James L. Haley: Wolf: The Lives of Jack London

In "Jack London's Dark Side" on the Slate.com, Johann Hari recently wrote this about the book:

If Jack London is chased forever from our historical memory by the dog he invented, then we will lose one of the most intriguing, bizarre figures in American history, at once inspiring and repulsive. In his 40 years of life, he was a "bastard" child of a slum-dwelling suicidal spiritualist, a child laborer, a pirate, a tramp, a revolutionary Socialist, a racist pining for genocide, a gold-digger, a war correspondent, a millionaire, a suicidal depressive, and for a time the most popular writer in America. In Wolf: The Lives of Jack London, his latest biographer, James L. Haley, calls London "the most misunderstood figure in the American literary canon"—but that might be because he is ultimately impossible to understand. London nearly died by suicide before he was even born. His mother, Flora Chaney, was a ragged, hateful hysteric who reacted to anyone disagreeing with her by screaming that she was having a heart attack and collapsing to the floor. She had grown up in a 17-bedroom mansion, but she ran away as a teenager and ended up joining a religious cult that believed it could communicate with the dead. She had an affair with its leader, William Henry Chaney, who beat her when she got pregnant and demanded she have an abortion. She took an overdose of laudanum and shot herself in the head with a—fortunately—malfunctioning pistol. When the story was reported in the press, a mob threatened to hang Chaney, and he vanished from California forever.

You can find that Slate article here. Also, NPR affiliate KQED recently aired a Forum (with Michael Krasny), about the book's main subject, Jack London, with the author. Find that podcast below.



And in July of 2010, The Washington Post said this about the book: Texas historian James L. Haley's sharply focused biography recaptures the breadth of London's achievements and the intricacies of his personality. Haley reminds us that, in addition to fiction and polemics, London produced influential journalism, covering the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst syndicate, two of Jack Johnson's boxing bouts for the New York Herald and the Mexican Revolution for Collier's. (Haley's analysis of all three persuasively argues that London's racial attitudes, though hardly enlightened, were more nuanced than some critics have claimed.) Conscientious summaries of London's prolific output will probably not inspire anyone to seek out books other than the ones already mentioned; Haley's primary interest is the author's rich, complicated life, and his intelligently measured assessment of that life is the biography's greatest strength. Find that article here.

"The Master Switch": Is the Internet due for a takeover? - from Slate.com - by Laura Miller

In "The Master Switch," Wu assembles all of these stories and reframes them as battles in a shifting landscape of high-stakes industrial warfare, from Ma Bell's dastardly campaigns against small independent phone companies to the conquest of every aspect of the movie industry -- from talent and production to distribution and theaters -- by the ruthless moguls of the studios' heyday. He scrutinizes the postwar years when AT&T was treated like a shadow agency of the federal government, and recounts how the Machiavellian head of RCA, David Sarnoff, double-crossed an idealistic old friend to suppress the introduction of FM radio (a technology whose capabilities have yet to be fully explored) for decades. These industries -- "the defining business ventures of our time," according to Wu -- "have from their inception been subject to the same cycle of rise and fall, imperial consolidation and dispersion." Furthermore, "the time has come when we must pay attention" because we are now, with the Internet, "on the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has always begun to swing in the opposite direction -- toward greater control and centralization." And while Wu strives for balance, acknowledging that monopolies can provide seamless service, efficiency, high-quality content and sometimes even lower prices, his heart is clearly with the wild and woolly (if also sometimes scruffy) nature of the wide-open model that currently abides online.

Read Miller's article at the Slate, here. David Leonhardt at The New York Times' Sunday Book Review, also covered the book the other day:

It was one of the more extraordinary instances of Ma Bell’s involvement with Uncle Sam. The company owed its very existence to a favorable federal patent ruling in 1878, which saved it from an early death at the hands of Western Union, the dominant telegraph company then trying to crush its new rival. A little more than a century later, Washington broke up AT&T. But regulators soon allowed many of the company’s parts to merge back together. This consolidation, Tim Wu argues in “The Master Switch,” probably allowed the Bush administration to conduct its wiretapping program in secret for so long. AT&T is the star of Wu’s book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew.

Read that New York Times article, here. Also, a couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post sat down with the author, and offered this introduction to the author:

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University, author of the (excellent) new book "The Master Switch" and chairman of the board of Free Press. Oh, and he coined the term "net neutrality" in 2003. He spoke with me from Canada, where he's promoting his book, about the net neutrality rules that Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, outlined this week. A lightly edited transcript follows.

The interview focused on the issue of net neutrality. Read a partial transcript of that interview at the Washington Post. The Atlantic also covered the author, the issue of net neutrality, and his book (of course):

What Faulkner once said about the American South -- "The past isn't dead. It's not even past" -- is now true of tech and telecom policy as well. The perennial Great Divide in tech policy is about the merits of applying existing regulatory models to the latest technology. The question of the moment is about whether and how government should regulate Internet broadband. And the debate is now roaming into lessons-from-history thanks to a fascinating new book, The Master Switch, by Professor Tim Wu of Columbia Law School.

Pair Tim Wu with Gerald Sussman. Sussman is a bit more academic, in terms of reading. The book we're suggesting here, "Communication, Technology, and the Politics in the Information Age," can come off as heavy reading over the weekend. It's often assigned at media and sociology of science and technology courses at universities. Sussman is a friend of some of our editors, and a professor to others of ours. But other than that, and the pennies we get in affiliate income from "the bookstore," we're pairing Sussman because in this title in particular, you have something of a Michael Pollan about technology and industrial science here; that is to say, you're presented with a narrative context, enveloped in economics, statistics, historical facts, events, dates, about momentous waves and social patterns in Sussman; and you get this with the more contemporary take, by Tim Wu. It pairs a bit heavy to the academic side, but as is the case with most heavily academic pairings, it's a couple of titles that you can languish over, that you can reread, and reference over and over again, through the years. That's incredibly difficult to say about texts these days, that cover such pertinent, current, and relevant issues as net neutrality and public policies about technology and industrial sciences. See Wikipedia's take on Gerald Sussman, here.

Better Than Freedom from The Slate.com by staff writers and editors

Editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg's pick:

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. Weisberg's Law states that any Jew more religious than you are is mentally insane, while any Jew less religious is a self-hater. The Finkler Question demonstrates this rule's applicability in Britain, where the striations of Semitism have their own complications and subtleties. It centers on three old friends, one a goy who thinks he might be Jewish, one a Jew ashamed of Israel, and a third who thinks the other two must be nuts. Like Phillip Roth, to whom he is fairly compared, Howard Jacobson is a magnificent prose stylist who is often at his most serious when he is being uproariously funny. This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, is both a send-up of some very silly people, and an examination of Jewish identity in relation to rising tides of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I don't think you have to be Jewish to find it funny, touching, and troubling.

The book was also listed on one of The Guardian's "best of 2010" lists, in which it was said:

It was a great 12 months for the comic novel, with Howard Jacobson's uproarious investigation of grief, friendship and British Jewishness, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a Man Booker winner that surprised and pleased in equal measure. Reviewer Alex Clark found it "a terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water", bringing knockabout humour to bear on the most serious themes.

Read our post about that Guardian list for 2010 here.

Slate Contributor, Sara Dickerman's pick:

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I read The Imperfectionists: A Novel in one sleepless gulp. It is a novel, as the subtitle informs you, but a multifaceted one: Each chapter stands as its own finely wrought short story about one of the various employees (and in one case a consumer) of a once-revered international newspaper based in Rome. For a group of professional observers, the journalists have whopping blind spots—the fossilizing stringer has never gotten around to purchasing a computer; the lonely business writer decides to date the very thief who robbed her. Rachman's prose is wildly witty but never arch, and even as his characters tangle themselves into absurd predicaments, you can't help but sympathize with them.

Read The Slate's full best-of list here.

Don't fire people for confessing fear of Muslims. from Slate Magazine by William Saletan

Twenty-four years ago, Juan Williams wrote Eyes on the Prize, a companion volume to the documentary history of the civil rights movement. The book, like the series, focused on the movement's leaders. But it also explored white America's difficulty in absorbing racial integration. Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy struggled to reconcile the truth of the movement's principles with the challenge of holding the country together. Martin Luther King Jr. wrestled with Fannie Lou Hamer over the wisdom of compromising with the Democratic Party. When the Little Rock Nine walked into Central High School, onlookers shrieked and wept. It was a long, slow story of fear, debate, and transcendence. This is how we must understand what's happening today with American Muslims. There are obvious differences: Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. But millions of American Muslims who had nothing to do with those attacks, other than losing loved ones in them, are now paying the price in fear and suspicion. And this compounds the difficulty that Muslims, like immigrants and minority religions of previous generations, face in gaining acceptance. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released last month, Americans expressed a net unfavorable opinion of Islam (49 percent unfavorable to 37 percent favorable), and two-thirds opposed the construction of an Islamic community center near Ground Zero.

Read the full Slate piece here. See also: This Far by Faith: Stories from the African American Religious Experience, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary

Who is Mrs. Cohen from Hadera, and should Israelis care where she puts her money? from Slate Magazine by Daniel Gross

TEL AVIV, Israel—Amram Aharoni has a serious résumé, but he has the mien of a comedian. On Sunday at the Globes' Israel Business Conference, Aharoni, who teaches investment theory and finance at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, ran through his many qualifications—degrees from Tel Aviv University, a doctorate in finance from New York University, many years of experience in the financial sector—before throwing up his hands. "I'm supposed to be a specialist in the capital markets, but I want to confess that many times I know nothing. How can I not foresee the future and any junior analyst can tell me what's going to happen?" In laying out the modern case against active asset management, Aharoni name-checked the efficient markets hypothesis, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, and ran through a bunch of gems from the behavioralist playbook (like those surveys that show most people think they're above-average drivers). Aharoni assembled a series of analysts' quotes making foolish and wrong short-term market projections, and displayed a chart showing that out of a few dozen Israeli investment funds, only three beat their benchmark indices over eight years.

Read the full Slate article here.