I was prepared to be angry about Christopher Buckley’s latest book Losing Mum and Pup.  I have been a fan – idealized is probably more accurate – of his father’s since a very young age and worried about any attempt at sullying that reputation.  I was so sure a tell-all book about losing both of his parents within a year would be offensive.  Throw in Christo’s (the name his parents used for him) less than astute political judgment of late and I had all but pronounced him beyond the pale.

But I decided to read the book first.  And, despite the difficult nature of the subject, I am glad I did.

Not surprisingly, Losing Mum and Pup reveals that being the only son of two famous, larger-than-life personalities was not always easy.  As is frequently the case, Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley’s vices and virtues were both larger than life.  Difficult health issues added another layer of burden on their son in their later years.

I can’t say I always enjoyed reading about the ugly reality of the last days of Christopher’s parents (it is never easy to read about the frailties and foibles of those you idolize); people who, for me, lived a sort of Olympian existence glimpsed only through the pages of books and magazines.  But Christopher’s talent, and clear love for his parents, makes the book a poignant, humorous, and engaging read.

Evaluating a book like this centered, for me, on three questions: why, what, how?  Why write it?  What to include and what to leave out? How did it turn out (was it worth it)?

Many have been asking that first question.  Why write about it now? Why air the dirty laundry in public and disappoint so many?  Christopher answers all of these related questions with a simple answer: “because I am a writer; that’s what I do.”

Writers write.  Put aside the professional aspect (making a living, furthering a career, etc.) this is also how they process and come to terms with life.  Having written it, Christopher comes to understand that this is really what it was all about:

Writing it (I suspect) was intended to enable catharsis; now, as I reach the end, it seems to me that I may have written it out of a more basic need: as an excuse to spend more time with them before letting them go – if, indeed, one ever really lets them go.  So instead of a working-it-out exercise, perhaps this is just a black-and-white album of memories, in which the unfond memories can be leeched of bitterness and settle quietly and stingless like scattered autumn leaves on the soft forest floor.

That paragraph both gets to the heart of what the book is really about and showcases, in the last sentence, the younger Buckley’s very clear talent.

And that brings us to the “what.”  The challenge for Christopher was what to include and what to leave out.  Leave out anything controversial or negative and what is the interest?  Put in too much and it seems like a kiss-and-tell book attempting to profit off his parents fame while at the same time denigrating their reputation and memories.

There are some who probably still feel the later description is accurate.  But I don’t think that is fair.  The book is a glimpse into the lives of the Buckley family as seen through the prism of Christopher having lost both parents in the course of a year.

The excerpt in the New York Times Book Review made it seem like the book was simply a catalog of the horror of growing up with famous parents and the ugly reality of their last years.  But as Neil Freeman noted in his NR review, the book provides much greater context.

Christopher is trying to come to grips with his relationship with his parents; to find some catharsis.  As an honest, and talented, writer he simply had to deal with the struggles and challenges.  Otherwise it would have come off as fake to those that knew the Buckley’s and as just another hagiography to those who didn’t.

But as Christopher so eloquently explained in the Postlude quoted above, the result was not necessarily simply catharsis – getting it off his chest – but a softening of the edges – a “leeching of bitterness” – from the emotion packed memories.  And the reader feels the bitterness seeping away and the love and devotion coming through.  In the end, the later emotions are what matter.

So yes, the book describes some difficult moments in the later months of his parent’s lives.  His dad’s growing dependence on sleeping pills and other medication; or his habit of urinating out of a moving car; or his unwillingness to spend the required money on wine for his wife’s memorial service.

And it relates the difficult side of growing up the only son of these two towering figures.  WFB’s cruel dismissal of one of Christopher’s books: “This one didn’t work for me. Sorry.” His mom’s scathing, and totally inappropriate, verbal attack on her granddaughter’s best friend simply because she was related to a Kennedy.  The day his dad walked out on his college graduation leaving him to wander the campus alone for the day or his mom’s penchant for tall tales.

And more substantive difficult issues are touched on – if not resolved.  Christopher deals with his moving away from his faith and the kind of truce that he had to broker with his father; largely by not talking about it.  And in almost a one liner he notes that his mom seemingly had no connection whatsoever to religious faith despite his father’s famous piety.

But all of this is put in context – not that it excuses the behavior – by the nature of the couple.  In all fairness to most people’s parents, the Buckley’s were simply not your average family. And Christopher recognizes this, even if at time it is cold comfort, but more than that he embraces the great things about his parents even while recognizing their faults.

As a writer Christopher is in awe of his father’s writing abilities (both the quality and the production) and, despite the difficulties, this shared calling or craft formed a bond between the two. He is similarly in awe of his mother’s force of personality; her wit, style, and determination.  Christopher readily acknowledges that whatever his gifts of satire and humor they come from his mother.

This may sound trite, but Christopher clearly loved his parents dearly and they him.  This comes through in the writing and as a result the anger, or offense, one might have felt falls away (the political opinions offered elsewhere are another matter). Or at least it did for me.

And so we come to the last question: how did it turn out or was it worth it? In discussing the first two questions I have gone some way in answering the third, but let me just say that I think Christopher did pull it off.

This is not to say there are not problems.  The humor can sometimes seem forced or over-the-top (a sense of cracking jokes to avoid getting too caught up in the emotions). The “advice for aging boomers who will soon lose their parents” sections seem out of place and discordant (are people really reading to learn about pre-negotiating funeral costs?).  And those looking for more serious examination of Christopher’s relationship with his father, his faith, and his politics will be disappointed.

But for me, the book offered the same thing it offered its author: “an excuse to spend more time with them.”  It offered me a glimpse into the lives of people I have long admired.  Maybe it is the height of tabloid naiveté to say so, but while reading it I felt a little closer to my hero WFB and felt a little less animosity to his son.

And outside of this psychological connection there is the plan fact that Christopher is a talented writer who handles a difficult subject with humor, grace, and skill.  As many others have noted, his parents might not have approved of the revelations contained in this unique book but they are undoubtedly proud of the man their son has become.

Enter win a free copy of Losing Mum and Pup.

To read the review see below.

Simon Schama is a great scholar, a great writer, and a great historian. Among his many works, The Embarrassment of Riches is the finest history of the Dutch Golden Age in English; and Citizens is among the best surveys of the French Revolution in any language. He is that most rare and privileged creature, the celebrity-scholar, who has proven his mastery in multiple subjects — he teaches in two departments at Columbia University, and boasts an academic pedigree from both Cambridge and Oxford — and is therefore allowed free rein in any. For the most part, he sticks with what he knows: a History of Britain, the Power of Art. This is for the best, because when he does not, it shows. Nowhere does it show more clearly than in his latest book, The American Future, already available in the United Kingdom, and slated for a May 2009 release in the United States.

The American Future is a sort of ersatz companion book to a four-part documentary series by the same name that Schama is starring in for the BBC. As of this writing, it has only recently aired (and it will assuredly make its way to PBS in due time). The description offered by the BBC would be nice if applicable to the book: “Simon Schama travels through America to dig deep into the conflicts of its history as a way to understand the country’s contemporary political situation.” Perhaps the television series both digs deep and arrives at some understanding. In print, The American Future does neither. It is, in fact, the worst Schama book this reviewer has ever read.

This does not necessarily mean it is not worth reading. Simon Schama’s worst is better than most people’s best. Yet because he is such a sterling historian elsewhere, it is all the more disappointing to see him phone it in here. The structure of the book purports to examine the American past as a means of discerning its future, and he does this in ways that vary wildly from interesting to absurd.

Much of the book is taken up with a narrative history of the august and rightly respected Meigs family, who managed to participate in the whole sweep of American history, mostly with rifle in hand, from the colonial era to the present. (The most recent Meigs of note commanded NATO forces in Bosnia in 1998-1999.) Yet Schama’s implicit argument, that the Meigs family history is a reasonable metaphor for the American experience, falls flat. He attempts to transform Montgomery C. Meigs, the Union quartermaster-general in the Civil War, into an emblematic American figure of that era. It works in the most awkward way, inasmuch as it works best if you don’t know much about that war. If you do, you know that though that Meigs was a deeply interesting man, he was eclipsed by far more interesting men in a period suffused with them. Shelby Foote on several occasions stated that the two towering figures of that war were Nathan Bedford Forrest and William Tecumseh Sherman; and he makes a better case in a few sentences than Schama manages in an entire book.

Even as he strains — or doesn’t — to make a case for his chosen narrative set-pieces wrested from American history, the reader of The American Future is left with the troubling sense that Schama has perhaps not done his due diligence in sourcing and research. There are the odd, Edmund Morris-style digressions into first-person recollection that cannot possibly be anything but fiction: “Sonofabitch,” Schama has yet another Meigs think just before dying at the Battle of the Bulge, “if it was this cold then you think the mud would’ve frozen … Clean it out, get into Deutschland, finish them off, good guys win, bad guys, very bad guys, lose.” Did any soldier actually think this? It is perilously close to tinny Hollywood rhetoric — what a British expat professor thinks an American infantryman speaks like — and if Schama made it up, shame on him. And if he has documentary evidence that the fallen Meigs of World War Two expressed these thoughts, shame on him for presenting it as his own weird reconstruction.

The reader’s confidence in these episodes, strewn throughout the book, is further marred by the occasional factual error. “[T]he second president of the Texan Republic was a Tejano,” Schama writes, though depending on how you count it, Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar were not Tejanos of any sort. There never was a Tejano president of the Republic of Texas: Schama is probably referring to Lorenzo de Zavala, who was interim vice-president of the Republic during the Texas War of Independence. Or rather, one of Schama’s graduate students is probably referring to de Zavala. This is emblematic of the minimal attention the author appears to have given this work, which stands in such regrettable contrast to his earlier, justly famed efforts.

It should be acknowledged that there are some interesting ideas in The American Future. Schama highlights the contrast between the present-day American disavowal of nation building, and the explicitly nation-building purpose of the pre-Civil War American military. He does it in a ham-handed way, and obscures his point with a fondness for illustrative anecdote that illustrates very little, but it is there. Similarly, his treatment of the Cherokee removal of the 1830s (via another Meigs, of course) is moving and vivid. In these brief passages, The American Future shows us what it could have been: a moral argument about American history, or an exploration of contradictions in that history. Schama neglects both routes in favor of anecdote upon anecdote.

We are presumably to plow through these anecdotes as a means of arriving at what the BBC promises, “a way to understand the country’s contemporary political situation.” Nothing like this emerges. We go from a touching account of a colonial Meigs romance, to a dusty Texas chow hall, to Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, to a somewhat dubious recounting of the time the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan educated a young Simon Schama into the pageantry of American democracy. None of it is linear, and little of it is thematically coherent. Out of this great, wonderful mess of history, Schama tries to say, the American character emerges, and its contradictions are with us still. Well, yes: but Walt Whitman said it better, and briefer, and much earlier.

Lurking throughout The American Future is the specter of Barack Obama, not yet President-elect when the book was written. It is no surprise that Schama sees Obama as the culminating figure of all that history: the embodiment of what is good, true, and worthwhile about our country. No doubt he is, from the perspective of an expatriate Briton, celebrity academic, and longtime Manhattan resident. So be it: but the acknowledgment makes The American Future less an explanation of America, and more an explanation of what Simon Schama wishes America was.

The first thing that jumps out at you today when you consider Shelby Steele’s book on Barack Obama, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win,  is probably the failed nature of the subtitle. But bad marketing aside (and Steele has admitted that the subtitle wasn’t his work), the book isn’t really about presidential politics as much as it is race relations in America.  And as a result, it sheds a great deal more light on race and culture than on the current president.Sure, there are certainly insights to be gained about Barack Obama and even about how the presidential primaries, and general election, played out in the light of Obama’s race.  But mostly Obama is a perfect contemporary lens with which to discuss Steele’s thoughts and ideas about race. And they are still worthy of discussion and debate now that Obama is president. Those familiar with Steele’s work will be familiar with his ideas but this slim volume is a great introduction

I am going to oversimplify to a degree here so please read the book for a fuller explanation, but Steele basically argues that there are two types of African American figures in mainstream American culture or two distinct ways in which they relate to American mainstream society: the bargainer and the challenger.

First, the bargainer:

When bargainers in any walk of life seek success in the American mainstream, they make a very specific deal with whites (individuals and institutions): I will not use America’s horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me. In other words, bargainers grant whites the innocence and moral authority they need in return for their goodwill and generosity.

In contrast, the challenger:

When challengers reach for success and power in the American mainstream, they never give whites the benefit of the doubt. Quite the opposite, they use their moral authority as blacks to stigmatize whites as born racists. Challengers presume whites to be guilty of racism in the same way that bargainers presume them innocent-as a strategic manipulation. Challengers put all whites in the position of having to chase after their racial innocence. The challenger’s code: whites are incorrigibly racist until they do something to prove otherwise.

You might recognize such figures as Bill Cosby, Collin Powell, and Oprah Winfrey as classic bargainers and figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as challengers.

The most successful bargainers in American life often reach the status of what Steele calls the “iconic Negro”:

The iconic Negro is someone who dispels the sense of “otherness” between the races and replaces it with a feeling of warmth, human familiarity, and racial goodwill. In him or her we have the sense that good race relations are really very easy and natural, and that tension between the races is essentially superfluous.

And again Oprah is the classic example, a figure beloved by millions and one whose imprint can make or break a venture.

Clearly, Obama has taken on this mantle in the realm of politics. In fact, Oprah signified as much by traveling with him and stumping for him early in the Democratic primary. And clearly Obama acts as a symbol for a lot of folks not of specific policies but of a better racial future for America; a sense that we have risen above the ugliness of racism. In return for his making them feel better about themselves they feel a profound gratitude towards, and a connection to, him.

This has to be a great asset for Obama, right? Yes, but there is a wrinkle in this scenario (and hence the title and subtitle of the book). The black community is inherently suspicious of bargainers. If racial guilt is the only tool they have to make their way in mainstream society any movement to deny the pervasive role of racism weakens the community’s power. This explains the near constant grumbling about those popular African Americans who refuse to use their position to castigate whites about racism (see Tiger Woods or recently Bill Cosby).

Steele argues that this puts Obama in a difficult situation:

If, to please blacks, Obama does more challenging, he begins to lose his iconic status with whites, his ability to flatter them with trust. He loses white votes because whites don’t want a challenging Al Sharpton; they want the iconic Negro, the bargainer in whom they see their own innocence and the nation’s redemption. If, to please whites, Obama bargains more, trades more innocence to whites, he loses votes among blacks-a vital constituency in the Democratic party-who define blackness as challenging, as withholding innocence from whites.

This in fact played itself out early in the primary with questions about Obama being “black enough” and his early lack of widespread support among African Americans.  The conventional wisdom holds that it was Bill Clinton’s awkward racialism, and a recognition that Obama could actually win, that caused the African American community to rally behind Obama to such a overwhelming degree (for my thoughts on this see here).

But one interesting aspect of this is Obama’s adoption of liberal mindset trapped in nostalgia and the past.  His political views are really no different than any other urban leftist.  Rather than using his unique background or his popularity to forge a new way of looking at race and politics, he suports the liberal status quo on issue after issue.  Steele sees this tied up with race.  Obam:

[N]eeds to “be black.”  And this hunger—no matter how understandable  it may be—means that he is not in a position to  reject the political liberalism inherent in his  racial identity. For Obama, liberalism is blackness.

And it is this bargainer/challenger dynamic that is at the root of his, and our, problems.  It lock him into a moribund liberalism and keeps him from offering reforms he might otherwise support:

Barack Obama is bound to the antiresponsibility  political left because his political fate depends on  his ability to offer innocence to whites—this  despite the fact that he clearly seems to accept  the importance of individual responsibility in  social reform. For his own mother, apparently,  responsibility was a rigid creed. He says of her,  “The idea that my survival depended on luck  remained a heresy to her; she insisted on  assigning responsibility….” Yet he offers no  thinking on how to build incentives to  responsibility into actual social policy.

And it this in flexibility that makes him a “bound man” and may be his biggest weakness:

But in many ways his truest  problem—the reason he is bound—is exactly that  he is so utterly conventional. Barack Obama works  entirely within the current configuration of race  relations—the masks of bargaining and  challenging, the need in whites for racial  innocence. And he exploits that world to move  himself ahead, not to advance a new configuration  of race relations—or to end such configurations  altogether. He is neither a revolutionary nor even  a reformist. He is simply infatuated with the  possibilities of his own skin color within the world  as it is, not as it should or could be. His genius is to  know his currency within the status quo.

It will be interesting to see how these dynamics play out over the course of Obama’s time as president.  What happens as the economy worsens and politics remains ugly and polarized even after his election.  His becoming president is not going to change the racial dynamic in this country so what happens to all that good will?  And will African Americans continue to trust him to act in their interests even if that means not using race as a bargaining chip or if that means moving past old political perspectives and coalitions?  Only time will tell.

But as noted above, Steele’s work is about much more than just Barack Obama.  If you are interested in subject of race in this country and its interaction with politics and public policy you owe it to yourself to read this book.  Shelby Steele uses the fascinating role and history of Obama to offer a window into the thorny subject of race.  It is not an easy subject to think about and discuss – and Obama’s election hasn’t made it any easier no matter what some might say – but it is an important one.

A great many liberals love to lecture on the importance of having a “national conversation” about race.  I challenge you to disregard the condescension, and the inherant slant, of such an argument and instead use Steele’s work to begin that discussion.  If more people could come to understand these dynamics we might actually be able to have a healthy conversation on this difficult topic.