American Terrorist

American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, 388 pages

On April 19, 1995, three tons of nitromethane explosives packed into the back of a Ryder truck were detonated outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, instantly demolishing over half the building and killing 168 people, wounding hundreds more.  The bomb was built, placed, and detonated by Timothy McVeigh, a decorated veteran of Desert Storm who had become convinced that the US government was preparing for a war against its own people.  April 19 was a double anniversary, of the battles of Lexington and Concord that began the American Revolution, and of the fiery end of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas two hundred years later, which McVeigh saw as emblematic of a new tyranny.  How an all-American kid from upstate New York grew into a soldier in a one man war against the federal government is the subject of American Terrorist, written by a pair of journalists from Buffalo with unequalled access to the McVeigh family.

Their account makes it clear that McVeigh was not, himself, the victim of injustice at the hands of the government.  To the contrary, American Terrorist reveals his remarkable attempts to provoke authorities - from flatly refusing to return extra money erroneously paid to him during his military service to speculating about whether he could shoot down a police helicopter with a flare gun in the presence of a man he knew was an undercover cop to trespassing at Groom Lake - without consequences.  Only with the bombing would he become, in his own eyes, the martyr he always wanted to be, sacrificing himself for The Cause.

One issue that the authors are unable to settle concerns McVeigh's attitudes on race.  McVeigh himself, while in prison, denied being a racist, and a number of witnesses support him on this.  Yet he did, at one point, join the Klan, he was cited while in the Army for using racial slurs, he associated with white supremacists such as those at Elohim City, and he was fixated on the virulently racist novel The Turner Diaries, to the point that he handed out copies like an evangelist might hand out Bibles.  Perhaps, as he claimed, the racial slurs were just locker room talk, his mail order KKK membership was a mistake, and the Elohim City and Turner Diaries connections were the result of a shared anger with the US government and not a shared racist ideology.

This reflects the major question surrounding this book - as reliant as it is on McVeigh's own account, to what extent can we trust McVeigh?  Surprisingly for a true crime book, in this case the subject comes across as quite candid - after all, McVeigh wanted people to know what he had done and why.  Michel and Herbeck communicate this effectively, and their tale of McVeigh's road to mass murder reveals more than about their subject than he intended.

Dictatorship of Virtue

Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future by Richard Bernstein, 346 pages

"Multiculturalism" is a fighting word.  To its advocates, it denotes an openness to new ideas and the lived experiences of others.  To some of its detractors, it represents a dangerous denial of key values which built and sustain Western civilization.  Bernstein, a journalist with long experience in China, has a deeper criticism - he asserts that "multiculturalism" is itself an ideology rooted in Western thought, an ideology that is, in fact, just as closed to alternatives to itself as any other.  What multiculturalists see as a refusal to privilege any particular culture, Bernstein sees as an opposition to all cultures, an anti-culture.

Starting from his own generally conventionally progressive worldview, the author explores an impressive taxonomy of thought crimes through an extensive collection of anecdotes.  In the twenty years since this book was written, the term "multiculturalism" has been largely replaced by its successors, "diversity" and "inclusion".  At one point the author mocks a scholar who dredged up a stale outrage from an old magazine, now many of the outrages catalogued appear in the same stale light.  Yet Bernstein's central critique remains not only perceptive, but prophetic.

Deliver us From Evie

Deliver Us From Evie, M.E. Kerr   1994       177 pages

  This is an older LGBT YA title, but I remembered reading M.E. Kerr when I was a kid, and was curious to see how the writing held up over time. The story still felt relevant, but the pop culture references did not hold up in the slightest, although I was amused to be reading about the main character's tape collection, especially the K.D. Lang tape they make mention of.  I also enjoyed that the story was set on a farm in rural Missouri.  Evie is an eighteen year old who is on the cusp of becoming an adult and deciding what kind of future she wants to have fore herself. She has always been different, and tough, but always herself.  Then she meets Patty, who changes everything.  Obviously, there is going to be some drama surrounding their blossoming romance, but what made the story readable was that it was told from the perspective of her sixteen year old brother.  I thought that this was a great way to talk about how coming out issues affect family members.  Kerr also gives readers a character who challenges gender stereotypes, and also challenges the stereotypes of what gays and lesbians "look" like, which was so relevant at the time this book was published.