Elevation - Stephen King

He may be the preeminent horror author of the 20th century, but Stephen King’s greatest skill as an author isn’t blood, gore, or terror, but his depictions of community. It’s easy to forget that The Stand includes an extended sequence about rebuilding Boulder from the ruins of the superflu-fueled apocalypse, and that these scenes are among the strongest in the book. I was reminded of this while rereading Hearts in Atlantis, in which the first two stories contain long passages of the characters simply existing, passages that in the hands of lesser authors would feel like padding or wheel-spinning. There is a coziness to King’s writing that you might not expect, but is essential to his stories’ power. He writes people you care about, and seeing their lives in such intimate detail is key to making you care about them.

I thought about this a lot while reading Elevation, which is essentially nothing but coziness. There’s some interpersonal conflict and a supernatural phenomenon affecting the main character, but none of it feels primed to draw blood. Even the character’s mysterious condition that renders him constantly lighter without appearing to lose weight feels to him more like a curiosity than an impending doom. If anything, it inspires him to be a better man, and to conjure better angels from the small circle of friends his condition draws around him.

Elevation is a warm cup of tea of a book, a momentary pause to be enjoyed in one reflective sitting. Some of the political elements flirted with the corny, but King has enough skill and experience to flesh out his characters beyond caricature, and to temper didacticism with honest depictions of human behaviour. The ending retains the courage of its convictions, and reminded me of the Baron in the Trees.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe

I feel like I’m always forgetting where I hear about books. This is another one of those cases. I put a hold on Say Nothing at he library at some point, and by the time it came in, the specific impetus for doing so had vanished. In such cases, I tend to trust my past self’s judgement—we tend to have similar tastes—and I did so again here.

Say Nothing is a history of a large event and a mystery about a small event (small in global terms; to those involved it was devastating). The history concerns the Troubles, which roiled Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties. The mystery is what happened to a woman named Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten who, on a night in 1972, was abducted form her home and never seen again. That she was murdered was never seriously in question, but the absence of a body was an abscess in the minds of her children, a puckered wound in their hearts that refused to close and thereby seal the certainty of their mother’s demise.

The two stories intertwine, with McConville’s disappearance a thread singled out from the broader tapestry of the Troubles. Keefe does a good job juggling both subjects, giving a brisk but thorough summary of the causes that led to the troubles, the struggles of the paramilitaries with the authorities and each other, and the eventual peace process that brought the bloodshed to a halt while undermining its meaning, a decision that caused no shortage of resentment among the IRA faithful.

Keefe’s interest is clearly with people over events, and he frames much of the history though specific stories, including those of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters whose violent exploits made them IRA darlings and media fodder; Brendan Hughes, an IRA footsoldier and gifted tactician with an uncompromising view of Irish nationalism; and Gerry Adams, one of the heads of the Provisional IRA (though never admitting as much) whose pivot to politics with Sinn Fein brought peace to Northern Ireland while leaving those who fought feeling abandoned and bitter.

The focus of the book is clearly with the nationalists, as unionist voices are relegated to villainous bit parts, but this is more due to focus than polemics. Keefe paints the IRA neither as purely cold-blooded killers or revolutionary heroes, but as normal men and women whose convictions and circumstances led them to commit unlawful and occasionally violent acts. His final weighing of the fat of Jean McConville is not a stone cold certainty, but he presents a credible argument as to who killed her and why, and helps refute the claim that her “touting (or informing) was the cause. A good book.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure - Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind neatly summarizes its thesis in its subtitle. The authors come from different backgrounds, Lukianoff as a lawyer and first amendment activist and Haidt as a social psychologist and academic, but are united over their concern with some of the trends appearing on modern liberal arts college campuses. They chronicle a shift in belief in a university’s core mandate from challenging students to protecting them, and argue that this change harms students by leaving them fragile and unprepared for life beyond school.

The subject matter is inherently inflammatory, but Lukianoff and Haidt take great pains to avoid turning their book into a polemic. The language is calm, circumspect, and reasoned, proffering explanations for this shift that include the political and social landscape these students came of age in and avoiding broad value judgments. There’s no bandying about terms like “snowflake.” The book’s focus on cognitive behavioral therapy struck me as bizarre at first, but the authors make a convincing case that speaker bans and trigger warnings feed into the negative thoughts CBT attempts to combat.

The structure of the book betrays their background in advocacy and academia, reading like a cross between a white paper and a textbook (albeit a pared down, accessible one). Chapters end with bullet point synopses, and the authors pause on a number of occasions to reiterate what they have discussed so far and tie it back to their original argument. Overall, I found it an interesting read, especially as someone who left university just a few years before these changes took hold.

The Corrosion of Conservatism - Max Boot

I came across this book by happenstance. Chantal had put a hold on it at the library and I picked it up for her. I flipped through a few pages on the way home and ended up reading the whole thing over a couple of days.

I knew Max Boot only through his columns at the Washington Post, which I read regularly. Lately I’ve found my favorite columnists are actually those rare conservatives and former Republicans who have become vocal critics of their former party in the wake of Trump. Folks like Boot, Jennifer Rubin, and Rick Wilson. While I disagree with them on most nuts-and-bolts policy issues, I appreciate their common stance on politics as a means of good governance, rather than a vehicle for seizing power. It’s not easy to speak up to your own team when they’ve gone stray, and I respect Boot and others like him for doing so.

The Corrosion of Conservatism isn’t the sort of book I usually gravitate towards. It’s essentially a platform book, in which Boot lays out what drew him to conservatism and where he feels the movement went wrong. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of thing, but such books usually come across as fairly shallow exercises, the sort of thing people buy for the name on the cover more than the actual content. Boot’s book rises above this level, largely thanks to his experience as a writer of modern history, which he uses to provide context and depth to his arguments.

In the closing section of the book, Boot offers a mea culpa of sorts, in which he highlights the darker side of conservatism that his party affiliation had blinded him to in the past. I’m aware there are hard-liners on the left who find his past stances unforgivable, but from where I stand Boot seems to have done some real soul-searching, and willingly embraced the aspects of progressivism that partisanship alone had previously repelled, without pinballing between extremes—an act that is surprisingly common in politics. There are many stances he holds with which I still disagree, but I think he’s got integrity, and these days you can’t ask for much more than that.