Favorite Books 2024
Art, War, and Anxiety
The end of 2024 is upon us. Last year, I posted my favorite books, music, art exhibitions, and movies. This year, I am posting only books and music. The music post arrives tomorrow.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness - Jonathan Haidt
Thomas Friedman published The World Is Flat in 2005. Technology has changed so much in the past 20 years that you can now buy this book at McKay’s for 25 cents. The last time I was at McKay’s, more copies of that book were on the shelf than used copies of a Hootie and Blowfish CD at a record store in 1996. And why charge a quarter for it? McKay’s has a free bin. It feels like a strange, personal attack on Friedman. I kind of like that pettiness.
Will The Anxious Generation suffer the same fate in 20 years? Somehow, I doubt it. Haidt attempts to peg the hockey-stick-shaped rise of teenage mental illness to the year Apple released the iPhone 4 with the front-facing selfie camera. Anxiety and depression skyrocketed. Is that true? He has his detractors. Those people have not been teaching college for the past 10 years and observed the shift in how the population communicates (or doesn’t). If I were to criticize Haidt for anything, it would be that he focuses too much on minors. He discusses the effects of this tech on society at large, but there could be more. This is not an anxious generation. This is an anxious “now.” It has captured everyone.
My takeaways from the book were more validations of my thinking. I have said this enough in this Substack, but here it all is again. Once more with feeling:
Turn off as many notifications as possible that still allow you to be a responsible family member or employee.
Take every social media app off your phone. Any app that makes billions of dollars a year by convincing you the true test of a friendship is keeping a daily “streak” alive is evil. And a Snapchat streak seems like the least evil of all the evil things these sites do.
Take news apps off your phone if you live in a stable country (and yes, the US is a stable country). If a bomb explodes 5,000 miles away, you can read about it later.
Remove all video streaming from your phone. If God wanted you to watch Oppenheimer on an iPhone, He wouldn’t have helped us create a 70-mm IMAX movie theater.
Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring - Brad Gooch
Reading this book made me aware of one thing: I knew nothing about Keith Haring besides his art and death. That’s not a bad thing, but it's odd. I knew so little about him that I once participated in a group show in Kutztown, and it never came up that Haring grew up there.
Gooch documents Haring’s career as much as possible in one book. Haring created a lifetime of work in ten years. Once I finished this book, I found a lot of material on YouTube that the book didn’t mention. To capture every mural and body of work Haring made would have required a three-volume biography. His output and scale are remarkable. To put it into numbers, Haring made over 5,000 subway drawings. That is just the subway drawings. That was a hobby turned passion project, turned occasional side jawn he would do while drawing and painting over the rest of the Earth’s surface.
It is difficult to imagine Haring working into the 1990s. His optimism was genuine. His sincerity confused the art world. It was inconceivable to writers at the NY Times, among others, that someone would want to engage as much of the public with his art without being a hack about it. That’s more of a reflection of the tired nature of the art world than Haring’s personality. That cynicism only deepened in the 1990s. By the end of his life, Haring had lost countless friends and mentors to AIDS, botched surgeries, and drugs. Despite that, he still made art pointing to hope while walking alongside those who suffered. I want to think that if he had lived, Haring would have carved out a standalone space, fully engaged with the public, and divorced from the art world. The art world didn’t deserve him.
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq - Steve Coll
Working from as much official documentation as possible, Coll charts the United States’ courting and eventual rejection and dismantling of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorial rule over Iraq. Coll is so firmly committed to a Dragnet-styled “just the facts” approach that he leaves no room at the end of the book for contemplation or examining what happened through the lens of a world that has had 20 years to consider the ramifications of the US/Iraq alliance turned sour. So focused on facts without posturing, the last paragraph of the book is about Hussein’s execution because that is where Hussein’s relationship with the CIA ends.
What unfolds in the book is no surprise. Both sides are composed of bad-faith actors and people with good intentions. And miscommunication. I cannot stress how much miscommunication took place. There was so much miscommunication that upon his capture, while being interviewed by the United States, Hussein said, “If you did not want me to invade Kuwait, why didn’t you tell me?” How different this century would be if he hadn’t invaded Kuwait.
The CIA tried and failed to play 4D chess in the Middle East to appease rivals while simultaneously keeping Iran in check. There was no way any of that was going to work, and the Iraqis were the ones to suffer for it.
This book goes far beyond the “war for oil” protests of 1991 and 2003. Like all history, this chapter in world history is grayer than how we talk about it now.
Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs - Johann Hari
Johann Hari’s books are so compelling that they make me suspicious of the data. To quote Talking Heads, “Facts all come with points of view.” That said, Hari often covers material I find to be important. Chasing the Scream made me reevaluate drug legalization. Unfortunately, it seems to have made influential people in Philadelphia reconsider the city’s drug policies, but they didn’t follow the recipe Hari points out as being successful in other parts of the Western world. His book, Stolen Focus, mined the same territory as Haidt’s Anxious Generation.
Magic Pill focuses on O-o-o-ozempic and similar weight loss drugs that are currently incredibly expensive and seem too good to be true. These may end up being revolutionary drugs that change humanity. GLP-1 drugs originally meant to help with diabetes are being studied for dramatic weight loss and treating kidney disease, Alzheimer’s, and colon cancer. Or they could doom us to a life of pill-popping and injecting ourselves when we need to start growing more food than we “manufacture.” To quote Jerry Seinfeld, “The hard way is the right way.” But that philosophy is not a one-size-fits-all statement. Some people are genetically predisposed to obesity. These treatments can help.
What is Hari’s conclusion? He is smart enough to know it is too soon to tell. He also knows he has a troubling emotional relationship with food and needs help. Your local KFC should not get you Christmas gifts because they are so familiar with you. Ozempic is a good band-aid on an open chest wound, and he’s working hard to change his relationship with food rather than medicate it to control it.
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See - Bianca Bosker
Graduate school consisted of critiques, seminars, and critical theory classes. I once suggested in a seminar class that anyone could do this. You just have to make art and read the correct things. This isn’t medical school. That did not go over well in a room full of people spending a lot of money so they could walk around saying they have an MFA. And it makes sense. For the money you spend, you want to feel like you alone have the right to administer prescriptions for the art world. But man, oh man, are you wrong.
To write this book, Bianca Bosker immersed herself in the New York art world, finding several jobs, both volunteered and paid, that most artists in NYC would like to have. She must have one heck of an elevator pitch to sell herself.
She finds what an artist would expect: well-intentioned, thoughtful artists, a small group of passionate dealers, and hacks with moneyed mailing lists. Guess who is more financially successful in this equation? One day, I talked with a young person about their desire to make a lot of money through sports or music. I didn’t want to burst their bubble, but I said, “You know what people with a lot of money do for a living? Money. That’s their job—money.”
Bosker’s enthusiasm and curiosity position her at every level: museum guard, gallery intern, studio assistant, performance art participant, and art fair salesperson. Her professional art CV looks better than mine. She manages this all with a great sense of humor and a desire to train her eye to see art as something more than a simulation of the world around us. She emerges more informed and sympathetic, and the reader hopefully leaves the book with the same impression.
Nowville: The Untold History of Nashville’s Contemporary Art Scene - Joe Nolan
For the out-of-state readers, Nolan is a Nashville jack-of-all-trades. We don’t know each other well, but are good to say “Hi” at art receptions. We have probably lived in this area for the same amount of time, but my time away makes our overlap less significant than if I hadn’t lived in Philadelphia for as long as I did. Nolan is a songwriter, a freelance writer, and a visual artist…and those are just things I have seen him do. Who knows what else that guy is up to? The wide net he casts over this city makes him well-suited to write a history of Nashville’s recent art scene.
Nowville opens with a brief history of Nashville’s art legacy: the Stieglitz collection at Fisk, Aaron Douglas, and William Edmonson. What follows is a series of interviews and blurbs from the people who helped shape Nashville's current art scene into what it is, starting in 1992 and working 30 years to where we are now. The book begins with a list of “cast” members: artists who hustled to create an environment for art to be taken seriously, starting when Nashville was more focused on Garth Brooks than anything else. What emerged was an egalitarian community. There is no room for gatekeeping in an art scene the size of Nashville’s. If you’re good, you’re good. Who cares what diploma you may or may not have squirreled away in a basement or attic? But to quote a Nashville artist I talked to a long time ago, “Everyone is welcome, but if you’re going to step onto our turf, you better be prepared to fight.” That wasn’t meant as a threat. It meant if you declare yourself an artist, prepare for a critique. You didn’t go to art school? You’re still getting a critique.
The list of artists at the beginning of this book is a testament to the ongoing culture of the Nashville art scene. Most of them are still here, 30 years later, contributing. When I moved back here, I didn’t know anyone aside from a lifelong friend, printmaker (that’s not enough to describe him), Bryce McCloud. My friend, Adam Hill, introduced me to Lain York. Patrick Deguira and I went to the same high school, but he was two years ahead of me. Despite not knowing one another, he still invited me out for a beer when I moved back to talk about the scene. Those were my connections. But, like most art communities, if you meet one or two people, you meet everyone else sooner than expected.
I am not a social butterfly. I want to stay home and work. The older I get, the more true that becomes. I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m just trying to be by myself. Therefore, I am not as woven into this scene as I could or should be. But no matter how infrequently I show my face, I am always met with smiles and hugs. That is what it is to be an artist in Nashville; I’m sure that is the same in other places. Maybe less hugs. Southerners like to hug. The people in this book truly built something. Sweat, jerry-rigged toilets, rats, possums, and fire marshals connect them.
When I moved back here in 2013, I was trying to wrap my mind around this city's artistic heritage beyond its Modernist history. Growing up in Hendersonville, I knew nothing more than our high school art field trip to Cumberland Gallery. It was easy to see that Lain was the mayor/tourism chair. But that is all I knew aside from occasional trips home when I went to the Fugitive, Tag, Ruby Green, or the Arcade. On several occasions, I said, “Someone needs to write a book about all of this so I know what’s going on.” Thanks, Joe.
The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film - David Thomson
The most difficult-to-explain book on this list. It roams a lot. The points hit, and Thomson’s ideas are valid, but I would not have liked being the editor of this book. He admittedly dives down rabbit holes, eventually returning to the path. This book reads like Thomson has been mulling it over for 50 years. He has so many theories about film’s relationship with war he can’t shape them all into a cohesive form. But why should he? War doesn’t make sense. Film is built on the montage of somewhat unrelated imagery. So how can a book discussing those two ideas fall seamlessly between the covers? Sometimes, it is enough to give space to deep thinkers and watch them work. You will agree with him. Then you will disagree with him. Then you will wonder where he is going, but he will return.
Mondrian: His Life, His Art, His Quest for the Absolute - Nicholas Fox Weber
I have not finished the book yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recommend it. A thorough account of Piet Mondrian’s life is long overdue. One of the most influential visual artists of the past 100 years, whose ideas have gone far beyond the museum wall to fashion, architecture, packaging, and interior design. If one Western artist has influenced the visual language of the past 100 years more than Mondrian, it is hard to imagine. Warhol? Maybe. But Warhol was responding to something that already existed on a mass level. Mondrian. What of Mondrian precedes Mondrian? They make Hot Wheels decorated like his paintings. Find another artist whose work inspired painters, fashion designers, musicians, architects, and toy manufacturers.