off the leash

The Postcard, Anne Berest

It’s 2003 when an anonymous postcard arrives in the mailbox of a French family. On it are simply four first names. They are the names of a mother, father and two of their children. All died at Auschwitz in 1942.

The postcard is the launching point for two stories. The first is the story of the Rabinovitch family. Refugees from Russia, they make stops in Latvia, Poland and Palestine before coming to France where they thought they’d be safe. This is a tale of Nazi-occupied France, a story of unbelievable cruelty and dehumanization. A story full of the crushed hopes and feelings of the four people who would be sent to the gas chamber.

The Rabinovitchs have one daughter who escapes. Miriam is Anne Berest’s grandmother. Yes, Anne Berest, the author of this novel, is the main character and narrator of the fictional story. The Robinovitchs are her ancestors. I turned back to the book jacket more than once to confirm I was reading fiction. I was. But it didn’t feel like it.

The second story is Anne’s quest to find who sent her mother that postcard. Was it someone’s cruelty? An act of remembrance? A lost connection? This part of the story reads like a detective novel, challenging the reader to put together the pieces. I didn’t.

Overriding everything else this is a story of anti-Semitism. It tells of how it spread through Europe in the 20’s and 30’s and the crude mentality that allowed Nazis to gain sympathizers even outside of Germany. Looking back it seems like there were warning signs that should have been heeded, but were they so different than the anti-Semitic incidents we hear of today, especially in America where all sorts of racists and bigots seem empowered to show themselves. Berest describes comments made to school kids in her family in 1925, 1950, 1985 and 2019.

This is also a story that explores Jewish identity. Berest the character in the book, and I have to assume the author as well, admits to never set foot in a synagogue, grew up in a family of two atheist parents and admits to a boyfriend that she has no idea what to do or say when he brings her to his family Seder. Yet her story is all about being Jewish.

There are so many moving and compelling parts of the story, but two I struggled to get past. One is simply the cover, a 1941 picture of Noemie Rabinovitch, either 18 or 19 at the time, one year before being taken from her family and murdered at Auschwitz. The other describes the scene at the end of the war when the survivors who had been taken to Germany are brought back to France, starving, bald, stunned and barely able to walk, while friends and relatives of people who disappeared during war desperately try to find their loved ones.

This is a brilliant novel. Both historic and contemporary, emotional and insightful.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe

The story starts with the patriarch, Arthur Sackler, one of three brothers whose father was a Jewish immigrant running a grocery store in Brooklyn. It starts as the stuff of the American dream. It ends as the embodiment of evil.

The initial Sackler fortune was based on the drugs Librium and Valium. Though he held a medical degree, Arthur Sackler didn’t discover or produce these drugs, he was the ad man who promoted them and did so with no regard for conflicts of interest. Ethics was not Sackler’s forte, either in business or in his personal life. At one point there were three women living in Manhattan going under the name of Mrs. Arthur Sackler. By the 1970’s Valium had become the world’s most widely used, and widely abused drug. Sackler assured that the drug was safe and was abused only by those who were predisposed to addiction. It was a line of reasoning that three generations of the Sackler family would use to deny any accountability for the devastating impact of their drugs.

The Sacklers and the pharmaceutical company they owned, Purdue Pharma, made their first venture into opioids with MS Contin. It was a morphine pill. The “Contin” part referred to the outer coating of the pill which enabled a timed release (another factor that the Sacklers pointed at to assure the safety of their offerings). MS Contin had two limitations when it came to feeding the family greed. Its patent was running out and morphine was widely viewed as an end of life drug. It is at that point that Purdue turned to another opioid, oxycodone, something described by the author as a chemical cousin of morphine and heroin. While oxycodone, the main ingredient in OxyContin, is more potent than heroin, the Sacklers/Purdue framed it as a pain medication for everyone, not just the dying.

Twenty-five years after OcyContin was introduced, 450,000 Americans died of opioid-related overdoses. Richard Sackler, the family member most active in prompting the drug, echoing line of argument used by Uncle Arthur decades earlier, once wrote, “The media has nefariously
cast the drug abuser as a victim instead of a victimizer.”

There were numerous enablers, lawyers, PR men, unscrupulous doctors, who own a share of the accountability. Some of those stories prompted the author to comment in the afterword, “I marveled at the mercenary willingness of a certain breed of ostensibly respectable attorney to play handmaiden to shady tycoons.” One was Rudy Giuliani (though he can no longer be listed amongst the respectable). After his term as mayor of New York, Giuliani set up a consultancy and one of his first clients was Purdue. Giuliani’s campaign was based on the theme that opioid abuse was a law enforcement problem not a pharmaceutical problem. And there’s the seemingly highly regarded consultant firm McKinsey which at one point counseled the Sacklers to focus their promotion on higher doses and longer term use in order to maximize profits. They didn’t have to be told twice.

Before the Sackler name became primarily associated with the opioid epidemic, it was known for the family’s philanthropy, starting with Arthur Sackler, who was an obsessive art collector. But philanthropy in the hands of the Sacklers is inseparable from ego and greed. Arthur once bought a whole collection from the Metropolitan Museum then donated it back to them. But only under the condition that the nameplate for each work would bear the notation “donated by Arthur Sackler.” Sackler reimbursed the Met for the original acquisition price of the art, but then when he did his taxes he claimed current value in order to juice his deduction.

This is a really well-written book. A thick volume on a heavy topic, yet a quick read. The research that went into it is massively impressive. The Sacklers are a secretive group that kept the family name off of the companies they owned and the products they produced. Purdue Pharma is a private company thus not required to disclose the kind of information that public companies must make available. One expects in a book like this to perhaps hear from former wives and disgruntled execs. Keefe goes way beyond that, reaching college roommates, admin assistants and even one yoga instructor.

It all ends with the comeuppance. Not the devastating financial blow one would hope for but enough to turn the perception of each family member as an indisputable pariah. One has to wonder if they all think the billions that they showered upon themselves was worth it. I suspect they do.

Paradise Falls: The True Story of an Environmental Catastrophe, Keith O’Brien

This is a story you’ve heard before. Large corporation is the lifeblood of the community, its primary employer and driver of the economy. But the blood is poison. And the forever chemicals that the company has spewed, flushed and dumped into the surrounding neighborhood produces cancers, birth defects, nervous disorders and miscarriages. The corporation refuses to be accountable and public officials try to look the other way. That is until the evidence becomes overwhelming and the media gets wind of the story.

This is the granddaddy of these stories. Love Canal in Niagara Falls in the 1970’s. The corporation is Hooker Chemical and the folks with the healthcare problems are young families who bought the modest starter homes that sit atop and surround the pool of contamination. People in Niagara Falls used to say that the chemical smell in the air was “the smell of money.” I read the same comment in another book, “Mill Town,” set in a town in Maine where the local paper mill was contaminating it with asbestos and dioxin.

Love Canal got its unlikely name from a huckster named William T. Love. In 1892 he got the state to approve his plan to build a canal and divert the Niagara River to produce electricity for the “Model City” he envisioned. The dig started, the economy tanked, the dig stopped and Love flew the coup. He left a big ditch filled with water, a ditch that Hooker would later fill with the drums of chemicals they were dumping. Believe it or not, the Board of Education bought the property for $1 in 1954 and proceeded to build a school atop the chemical dump.

What makes O’Brien’s story so compelling are the heroes of this tale, the Love Canal residents and a few local sympathizers who took on the corporation and called out the do-nothing local and state officials. There’s Lois Gibbs, housewife and mother of a son suffering from seizures, who organized the homeowners and proved to be a master of manipulating the media. She had neither the education nor the experience that would equip her to do this. Another Love Canal housewife, Luella Kenny watched her young son die of an ailment his doctors couldn’t diagnose, an ailment linked to the stream behind her house and the dioxin that was found there. Kenny flew to Los Angeles and faced down the arrogant, dismissive CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Armand Hammer. (Occidental owned Hooker.) Beverly Paigen, a scientist at a state owned laboratory who compiled and supplied much of the data that connected Hooker to the cancers and the miscarriages despite risking her job to do so. Her bosses were unhappy with the political difficulties her findings presented and tried to suppress her efforts and discredit her research.

There’s also a healthy dose of anti-heroes including two successive New York State Health Commissioners Bob Whalen and David Axelrod. The latter, in particular, seemed expert primarily at inventing excuses to explain why he was refusing to help the people he was charged with protecting. One Health Department ‘scientist,’ presented with Paigan’s data showing the pattern of ailments in the neighborhood, dismissed it as “useless housewife data.” You can add Gov. Hugh Carey to the list, a man who did his best to ignore Love Canal until election time came around.

It is massively impressive that 40-50 years after this whole episode took place, O’Brien is able to make the story come alive and bring the reader so close to the canal, the spewing gunk, the sick children and the outrage of the residents. Yes it’s an old story and yes you read about many others, but this is well worth a read. It’s tragic but it’s also uplifting.

Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez

When I started reading this book it was breezy and funny. It felt like putting on baggy casual clothes after spending the day in a suit. Then along comes things like AIDS and Hurricane Maria and suddenly it’s not so breezy.

Olga Acevedo is a Brooklyn woman of Puerto Rican descent who has built a wedding planning business working mostly for wealthy clients. Her brother Prieto is a closeted gay congressman. Their parents were political activists, members of the Young Lords. Their mother left them in search of a revolution while Olga was still a child. Their father became a junkie. And there were too many Tios and Tias for me to keep track of.

This is a story of politics, of history, of sexual identity and of female empowerment. There’s something of a love story as well, as we learn of Olga’s affairs with a soon-to-be famous rapper, the wealthy father of one of the brides Olga is planning a wedding for, and the hoarder she meets in a neighborhood bar.

The novel is confident and cynical, uncompromising but loving: exactly the characteristics of Olga. Above all else it is about family and community.

Xochtil Gonzalez’ writing is clear, concise and fast-paced. Others may use a lot of words to paint pictures of the setting and the landscape, Gonzalez focuses on emotions, dreams and regrets. Her characters are complex, occasionally self-destructive and prone to contradictions. Just like real people. This is a great story.

The Year That Broke America: An Immigration Crisis, a Terrorist Conspiracy, the Summer of Survivor, a Ridiculous Fake Billionaire, a Fight for Florida, and the 537 Votes That Changed Everything, Andrew Rice

The year that broke America? If you guessed 2016, you’re wrong. It’s 2000, according to author Andrew Rice. An easier question to answer is where did America break. Florida, of course.

What’s going on in Florida in 2000?

— There’s the hanging chad presidential election.
— There’s the international custody dispute over Elian Gonzales, the five year old boy who was the only survivor on a boat leaving Cuba for Miami.
— The terrorists who would fly passenger airplanes into the World Trade Center were training there.
— A government sting operation was offering arms sales to shady Pakistani operatives.
— Right wing conspiracy theorist Chuck Harder was on national radio stirring up anger and resentment.
— Governor Jeb Bush sought an end to affirmative action by executive order.

The cast of characters in Rice’s news/history includes George W. Bush, Al Gore, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, Dick Cheney, Janet Reno, Roger Stone and Donald Trump. It is uncanny how it seems everything that has plagued this country in the 21st century really got going in 2000.

2000 is the year when Donald Trump first got interested in running for President. He briefly posed himself as a prospective candidate for the Reform Party. He lost out to Pat Buchanan. Buchanan ran on an “America First” platform that included shredding trade agreements, abandoning allies, deporting ‘illegals’ and building a wall.

I always enjoy a good Trump story and Rice offers this one. After he bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985, Trump ditched all the books in the library and turned it into a bar. He then graced the walls with an oil painting of himself which he titled ‘The Visionary.”

Rice has a journalist background and was a cub reporter with the New York Observer in 2000. His writing reflects that background, full of facts and clearly laid out. This is a fast-paced read.

Eventually it is the Bush-Gore election that takes center stage. Did the outcome of the election set America on decline? I’m not convinced of that. But its impact was on the efficacy of democracy in America. There was voter suppression, threats of creating competing sets of electors and a decision ultimately made by partisan judges. This is an election in which one out of every seven votes cast by Black Floridians was thrown out. Reflecting on what has happened since, Rice suggests, “It seemed the system might never produce another president whose legitimacy was accepted by all Americans.”

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford

What is the first thing you think of upon mention of the Alamo? Bet you didn’t say slavery. But folks, that’s what the so-called Texas Revolt was all about. On one side, displaced slave-holding southerners heading to this part of Mexican territory, usually fleeing some reversal like indebtedness. On the other side, a decidedly abolitionist Mexican government.

As for the heroes of the Alamo, the authors of Forget the Alamo, have this to say: “(Jim) Bowie was a murderer, slaver and con man; (William) Travis was a pompous, racist agitator and syphilitic lech, and (Davy) Crockett was a self-promoting old fool who was a captive to his own myth. All were killed at the Alamo in 1836, although contrary to the legend, it appears Crockett surrendered and was then executed.

This story is partly about the actual battle and events leading up to it, but even more so about what has happened since, how the story of the Alamo has been told and what it means to different groups of Texans. It turns out that everything about the Alamo turned out to be a battle: its preservation and renovation, its place in Texas history and the state’s classrooms, even in the collection of Alamo memorabilia.

“Remember the Alamo” was indeed the battle cry that led to the success of the Texas Revolt by marshaling support and volunteers. That led to a brief period of independence during which the Republic of Texas became the only country ever to adopt a constitution that guaranteed slavery and prohibited emancipation. There were no survivors so storytellers could start with a blank sheet of paper. This led to what the authors refer to as the Heroic Anglo Narrative. It started with 19th century novelists and poets, went through several generations of historians and pseudo-historians and eventually culminated first in a Disney movie and then one by John Wayne.

When I see a history book that has three authors, I immediately fear some heavily-worded academic treatise with all the interest of a lengthy legal contract. These guys disavowed me of that immediately in the preface where they talked about Ozzy Osbourne urinating on the Alamo and relayed the Daily Mail’s description of drummer turned Alamo memorabilia collector Phil Collins as “one drumstick short of a pair.” This is a breezily written, interesting story. It’s also timely. As we hear of reactionary politicians and the people who follow them seeking to ban books and proscribe the teaching of everything from racism to climate change, we find here a good look at how that all works. This is, after all, a state that requires by law the teaching of the “heroic” version of the Alamo story. Pay no heed to the fact that it’s neither inclusive nor true.

-0-

The usual disclaimer: These books may or may not have been published in 2023. They are on this list because I read them in the past year.