The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics or Learning to Drive

The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics: The Personalities, Elections, and Events That Shaped Modern North Carolina

Author: Rob Christenson

How can a state be represented by Jesse Helms and John Edwards at the same time? Journalist Rob Christensen answers that question and navigates a century of political history in North Carolina, one of the most vibrant and competitive southern states, where neither conservatives nor liberals, Democrats nor Republicans, have been able to rest easy. It is this climate of competition and challenge, Christensen argues, that enabled North Carolina to rise from poverty in the nineteenth century to become a leader in research, education, and banking in the twentieth.
Although party divisions and the issues of race that often distinguish them are deeply rooted, Christensen explains, North Carolina voters remain loyal to candidates who focus on issues such as education and building a business-friendly infrastructure. He takes us to picket lines and debates and through numerous red-baiting and race-baiting political campaigns. Along the way we are introduced to many remarkable characters, including a U.S. senator who was a Nazi sympathizer, a candidate for governor who was a Soviet agent, a senator who helped bring down Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and a TV commentator who helped usher in the Reagan Revolution. Long before the talk of red state-blue state polarization, North Carolina was an intensely divided state politically. With Christensen as a guide, readers may find there is sense after all in the topsy-turvy nature of Tar Heel politics.

New interesting book: Cooking Healthy with a Pressure Cooker or Safe in the Fathers Hands

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories

Author: Katha Pollitt

Celebrated for her award-winning political columns, criticism, and poetry, Katha Pollitt offers something new in this poignant, hilarious, and sometimes outrageous collection of stories drawn from her own life. With deep feeling and sharp insight, she writes about love, sex, betrayal, heartbreak, and much more: what she learned about her parents from reading their FBI files, the joy and loneliness of new motherhood, the curious mental effects of a post-college stint proofreading pornographic novels, and the decline and fall of practically everything, including herself. Unafraid to say what others only think and acknowledge what others won’t admit, Katha Pollitt surprises and entertains on every page.

Praise for Learning to Drive

“The kind of book you want to look up from at points so you can read aloud certain passages to a friend or lover.”
–Chicago Tribune

“A powerful personal narrative . . . full of insight and charm . . . [Katha] Pollitt is her own Jane Austen character . . . haughty and modest, moral and irresponsible, sensible and, happily for us, lost in sensibility.”
–The New York Review of Books

“With . . . bracing self-honesty, Pollitt takes us through the maddening swirl of contradictions at the heart of being fifty-something: the sense of slowing down, of urgency, of wisdom, of ignorance, of strength, of helplessness, of breakdown, of renewal.”
–Sunday Seattle Times

“Essays of breathtaking candor and razor-sharp humor . . . [Pollitt] has outdone herself. . . . [Her] observations are acute and her confessionstonic. Forget face-lifts; Pollitt’s essays elevate the spirit.”
–Booklist (starred review)

“Candid, confessional prose . . . But even at her most intimate, [Pollitt] manages to infuse her tales of dissatisfaction and heartbreak with levity and humor.”
–San Francisco Chronicle

“Pitch perfect . . . painfully hilarious to read.”
–The Boston Globe

The New York Times - Toni Bentley

Her three previous essay collections gathered brilliant commentary on welfare, abortion, surrogate motherhood, Iraq, gay marriage and health care, mostly from the pages of The Nation. But with Learning to Drive, she gets personal, and shameless. She has decided to wave her dirty laundry (among which she found unidentified striped panties) and confesses to "Webstalking" her longtime, live-in, womanizing former boyfriend…It's hard to tell if she's coming into her own, trying to sell more books or has lost it entirely. Or perhaps she's giving up her dignity in a generous motion of solidarity toward the rest of us who have already blown our cover? Whatever the reason, she's entitled.

Publishers Weekly

This collection of reflections by the Nationessayist and poet Pollitt (Reasonable Creatures) ranges in subject from her philandering boyfriend to a general late-midlife sense of loss. The title essay is the zippiest and most successful, fashioning a canny metaphor about the importance of observation both in learning to drive for the first time at age 52 and in recognizing that her lover of seven years was cheating on her from the get-go. Pollitt plays the conflicted modern woman par excellence, both feminist and feminine; she writes of unabashedly joining a Marxist study group at the behest of her guru-like boyfriend, who padded the meetings with past and present lovers ("In the Study Group"), then wonders with wistful anticipation what kind of life it will be when she has outlived all the men who find her desirable ("After the Men Are Dead"). Familiarity seems to breed weariness, however, and her essays about motherhood ("Beautiful Screamer") and women's tenacious collusion in men's superiority ("Sisterhood") have the feel of oft-tread ground. (Sept. 4)

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Stacy Russo - Library Journal

Pollitt (Virginity or Death!) is unconcerned with making friends: some of her comments, particularly on the subjects of abortion and religion, will anger members of the conservative right. But a close reading of these 11 nonfiction pieces executed with fiercely poetic language and brilliantly placed sarcasm reveals a highly inquisitive and independent voice. Pollitt divvies out clever observations of American culture along with honest moments of self-examination. In "Webstalker," she frankly and humorously describes her voyeuristic obsession with her former partner. Another comical yet endearing essay, "In the Study Group," portrays various members of a Marxist study group. Pollitt writes movingly of her father in "Good-bye, Lenin" and of her mother in "Mrs. Razzmatazz." In the final entry, "I Let Myself Go," she questions how some feminists equate plastic surgery with women's freedom. In one of the collection's most poignant moments, Pollitt describes a black-and-white photograph of writer Iris Murdoch's wonderfully wrinkled and asymmetrical face. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. [The New Yorkerwill feature the first serial.-Ed.]

Kirkus Reviews

A collection of savvy, witty essays, more personal than political, from a feminist known for her social and cultural commentary. In the title essay, Pollitt (Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, 2006, etc.), a long-time columnist for The Nation, has lost her man and consequently must learn to drive a car, a task fraught with difficulties for a woman in late middle age. In the second piece, "Webstalker," the loss of her man turns her into an Internet addict who compulsively Googles him and anyone connected to him. These two essays, both previously published in the New Yorker, are laced with self-deprecating humor, as is "Memoir of a Shy Pornographer," about her stint as a young, shy freelance copyeditor and proofreader of pornography. There is a darker tone to her wry essay on belonging to a Marxist study group, led by a charismatic leader who was also her philandering boyfriend, and in the several pieces on feminism. A measure of poignancy marks her recollections of her Communist father ("Good-Bye, Lenin"), on whom the FBI kept error-filled files, and of her alcoholic mother ("Mrs. Razzmatazz"), who hid bottles in the kitchen cabinets. Resignation fills "End Of," her meditative piece on a vanishing landscape near her Connecticut home. Love, sex, marriage, mothering, aging, keeping up appearances-all come under her sharp scrutiny. A sardonic observer of human behavior, especially the relations between men and women, Pollitt leaves no doubt about her opinions. She writes that " the stories women tell each other about themselves emphasize the comical, the improbable, the vaguely malevolent but always entertaining twists and turns of fate," acharacterization that fits much of her work here. Thoroughly enjoyable reading for anyone, feminist or not, who likes bright, funny, opinionated writing. Agent: Melanie Jackson/Melanie Jackson Agency