Ninety-Two in the Shade 

By Thomas McGuane
Published 1973
208 Pages

This was one of two books I read for the latest meeting of The Mules (my book club). I’d never read McGuane before, but Ninety-Two in the Shade came recommended from one of our younger members who’s got a sharp eye for good books, so I figured why not give it a shot. And it was worth it! But while I enjoyed it, most of the others didn’t. Outside of the guy who picked it and me, only two gave it a thumbs-up. The rest found it so annoying they couldn’t even finish it. We’ve had our disagreements before, but this was one of our biggest splits yet.

What It’s About 

Ninety-Two in the Shade is the weird tale of Tom Skelton, a young man from an old Key West family who returns home to become a fishing guide. But this isn’t your typical Hemingway adventure. Tom lives in an abandoned airplane fuselage, has a carefree schoolteacher girlfriend named Miranda, and navigates a town full of misfits. His family is a mess: a bitter grandfather with shady past, a father crippled by a failed blimp factory and a failed whorehouse, and a mother who just keeps cooking through it all. At the docks, Tom gets into it with two other guides, Nichol Dance and Faron Carter. After a prank turns into a serious feud, Nichol threatens to kill Tom if he ever tries to work as a guide. The tension builds from there.

What I Liked About It 

The whole book gives off a kind of wild, humid darkness that feels both literary and lethal. It’s like Hemingway if he’d been hanging out with early Cormac McCarthy, but with more jokes thrown in. McGuane’s sense of language is razor sharp. His sentences sparkle with cynicism and poetry.

Some standout elements:

* The whole setup is soaked in fatalism – Skelton’s choice to go forward with life despite a death threat feels like a metaphor for something bigger.

* The characters are vivid, strange, and memorable: the bedridden father who smells like Faulkner, the scheming grandfather, the girlfriend with her shifting morals.

* The subplots – like Goldsboro’s secret affair or Jeannie’s obsession with baton twirling – make the book feel lived-in.

* My favorite lines include: “It’s just that when you realize that everyone dies you become a terrible kind of purist” and the opening salvo, “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic…”

What I Didn’t Like So Much 

The plot can be hard to follow, and some scenes feel less like storytelling than stylistic exercises. That didn’t bug me, but several members of The Mules found it frustrating – enough so that they didn’t finish the book. If you need everything spelled out clearly with a tidy ending, look elsewhere.

Critical Reception 

* “Thomas McGuane makes the page, the paragraph, the sentence itself a record of continuous imaginative activity…. He is an important as well as a brilliant novelist.” – The New York Times Book Review

* “A fine novel by an extraordinarily gifted writer…. His prose is vivid, ironic, filled with surprising and revealing insights.” – Washington Post Book World

* “Few writers have explored our national malaise as persistently – or as elegantly – as Thomas McGuane, a writer whose command of the language has helped define our American loneliness.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

The novel was nominated for the National Book Award.

Interesting 

* McGuane was the first American novelist to adapt and direct his own novel as a feature film.

* While married to one of the film’s stars, he reportedly had an affair with another actress during filming. That tells you something about the energy behind the writing – wild, impulsive, a bit unhinged.

* The vibe of decay and eccentricity in Key West – especially in the family manse – feels like an ode to the ruined South, but without the nostalgia.

My Rating 

* Verticality: 4.4 – Sharp commentary on character, fate, and Southern decay.
* Horizontality: 4.1 – Narrow setting, but deeply explored.
* Literary Richness: 4.7 – Sentence by sentence, it dazzles.
* Average Score: 4.4

* Bonus Points: 0.2 – For being so strangely unforgettable.
* Total Score: 4.6 out of 5.0 – Strongly recommended, but not for everyone.

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs 

By Ian Leslie
Published 2024
368 pages

I’m still in the middle of this one, but I’m recommending it anyway because I already know it’ll be hanging out on my nightstand for a while – a chapter here, a chapter there. I didn’t need to finish it to be sure I was going to enjoy it. Ian Leslie is a psychology writer, and here he brings that background to bear on a compelling theory: that the emotional power of Lennon and McCartney’s songs grew directly from the emotional force of their friendship.

What It’s About 

At its core, the book is a study of collaboration – how two imperfect, gifted teenagers met, merged, and created the most iconic songwriting partnership in modern music. Leslie traces the evolution of their bond from a Liverpool bedroom to the world stage, using close readings of the songs themselves as milestones in their deepening – and eventually unraveling – connection.

What I Liked About It 

The Beatles were, and probably still are, my favorite band. Their music was the soundtrack of my adolescence and remained important to me into my 20s, even as I developed other musical loves – Simon & Garfunkel, Otis Redding, Richie Havens, Cat Stevens. So naturally I was drawn to a book that revisits the Beatles’ early days with a fresh angle: that the secret to their genius lay not just in talent, but in the emotional synergy between two complicated young men.

Some of Leslie’s best insights:

* Lennon and McCartney, even as teenagers, weren’t content to copy American R&B acts. They wanted to be heard.

* Their first encounter was electric – Paul playing “Twenty Flight Rock” for a skeptical John, who was quickly won over.

* From the beginning, they dreamed not just of performing, but of writing songs like their idols – Leiber and Stoller, the Gershwins.

* By the time they were singing face-to-face in some dingy Hamburg club, guitars mirroring each other across a mic, their musical chemistry was unmistakable.

Leslie is especially good when he explores how early trauma fueled their creative output. Both boys lost their mothers while still in their teens. Those wounds were deep – and unspoken – but they haunted and shaped the music. The emotional weight in songs like “We Can Work It Out” or “Two of Us” hits differently when you understand the losses underneath them.

What I Didn’t Like So Much 

Not much. I didn’t share Leslie’s relatively generous take on Wings, and wish he had gone deeper into some of Lennon’s post-Beatles solo work. But these are preferences, not criticisms. The prose is smart but never precious, and the emotional tone stays grounded even when the subject is mythic.

Critical Reception 

* “We think we know everything, but author Ian Leslie proves otherwise. His new book, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, is, astonishingly, one of the few to offer a detailed narrative of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s partnership. And it’s a revelation.” – Los Angeles Times

* “A celebration of the convoluted, beautiful, and tragic nature of a songwriting partnership that still reverberates across the universe.” The Wall Street Journal

* “Leslie does an extraordinary job of providing context for familiar anecdotes, and there are many that will feel surprising.” – USA Today

Interesting 

* Leslie calls “She Loves You” a miracle of structure and energy that’s “easy to miss because its effect is so immediate.”

* The intense way Lennon and McCartney locked eyes – during early jam sessions and even later acid trips – is portrayed as both an artistic tool and a strange kind of intimacy.

* On the night after Lennon’s assassination, McCartney’s flat public remark – “It’s a drag, isn’t it?” – is reinterpreted by Leslie as the stunned voice of a bereaved child, emotionally mute.

* One of the book’s most moving scenes describes how John and Paul, during one of their final sessions, record “The Ballad of John and Yoko” by themselves – just the two of them, one last time.

My Rating 

* Verticality: 4.5 – Deep insight into emotional themes and collaborative genius.
* Horizontality: 4.7 – Rich cultural context, personal narrative, musical history.
* Literary Richness: 4.4 – Smart, clear, and occasionally poetic prose.
* Average Score: 4.54

* Bonus Points: 0.3 – For shedding light on the emotional interior of two icons.
* Total Score: 4.7 out of 5.0 – Strongly recommended.

My Rating System for Most Books 

Each book is evaluated – from 0 to 5 – in terms of three categories:

1. Verticality – How deeply did the book go in mining the depths of the human experience?

2. Horizontality – How much and how well did the book provide a sense of a particular place, time, community, and/or culture?

3. Literary Richness – How well did the writing enhance the story?

I calculate the book’s average score – and sometimes, as you can see in both of my reviews today, I add bonus points for something I felt was especially good.

Then, based on its total score, I deliver mv verdict.

The Tipping Point:
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

By Malcolm Gladwell
Originally published in 2000
304 pages

I read The Tipping Point soon after it was first published. It was a book about how social and cultural phenomena come about – and how values and mores change.

The author, Malcolm Gladwell, was interested in “big” issues like crime and racism and education. But he introduced his thesis with several simple examples, one of which was how “desert boots,” a shoe that was first produced in 1949, gradually expanded its market reach until it seemingly suddenly became enormously popular in the 1960s… had a revival in the 1970s… and, eventually, more than 10 million were sold.

As I said, the book was meant to be about social and cultural change. But for me, it was a brilliant insight into mass marketing, much like Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

What I Liked About It – and Why I’m Still Recommending It

The core idea – that trends start on the fringes of a social system and gradually move towards the center until, at one point, they explode in popularity – wasn’t entirely new to me.

But what The Tipping Point gave me was an explanation as to why, in every industry, dozens or even hundreds of competing businesses spend years and millions of dollars on marketing campaigns with similar themes that see similar results – and then, suddenly, one of those campaigns takes off like a rocket and leaves everyone else in the dust.

It also explained why so many creatives in marketing and advertising – copywriters, marketing directors, and campaign managers – are always complaining that their competitors are “knocking off” what they believe to be their original ideas.

And finally, it explained why, when marketing breakthroughs are achieved and the “geniuses” behind them are asked how they came up with the ideas, they don’t have good answers. It’s why many of them say it was just timing and luck.

Though I had been successfully marketing products and services for 25 years when I read the book, it changed the way I thought about marketplace competition and the true value of “great ideas.”

Since then, I’ve given dozens of speeches, written dozens of essays, and had hundreds of interactions with marketing people trying to explain the power of what Gladwell calls the “tipping point” – that it’s not the idea itself that is the secret of the phenomenal marketing success stories we are all familiar with. Because just before a marketing idea seems to explode out of nowhere, there are dozens or even hundreds of smart marketers testing out the very same idea.

Critical Reception 

The reading public has loved everything that Gladwell has written, especially The Tipping Point, his first book. Often mentioned: his “journalistic curiosity,” “meticulous research,” and “engaging storytelling.” The critics, however, are not as enamored.

* “To the intelligentsia, Gladwell’s an oversimplifier on his very best day; on his worst, a conspiracy-theorizing spinner of mass delusion.” – Wired

* “Malcolm Gladwell… master of the let me take you by the hand prose style, dealer in the simple and unmistakable thesis…” – The Atlantic

Gladwell responded to such criticism in The Guardian, saying, “If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: You’re not the audience!”

And as one critic noted in Slate Magazine: “[All of this criticism] brings me back to the question of why Gladwell matters so much. Why am I, an academic who is supposed to be keeping his head down and toiling away on inaccessible stuff for others to bring to light for the masses, spending so much time on reading Gladwell’s interviews, reviewing his book, and writing about him? I think that what Malcolm Gladwell says matters because, whether academics like it or not, he is incredibly influential.”

Here’s Gladwell doing a TED Talk about The Tipping Point. (Watch Time: 17 min.)

Ten magazine articles and/or journal essays that either changed my mind or deepened my opinion on something that matters to me:

Education

1. Kids’ reading, math skills are worsening. 
What’s going on? 
Kayla Jimenez in USA Today
Read it here.

Economics 

2. Five People I Refuse to Take Seriously 
Garrett Baldwin in Postcards from the Republic
Read it here.

3. The Number of Hours Americans Must Work to Afford Their Mortgages 
Elizabeth Beauchamp in Today’s Homeowner
Read it here.

Domestic Politics 

4. John Fetterman Admits What No Democrat Wants to Say 
Tara Palmeri in The Diligent Fox
Read it here.

Society & Culture 

5. PBS Disappears DEI Department in Wake of Investigation 
Josh Code in The Free Press
Read it here.

Geopolitics 

6. Make the Ukraine Truce, Then Cut Europe Loose 
David Stockman in David Stockman’s Contra Corner
Read it here.

7. Inside Russia’s Torture System for Ukrainian Prisoners 
Thomas Grove in The Wall Street Journal
Read it here.

 
History 

8. Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch’s Hammer): 
A Manual of Terror in 16th Century Europe 
Editorial Staff of Historic Mysteries
Read it here.

Health 

9. Cancer Deaths Rose in Japan in 2022 and 2023 
(post-mRNA shots) 
Alex Berenson in Unreported Truths
Read it here.

Puzzles & Games 

10. The Asian Game of Mahjong
Which Creates Order Out of Chaos,
Is Trending in the West
Claire Turrell in Smithsonian Magazine
Read it here.

Monkeypox and the Monkeypox Vaccine: A Brief History 

In the Aug. 19 issue, I wrote briefly about Monkeypox, a virus that some health officials are predicting might spread as fast as COVID-19 but with a lethality rate 10 times as high.

There was a time – and not terribly long ago – when I would have considered such a news item to be a scary fact. But now, after researching so many of the early “facts” we were given about COVID, I’ve become suspicious of any sort of news or analysis that comes from the world’s major health organizations, and especially the WHO, the NIH, and the CDC.

Here is Meryl Nass, the astonishingly prolific scientist/researcher on viruses and vaccines, tracing the 20+ year history of the Monkeypox virus and the vaccine developed to combat it, and explaining why she calls it Monkeypok$.

Antisemitism Watch: Inside the Campaign to Blacklist “Zionist” Therapists 

A therapist on a professional listserv in Chicago posted a request for a therapist who was a Zionist because the potential patient was dealing with feelings about the “current geopolitical climate.” Apparently, this is a common practice – not only to use these professional platforms to make and accept referrals for patients, but also to indicate a preference for a therapist of a particular ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.

One member of the group responded by saying, “I’ve put together a list of therapists/practices with Zionist affiliations that we should avoid referring clients to.” She added: “Please feel free to contribute additional names as I’m certain there are more out there.”

And the situation escalated from there.

As psychiatrist Sally Satel writes in The Free Press:

There are two stories here. The first, no less troubling for being obvious, is that trying to prevent clinicians who support the existence of Israel – or are Jewish, or have Jewish-sounding names – from treating patients constitutes a grave breach of professional ethics.  Interfering with the work of colleagues for political reasons is unconscionable.

But the blacklist is also part of a larger drama unfolding within the world of psychotherapy as more and more clinicians insist that psychotherapy is, foremost, a political rather than a clinical enterprise. It is a trend that I, a psychiatrist, find alarming.

Read more here.

“Terrible Racists” 

Joel Bowman, an acquaintance and colleague who writes Notes from the End of the World, recently attended a family reunion in Pigeon Forge, TN, a town of just over 6,000 people. Spending an evening in town one night, he and his wife, he says, were “confronted with some truly awful racists…”

Read his account of what happened here.

Escaping the Madness: Two Hikes into the Wilderness 

It’s been a crazy few weeks after three years of drama cooked up by Big Medicine, Big Government, and aided and abetted by Big Media.

As a mental dip into a refreshing mountain stream, The Free Press published this essay written by Elias Wachtel, who, as an intern for the publication in 2020, escaped from the COVID and political hysteria by deciding to disappear for a while and hike the entire 2,193-mile length of the Appalachian Trail.

And if that puts you in the mood to read another escapist adventure, here’s my account of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in February 2010.

“I Do Not Need to Defend Myself for Believing That Political Candidates Should Be Chosen Democratically” 

I was going to write something like this and publish it as a Special Issue. But Freddie deBoer, the smartest leftist in the country, beat me to it.

Eight Quick Bites 

Since K and I set off to Japan on June 24, I’ve not read a single book or watched a movie. Now that my speeches and meetings here are done, I’m hoping to get back to writing movie and book reviews. In the meantime, I’ve written mini-reviews of various newspaper articles and magazine essays I’ve read on trains and in cars, shuffling from one place to another, which I found – for one reason or another – worth recommending.

* The Boycott Against Israel 

The anti-Israeli protests and rallies that were ubiquitous among Western colleges and universities since the beginning of the year have diminished considerably since the summer recesses began, but the efforts by academic and cultural groups and institutions to support Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism by boycotting everything Israeli – from Israeli technology to Israeli consumer goods to Israeli participation in educational and cultural events – are stronger than they have ever been this summer. And according to this essay recently published by the WSJ, those boycotts are being felt far and wide in Israel.

Read Time: 12 min.

* The Case for Kamala Harris 

In this piece published recently in Slate, Jill Filipovic, argues that Kamala Harris would be a great replacement for Joe Biden, but she fears that the American public is too racist and misogynist to elect her. I’m recommending it not because I think it has any merit, but to illustrate the almost astonishing detachment from reality and pre-adolescent logic it takes to make an argument like this.

Read Time: 8 min. (but you may give up after 2 or 3)

* AI and the Future of Books 

“Scraping” is a term that describes the process of feeding massive amounts of diverse data into AI entities. When R.O. Kwon discovered that one of her books had been scraped from a book data site that some AI models were trained on at the time, she felt cheated. She realized that not only was her work taken from her without compensation, but that all sorts of elements of her creativity, including her diction, sentence structure, grammar, and literary style were being gobbled up, too. “It’s potentially the biggest rip-off in creative history,” says Douglas Preston, a bestselling author and one of the plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit filed against Microsoft and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Click here.

Read Time: 55 min.

* Returning to the Music of Natalie Merchant 

“Just around the time I was introduced to Natalie Merchant’s music, Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994) made cultural waves as an exposition of girlhood and adolescence,” Jenny Boyar writes in this LA Review of Books essay about Merchant’s effect on her life, including a theme she sees in Shakespeare’s depiction of Ophelia. There’s no doubt that Merchant’s primary audience has been young women, and particularly those swept up by leftist social causes. But I was a mid-forties, politically middle-of-the-road man when I first got hooked by her. I can’t say Boyar’s insights helped me understand my attraction to Merchant, but they do shed light on why and how she had such an effect on so many smart, young women of that time.

Read Time: 18 min.

* Big Pharmacy-Benefit Managers 

I believe I’ve heard the term before, but I forgot or never understood what it meant. Benefit managers are businesses that corporate health plans and employers hire to manage drug benefits for insured employees. They are supposed to be working for the good of the employees they give advice to. But according to the FTC, they are steering patients away from perfectly effective medicines and therapies that are inexpensive and towards others that are more profitable to them. To the tune of $1.6 billion.

Click here.

Read Time: 14 min.

* Should Businesses Offer Well-Being Days? 

Can you improve the mental health and attitude towards their work by giving employees days off to restore their mental health? In this article from Raconteur Daily, two experts debate the pros and cons. Can you guess which one I agree with?

Read Time: 4 min.

* Why Does NATO Exist? 

I don’t agree with the argument Dan Gardner makes in this essay in support of NATO, but he does a good job of laying it out from an historical perspective. In a future issue, I’ll give you my thoughts. Meanwhile, I thought this was worth reading.

Click here.

Read Time: 11 min.

* An Alternative Education 

In the most recent issue of Doug Casey’s International Man, Jeff Thomas recommends to a young woman what she should do instead of going to college next year.

Click here.

Read Time: 4 min.

By Percival Everett
320 pages
Published March 19, 2024

James – a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave – was The Mules book selection for June. And when I started reading it, I thought, “Oh boy! Here we go with another woke narrative.” Which is to say that, though the reviews were overwhelmingly laudatory (“Gripping!”… “Thrilling!”… “Genius!”… “Masterpiece!”… etc., etc.), I was prejudiced against it from the get-go.

There were sections of the novel that didn’t pass muster for me in terms of what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative” – a concept in literary criticism suggesting that the emotions of a character should be expressed through external objects, a situation, or a chain of events that can evoke those emotions in the reader. But as I moved through it, I was caught up in the plot itself, which is always the most important (and for the author the most difficult) part. Then I began to admire Percival Everett for his undeniably high marketing intelligence – i.e., creating a novel that would have Huckleberry Finn, one of the most loved and accomplished novels in American fiction, serve as a springboard for the success of this book – and his equally impressive literary skills.

James is a novel that aimed to be not just a bestseller but also a literary award winner, both of which lofty goals Everett achieved.

But here’s the thing… it had a remarkably divisive effect on The Mules, with half the group strongly liking it and the other half disgusted by it. We’ve had plenty of disagreements over books before, but I can’t remember the opinions being so neatly divided and so strongly felt on each side.

I liked more about James than I disliked – and since I consider my opinion the correct one, I can recommend it to you without qualification. But I found it interesting that 100% of those that hated the book had read it, while 100% of those that liked it had listened to it.

I thought about that later that night, and sent this email to the rest of the group:

I have, as some of you know, produced three movies. The first was terrible. The second was bad. And the third was “not bad.” (But not good.)

Despite the low quality of two of the three scripts (which I wrote), I did discover something about acting that surprised me. I noticed that most of the actors that tried out for a part somehow managed to emphasize the badness of my lines, but there were a few that somehow made them work.

I had been a devotee of the auteur view of cinema: that the director is the one and only person that can make a movie succeed or fail. But this experience taught me what a difference good acting can make.

So, it might be that the actor(s) on the audio version of James were good enough to make the lines that didn’t work for those of us who read the book believable to those of us that listened to it.

That’s my two cents…

What I learned about medical “meta studies” in this essay by Toby Rogers obliterated the naïve trust I’ve had in them.

“All people of good faith should be troubled by the information I lay out below,” he writes. “It took me eight years to figure out how to describe this problem and it’s massive – it threatens the very existence of humanity.”

Read on here.