Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction - J.D. Salinger (1959)

It's hard for me to write about J.D. Salinger without coming off a certain way, so I'd like to open this review by mentioning my friend Libby.  Libby and I met our freshman year at NYU.  One day, she started talking to me about Salinger, I forget why.  Like a lot of people, my primary exposure to Salinger was Catcher in the Rye.   I don't think I had read any of his three other books.  But Libby laid down the line and went through a brief synopsis of each, in particular mentioning how she had written a paper about religion in "Teddy," which was the last in Nine Stories, and extremely beautiful.  She explained that the majority of his work, outside of Catcher, concerned the Glass Family: Seymour, Buddy, Boo Boo, Walter, Waker, Zooey, Franny, Bessie and Les.  Seven children of vaudeville performers, several of them gaining notoriety on a children's quiz show radio program, and others entering careers in show business, the military, the clergy, prose and poetry (sort of).  At least one out of Nine Stories is specifically about Seymour--"A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which is a masterpiece.  Franny and Zooey rightly earns its place on the Best Books List (and Catcher in the Rye, I predict, will make it when it is reviewed--I read Catcher like 6 times over the course of 6 years, but I haven't read it in the last 9).  I had been meaning to read these for the first time in any case, but after Libby's mini-lecture, I made it a priority and read them my freshman year.  I remember having a particular soft spot for Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction and thinking they were as good as any of his other published writings.  I loved him so much at this point, that I tracked down the old issue of The New Yorker that had published his story "Hapworth 16, 1924," and photocopied it and put it in a nice binder and gave it to my mother for her birthday, as she was a massive Salinger fan. I thought this was one of the better gifts I had ever gotten her, but then I actually read it.  Do not read it.  Read it only if you want a reading list.

So I looked forward to revisiting these two novellas, similar in length to Franny and Zooey.  And I found that I felt exactly the same way about Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.  It is a masterpiece on the level of his other three books (to be clear, I do not think I would consider Nine Stories to be in Best Books league, though parts of it certainly are--at least "Bananafish" would make a Best Short Stories list, which isn't a bad idea for a project).  It is hilarious, socially observant, brilliantly detailed, breezily delivered, intriguing, and inviting.  Seymour: an Introduction, however, had aged badly in my mind.  This may come into play in the upcoming series planned for Flying Houses, the Kurt Vonnegut Project, for which I am reading Slaughterhouse Five presently, and for which I have this to say: these books may be influential to young would-be writers because they see the authors having fun with the medium.  You get a sense of the possibilities of literature.  At the time, when I was 19, going through the most artistically fecund period in my life, I thought the conceit of a story like Seymour was tremendously encouraging and successfully experimental.  I don't feel the same about it now.  Basically, I would put Carpenters in Best Books territory, and Seymour in Egregiously Frustrating territory.  I guess I can't actually do that because they're together here.  Anybody that reads Carpenters will go onto Seymour and maybe some people will slog their way through it out of a sense of loyalty to the author and the characters, but they might be better off putting it away after about 30 pages.  I will get more deeply into the details of the plots of each in a moment, but I wanted to put this down for now, to give an overview of my general feelings on Salinger's oeuvre and distinguish my opinions on this, his final published volume.
***
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is 89 pages long.  It is about Seymour's wedding day.  Buddy is the main character.  The time is May 1942.  Buddy is in Georgia and wrangles a three-day-leave from a stay in the military hospital to take a train to New York to attend the wedding.  He has no time to go to his apartment so he leaves his luggage in a locker at Penn Station.  He gets in a cab and goes to an old house where the wedding is to occur.  After an hour and twenty minutes, the bride, Muriel, leaves.  The guests are told to "use the cars" and Buddy ends up getting into one with Muriel's aunt (Helen Silsburn), the Matron of Honor, the Matron's husband (Lieutenant), and a little old elderly mute man (Muriel's great uncle).  The Matron of Honor is furious with Seymour.  Nobody knows that Buddy is Seymour's brother.  The tension in the early part of the scene is fantastic.

[I have to break in here and make a note.  I'm finding this review hard to complete because of the great deal of time that has passed.  I read Carpenters in early June.  Then I read This Fight is Our Fight, Days of Abandonment, Meet Me in the Bathroom, and Giant of the Senate.  Then I read Seymour: an Introduction.  So while Seymour is relatively fresh in my mind, Carpenters is not.  I can only attribute the gap to library deadlines and procrastination.]

Really, the cab ride reads like a play.
***
Again, another long break has occurred.  You know what I'm going to say.  Carpenters is great, Seymour is not, so I will attempt to illustrate that with 2 (only 2) excerpts, one from each.  It is a tall task to pick out a representative sample but I think for Carpenters the choice is clear.

"The Matron of Honor seemed to reflect for a moment.  'Well, nothing very much, really,' she said.  'I mean nothing small or really derogatory or anything like that.  All she said, really, was that this Seymour, in her opinion, was a latent homosexual and that he was basically afraid of marriage.  I mean she didn't say it nasty or anything.  She just said it--you know--intelligently.  I mean she was psychoanalyzed for years and years.'  The Matron of Honor looked at Mrs. Silsburn.  'That's no secret or anything.  I mean Mrs. Fedder'll tell you that herself, so I'm not giving away any secret or anything.'"
.........
"'About the only other thing she said was that this Seymour was a really schizoid personality and that, if you really looked at things the right way, it was really better for Muriel that things turned out the way they did.  Which makes sense to me, but I'm not so sure it does to Muriel.  He's got her so buffaloed that she doesn't know whether she's coming or going.  That's what makes me so--'"
She was interrupted at that point.  By me.  As I remember, my voice was unsteady, as it invariably is when I'm vastly upset.
'What brought Mrs. Fedder to the conclusion that Seymour is a latent homosexual and a schizoid personality?'
All eyes--all searchlights, it seemed--the Matron of Honor's, Mrs. Silsburn's, even the Lieutenant's, were abruptly trained on me.  'What?' the Matron of Honor said to me, sharply, faintly hostilely.  And again I had a passing, abrasive notion that she knew I was Seymour's brother." (36...38)

This is the climax of the first "act" of the story, and probably the whole story.  I believe it is representative of the qualities that make for an excellent piece of writing.  I have not seen many other writers italicize portions of words to denote accents on certain words.

I also believed Salinger was something of a pioneer in his use of a footnote or two in Seymour, but recall that Nabokov published Pale Fire in 1962.  Seymour is an intriguing premise.  It is an artistic biography of Seymour by Buddy.  The opening sentence (after two excerpts by Kafka and Kierkegaard) gives a fair indication of how bumpy things are about to get:

"At times, frankly, I find it pretty slim pickings, but at the age of forty I look on my old fair-weather friend the general reader as my last deeply contemporary confidant, and I was rather strenuously requested, long before I was out of my teens, by at once the most exciting and the least fundamentally bumptious public craftsman I've ever personally known, to try to keep a steady and sober regard for the amenities of such a relationship, be it ever so peculiar or terrible; in my case, he saw it coming on from the first." (96)

This is a difficult piece of writing.  It can be very charming at times.  The trope of Buddy writing in a stream-of-conscious style--commenting upon his drinking or the late hour or a recent illness--is one of its more amusing qualities.  One will not deepen their understanding of Seymour by reading it.  It is more about Seymour's effect on Buddy than Seymour himself.  He is every bit as inscrutable a character as he appears in any other place. 

Seymour is mostly notable as Salinger's comment on celebrity.  If one reads the story in this context, it becomes much more interesting.  Buddy is pretty much a stand-in for Salinger.  He lives alone in the woods isolated from society.  He wrote a bunch of the stories that Salinger published.  There are a few moments that definitely break down the fourth wall. 

Salinger has such a small oeuvre, and it is of such a high quality that anyone who wants to read beyond the first exposure (Catcher) will likely go through them all.  This is the weakest piece, but it's still Salinger, and it's not a bad story.  It's just difficult.  It's very frustrating. 

Because then I see the parts I underlined some fifteen years ago and am reminded that to a particular sort of young person, the story is a treasure:

"I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions [when you die].  Were most of your stars out?  Were you busy writing your heart out?  If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions.  If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer.  You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice.  The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe as I write it.  You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.  I won't even underline that.  It's too important to be underlined." (160-161)

Al Franken: Giant of the Senate - Al Franken (2017)

This is the second post about politics in as many months.  Perhaps it being 2017 has something to do with that.  People have their ways to speak out about various issues through social media, and this is mine.  I do not engage in prolonged persuasive argument, nor condemnations via Facebook status updates against the scores of politicians and other bad actors that commit atrocious acts every other week, or day.  While I do find many of their actions hilariously terrible, I write about them by writing about books by Democratic Senators.

I am referring, of course, to Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Cruz.  I do not need to say that Trump is the worst president in history.  He is just hilariously terrible.  Hopefully no major damage will be done by his administration.  Many will say, "C'mon man, how can you say that?  What do you call the travel ban?"  And sure there's that, and probably a number of other things that have already been actively changed for the worse.  My point is, he wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and he can't seem to get the votes, so we can hope that his term will be mired in the same gridlock that compromised so many of the bills passed by the Obama administration.

Franken tells that story in a very effective way.  The obvious thing to do here is compare it to This Fight is Our Fight.  Giant of the Senate is a better book.  Warren specializes in financial policy, so it makes sense that she needs to make a little extra effort with the reader.  Franken supports Warren on the vast majority of issues (I would be interested to see if they voted the same way on every bill).  He does not, however, purport to be any kind of expert on financial regulation.  Like Warren, he writes about how his previous career informed, and continues to inform, his political career.  He writes saliently about many of his pet issues (minute details of the ACA, especially) and outdoes Warren in the departments of readability and creativity.  And we always have to go here too--everyone wants Elizabeth Warren to run for President, and she's made it clear she doesn't want that, but what about Franken?  No one ever talks about him running for President.  He says nothing whatsoever to suggest that he would like to run.  Nor does he say why he wouldn't.  

Considering the book on its own, it's quite good and highly recommend it.  Like the recently-reviewed NYC 200's oral history, I did not want it to end.  Okay, it wasn't quite the same--I didn't enjoy it quite as much.  However, it was much more consistent.  They're completely different books.  I don't know what I am doing.  I wanted to excerpt one thing about the ACA, because Franken explained something about the Supreme Court decision in 2012 that I never really knew or understood (how Justice Roberts struck down certain provisions of the law) even though I wrote an extensive feature on the various opinions issued by the Court for my school newspaper.  Franken's tone is less of a teacher and more of a regular guy acerbic comedian that went to Harvard who just tells you how things worked:

"But Chief Justice John Roberts, custodian of the Court's reputation, knew that killing health care reform with a third highly partisan, legally dubious, and immediately impactful 5-4 decision on the heels of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United might undermine any remaining confidence in the Court's integrity once and for all.  So Roberts voted with the liberals, agreeing that the mandate was constitutional.  But he picked a different rationale, concluding that the mandate was allowable because the penalty it imposed on people who didn't buy insurance was really a tax, which Congress is empowered by the Constitution to implement.

Roberts's reasoning was so weird that Supreme Court reporters from both CNN and Fox News initially reported the ruling wrong.

Also, critically, Roberts's decision included a drive-by shooting: It eliminated the requirement that states use federal dollars to expand their Medicaid programs, which would have helped cover millions more low-income Americans.

An expert marksman, Roberts had aimed directly at the ACA's foot, weakening the law before it could go into effect.  Republicans hadn't succeeded in getting the Court to block Obamacare, but they could take solace in the fact that Chief Justice Roberts had made it less good." (258)

On the subject of health care, there is another example early on that underscores why the Affordable Care Act makes sense.  Here I will pause briefly to say that, I do not like the ACA because I consider the premium for my exchange plan very high ($366), having known what it's like to have excellent employer-provided coverage ($30, pre-tax).  Franken describes how the U.S. health care system is analogous to the Cambodian system (for those without a job that gives them insurance), and he does it so well as to be nearly immune to criticism:

"The day after the announcement, I visited a health clinic in Minnesota where my friend Dr. Margie Hogan worked.  I spent time meeting with health care providers and patients and listening to some of the horror stories that were commonplace before the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
One of the stories Margie told me became a mainstay of my stump speech.  It involved an incredibly promising seventeen-year-old girl from a Hmong* family who was doing college-level work as a junior in high school.  But she had lupus.  And her family earned just enough money to no longer qualify for MinnesotaCare, a program that covered low-income families in the state.  The girl lost her health insurance.
Lupus is a chronic disease, and the medication that controls it is extremely expensive.  The girl told her parents to stop buying it so they could afford to take care of the other kids in the family.  It broke their hearts, but she was right: They couldn't afford the medicine, not with everything else weighing on the family budget.  So they stopped buying it.
The next time Margie saw the girl was six weeks later, back in the hospital.  But this time, she was in the emergency room, suffering from renal failure.  She had to be put on dialysis, and doctors thought she might have to be on dialysis for the rest of her life.
'Now, that's wrong,' I would tell crowds that had invariably gone quiet by this point in the story.  'But it's not just wrong--it's stupid!  How much is it going to cost our system to give her dialysis throughout her life?  And how much is this going to cost her, in terms of her potential and her quality of life?'" (80-81)

That asterisk goes on to describe the Hmong people (random aside: isn't the kid's family in Gran Torino Hmong?) and is also the major point of my criticism: the asterisks are too small!  Clearly, I can see when each page has footnotes, but I would always miss the asterisk in the body of the text itself and search for sometimes like 30 seconds to see which part Franken was joking about or explaining further.

There are a ton of jokes in this book and that is one of the ways it is most refreshing.  Because Franken writes a lot about how he has not taken most of the opportunities he has gotten as a Senator to be funny, and he seems to have been holding his breath for the past 8 years, and finally this is like a big vomit pool of jokes.  I was kind of excited when Franken got elected because I thought he would bring more humor to various political events, but he hasn't done that very much.  He does in this book, however, and he also mentions every time he tried to be funny and how it backfired.

Those above quotes about health care also make me want to mention Mitt Romney. Because part of what makes this book good is Franken's willingness to point out the few redeeming qualities his Republican colleagues possess.   I have never heard anybody complain about Romneycare, and regardless of how much credit he is due for that piece of legislation, it appears to be the gold standard in the American health care system:

"What would a conservative solution to the 'Cambodian system' problem look like?  Well, actually, a lot like Obamacare.  The three-legged stool model, in fact, had originated with the very conservative Heritage Foundation, and had been enacted in Massachusetts under a Republican governor with the improbable name of Mitt.  Where, by the way, it worked extremely well: Romneycare now covers 97 percent of Bay Staters, and both Democrats and Republicans there intend to keep it intact, no matter what Trump and my Republican colleagues do to Obamacare between the time I finish this book and the time you read it." (250-251)

This is the beginning of the change I hope to see develop in this country over the next few years.  Democrats never give Republicans credit for anything, and Republicans never give Democrats credit for anything, but Franken recognizes that we need to focus on our commonalities rather than our differences.  This is most effectively established in his "64 Percent Rule" chapter.  Most of this is spent discussing No Child Left Behind and amendments thereto.  It comes across more generally throughout the rest of the book as well.  Franken is very good at "reaching across the aisle."  Even though he humiliates several Republican members of Congress, he generally has something nice to say about them to offset the opprobrium.  This is not the case for Ted Cruz.  Notwithstanding that, he still refers to Cruz as "extremely smart," a "gifted speaker" and a brilliant advocate at oral argument in the Supreme Court.  The chapter "Sophistry" details many of their encounters and is one of the true highlights of the book.  In particular, the whole joke about the Carnival cruise line incident is very memorable.

***

Okay, big mistake.  This is the worst mistake I have made on this blog in years.  I had written a whole other long section of this review, and I think it may have been the best part.  It touched on how this book was also notable because it could be classed in the same category as books like Bossypants.  It touched on the fact that I saw Ted Cruz on CNN yesterday, doing an interview segment from Houston, and expressing that Texas did not have enough disaster relief funding, and how that is one issue that is non-partisan.  Still, NPR could not help bringing up climate change and asking if the storm was caused by it.  Their scientist said it couldn't be directly attributed to it, but more moisture will generally form as the air gets warmer.  I compared it to Katrina and basically forgot about the more recent underfunded disaster Sandy, maybe because I was in a part of Brooklyn largely shielded from it.  I think we can all agree that Katrina was more devastating.  Yet the point was made that Sandy was more devastating, and many Texas congressmen (35 out of 36) voted against additional funding for Sandy relief effort.  So yes, we could think that disaster relief will become a partisan issue too, depending on the state that is being affected.

And I excerpted the second half of a section about a joke Franken made about the Supreme Leader of Iran.  During a hearing, when his turn came, he said something like, "I'd like to question the Supreme Leader, whom I like to refer to as Supreme Being, a few questions..." Everybody thought this was hilarious, and it is funny, but the story of how Chuck Schumer botched the joke with President Obama is funnier.  I regret that the book was due at the library today and I finished up yesterday, thinking it was close to complete--or at least complete with excerpts, because I needed to include one that was actually funny.  On the subjects of botched jokes and Ted Cruz again, the line where he suggests changing "difficult" to "challenging" (as an adjective for "cruise") was probably the funniest moment of the book for me.

I didn't hit "save" last night, maybe because I was interrupted by a door-to-door canvasser for an alternative energy supplier (Constellation) that led me down a 30 minute rabbit hole and no small bit of consternation.  I am not going to write about that but it was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life.  So that is my excuse.

I ended on a very "book review ending" note.  I assessed the work as a whole, and I mentioned that Franken was unique because he was the one politician that was actually funny.  Somehow, I linked to reviews of both of Warren's books for some proposition that I forget.  I believe I mentioned that he did not have as specific ideas as Warren when it came to re-allocating government funds.  For the life of me I cannot recall what idea led to that statement.  Like, I wasn't saying Warren wasn't funny, but acknowledging that her career as a law professor did not prepare her as well as Franken's for writing funny books.  There is a little bit of Kurt Vonnegut in Franken's literary style, and it is refreshing to witness a lawmaker write about serious issues and still maintain a certain ironic distance to capture the absurdity of the situation.  This quality makes Franken an effective writer, speaker, inquisitor, leader, and whatever other nouns might be relevant.  Most importantly though, he hates lying politicians.  People hate politics because they hate all the lying.  Franken calls out a ton of it in this book, and it's always infuriating and ridiculous.  So that's ultimately why Franken is such a likable political figure.  It never feels like he's feeding you any B-S line.  If he did, he would self-consciously admit that it was a B-S line.

Except the line about Mitch McConnell snorting milk out of his nose from laughing so hard with him.  I think I only know he meant that satirically by hearing him mention that on a podcast.

This Fight is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class - Elizabeth Warren (2017)

I've written a fair amount about Elizabeth Warren already in the review for A Fighting Chance.  So I will direct you there for background.  Here, all I will add is that, I got this book from the library when a friend was visiting, and after briefly discussing more serious literature (Elena Ferrante), I revealed that I had gotten this book out at the same time as The Days of Abandonment, and laughed, and he laughed.  I then explained that something about the book seemed a bit disappointing.  But that was only in the first 20 pages or so, and my opinion evolved.  I explained not to get me wrong, I love EW, but the message just seemed to be more of the same.  Is it a sequel to A Fighting Chance?  And does she always have to use "fight" in the title, and be so combative about things?  I agree with pretty much everything she says, but there didn't seem to be much that was "new" about it.

Now as I said my opinion evolved, and I actually ended up enjoying this book very much.  But as a pure reading experience, it is not as essential as A Fighting Chance.  In general, that book was much more entertaining.  This is not to say that This Fight is Our Fight is boring, but it does tend to focus on Washington DC and its relationship to big business.  There are still a few personal stories sprinkled throughout, but A Fighting Chance feels more like an autobiography and This Fight is Our Fight feels more like a position statement.  

Still, just three years later, life is radically different in 2017 than it was 2014, or at least seems to be that way.  So, much of this is an update on the situations that Warren explored in her previous book.  But yes, a great deal of this is directed at Donald Trump (which now I guess will have to be added to my tags/labels--the floodgates have opened).  Trump is one of the main threads in This Fight is Our Fight, along with the Republican party, and big business executives (and overt disdain for each of them) and the struggles of the middle (now "working poor?") class.  

If I have any criticisms of Elizabeth Warren, it is that sometimes her prose reads as if she has commissioned someone to adopt her artistic license and write in her voice.  There are moments of rhetorical flourishes that would likely go over quite well in a speech, or at one of the many readings Ms. Warren must have given on her book tour.  But on the page they seem somewhat unnecessary, and sometimes make it seem like she is talking down to the reader.  I mean, I really can't call it a condescending tone at all, just a tad geared towards the lowest common denominator.  And perhaps I only feel this way because I've read an Elizabeth Warren casebook and I know she can write in a more academic tone.  Perhaps Ms. Warren has intuited that she is popular with many young people and so she is aiming even towards super idealistic high school debate club team members.  It's worth noting that she doesn't spell out bull**** in this book, but did in A Fighting Chance, and apologized.  So that is one way it feels a little censored, or safe.  I don't disagree with it from a professional perspective, only in an artistic one.  She doesn't need to resort to objectionable language to get her point across but I wonder how much she swears in her life.  

Income inequality is one of the first topics addressed in the first chapter.  She goes after a company I had never heard of and its CEO and it is hilarious:

"It's gotten so good that even lavish Wall Street parties have ratcheted up.  Citadel, a major hedge fund, had a good 2015.  It celebrated with a party featuring Katy Perry (for a rumored $500,000) and another party starring Maroon 5 (also $500,000 or so) along with--my favorite touch--violinists suspended from the ceiling by cables.  Maroon 5 and Katy Perry are hugely talented, and both have fought hard for progressive causes.  If a billionaire wants to pay them and an army of violinists a fortune, they should all take the money.  But good grief, a party where just the entertainment costs as much as it would take to feed a family of four for half a century?  The next year, according to news reports, Citadel's CEO was buying a new condo spanning three floors of a high-rise overlooking Central Park, a pad priced at a cool $200 million.  This condo in the sky has about the same square footage as twelve typical american homes.  And why shouldn't he go for it?  He had already set the records for the most expensive home purchases in Chicago and Miami, so obviously it was time to upgrade his New York digs.
Pop the champagne corks!" (18)

She then tells the story of Gina, 50, who had raised two sons with her husband, and had done reasonably well as a middle class family--buying a home, combined income of $70,000--to dropping down to $36,000 combined, and working at Wal-Mart.  She tells a similar story about Michael Smith, in his 50's, worked at DHL and had a pretty solid middle class lifestyle, moving around the south side of Chicago from Woodlawn to Hazel Crest to Homewood--until the crash of 2008 hits and his job gets eliminated and his mortgage payments balloon.  Finally, she tells the story of Kai, 27, who decided to go to school with the Art Institutes and earned a 3.9 GPA, and had loans of $45,000 after 2 years there.  They go up to $55,000 before the school begins to implode after a DOJ investigation and she leaves to go to another art school in Florida for $30,000, then finally the University of Colorado.  Then finds out that her credits from Art Institutes would not transfer due to accreditation standards, and she would need to complete another 2 years.  Her loans hit about $100,000 and she never finished her degree.  Of course, I identified most with Kai's story:

"The loans can also chop off big parts of a former student's future.  In Kai's case, they kill her opportunity to take out a mortgage to buy a home.  They kill her chances to borrow more money to go to school and finish her degree.  Without that degree, those loans kill her dream of getting an entry-level job in a business that employs people with a degree in visual arts.  And she can just plain forget about building up a little savings, buying health insurance, or stashing away some cash for retirement." (50-51)

It does appear that Kai has actually paid down enough to get the debt down to $90,000.  As a person whose debt has grown $15,000 higher over the past several years, effectively rendering my life a Sisyphean struggle, there is also this reality to address.  Warren does work on a bill to reduce student loan interest rates and allow them to be refinanced, but it gets killed.  Still, I feel like a good portion of Kai's debt should have been dischargeable because Art Institutes seemed to close while she was still in it.  I feel like that's one of the few exceptions.

After the broad overview of the first chapter, Warren delves into the economic history of the United States, with a particular focus on FDR and the wave of prosperity that persisted until the election of Ronald Reagan and the institution of trickle-down economics.  She bemoans the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, as she did in A Fighting Chance, and advocates for a 21st century version of it, with this incredible factoid:

"This doesn't have to be partisan.  My first cosponsor for a twenty-first-century Glass-Steagall bill was the Republicans' 2008 presidential nominee, Senator John McCain.  In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on this idea, and, at his insistence, adopting Glass-Steagall was added to the Republican platform." (93)

Of course that was undone in short order, and is now "headed in the opposite direction."  But it's still incredible to think that Warren and Trump shared any common ground, particularly after what comes later in this book, which is basically a blow-by-blow retelling of their Twitter wars, calling each other "Loser" and "Goofy" and "Pocahontas."

There is a great deal of rancor reserved for Wells Fargo, which is one of the most righteous sections of the book, and while I earlier called this a "position statement," I would revise that to say 3/4 position statement and 1/4 narrative of the 2016 campaign.  She details her hesitation to endorse Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders until the primary was decided, because she "didn't want to undermine either of our candidates or to short-circuit any part of that debate." (221) She concludes the book with a reflection on the Women's March in Boston on January 21, 2017, remarking, "We are an army--an army filled with optimism and hope and fierce determination." (270)

 With this book, Warren establishes herself as one of the leaders of the Democratic party.  When A Fighting Chance came out, people considered it a potential prelude to a presidential campaign.  She comments upon that here, briefly, and also tries to put to rest any speculation that she might run in 2020.  I am sure there were still be people that want her to do it, but it is clear that she loves her job as a Senator.  I highly doubt she will change her mind, but it will be interesting to see who emerges as the next Democratic candidate.  Anyone considering that run will hopefully adopt many of the policies spelled out in this volume.