Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James (Knopf, 415 pages).

If you have the money and the power, you can command the best. That’s exactly what billionaire industrialist Sir Alred Treeves does when his adopted son Ronald dies in an apparent accident in the sand cliffs near the theological college he’s attending on the east coast of England. 

The best is Commander Adam Dalgliesh, the Scotland Yard officer who figures so prominently in many of James’s novels.

The Home Office sends Dalgliesh to the tiny—there are only 20 students or “ordinands” as they are called in theological parlance—college near Lowestoft in East Anglia. It’s a sentimental journey for the Jaguar-driving, poetry-writing Dalgliesh: He spent three summers at St. Anselm’s as a teen when his pastor father exchanged parishes with an inner-city clergyman and sent young Adam to the coastal school.

Once Dalgliesh arrives at St. Anselm’s, the action picks up. He’s like another fictional detective, Jessica Fletcher of TV’s “Murder, She Wrote” in that crimes, especially murders, seem to follow both of them. 

St. Anselm’s is a traditional Church of England institution: “Smells and Bells” is how one of the novel’s characters describes the High Church atmosphere of incense and bell ringing. For a small school, threatened with closure, it’s packed to the rafters with people who are often very hostile toward each other.

This hostility breaks through to the surface with the brutal murder of the controversial archdeacon who wants to close St. Anselm’s, leading Dalgliesh to bring in two of his talented subordinates from the Yard, Piers Tarrant and Kate Miskin, officers familiar to readers of James’s novels.

As in many detective novels, there are many strange coincidences in Death in Holy Orders, far too many for real life. But it’s vintage P.D. James, making it top-rank mystery fiction in the manner of Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith.

Time to be in Earnest by P.D. James (Knopf, 269 pages).

Time to be in Earnest is an autobiographical diary of the author’s 77^th year, 1997-98. It was published in England in 1999 and in the States last year and is a wonderful look at Baroness James of Holland Park, her House of Lords title granted by the Queen in 1991.

It’s too bad we former colonials can’t make knights and ladies out of our writers: I can visualize Lord Philip Roth of Newark, Lady Joyce Carol Oates of Lockport or Baron Ed McBain of Isola!

Subtitled “A Fragment of Autobiography,” Time to be in Earnest gets its title from a quotation by Samuel Johnson: “At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.”

Phyllis Dorothy James, born in 1920, is part of Britain’s “Greatest generation.” She frankly discusses her husband’s descent in madness and touches on her career in the British civil service.

Her stint as a civil servant in the Home Office, the agency in charge of Britain’s centralized police system, led her to become a crime novelist in her late 30s with Cover Her Face, the first of her 15 novels (counting Death in Holy Orders). From the start, she’s been a widely read author and her popularity is deserved. Her novels are literate in the best traditions of British crime fiction.

Roy Marsden brought Adam Dalgliesh to the small screen in the British TV adaptation of Death of an Expert Witness in 1983 and to those of us who are fans of mystery, he’s as much Dalgliesh as John Thaw is Inspector Morse.

James’s comments on the death of Princess Diana in August 1997 are among the best I’ve seen on the subject. If she hadn’t become one of England’s best novelists, she would have made a wonderful newspaper columnist.

If you’re a fan of P.D. James, Time to be in Earnest is must reading. And, you’ll enjoy it immensely.

John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 389 pages).

It’s entirely fitting that this novel about media hype should have garnered so much of its own hype.

 No less a literary giant than John Updike wrote about it in the May 7 New Yorker and  John Henry Days has been reviewed in Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal and in all the major book reviews. This is a great deal of attention for a novel covering a three-day 1996 festival—a real one—in Summers County, West Virginia.

The novel’s central figure is black free-lance writer J. Sutter, part of a traveling band of journalists who cover public relations media events all across the nation. Media outlets—newspapers, magazines, Internet sites—using free-lancers easily skirt ethical considerations about free travel, food and lodging—enabling them to look more ethical than they are.

Manhattan public relations expert Lucien Joyce not only is handling the event, he’s the keeper of the legendary industry-wide “list” of free-lance junketeers who are invited to media events.

The efforts of at least one member of the five-man Summers County junket crew to gain access to this list provides a comic interlude to this essentially comic novel.

Sutter—we never learn what the “J” stands for—is going for the junket record, held by the legendary Bobby Figgis, who mysteriously disappeared after nine months of nonstop junketeering. He’s the John Henry of freeloaders and Sutter is in the third month of his own quest.

Whitehead and his characters are equal opportunity offenders, so Hinton and Talcott don’t come off as badly as I anticipated. There’s the usual apprehension about small town southern attitudes on the part of the outsiders, but it’s not much more than that shown in David Mamet’s most recent movie, “State and Main,” about the adventures of a film crew in a small New England town.

Hinton and Talcott are vividly drawn, with just enough fictional changes to prompt locals to guess, for instance, what’s the real name of the popular riverside restaurant called Herb’s in the novel.

The festival, sponsored in part by the United States Postal Service to mark the issuance of the 32-cent John Henry stamp, is marred by a shooting incident with fatalities, a form of going “postal” that’s not what most readers will expect.

Mixing real and fictional characters in the manner of many recent novels, including Kurt Andersen’s 1999 Turn of the Century, John Henry Days will appeal to readers who like E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime), Bernard Malamud (The Natural) as well as works by Updike, Don DeLillo (Underworld) and Thomas Mallon (Aurora 7 and Dewey Defeats Truman).

Here’s Whitehead’s depiction of Sutter’s first glimpse of Hinton:

 “Hinton is dropped down in the middle of a valley, a marble cupped by monstrous green hands. The car is separated from the town by the murky gray river that carved the valley. J. sees the low bridge that would have taken them into Hinton if they had turned left. A flat section of the town groups along the opposite bank, he spies a shopping center and above it the buildings inch up the mountain wall, thinning, a scattering of two- and three-story buildings that are probably the original town: old and distinguished structures.”

Whitehead, a 31-year-old African-American Harvard graduate who gained his journalism experience on The Village Voice, enjoyed critical acclaim for his 1999 The Intuitionist, is a talented writer with a great future. His special way of portraying the black experience in America expertly transcends race.

Torpedo Junction by Homer H. Hickam Jr. (Naval Institute Press, 367 pages).

Question: Homer Hickam’s first book was the best-selling “Rocket Boys,” made into the movie “October Sky” and recounting the saga of high schoolers experimenting with rockets in a McDowell County, W.Va. coal town in the late 1950s.

Answer: Wrong! His first book was published in 1989 by the Annapolis, Md.-based Naval Institute Press, which also published Tom Clancy’s first novel The Hunt for Red October.

“Torpedo Junction” is the nickname for the North Carolina coast in the first half of 1942, when German submarines sank ships at will, without any significant opposition from the U.S. Navy. “Torpedo Junction” the book grew out of Hickam’s scuba diving efforts in the 1970s, when he used his vacations from his job at NASA to explore the wrecks of freighters and tankers off Cape Hatteras and adjacent areas.

He tells how a navy still reeling from Pearl Harbor and using its resources to concentrate on the Pacific Theater turned to the Coast Guard, especially ships like the cutter Dione, to battle the U-Boat menace. When the attacks began in January 1942, the Dione was the only U.S. antisubmarine ship in the area.

Hickam’s book is part  of a story comprehensively told by Clay Blair Jr. in his two-volume work Hitler’s U-Boat War (Modern Library War). I’ve read Blair’s books and recommend them to readers who want a complete picture of the events.

The Germans ranged up and down the East Coast, close enough to see people in cars driving past the brightly lighted resort towns. Blair minimizes the overall effect of the campaign on shipping, but being burned alive in a torpedoed tanker is not something to minimize, in my opinion. 

Thanks to wartime censorship, “Operation Drumbeat,” as the Germans called the U-Boat attacks, was largely a secret battle. It was rightly thought that morale would be damaged by an attack so soon after the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Too, many ship captains ignored repeated attempts to travel in convoys.

Before it essentially ended in August 1942, Operation Drumbeat claimed hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping and thousands of lives. Hickam writes movingly of the devastation. All those who rooted for the U-Boat captain and crew in the German movie “Das Boot” (I wasn’t one of them) should read Torpedo Junction.

Dismal Mountain by John Billheimer (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 304 pages)

John Billheimer, a West Virginia native living in the San Francisco Bay area, is rapidly becoming the Mountain State’s answer to Louisiana’s James Lee Burke. Dismal Mountain, the third in his Owen Allison mystery series, sounds as if it was inspired by recent news accounts of West Virginia’s legendary skullduggery and political corruption.

There’s a hospital in financial trouble, a shopping center in the middle of nowhere that appears to be a cover for illegal mountaintop removal mining and other acts of monetary gain in the East’s poorest state. Owen Allison, like his creator, lives in Northern California, where his doctorate from Cal Tech and his expertise as a transportation consultant earns him a good living. His previous appearances were in Billheimer’s debut novel, Contrary Blues and his sophomore effort, Highway Robbery. I haven’t read either one, but I’m tempted.

I started reading Dismal Mountain before the July coal country floods and finished it just before the recent outbreak of flooding in Nicholas and Raleigh counties at the end of July. I can’t prove it, but the damage caused by the excessive July rainfall appears to have been exacerbated by coal mining and timbering efforts that are less than kosher. We in Summers County are blessed with the majestic Bluestone Dam and the total absence of coal mining. What timbering that takes place in Summers County appears to be ecologically sound, judging by the lack of flood damage. 

In West Virginia to help out his cancer-stricken mother, Ruth. Allison quickly becomes embroiled in the clandestine mining matter and the hospital scandal involving Barkley’s Saint Vincent’s Hospital. At first I thought Barkley was a stand-in for Beckley, but it sounds more like Logan or Williamson.

 His boyhood sweetheart, Kate O’Malley, is now a doctor at Saint Vincent’s, where Ruth Allison is being treated. Kate is a nun who goes by the religious name of Sister Mary Perpetua.

Owen Allison hasn’t seen Kate since they were both students in Milwaukee decades before. They soon resume a friendship that could grow into something more for both Allison, who is estranged from his California lawyer wife Judith, and Kate. 

The complicated plot—sometimes a tad too complicated—also involves Allison’s efforts to clear his aunt Lizzie Neal’s name after the elderly but still feisty woman is accused of shooting an alleged trespasser. There’s something in Dismal Mountain for everybody, but it will especially appeal to Mountain Staters who revel in West Virginia’s reputation. Dismal Mountain is a first-rate genre work that does justice to its setting.

“Far Appalachia: Following the New River North” by Noah Adams (Delacorte Press, 238 pages)

No author likes being compared to any other, but I don’t think Noah Adams would mind being compared to Jonathan Raban, author of “ Bad Land,”  “Coasting,” “Hunting Mr. Heartbreak,” and—most recently—“Passage to Juneau.”

Adams, co-host of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” grew up in Ashland, Ky., so he knows his Appalachia. Raban, in his late 50s, grew up in England and now lives in Seattle. He’s one of the two or three best travel writers in the world, in the same category as Jan Morris and Paul Theroux. He’s so good he transcends the travel writing genre.

Adams follows a similar approach to Raban’s in his account of his 350-mile journey from the New River’s North Carolina mountain beginnings to its end at Gauley Bridge, W.Va., where it joins with the Gauley to become the Kanawha.

Both authors engage in conversations with people they encounter along the way, delving into what makes each place special. Both Raban and Adams bring more than a little of their personal history into their narrative, although Raban in “Passage to Juneau” goes about as far toward a memoir as is possible in a travel book. He details the break-up of his marriage and the death of his “greatest generation” father.

“Far Appalachia” is a worthy addition to Mountain literature, a growing genre. Adams recounts the poignant saga of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel of the early 1930s, which resulted in hundreds of men dying prematurely from silicosis. Hawk’s Nest is a paradigm for Appalachia in general and West Virginia in particular, involving as it does out-of-state interests plundering the Mountain State like a colony, only to leave when the wealth is depleted.

As a resident of Hinton for more than nine years, I was naturally drawn to his chapter on the area, “Bluestone Dam.”  He interviewed retired railroaders and the Rev. Charles Wood, founder of the Wood Memorial Clock Museum on Temple Street. Wood’s homeplace was inundated by Bluestone Reservoir, and the retired minister has distinct memories going back more than 50 years of what life was like before the dam when his father operated the ferry at Bull Falls.

Adams travels by canoe, kayak, mountain bike, whitewater raft, Jeep and on foot, reminding us vividly that life is a journey, not a destination. “Far Appalachia” is a keeper, the kind of book—like Raban’s—you’ll want to re-read. The 32 chapters on his travels mostly in 1997 are updated by another chapter written last year. A further update: Frank Thomas, whose $5 flights are detailed in the chapter entitled “Fayetteville Airport,” died earlier this year.

“Shay Logging Locomotives at Cass, West Virginia, 1900-60” (TLC Publishing, Lynchburg, VA., 112 pages,  $26.95).

The legacy of mountain logging in West Virginia has long been overshadowed by coal mining. Philip V. Bagdon, a Hinton resident since 1994 and an authority on logging in Cass, Pocahontas County, goes a long way to remedy this with a lavishly illustrated hard cover book entitled  “Shay Logging Locomotives at Cass, West Virginia, 1900-60” (TLC Publishing, Lynchburg, VA., 112 pages,  $26.95).

The carefully preserved company town of Cass, on the upper reaches of the Greenbrier River, has been the home of Cass Scenic Railroad State Park since 1963, making it virtually unique among living history venues in the United States.

A northern Virginia native who earned his bachelor’s degree in printing management from West Virginia Tech in 1976, Bagdon first became enamored of the Cass legacy with a visit in 1964—a year after the state scenic excursion operation began.

 He’s spent many years collecting material on the Cass geared logging locomotives employed to haul logging trains up and down some of the steepest mountains in the Mountain State. The summit at Cass’s Bald Knob is only 18 feet lower than the 4,861-foot summit of Spruce Knob in Pendleton County, the state’s highest point.

 Saved from extinction by dedicated railfans when the Mower Lumber Co. ceased operations in 1960, Cass has evolved into a popular tourist destination, especially with those of us who are fascinated by machinery. I’ve taken the rides several times and never miss an opportunity to repeat the experience.

Bagdon points out that two of the former Cass logging Shay locomotives, one built in 1905 and the other put into service in 1943, haul tourists up and down the mountain starting in late spring and going through October. The book contains photos of all 17 Shays and the one Climax, along with the dates of their service and their eventual fates.

These are not your ordinary steam locomotives: They’re specially designed for steep grades, built for power, not speed. The correct designation for the Lima, Ohio-built Shays is “Shay Patent Geared Locomotive. 

The lone Climax, used for only a few years, was built by Climax Manufacturing Co., Corry, Pa. The various owners of the property at Cass—West Virginia  Spruce Lumber Co., West Virginia Pulp & Paper Co. and the Mower Lumber Co.—found that the rugged Shay locomotives worked best in the harsh conditions prevailing during West Virginia mountain winters. Logging at Cass was a year-round operation.

Bagdon recounts plenty of anecdotes about the colorful and often rowdy enginemen—men to match West Virginia’s mountains—who did the always dangerous job of hauling pulpwood and logs to Cass. These elements and the historical material in his book make it an important addition to West Virginia’s historical literature.

The saga of railroading in West Virginia is vital to an understanding of its history and Bagdon’s book brings a colorful era of railroading to vivid life. Even if you’re  not a gearhead, “Shay Logging Locomotives at Cass, West Virginia, 1900-60” is a wonderful read.

“Crooked River Burning” (Harcourt Inc./Harvest Book, 592 pages $14.00).

In 1948, Cleveland was the nation’s sixth largest city, a position now held by San Diego. By 1969, it had shrunk to twelfth place. Today, with a population of about 478,000 it’s in the high 20s, with a population about half of the 900,000 living in the lakeside city in 1948.

Mark Winegardner takes us from 1948 to 1969 with a love story between Westsider David Zielinsky and Eastsider Anne O’Connor in “Crooked River Burning” (Harcourt Inc./Harvest Book, 592 pages $14.00).

Winegardner’s unlikely love story reminds me of the one in Thomas Mallon’s “Dewey Defeats Truman,” a novel of a few years ago set in southeastern Michigan during the 1948 Presidential campaign. Both authors use use historical novel techniques to bring a period to life. History puts many people to sleep, but Winegardner, Mallon and older masters of the genre such as Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, E.L. Doctorow and John Updike use historical events creatively to carry their narratives forward, keeping the reader interested in the characters.

David’s dad is Mike Zielinsky, a labor organizer/political fixer with ties to Cleveland’s mob figures. Anne’s dad is the political boss of Cuyahoga County. Their story doesn’t end like Romeo and Juliet, but it has as many twists and turns, incorporating both comedy and tragedy. You want to continue reading this hefty book to find out if they will ever get together after their first meetings on a resort island in Lake Erie.

In keeping with the rules of the genre, Winegardner brings real people into his narrative, including Dr. Sam Sheppard, Eliot Ness of “Untouchables” fame, Rock ‘n’ Roll pioneer Alan Freed and political figures like Carl and Louis Stokes.

 Freed , Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of Cleveland and television pioneer Dorothy Fuldheim are among the people highlighted in “Local Heroes” segments that appear throughout the novel.  These segments both interrupt the narrative and carry it along at the same time, a neat trick by the author.

Before its Cuyahoga River caught fire, Cleveland was anything but a joke, a “mistake by the lake.” The founder of the Rockefeller dynasty, John D. Rockefeller, got his start in Cleveland. It was an important industrial city, one of the “Arsenals of Democracy” during World War II. Its Cleveland Playhouse nurtured the talent of native son Paul Newman.  It was an important sports town, with the baseball Indians and the football Browns, when places like Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco had no major league sports teams.

Native Ohioan Winegardner, head of the creative writing program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, obviously loves his Cleveland, warts and all. He makes us want to root for a city that’s down on its luck. Anne and David and their families are people we care about. “Crooked River Burning” is a remarkable achievement by a relatively young author that we’ll be hearing more about in the coming years.

“Ava’s Man” by Rick Bragg (Knopf, 259 pages, $25)

 “Ava’s Man” by Rick Bragg (Knopf, 259 pages, $25) is an easy winner for inclusion on my informal list of the best books of 2001. It grabbed me from the start and, to use the old cliché, I just couldn’t put it down until I finished it.

In many ways, “Ava’s Man” is a prequel to Bragg’s 1997 memoir “All Over but the Shoutin’ (available in a 1998 Vintage paperback). Bragg talks briefly about Charlie Bundrum, the grandfather he never knew, at the start of “All Over” but the book is mostly about his alcoholic father, the choices women make and how they affect the children born to that dysfunctional union. It also tells how he became a reporter.

Bragg, a Pulitzer-prize winning reporter for the New York Times, was born in 1959; Charlie Bundrum died in 1958, his life undoubtedly shortened by regular consumption of the excellent moonshine he was noted for in the Appalachian foothills of Alabama and Georgia.  He was only 51.

Charlie and Ava moved 21 times and never owned a place of their own, Bragg tells us. Charlie was a roofer, a carpenter, a fisherman, a moonshine distiller and “probably the only man on earth who could love that woman and not perish in the flame.”

That woman was Ava Hamilton, a Presley on her mother’s side, yes, related to the Presley family of Tupelo, Miss. that produced Elvis. She was argumentative to the point of exasperation, was as noisy as Charlie was quiet and was deeply in love with Charlie, who affectionately called her “four-eyes” because of her spectacles. They raised seven children.

Unlike Bragg’s father, Charlie Bundrum wasn’t a mean drunk. There was none of the abuse Rick Bragg, his mother Margaret and his brothers Sam and Mark endured at the hands of his father. Ava’s man wasn’t always in control of all his faculties when he drank too much, but he never terrorized his family that way Bragg’s dad did. 

He was a combination of gentleness and ferocity, Bragg relates. “He was a man who did the things more civilized men dream they could, who beat one man half to death for throwing a live snake at his son, who shot a large woman with a .410 shotgun when she tried to cut him with a butcher knife, who beat the hell out of two worrisome Georgia highway patrolmen and threw them headfirst out the front door of a beer joint….”

First, last and always, Rick Bragg is a storyteller, a talent he may have inherited from Charlie Bundrum, the grandfather he never knew. Charlie was illiterate, but he was known in parts of two states as one of the best natural storytellers around.

I read “All Over but the Shoutin’” after finishing “Ava’s Man.” I quickly realized why the Pulitzer folks chose Bragg for the 1996 Pulitzer for feature writing; you learn something after putting in 35 years in journalism on five daily newspapers as I did

If you want to understand the culture of Appalachia as examined and explained by an articulate native son, “Ava’s Man” and “All Over but the Shoutin’” are indispensible. Bragg’s writing entangles you in verbal kudzu that keeps you enthralled to the end. Read them both to double your pleasure and understanding.

“Bearing Witness” (Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 316 pages, $23.95).

A seemingly peaceful and friendly Midwestern city can be a mass of contradictions, as I learned during my decade-long stay as a reporter and editor at The Milwaukee Sentinel in the 1960s and 1970s. 

The same city that nurtured Golda Meir, Israel’s first—and so far—only woman prime minister also was home to a large chapter of the pro-Nazi German American Bund just before our entry into World War II.

 Just up the street from our newspaper on North 4^th Street was the Turner Hall, where many pro-Nazi types combined German propaganda with their Turnverein exercises and fatherland cuisine and beer. In our time, the Turner Hall was one of the best lunch places in Milwaukee, a city known for its good eating. The much more infamous Forstkeller—where the Bund actually met—wasn’t all that far from The Sentinel and The Journal in downtown Milwaukee.

St. Louis didn’t produce a Golda Meir, who left Milwaukee for Palestine in the 1920s, but, like Milwaukee, it did have a substantial German population and many pro-Nazi types sixty years ago, as Michael A. Kahn points out in “Bearing Witness” (Tom Doherty Associates, New York, 316 pages, $23.95).

Lawyer Rachel Gold, the central figure in “Bearing Witness”, learns about the dark side of St. Louis when she takes on the age-discrimination case of her mother’s 63-year old friend Ruth Alpert. Her client was a victim of downsizing at Beckman Engineering Co., one of the city’s most respected employers. The downsizing was a blunder, because Alpert has a great deal of information about shenanigans at Beckman and several other Midwestern engineering and construction firms.

A simple age-discrimination case balloons into a federal bid-rigging fraud case, with Ruth Alpert eligible for a percentage of the judgment—if Rachel is successful. She’s a one-woman law firm facing one of the city’s most prominent firms.

On the plus side,  Rachel Gold, a continuing character in Kahn’s legal thrillers, has an unusual assortment of legal talent helping her out, including boyfriend Jonathan Wolf, a former prosecutor turned ace criminal defense attorney and Professor Benny Goldberg and his hotshot law students at Washington University.

Like all the other legal thrillers, “Bearing Witness” has its share of bizarre and dangerous incidents, involving as it does pre-war homegrown Nazis along with their contemporary skinhead counterparts. Jonathan, a former Golden Gloves light heavyweight boxer is called on to put his fighting skills to good use. There’s a climactic showdown scene in one of the city’s historic downtown buildings. Cars are forced off freeways by skinheads.

 But lawyer/author Kahn has Rachel, Jonathan, Benny and the hotshot pizza-eating students perform many of the time-consuming, routine tasks real lawyers do. That’s what real lawyers do most of the time, Kahn reminds us.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert  A. Caro (Knopf, 1167 pages, $35)

Much of Robert  A. Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (Knopf, 1167 pages, $35)—too much in the view of some—is devoted to Johnson’s drastic reshaping of the Senate. Also exhaustively covered are his strategies in arranging for the 1957 Civil Rights Bill to get through a legislative body dominated by Southerners opposed to any form of civil rights legislation.

This makes for fascinating reading to anyone interested in American political history, especially for a reviewer whose first national vote was cast in 1960 when Johnson was the Democratic vice presidential candidate in an unlikely pairing with John F. Kennedy. Still liberal to the core, I voted for LBJ in 1964 while living in conservative Indiana.

But the part of Caro’s book—the third volume in a projected four-book biography—that affected me the most was his description of Johnson’s McCarthy-like destruction of Leland Olds, a decent, idealistic public servant, in a Senate confirmation hearing in 1949.

At least nine months before Joe McCarthy’s February 1950 commie hunter debut in Wheeling, W. Va., Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, D-Texas, practiced McCarthyism to an extent that he may have influenced the Wisconsin senator’s choice of issues. Caro doesn’t make this connection, but his three chapters on the demolition of Olds illustrate what Caro calls LBJ’s “utter ruthlessness” in destroying any obstacles on his path to power.

Olds, born in 1890, had been appointed chairman of the Federal Power Administration in 1939 and reappointed to a five-year term in 1944. He was strongly pro-consumer, especially in the natural gas arena—a stand that made him a target for the new senator from Texas.

Doing the bidding of the powerful gas and oil interests that helped him get elected to a bitterly contested 1948 senate seat, Johnson talked his way onto the subcommittee that would decide if Olds would be approved for a third five-year term at the FPA. In thorough Caro fashion—of which there can be no thorougher—the author details how Johnson brought up Olds’ reporting on the organized labor movement in the 1920s, making the point that Olds was a fellow-traveler if not an out and out Communist.

Even before Joe McCarthy’s West Virginia speech, Republicans like Richard Nixon and conservative Democrats were targeting members of the Truman Administration as being soft on communism. The attack on Olds, led by a New Dealer like Johnson, was a wake-up call to liberals throughout the government—or it should have been.

Caro’s previous two volumes on Johnson, The Path to Power (1982) and Means of Ascent (1990) show how Johnson managed to be all things to all people. He could be seen as a liberal to liberals who desperately wanted him to be one and a good old boy conservative to the Southern Democrats so powerful in the House and especially in the Senate.

Master of the Senate devotes a great amount of space to the history of the U.S. Senate, a subject near and dear to West Virginia’s senior senator, Robert C. Byrd. Our senator was one of 263 people interviewed by Caro and Byrd’s history of the senate is cited in the bibliography.

 I’ve been a big fan of Caro’s writing ever since I read his 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. Like me, Caro is a journalist by training, rather than an academic historian, so I cheered for a writer who could take his street reporting for Newsday on Long Island to another level.

Lyndon Johnson the man, the husband and the father is carefully delineated in Master of the Senate and it’s not a pretty picture. He was an often cruel and unreasonable boss to his devoted staff and he was a serial adulterer to a wife, Lady Bird, who worshipped him. I think it’s irrelevant to argue if Caro likes or dislikes Johnson: He paints LBJ as he perceives him, warts and all.

 The Emperor of Ocean Park by Author Stephen L. Carter

The Emperor of Ocean Park (Knopf, $26.95) is a thriller you can enjoy on vacation with the added benefit of learning about a world most people are unaware of.

Author Stephen L. Carter is either a product of the world of upper middle class African Americans who have vacation homes in the community of Oak Bluffs on the island of Martha’s Vineyard or he’s done an extraordinary amount of research. His portrayal of the more privileged denizens of what his protagonist Talcott Garland calls the “darker nation” rings true. So does his rendition of the backbiting world of legal academia, which makes sense because Carter has been a law professor at Yale University for two decades.

Talcott’s life as a law professor in an elite New England university changes forever when his father Oliver Garland dies of an apparent heart attack in his home in Washington, D.C.’s Gold Coast, an enclave of privilege for blacks in D.C. The 70-something former judge—the owner of a house in the
Ocean Park section of Oak Bluffs and the “Emperor” of the title—leaves clues behind for his son to follow. Most of the clues are chess related because Oliver and Talcott shared a love of the game.

Talcott’s nickname is “Mischa,” a play on the shortened form of his first name—“Tal”—the last name of Russian chess master Mikhail “Mischa” Tal. It was given to him by his communist uncle Derek. Talcott’s older brother Addison is an opportunistic talk-show host (is there any other kind?) in
Chicago and their father was a conservative judge on the court of appeals nominated by President Reagan to a Supreme Court post fifteen years earlier. The Garland clan is quite diverse in their political views.

The nomination was destroyed by an aide’s revelations of Oliver Garland’s association with the notorious Jack Ziegler, an elderly multimillionaire suspected of connections with the underworld. Ziegler, making one of his rare appearances away from his mountaintop lair in Aspen, Colo., asks
Talcott Garland at Oliver’s funeral to search for “the arrangements” Oliver may have left behind.

Most of the novel concerns Talcott’s hunt for the mysterious “arrangements,”with sizable segments devoted to the politics of his wife’s possible nomination to a federal judgeship. Talcott’s wife Kimberly Madison is a hard-charging corporate lawyer who earns twice what he does. Talcott suspects Kimberly or “Kimmer” as he calls her of having an affair with her boss Jerry Nathanson.

Carter, the author of several well-reviewed nonfiction books, makes an auspicious fiction debut with this 660-page novel. If you’re looking for literary influences, Carter throws out the tantalizing tidbit that among the books on Talcott’s shelves are the novels of Scott Turow.

Chicagoan Turow is an influence on Carter, especially in his use of richly layered revelations of “Sins of the Fathers,” but I also detect a bit of George V. Higgins, the Massachusetts master of dialogue who died a few years ago and who influenced virtually all the lawyer-authors who came after. Citing

Turow and Higgins as possible influences takes nothing away from Carter’s achievement in “The Emperor of Ocean Park.”

Despite what some would call the cliché of cliffhanging chapter endings, “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is a worthy addition to the legal thriller genre. Conspiracy theorists will undoubtedly enjoy the machinations of the Washington power brokers who may or may not be helping Talcott Garland in his quest.

 Finally, A Vacation Book You Can Feel Good About
By David M. Kinchen

A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America by Lisbeth Cohen  (Knopf, 480 pages, $35.00).

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen

From 1945 to 1975, the United States was transformed into a "Consumers’ Republic," marked by the development of consumer credit, the construction of shopping centers, the creation of massive housing developments on the rural fringes of the big cities and a heightened sense of deprivation on the part of many minorities.

That’s the picture drawn by historian Lizabeth Cohen in "A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America" (Knopf, 480 pages, $35.00). It’s difficult for anyone under 50 to imagine, but once upon a time there was an America without credit cards and shopping centers, where the majority of the nation’s urban families rented an apartment in a central city rather than owned—with the bank—a ranch house or Cape Cod in the ‘burbs.

Cohen is a prize-winning historian at Harvard University—and judging by the 1956 photo of her and her sister in front of their family home in Paramus, N.J., a member of the early wave of baby-boomers. She tells the story of how much of America—the white majority, at least—formed the vanguard of today’s mass consumption society.

Except for a number of politically correct phrases, Cohen doesn’t look down her professorial nose at consumers: She tells their story, warts and all, as Oliver Cromwell instructed his portrait painter 350 years ago. The "warts"—including the unintentional or intentional exclusion of minority consumers from the "Consumers’ Republic," often dominate her narrative.

One of the PC phrases that Cohen uses throughout is "racial rebellion" to describe what we newspaper reporters called "urban riots" in the mid-1960s. It was the time when I was starting out as a metropolitan newspaper reporter and the riots that hit New York, Los Angeles, Newark, Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and other cities weren’t called "rebellions" in the Milwaukee Sentinel where I started working just after Milwaukee’s summer riots of 1967.

Much of Cohen’s focus is on the heavily urbanized—and suburbanized—counties of northern New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. She describes the white flight from Newark, Jersey City, Paterson and other once thriving centers to suburbs like her hometown of Paramus, where two large shopping centers opened in 1957.

The Garden State Plaza and the Bergen Mall were deliberately designed to draw customers from the surrounding suburbs, customers who had cars and could reach the centers at or near the junction of the New Jersey and the Garden State Turnpikes. If you lived in rapidly declining Newark or Paterson or Hackensack, you were largely out of the picture unless you had a car. This, she points out, was de facto racial segregation of the harshest kind.

Cohen shows how the foundation—including a powerful consumer movement driven by both women and African Americans—for the postwar "Consumers’ Republic" was laid block by block in the 1930s, as the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal transformed the political structure of the nation.

With unemployment at 25% or more during the 1930s, she illustrates how difficult if not impossible it was to put into place the ideas of the "Consumers’ Republic" that began in 1945 and lasted for a hectic three decades.

Still, revolutionary changes in the nation’s mortgage system instituted by the New Deal in the 1930s, along with the Veterans Administration’s so-called GI Bill of Rights passed the year before the war ended, were major factors in creating the mass housing market that resulted in housing starts as high as 2 million a year in the postwar years.

This aspect of Cohen’s well illustrated and carefully documented book was particularly interesting to me, since from about 1970 on, my reportorial duties at both the Milwaukee Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times encompassed the housing and development industries.

By quoting and referring to people who were present at and during the creation of the "Consumers’ Republic," Cohen makes the story of America’s amazing transformation relevant to readers who’ve never known anything else, as well as to those of us who lived through it and reported about it.

 --Reviewed by David M. Kinchen

Separate, but Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (PublicAffairs, 160 pages, $35.00).

Long before white photographers from the North descended on the deep South to document the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, professional photographer Henry Clay Anderson used his press camera to produce striking images of the black middle class of the thriving city of Greenville, Miss.

About 130 of Anderson’s photographs from about 1948 to 1978 constitute the nucleus of  Separate, but Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (PublicAffairs, 160 pages, $35.00). 

In addition to photographing society events and life milestones, Anderson (1911-1998) was the only photographer willing to document the murder of a black minister in 1955, the year Emmett Till was murdered in another part of the bloody state of Mississippi. Events like this and the Montgomery bus boycott prompted northern photographers and journalists to document the plight of the poor blacks in the South, resulting in neglect of more affluent black residents. Similarly, the photographers of the Farm Security Administration project in the 1930s and early 1940s, concentrated on poor blacks and whites. 

Greenville is on the Mississippi River, about midway between Memphis and Natchez. It’s a bustling city of more than 50,000 in the heart of the legendary Mississippi Delta. When Anderson was running his photo studio, it also had a thriving black middle class that, like the city’s whites, wanted a documentary record of milestones like weddings, funerals, proms, beauty contests and even the purchase of a new car or—in a memorable photo included in this volume—a shiny new Harley-Davidson full-dress motorcycle with its proud owner and his female companion. 

Anderson, born in Nitta Yuma, Miss., not far Greenville, served in the U.S. Army in World War II and studied photography in Baton Rouge, La. Under the G.I. Bill of Rights. He relates how he was interested in photography as a child and knew he wanted to make it his career. He worked with large-format cameras like Speed Graphics that produced 4-inch-by-5-inch negatives of great sharpness. 

Anderson’s work was rediscovered by a New York filmmaker with roots in Greenville’s black elite, Shawn Wilson. Searching for a family photograph, he discovered Anderson’s work and interviewed the photographer not long before Anderson’s death in 1998. 

Working with Clifton L. Taulbert, the author of Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, who was born and reared near Greenville, Wilson found it an easy task to convince the savvy folks at PublicAffairs Press to produce the book as it we have it today. Wilson and Taulbert contribute essays, including a brief autobiographical essay by the talented Mr. Anderson. 

In addition, Mary Panzer contributes an insightful essay on the events of the murder of the Rev.George Lee in the town of Belzoni near Greenville on May 8, 1955. H. C. Anderson was the only photographer willing to document the crime that claimed his friend. One can only imagine the dangers facing Anderson as he went about photographing Lee’s car and the porch he crashed into after he was shot and killed. 

The book is properly indexed, something we reviewers can’t take for granted these days, and is printed in Italy on coated paper that reveals the quality of the photos. 

Separate, But Equal is an insider’s glimpse into a world that has been sadly neglected by photojournalists. It belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in photography and recent American history. I look forward to an additional book or two.

Reviewed by David M. Kinchen

For Common Things (Knopf) by Jebediah Purdy

 Jedediah Purdy isn’t a character from the proposed new CBS reality show about Appalachians transplanted to Beverly Hills, despite the similarity of his first name with the Jed Clampett character played by Buddy Ebsen in the hit (CBS!) TV sitcom that aired from 1962 to 1971.

 No, the young man with the biblical name—it means “beloved” in Hebrew—is the author of “Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World” (Knopf, 352 pages, $24.00) an often brilliant, often exasperating attempt to discover why the United States is so hated and so admired—often at the same time by the same people.

 Purdy, born on a farm in Chloe, Calhoun County, West Virginia, in 1974, attained national celebrity in 1999 with the publication of  “For Common Things” (Knopf), which attempted in just over 200 pages to explore the rise of irony among young people, along with its concomitant lack of trust and engagement in political institutions. This is a lot for a kid who was home-schooled on a hardscrabble farm in central West Virginia.

 His parents were part of the back-to-the land movement that saw many educated and idealistic young people move to rural areas of the nation in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This in-migration was much smaller than the outward migration of West Virginians that saw native sons and daughters take to the highways and railroads for jobs in the Midwest, the Baltimore and Norfolk areas and the Carolinas. But it included a fabulously wealthy young man named Rockefeller, John D. Rockefeller IV or Jay, as he’s known throughout the Mountain State.

 In Summers County, we call people like Walter and Deirdre Purdy “NOFHs”—Not Originally From Here. I’m one, having arrived in 1992 with no roots in Hinton or Summers County.

 West Virginia native John Alexander Williams in his “Appalachia: A History” (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) mentions both Purdy and Jay Rockefeller toward the end of his very readable—and highly recommended—book. He calls Rockefeller and Purdy’s parents “neonatives,” a coinage I like.

 In “For Common Things,” Purdy tells how his parents and other NOFHs or neonatives brought their values and skills to a place that was much like a Third World country. Purdy uses the newly liberated countries of Central Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states—to compare and contrast the ecological devastation wrought by mining and timbering interests on the Appalachian landscape. The touchstone here is mountaintop removal mining, lauded in 1996 by Clinton’s interior secretary Bruce Babbitt, an episode cited in “For Common Things.”

Reviewed by David M. Kinchen

I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story  by Rick Bragg(Knopf, $23.95) 

As I’m writing this review of “I Am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story” (Knopf, $23.95) I’m listening to NPR reports of 16 Italian soldiers dying in a blast in Nasiriyah, the very same city where the 19-year-old West Virginian was critically injured and hospitalized. 

Rick Bragg (“All Over but the Shoutin’” and “Ava’s Man”) was the perfect choice to chronicle the story of Pfc. Jessica Lynch of Palestine, W.Va. and the attack on her 507^th Maintenance Company convoy in Nasiriyah, Iraq on March 23, 2003, just three days into the controversial war. 

Bragg, like Jessica Lynch the subject of media controversy, grew up in Alabama among people very much like Jessica’s parents Greg and Deadra Lynch, people for whom the military is often a step up and out of rural poverty. 

Bragg left a prestigious writing job at the New York Times after he was accused of by-line improprieties that strike this veteran of five daily newspapers—including The Milwaukee Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times—as hysterically overwrought. The New York Times lost a wonderful feature writer when Bragg quit in anger earlier this year in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal. 

In a little over 200 pages, Bragg tells the story expertly and vividly. He lets Jessica Lynch tell her side of the controversial hospital rescue—which has plenty of “Wag the Dog” elements for those seeking a comparison with the 1997 Barry Levinson film. The doctors and nurses at Saddam Hussein General Hospital had tried to bring Jessica Lynch to American forces, but were turned away by gunfire, Bragg writes. The American soldiers were rightly fearful of a suicide attempt and Pfc. Lynch was spirited back to the hospital. 

Considering the conditions at the hospital, Jessica Lynch received excellent care. She was fearful that the doctors would amputate her severely damaged leg. The account of the convoy ambush doesn’t say much for American military equipment: Those M-16 rifles that jammed repeatedly in Vietnam, apparently are still jamming; Humvees could use better crash protection, considering the havoc sustained by Jessica and her comrades in a 45-mile-per-hour crash. Maybe the American military should consider buying Israeli Galil rifles to replace those M-16s; after all, a dozen years ago the military chose Beretta nine-millimeter sidearms to replace the venerable .45s. 

Writing with sentiment but without sentimentality, Bragg tells of the welling up of support from people in West Virginia and throughout the country for Jessica and her family. Her family’s A-frame two-bedroom house has been remodeled and doubled in size, to make it handicapped accessible for Jessica. I sense from Bragg’s book that Greg and Dee Lynch, Jessi’s parents, are more than a little overwhelmed by it all. Who wouldn’t be? 

Not overlooked is Jessica’s friendship with Lori Piestewa, the Tuba City, Ariz. Comrade in arms who died in the March 23 attack. The Navajo soldier, the first Native American woman to die in combat in U.S. armed forces history, bonded with the green-eyed blonde  Miss Congeniality from Wirt County, West Virginia, and Bragg captures this relationship expertly. He performs a similar task with the relationship between Jessica Lynch and her boyfriend—and now fiancé—Sgt. Ruben Contreras. If nothing else, today’s “Army of One” takes people from homogeneous settings like Jessica’s Wirt County to more culturally diverse venues. 

Regardless of your views on the Iraq war, “I Am a Soldier, Too” is Rick Bragg at his best in portraying working class Americans doing what’s needed to survive in an economy where family-sustaining jobs are rapidly going overseas to China and other developing countries. The playing field is being leveled, all right; pretty soon we’ll all be level with China!

“The Working Poor: Invisible in America” by David K. Shipler (Knopf, 336 pages, $25)

One of the first things I learned as a rookie daily newspaper reporter in the mid 1960s was “don’t bury the lede.”

The first paragraph of any news story is the lead or “lede” in journospeak. It’s pronounced “leed.” Traditionally—and I’m talking manual-typewriter tradition—a  reporter’s task is to summarize the thrust of the story in the first paragraph—at least for straight news stories, as opposed to features or columns.

As I see it, the lead in David K. Shipler’s “The Working Poor: Invisible in America” (Knopf, 336 pages, $25) is on page 252: “Poverty or near poverty is not a problem, it is an array of interlocking problems.”

As a Pulitzer-prize winning former (1966-1988) reporter for the New York Times, Shipler undoubtedly knows this rule. As the author of three previous well-received books, Shipler also knows it doesn’t necessarily apply to nonfiction books. I’m sure any editor would forgive him after he reads this splendid, often heart-breaking account of poverty in the supposed land of plenty.

Shipler’s take on poverty comes at a time when service jobs are being shipped to India and other overseas locales; at a time when Bush’s economic adviser Greg Mankiw says that’s a good thing; at a time when voices as diverse as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and CNN business anchor Lou Dobbs are attacking what they perceive as the hollowing out of the American work force. While the The Wall Street Journal attacks Dobbs in opinion pieces, its news columns reflect the nation’s stunning lack of job creation in the midst of a so-called economic recovery.

I have to admit my bias: I believe short-sighted corporate executives and stock market- driven boards of directors will continue to deprive Americans of a chance at decent paying jobs with benefits—including health care—as long as they can get the job done cheaper with overseas job outsourcing.

Rather than working at a variety of low-paying jobs as Barbara Ehrenreich did in preparation for her excellent 2001 book, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America”, Shipler traveled around the country doing extensive interviewing and reporting. (He refers to Ehrenreich twice in his book).

Shipler and Ehrenreich are complementary; both books cover similar terrain and both are valid examinations of domestic poverty. While some economists dispute it, most believe that real wages (adjusted for inflation) for working people—and I include white collar jobs like journalism, teaching and clerical work—have been on a downward spiral since about 1973. This is at a time when CEO’s typically are paid as much as 500 times more than their workers.

As both Shipler and Ehrenreich point out, it’s not enough to say that the poor in America have—most of them, at least—cable TV, cars and other material goods the poor of Bangladesh or Indonesia or Vietnam lack. Americans slightly above, at or below the poverty line have to live in high-cost America, where a run-down trailer in rural New Hampshire re= nts for $675 a month or a one-bedroom apartment in Tarzana, Calif. crammed with illegal aliens from Honduras or El Salvador rents for $800 to $1,000 a month.

When Shipler described the plight of a working poor single mother to a colleague, he relates that the colleague, guiltily, assumed the woman was black. It turned out she was white in virtually all white New Hampshire. Poverty in America afflicts more whites than minorities because there are more whites than minorities. This is changing in places as diverse as the sweatshops of downtown Los Angeles or the vegetable fields of North Carolina, where Shipler found the face of poverty to be that of Latino migrant workers, most of them illegals from Mexico. The Latinos are doing work once done by blacks, many of whom moved to northern cities where they now live in poverty.

Much of black and other minority poverty is driven by a cycle of kids having kids, often with multiple fathers, Shipler points out in his discussion of poverty in Washington, D.C., not far from his home in comfortably suburban Chevy Chase, Md.

His discussion of black poverty brings up the familiar topics of too many children, drug and alcohol abuse, poor work habits, dangerous schools and lack of parental supervision. All too often, in poor black communities, the grandparents are the only positive force, Shipler points out.

Perhaps the most heart-breaking chapter in “The Working Poor” is Chapter 6: “Sins of the Fathers.” Shipler discusses the problem of sexual abuse of girls and boys alike by parents or boyfriends, one of the most significant of his “interlocking problems.”

Sexual abuse of children renders them unable to trust anyone and supplies the “edge of poverty,” as Shipler puts it, with a growing pool of victims: “A surprising number of women at the edge of poverty turn out to be victims of sexual abuse. Like huge financial debt, their trauma weighs them down long after it occurs. Unlike debt, it cannot be erased by declaring bankruptcy….Even though I never posed the question, sooner or later most of the impoverished women I interviewed mention that they had been sexually abused.”

Lest those of us who still have well paying jobs get too complacent, consider the positions of the aforementioned Bob Herbert and Lou Dobbs. Herbert suggests that the middle class may be even more imperiled than those workers below them because extremely low paying service jobs will always be performed by people in situ, already in place in California, North Carolina or their own home town.

Outsourcing by well-educated Indians in Bangalore or Bombay is already endangering jobs of income-tax preparers, paralegals and computer call center staffers. I might point out, from my own reportorial experience dealing with economists from banks and trade associations, that Indian and Chinese names are quite common among these experts.

Dobbs on his 6 p.m. CNN show “Lou Dobbs Tonight” nightly discusses outsourcing and our porous southern border that allows free entry by millions of illegal aliens who—contrary to what economists say—take jobs from local minorities and others. Employers actually prefer illegals, since the employers find them to be docile workers who can be kept in virtual serfdom through fear of “La Migra.”

Shipler has performed yeoman service with his new book. It remains for corporate America, government at all levels and private foundations to connect the dots on the interlocking problems that cause and exacerbate poverty to find ways to reduce and perhaps eliminate its horrible cycle in a nation of plenty

                                                                                          Reviewed by David Kinchen

Bill Clinton’s Memoirs, ‘My Life,’ (Knopf, 1,008 pages, $35.00) by David M. Kinchen

It’s my long-standing policy never to read a review of any book I plan to review. I broke the policy for Bill Clinton’s “My Life” because I didn’t receive a review copy and hadn’t planned to review it.  

The folks at Knopf, especially Nicholas Latimer, have been very good to me in the past—and I hope in the future—so I decided to check out the book at our excellent local library. And read it. And read it. I normally don’t have to renew a book, but this gigantic tome required one renewal. 

“My Life” is much better than I was lead to believe by the early reviews and comments. Thanks to writer Justin Cooper—who should have gotten “as told to” or “written with” credit on the title page, but didn’t – the monster memoir hangs together well.  

It’s not “eye-crossingly dull” as one New York Times book critic called it—it’s just so packed with details that a reader has to use patience. That’s the trouble with our 24/7 multitasking world: We’re too busy to read books of importance. Turn off the TV and take a chance on a good book. Another reviewer for the New York Times, acclaimed novelist Larry McMurtry (“The Last Picture Show,” “Lonesome Dove”), was closer to the mark in proclaiming our 42^nd President’s memoirs an outstanding piece of Americana.

McMurtry grew up not far from Kenneth Starr’s hometown near Wichita Falls, Texas, so he could understand the milieu that produced a grand inquisitor of the Bible Belt variety, someone who wouldn’t give up on Clinton until everything was exhausted, including a nation full of people who wanted to cry out: “Enough, already!” 

Naturally, Clinton covers the “Les Miserables” Inspector Javert’s aspect of Starr’s quest very extensively, up to and beyond the 1999 impeachment. He doesn’t use the phrase “great Right-Wing conspiracy,” but any reasonably intelligent reader can fill in the blanks. Monica is there too, with about five pages. His other sins of the flesh are touched on.  In the scheme of things, they don’t amount to much; I constantly wish this country had been settled by convicts like Australia, rather than religious fanatics. I just love those virtually-free-of-hypocrisy Oz-Dwellers! 

A disclosure: Although I’m not a member of any organized political party—I’m a Democrat—I voted for Perot in 1992 and Libertarian candidate Harry Browne in 1996. After nearly four years of Bush-Cheney, I look back on Clinton-Gore as a Golden Age, a “L’Age d’Or,” to use some of my college French. 

Growing up with an alcoholic, abusive father, I can identify with Clinton’s problems with his stepfather Roger Clinton better than the negative reviewer from The Times. Somehow, I don’t think she had the same family situation.  

 Bill Clinton’s mother didn’t have any better luck—until her last husband Dick Kelley—with men than did my late mother. I can visualize Rose Kinchen and Virginia Clinton getting together at the local café for a cup of coffee and some stimulating conversation. I can also identify with small town life, playing in the band and orchestra, not being very good at sports, liking books and writing and other aspects of Clinton’s life. He was in Boy’s State in Arkansas in the early 1960s, as I attended the Illinois Boy’s State in Springfield about eight years earlier.  

Clinton’s coverage of the 2000 Israeli-Palestinian Camp David peace process is excellent, showing how Arafat didn’t take the opportunity to build a Palestinian state with the reluctant but willing Ehud Barak of Israel. Arafat, as Clinton reminds us, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 

Speaking of opportunities, his efforts and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s to get an universal health plan show that his heart was in the right place. We’re the only industrialized country in the world without universal medical coverage, which is probably our biggest claim to shame! Bob Dole and others who don’t have to worry about their medical care should reflect on what they’ve done by blocking universal health care when we had the money to fund it a decade ago. 

In effect, with more than 45 million Americans lacking health insurance, we have attained a state of socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor—and middle class. Millionaires like my congressman, Nick Rahall and my senator, Jay Rockefeller, have excellent health insurance, while I have only Medicare. 

There are a few glitches here and there in “My Life,”  but the one that sticks out the most is Clinton’s calling Appalachia the nation’s poorest all-white area. We may be poor, but we’re not all white. 

This is a memoir worth investing time in, by one of the nation’s best-ever natural politicians. His heart was always in the right place, even if at times other body parts weren’t. If you can’t afford the $35 and want a copy for your very own, check out Amazon. Nobody pays list price on anything these days! 

Reviewed By David M. Kinchen, Editor, Huntington News Network
Kinchen is editor of Huntington News Network, which has web sites specializing in Huntington, Hinton and Bluefield. He has been a journalist since January 1966 and has been a Hinton resident since 1992. 

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