Tag Archives: politics

Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen

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I don’t know about you, but I frequently have the impulse to pause political speeches and do a point by point analysis of what’s being said. Without that pause, it feels like a lot of important meaning gets lost to the overall vibe of the speech. If you crave it too, there’s plenty of deep analysis like that in Masha Gessen’s book, Surviving Autocracy.

Using the backdrop of Gessen’s experience with Russia, the book provides an analysis of contemporary government for its autocratic tendencies. There is a lot of fascinating analysis. The book is framed by its time, which is that it came out shortly after the start of the covid pandemic. The critique around that falls a little flat to me because the pandemic was such a novel circumstance. I think this is the piece that seems most partisan as well. However, most of the rest of the book is full of other more common aspects of governing that feel endlessly timeless and relevant–the issues that we may very well be grappling with for all of human history.

The Lazy B by Sandra Day O’Connor and H. Alan Day

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Sandra Day O’Connor is in the news today saying that the Supreme Court should have stayed out of the 2000 Bush/Gore election. So I thought I would take the opportunity to review her book, which I just finished, entitled The Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. She co-wrote it with her brother Alan.

image from Barnes and Noble

Since I grew up on a cattle ranch, I love reading these kinds of stories. They fill me with nostalgia for my childhood home. Since ranching in the Southwest is very different from ranch in NE Oregon, there really were quite a few differences between her upbringing and mine.

I loved the long descriptions of people who lived and worked on the ranch. I loved the honorable attitude of the farmers. This is something I’ve heard people give lip service to my whole life, but it’s something I’ve grown to appreciate more as I get older and see how it plays out in the real world. The people described in the book were completely honest with their word. In many ways, they selflessly sought the best outcome for each situation. In my world, people are far more self-serving and ambitious to a fault. It was refreshing to see how doing the right thing for the whole group was consistently best for the individual.

Of course, there were politics. O’Connor, like in her time on the Supreme Court, was a good politician in the book, pointing out problems, analyzing them, but never really taking a stance one way or the other. Good politicians and critical thinkers know that it’s usually more complicated than that. It’s usually not “one way or the other.” So I appreciated that nuance.

I would have seen more critical commentary of her father and a deeper portrait of her mother. The father calls the shots and wins every argument to a fault. The brother is cocky and bullheaded–even in adulthood. The mother seems typically suppressed for the time period. Everyone grew up, married, had children, and the lifestyle of the ranch–though beloved–was no longer sustainable because of the changing social and financial landscape. To me it represented a tragedy that could have been explored in more detail.