Go Set a Watchman

Author: Harper Lee

I can’t recall the last time the Wall Street Journal devoted a couple of pages of newsprint for a word-for-word reproduction of the first chapter of a novel. I guess it is not often that you discover something that is conveniently advertised as a “sequel” to a Pulitzer Prize winning American Classic more than 50 years after the novel was first published. Nevertheless, it did what it was supposed to do. I was intrigued enough to borrow the book from my local library and read it.

The book is set in Maycomb county some 20+ years after the events that Scout describes in “To Kill a Mockingbird”.  Harper Lee’s prose is so amazing that in a single sentence she can sum up the racial tensions that must have been prevalent in the South for a large part of the twentieth century. The view that African Americans are in many ways “lesser” than their white counterparts is almost taken for granted.  With this poignant background, the book stumbles along from describing a budding romance between Jean Louise Finch (Scout) and Hank Clinton to the radical views that Atticus Finch hold against the underprivileged black community.  She sums up Atticus behavior in this book quite well with this quote from her Uncle Jack “[A]ll over the South your father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that's almost gone down the drain”. So it is not a hatred of black people, but rather an acceptance that they are not capable to think and manage their own affairs, so we have to limit the damage that they can do. Needless to say Jean Louise will have none of it!

What fascinated me the most was how the editor of “Go Set a Watchman” — Tay Hohoff —  saw the potential in Harper Lee and was able to give her feedback and guidance to create the very polished work that is “To Kill a Mockingbird”. She clearly identified the childhood stories recounted by Jean Louise Finch in “Go Set a Watchman” as the keepers and asked her to rewrite the novel with those at its core.  I would love to learn more about the editorial process and how it all went down.

While the book lacks a cohesive story and structure, it is reasonably well written and is worth a read just so that you can participate in all the discussion about how the Mockingbird hero Atticus turns out to be a common Southern racist!

The Seven Good Years: A Memoir

Author: Etkar Keret

Reading Etkar Keret’s Memoir feels like you are having a conversation with the author and he is telling one good story after another. In fact, the book reads like a bunch of short stories that happen to have taken place during seven years in his life during which he had a son and lost his father.

I have visited Tel Aviv a couple of times, and very close friend of mine is from Israel so I have a good understanding and appreciation for some of the challenges that Israeli’s face on a day to day basis. Here Etkar fondly recounts a few of these personal eccentricities with a keen sense of observation that makes you hang on to every word that he writes. You can see that Etkar doesn’t take himself too seriously and invites you to laugh at him and the folks that he hangs out with.  As long as you can relate to the author you will find yourself in splits of laughter.

Read it and enjoy. It’s a short book and you will soon be begging for more.

Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice

Author: Adam Benforado

There’s plenty of memorable statistics in this book, but this one sums it up quite well. "America accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost a quarter of all prisoners.” Clearly we are doing something wrong in this country.  In this book, Mr. Benforado takes aim at the US judicial system and highlights the many places where you may think we have a good system, but in reality, it comes up very short.

Take the case where our Sixth Amendment pretty much guarantees that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial”.  Mr. Benforado points out that in reality fewer than 10 percent of criminal defendants make it to trial. The adervsarial nature of a U.S. trial make it very expensive and the punishments so severe that most criminals end up getting a plea bargain. Mr Benforado points out that in a plea bargain the prosecutor is all powerful. The defendent does not have recourse to due process while the prosecutor takes on the role of accuser, investigator, adjudicator and sentencer. This high concentration of power in a single person is a recipe for unfairness. 

The chapter in "throwing Away the key" is very sobering and some of the data there on our prison population and experience is bound to make you reconsider your view on whether American Jails are unduly cruel and inhuman. Putting someone in solitary confinement is tantamount to messing with their mind and we end up creating bigger monsters of people than what they might have been when they were incarcerated. The author praises the prison system in Norway which is all about rehabilitating prisoners rather than punishing them. This Scandinavian country has a 10 times lower rate of incarceration (70 per 100,000) than the US and must be doing something right. The article in Business Insider gives a great description of their system which is summed up well by one of their prison governors, "If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings."

Another statistic that stopped me dead in my tracks was learning that there are a greater number of black men in prison in the U.S. today, than there were slaves in 1850! Mr Benforado is unequivocal in criticizing the complex rules that the U.S. judicial system has created that give us the illusion of fairness. In describing procedural technicalities like reading someone his Miranda rights, Mr Benforado declares that in the U.S. "we are now all form, substance be damned". 

Read this for an eye-opening lecture on “Unfair" our Criminal Justice System can be in the US. 

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Author: Ashlee Vance

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are three of the most visionary entrepreneurs of my generation. I have read biographies of Steve and Jeff and with this book I got a glimpse into the events that shaped Elon Musk.  While every one of them is hugely impressive, Elon clearly stands out as the one with most audacious vision.  The book opens with how the author, Ashlee Vance struggled to get Elon’s co-operation as he refused to give him editorial control on the manuscript. Only when Ashlee made it clear that he was not going to back down from his project of writing the book, did he get Elon’s support. Since Elon eventually cooperated with Ashlee Vance, I didn’t expect too many negative portrayals about him. Nevertheless Ashlee attempts to keep it balanced and includes the story of Elon firing his long time secretary Mary Beth Brown. Despite this and other instances of his lack of empathy with individual human beings, Ashlee attempts one last ditch effort to paint Elon in a good light. He says "Elon has the weirdest kind of empathy of anyone I've ever come across. He doesn't have a lot of interpersonal empathy, but he has a lot of empathy for mankind,"

Regardless of whether you like Elon or not, one thing is clear. This guy will have done more for humanity than anyone else in our lifetime. Read this as a small tribute to him!