| | | Presented by W. W. Norton & Company | | “Ungoverning” (Princeton University Press); Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth (Photo by Allison Robbert for The Washington Post); Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post); director of national intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard (Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post); briefly attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) | | Given his history, I assumed that sometime next year the wheels would again come off Donald Trump’s administration. But here we are, two months away from Inauguration Day, and his presidency is already noisily scraping along wheelless, trailing a pungent plume of burned opportunity. It’s tempting to hope that Trump’s farcical behavior might continue to thwart his most malevolent threats. But what if his buffoonery isn’t a bug but a feature? How will the country defend itself from such weaponized incompetence? For Russell Muirhead, who teaches at Dartmouth, and Nancy Rosenblum, who teaches at Harvard, the first step is to recognize what’s happening. They’ve just published an illuminating — and alarming — book called “Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos” (Princeton University Press). The authors contend that the disruption we’re already enduring is an intentional deconstruction of the state. “Ungoverning,” Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “is an unfamiliar name for an unfamiliar phenomenon: the attack on the capacity and legitimacy of government.” “Ungoverning has been accepted and weirdly normalized by officials and party leadership whose remit is to govern.” It’s an “overt and increasingly specific plan to incapacitate the administrative state, to eliminate its expertise and regular processes and the ethos of public service.” Yesterday, I spoke with the authors about their analysis of our political situation. Rosenblum readily concedes that “America has a history of libertarianism and quite virulent anti-governmentism.” But the Reaganesque dream of a smaller state has fermented in a fetid atmosphere of conspiracies to produce an intoxicating desire for no state. “Burn it down,” as Stephen K. Bannon reportedly said. In service to that cause, the Justice Department must be bent away from the rule of law toward absolute fealty to Trump. The intelligence community must sculpt its analysis to fit the president’s fantasies. The I.R.S. must be starved so it can’t effectively fund the functions of government. Whole departments could be eliminated or rendered ineffectual now that expertise has been reclassified as elitism, and competency is akin to disloyalty. Muirhead and Rosenblum finished “Ungoverning” before the 2024 election, but Trump’s ludicrous nominations — one already crashed in flames — serve as a sort of publicity campaign for the book’s thesis. “He’s picking incompetent people because that’s how he maintains his own power,” Muirhead tells me. “Their only skill is to be submissive to him.” In just 200 pages, the authors spell out how this works and what it could mean for the future. “Our challenge,” Muirhead and Rosenblum write, “is to understand why a president would declare war on the machinery of government. Our answer: to throw off the constraints that the machinery imposes on the exercise of personal power. In telling this story, we argue that ungoverning grew out of Trump’s unchained impulse to command and his need to ‘own’ reality and impose it on the nation. The vehicle is an imagined conspiracy, the malignant ‘deep state.’ And because the ethos of ungoverning has come to define the Republican Party, the threat it poses goes beyond one person.” “If unchecked,” they write, “ungoverning in the United States will lead to an incapacitated state, where the national government cannot offer a countervailing power to protect individuals.” While authoritarian leaders grow ever more powerful, citizens without a qualified government would be left to predict their own weather, measure their own gasoline, stop their own pandemics, resist monopolies, deliver mail, educate their children, fight discrimination, monitor their own water, select safe meats, test their own medicines, build their own highways, etc., etc., on to a thousand and one things that a functioning government does every day. Admittedly, “Ungoverning” can get jargony, e.g. “The maximal versions of unitary executive theory ultimately collapse the division between office and person.” Yikes. And the book’s thesis sometimes sounds too neat. But it remains an illuminating explanation of the great unraveling that’s underway in Washington. Successful resistance, Muirhead and Rosenblum say, will come from individual states devoted to competent government, judges who won’t bow to this anarchic movement and a citizenry with a renewed respect for public service. Meanwhile, “Ungoverning” offers a sobering reminder that Trump’s political chaos, no matter how much fodder it provides late-night comics, is not benign or even unintentional. ❖ Books to screens: - If you just arrived this morning to planet Earth, you may not know that “Wicked, Part I,” starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, opened last night in theaters. The movie is adapted from the stage musical, which was based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel, which was a prequel to the 1939 MGM classic, which was inspired by L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” which is a very long yellow brick road, indeed. “Wicked, Part I” is set to do for green what “Barbie” did last year for pink. Writing in The Washington Post, Ty Burr says this holiday extravaganza “is capable of defying gravity” (review). One data point: The day after Thanksgiving, 17 Charleses are going to see the movie in St. Louis.
- A new version of “Cruel Intentions,” starring Sarah Catherine Hook and Zac Burgess, started streaming on Prime last night (trailer). This eight-episode series is an update on the 1999 movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Michelle Gellar, which was a teen take on the 1988 movie “Dangerous Liaisons,” starring Glenn Close, John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer, which was adapted from Christopher Hampton’s 1985 play, which was inspired by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 novel “Les Liaisons dangereuses.” Apparemment, tout a déjà été dit.
- “Out of My Mind,” starring Phoebe-Rae Taylor with Jennifer Aniston providing her voice, debuts today on Disney Plus (trailer). The movie is based on a 2010 middle grade novel by Sharon M. Draper about a girl with cerebral palsy who fights for the respect and education she deserves. Mary Quattlebaum wrote in The Washington Post, “Draper creates an authentic character who insists, through her lively voice and indomitable will, that the reader become fully involved with the girl in the pink wheelchair.”
|  | | Lyons Press; background photo of the Mayflower II in Plymouth, Mass. (AP file photo/David Goldman) | | The Mayflower is so barnacled with legends that even the replica floating in Plymouth Harbor seems to glimmer with a mythological aura. When we lived in Boston, I visited the new-old ship several times, but I never considered how it got there until this week when I read a curious work of history by Richard A. Stone called “Project Mayflower: Building and Sailing a 17th-Century Replica.” I was expecting a study of craftsmanship, and while there’s some of that here, Stone’s focus is different. He’s interested in the characters who got this project moving and the cultural climate that produced it. Independent of each other, in the 1950s two men started dreaming of building a full-scale replica of the fabled ship. British war vet Warwick Charlton wanted a gift for America that would rival France’s Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, American financier Henry Hornblower II wanted a new Mayflower as the anchor for an innovative outdoor museum in Massachusetts. Once they teamed up, their work necessarily began with historical investigation — and speculation — because the original Mayflower had vanished more than 300 years earlier, and there were no detailed descriptions. An even larger and more persistent problem was money; they needed a boatload. Fortunately, as Stone writes, “Charlton was a marketing and promotion maestro.” Again and again, he successfully positioned the Mayflower project in ways that generated enthusiastic media coverage and fired the public’s imagination. Stone takes us back to a gilded era when elites asked, “How dare private enterprise and public companies sully the waters of cultural preservation?” To some, Charlton’s efforts smelled of hucksterism. “Funding for museums and the arts was the purview, within the tradition of noblesse oblige, of well-heeled patrons and individual citizens with sensibilities more refined than the average person.” The London Foreign Office had misgivings about Charlton’s character, but the Mayflower II soon became caught up in international politics that stretched all the way to war in the Middle East. Suddenly, the wooden ship’s role in cementing the “special relationship” between Britain and the U.S. gave the Mayflower II a radically expanded purpose and urgency. All these financial and political complications make for a fascinating story in Stone’s brisk narrative. But the actual voyage, described across several chapters, is the real treat. Modern-day sailors ate hardtack and salt pork and worked constantly to keep the wooden ship swabbed and caulked. In still weather, all movement stopped. In rough winds, the captain said the replica “was like a wild little bronco constantly taking an uneven series of high fences and rolling and all but falling over as she came to each one.” Spoiler alert: In June 1957, Mayflower II docked in Plymouth Harbor — but in its wake stretched almost $200,000 in debts. The new ship’s appearance also revived tough conversations about what the Pilgrims’ arrival meant for the Wampanoag people who had lived here for thousands of years. For anyone interested in the unpredictable crosscurrent of money, politics, dreams and serendipity that produced this world-famous historical replica, Stone’s “Project Mayflower” is a voyage worth taking. ❖ |  | | (Knopf; Sandycove; Knopf; Scribner) | More literary prizes and honors: - “Question 7,” by Australian writer Richard Flanagan, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction on Tuesday in London. The award, worth about $63,000, honors a nonfiction book published in English anywhere in the world. Flanagan is now the only person ever to have won England’s top awards in nonfiction and fiction. (In 2014, he received the Booker Prize for “The Narrow Road to the Deep North.”) In The Washington Post, Michael Dirda wrote, “Flanagan has produced a kind of philosophical fantasia, a highly original weaving together of a half-dozen essayistic narratives about the sad, wondrous world we all live in” (review). Breaking: “Question 7” has just been named one of the top 10 books of 2024 by The Washington Post (full list).
- Irish former tennis pro Conor Niland won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award for his memoir “The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the other 99%.” A statement from the betting and gaming company William Hill said this is the first tennis book to win the world’s most valuable literary sports prize, worth about $38,000.
- Anne Michaels’s poetic novel “Held” won the Giller Prize. The award, worth about $71,500, honors the best work of fiction in Canada. In short blocks of text that often feel like stanzas, “Held” tells a story about the traumas of war and the persistence of love. At the start of this year, I wrote, “Perhaps the word ‘romantic’ has been too thoroughly attenuated to use in praise, but ‘Held’ may be one of the most romantic books I’ve ever read” (rave).
- “A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon,” by Kevin Fedarko, won the Outdoor Literature Prize from the National Outdoor Book Awards foundation (full list of winners). My parents heard Fedarko and photographer Pete McBride at the Chautauqua Institution in 2023 and said their story of trekking 750 miles through the Grand Canyon was gripping (video).
REVIEW By Jonathan Russell Clark | | | |  | | As we get ready to celebrate a national holiday around a dead bird, nature writer Sy Montgomery has released a charming little book called “What the Chicken Knows.” This “appreciation of the world’s most familiar bird” — No. 7 on our nonfiction bestseller list — was previously published as a chapter in Montgomery’s 2010 book, “Birdology.” But here in this new, eminently giftable format, with delightful color photos of Montgomery’s feathered friends, many more readers can vicariously experience the comedy and the tragedy of raising hens and roosters. As one of the country’s best nature writers, Montgomery has a knack for explaining chickens’ extraordinary qualities, including their long memory and their capacity for spatial learning. And after living with these strong-willed birds for decades, she knows a lot about their loyalties and personalities. Her little flock became her personal fan club, rushing to meet her at the start of each day and filling her office with the soft sounds of clucking (and feathers). But beware the rooster! Her description of a once friendly cock suddenly attacking her minister sounds downright demonic. And the ultimate fate of her free-range flock is a sad but important lesson about the law of nature. “They are creatures made less of flesh than of air,” Montgomery writes about these hollow-boned marvels. “And yet we share a fundamental talent: a need for companionship, a capacity for affection.” Here are two more bird-related books to give this season: - “The Courage of Birds,” by Pete Dunne. This engaging book, filled with full-page black-and-white illustrations by David Allen Sibley, explores the remarkable ways birds manage to evade or endure the deadly cold of winter. (Dunne also includes helpful advice about birdfeeders and bird-friendly plantings.)
- “Bird Photographer of the Year,” edited by Will Nicholls and Paul Sterry. This stunning collection of images — chosen from 23,000 submissions — presents the avian world in all its soaring grandeur, stunning color and, yes, accidental comedy. You’ll see helmetshrikes lining up for sleep, two bald eagles in flight sparring over a fish, a king penguin arguing with an Antarctic fur seal and hundreds more arresting feathered moments. Each image comes with a brief explanation from the photographer.
|  | | A Bug’s Life. “Franz Kafka” opens today at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The exhibit — commemorating the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death at the age of 40 — is a collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. Many of these manuscripts, letters, diaries and photographs have never before been displayed in the United States. Let’s hear it for the betrayal of friends. The fact that we can see an exhibit like this — that we know of Kafka 100 years later — stems largely from the fact that Max Brod ignored Kafka’s explicit instructions to destroy his papers, including “The Trial,” after he died. (The writer who got us all saying “Kafkaesque.”) The Morgan show contains manuscripts of “Amerika,” “The Castle,” and “A Hunger Artist”; letters to his sister, Ottla; the diary in which he wrote “The Judgment”; and a special concentration on “The Metamorphosis,” which includes manuscripts, Vladimir Nabokov’s copy of the novella and drawings of the “ungeheuren Ungeziefer.” A number of special events have been planned in coordination with “Franz Kafka.” For instance, on March 6, pianist Jenny Lin will perform Philip Glass’s “Metamorphosis 1—5” (which I’m listening to right now). If you can’t make it to New York, but still find yourself awaking from uneasy dreams, get the exhibit’s companion, “Kafka: Making of an Icon.” Illustrated with scores of stunning images, this book offers essays edited by Ritchie Robertson that consider Kafka’s life, work and modern-day brand. “Franz Kafka” at the Morgan runs through April 13, 2025 (more information). ❖ |  | | (Beach Lane Books; Philomel Books; Boynton Bookworks) | | My nephew’s wife is having a baby early next year, so I’m already plotting to fill the nursery with picture books. Here are three new but familiar ones I particularly like for the holidays: - My usual position is: Don’t fiddle with perfection. But “Chicka Chicka Ho Ho Ho,” written by William Boniface and illustrated by Julien Chung, is a worthy holiday companion to the 1989 classic “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” written by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault and illustrated by Lois Ehlert. In this jolly new version, “A told B, and B told C, ‘I’ll meet you in the branches of the Christmas tree.’” Yes, disaster strikes again — “Slip, drop, topple, plop!” — but these exuberant letters manage to get everything “wrapped up nice and neat.”
- To mark the 20th anniversary of Oliver Jeffers’s debut picture book, “How to Catch a Star,” he’s published an equally adorable sequel called “Where to Hide a Star.” Boy and his friend the star are back, but during a game of hide-and-seek, the star goes missing for too long. “The star had never been this good at hiding,” Jeffers writes. Boy’s friend the penguin can’t find it either. Don’t worry: A Martian comes to help — but then another complication arises.
- There’s a racket in the barnyard again, and it’s glorious. “Cows and Holly,” by Sandra Bo
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