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.

'No Labels' Political Movement Launches from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Today a new political movement is launching in New York City called “No Labels.” It’s ambitious. It’s inclusive. The crème de la crème of analysts and strategists are on board, as are former and current politicians of both parties as well as independent. But what exactly is "No Labels?" Here to explain is founding leader John Avlon, a senior political columnist for The Daily Beast, and the author of "Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America."

See the webpage for this show, here. Download the podcast here. See also: Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. Last week, a Washington Post opinion was blogged: "No Labels = No Content", by Jennifer Rubin. Rubin said this: The group is comprised of a lot of midterm losers (oops, mustn't label) and retirees. And while they decry name-calling, Avalon immediately denounced partisan loyalty as "cowardly." (Do these non-labelers put a dollar in the jar every time they use a label?) It turns out it's hard to operate without labels. "We're going to call ourselves the radical center, the people who care about results, not rhetoric," said former congressman Tom Davis. "Radical" and "center," Mr. Davis? For shame. The group says it has raised $1 million already. That suggests that people will spend their money on anything, or rather nothing. Really, why is disbanding "labeling" a virtue? It's a con job, really to demean those who have strongly held beliefs for which they rigorously advocate. That is, after all, what small "d" democracy is all about. So as for me, I'll stick to candor, truth in advertising and robust debate.. View that WP post here. Below is the launch video for the movement, which can be found on YouTube.

Hip-hop, money and politics are practically inextricable from each other.

In "The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop," author Dan Charnas traces how rap grew from its obscure roots in the ghettos of 1970s New York to its culmination as the world's predominant youth pop culture and a multibillion-dollar industry. The event that epitomized just how far hip-hop had come was the headline-grabbing partnership between the rapper 50 Cent and the upstart beverage company Glaceau, the maker of Vitaminwater. It may well have been the biggest deal in hip-hop history, propelling 50 Cent's personal net worth toward a half-billion dollars. In this excerpt, Charnas outlines how it happened. By the summer of 2003, 50 Cent's debut album, "Get Rich or Die Tryin'," had sold more than 5 million copies, and he was easily on his way to becoming a multimillionaire on these sales alone. But the rapper from Queens, who was born Curtis Jackson and had begun his career on the reputation of being shot nine times (a bullet was still lodged in his tongue), wasn't content to remain a recording artist. And his young manager, Chris Lighty, himself a Bronx street kid turned businessman, was well-positioned to exploit 50's stardom by creating multiple income streams. Lighty had come out of the Def Jam fold and managed such stars as Missy Elliott and LL Cool J. With Lighty, 50 Cent created the "G-Unit" brand, including a record company, a clothing company and a sneaker deal with Reebok's RBK line. The G-Unit Clothing Company was a joint-venture deal, with hip-hop-influenced designer Marc Ecko fronting the money, handling the manufacturing and distribution, and splitting the profits fifty-fifty with 50.

Read the full Dan Charnas article out of the Washington Post, here. A Chicago Tribune blog had this to say about the author and book:

Those who lament how money has sucked the creativity out of hip-hop haven’t been paying attention, Charnas argues. He says hip-hop has always been about finding a way to get paid, an art form that was driven by economic aspiration from the get-go, and proud of it (which made it not much different from rock ‘n’ roll). Like blues before it, hip-hop was basically a form of folk music, a community talking to itself through music made with readily available instruments. In the case of hip-hop, those instruments weren’t guitars but turntables and microphones. DJs honed in on key parts of dance records – break beats – and MC’s toasted or rapped over them at parties in parks, clubs and recreation centers. Out of these celebrations in the South Bronx and other destitute areas of New York City an intricate urban culture emerged that also encompassed break-dancing and graffiti art.

Read the Chicago Tribune article, here. Charnas contributed to this list of the biggest deals in hip-hop; see the list here. NPR's All Things Considered recently aired this broadcast on the author, the book, and the topics on the whole. See also: Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop--and Why It Matters

"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.

"Best of 2010 -- A look back at the year in books" from Washington Post by Stephen Lowman

Jan. 12 - Peter Biskind's biography of Warren Beatty arrives in stores with the extraordinary claim that the actor has slept with 12,775 women. Oh, and Biskind says that figure doesn't include "daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on."

Jan. 17 - Erich Segal, who broke the hearts of millions of readers with his novel "Love Story," dies at the age of 72. Published in 1970, the tale about the doomed romance between Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavilleri became one of the bestselling books of the decade.

Hold on a minute here, the first two books, off the bat, are about these hot and steamy, sort of cheap lusty gossip stories? Ugh, check out the rest of the list yourself, here. It's in chronological order.

Sen Says U.K.'s Brown Recognized Bank Problems Early On‎ Washington Post - 3 hours ago

8 (Bloomberg) -- Amartya Sen, professor at Harvard University, talks about former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's book, "Beyond the Crash: Overcoming ...

Read the feature story, at the Washington Post. See also: Jubilee on Wall Street: An Optimistic Look at the Global Financial Crash, The Day After the Dollar Crashes: A Survival Guide for the Rise of the New World Order, The Global Crash: Towards a New Global Financial Regime?, The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It