Ronson Review

I read this book by Jon Ronson because Austin Kleon told me to, and I basically do whatever he says. It’s an account of how we use social media to shame others into normality and it’s written in investigative journalism prose with the an added lift at the end of every section that links to the next in the manner of Buzzfeed *click for more* previews. Ronson is a likable sort, though a bit gregarious in his support of The Fallen; their “suffering” is rendered as the very nadir of human travails, though several of his examples are still very rich and popular. I keep thinking about ditching social media altogether, since it brings much more anger and anxiety into my life than it does joy or peace and this book shoved me a little more in that direction, but though Ronson means it as a meditation on where we are now, it’s more like reading a mystery than anything else. I agree that shame can be paralyzing, and that the punishments a hostile public meets out are often unjust. But–perhaps it’s just me–the accounts of the various rises and falls in this book felt, firstly, salacious, and secondly, concerned as they were with pop-cultural figures and other ephemera, rather too of the moment: very cool as magazine articles, but hardly meaty enough for a book. I don’t know. It was fine. 

Peter Stark "Astoria"

I saw this book on the shelf at the Edmonds Bookshop on my bi-monthly trip to the seaside town for tea. I’ve never been to Astoria proper, but when I was a kid, we swam at nearby Canon Beach, and anyway, I’ve always been a sucker for Pacific Northwest history. Stark’s book is more popular (as in, written for non-specialist audiences) than I usually read, and it took a few chapters to get used to the lack of references, and the repetitions, but once I did, I flew through it. It’s part adventure story, part-historical recovery, and a large part what-if? Had a few events gone only slightly differently, the whole west coast might have been a country called “Astoria,” which Thomas Jefferson imagined as a separate, sisterly democracy to the U.S. Had other minor adjustments been made, or natural disasters allayed, all of Western Canada might have been added onto America. It was all so tenuous, and Stark’s gripping (and often moving) story gives us Astor and Jefferson as men of far-sighted vision while also giving us a memorable cast of players: some heroes, some villains, (though no one firmly in either camp) and as a backdrop to the suffering they endured and enacted, this whole, huge, terrifying west.