Janet Malcolm, _Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial_

 JANET MALCOLM AND Joan Didion, both gone now. And both missed. Didion was more a culture hero than Malcolm was, perhaps. I suspect no book by Malcolm shows up on reading lists for courses in MFA programs as often as The White Album or Year of Magical Thinking does. And Malcolm's work is quite a bit less personal, which makes a difference. They were both journalists, though, at bottom, and both gifted ones. 

They had that knack of getting people to trust them enough to start talking and keep talking...talking a little too much, even, revealing more than they ever planned to. Reading this book, I began to wonder, why did people continue to talk to Didion and Malcolm even though perusal of their books reveals that they are going to serve you up to their readers, done to a turn, slow roasted in your own juices?

Didion put it as plainly as possible, in italics, right at the end of the preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem: "That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out." So they weren't coy about it. People still talked to them...and talked and talked.

Case in point--this book, about people from the small, tightly-knit, somewhat closed-off community of Bokharan Jews in New York City. In the trial the book presents, Mazoltuv Borukhova is convicted of hiring a hit man to murder her ex-husband, Daniel Malakov. She pleads not guilty, but if a motive could be discerned, it might be her fears that her ex-husband was abusing their daughter, Michelle Malakova. Going to fatal lengths to address a wrong to her daughter makes Borukhova a kind of Clytemnestra--hence the book's title.

The trial does not Borukhova's way, but Malcolm, I would say, does. Malakov's relatives, then, get to be the slowly-roasted-in-their-own-juices ones. They seem wary of Malcolm, conscious of how she could make them look, but they just can't help themselves. And Malcolm serves them up to us.

Eric Burdon with J.Marshall Craig, _Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood_

 ERIC BURDON WAS the lead singer in the Animals, a British band of the 1960s whose biggest hits you still might hear occasionally wafting through the air today--the song named in this memoir's title, for instance, or "It's My Life," "Don't Bring Me Down," "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," or especially their version of "House of the Rising Sun," with its arpeggiated guitar intro, bluesy organ, and Burdon's vocal, moving from ominously quiet to searing howl over three minutes. 

I don't think Burdon had a hit after "Spill the Wine" in 1970 (with a different group, War), but he remained a live draw over most of the world for quite a while. He lived a lot of different places and met a lot of interesting people and has a lot of good stories, so the book is a good read if you are interested in the British rock explosion of the 1960s.

Lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of touring--not to mention bad management, troubles with the law, "musical differences," and disappearing money--so it's understandable that the book's chronology is fuzzy and some episodes are just swallowed in the mist. For instance, I was curious how the original Animals of "House of the Rising Sun" turned into the later Animals who played Monterrey Pop and had hits with "Sky Pilot" and "San Francisco Nights," but we don't find out. Perhaps Burdon doesn't actually remember that precisely.

What he does remember vividly is Jimi Hendrix. They were friends and shared a stage on Hendrix's last night alive--Burdon was one of the first people to know Hendrix had passed. Even if you are not that interested in the Animals, Chapter 7 is worth a look for its up-close view on one of the 20th century's most remarkable musicians.

Thomas Frank, _The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism_

FRANK IS ONE of my indispensables. Not only does he write well, but he also has a better historical foundation for his political analysis than most of his pundit peers, and furthermore his heart is in the right place, by which I mean right here in the Midwest, even though he now lives "outside Washington, D. C." You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can't take the Midwest out of the boy.

The Midwest is where the 1890s version of American Populism flourished, and Frank writes to correct the misapprehensions that mushroomed during the Trump administration. Trump's appeal was often ascribed to something coastal pundits called populism, by which they meant a foul brew of racism, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and ignorance found in its highest concentration here in the red states. 

No, no, writes Frank. The foul brew is real enough, but let's not call it populism. Actual, historical populism was something else--democratic, progressive, community-minded, knowledgeable.  And he's got the research to back up his claims (unlike historian and Populism-hater Richard Hofstadter, whose unfamiliarity with the primary documents of populism Frank notes more than once). 

Another fine book from Frank, then. I do have a demurral on one point. 

Frank has a chapter ("Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade") that dwells on some of the cultural products  of the Popular Front Era--Paul Robeson, Ben Shahn, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, James Agee, various WPA projects--and why not? Good on them. I was a bit surprised, though, when Frank's praise of Carl Sandburg's book of poems called The People, Yes (obviously, the source of Frank's title) included the claim that "what we expect from our poets is abstruseness, exclusivity, peer-reviewed professional excellence" (p. 114). Jeez. Does he read any contemporary poetry? Little of it sounds like Sandburg, true, but it is about as engagé as anyone would ask. Somebody get this man a subscription to Oversound or any boom that won the Pulitzer for poetry in the last ten years. He sounds like one of those folks who never forgave their high school English teacher for assigning The Waste Land.