A Bibliophile in Banner Elk.

Last weekend I helped Tammy with her booth at an art show in Banner Elk.  'Helping' consists of two hours of heavy lifting bracketing 3 days of sitting in under a sunny blue sky surrounded by green mountains and reading; it's like heaven.  I brought two thick books but they were so engrossing I gorged myself and had to trade them for two more at a coffee shop halfway through the weekend.  The two I brought with me were excellent, the two from the coffee shop were... free.

Stephen Sears Landsape Turned Red leads us through the Civil War battle at Antietam Creek (Sharpsburg, if you're a Southerner) like a triptych of blunders and horrors. Having been to the battlefield I saw it all unfold in my head like a movie, the kind where you shout at the screen "Don't go in that dark basement alone, you idiot!" and no one can hear you and they go anyway and terrible things happen.  Pride and fear are the most ferocious and formidable of opponents, and they battle in us all.

Speaking of pride, my takeaway from Trevor Rees-Jones' fascinating The Bodyguard's Story is that extreme wealth creates a disturbing mentality of casual superiority to the proletariat - the rules of the 99% simply don't apply to the 1%.  Trevor Rees-Jones was Dodi Fayed's bodyguard at the time when Dodi's billionaire father Mohammed Fayed was orchestrating a romance between his son and the recently single Diana, Princess of Wales.  The elder Fayed reveled in the overwhelming attention the relationship garnered in the press which - in the mind of a shipping mogul - equated free marketing for him.  That level of attention became lethal, however, on August 31st, 1997 when Dodi, Diana, and their inebriated driver were killed in a car crash while fleeing the paparazzi; Trevor was the only survivor.  He wrote the book several years after recovering from the crash not only to pay his hospital bills but to defend himself from increasingly hostile, frantic, and fantastic attacks in the press by Mohammed Fayed alleging that Rees-Jones was part of an international conspiracy to eliminate Dodi and Diana. Delightful look at a normal guy inside an elite sphere.

I was reminded of Fayed's 1% mind-set when I read Predator's Ball by Connie Bruck, the story of Michael Milken's rise to the throne of junk-bond king in the 1980's.  The fulminating brew of risky capitalism incubates predators and prey like a Jurassic swamp; Bruck's detailed account submerges you in its fetid stink.  Books like this create dissonance in my gut because I want the lubricious life wealth brings without its attending corruption, while history tells me the two are inseparable.  Sigh. No Bentley for me, I guess.

I needed to take my mind off my status as prey so I cracked open the mindless fun of James Swain's Sucker Bet and learned nothing except the myriad and creative ways people cheat at games of chance.  I did enjoy the refreshing change of a protagonist in his sixties who's confident enough in his skin not to succumb to navel-gazing.  I also like stories that take place in Florida - the birthplace of goofy. Florida seems like America's appendix: a dangling fixture that collects toxins and causes all sorts of problems.  But I admit, it's easy to be critical when you're basking in the high-country of Banner Elk.