Bout of Books Days 2, 3 and 4

I've been reading away, but without time to blog regularly for BoutofBooks  This is the official start of the spring semester in the U. System of Georgia, so blogging and challenges had to wait. 

Day 2:
On Monday 1/9, we had an official day off from the state because of the big football game possible ice storm and an "abundance of caution." I spent the day reading the classic work on analytical reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book. As my students noted, this book is very dated. It was first published in 1940, and its authors are notoriously Eurocentric. Nonetheless, the book still serves enough of a purpose that teachers still assign it, even to graduate students. I started assigning it because one of my students told me that she had read it after I commented on the noticeable improvement of her discussions of assigned reading in one of my classes. One of the things I like about this book is the way the authors describe the act of reading "There is the book, and here is your mind" - with a real affection for the cognitive acts involved in reading words on a page, for the relationship between book and reader as between student and teacher. It's hierarchical in some ways, as my students observed, but in the insistence that the reader learn to use only the tools of the mind on the book, rather than reaching for interpretive authorities to do it for him/her, it has a fundamentally democratic underlying principle.

Day 3:
On Wednesday, Jan 10th, to start the day I finished Dick Lehr and Michael Zuckoff's chilling and detailed Judgment Ridge. I'd had it on my shelf for a while, and used it to fill the Book Riot Read Harder challenge category for True Crime. I have a weird relationship with True Crime as a genre. I know it's lurid, voyeuristic and appeals to the worst morbid curiosity, and, as happened at the time that I picked up this book, I've often found it too compelling to resist reading. When I was in graduate school, I read several books by Anne Rule until I really couldn't stand her. Judgment Ridge, is a different sort of book from Rule's - more sociological than psychological, though the central premise in the end is that one of the killers is a sociopath.  To make sense of what seemed like a very senseless crime - two high school boys from a small town in Vermont randomly chose to go into the home of two Dartmouth professors and then brutally kill them - they describe the warmth and generosity of the victims, Half and Susanna Zantopp, who of course would welcome two high school boys into their home to help them conduct a survey on environmental issues. Most of all, they  describe the culture of small-town Vermont where the boys came from, in somewhat excruciating detail, as Goodreads reviewers have noted. Through these descriptions, we are supposed to understand the strange behavior of the boys (lazy, unaccountable, probably over-praised) and the community's failure to recognize the warning signs that two young murderers were on their way to a heinous act. The authors argue that Robert Tulloch was a sociopath who killed for pleasure and Jim Parker, who confessed in court, was the weak and insecure friend. The short version of the story is available in the New York Daily News, here. Cases like this one try my convictions as a prison abolitionist. From even a reform perspective, since they were very young when they committed the crime, they are people whose sentences should be much shorter than they are. At the same time, they had every advantage in life and, seemed to commit this crime out of sheer arrogance and lack of empathy. In a world without prisons and organized around different priorities, the hope is that instead of drawing praise and privilege, people like Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker would be subjects of much earlier intervention to stop them from victimizing others. The other thing that is notable in a case like this is that people are so mystified and shocked that young, white, middle-class boys would commit violent crime, since they are so "normal" and fit so many social ideals. The book does a good job revealing all the ways that our own "normal" ideals might have nurtured a sociopathic killer.

On Thursday, Jan 11th, I finished reading George Hawley's Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism. This book is a discussion of the ideological content of the US far right, written in a dispassionate style by someone who identifies as a conservative. It is interesting that those on the far right who are described in the book can be found across the internet describing it as a "liberal'or "left" book, when the author portrays the conservative movement as having been an effective check against the far right in the US, and can also be found blogging and contributing frequently to mainstream conservative publications. I found the book useful, even though the conclusion surprisingly underestimates the likelihood of increased popularity of white nationalism in the US, and dismisses the "manosphere" as a major force in politics.  I do agree with the author's assessment that libertarianism is the most likely large-scale conservative movement. Considering that the book was written in 2015, it makes sense that the author may have to revisit both positions in the wake of the 45th presidency and growth of the "alt-right." I look forward to reading his more recent book, Making Sense of the Alt-Right