Libra by Don DeLillo

I finished Libra by Don DeLillo last week. For some reason, I haven't been good about blogging recently (almost a month since I updated the dog's blog). Anyhow, I'm having writer's block at work and I thought this would help jump start it.

First, let me say that DeLillo is a master of the novel. He's able to do things with words that few others can. He seems to be able to shift the reader from one character's thoughts to another without any effort at all. I'm surprised he isn't a more popular and revered author.

Libra is a work of fiction about the plot to kill JFK. DeLillo takes care to note that this is a work of fiction and that many of the events and people are imaginary. But he does take on some of the primary players, mainly Lee Harvey Oswald. In DeLillo's world, the plot is hatched by former CIA operatives whose careers were ended or put on indefinite hold by the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Their thought was that Kennedy had let them down and abandoned Cuba. So what they needed was not to kill Kennedy, but to have a very realistic attempt on Kennedy's life that could be traced back to Castro's government. They were hoping for a "spectacular miss." From there the plot unwinds to include the mafia, Cuban expatriates, former FBI agents, private investigators, soldiers of fortune, and of course, Oswald.

Oswald is the focus of the book. DeLillo puts you in Oswald's head from the time he was a boy. He never felt comfortable, but always felt he was bound for something greater. This explains his dalliances with Marxism and his defection to the Soviet Union. But when he found that the USSR didn't provide him with any more opportunities than he had in the U.S., he arranged to come back (but not without complications). The CIA agents found Oswald and promised him better. Promised him that he could be a hero in Cuba. But of course, that's not how it worked out, much to the dismay of Oswald, the hatchers of the consipiracy, and Jack Ruby.

Finished The Men Who Stare at Goats on Wednesday

A little bit ago, I read and enjoyed Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists in which he interviews and follows around conspiracy theorists and other weirdos. So I decided to give his more recent book, The Men Who Stare at Goats a try. I wasn't disappointed. In this work, Ronson investigates many of the oddball parapsychology projects that the U.S. military and government undertook from the 70s through the 90s. Then he goes on to write about how many of these projects are indeed still be going on under the guise of the War on Terror.

Many of these projects involved such flights of fancy as mind control, the use of LSD to see if it could aid in mind control, use of subliminal messages, use of ultra and sub-sonic frequencies to try to cause pain and discomfort to the enemy, and the title of the book, where "psychic warriors" attempt to explode the hearts of goats just by staring at them and concentrating. One of Ronson's interviewees claims he was successful in killing a goat this way. Of course, none of these used proper scientific or ethical protocols.

As usual, Ronson writes with great wit and clarity. The book is funny, but disturbing. It's hard to imagine that we, the "good guys," are spending money on projects that not only are ethically dubious, but have no basis in science and no chance of working. In what we usually consider to be one of the most steely-eyed and results oriented segments of the nation, our military, it seems that superstition still has a very strong foothold.

Gave up on American Project

Sorry to report that I gave up on reading American Project by Sudhir Venkatesh. I was really interested in the subject matter, but the writing was just too dry.

Finished A Few Bricks Shy of a Load

Finished A Few Bricks Shy of a Load by Roy Blount, Jr. this morning. It's an account of Blount's year embedded with the 1973 Pittsburgh Steelers. I've been meaning to read this book for oh, say 25 years, and now I really wish I had read it earlier. It was superb. Blount really got into the heart of the team, which is to say, it seemed he really understood the players as people. Not supermen, no interchangeable pieces in a football puzzle, but as people like everyone else. He also did a fine job reporting on the ownership of the team, the Rooney family. He swore he didn't want to write a glowing review of the Rooney family, but that he couldn't help it. He felt a little defeated as a journalist that he couldn't find anything significantly mean or rotten about the family. Because Chuck Noll was cool to him, Blount never really was able to talk about the coaching much, but that didn't really matter. This wasn't a book of X's and O's anyway.

Blount covered many other important areas: race, drugs, the toll on the body, and locker room chemistry. All were done with a very fine and detailed touch. It's hard to remember a time in sports when steroids were legal, let alone not worth much of a mention. One of the linemen talked about how steroids helped him bulk up out of college but how his wife made him quit. That's it....one small mention. One has to assume that it was so common that it didn't warrant more attention. He did talk about players using amphetemines to get up for games and how some players didn't like that they couldn't smoke pot on the plane on the way back from road games but that they could drink beer.

It was also weird to read a book that had some Steelers I don't really remember well from my childhood. I had heard of Ray Mansfield being a great center, but I never, ever remember the Steelers without Mike Webster as the starting center...he was still in college. And Jack Lambert wasn't a Steeler in '73, he was a senior at Kent State. That was really bizarre. And stranger still, no Lynn Swann and no John Stallworth. They were still in college too. Four Hall-of-Famers that I grew up know as THE Steelers weren't on the team at the time. Noll had a helluva draft in '74 though, wouldn't you say?

Simply put, I loved this book. If it had just been about any football team, I'd have really liked it, but since it was my hometown team, I loved it.