Blog - Scott Martelle journalist/author

The roundabout version of how America got its name

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Sunday's Washington Post carries my first freelance book review for them, a piece on Toby Lester's The Fourth Part of the World, a very good survey of Europe's quest for knowledge of the world, and the riches that came from the first forays into globalization. Lester is a contributing editor at Atlantic Monthly, and this is his first book. It's a solid effort, if a little too European-focused. AS I mention in the review it would have been nice if he had touched on, for example, China's explorations around the same pre-Columbian time. But that doesn't detract from the work. Well worth picking up for yourself (and we are all history buffs, now, aren't we?) or for the history reader on your holiday gift list. I'm hoping to place more book reviews at the Washington Post, and elsewhere. As it is my reviews and author profiles have been appearing regularly in the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Publishers Weekly, which is a nice array (links are on the left). Very satisfying work, to say the least.

On North Korea, the anti-Disneyland

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

My short profile of Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent Barbara Demick and her forthcoming book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, is live now at Publishers Weekly. It's a remarkable book, due out in December, and you ought to put it on your pre-order list. First a disclaimer: Though I spent a dozen years as a staff writer for the LA Times, I never met Demick nor, to the best of my recollection, did we ever work together or share a byline. But I've been reading her journalism since she moved from the Philadelphia Inquirer to become the Times' first Seoul bureau chief, a gig that led directly to this book. As my piece says, there are certain hurdles to writing about North Korea, not the least of which is dreadfully thin and controlled access to the place. Demick found a way around that by diving into the lives of refugees from the same small city, and through their eyes and memories has been able to create a gripping portrayal of life in what is likely the world's most repressive regime. So why is this book important? It helps us understand a bit about life in a country that has been a major influence on U.S. foreign policy in Asia since the end of World War Two. The government is a holdover from Stalinist totalitarianism, and the populace lives under intense poverty, famine and indoctrination. The headlines these days are all about the push for nuclear weapons. But in the end, it is a nation of people shackled by mad men.

A CEO excessive-pay solution that will go nowhere

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera has a column today looking at "executive pay czar" Kenneth R. Feinberg's decision to curtail executive compensation at firms that received massive government bailouts. He could do that because of the public investment in the businesses, but the problem extends far beyond a few troubled banks and GM. It is endemic in the private sector, with executives receiving millions of dollars for, in effect, screwing up. Nocera suggests that the ultimate power needs to be held by the shareholders in the companies, and there's some merit to that. They are, after all, the ones immediately shouldering the weight for those obscene pay packages. But getting corporations to change their governance structure to let that happen isn't going to be easy. As good revolutionaries know, those who hold power aren't likely to let it go without a fight. It would be easier, and more effective, to do it through the tax code. Congress could set up an agency, or use Treasury, to develop formulas for acceptable executive pay ratios. It could tie the pay package to the size of the company and to the average wage of the workers, making it some reasonable multiple of what the lowest rung gets paid. And for every dollar over that level the executive is paid, the company is taxed dollar for dollar. So if the level under the formula is $10 million, and the executive receives $15 million, the company pays another $5 million in taxes. In the short term, the taxpayers get some benefit. In the long term, the brakes are put on this obscene practice.

Shane MacGowan, The Pogues, and NASCAR

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Went last night to see The Pogues, long one of my favorite bands, though I'd never managed to catch them live during their first incarnation in the '80s. Glad I went, but Margaret and I left before the encore - and that is a key mark of how bad they were. The band has become a self-caricature. Lead singer Shane MacGowan's drinking problem is legendary - the band fired him over it in 1991. Last night, MacGowan fell over three times on stage, finishing songs from the floor before the roadies, then his band mates, helped him to his feet. They finally wheeled in one of those big gray equipment cases for him to sit on. And naturally it affected his performance. MacGowan's voice has always been an acquired taste, a whiskey-and-cigarettes rasping (and often indecipherable) mumble that was also a muted primal scream. The raw intensity gave the songs an urgency. He was the romanticized fallen man incarnate, the beauty of the emotion overcoming the limitations of the voice. Last night at Club Nokia, all that was left was the bad voice. Except for a few moments that sparkled ("If I Should Fall From the Grace of God" and "Sunny Side of the Street" taped live here in March in the current incarnation), it was an ineffective drone of a voice, with no intensity or emotional impact, off-tempo much of the time, and that seemed to throw the whole band off. "Turkish Song of the Damn" was a reel of mush. "Bottle of Smoke" careened badly. When Spider Stacey, the whistle player who eventually took over singing duties after MacGowan's departure (and after a short stint by the irreplaceable Joe Strummer), sang it was a tighter band. But it wasn't The Pogues. And with MacGowan, The Pogues were close to unlistenable. After MacGowan's third tumble - flat backwards with a dumb look of surprise on his face - the rest of the show was like watching a NASCAR race, where part of the draw is anticipating the next wreck. And you have to wonder where the band's pride is. Can they be satisfied propping up MacGowan just for the sake of a gig?

National Book Award finalists named

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 National Book Awards finalists (see any of your personal favorites on there?): FICTION Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press) Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House) Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.) Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf) Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) NONFICTION David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt) Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press) T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf) YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins� Leap of Faith (Henry Holt) Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.) Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic) Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins) POETRY Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press) Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin) Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press) Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Terry Teachout on Louis Armstrong

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Every now and then a nonfiction writer gets lucky and stumbles across a treasure trove previously unavailable to other writers on a topic. That happened to Terry Teachout, the (sometimes controversial) culture critic for the Wall Street Journal and an inveterate blogger. Teachout's trove? The private tape recordings of jazz legend Louis Armstrong, which imbue his new biography of "Satchmo" with an intimacy not available to earlier writers on Armstrong's life. He talked about it with me for a profile that went live yesterday at Publishers Weekly.

�To people who know about Armstrong in the general way that most of us know about Armstrong, I think they're going to be surprised by a lot of this book,� Teachout says, pointing to Armstrong's own underappreciated skills as a writer (he wrote two memoirs), his dealings with the Chicago mob, his pot smoking, or that his �career was short-circuited because of lip damage that caused him to withdraw from performing for years before he became famous.�

Armstrong led a fascinating life, and was one of the first African American artists to enter mainstream pop culture. The book is due out in December - PW targets the book industry, so these pieces are published before books go on sale. So plenty of time to put it on your holiday list.

On Ishiguro, and the pitfalls of unresolved fiction

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

My review of Kazuo Ishiguro's collection of short stories, Nocturnes ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer today, and I ended up disappointed with the book. A recurring theme in Ishiguro's work is the enigma of unresolved plots, and unresolved relationships. He takes slices of lives and weaves broader stories from them, most successfully in Remains of the Day. But reading a series of short stories that all end in various shades of ambiguity just gets tiring. Rather than waiting for a surprise, you just wait for the end, like the train getting into your local station. You know it will get there, and you know when, so it's awfully hard to get too fired up about it.

The Great Recession close up

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

I met with a couple of women the other day outside a local coffee shop. One was a friend, the other I was introduced to for the first time. They were putting together Spring courses for a UC Irvine-related program of continuing education for older folks, and it looks like I'll be doing one and maybe two courses (as a volunteer, unfortunately). Both the women I met with are of retirement age, though both had still been working -- until the recession. Now both have been laid off, one as an overseer of student teachers and the other from the jewelry department of a major retail department store chain. There's a lot of that going around -- the first anniversary of my lay off from the LA Times came a couple of weeks ago. But the meeting got me thinking about the far reaches of this recession, and what it has meant. My wife, a first grade teacher, now has 25 students in her class instead of 20, a massive increase in work load given that they're all 5 and 6 years old. I play soccer regularly in some neighborhood pickup games. One guy was laid off from his job with a software company. Another, an artist, has left the area to move in with his in-laws in San Diego. A third player lost his job and has since formed his own PR agency. A close friend of a neighbor -- a regular visitor -- has been laid off twice from accounting jobs tied to the mortgage industry. And every time a rumor swirls in the LA Times about more layoffs there, I get emails from folks still working wondering about how to get ready for the ax. Our family is surviving. Margaret's job is reasonably secure, even if the workload has increased. We've thought about moving for another newspaper job, but pretty much ruled it out. Even if someone was hiring, it's not a smart gamble to cut the security of Margaret's job for a newspaper job that can still easily disappear. So I'm freelancing when I can, teaching journalism part-time at Chapman University, finishing up the current book project and putting thoughts together for a proposal for the next one. With one son in college and the other heading there in two years, this has meant a radical shift in how we live, but we're surviving and trying not to think about the age of the cars, let alone setting aside money for retirement. But we're surviving. We're the lucky ones, I know. And it's a strange indicator of the times that where once we were thankful for good jobs and health, now we're thankful for good health and that we're not at risk of losing the house. There has got to be a better way.

Hadrian, before the wall and after

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Postings, as you may have noticed, have been light around here lately. I have a little over two months to go before submitting The Fear Within to my publisher, Rutgers University Press, and so have been nose deep in communists, anti-communists and all sorts of post-World War Two dramas. But I'm nearing the end of some non-research reading that is quite good - Anthony Everitt's Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, which came out earlier this month. Ancient Rome is one of the gaps in my reading/knowledge bank, so I've found this to be quite illuminating. Relying heavily on primary sources, Everitt has written an engaging history depicting life in the Roman Empire leading up to Hadrian's rise, and then his leadership that brought about a rare period of stability - and some notable atrocities, particularly against Jews who were staging an uprising in the Middle East. The New Yorker found fault with Everitt's relatively limited details on Hadrian himself, though the brief review points out that there isn't much material available. Historians are inherently limited by the material, and it's hard to fault Everitt for the paucity of details preserved over the centuries. And the book is touted as the first in-depth look at Hadrian in some 80 years, which in itself makes it worth a look. So if you're interested in ancient history, this would be a good book to pick up. If you're interested in history and, like me, don't have a grounding the Roman Empire, this can help fill a gap.

Celebrate Banned Books Week: Read something radical

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

There are many anomalies in American life, but one that has always stymied me is the compulsion by some to try to ban books. Usually it's social conservatives fearing Little Johnny or Suzie might encounter some naughty bits in a novel. But sometimes it's progressives offended -- or fearing to offend -- by inappropriate depictions of minorities. Neither is defensible. In fact, I can't envision any reason why any book should ever be banned by any entity. Culture thrives through the exchange of ideas, the good and the bad, and if a writer has penned objectionable material then attack the thinking behind it, don't just try to hide the idea away. We learn through discussion. We grow through peaceful resolution of conflict. We mature as a society by looking outside rather than walling off our minds -- and those of our children. So celebrate Banned Books Week, which begins today, by buying and reading any of the books found in this rather chilling map of local fights over books. Then make sure your child reads it, and talk about why some might want that book banned. And, more importantly, why it shouldn't be.

On Dan Brown, and megabooks

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Today's Los Angeles Times carried a piece I wrote on Dan Brown and the impact of his The Da Vinci Code tied to the release tomorrow of his new novel The Lost Symbol. The story doesn't get into all the conspiracy stuff and fanciful embrace of occasionally indicted history, but looks more at the state of publishing, and what The Da Vinci Code did. It really was a remarkable mass-market cultural phenomenon. There are some 81 million copies of the book in circulation worldwide. That's not Harry Potter numbers, but it's still one hell of a hit. Prime evidence that Brown has touched the central nerve of Middle America: Last week NBC's "TODAY Show" did a "Where's Matt Lauer" knock off, sending the co-host to different sites from the book and setting them up as clues. That was followed by a Q&A and excerpt Sunday in Parade magazine, the newspaper insert. It was the fist tome the magazine had excerpted a novel in its 68-year history. Obviously, I need to find a way to include the Knights Templar and the Masons in my books ...

The Gloves Off Economy: A survey of how things got brutal

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Last Winter and into the Spring I worked under a contract with four advocates/academics* who had written and/or co-edited a book called The Gloves-Off Economy: Labor Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market. It's a collection of articles by labor economists and others looking at how the low-wage sector of the economy had eroded or stagnated, and the forces that brought it about. My part of the project was to take the book and rewrite and condense it into a more accessible report, taking the highlights and hopefully putting it in a form that would find wider distribution among policy makers. Here it is, free for the downloading. It was an intriguing project to help out on. I was familiar with many of the conditions detailed in the book, but learned a lot about how these conditions came to be, and the repercussions of the declining power of unions, the surge in cheap immigrant labor, the steps being taken to organize and improve the lives of the lowest-wage earners, and strategies for leading businesses to realize that paying the lowest wage possible isn't always the best way to run a business. Or, more broadly, to contribute to society. Give it a read. And feel free to post comments about it below. * They are: Annette Bernhardt Heather Boushey Laura Dresser Chris Tilly

Will Mt. Wilson survive? The web cam is down

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

One of my favorite spots on the web is the Mt. Wilson web cam, which usually shows beautiful frames of the mountain tops over LA, and the occasional glowing night lights in the basin. But for the past few days it's been showing the encroaching smoke and lurching flames (see my post and photo from the other day. Today the cam went dark. The site loads a saved photo and runs this explainer underneath: "The Mount Wilson web server has gone down, most likely due to a backfire infiltration of a pull box containing telephone lines that bring us our T1 internet service. The will be no more updates from the Towercam, the last one being uploaded at 13:49:06." Let's hope it's just some equipment with smoke in its eyes, and the facility itself -- which has been involved in scores of crucial astronomical discoveries -- has survived.

The mountains are burning

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

As of right now more than 32,000 acres have burned in the foothills above La Canada/Flintridge, just about due north of downtown Los Angeles. There have been many great photographs of the fires by both the pros - many of them my friends - at the LA Times, and by amateurs. This is my favorite - and in a sense, it's robotic.I grabbed this before 6 a.m. today from the web cam at the Mt Wilson Observatory, which usually shows lovely expanses of mountaintops or star-filled nights. The Station Fire, as its being called (it began about a mile from a fire station in the Angeles National Forest) lapped up to the top of the ridge that holds a bunch of communications towers, and threatened the observatory itself before apparently veering off in another direction. In this photo you can see the flames seeming to touch the base of the towers. I've covered wildfires and they are fearsome, remarkable and unpredictable things. And the further they are from me, the happier I am. UPDATE: Fire officials are warning at dinnertime Sunday that Mt. Wilson will likely be overrun by flames sometime tonight. And in the picture above from this morning, the flames were not as close to the towers as the camera makes it seem. But then, maybe it was just prescient.

Up to my elbows in Communists

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

It's been hot here in Southern California -- distractingly and hillside-burning hot, with four wildfires racing through the mountains above Los Angeles and on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. None of them are near us, but there's always a "there but the grace of God" feeling when these things start roaring to life. Our house is in the heart of suburbia, but we're close enough to a wildlife area - a very parched-looking wildlife area - to wonder whether some day it will be our turn. It has come close before, neighbors tell us. It's hard to write when the temperature is in the mid-90s and the breeze feels like someone has just checked to see if the cookies are done (we don't have air conditioning). Add to that the desire to keep checking the TV for fire updates. But as an early riser, at the computer before the sun is up and the heat begins building, I'm still making good progress on The Fear Within. I'm about to get the prosecution rested (in May of 1949), and then I lurch into the defense, a five-month drawn-out attempt by the leaders of the Communist Party to persuade the jury that they were standing up for the common man, not fomenting revolution. We all know how that turned out.