nonfiction

“A vital, essential addition
to the shelf of great books about New Orleans.”
from ernie k-doe
and sold. That thinking justified human slavery in the United
States until the end of the Civil War, but Sandel’s examples are
far subtler than slavery. Should any society find it desirable to
place a price on polluting the environment On first-rate health
care On admission to the best colleges When so much is available
for sale, writes the author, there are two inevitable negative
consequences: inequality and corruption. Sandel devotes the
first chapter to “Jumping the Queue.” He explains the conundrums
that arise when first-class airline passengers are allowed
to skip the long lines at security, when single-passenger cars purchase
the right to use express lanes designed for fuel-efficient
multiple-passenger vehicles, when theatergoers pay somebody
to stand in line overnight to score tickets for the best seats
and when long waits for medical treatment at hospitals are circumvented
by buying the services of concierge doctors, who
guarantee quick access. Although not primarily a quantitative
researcher, Sandel tests the boundaries of a market economy in
his Harvard seminar on Ethics, Economics and the Law. The
reactions of his students provide him with new examples of
moral (or immoral or amoral) reasoning about everyday decision
making in an economy where cash payments rule. Sandel
notes that the reality of a market economy embeds a vital
question: How do members of the citizenry choose the values
by which they will conduct their daily living Are there certain
commodities that markets should not honor
An exquisitely reasoned, skillfully written treatise on
big issues of everyday life.
ERNIE K-DOE
The R&B Emperor
of New Orleans
Sandmel, Ben
The Historic New Orleans Collection
(304 pp.)
$39.95 | Apr. 11, 2012
978-0-917860-60-7
A vital, loving chronicle of the colorful
life and frequently hard times of the New Orleans R&B
singer and self-styled “Emperor of the Universe.”
To many, Ernie K-Doe (1936–2001) is a one-hit wonder:
His evergreen oldie “Mother-in-Law” topped the pop and
R&B charts in 1961. But to New Orleans journalist Sandmel
(Zydeco!, 1999), the vocalist was much more, and this smart,
funny and richly designed and illustrated book makes a rousing
case for the musician as a quintessential Crescent City
figure. Born Ernest Kador Jr. in the city’s Charity Hospital,
K-Doe authored his hit single and other lively R&B tracks
for local Minit Records, but a follow-up smash proved elusive.
While he maintained a hometown profile as a hardworking
performer in the James Brown/Joe Tex mold, K-Doe was best
known for years as a DJ on New Orleans’ WWOZ. There, his
lunatic manner, unique lexicon and stream-of-consciousness
raps cemented his status as a NoLa institution. Megalomania,
alcoholism and a propensity for professional bridge burning
left him virtually homeless by the late ’80s. However, he
enjoyed a second act in the ‘90s after he opened his famed
Mother-in-Law Lounge with wife Antoinette, who restored
him personally and professionally. The club, which often
doubled as the K-Does’ living room, attracted a crowd of tourists,
oddball locals, young musicians and journalists (including
the New York Times’ Neil Strauss, who had a notorious
set-to with the eccentric proprietors while on assignment in
2000). K-Doe’s saga didn’t end with his death: He maintained
a bizarre afterlife at the Mother-in-Law and around town in
the form of a life-sized sculpture created by local artist Jason
Poirier. Though severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina, the
lounge was restored and run by Antoinette until her death in
2009. Despite a multitude of personal faults, K-Doe emerges
here as hilarious, complex and indomitable—a larger-than-life
character altogether worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of
his city’s oversized musical titans.
A vital, essential addition to the shelf of great books
about New Orleans. (137 images)
THE REAL CRASH
America’s Coming
Bankruptcy—How
to Save Yourself
and Your Country
Schiff, Peter
St. Martin’s (320 pp.)
$25.99 | May 8, 2012
978-1-250-00447-5
978-1-250-00835-0 e-book
Schiff (Crash Proof 2.0, 2007, etc.)
offers a controversial set of remedies for the economic crash he
believes is still on the horizon.
The author, who ran in Connecticut’s Republican Primary
for U.S. Senate and advised Ron Paul’s presidential campaign
in 2008, makes no bones about his political agenda. For him,
the coming bankruptcy of the United States is the main driver
of ongoing economic crisis and the top issue on the political
agenda. “The U.S.A. is insolvent,” he writes, “and should enter
the sovereign equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” Schiff concedes
that the measures he proposes will be painful. Among
them, he advocates abolishing the payroll tax that pays for
Medicare and Social Security, repealing the minimum wage,
killing unemployment insurance “to allow wages to fall,” eliminating
the FDIC and getting rid of other regulatory bodies or
making them “optional.” The author insists that “lower wages”
would mean a better quality of life, and he proposes long-term
changes as these shock-therapy quick fixes take hold, directing
his fire against primary education and the college system,
which for the most part “wastes everyone’s time and money.”
Schiff consistently claims that to secure protection against the
disasters looming ahead from debt growth and dollar devaluation,
the need is for “shorting the U.S. government”—he recommends
investing in gold-mining stocks and foreign currencies
like the Chinese RMB. The author also opposes the war on
drugs and favors legalizing prostitution and gambling.
Caveat lector. The inclusion of contact information
for Schiff’s various investment companies highlights the
element of self-promotion for both his businesses and the
political approach he advocates.
SPIES AND COMMISSARS
The Early Years of the
Russian Revolution
Service, Robert
PublicAffairs (480 pp.)
$32.99 | May 8, 2012
978-1-61039-140-5
British historian Service (Russian History/Univ.
of Oxford; Trotsky, 2009, etc.)
examines the fraught birth of the Soviet
Union in this careful, dense scholarly study.
The conventional view of the Bolshevik Revolution and its
aftermath posits a Marxist-Leninist regime cut off from the rest
of the world, a state behind an iron curtain decades before the
fact. As Service capably shows, this view is incorrect. The outside
world was well aware of events inside the new Soviet Union,
while the Union had a network of agents, representatives and
sympathizers able to convey its wants and demands abroad.
During the first years of the Soviet experiment, civil war raged
in the country. The White and Red armies were well apprised
of one another’s actions, and it seems largely thanks to the
ineptitude and personal strangeness of many of the anti-Soviet
commanders that the Revolution was not overwhelmed, particularly
since foreign expeditionary forces—including American,
British and French detachments—were fighting on behalf of
the Whites inside Russia. One of the most interesting snippets
of Service’s book is a passing reference to what happened to
the White leaders after the civil war ended: Pëtr Wrangler died
suddenly and mysteriously in Serbia, Anton Denikin wound up
in the United States and Nikolai Yudenich retired quietly to
the French Riviera “and shunned émigré affairs through to his
peaceful end in 1933.” Meanwhile, on the opposing side, Trotsky
suffered a terrible end, Lenin was embalmed and entombed
and Stalin took the nation through several grim decades. Service
paints detailed portraits of the revolutionary principals
and their sometimes-surprising allies and enemies—e.g., one
British spy who worked inside the Soviet Union was the noted
writer W. Somerset Maugham.
Why did the Soviets kill the tsar Why was Finland
granted its independence How did Keynesian economics
save Lenin’s skin For those with an interest in such questions,
Service’s book will hold plenty of appeal.
COMING OF AGE ON ZOLOFT
How Antidepressants
Cheered Us Up, Let
Us Down, and
Changed Who We Are
Sharpe, Katherine
Perennial/HarperCollins (336 pp.)
$14.99 paperback | Jun. 5, 2012
978-0-06-205973-4
A knowing account of what it is like
to grow up on psychiatric medications.
After a 20-minute session with a counselor during college,
former scienceblogs.com editor Sharpe was prescribed Zoloft,
and for most of the next 10 years she continued on antidepressants.
That experience was not unusual in her generation, nor is
it among young people today. The author questions the effect
of such medication on adolescents who have not yet fully developed
a sense of self. Antidepressants, she writes, got her moving,
but they failed to give her the sense of direction that talk
therapy later provided; she deplores the decline in access to talk
therapy, a powerful complement to drug therapy. Sharpe interviewed
or corresponded with dozens of other people about their
experiences growing up on antidepressants, and their stories
reveal a range of reactions. For some, the judgment that they
had a chemical imbalance in the brain came as a relief, freeing
them from a feeling of blame; for others, it made them feel like
freaks. Besides her personal story and those of her interviewees,
Sharpe provides a history of antidepressants, a revealing look at
the politics behind the evolution of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders and an account of the rise of
the biomedical model of mental illness, which holds that disorders
like depression have biological causes and can be managed
with pharmaceuticals. She also analyzes the effects of directto-consumer
advertising by drug companies on the demand for
antidepressants and the role of health insurance in determining
patients’ access to therapy modalities.
Balanced and informative—an education for any parent
considering psychiatric medication for a troubled adolescent.
LOVE, LIFE, AND ELEPHANTS
An African Love Story
Sheldrick, Daphne
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (352 pp.)
$27.00 | May 15, 2012
978-0-374-10457-3
A heartfelt memoir about the author’s
decades-long efforts to save baby elephants.
At 17, the author traveled to Kenya’s
Tsavo National Park, one of the world’s
largest game reserves, and briefly met
David Sheldrick, the park’s first warden. The two met again on
her following visit a few years later, when she was newly married
with an infant daughter. Sheldrick felt an instant attraction to
David, 15 years her senior, and a major arc of the book follows
832 | 15 april 2012 | nonfiction | kirkusreviews.com |
| kirkusreviews.com | nonfiction | 15 april 2012 | 833