Real

True Narratives

[Harriet Jacobs offered this droll observation about the dishonesty of American slave owners.]

Not far from this time Nat Turner's insurrection broke out; and the news threw our town into great commotion. Strange that they should be alarmed when their slaves were so "contented and happy"! But so it was. [Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Chapter XII, Fear of Insurrection.]

Narratives in book form:

• Janet Malcolm, Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (Yale University Press, 2011): the murder trial of Mazoltuv Vorukhova.
• Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer (Knopf, 1990): the Jeffrey MacDonald murder trial, a journalist and betrayal
• Stuart E. Eisenstat, President Carter: The White House Years (Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2018): Jimmy Carter told the truth about many things, especially our dependence on oil for engery. It was not what people wanted to hear.
• Jonathan Alter, His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (Simon & Schuster, 2020): “It exposes Carter’s weaknesses as well as his undervalued strengths, his reverberating failures as well as his unsung triumphs. Above all, it shows how the qualities that propelled Carter to the pinnacle of American politics also kept him from rising to his historical moment.”
• Kai Bird, The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter (Crown Publishing, 2021): “Bird blames Carter’s basic honesty for the fact that most Americans missed (the hard work and accomplishments) about his presidency.” [Blaming the messenger was easier than addressing the problems.]
• David Maraniss, A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father (Simon & Schuster, 2019): “ . . . Maraniss has used his prodigious research skills to produce a story that leaves one aching with its poignancy, its finely wrought sense of what was lost, both in his home and in our nation. It is at the same time a book that, like his family, never gives in to self-pity but remains remarkably balanced, forthright and unwavering in its search for the truth.”
• Philip Rucker and Carol Lennig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America (Penguin Press, 2020): “They’re meticulous journalists, and this taut and terrifying book is among the most closely observed accounts of Donald J. Trump’s shambolic tenure in office to date.”
• Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing: A Memoir (Little, Brown, 2020): “a purposefully named, brutal and brilliant retort to the asinine question of ‘Why now?’ What Crawford experiences at the hands of an esteemed institution with the money, power and connections to operate as a 'minor nation' is downright crippling.”
• Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (Liveright, 2020): “We need a prophet — a voice to call up the nation’s oldest stories, a reckoning with what was so that we might understand what is.”
• Richard Rhodes, Scientist: E.O. Wilson: A Life in Nature (Doubleday, 2021): “He eventually became an activist, one of the few scientists who dared to leave the comfort and security of the ivory tower. The trigger was, Rhodes explains, a report in the late 1970s, published by the U.S. National Research Council, which stated that the world was losing one species a day, rather than one a year as most biologists had previously believed. Rhodes describes how Wilson made it his mission to create public awareness of this mass extinction and loss of biodiversity.”
• Liz Scheier, Never Simple: A Memoir (Henry Holt & Co., 2022): “. . . Liz Scheier writes about life as the child of a master manipulator.”
• August Kleinzhaler, et. al., eds. The Letters of Thom Gunn (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “Gunn was not a confessional poet, but he spilled his guts in rowdy, funny, filthy, intensely literate correspondence.”
• Gary Indiana, Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984-2021 (Seven Seas, 2022): “It requires no genius to be disgusted with our culture these days, but Gary Indiana expresses his own disdain with a rare intelligence. The essays . . . are erudite, discomforting and often caustic — and almost always spot on, which is a little sad because they tell us such ugly true things.”

Some honest histories:

• Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper, 2003).
• Jill LePore, These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018s): “We need this book. Its reach is long, its narrative fresh and the arc of its account sobering to say the least.”
• Ilan Stavans, A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States (Basic Books, 2014): “The prose drives the narrative, and imagery enhances the view along the journey. The illustrations add emphasis to Stavans’s historical interpretation, often enlivened by comedic flourishes that leaven his message that 'America does indeed have an ugly side: When abundance becomes opulence, morality often falls by the wayside.'”

A free press as an indispensable part of an honest and open society:

• David E. McCraw, Truth in Our Times: Inside the Fight for Press Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (All Point Books, 2019): “McCraw is rightly proud of his role in defending The Times in so many controversies.”
• Carl Bernstein, Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom (Henry Holt and Co., 2022): “Carl Bernstein’s book, which is ultimately a eulogy for print newspapers, is a passionate reminder of exactly what is being lost.”

When dishonesty is or may be desirable, and ethical

• Matti Friedman, Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel (Algonquin Books, 2019): “At times, these first-person jaunts feel awkward, but others achieve their intent, to evoke a scene or individual more vividly. It’s a fine line, but over all Friedman succeeds in portraying the ‘stories beneath the stories’ that acted as bedrock to the rise of the Mossad and serve still as a window into Israel’s troubled soul.”
• John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds., The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison (Random House, 2019) “ . . . presents this writer in all his candor, seriousness, outrage and wit. Nearly all of these letters are previously unpublished. What brings them alive is that while they brood on the largest of issues — identity, alienation, the political responsibilities of the artist — they’re earthy and squirming with all the vital things of everyday experience.”
• Javier Cercas, The Imposter: A True Story (Knopf, 2018): when is lying ethical?

On the dark side, small scale:

• Mary V. Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017). “His final failing . . . was his inability ‘to tell the truth, even to himself.’”
• Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “Churchill, in this telling, was not just a racist but a hypocrite, a dissembler, a narcissist, an opportunist, an imperialist, a drunk, a strategic bungler, a tax dodger, a neglectful father, a credit-hogging author, a terrible judge of character and, most of all, a masterful mythmaker.”

On the dark side, large scale – misinformation and disinformation:

• Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020): “. . . a colorful history of modern Russian disinformation”.
• Cailin O’Connor and James Owen, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread (Yale University Press, 2018):”The purveyors of disinformation exploit certain basic cognitive biases. The most often cited is confirmation bias, which is the idea that we seek information that confirms what we already believe. . . . even scientists, who by definition are seeking the impartial truth, can be swayed by biases and bad data to come to a collective false belief.”
• Richard L. Hasen, Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics – And How to Cure It (Yale University Press, 2022): “Hasen . . . posits that the increase in dis- and misinformation is a result of what he calls “cheap speech,” a term coined by Eugene Volokh, a law professor at U.C.L.A. The idea is that social media has created a class of speech that is sensational and inexpensive to produce, with little or no social value.”
• Moisés Naím, The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21^st Century (St. Martin’s Press, 2022): “. . . the modern combination of technical empowerment and economic disempowerment has resulted in a frontal attack on a shared sense of reality.”

Documentary and Educational Films

• Street Fight, an exposé of Sharpe James’ corrupt and abusive political machine in Newark, and his electoral defeat
• The War Tapes: three U.S. soldiers record their tours of duty in the second Iraq war
• When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts: a documentary critique of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina

Technical and Analytical Readings

• Eric G. Wilson, Keep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015): on the value and limits of honesty

From the dark side:

• Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections On Self-Delusion (Random House, 2019): “She writes beautifully about her desire for self-transcendence and how it led her to writing, a tool she uses to understand herself.”