You don’t want to read this book.

I’m only bothering to write about it because it’s been on the best seller list for months.

Books are not like music, you don’t get to experience it before you buy it, so with the accolades and sales many people are purchasing this book, and I won’t say as few are completing it as Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” but I think most people never make it to the end.

The bottom line is first and foremost a book must be readable. Information is not enough, you must have a narrative, you must pull the reader in. But “1929” is a pastiche of facts, of research, it reads like a college thesis, and you know how many people read those when they’re done…ZERO!

I’ve got no problem with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Then again, when you spread yourself this thin… Ryan Seacrest might be doing many things, but he’s got as much gravitas as a box of Cheerios. It’s mindless. Whereas Sorkin is on CNBC, helped create “Billions” and is a writer for the “New York Times.” As for taking the time to write a book? When? With not only these gigs, but three children to boot!

So you’re scratching your head saying he writes for the “New York Times,” how bad can he be?

Well newspaper writing is different from book writing. Newspaper writing is about information laid out clearly and concisely. Furthermore, in a paper like the “Times,” opinion is relegated to a different page, so there’s no attitude, no real perspective, just the facts.

If you want someone to take the time to read a book…

The dirty little secret is most books don’t sell. Maybe a couple of thousand copies at best. And in a country of 300+ million, that’s bupkes. But we’re subjected to hype about these tomes for months, and reviews and… Kara Swisher talked about her lame book for months, as if anybody cared, and it came out and face-planted…it wasn’t good, I tried to read it. But she gets a pass from the others in the information industrial complex.

As for the book business… If you want to talk about people with a lot of self-respect, it’s not down and dirty like the music business. And those who work in it hate that lowbrow stuff is keeping the lights on.

So “1929” was billed as a deep dive into the crash, with lessons for today.

Well, at first I could see the parallels, but those died pretty quickly. It was a different time with different regulations, or lack thereof. Are there still crooks in finance? Yes, but they’re not really doing it the same way. (Although you did see that Jamie Dimon made $770 million last year…and this is heinous, no one deserves that much, especially when people are hurting, having a tough time making ends meet, never mind getting health care.)

What I wanted was drama. What it felt like when the market actually crashed. And at that point, Sorkin is writing about the market day by day, I’m waiting for the shoe to drop, but it never does narratively, you feel like the market went down and then down further and…whatever is happening on Wall Street is detached from the rest of the country in “1929.”

At the end of this book, Sorkin thanks Erik Larson for advice. I’ve read all the Larson books, the best one is still the one I read first, “Devil in the White City.” But as good a researcher as Larson is, and decent with narrative too, his books are flat, there’s no arc, just endless information. As for Sorkin’s “1929,” it’s a pale imitation of Larson.

Only when you get to the end of the book does Sorkin say he wanted to flesh out the personalities. Well, the focus of the book kept on switching from the people to the market and…you can’t do everything, focus on one or the other, or write about one person, or the crash itself, a secret of writing is you sometimes have to leave the best stuff out, because it doesn’t fit with the narrative. But Sorkin throws in the words of a preacher from Massachusetts at the end…someone without profile who had no connection with the players, why?

Because Sorkin was determined to see all his research in print.

The most amazing thing, the true lesson for me, was that so many of these people ended up broke, they were gamblers, they never saved for a rainy day. And most of their names have been forgotten. And you will read a bit about the individuals, but you’ll tell yourself there’s got to be a better book about this out there, and I’m sure there is, probably one of those Sorkin credits as a jumping off point.

Writing is hard. And I’ll also say, writers are born, not made. As a matter of fact, the more you teach someone how to write the more you risk squeezing the creativity out of them. We don’t need me-too, we need unique.

So I finished this book, even though at times my eyes glazed over and I had to reread passages, but not only was it disappointing, I just couldn’t get over the fact that this was the book everybody was hailing, everybody was talking about, that was selling.

It doesn’t deserve it.

1

He was the cute one.

The history of the Grateful Dead is presently well-known, but at the turn of the decade, from ’69 to ’70, that was not the case. The Dead were a fringe band from San Francisco which had a deal with a major label but had no radio hits, never mind a Top 40 hit, unlike Jefferson Airplane, another act that was seen as a collective, living together in a house. Eventually news squeaked out about the Warlocks, but unless you were living in San Francisco, the Dead were an enigma.

They finally got press with their 1969 double album “Live/Dead,” but that didn’t move the needle significantly. Whatever audience the Dead had was built on the road. And since the band had to survive, they worked.

And then came “Workingman’s Dead” and “Uncle John’s Band,” which was perfect for the summer of 1970, it sat right alongside the CSNY hits. And it was a double whammy, in the fall came “American Beauty,” the true breakthrough, much more accessible than anything the band had released previously, and this is when their touring footprint increased and they garnered new fans. It was really three tracks: “Friend of the Devil” and “Ripple” and “Sugar Magnolia.” Easily digestible, as opposed to the space rock that preceded them, this is when new fans came aboard, casual listeners. And when they went to see the band they expected something conventional, short songs as opposed to extended jams, which turned out to be a bonus.

Not that the audience was completely ignorant. Let’s be clear, the Dead were not an AM thing, they existed on FM and turntables. But that’s where the passion was, that’s where the action was, that’s where the exploration was, that’s where the envelope was being pushed. The listeners of FM were always eager to have their horizons expanded. They might have known about the long Dead shows, but it was the short songs that were the entry point.

And live, it might have been Jerry Garcia’s band, but Bob Weir was the frontman.

The rest of the band did not look like people you knew, the suburbanites who cottoned to the Dead were used to more freshly-scrubbed acts. Sure, some might be rough around the edges, but the Dead looked like they rolled right off the bus, maybe without a shower. They were not physically appealing.

Except for Bob Weir. He was younger than the rest, and he had that shoulder-length hair. How did he end up in this band? It was as if the act recruited from summer camp…how did he get a chance, how did he get included, how did he stay in the group?

But he was definitely a member, as delineated in “Truckin’.” They were all drinkin’ and druggin’ and although the one-two punch of the 1970 albums brought them closer to the mainstream, right thereafter they steered away. The Dead were sui generis. Maybe influenced by what had come before, blues, jug band music, but no one sounded like the Grateful Dead, no one even went down the jam band path until that scene flowered in the nineties.

But to have a band this big, women must be interested. And women were, and Weir has to get credit for that. Otherwise, the Dead would have been Rush, a cadre of male acolytes, but very few females.

Bob was a member of the band, overshadowed on wax until his solo album “Ace” came out in 1972.

By this point people were hungry for everything Dead affiliated, there’d been an album released from the era before Warner Bros. And earlier in the year, Jerry had released “Garcia,” his first solo album. It started with the infectious “Deal” and contained “Sugaree,” which became a standard, but it was definitely a side project, a ramble down the road of Garcia’s personal interests.

That was January. “Ace” was released in May. And it delivered what “Garcia” did not, in your face upbeat playability, with one bonafide standard, “Playing in the Band,” and “One More Saturday Night,” which became a staple of the Dead’s live shows, and “Cassidy.”

This was a surprise. From a distance it almost seemed like a rivalry. But “Ace” lifted Bob Weir’s cred dramatically, he and Jerry were now clearly the leaders of the band…if not quite equals, Bob was now right there alongside him. 

2

I could recite the rest of the Dead’s history. From their own label to the hit with Clive Davis to the eighties when Gen-X glommed on and cities didn’t want the Dead in their buildings because of the penumbra they brought with them, the hangers-on.

And then Jerry Garcia died. In 1995. Before his time, at age 53. It wasn’t surprising his body gave out, after all the abuse he’d put it through, but Jerry was seen as the heart and soul of the Dead and the rest of the members decided not to operate under that moniker. Not that they didn’t play, they just called it something else, like the Other Ones, whose double album “The Strange Remain,” with Bruce Hornsby in the group, is my favorite late “Dead” work.

Weir, Lesh and Hart were in that band, but there were also solo projects. The legend continued. And the man carrying the flag forward was Weir. Sure, Phil had his fans, and would do solo work, but it was Weir who’d written and sung those songs, Weir with the personality. Sometimes they played together, and sometimes not. And I won’t say that anybody could replace Jerry, but sans Bob, there would be no continued Dead mania, and there was.

There were highlights, like “Fare Thee Well,” and then came Dead & Company, pure heresy to many fans who’d come on board from the sixties to the eighties, but the dirty little secret was that Dead & Company were tight in ways that the original Dead were sloppy. If you went, you know.

But you can’t go no more.

Now the thing about the Dead is as important as the music was and still is, it’s a culture, far surpassing any act of its stature. You belong to a family. And just like with a family, everybody has a different take on the history, there are arguments. If I write anything about the Dead I hear from Deadheads correcting and insulting me, as if I have no right to write. When the funny thing is almost all of them came aboard in the eighties and I first saw the band in ’71. Bought my first album in ’69. But that is not enough. However I see it is wrong. But I do see it, and this is my take.

3

Joe Walsh once said he was too old to die young. That the paper wouldn’t be filled with laments about being cut down before his time. 78? Every boomer expects to live longer, but that’s a full ride. Sure, Weir wanted more, we wanted him to have more, but it’s over. Sure, there was shock hearing about Bob’s death, but there was an underlying weirdness, that the dream had died, that it was all over. Without Jerry we had the Dead. Without Phil we had the Dead. Without Bob, there is no Dead. Period.

Sure, John Mayer can lay down the licks. Hornsby can tickle the ivories. But that would be more like a tribute band.

There’s not going to be a 65th anniversary show. And no more Sphere shows either, no more pilgrimages to Las Vegas to revel in the history of the music and this band.

It’s over. That’s that.

When on some level we thought the Dead were forever.

The interesting thing is the Dead never flagged, and that’s extremely unusual. Most acts are hit dependent, the Dead never were. After “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty,” with “Europe ’72” as the cherry on top, the Dead could always sell tickets. Just as many as before. There was never a dip in their business. Bob Weir has been in the public eye for nearly sixty years. He never went on hiatus, retreated to the mountains for a decade, or to a monastery like Leonard Cohen. He was always here, playing that music.

And he aged in public. From that long brown hair to short to a white mop top and moustache, looking like a Gold Rush miner. Sure, he got his teeth fixed, but otherwise it was still the same Bob underneath. And no one with this amount of fame is a regular person, but Weir never evidenced an edge, he was always open and friendly. He’d come from a family band and treated you like family.

So it’s like the death of a loved one. Kinda like your mother or father. Someone you knew your whole life, who you never lost touch with, who you checked in with on a regular basis, who remained true to themselves, who you could count on.

So the absence hurts. Not in an Elvis way, or a Garcia way, there was shock, but Weir’s death hit me as the end of an era. Sure, classic rockers have been dying with increased regularity over the last decade, but somehow the Dead always carried on. Usually with Bob out front. But that’s gone.

So it makes me think of my own mortality. When I first saw the Dead Bob was 23, I was in college. I’m never going back to any school, and the people I studied with are in their seventies, unlike Weir, many retired. They’ve left whatever mark and now they’re running on fumes. Off the radar screen. But Weir? He was still up front and center.

So…

That’s it. A complete career arc. A lot of us saw it from start to finish, and we can’t say that we were ripped-off, Weir gave it his all, he was the last frontman standing, and every band needs a frontperson.

What happens to the Dead’s music hereafter?

I don’t know, predicting the future is a fool’s errand. Sure, there will be tribute acts, but how long will that last? And the truth is the Dead were always a live experience, the records were just a jumping off point. You had to be there.

And many of us were.

But never again.

Tune in Saturday January 10th to Faction Talk, channel 103, at 4 PM East, 1 PM West.

Phone #: 844-686-5863

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app. Search: Lefsetz

I could not put this book down.

What we’ve got here is a working class girl, who employed a Pell grant to go to college, who became a successful writer, who goes back to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio to see what’s going on, to see how it’s changed, to see how all those people became TRUMPERS!

That’s right, I don’t think a lot of MAGA people are going to read this, but it’s not really a polemic against them, rather a delineation of where they’re coming from.

“Paper Girl” is akin to Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.” So if you read that one, this is right up your alley. However, as I got about halfway through, I realized “Paper Girl” was less about narrative than an exposition of themes. But still, I just could not stop reading it. I yearn for a book that calls out to me, that keeps me from surfing the web endlessly, that I want to dive into, “Paper Girl” is one of those books.

You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. Author Beth Macy’s father dropped out of school in the seventh grade, went to war and met her mother while he was working at a gas station. Furthermore, he was an alcoholic. Her mother was the breadwinner, but it was not that much bread. Not that Beth was unhappy, she didn’t really know any other life, and she had friends and was involved in school activities and…

Then the whole world changed. You know this.

First opioids invaded this area. The parents here are constantly going to jail or losing their kids because they’re drug-addicted. That didn’t happen when I was growing up. And some families are living in motels. As for going to school, that’s not a priority.

And Macy makes a big point about school. Most of those on the left don’t realize that the right is doing its best to eviscerate public schools, which they call “government schools.” You hear about vouchers and…the bottom line is they’re starving traditional institutions. And even if you make it through… A Pell grant today does not cover one’s entire education, just a fraction of it, unlike in Macy’s era. Because our nation is about cutting costs and making sure everybody carries their own burdens. Macy also brings up how those at the top don’t want to give those at the bottom advantages, they want those for their own kids, and that is true.

So one of Beth’s sisters got pregnant as a teenager and spent most of her life married to a religious zealot, who molested her daughter, but the mother wouldn’t believe it.

Nobody’s going anywhere fast. And even those who want to give back… The state authorizes a $2+ million grant to a youth center, but the Republican mayor and his minions put the kibosh on that, primarily because the man who runs it is on the other side of the political spectrum, and ran against the mayor in the last election. Sometimes it’s just that simple.

As for the truant officer… She deals with a family that believes they’re sovereign citizens, that the rules don’t apply to them.

The bottom line is if you miss a certain amount of school there’s big trouble, so all these parents say they’re home-schooling their kids, and Ohio got rid of any hoops home-schoolers have to jump through.

And if you’re gay, forget about it.

Then there’s the left wing college boyfriend who flips and becomes a Trumper.

And there’s the relative who won’t get a transplant because he doesn’t want to risk getting the organ of someone who got the Covid vaccine.

You may laugh at all this, but you are living in a bubble. Too many of those on the left are. They don’t realize these people were left behind. That retraining after NAFTA…that didn’t happen.

And one of the eye-openers is that just getting people to show up for work is nearly impossible. One company just lets you show up when you want to, otherwise they wouldn’t have enough employees.

And like the newspaper reporter she started out as, Macy keeps hammering the lack of local news. How no one knows what is going on in their hometown, but they’re up to speed about national issues, even if misinformed. The lack of local news is a distinct problem, but propping up newspapers is not the solution, this is what the digital disruption of the past few decades has taught us. You don’t want to save the struggling old, you want to find a new way. But so far, no one has cracked the nut.

Education and news, those are Macy’s main foci.

But “Paper Girl” is neither off the cuff nor a bummer. It is incredibly well-researched, half the book is footnotes. There are a lot of experts out there, some who predicted where we were going, but were unfortunately ignored.

And there are some laughs, and not everybody and everything is downtrodden in Urbana, but…

Three out of four people in the county within which Urbana sits voted for Trump.

And:

“…he won 91 percent of the counties lacking a professional source of local news, trouncing Harris by an average of 54 points.”

And:

“Rigid thinking is a trauma response.”

And a lot of these people have experienced trauma. And Macy says how the poor live their lives based on relationships, with a very short term outlook. One girl gives the money she needed for rent to her mother for her expenses…just like people had given money to the girl when she was down and out. It’s an entire subculture.

And:

“‘And scared people will trade a lot for a sense of stability.'”

And:

“Traumatized people often cling to what little security they have. The monster they know.”

And the piece-de-resistance:

“‘Emerging neurological research has shown clear links between despair and vulnerability to misinformation, right-wing radicalization, and violence,’ noted a Brookings Institutions study Chad shared with me.”

“Paper Girl” is not one-sided. You don’t get the feeling Macy had an agenda and then went out to find stories to prove it. She just interviewed people. At length and over years. People reveal their true colors. Some of her close friends growing up no longer shared the same political outlook. And then there were those who kept giving back, opening their own pockets for those in need. And, one of the things that keeps kids in school, that creates cohesion for students, is the band… But:

“Because of school fees, the cost of instruments, and the need for transportation home from after-school practices, the band is now so small that it can no longer spell out the word ‘Hillclimbers,’ the school’s team name, as we did when I marched in it. It’s no longer big enough, even, to spell ‘Urbana.'”

The doctor, who grew up on a farm in the area and came back says:

“Sometimes I feel like I’m the one person in their week who sits and listens to them. The loneliness, it’s huge.'”

As for the left wing take on the right:

“At a gathering in the college town of Lexington, Virginia, for a mutual friend’s book release, the celebrated photographer Sally Mann told me that Democrats had never done anything worthy of provoking the ire of the right. I told her about my trips home, including the ammo-buying activists. I suggested that maybe she was too insulated to understand the rage provoked by globalization, Christian nationalism, and widespread rural despair—and how truly nihilistic the American experiment seemed to be turning. We argued for a bit, and she pushed back hard, as if she didn’t believe me. Finally,  I threw up my arms and sputtered out the rawest description I could manage on the spot: HURT DOGS BITE.”

And in summation:

“The changes wrought on Urbana were a microcosm of the country’s larger failures to address the collapsing economic order brought on by global trade, the transfer of control from public to private, and the growing impotence of what was once a free, fair and fact-checked local press.”

“Paper Girl” is not an obscure book, even Obama said it was one of his favorites of the year…then again, that might make some not want to read it.

Macy is not an amateur. You might know her from her earlier book “Dopesick,” about the opioid crisis, which was made into a well-reviewed Hulu series starring Michael Keaton.

But getting someone to read a book, especially if they don’t agree with everything in it, is a heavy lift.

But like I said, I couldn’t stop reading “Paper Girl.” Because this is America, and you should know what is truly happening here. Not enough people do.