outlined above, including a lot of high-quality letter campaigns, we have passed numerous bills at the state level that have been equally effective at addressing our concerns. Smart, persistent, patient lobbying can move the ship of state in the direction we desire.

PS Just ran into this series of interviews with staffers that really proves the points above!

320-329: Political Science

Now we are going to dig through the fuzzy studies one by one, starting with PoliSci. (PS 310-319 is supposed to be "general statistics," but I couldn't find any books in this category. Fortunately.) Here I can read Arthur Miller On Politics and the Art of Acting, which, as it happens, is available almost in full as the 2001 NEH Jefferson Lecture, presented in March of that year. The "recent" election he is analyzing is 2000's Bush/Gore contest, which, some of us may remember, seemed at the time to be the most ridiculous Presidential election in history, with its dynastic candidates and its hanging chads... sigh. The election of 2016 makes 2000 look like a model of civility and rationality.  And that date, March 2001, reminds us that even though a presidential election plays like a TV show, the consequences can be very real. If we had known in November of 2000 what was coming in September of 2001, how many of us would have voted differently!

Ugh, maybe I'd rather read about a specific issue, like immigration, that I can actually do something about. Let Them In, by Jason Riley, dates from 2008, when the issue was simmering but not boiling. Reviewers on the right and the left found a lot to like in this defense of increased legal immigration, and apparently Riley addresses a lot of the concerns that people are now heatedly debating. Even though, or because, he is a conservative, he presents research to dismiss fears about job loss, wage depression, increased crime, and difficulties assimilating.

Speaking of doing something, there's a book for that, too: Citizens in Action, by Stephanie Vance. She offers this brief (111 pages), breezy "guide to influencing government" that, so far, really has me believing that I can do it. This checklist serves as a great outline of the book. If you understand and implement the checklist, you will be in the 1%... the 1% of people who effectively use their privilege of citizenship to affect the course of our country! Extra credit: how cool is this directory to the federal government, so you can FIND the person you want to lobby??!

I have a lot to say about advocacy in general and my role in particular, so stay tuned!

300-309: The Varieties of Human Experience

The 300s, "Sociology," is where we find the familiar "fuzzy studies," or soft sciences: political science, economics, education, and, sadly that this is necessary, military science. The task of 300-309 is to introduce these topics, and it's a lot to cram into 10 little digits.

306, just to pick a random example, ricochets from pop culture to regional culture to the culture wars to consumerism to work to slavery to retirement to the media to... well, you get the idea. I picked the embarrassingly titled Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs because its author, Chuck Klosterman, is having a moment right now. Klosterman is a very funny guy: "breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep." But ultimately, a little of him and his excessively abrasive language was enough for me.

I also selected The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton, because, oh my gosh, that title! I got it on audio, because I thought it would be superawesome to be driving to work listening to some kind of pep talk about how it's worth it. But no. As it turned out, it seemed to be about different people's jobs, just, you know, what's involved in catching a tuna or making a biscuit. Which could also be interesting in its own way, but proved(possibly due to the performer rather than the author) to be dangerously soporific. After I arrived at my destination in an audiobook-induced stupor not once but twice, I realized public safety demanded I give up on this one.

James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son was in 305, but, Langston Hughes' recommendation notwithstanding, I just couldn't. Something about the writing style that I just couldn't get through. I could see myself having better luck with Rich Benjamin's Searching for Whitopia, a sort of Black Like Me with an actual person of color, except that it was just so sad to realize that I myself might be part of the problem. See, my dream retirement home is in Ocean City New Jersey. The beaches... the jolly families... the beautiful homes and gardens... the strong church heritage and influence on the city's vibe... and the 92% white population. 92%! Maybe I will stay landlocked...

As noted last time, 290-299 included books about what Muslims believe, but 305 offered me at least one book about what it's like to be a Muslim: Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, by Zarqa Nawaz. How could I pass up that title? And when I found out she was the creator of "Little Mosque on the Prairie," that charming sitcom about Muslims in Saskatchewan, I was all in. The book is full of incidents that illuminate as they entertain... for example, in the process of telling us about how she self-arranged her marriage, I have learned that a Muslim can be an atheist and that if you believe the Qu'ran but not the Hadith, that's a dealbreaker. This one, I'll see through to the end.