A Buffett farming in Africa

Thurow, Roger and Scott Kilman. (2009).
Enough: why the world's poorest starve in an age of plenty. New York: PublicAffairs.












Howard Buffett teaches farmers in a Burundi cornfield. Agriculture is the main livelihood for citizens of the country, one of the world’s poorest.











June 29, 2009 - Philanthropy

A Buffett Turns to Farming in Africa

Warren’s son Howard has quietly become a player in the fight against global hunger

By SCOTT KILMAN and ROGER THUROW 

After a meeting with farmers in Fufuo, Ghana, Howard Buffett stood up to shake hands, African style. He extended his right arm, marked with a faint scar from a cheetah bite, and then launched into a rapid combination of finger snapping and palm slapping.

The middle child of Warren Buffett is an unassuming Illinois soybean and corn farmer. But for the past four years, he has played a behind-the-scenes role in the global war against hunger. Given a small portion of his father’s fortune for philanthropy, he spends much of the year traveling through Africa, experimenting with ideas for helping poor farmers produce enough crops to feed their families and so lessen the continent’s food shortage. His foundation is spending about $38 million this year on projects such as developing a disease-resistant sweet potato, encouraging poachers to switch to farming, providing micro credits, and helping farmers market their crops to United Nations’ hunger-relief programs. Probably his most ambitious project under way would give African corn breeders royalty-free access to Monsanto’s biotechnology for drought-tolerant corn.

His father’s very public decision in 2006 to bequeath no more than a fraction of his fortune, then worth $40 billion, to his children’s foundations has put Howard on his unusual course. The famous stock picker opposes big inheritances; they coddle the second generation and concentrate wealth, he argues. Each of his children receives an annual donation of Berkshire Hathaway shares, which shrinks in size each year, for their charitable foundations. The sage of Omaha has never been to Africa and, of his son’s arduous lifestyle, says, “I would hate it.”

When Howard, 54 years old, was 23 he cashed in stock from his grandfather to buy a bulldozer to start an excavating business. What he really wanted to do was farm, but he didn’t have the money. His father agreed to buy a modest Nebraska farm for his son, but in classic Buffett fashion, he charged him market-rate rent.

Howard became chairman of a state agency aimed at encouraging the construction of ethanol plants in Nebraska and then won election to the Board of Commissioners that governs the county in which Omaha sits. Howard’s grasp of farm politics, as well as his last name, put him on the radar of Dwayne Andreas, the cagey chairman and chief executive of grain-processing behemoth Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. in Decatur, Ill.

Mr. Buffett joined ADM’s board and became a corporate vice president, posts that gave him a global perspective on agriculture as he began buying land for an Illinois farm. Mr. Buffett left ADM in 1995, upset about a price-fixing scandal at the company and joined a nearby manufacturer of steel grain bins called GSI Group. Soon he was off to South Africa to drum up business from its large grain farmers.

He traces his interest in fighting global hunger to his hobby taking photographs on those business trips in Africa. As he was photographing migrating wildebeest and zebra in 2000 from a rickety plane, trying to position his camera for a picture, he saw scars on the ground where poor farmers had used fire to clear desperately needed land. Mr. Buffett realized that he couldn’t protect Africa’s environment without first fighting its food shortage.

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Melissa L. Hickox

Howard Buffett teaches farmers in a Burundi cornfield. Agriculture is the main livelihood for citizens of the country, one of the world’s poorest.

“I’m watching this thinking, ‘They are going to destroy the last forest,’” Mr. Buffett later recalled. “It was an epiphany for me: The hungry can’t worry about conservation. I realized you can’t save the environment unless you give people a chance to feed themselves better.”

The death of his mother, Susan Buffett, from a stroke in 2004 helped to crystallize his focus on the poor. It also gave him the means to make a difference. The Buffett children had always expected that their mother’s foundation would oversee the distribution of their parents’ vast wealth. She had long supported medical research, education, abortion rights and nuclear disarmament, and had encouraged her children to be socially conscious. She brought young Howard along when she went into Omaha’s housing projects to help a Cub Scout troop.

Her death at 72 forced Warren Buffett to confront how to start giving away his fortune. He settled on directing the bulk of his Berkshire Hathaway shares to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He trusted Mr. Gates, a Berkshire Hathaway board member and friend who played bridge with him. What’s more, the Gates Foundation had the infrastructure to handle a gift of such size.

On top of this, Warren Buffett promised each of his three children’s foundations annual gifts of stock initially worth $50 million. For Howard, the gift meant that the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, from which he doesn’t draw a salary, could increase its annual spending at least eightfold.

It was ordained that Howard and his two siblings would see the family fortune given away rather than have it to spend on themselves. His father, who lives far below his means in a modest Omaha house, has argued publicly that it does little good for society when children inherit great wealth by virtue of an “ovarian lottery.” The multiplier effect is far more powerful, the argument goes, if fortunes are used to help the less fortunate rather than to suckle a bloodline of trust funders. Warren Buffett went to Congress in November 2007 to argue in favor of the estate tax, saying it counters an unhealthy concentration of wealth. Of his middle child, he says, “he’s got my money and his mother’s heart.”

With one foot in American farming and the other in Africa, Mr. Buffett has developed his vision for African farming. With oil prices so volatile, he thinks few farmers in African villages should use the same type of high-tech, mechanized farming he practices in Illinois. A typical farm in the Midwestern U.S.—of the sort Mr. Buffett owns—is an investment of millions of dollars.

“It takes a lot of fuel to run my equipment. And for inorganic fertilizer. And pesticides. How can that be the right answer for someone who has the opportunity to start from the beginning?” Mr. Buffett says.

While many economists and anti-hunger advocates call for a Green Revolution in Africa, Mr. Buffett shuns the phrase because it refers to the agricultural boom that swept Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. Modern seeds as well as hefty applications of fertilizer and water caused Asia’s wheat and rice crops to rapidly swell.

Mr. Buffett believes that getting Africa to feed itself is a lot more complicated. Africa’s geography is so diverse that its population has to depend on far more than two crops for its calories. Many of Africa’s farmers are poorer, less educated and even more isolated from infrastructure such as roads and irrigation systems than Asia’s were.

So Mr. Buffett is looking for ways to help African farmers increase their harvests without increasing their costs, thus his interest in developing plants that resist disease and drought.

To lobby for Africa aid, Mr. Buffett invites politicians, scientists, entertainers, and corporate executives to squeeze into the cab of his Deere tractor in Illinois, where he has their full attention as he navigates corn and soybean fields with global positioning technology. One of the few people he has let drive his harvesting combine, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is Shakira, the pop singer from Colombia who has an education foundation.

It’s hard to measure the impact of Howard Buffett’s foundation, something Mr. Buffett himself acknowledges. He does most of the work finding and visiting projects. He employs eight people, mostly in administrative roles. One man is based in South Africa overseeing research on Mr. Buffett’s 6,000 acres of farmland outside Johannesburg. It was there on a wildlife preserve that he set up that a cheetah bit him.

Mr. Buffett figures his foundation’s projects have helped about 1.5 million Africans so far. He hopes that the crop-breeding work he is supporting will eventually help millions more African farmers feed their families.

His father, for one, counsels patience. “If you bring your heart to something it makes a big difference,” says Warren Buffett. “And he has time. He didn’t have to wait until he was 80 years old.”

For the first time since the early 1970s, the prevalence of hunger in the world is climbing. According to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, 15% of the world’s population is hungry, up from 13% at the middle of this decade. FAO economists are predicting that the number of chronically hungry people will climb this year to 1.02 billion, up 11.5% from 2008.

As soon as next year the world could resume consuming more grain than its farmers produce. That global trend earlier this decade is what drained world grain stockpiles, setting the stage for last year’s price shocks. The fear is that food prices will leap when the world economy recovers.

“I am more discouraged than I was when I started. The problems are so huge,” Mr. Buffett says.

In February 2007, his SUV pulled into Fufuo, a village in central Ghana. Accompanied by Ghanaian agronomist Kofi Boa, he hurried into a large cinder-block building where 30 farmers had been waiting, sheltered from the sun.

Back home, Mr. Buffett owned 800 acres of corn and soybeans and a fleet of the most modern John Deere implements. Now, he hoped to learn something from farmers who scratched the dirt with sticks and machetes. Mr. Boa, the agronomist, had been coaching them to replace slash-and-burn farming with a practice he called “no-till.”

In many African villages, poor farmers—who are often women—had traditionally made room for their crops by chopping down the brush and trees on a few acres of tribal land. It is hard on the farmer and the environment. The land is laid bare to erosion. As the soil deteriorates, farmers work harder and harder to produce food until they have to move on to another spot, repeating the cycle.

Mr. Boa told Fufuo’s farmers to disturb the ground as little as possible. Other than poking holes in the dirt to plant their seeds, the ground was not to be hoed or vegetation burned. Organic residue—such as leaves, stalks, and roots—was valuable, not trash. Fufuo’s farmers were taught to make room for their seeds shortly before planting time by squirting the competing vegetation with Chinese-made weed killer dispensed from backpacks.

The village quickly discovered that no-till plots yielded bigger crops with far less labor. The mulch acts as a sponge when it rains, banking water for crops, and then breaks down into plant food. The time the farmers saved by no longer hoeing weeds and cutting brush was time for money-making endeavors. Some started to raise cocoa trees, a crop prized by Ghana’s government for its export earnings; others began to raise chickens, feeding them with their surplus grain.

“How many seeds of corn do you plant on a hectare?” asked Mr. Buffett as he peered through thick eyeglasses and jotted down answers in a notebook. “Can you farm more land now?” he continued. “How much corn did you harvest?”

Further convinced he should support the no-till training of farmers, Mr. Buffett left. After his SUV drove off, swallowed in red dust, the farmers were told that their visitor was the son of a billionaire named Warren Buffett.

—Adapted from “ENOUGH: Why the World’s Poorest Starve In an Age of Plenty” by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman. Copyright 2009 by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman. Published by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

American History: 5 best books

An eclectic list

1. The Journals of Lewis and Clark: 1803-05 917.3 (also 978.02)

There are hundreds of books on the Lewis and Clark expedition— scholarly treatises, narratives, biographies, collections of maps. Engrossing reading, sure, but why choose them when the original journals by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exist? Even if the prose is rough, the journals are an American treasure, a first-hand account of the discovery of a nation. There is a hypnotic, galvanizing power in the daily descriptions of rivers forged, buffaloes seen, Indians met, meals eaten, illnesses suffered, plants examined, rainstorms weathered and dangers overcome. No matter the hardship experienced over the more than two years they spent in the wilds, the two explorers always managed to update their journals, as Lewis did one winter day: “The ink f[r]iezes in my pen,” he complained, before continuing with his account. When Clark writes on Nov. 7, 1805, “Ocian in view! O! the joy,” your heart, too, will leap.

2. The Great Bridge, David McCullough 624.55 M

No other structure better represents American industriousness and ingenuity than the Brooklyn Bridge. In this magisterial account, David McCullough describes its design and construction with all the drama of an epic battle. John A. Roebling, the original engineer of what would be the longest suspension bridge in the world upon its opening in 1883, dies after being injured in a dockside accident as he scouted the construction site. His eldest son, ­Washington Roebling, takes up the cause, but frequent journeys below the murky East River waters to set the foundations of the bridge’s two massive stone towers leave him crippled with decompression sickness, or “the bends.” His wife, Emily, all but assumes command of the ­endeavor and sees the project through to its glorious completion.

3. Paul Revere’s Ride, David Hackett Fischer 973.331 F

David Hackett Fischer offers a bracing corrective to the ­traditional view of the lone silversmith named Revere on horseback alerting Massachusetts ­patriots with the cry: “The British are coming!” Paul Revere, the author ­observes, would never have warned of the “British” approach; the colonists still considered themselves British, even if on the cusp of revolution. A minor point, perhaps, but evidence of how legend becomes accepted fact. More important, Fischer shows that though Revere—a “gregarious man, a great joiner”—might have led the alarm-sounding effort, he was far from alone. Dozens of other brave riders set about the countryside on the night of April 18, 1775.

4. The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe 629.45 W

In Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of Project Mercury and America’s first manned space flight in the early 1960s, we have the perfect marriage of writer and story. With his unblinking eye, Wolfe reveals what constituted the “right stuff”—for test pilots like Chuck Yeager, and, despite the skepticism of some of those flyboys, the seven Mercury ­astronauts who vied for the chance to perch atop a rocket filled with liquid ­oxygen and go where no man had gone before. “It was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life,” Wolfe writes, because “any fool could do that.” No, “a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the ­experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day.”

5. The Children, David Halberstam 323.1196 H

In a Montgomery bus station on May 20, 1961, a young man got down on his knees and prayed for the strength to love the racist mob closing in on him. “When he tried to get up, someone kicked him violently in the back, so viciously that three vertebrae on his spine were cracked.” This is one ­visceral scene among scores of others in David Halberstam’s “The Children,” a sweeping portrait of Nashville activists, most of them students, who brought courageous nonviolent protest to the civil-rights struggle in the Deep South. Halberstam covered the movement as a young reporter for the ­Tennessean, and when he wrote this book four decades later, the memory of those students clearly still burned in his heart.

Mr. Bascomb’s latest book is ­“Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World’s Most ­Notorious Nazi” (Houghton Mifflin).

Mind the Gap

"The story of five people, who seem to be unrelated, who make a decision to take some risks with their personal lives while searching for happiness."

Alan King plays a Herb is a cantankerous old New Yorker who can barely walk to the corner store because of his infirmity. But he has vowed to pilgrimage on foot seven miles to the northern most tip of Manhattan to visit a part of the Hudson River -- Spuyten Duyvil -- a place he used to swim in as a child.

4 other characters are developed separately: a single father who lives with his son in Jamaica, Vermont; an accountant in Arizona who is suffering psychically from not seeing his son; a quirky North Carolina caring for her mother; and a folk singer in New York who performs on street corners but will not go into Manhattan.

The story flows, and draws in the viewer. Quite enjoyable.

The state of Jones

The State of Jones
By Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer
Doubleday, 402 pages, $27.50






The idea is beguiling: a ­region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance.

Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Confederacy boiled for much of the war, but only Jones County was elevated by folklore, ­especially in the decades after the war, into a scene of noble rebellion. It helped that the anti-Confederate ­faction there was led by a tall, stern backwoodsman named Newton Knight.

The operative words here are ­“legend” and “folklore.” Although Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer labor mightily in “The State of Jones” to make the case for Newt Knight and Jones County as emblems of ­enlightened “insurrection” within the Confederacy, the truth, alas, is hardly as inspiring as the authors suppose. Far from being a haven for the ­high-minded, Jones County was a magnet for Confederate deserters. Their hostility to being executed, ­imprisoned or pressed back into the service of a lost cause was the men’s animating principle.




“As far as the foot soldiers were concerned, the other side could have the damned town. The generals might have gladly given it up too, if not for the railroad junction. ” Read an excerpt from ‘The State of Jones’



It would have helped the authors’ argument if the book were simply better organized—the narrative is often difficult to follow—and if they had been more comfortable with Civil War history. They don’t place the ­battle of Corinth, or other Mississippi clashes described in the book, within the larger context of the war. Why did these fights happen and why were they important to the wartime fortunes of ­Mississippi? We’re also left to wonder about Knight’s ­experience in battle. The authors focus mostly on the “insufferable” day-to-day life of Confederate soldiers.

It wasn’t long, of course, before the bothersome deserters in Jones County became irrelevant to a Rebel army in retreat. Here the book’s ­interest shifts fully to the life of Newt Knight, during Reconstruction and beyond. As it happened, Knight was married to a white woman but also had a long-running affair with a black woman, even maintaining two ­separate households. Ms. Jenkins and Mr. Stauffer take this as evidence of Knight’s anti-racist, anti-slavery bona fides, but miscegenation had long been commonplace in the South, even—or especially—among slave owners, who took care of their ­mixed-blood offspring.

To be sure, Knight went beyond most in his studious maintenance of two households, one white and one black. And the arrangement resulted in many trials for him and his ­family—his white wife left him, ­jealousy raged between his two sets of children, and later generations ­intermarried without regard for their blood links. This is a complicated story, and the authors handle it well; it is easily the most interesting part of the book.





— Michael Ballard, the author of “Vicksburg: The Campaign That Opened the ­Mississippi,” is the coordinator of the Congressional and Political Research Center at the Mississippi State ­University Library.








The New York Public Library/Art Resource NY - The Tishomingo Hotel in Corinth, Miss., was used at different times as a hospital by both Union and Rebel troops.















Collection of Herman Welborn - Newton Knight, a Confederate medic and deserter

High Fidelity

Turned it off. Too juvenile.

Black legion

Bogart film that should have been good, might have been good, but was not that good. I turned it off, a difficult thing for me to do; I almost never give up on Bogey. The film is about a group that opposes the presence of immigrants in American life.

The big clock

Fairly good film from 1948. Ray Milland is good; Charles Laughton wears a ridiculous moustache, and is bearable; Elsa Lanchester plays an artist with panache, and is actually funny; Maureen O'Sullivan struggles with a stereotypically narrow role; and George Macready appears in a film yet again (he was in Gilda, playing her possessive husband).

A hotshot crime magazine editor inadvertently becomes the subject of a murder investigation after spending an evening with his boss' mistress.

Cheney to Publish His Memoir

Former Vice President Dick Cheney is working on a book.


The deal was negotiated by Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer who also represents Mr. Bush, former President Bill Clinton and President Obama.



Is there any better proof of what C. Wright Mills called the Power Elite?

June 24, 2009
Cheney to Publish His Memoir
By MOTOKO RICH

As widely expected, Vice President Dick Cheney has signed a deal with an imprint of Simon & Schuster to write a memoir about his life in politics and his service in four presidential administrations

A spokesman for Simon & Schuster said Mr. Cheney would write a book for Threshold Editions, where Mary Matalin, his close friend and adviser, is editor in chief.

Mr. Cheney, who had been looking for a publisher for about two months, joins a roster of Bush administration figures writing memoirs, including President George W. Bush; his wife, Laura; former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.; former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; and Karl Rove, the former presidential political adviser. Mr. Rove’s book will also be published by Threshold.

Mr. Cheney’s memoir, which will focus on the past 40 years of his life, mostly in Washington, will be published in the spring of 2011. The deal was negotiated by Robert Barnett, a Washington lawyer who also represents Mr. Bush, former President Bill Clinton and President Obama.

The former vice president is working with his eldest daughter, Liz Cheney, on the memoir. Ms. Cheney is helping with research and “filling in the gaps.”

“He’s a student of history, and I think he never really planned to write a book,” Ms. Cheney said. “But I think because the job he just finished is obviously his last job he’ll ever have in government and because he cares about history and has been part of so many consequential events over the last 40 years, he wants to make sure that his story is told, and told in a way that his grandchildren will be able to understand and appreciate even 20 or 30 years from now.”

She said Mr. Cheney had been writing out his thoughts in longhand but had also begun writing on a laptop, working in homes on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in Virginia and in Wyoming.

In addition to covering his roles in the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, George Bush and George W. Bush, Mr. Cheney will write about his private-sector experience, including his time as chief executive of the Halliburton Company, the oil field services provider.

A person familiar with the negotiations said Mr. Cheney would receive around $2 million for his book. The spokesman for Simon & Schuster declined to comment.

Grace is gone

Good story of a father of two daughters who can not find a way to tell them their mother, s soldier, was killed in action in Iraq. Cusack is good. Shélan O'Keefe, whoc plays the older daughter, is a gem.

The Past's Partisans

The Conservatives
By Patrick Allitt
(Yale, 325 pages, $35)





The slant on the reviewer is immediately available in the review's subtitle: A view wary of government programs—and now out of fashion.


Conservatives, at least modern, self-declared conservatives are not wary of government programs; they simply oppose liberal programs and favor their own.




Has American conservatism run its course? To judge by the pronouncements of scolding liberal pundits -- not to mention of conservatives themselves -- it may even be at death's door. Long ago, the worker-philosopher Eric Hoffer remarked that "all great movements start as a cause, evolve into a business, and end up a racket." While conservatism has gained too much intellectual respectability to be dismissed as a racket, it certainly has its problems.

Indeed it does. One of the problems is confusing conservatism with right-wing ideological purity.

Mr. Allitt does not discover a perfect unanimity of conservative outlook or judgment, of course. But certain principles or concerns persist: limiting power, defending a balanced order, securing property and upholding the rule of law -- not least against radical or anarchic elements.

What a bunch of nonsense: Reagan limited power? Bush? Cheney? Justice Roberts? They sought to consolidate power in the president and run around the check and balances of Congress.

Harrison Gray Otis, a Boston Federalist, warned that those who saw a radical spirit in the clash between the American colonies and British crown mistook the Revolution's nature, for the colonists were acting defensively to protect their constitutional rights.

Excellent point, though one could quibble.

American conservatives in later generations returned to this theme. Nicholas Biddle and Rufus Choate viewed Andrew Jackson in the 1830s as a frontier "Napoleon" and Jacksonian democracy as homespun Jacobinism.

Old Hickory a Jacobin radical?

Southern Conservatives like John Randolph (who denounced "King Numbers" -- majoritarian rule -- in 1830) opposed pure democracy no less than their Northern counterparts. Mr. Allitt shows that what may look like elitism to us, or just plain crankiness, actually reflected a concern with the limits necessary for a stable republican order. The same impulse for order can be seen, he says, in John Marshall's insistence on the judicial review and, decades later, in John C. Calhoun's theory of states' rights, a bulwark, as Calhoun saw it, against the potential despotism of central government.

Calhoun's theory included secession. Given that, perhaps Bob E. Lee and Jefferson Davis can be counted as conservatives. Imagine that.

I would say that Justice Marshall's ruling checked the tyranny of the elite, and strenuously object to his being paired with Calhoun.

During the Depression, conservative politicians found themselves on the defensive, but a backlash against the New Deal eventually laid the foundation for a conservative movement.

Anti-liberalism is the foundation for his conservative movement. They opposed Social Security, engagement in Europe, and unemployment insurance.

Its leaders argued that collectivism assaulted cherished traditions and ignored the concerns of Sumner's "forgotten man."

Who forgot the common folk? Hoover? Hoover.

It was anticommunism -- together with a traditionalist reaction to the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s -- that finally gave conservatism a wide base of support. The tenets of the movement included a suspicion of government programs and a faith in the wealth-creating capacities of capitalism. Both seem almost quaint in Barack Obama's America.

Ach, it is the hippies, with their free love and drugs that resulted in Obama.

When the World Tilted--Again

Kaplan, Fred M. 1959: the year that changed everything. (2009). Hoboken, N.J. : J. Wiley & Sons.


It was the year, as Mr. Kaplan's handy timeline reminds us, that Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, Berry Gordy started Motown records in Detroit, Allen Ginsberg recited "Howl" at Columbia, the Pioneer spacecraft blasted off, the dirtiest version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was published, Toyota and Datsun (now Nissan) made their American debuts and Ford mercy-killed the Edsel, the microchip was introduced, the first U.S. soldiers were killed in Vietnam, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum opened, Martin Luther King went to India to study nonviolence, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, and Searle sought approval to sell the first birth-control pill, Enovid. In sum, a year "when the world as we now know it began to take form."


Some of Mr. Kaplan's strongest chapters deal with the evolution of Dr. King and the man who seemed to some his evil twin, Malcolm X, the Black Muslim apostate, and the civil-rights rebellion that gained momentum after the first lunch-counter sit-in in Greensboro, N.C., a month into the 1960s. The author gives credit to the now all-but-forgotten September 1959 report of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a chart-laden, 668 pages that meticulously documented the scope of racial discrimination in America. Southern senators immediately tried to kill the commission. "Isn't a segregated life the proper life?" asked Mississippi's Jim Eastland. "Isn't it the law of nature?"

Outsourced

At times, a randomly chosen film works out to be a good choice. This is one of such: Friday afternoon I went over to the DVD area and looked at the NEW arrivals, and took this one home. It was a good choice. Reviews are positive.

A Seattle call center, Todd, manager is sent to India to train his own replacement, and get the outsourced call center to reach the 6-minute minute per incident (the much-vaunted MPI). When he gets there, a building in the process of being built, the MPI is over 12. Funny, effective, scenes develop: on arrival he misses the sign held by the driver sent to pick him up (a small, hand-lettered one reading Mr. Toad), and thus has to ride a crowded train, then take a taxi to the town where he'll be working; Todd learns about eating with his right hand; sees how the poorer half live; calls his ex-girlfriend, forgetting the 12-hour time difference, and is surpirsed to hear someone with her; longs for a burger; and lives through the celebration of the day of Holy.



I enjoyed it a lot. It is a smart, amusing, fun movie, well acted, with good cinematography, and a crisp script.

Broken English

Parker Posey is older than in Party Girl (2007 vs. 1995), and plays her character well (contemplative, thoughtful, baffled, pained), but the script is thinner, and this movie doesn't work that well.

Telling the Tale

June 7, 2009
Telling the Tale
By PAUL BERMAN

Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
Gerald Martin
Illustrated. 642 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50


The single most thrilling event in Gabriel García Márquez’s life, judging from the biography by Gerald Martin, took place in February 1950, when the novelist, who was 22 and not yet a novelist, though he was already trying to be, accompanied his mother to the backwoods town where he had spent his early childhood. This was a place called Aracataca, in the “banana zone” of northern Colombia. His grandfather’s house was there, and his mother had decided to sell it.

García Márquez himself has described this trip in his autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But Martin supplies, as it were, the fact-checked version — a product of the 17 years of research that went into “Gabriel García Márquez: A Life,” together with the benedictions of the novelist himself, who has loftily observed, “Oh well, I suppose every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer.” In “Living to Tell the Tale,” García Márquez says that, upon arriving at Aracataca, he entered the house and inspected the rooms. The English biographer, by contrast, observes that García Márquez has also said he never entered. Either way, he saw the house. Childhood vistas presented themselves, and vistas prompted thoughts.

García Márquez was engrossed just then in a study of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner and Proust, in Spanish translation. He was learning to appreciate what Martin calls “the multiple dimensions of time itself.” And with a pensive gaze at the old house, he realized — here was the epiphany — he could invent himself anew. There was a way to become a member of the sleek novel-writing avant-garde, and this was to be the boy from Aracataca. And so he had his grand theme; and he had his writer’s persona, who was himself, as adult and child both; and he had his method of inquiry, which was to gaze back on his own most powerful childhood experiences.

The opening sections of Martin’s biography are clogged with genealogical chronicles of the Garcías (the father’s family) and the Márquezes (the mother’s), snaking into the 19th century — a preposterously tangled story of cousins and noncousins united in wedlock, nonwedlock, near-incest, vendetta-mania and frontier trailblazing in the Colombian wilds, such that, after a few pages, you can hardly remember who is who, and where the murder took place, and what the civil war was about, or the next civil war, or the next. You could even suspect that Martin, having set out to describe García Márquez, has ended up competing with him: where the novelist ornamented some versions of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” with a one-page genealogical table, the biographer has ornamented “Gabriel García Márquez” with seven pages of them.

But what else was a biographer to do? A kind of sea breeze of atmospheric moods blows across García Márquez’s work — a saline mood of unexplained and understated pathos, moods of delicate solidarity and even complicity with everything frail and cracked, a slightly morbid mood. And all of those moody currents seem to converge, in the end, on a single lush and regal emotion, which is nostalgia — García Márquez’s never-exhausted and always tender search for what he is not going to find: his own past, and his family’s, and the universe at his grandfather’s knee.

His childhood touched on one other experience, though, and this had nothing to do with family lore. Martin tells us that, as a child, García Márquez read Alexandre Dumas and “A Thousand and One Nights.” He was a normal boy. Mostly he was a normal Latin American. He read the poets of Spanish literature’s “Golden Age,” the 16th and 17th centuries. And, in this fashion, he appears to have spent whole portions of his childhood dwelling not just in northern Colombia but also in the hyper-­elegant universe of Luis de Góngora and the ­syllable-counting poets of imperial Spain, long ago — whose own memories reached spectrally back into the shadows of Roman myth and esoteric philosophy.

The lucky break in García Márquez’s life was to win a scholarship to an excellent college outside Bogotá, where his studies concentrated on still another of the early modernist writers, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. The English-speaking world has never paid much attention to Darío, but that is because his deepest theme was strictly a Spanish-speaking one — namely, the same vexed problem that García Márquez would have to solve: how to reconcile a childhood immersion in the poetry of the Golden Age with an adult immersion in the realities of the modern age. Darío entertained a precise idea of how to do this. It was through a kind of madness. He embraced every last extravagant curlicue of the Golden Age — the Roman myths and esoteric doctrines, the fanatical dedication to the verse structures of Spanish tradition — only he embraced them in a pop-eyed spirit of paradox. He wanted to show how large and heartbreaking is the gap between life as it ought to be and as it actually is. And this idea, too, Darío’s mad embrace of the Golden Age, entered into García Márquez’s imagination — or so it seems to me, though Martin says not too much about this.

García Márquez’s readers sometimes imagine that supernatural events and folk beliefs in his novels express an all-­purpose spirit of primitivist rebellion, suitable for adaptation by progressive-minded writers in every region of the formerly colonized world. Martin endorses that interpretation in the opening sentence of his biography, where he flatly defines García Márquez, encyclopedia style, as “the best-known writer to have emerged from the ‘third world’ and the best known exponent of a literary style, ‘magical realism,’ which has proved astonishingly productive in other developing countries.” But I think that, on the contrary, magical events and folk beliefs in the writings of García Márquez show how powerfully the Golden Age has lingered in memory. Instead of a post­colonial literary rebellion against Western imperialism, here is a late-blooming flower of the Spanish high baroque. Gongorism disguised as primitivism. And, being a proper son of Darío, García Márquez has gone on to embrace in his mad spirit the glories of Spanish rhetoric at its most extreme.

Martin tells us that in García Márquez’s own estimation, his greatest book is “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” from 1975 — a book that is an extended homage to Darío, who is invoked at the beginning and again at the very end, and who, somewhere in the middle, shows up as a character, sailing into port on a banana boat to deliver a poetry recitation. Every last sentence in “The Autumn of the Patriarch” offers a heroic demonstration of man’s triumph over language — unless it is language’s triumph over man. The sentences begin in one person’s voice and conclude in someone else’s, or change their subject halfway through, or wander across the centuries, and, even so, conform sufficiently to the rules of rhetoric to carry you along. To read is to gasp. You want to break into applause at the shape and grandeur of those sentences, not to mention their length. And yet to do so you would need to set down the book, which cannot be done, owing to the fact that, just when the impulse to clap your hands has become irresistible, the sentence you are reading has begun to round a corner, and you have no alternative but to clutch onto the book as if steering a car that has veered out of control.

Those are gorgeous sentences, but they are also tyrannical — and tyranny, in the conventional political sense, is entirely the novel’s theme. “The Autumn of the Patriarch” tells the story of a despot ruling over an unnamed and benighted Caribbean land. It is a dictator novel. The marriage of plot and prosody makes it a masterpiece — a greater triumph even than Mario Vargas Llosa’s marvelously brilliant “Feast of the Goat,” which is likewise a Caribbean dictator novel, and likewise invokes Rubén Darío. “The Autumn of the Patriarch” does have a puzzling quality, though. The dictator whose portrait emerges from those ­tropical-flower sentences is monstrous and despicable — yet even his creepiest tyrannical traits are presented as signs of the human condition, deserving of pity and compassion, maybe even a kind of sorrowful love. I have always wondered what sort of political attitude García Márquez meant to convey with those peculiar ambiguities.

But now that I have read Martin’s biography, I know. The book is 642 pages long, and the first half of it, after completing the genealogical survey of northern Colombia, records the dreadful poverty that García Márquez and his wife and two sons endured before 1967, when “One Hundred Years of Solitude” finally lifted him into the comforts of multiple-home ownership and, in 1982, the Nobel Prize. But the second half mostly recounts the novelist’s subsequent career as hobnobber among the powerful — a man who, according to his biographer, has labored hard and long to get himself invited to the dinner tables of presidents, dictators and tycoons around the world. And among those many table companions, no one has mattered more to him than the maximum leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, with whom García Márquez has conceived a genuine friendship, based on shared vacations, a part-time career promoting Havana as a movie-industry capital and a history of defending the Castro dictatorship against its detractors in the Hispanic literary world. Here is the real-life Caribbean tyrant. García Márquez does lead you to think about Castro in some of those spectacular sentences in “The Autumn of the Patriarch.” And the novelist plainly loves his dictator.

Martin gushes over nearly everything that García Márquez has ever done, yet, even so, he concedes that friendship with Castro has sometimes aroused criticism. The biographer mentions twice that Vargas Llosa (who at one point punched García Márquez in the face, for reasons possibly bearing on marital honor) has described García Márquez as Castro’s “lackey.” Martin emphasizes the insult mostly to show the indignities that García Márquez has undergone out of fidelity to Fidel. And yet, the biography’s account of the friendship will make readers pause thoughtfully over that word, “lackey.” Martin tells us that, on an occasion when Castro visited Colombia, García Márquez volunteered to be one of his bodyguards. The world’s most popular serious novelist does seem to be a flunky of the world’s longest-lasting monomaniacal dictator. Why García Márquez has chosen to strike up such a friendship is something I cannot explain — except to point out that, as Martin shows, the great novelist has never veered from the epiphany that came to him at his grandfather’s house in 1950, and he has always been fascinated by the grotesque, the pathetic and the improbable.

Paul Berman is a writer in residence at New York University and the author of the forthcoming “Flight of the Intellectuals.”



abriel García Márquez in 1976 with black eye courtesy of Mario Vargas Llosa.

In the valley of Elah

A father, himself a former military MP during the Viet Nam War, looks for his son, and finds him dead, butchered. Investigating

Redacted

Showing war from three perspectives, this film uses hand-held cameras, in-your-face violence, and the horror, boredom and grittiness of everyday Iraq.

A company of GIs mans a checkpoint bristling with guns, barbed wire, and signs in English and Arabic, intended to control vehicle and human traffic and stave off the flow of arms and explosives. Much of the time they sit and watch, laden with uniform, bullet-proof gear, knee pads, and their ammunition and weapon. Bored, from time to time they nod off or find distractions to occupy their minds.

Around them, Iraqis carry on their lives, going to school, to work, herding goats. When young females need to walk past the checkpoint, they are subjected to being frisked by male soldiers, who in turn, in some cases, can use the procedure as an opportunity to touch a female body.

There are also insurgents, or terrorists, who wait for opportunities to kill American soldiers. An improvised explosive device (IED) is set among rubble. monitored remotely, ready to maim or kill.

Off duty, the soldiers read, film video with small, hand-held recorders, play cards, drink. Boredom and tension are constant. On duty, they sit and wait. Once, an innocuous incident results in a sargeant being blown up by the IED. A misunderstanding at the checkpoint results in a pregnant woamn being killed. Boredom and alcohol result in the hatching of a plan to go back to a house, where the soldiers had arrested a man, and rape a 15-year old.

Rape they do, as well as kill and burn her body. Revenge is exacted by the kidnapping of a GI by an anonymous group of presumably, but not certainly, Iraqis, who film his beheading, and leave his body and head to be found.

Technically, the film uses interesting devices: a documentary is presumably being filmed by a French crew; Iraqi television journalists interview and report.

The film is meant to shock, and does.

Gilda

Friday night movie.

"Johnny Farrell goes to work for Ballin Mundson, the proprietor of an illegal gambling casino in a South American city and quickly rises to become Mundson's 'main man.' All is well until Mundson returns from a trip with his new bride, Gilda-- a woman from Johnny's past. Mundson, unaware of their previous love affair, assigns Farrell the job of keeping Gilda a faithful wife. Fraught with hatred, Gilda does her best to antagonize, intimidate, and instill jealousy in Farrell-- until circumstances allow him to get even."

For 1946, a good film. Script weak; then again, it was 1946. The acting is excellent.






An interested aside: Gilda Radner was named after this Gilda, according to Make 'em laugh: the funny business of America. (2008). Kantor, Michael& Laurence Maslon. Hachette: New York. pp. 238-239. [Wednesday, June 17, 2009 Delanceyplace.com 6/17/09 - Gilda Radner]

The East, the West, and sex

Bernstein, Richard. The East, the West, and sex: a history of erotic encounters. (2009). New York: Knopf.

Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

De Botton, Alain. (2009). The pleasures and sorrows of work.
New York: Pantheon Books.

Stop-loss

Excellent. Powerful. Impressive.


I really liked this movie: the action was continuous and evocative, vigorous and compelling; the acting was superb.

Ryan Phillippe has quickly become a favorite: even his accent was good. Abbie Cornish, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, all were quite good, as was, in fact, all the cast.

Stop-loss refers to soldiers who are sent back to war after their tours of duty ended. The brutality of that, the impact of the life of a soldier, is demonstrated graphically. This is a major film, an important war film.

Peter Travers, of Rolling Stone, gave it 3.5 stars; I give it 4.

Breach

Rather good. Suspenseful, gripping. Chris Cooper does his usual superb job of understatedly portraying a character; Ryan Phillipe is excellent. Laura Linney's character is drab, and her talent is wasted.