#3 The Big Short

The Big Short

By Michael LewisW.W. Norton, 2010I used to know a pair of aspiring plutocrats who’d occasionally trade books about rich investors managing, through their cunning, to get even richer. “He’s a very interesting guy,” the first would say, handing over the book with a knowing squint; “… he’s doing very interesting things.” The other would nod, knowingly. Even more then these backseat investors wanted knowledge of the market, or useful tips, they wanted a sense of being in on the deal, at the table, planning the big heist with their compatriots; and The Big Short is a book made with this kind of reader in mind. I wish I still knew those guys, because I’d be curious to know how they fortified themselves to read it through. They were not bad people, unlike every single person in The Big Short, all of whom are repellent, and all of whom – most disturbingly – are still at work in the financial world.As Michael Lewis shows, perhaps intentionally, all of the traders and hedge fund managers and analysts involved in the subprime mortgage fiasco and its worldwide meltdown are possessed of a crassness, crapulence, dishonesty, and most of all a cynicism that has real power to shock; this is true even of those characters I’m forced to guess were meant to be The Good Guys (“good” because they end up profiting in the end). “The fixed income world dwarfs the equity world … The equity world is like a fucking zit compared to the bond market.” So says a bond trader, one of the many we meet in this book.“All of them were, by definition, odd,” says Lewis, who attempts to draw these ghouls as Thurber might, with their mismatched socks and endearing tics. He’s not a bad writer, but his task might have been easier to perform convincingly if the creatures in question weren’t morally repugnant. I kept wishing this book were political, I kept wishing it were a call to arms. But it’s a caper story, and that’s why it’s selling out all over.In 2007 the world economy collapsed, as we all know. As we also know, this was due to the fact that big Wall Street investment firms had been brokering deals involving the extension of home loans to people who could not possibly ever pay them off. Once those loans were on the books, Wall Street firms figured out a way to bet on and bet against them and to profit hugely regardless of what happened. This is called hedging. The trouble here (aside from the fact that such loans even existed – for which you can thank both opportunistic loan sharks and the widespread mentality of what George W. Bush dubbed The Ownership Society) is that so many bets and hedges existed there was not enough money in the world to pay every gambler when the wheel stopped. Well then why would the house (or houses) allow so many bets? Because cynical and dishonest people had created an architecture of legal language and mathematics to conceal even from themselves what was happening so that there would be no deterrent. The most informed analyst, writes Lewis, “concluded there was effectively no way for an accountant assigned to audit a giant Wall Street firm to figure out whether it was making money or losing money.” One of Lewis’s characters is a one-eyed man, and he makes the obligatory “land of the blind” pun, but the joke falls flat.Again and again, we hear comparatively honest analysts voicing admissions like, “in the bond market it was still possible to make huge sums of money from the fear, and the ignorance, of customers,” or “that’s when I decided the system was really, ‘fuck the poor.’” Subprime lenders were even making equity bets on mobile homes – and mobile homes do not appreciate in value, ever. The reader doesn’t even know what to do with this information and so just keeps reading on, numbly.Lewis does succeed in explaining things well, as below, where he describes the safety of the economy as predicated not on a stable housing market or a rising one, but an irrationally rising one:

Since 2000, people whose homes had risen in value between 1 and 5 percent were nearly four times more likely to default on their home loans than people whose homes had risen in value more than 10 percent. Millions of Americans had no ability to repay their mortgages unless their houses rose dramatically in value, which enabled them to borrow even more … [analyst Eugene Xu produced] a chart illustrating default rates in various home price scenarios: home prices up, home prices flat, home prices down. [Investor Steve] Lippmann looked at it … and looked again. The numbers shocked even him. They didn’t need to collapse; they merely needed to stop rising so fast.

So a bunch of investors, who I suppose we’re intended to be rooting for, devise a shrewd way to bet against the firms that are betting on the subprime housing market (sort of) and wind up rich. How rich I can’t say, because after shutting The Big Short, numbers that end in zeros no longer feel real to me. And if a few hours of reading can have that effect on a reasonably intelligent and reasonably worldly person, I can only imagine how unreal those numbers seem to the people who push them around and tack zeros on. I don’t know how much money these people think is “a lot” or “enough” – maybe such sums don’t exist.I’ve read about bankers before and I’ve even been close friends with a few, but The Big Short showed me a world that was surprisingly dark and strange to me, and I feel more than a little sullied and unsettled by it. Everyone’s a “guy” and everyone’s on the make and everyone cusses and bitches as they lie. Lewis knows who they are and describes them well, which is to his credit, but he errs in trying to turn this world of sad and angry people into the setting of a goodtime caper story. Take the little anecdote that analyst Danny Vincent tells below. Read once, it’s fun; read for 250 pages, it’s not fun anymore:

When a Wall Street firm helped him to get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, [Danny] asked the salesman, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?”Heh-heh-heh, c’mon, we’d never do that, the trader started to say, but Danny, though perfectly polite, was insistent … And the salesman explained how he was going to fuck him. And Danny did the trade.

___John Cotter is an editor at Open Letters. His first novel, Under the Small Lights, was recently published by Miami University Press.

Read #4, Medium Raw, by Anthony Bourdain

#5 Sliding into Home

Sliding into Home

By Kendra WilkinsonGallery Books, 2010Kendra Wilkinson's name will be familiar to the many fans of her two reality-TV shows, The Girls Next Door and Kendra, and the story she tells in Sliding Into Home, her heavily-ghostwritten 90-page memoir, will be familiar as well: a pretty blond girl comes to the attention of Hugh Hefner, gets invited to live in the Playboy Mansion, is paid $1,000 a week for an occasional five minutes of sex with the octogenarian, has sex with and then meets a professional football player, gets pregnant and marries him, and tells everybody in the world every single detail of it all.Kendra has none of the qualities we naively associate with the writing of books. She is not intelligent – she appears, rather, to be almost unbelievably stupid. She's not well-spoken – her Facebook updates and Twitter posts strongly suggest illiteracy, and perhaps struggles with simple cognition. She's not particularly alive to the lessons her own life has tried to teach her – throughout her 90 pages, she constantly blames anybody but herself for every mistake or bad thing she's ever done. And she's not honest – the book has all the endless contradictions and evasions of someone who has never voluntarily told the truth about anything.“Even though I was always up to no good, deep down I had a good heart,” Kendra tells us, in the middle of her account of dropping out of high school in order to smoke, drink, cut herself, do meth, snort coke, and share needles with heroin addicts. She assures us she wasn't ever addicted or anything – “I just really, really liked how I felt when I was high. There's a difference.” True, her really, really liking drugs causes her to steal money from her mother, grandmother, and friends, and true, she OD's a few times, but the important thing is, it's always somebody else's fault. Like the time she tried out for a special traveling soccer team at school:

Despite the toll the drugs took, for the most part I was still a pretty good player. There was a traveling team that I really wanted to be on. It was expensive, and I knew my mom couldn't afford it, but I tried out anyway and made the team. When my mom told me I couldn't go, it was heartbreakng. When I realized I was stuck playing on the local team, my interest level dropped even further.

And why was it heartbreaking, when she knew all along her mother couldn't afford it? Because nothing, nothing in the world, is more important to Kendra than what Kendra wants. Like every other 'reality' TV star, she is a compact, ever-churning tornado of nauseating egotism. That there's a jostling crowd of consumers willing to make celebrities out of these idiots is not exactly an endorsement of our times.It's those consumers who are the audience for this booklet. Anybody else will be stopped on every page by the moronic inconsistencies typical of every bad liar. “Since I was always more comfortable around guys than girls, I never really knew if I was sexy or not … I really didn't know how others saw me – and to be honest, I really didn't care all that much,” she tells us, one page – 345 words – from “When I was in high school I was always dancing on tables and grinding on guys at parties. I would go to this all-ages club called Ice House and dance all night on stage, hogging the spotlight and winning all sorts of ass-shaking contests … I wasn't shy at all – I loved the attention, in fact.”And naturally, there are territorial squabbles with Hefner's other sex-toys. At one point, one of them starts to say rude things to Kendra on Hefner's private jet (or they aren't rude and it wasn't his private jet – the 90 pages contain a couple different versions):

“What the fuck, bitch?” I finally yelled. “Shut the fuck up!” She's lucky I was buckled into my seat or I would have knocked her out.“That's why I like you, Kendra,” she said. “You tell it like it is.” Then she started calling me chickenhead and a bunch of other names.I turned to Keith and said, “I'm going to knock this bitch out. Get your girl in check.”

Sliding Into Home is not a booklet written by a Playboy 'bunny' – as her hilariously straight-faced Wikipedia page informs us, Kendra was never officially one of Hefner's 'bunnies' (apparently, there are ranks even among whores – King David could've told us as much) – but it may be the closest we ever get to a book written by an actual bunny, a petty, petted, fluffy, brainless, ruthlessly self-absorbed gnawing creature accustomed to being kept on display, used for pleasure, and, if there's any justice in the world, discarded the instant it grows just a bit older.___Rita Consalvos works for an architectural firm in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and is a frequent contributor to Open Letters.

Read #6, Coming Back Stronger, by Drew Brees

#7 Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang

By Chelsea HandlerGrand Central Publishing, 2010It’s hard not to like Chelsea Handler, only you keep wishing she were funny. Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang is her third book to reach the bestseller list, and its essays are simply extended versions of monologues that might appear on her benign, endearingly low-budget, and unfunny talk show Chelsea Lately. Viewers of the show – TV viewers in general, really – will find its contents as undemanding as an hour surfing Youtube clips. Handler’s basic-cable entourage are all featured: her no-nonsense personal assistant Eva, her pale, mouth-breathing producer Brad, her amiable dwarf sidekick Chuy (pronounced Chewy), and so on. Their presence in her narratives keeps Handler feeling comfortable, and allows her to ramble on for the requisite number of triple-spaced pages in the inoffensive bantering style that has helped her stake a claim in the male-dominated field of late night television, and recently earned her a gig hosting the Video Music Awards (a performance that, sadly, was not well-received, owing to the fact that it wasn’t funny).Handler’s running shtick, in which her viewers and readers get to be complicit, is that she is supposed to be an edgy, unfiltered, bitch-on-wheels personality type. The truth, of course, is that all of her material would be perfectly at home on The View, that elephant’s graveyard of once-talented women. Here she writes about farting in public, getting “the feeling” as a young girl, drinking before noon. All of it seems like it may have been moderately shocking forty years ago, and that in turn lends her essays a warm sense of nostalgia, for the era of Bob Hope and Henny Youngman, when comedy was mannered, friendly, winking, and unfunny. The dedication in Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang just needs a rimshot: “To my brothers and sisters. What … a bunch of assholes.”Given the widespread toleration for the onetime “seven words you can’t say on TV” (and that the number one book on this bestseller list is called Shit My Dad Says), there are a surprising number of safe-for-work euphemisms throughout these essays – but that’s clearly part of Handler’s faux-wild girl appeal. Her first piece, about her discovery of masturbation as an eight-year-old, gives us the cutesy slang “hot pocket in a pita,” “magic muffin,” “baby bean,” and, a little out of place perhaps, “albino pincushion.” A later essay is mostly about how her dog Chunk is unable to take a “shadoobie” in her presence. Handler’s large family, characterized as unregenerate screw-ups, are adorably tame, squabbling in their Martha’s Vineyard beach house about God knows what, getting high and eating sandwiches. The drugs in this world are Vicodin and – be careful now – mushrooms.On occasion, Handler will venture her big toe over the line of political correctness, albeit in perplexing ways. “Hawaii bores me,” she writes. “There’s no nightlife, and whenever I’m there, I wake up at seven. If I wanted to wake up at seven, I’d adopt a black baby.” But before you’ve had time to puzzle over that newly-minted stereotype, she introduces us to her beloved chauffeur Sylvan (some of my best drivers are black!), whom she takes on an expensive beach vacation and pairs up with a sassy black woman named Wendy. “You white people are CUH-razy,” says Wendy, who didn’t even know about the ‘shrooms. The foil to all these yuks is Handler’s then-boyfriend Ted Harbert, who’s the CEO of Comcast and therefore, rather interestingly, the head of the E! network, which puts on Handler's show. But he might as well be Ricky Ricardo, as his roles include engaging in a dance-off with one of Handler’s exes and being the butt of a prank that was filmed and later aired on her next appearance with Jay Leno, our reigning heavyweight champion of comfortably unfunny comedy.Only the first two essays here, about Handler’s girlhood, show any semblance of having been written and constructed – the rest are more like slice of C-list celebrity life. But at one point she expresses what almost resembles a writerly ethos of a sort: “I am fascinated by anyone and everything,” she says, “especially if it involves a childhood story about an inappropriate uncle or obesity.” Human curiosity is not exactly a common trait in television stars, and that too must be what makes her such a likable commodity. I came away from Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang hoping she’d spend more of her capital on time for real writing about things that fascinate her. And maybe, in doing that, she’ll drop the whole awkward pretense of trying to tell jokes.___Sam Sacks is an editor for Open Letters living in New York. His book reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, and The Barnes and Noble Review, amongst other places.

Read #8, Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne

#10 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca SklootCrown Publishing Group, 2010In American criminal law, there is a doctrine called “the fruit of the poisonous tree.” In the 1950s, it was at the core of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: the idea that evidence, even very good evidence, if obtained through a violation of a suspect’s rights against warrantless searches and seizures, is poisonous to ordered liberty, and cannot be used against him. The doctrine is much in decline nowadays; when it comes to catching a murderer, the law sometimes finds that two wrongs can make a right.It is not only the law that has poisonous trees. In the 1950s, when American’s lawmen were weathering a period of judicial idealism, its doctors and researchers were a bit more lax. If they needed something to experiment on – say, a patient’s tumor, or even a patient – they did not stoop to ask permission. The result is that many of the discoveries that make our lives longer, safer, and more pleasant emerged from a complete indifference to consent.Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells to the story of one of these discoveries: the HeLa cell line, the world’s first immortal cell culture. This cell line has been and still is used in countless experiments, and was instrumental in the development and deployment of the polio vaccine. It also costs scientists millions of dollars annually. HeLa cells routinely contaminate samples of other things. Scientists in the 1970s announced amazing discoveries with regard to different types of cell tissue, only to learn that they’d been experimenting on HeLa the whole time.But where did HeLa come from? Building largely on first-person interviews , Skloot fills out a story that had only been traced in a few short articles, mostly in medical journals. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, complaining of a “knot” inside her. She and her family had farmed tobacco in Virginia for generations, first as slaves, then as sharecroppers. Many of them, along with Henrietta and her husband, moved to Baltimore in the 1940s, for jobs in the Sparrows Point steel mill. When she went to Johns Hopkins, Henrietta had just given birth to her fifth child, a boy. Another girl was still an infant; yet another was committed to a state hospital, with a diagnosis of epilepsy.Doctors were at first not overly concerned about her diagnosis: cervical cancer in situ. However, the diagnosis was wrong: she did have cervical cancer, but it was invasive and incurable. She died within months of her first visit to the hospital, just after her 31st birthday. Unbeknownst to her and her children, however, her doctor had taken a sample of her tumor on that first visit and sent it off to a researcher who was trying to perfect cell culture. Six months later, after her death, doctors persuaded her husband to agree to an autopsy, leading him to believe that it could help prevent his children from suffering a similar death. Skloot recounts the story, as told to her, of the lab assistant that first cultured HeLa cells from the biopsy taken on Henrietta Lacks’ first visit to the hospital:

Mary stood beside Wilbur, waiting as he sewed Henrietta’s abdomen closed. She wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but instead, she stared at Henrietta’s arms and legs – anything to avoid looking into her lifeless eyes. Then Mary’s gaze fell on Henrietta’s feet, and she gasped: Henrietta’s toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish.“When I saw those toenails,” Mary told me years later, “I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she’s a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we’d been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I’d never thought of it that way.

Henrietta Lack’s cancerous cells were the first to survive in culture beyond a few days. And then they kept right on dividing. They are still dividing. They never died. Skloot ‘s book tells their story, and more importantly, the story of Henrietta and the family she left behind. It tells how her children did not learn about her cells until decades after her death, when they were grown and had children of their own. Their mother’s death had deprived them of an advocate they sorely needed while growing up; to learn that she was in some way still alive and being experimented on, was a second loss and violation. And more violations were to occur: in the 1970s, researchers seeking to understand and combat HeLa contamination approached the family and had them donate blood for further cell culture experiments. The family thought it was being done to test them for the cancer that killed their mother.This sort of treatment, along with partial and error-ridden news articles that surfaced from time to time, misidentifying Henrietta Lacks as Helen Lane, or mixing up family members’ names and other details, left the family tired and suspicious. Skloot is keenly aware, throughout the book, of how much Henrietta Lacks’ family has been hurt by outsiders – predominantly educated, prominently white – who sailed in for a piece of the Lacks’ puzzle, and left without giving anything in return, not even an explanation. Skloot gained their confidence only slowly, and part of learning their story was allowing them to tell it – faithfully recounting their conversations and reactions both to her and the fruits of her research – but becoming part of it. In doing so, Skloot avoids becoming just another outsider; the book is richer for her attentive, humanistic focus on the relationships between the Lackses, and their alternating suspicion and acceptance of her. At all times, the book gives pride of place to Lacks and her family, letting them drive and shape the story. Here, Skloot recounts the conversation in which Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, finally agreed to talk with Skloot about her mother, almost a year after Skloot first contacted her:

[T]en months after our first conversation, Deborah called me. When I answered the phone, she yelled, “Fine, I’ll talk to you!” She didn’t say who she was and didn’t need to. “If I’m gonna do this, you got to promise me some things,” she said. “First, if my mother is so famous in science history, you got to tell everybody to get her name right. She ain’t no Helen Lane. And second, everybody always say Henrietta Lacks had four children. That ain’t right, she had five children. My sister died and there’s no leavin her out of the story. I know you gotta tell all the Lacks story and there’ll be good and bad in that cause of my brothers. You gonna learn all that, I don’t care. The thing I care about is, you gotta find out what happened to my mother and sister, cause I need to know.”She took a deep breath, then laughed.“Get ready, girl,” she said. “You got no idea what you getting yourself into.”

And Skloot gets into it, taking long road trips with Deborah, visiting Henrietta’s relatives in Virginia, meeting all of the Lackses and becoming treated both as an usurper and the possible key to shifting a load the family has borne for decades. Skloot also traces the history of the medical cultures and conditions that led to Henrietta Lacks’ unwitting donation of cells, and place in medical history. As Skloot describes, the scientists who took Henrietta Lacks’ cells and the others, a generation later, who took blood samples from her children were not rapacious or cruel. They were simply thoughtless. When Henrietta Lacks was being treated, the idea of informed consent was in its infancy. Instead, doctors believed in the “benevolent deception” of their patients.A generation later, serene in their own education, the doctors and researchers who experimented on Henrietta Lacks’ family could not even conceive that her sons and daughters did not know that cervical cancer can’t be inherited; that their mother’s cells were contaminating cultures all over the world, and that the identification of specific genes and other markers from her family’s DNA would better enable the testing of cultures for contamination. They didn’t bother to ask, so they didn’t find out that the family knew nothing of this; that every news item regarding her cells made them think their mother was out there, alive, being cloned, being experimented on, being tortured.At bottom, this book is not just about medical history; it is not just about science, or even just about Henrietta Lacks. It is about telling the truth. And in doing it, it does not trample on the right of Henrietta Lacks’ family to tell their own story. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks owns the many good and many terrible things that happen when we forget that each individual has their own story, their own dignity, and their own rights. It makes a poisonous tree a little less poisonous. And it is amazing.___Maureen Thorson is the author of three chapbooks: “Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor,” (flynpyntar/dusie press 2009), “Mayport” (Poetry Society of America 2006) and “Novelty Act” (Ugly Duckling Presse 2004). She lives in Washington, D.C., where she co-curates the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and runs Big Game Books, the tiniest press in the world.

#6 Coming Back Stronger

Coming Back Stronger: Unleashing the Hidden Power of Adversity

by Drew Brees with Chris FabryTyndale House Publishers, 2010Winning a Super Bowl entitles you to a book. I don’t have any problem with that. Win the Super Bowl and the quarterback gets a book, the coach gets a book . . . hell, if a running back is the MVP, then even he can have a book (sorry defense and special teams). It’s an optional revenue stream, like saying “I’m going to Disneyworld!” after the game, and a fairly innocuous one. People who don’t think these temporary heroes deserve a book are probably the same people who were upset when the game itself pre-empted Dancing with Rehabbing Celebrities or whatever, i.e., not sports fans.It is not expected that these trophy books be good. My assumed standard for an athlete’s topical memoir is that it be perfunctory. Everyone in professional sports has worked hard for a long time to get where they are. If someone’s performance in the championship game delivers the opportunity to tell his story, then I have every expectation that the story will be inspirational and serve as an example of how working hard and being a teammate can result in a big, just payoff. It wouldn’t hurt to throw in a little locker-room scuttlebutt either.Quarterback Drew Brees’ memoir and story of winning the Super Bowl XLIV fails to live up to any of my expectations. It’s not that his story isn’t inspirational. The man fought through incredible amounts of adversity, always with a positive attitude, to lead the recently-devastated city of New Orleans’ football team to its first-ever championship win. A better-than-perfunctory book was there for the making, no question. The trouble is with the ham-fisted way either he or his ghostwriter, Chris Fabry, tries to straddle the line between telling an inspirational story and force-feeding the reader a Christian self-help book. There is no leaving it up to the reader to take away the lessons of Drew Brees’ ability to overcome adversity here. You are point-blank instructed about how to apply Brees’ lessons in your own life:

If God leads you to it, he will lead you through it. Everything happens for a reason, and everything is part of his master plan. If you let adversity do its work in you, it will make you stronger. When you come out the other side, you may be amazed at the things God has allowed you to accomplish – things you might not have believed were possible.

His message is ridiculously insistent. Some form of the above-quoted sentiment isn’t just the conclusion of each chapter (though it is that too), it is the concluding sentence of every paragraph. Coming Back Stronger would be an excellent book for unexceptional middle-schoolers to practice identifying themes. And, in case anyone does manage to miss it (or needs to cram for the test), there is a handy cheat sheet: the epilogue is a bulleted list summarizing the pabulum that passes for battle-earned wisdom: don’t give up; turn your defeats into triumphs; finish strong.Even exploring something as mundane as crediting his physical rehab coach with helping him recover from shoulder surgery is first attributed to the powers of the almighty: “God gets the ultimate credit for healing my body, but as far as human beings go, Kevin deserves the kudos for my comeback.” Kevin is probably thrilled to get this shout-out from the Superbowl MVP, but I wish Brees recognized that God doesn’t really need those kudos right there. You get the impression that, given more space, Brees would first congratulate God for providing the gravity that facilitated Tracy Porter’s 4th quarter interception that sealed the victory. Tracy Porter can wait in line with the rest of the human beings.The book is also utterly humorless. In Brees’ world the only time football players talk to one another is to have earnest one-on-one conversations about duty and responsibility. Worse, descriptions of individual football games, ostensibly from Brees’ point of view, are less interesting than Monday morning write-ups on ESPN.com. They are so clinical and devoid of personal color, I am convinced that they were written entirely by Chris Fabry using news clippings and videotape. The whole NFL season prior to the one the Saints won the Super Bowl is covered in 10 pages.The Saints are incredibly popular in New Orleans, despite many years of playing terrible football, and winning the Super Bowl was extremely heartening for the residents still reeling from the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Drew Brees chose to play in New Orleans the year after the disaster, having spent the past year recovering from major shoulder surgery. So conflating the two comeback stories is a natural move for the narrative, subtlety being optional: “In a lot of ways, this city and I have had parallel journeys. New Orleans was trying to come back at the same time I was rehabbing my shoulder and trying to resurrect my career.” That said, once the story moves on from the initial decision to play in New Orleans, all further conflation of Brees’ career arc and the troubled city is handled with increasingly less tact. “Building a championship team is not an overnight process. It’s not all that different from the reconstruction after Katrina. You have to go through some pain and tearing down before you can get to work on the rebuilding process.”God is constantly molding Brees for greatness . . . by tearing a tendon in his knee and the labrum in his shoulder, by letting him get benched and shown the door by the San Diego Chargers, and even through the suicide of his mother at the start of the 2009 season. It gets to the point where Brees actually loses track of why he’s enduring all these setbacks, seeming to suggest that God was harassing him with adversity to prepare him for future adversity. “Looking back, I can see how [terrible, Job-like tribulation] helped prepare me for better things down the road.” The functional part of that statement is, “Looking back.” Having won the Super Bowl makes it much easier to say all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. For the rest of us, Brees’ how-to book on unintentional Calvinism is a lot harder to take seriously.___Jeffrey Eaton is a fundraiser, amateur photographer, and Open Letters editor-at-large. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Read #7, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang, by Chelsea Handler

#1 Sh*t My Dad Says

Sh*t My Dad Says

By Justin HalpernItBooks/HarperCollins, 2010The story behind this New York Times best-selling plotless, formless, uncrafted 90-page pamphlet is the kind of thing that could give hope to an entire San Fernando Valley of couch-dwelling stoners. In August of 2009 the pamphlet's chief marketer, Justin Halpern, was unemployed and living at home when he opened a Twitter account called “Shit My Dad Says” and started posting the off-color remarks made all day by his retired father. It happened to catch on, and by September Halpern had offers from publishers. In June it was #1 on the Times bestseller list. Simultaneously, it got made into a TV series starring William Shatner.In the span of barely a year, Justin Halpern went from being just another lazy twenty-something to being a famous, successful, independently wealthy lazy twenty-something, and he did it in the only way that matters to today's twenty-somethings: without trying hard at anything. He's a living, breathing refutation of every teacher's insistence that hard work and talent are the only paths to success. Want the lifestyle you've always dreamed about? Belt your girlfriend across the face, hard, in front of a camera somewhere on the Jersey shore. Swallow black market fertility drugs by the fistful so you can give birth to eight, ten, even a full litter of fifteen babies on camera. Or sit back and record your dad's preening, profanity-packed pearls of wisdom and make a pamphlet out of them.Those pearls of wisdom aren't particularly wise, and frequently (far more often than Halpern realizes, I'm guessing) they're the exact opposite of funny. During one 4-page episode (no point at all in calling them “chapters”), Halpern's dad sets his brother Evan up on a blind date. Halpern is confused that his brother doesn't object, and we get his very disturbing answer set to a laugh-track:

I was shocked that Evan didn't ask our dad more about her, but that's not his style. Later, when I questioned his reticence, he explained, “I sort of do what Dad says. You get mouthy with him, and then he yells at you. I always figured if you could stay the kid he yelled at, I wouldn't be that kid.”

Sounds all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it? Move around a couple of words, and you've got an excerpt from Hitler's Table Talk. And if that point isn't clear enough before the blind date, there's always dear old dad's reaction afterward to ponder:

“She's out of my league! It was humiliating!”My dad looked down at the floor and mumbled quietly to himself “out of your league?” over and over, like he was Indiana Jones trying to figure out if what a weird tribal person had told him right before he died was a clue. Then he exploded.“That is complete fucking bullshit!” he screamed.

The pamphlet has about a dozen episodes interspersed by blocks of the dad's prized one-liners. On Puberty: “How do I know you're going through it? Oh I don't know, maybe it's the three hundred dick hairs you suddenly leave all over the toilet seat that clued me in.” On Furnishing One's Home: “Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if someone walks past it they want to steal it.” On Living on a Budget: “You make dog shit, so don't spend any money.” It goes on like that. 90 pages starts to feel long.I'll bet you money – solid cash on the table top – that prior to 2009, Halpern thought many times, “You know, I really ought to get off my ass and write a book about my dad and the crazy stuff he says.” But writing an old-timey book requires drafting and plotting and revising and typing, and Two and a Half Men is on in only 45 minutes … It's lucky for Halpern Twitter came along (and that it's free to join).Not so lucky for the rest of us, who now have to deal with the inevitable ratings success of the Shatner sitcom, who have to deal with the spin-off “Sh*t My Dad Says” greeting cards and T-shirts and coffee mugs, and with the endless sequels and the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Book That Started It All!” Not so lucky for the world, which will now be inundated with "Twitterature" transcribed by lazy morons looking to exploit something all the way to the bank.“Son,” dear old dad asks Halpern at one point, “do I look like the type with a master fucking plan?” Hell no – who needs those anymore?___Tuc MacFarland currently lives north of Seattle and writes regularly for Open Letters.Read #2, The Obama Diaries, by Laura Ingraham

#8 Empire of the Summer Moon

Empire of the Summer Moon

By S.C. GwynneScribner, 2010I naturally looked at this whole endeavor with trepidation. After all, the latest reading-polls of adult Americans are not promising. Fewer and fewer adults are reading at all, and those who are have definitely grown lazier over the last four or five decades. A glance at the very Nonfiction Bestseller list we're dissecting this time around seems to confirm the worst: three of the top slots are occupied by wide-margined 100-page pamphlets of no intellectual merit whatsoever.The gods of reading must be watching out for me this time around, however, because I drew a winner, a book that would have stood out against far, far stiffer competition: S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon is both a superb work of history and a fast-paced, gripping narrative on par with the some of the smartest historical fiction on the market.This is the story of Quanah Parker, the half-breed Quahadis Comanche (Gwynne informs us that the Quahadis were the most reclusive and warlike of that whole reclusive and warlike people), son of the famous Indian abductee Cynthia Ann Parker (“the white squaw” as she was nicknamed when it became common knowledge that she didn't want to be “rescued” from her captors) and a Comanche brave. Quanah Parker rose to the status of a prominent war-chief by the early 1870s, when several U.S. Army groups (including that led by Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, the book's other central character), were commanded to either kill him or bring him and his followers onto a reservation. The command was understandable, since Parker's Comanches had been terrorizing the wave of settlers let loose on the West in the wake of the Civil War. And the terror itself was understandable, since those settlers were invading the tribe's immemorial homeland with the intent to possess it.Gwynne sees both sides of this much-vexed question – Manifest Destiny versus aboriginal destruction – and one of the many wonders of his book is its complete lack of sentimental shadings in either direction. When the U.S. Government is guilty of stealing from the natives (which it actually, literally always was), the stealing is called stealing, nothing else. And when the Comanches and other tribes are guilty of exorbitant cruelty toward their white captives (they weren't at first, but they warmed to their work), it's detailed unflinchingly. And everywhere in the book is Gwynne's unerring ability to dramatize events without compromising them; he's a present-day expert at the craft pioneered by Prescott and Parkman and perfected by Morison and Catton:

At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a succession of unearthly, high-pitched yells. Those where followed by shots, and more yells, and suddenly the camp was alive with Comanches riding at full gallop. Exactly what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled with the screams and gunshots and general mayhem of the camp was another sound, only barely audible at fist, then rising quickly to something like rolling thunder. The men quickly realized, to their horror, that it was the sound of stampeding horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of “Every man to his lariat!” six hundred panicked horses tore loose through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at full speed. Lariats snapped with the sound of pistol shots; iron picket pins that minutes before had been used to secure the horses now whirled and snapped about their necks like airborne sabres. Men tried to grab them and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the horses …

In telling the story of Quanah Parker, Gwynne has found the perfect focal point from which to expand in all directions with other stories. We learn a good deal about the sweaty pathologies infesting many of the men who became legendary Indian-fighters (none of them comes off well, although one of them became a legend and two of them became President), we live through the harrowing Great Plains campaigns right alongside the ordinary troopers whose memoirs and letters Gwynne has studied, and of course we come to know poor Cynthia Parker, often through reports in the press of the day (Gwynne's bibliography and end notes reveal endless hours sequestered with dusty old newspapers, but there isn't even a small whiff of tedium in the end results):

Texans could not get enough of her. There were many newspaper accounts of her return, all of which were uniformly obsessed with the idea that a pretty little nine-year-old white girl from a devout Baptist family had been transformed into a pagan savage who had mated with a redskin and borne his children and forgotten her mother tongue. She was thus, according to the morals of the day, grotesquely compromised. She had forsaken the virtues of Christianity for the wanton immorality of the Indian That was the attraction.

The conflict at the heart of Empire of the Summer Moon could only have one ending. A fierce, expertly-mounted nomadic warrior culture was confronted with an invading force of homesteaders protected by a fierce, expertly-mounted warrior culture and possessed of the one unbeatable quality: endless numbers. Once the big game on which the Comanche life-cycle utterly depended was exterminated, once wagon-trails and railway lines were driven into even the most remote sectors of the West, the result was inevitable. Gwynne knows this better than anybody; there are no rosy sunsets in his book – instead, there's the bitterness of defeat and the indelible shame of the conquerors.What on earth such a book is doing on the Bestseller list of 2010 America is beyond my power to speculate, but I'm glad of it, glad there's at least a chance this fantastic book is being read and enjoyed by the wide audience it deserves. It's a masterpiece; at a stroke, Gwynne becomes one of our best historians.___Steve Donoghue is a writer and reader living in Boston with his dogs. He’s recently reviewed books for The Columbia Journal of American Studies, Historical Novel Review Online, and The Quarterly Conversation. He hosts the literary blog Stevereads and is the Managing Editor of Open Letters.

Read #9, Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

#4 Medium Raw

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

By Anthony BourdainEcco/HarperCollins, 2010There's a chapter in celebrity chef/food critic Anthony Bourdain's new book Medium Raw about his life-expanding and heartwarming experiences as a new father, and the book is dedicated to his new wife, who's the subject of many an aria of besotted praise throughout the text – so readers familiar with Bourdain's scorching prior works (especially the delightfully exasperated and infinitely quotable Kitchen Confidential) could be forgiven for thinking this latest book might be a more laid-back affair, more given to homespun yarns than blood-splattered feuding.Those readers will be sorely disappointed by Medium Raw, but they'll be the only ones. This book is a hoot from start to finish; celebrity foodies might not be nice people (celebrity foodies cannot, by definition, be nice people), but some of them sure do write snarky books. And the snarkiest of them all is Bourdain, who cultivates an aura of seer and scold. He has a sharp wit and a bottomless penchant for profanity (he's so fond of one in particular that it's surprising the book wasn't called Medium Fuck), and any collegiate feeling he might have for fellow food-stars is limited to the people he actually likes. This has an absolutely marvelous benefit: fully half of Medium Raw is one celebrity attacking, mocking, and lampooning lots of other celebrities. If Brad Pitt wrote a book like that, I'd buy it.The slash-and-hackery starts right away, with a playfully bouffant depiction of an icy boss he once acquired while working for the Food Network – a soulless corporate type that will be ruefully familiar to anybody who's had an evil manager walk into their workspace:

Ms. Johnson was clearly not delighted to meet me or my partners. You could feel the air go out of the room the moment she entered. It became instantly a place without hope or humor. There was a limp handshake as cabin pressure changed, a black hole of fun – all light, all possibility of joy was sucked into the vortex of this hunched and scowling apparition. The indifference bordering on naked hostility was palpable.

And given how entertaining Bourdain can be, it's an added attraction when he starts throwing his knives at a fellow writer. The most ballyhoo'd example of this is his long-standing clash with influential GQ food writer (and, pace Bourdain, first-rate prose stylist) Alan Richman. That clash is brought to life in all its tawdry glory in the chapter titled (spoiler alert!) “Alan Richman is a Douchebag,” and it's the highlight of the book.In fact, the only real shortcoming of Medium Raw is one it shares in common with all Bourdain's other books: our author knows a great deal about food, a great deal about cooking, a great deal about writing vigorous prose, but next to nothing about himself. When he cites the attitude problems of famous food-celebrities, he cites them as though he were watching specimens in a petri dish, creatures with whom he himself could have nothing in common. A little of this can be charming, in a 'boys will be boys' kind of way. But page after page of it can put the reader in a decidedly 'physician, heal thyself' frame of mind. “I'm a romantic, I guess,” Bourdain says at one point – and you want to stab him with the nearest cooking utensil. Here's a description he gives of one particularly decadent eating experience he had recently:

On 59th Street, at a fancy Italian joint and fortified with Negronis, you're ready for a good meal – but you're not ready for the little cicchetti that arrive unexpectedly at the table: little pillows of sea urchin roe sitting atop tiny slices of toasted bread. Wonderful enough, one would think, but the chef has done something that goes beyond mischievous, possibly into the realm of the unholy: melting onto each plump orange egg-sac is a gossamer-thin shaving of lardo, the lightly cured and herbed pork fat made in marble caverns in the mountains of Tuscany, slowly curling around its prey, soon to dissolve. You hurry to put it in your mouth, knowing it's surely a sin against God – and are all the happier for it. It's too much. Way too much. Beyond rich … beyond briney-sweet. Beyond decency. You call the waiter over and ask for more.

To put it mildly, that isn't a romantic speaking. Little pillows of sea urchin roe sitting atop tiny slices of toasted bread? That, ladies and gentlemen, is a cynic, as bad, bored, and monstrous a cynic as anybody this side of Monty Python's Mr. Creosote. Bourdain writes often in this book about the simple joy he finds in eating good food, but that passage (and there are many like it) could only have been written by somebody who hasn't experienced simple joy at a supper table in a long, long time.But all interesting food-writers have their shortcomings (Elizabeth David's passive-aggressive self-pity is far more annoying than anything in this book), and Bourdain is allowed his own. It's a small price to pay, after all, for the treat that is Medium Raw.___Amanda Bragg Amanda Bragg is a florist living in Baton Rouge. She writes regularly for Open Letters.

Read #5, Sliding into Home, by Kendra Wilkinson