The distance was a bit of dissonance in this case. I attended a book signing and speaking event for an author who lives just a few miles north of where I do. But the book in question had reach around the globe, and the story opened with a scene in Congo - where the author was on board a rickety plane that looked to be about to crash.
He is Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and for years before that a for4eign correspondent for the newspaper. Obviously he survived the rough landing and, just afterward, he pulled out his satellite phone and called his wife. The idea was to tell her he was okay, but when she came on the line, he decided otherwise: The story was best told in person.
Except, that soon afterward his wife got a call from the home office in New York which included the comment that people there were happy Nick had survived. Oops. The lesson after that, Kristof recounted, was: Immediate transparency about important events is helpful in a marriage.
Kristof's memoir, Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life, is packed with stories about things learned in the field. He's Harvard and Oxford-educated, but much of what he recounts here - and a lot of the book is devoted to the practical work of researching and writing about places around the world, many remote and some of them extremely dangerous - which plainly constitutes its own form of grad school.
Some of that relates to how to get the work done (how, for example, you get past checkpoints filled with armed soldiers when you're in the4 country illegally). Some of it relates to how people live in places extremely different from the United States (the hazards of introducing himself in certain locales) by his nickname).
But some of it too comes from what you learn when you're on the ground and can see for yourself - which can look a lot different than it does from a distance. That applies not only to distance places in Africa and Asia but even to his home town area around Yamhill, where many of the problems facing parts of rural America can come into sharp focus.
There are plenty of reporter memoirs out, and many of them make for lively reading. (In the last few years, I especially liked Seymour Hersh's.) None I've seen, though, has been livelier, or covers more ground, than this one. He talks in detail about life growing up in small-town Oregon, about his time in universities and freelancing articles about places around the globe - an achievement that seemed to me as remarkable as anything else he has done - and dealing with deadly threats, from illness to being in a crowd fire upon by Chinese troops at Tiananmen Square (then frantically running on foot miles back to his residence to send the story so the paper would have its own version).
There's plenty of solid fact and earned wisdom here. And if you're in the mood for an adventure story, you can find a while pile of them between these covers.
He begins with a quick review of the last 30 years or so if the online world and how it developed into the one we know, transitioning from a system dominated by protocols (meaning, generally, e-mail, websites and a few others services) to one dominated by a handful of tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Those mega-companies, he points out, started out by building networks of users, which became enormous with time, and transitioned from an effort to add people and groups to their networks, to trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of them (the "take"). So much money is being pulled in this current extractive phase, he says (and he's clearly right) that much of the commerce and creativity of our world is being diminished, and our society and democracy are being weakened.
The book is structured as a loose interior group biography, shifting from one candidate to another, sometimes comparing and contrasting, sometimes simply bouncing around, but written in a style neither academic nor journalistic but instead intended to reflect the different mindset and personalities of the candidates. You can quickly tell, for example, if you're reading about Robert Dole as opposed Dick Gephardt just from the tone and the word choices. For Bush, for example, while there are scary and even near-death experiences (when his plane was shot down in the Pacific) and tragedy (the death of his infant daughter), much of the sensibility reflects a take on the world that things come together as they should, and things just wonderfully fit together. Most of the time.
The answer, on the basis of the story told here, is yes, but not at all easily, and only with some luck and some kind of edge. Ben and Whitney Waxman, the two founders, got their edge is considerable part from Ben's extensive national labor connections: The bulk of the hoodies the company produced were sold, early on at least, to unions and union members. They had some good luck, too, sometimes in odd and unexpected places: The pandemic, which at first seemed like a business-killing disaster for them, wound up helping them enormously by providing a mass market for masks and other health goods they were able to produce.
Here's a list of propositions drawn from some the chapter titles, some of which will appeal to the left and others to the right:
But a lot of that support for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime was specifically ideological (and racially bigoted as well), and it was not small in size. It was also organized and, as the 30s ended, increasingly well organized. A lot of domestic terror plots were being hatched; many small cells around the country were actively trying to destabilize the United States government and (through destabilizing elections) its whole system of self-government, which increasingly many of the people involved were willing to dispense with.
That doesn't mean they didn't attract lots of other people, of course; over the years I've known quite a few people who play them, to one degree or another. Some of the most popular games have sold immense numbers of copies, into the hundreds of millions, and some of them (Pokemon go is an example) have burst into the general cultural fabric. (Some years ago we often spotted PG players at a residential intersection near our house, deeply engrossed.) But what effect do they games have? Where did they come from? How have their evolved, and where might they be going? I didn't have much of a handle on any of this.
But, they said, it has now. Any doubt about that should be easily dispelled for anyone paying attention to these pages, which do talk about the Trumpian GOP, and how it has gone full authoritarian (read: pro-dictatorship) in recent years.