Review: Jen Psaki SAY MORE

 

 Psaki’s 2024 book is subtitled “Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World.”  There is no ghost  writer listed and it reads as a group of suggestions about the nature of communication in general and political communication in particular. There is no muss, no fuss, no interminable length. Her focus is positive and reflects a quote from the early pages.  “People who are drawn to public service want to be part of a greater good—it isn’t about them as individuals, but how they can contribute.”      

 

Her practical advice is on the money.  I liked “Do the task you are dreading most first. Then everything that follows will feel easy.”  Another favorite was to admit to yourself that you can’t be good at everything. Locating your weaknesses can go a long way to make successful corrections as you move through life.

 

Often her suggestions focus on the particular problem of being a political spokesperson. She says it is difficult to reflect your bosses’ views accurately without letting your personal views creep in. She rues the ease with which disinformation and violence can be spread in today’s social media.  If an attack is personal to you as a spokesperson, then use it to remind yourself that if you got so much under the skin of your adversary they felt the need to attack you with lies, you may be on the right track. Also defending yourself strongly from these kinds of attacks can be counterproductive. I note here that Kamala Harris has been able to use a laugh and humor to sidetrack personal slanders thrown at her. 

 

Good communication doesn’t have to be loud or long. One descriptive and emotional human interest story is often worth more than a string of statistics. For all communicators, but especially spokespeople, you must know your audience. You can’t craft a good  message or response if you don’t know who you are speaking to. Do your prep. Anticipate objections and have answers ready. Own up quickly to mistakes. It helps to be a better listener because then you can read the content and body language as it comes at you.

 

She claims the successful political communicator has to build bridges where none exist. I grant you there are adversaries who want no bridges and are concentrating on filling the river with crocodiles, but one way to build a bridge is to speak humbly about hardships you might have had that they also may have faced.  Just present yourself as human and flawed just as they are.

 

Her best advice was “Don’t take the bait!” When you get questions like “Many are saying”, “Some say”, or “Critics are saying”, your best option is to respond with a question rather than launching into a refutation. i.e.  “Can you tell me more about who they are?  Can you attach a number to apply to your question? In other words “How many is some?” or “Who are they?” There is a difference between your golf foursome and a clutch of twenty foreign heads of state.  

 

She closes by emphasizing that good communicators are optimists at heart and they keep on thinking that connection is possible and something positive is attainable. She also successfully steers clear of the contemporary political scene. That means you can pick up some good ideas regardless of your party. The book is a long way from being a candidate for a Pulitzer Prize, but does give you a bit of a look at the development of a political junkie. It is not exciting, but the advice is pretty solid.

 

I give it a 3.5 out of 5

Review: Daniel Silva A DEATH IN CORNWALL

 

Daniel Silva’s latest spy thriller, A Death in Cornwall, is every bit as good as his last ones. In this outing, Gabriel Allon, Israel’s semi-retired spy chief and part-time art restorer, is asked to help solve the murder of a well-known art authenticator. The trail leads out of the art world and into the world of billionaire oligarchs who hide their wealth in layer after layer of foreign shell companies and often use the acquisition and trading of valuable paintings as a part of their tax evasion schemes.

 

I am still in awe of how expertly Silva knits his plots and brilliant humor together as Allon and Ingrid, his kleptomaniacal computer guru associate, weave their way through all of Europe including London, Cornwall, Paris, Marseille, Corsica, and Venice at breakneck speed. Silva seems to know in acute detail every local wine and food preference as well as every road turn and railway and flight schedule to get you to the next destination. I give you one example. As the violent climax nears, one of the attacking duo asks the other what is in the rucksack he is carrying. The answer is “night-vision field glasses, two Glock pistols, ammunition, a couple of secure phones, and a box of McVities.” The sidekick asks, “Dark chocolate?” And the answer is “Of course!”  To which the reply is “I’d kill for one.” Only immaculate research, an eye for word play, and vast experience can come up with that exchange.

 

Interspersed with the action is the main theme, which is as up-to-the present as today’s evening news. It is stated baldly by the cashiered former MI5 villain Robertson when he tells Allon, “Your implacable sense of right and wrong is admirable, but I’m afraid it’s rather out of fashion at the moment. The truth is there is no right and wrong any longer. There is only power and money.” 

 

I give it a full-throated 5 out of 5 for its genre.

 

 

Book Review: Smolder by Stuart Woods sort of.

 

Mr. Woods is another of those hyper-prolific authors that turn out books like a plastic extrusion machine.  They are quick reads and even more quickly forgotten. There are about thirty of them in the Stone Barrington series alone. 

In this one Barrington, an obscenely rich lawyer, spy, serial lover, and son of a famous artist finds that an old enemy wants to humiliate him by purchasing or stealing his mother’s valuable paintings and then burning them.  At the bottom of the rotten art world, the fancy cars, the right wines, the casual affair minded women, and the equally casual killing is just another tired formula thriller.  Oh, did I mention! Mr. Woods is dead and some other hack is carrying on the torch.  “Old writers never die: the heirs just want more money." 

.5 out of 5  

Stacy Abrams Rules of Engagement

 

Abrams has written other novels under the name Selina Montgomery. It would appear this re-publishing under her now more recognizable name as a Georgia prosecutor is intended to squeeze more money out of a losing proposition. This story of super spies tracking down a doomsday weapon goes nowhere fast.  Every other page is full of hyper-sexual panting with no return on your investment. I finally quit around p. 100 with the jousting still underway and no real interest developed in the characters or the apparent plot.

Into the trash pile and give it a rating of

 Zilch out of 5   

 

The Conditions of Unconditional Love by Andrew McCall Smith

 

Alexander McCall Smith writes books (a lot of books) and they are the kind that are needed when you are under duress and ready to shout “STOP” to the universe.  There is a soothing quality about his prose and the characters who utter it.  The villains are more pompous or unconscious rather than evil and the good folks always seem to be able to solve their problems by practicing some element of unconditional love. That keeps them and you going.  

This brings us to Isabel Dalhousie the main character in McCall Smith’s The Conditions of Unconditional Love. She is well-off, happily married with two children, and the editor of an academic philosophical journal. She says early on, “. . . we have to accept people for what they are and not spend our time looking for perfection in them.” Now, according to her husband Jamie, Isabel also has a penchant for taking on the troubles of the people around her.  He would like her not to do that, but she is persistent and he finally gives up and just watches. For the reader, it is exactly those gently quirky and often humorous problems that draw you in.  

Four troubles are featured in the book. Isabel’s scholarly nemesis has tried to set up a conference that will result in giving him a way too large a paycheck for organizing it. Second, her husband has suggested offering a spare room to a woman who has run into a bad patch. Third, Isabel is maneuvered into participating in a book group comprised of women who hate each other.  And finally, her niece, Cat, has had another troublesome love affair. These problems throw a monkey wrench into Isabel’s normally comfortable and ordered life. By the end, each has been put into the rearview mirror. Isabel feels better. Her husband Jamie is happier. The troubled person or persons feel better and McCall Smith has worked his erudite, poetic, and gently humorous magic once again. He is the ultimate feel-good author.

I give it four out of five.   

 

 

 

Book Review Anne Hillerman LOST BIRDS

I fell in love with Tony Hillerman’s books a long time ago. When his daughter Anne picked up the franchise after his death, I was not expecting a lot. Sequels written by children or ghostwriters often fall short. Lost Birds is now Ms. Hillerman’s ninth book featuring the familiar characters of Joe Leaphorn, Bernadette Manuelito, and Jim Chee whom her father created. I can say unequivocally I have transferred my membership in the Tony fan club to his daughter Anne. Most of her first eight books increased the stage time given to Bernadette Manuelito and her husband Jim Chee (Cheeseburger) with Joe Leaphorn retired but lurking in the background as a helper.  Lost Birds now brings him back into well-deserved prominence.

It opens with Leaphorn receiving a phone call from a Navaho, Cecil Bowlegs, who asks for help in locating his wife. She had been working at the Indian School where Bowlegs was a janitor and now has vanished. Before the call can be completed, a loud explosion cuts it off.  The explosion pretty much destroys a building at the school and inside it is a car that contains a body. Bowlegs fears the bomb was aimed at him because he was in arrears on some gambling debts and goes on a runner himself.  Meanwhile, Joe Leaphorn has another client who has been adopted out of the native community and is now trying to re-find her roots. She is one of the lost birds alluded to in the title. While Leaphorn looks for Bowlegs and tries to help the woman, Chee, and Manuelito become involved in the bombing investigation and apparent murder. In another subplot, Leaphorn’s significant other meets with her estranged son and finds that pulse-pounding danger can lurk even for elderly cops and their loved ones.

The tragic history of the "lost birds" is the glue that holds all this together. It added new information for me. I was aware of the problems with Reservation Schools of the past that tried to eliminate tribal history in favor of Western European culture, but I had little knowledge of the program that removed Native children from their natural tribal communities and offered them up for adoption by Non-Native couples.  

No Hillerman book, father or daughter, would be complete without a reverence for the Dine community and the land on which they live. If you have traveled to the Four Corners area or even if you have just seen pictures of it, you will find Anne Hillerman's geography faithful and her description of the land as captivating as her father's. I recommend you start her series now and bet you will be hooked and start looking for copies of the first eight as soon as you finish this one. 

Definitely a 5 out of 5

 

 

Book Review of ORWELL'S GHOST by Laura Beers

 

Orwell’s Ghost-- Wisdom and Warnings for the 21^st Century by Laura Beers--

I happened upon this title in the Marion Library and it reminded me that I had not read 1984 in some fifty years. I also had been seeing his name and books bandied. All sorts of talking heads and essayists seemed to be shouting that this or that is “ Orwellian”.  I wondered what that label meant to modern readers.

First, it does carry enough meaning to still place 1984 on best-seller lists in multiple languages some seventy years after its publication.

Second, I re-learned that George Orwell was a pen name and not his real name. That was Arthur Blair. His father was an imperial administrator in India and Arthur had a pretty typical upper-middle-class childhood,  which included pricy prep schools and the very upper crust Eton. Critical to his later development, he did decide to eschew Oxford or Cambridge and went instead off to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s.

Third I learned that Orwell was a major-league misogynist. He had little use for women even though he married two of them. He expected them for the most part to stay home, do housework, and take care of any children. He wrote reams about the plight of the working man, but had little to say about the working woman. In the same vein he was also adamantly against any and all forms of abortion. 

Even though he was not a very pleasant human being, his philosophy on government holds up well. He considered the “will to power” universal and believed it could exist on the left or the the right political spectrum. His indictment of totalitarianism in 1984 is alive and well in 2024 and the work remains readable today even though in his time his main attacks were aimed at colonial empires and Communism. Today we can easily see that cancel culture, disinformation, and fake news are just new names for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth?

Our present access to the internet may have increased our individual powers, but along with that has come increased surveillance capacity on us by the state and multinational corporations. In his day Orwell never reached the point where he claimed freedom could exist without some form of restraint. There must be some social responsibility to speak the truth.  As Ms. Beers said, “Freedom is the right to say 2+2=4, but not to claim that 2+2=5.”  A life can be censored and someone who continues to insist that 2+2=5 cannot be tolerated. “Double think,” Russia calling its invasion of Ukraine “a special operation” for instance must be corrected.  The scary thing about information today is that an idea deplatformed in one space can find plenty of alternative spaces on which to continue. .   

Give it a 3 of 5  Not for all souls.