the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt fifteen)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

It was all but over. In what was to be another easy fight, Ali met light heavyweight Olympic gold medalist Leon Spinks in early 1978. With only seven professional victories, Spinks was sure to lose. No one told Leon. The young and hungry ex-marine wore down a fighter who looked tired and old at thirty-five, winning a unanimous fifteen round decision. In September 1978 in front of a record indoor crowd of 63,532 at the New Orleans Superdome and the second largest television audience in history, a better-trained Ali beat Spinks to become the only heavyweight champion to hold the title three different times. Although Ali won, it was another dull fight that highlighted how little he had left as well as how much damage drinking and drugging had done to an out-of-condition Spinks. Ali triumphed once again, but it felt like he had barely survived. His fans realized he could go no further.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt fourteen)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Both Ali’s positive impulses and his flaws were evident in his first title defense against little-heralded challenger Chuck Wepner, dubbed “the Bayonne Bleeder” for his propensity to cut easily. Scheduled for March 24, 2975, the fight was to be an easy one to allow the champ to stay in shape by boxing on a regular basis. Promoted by Don King, whose star had risen as a result of his prominence in Zaire, the Wepner fight was to be the first where Ali gave away the profits after expenses. As reported in Jet, Ali announced at a press conference that from this fight on “all the profits will be given away.” This impulse arose from the guilt he experienced over having amassed a fortune without doling much to help poor black people. Driving through Gary, Indiana, in his Rolls-Royce, “I saw this little girl with hardly any clothes on standing at a bus stop with her mother,” Ali explained. “It was zero degrees, and she had no shoes.” He gave her mother $100: “I’ve spent $100 on some dinners. All of a sudden I felt so guilty. I’ve never felt like this in 14 years of fighting.” The experience moved him to donate money from the Wepner fight to poor African Americans in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Louisville, Gary, or elsewhere through various black organizations such as the NAACP, the United Negro College Fund, and the Nation of Islam. This proposal led black sports columnist and frequent Ali critic A. S. “Doc” Young, to call this “the best idea Muhammad Ali has ever had, the best proposal he has ever presented to the public. If he follows through on his declaration, he will make the most important individual financial contribution to Black causes in the history of sport.”

This grand stance burnished his image as a black folk hero, but the Wepner fight, like much else during the second half of the 1970s, laid a little tarnish on that image. Part of the problem was that instead of offering Foreman a rematch, Ali decided instead on a series of easy fights that would offer a respite from years of constant training and self-discipline. As for a rematch with Foreman, he asserted that his decisive victory proved that Foreman was no longer a worthy contender. In contrast, he may have surmised that he had been lucky against Foreman the first time around and that the ex-champion would not be so easily fooled again. With little to fear from Wepner, Ali did not train very hard – a practice repeated numerous times in his second reign as champion – and he was decidedly unimpressive.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt thirteen)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Zaire was not the only African nation that reveled proudly in Ali’s victory. After all, throughout black Africa the Reuters news service noted that he was billed as “the people’s choice,” because he was a “symbol of independence and freedom from White domination for millions of Blacks in the United States and elsewhere in the world.” There was no doubt who four thousand fans favored at Nairobi’s Kenyata’s Conference Center: “The entire crowd rooted for Ali and roared excitedly with every blow.” When the knockout came in the eighth round, the audience jumped for joy. In Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, groups of fans expressed their joy by driving around the main avenues of the city and honking their horns in celebration. After listening to the fight over radio, hundreds of fans in Accra, Ghana, “went mad with joy.” One fanatical Ali supporter ran bare chested through the city, waving his white shirt in victory, while many fans were “seen openly hugging and congratulating each other in appreciation of the resounding victory of their idol.”

President Senghor of Senegal, one of the major architects of Negritude as a Pan-African ideology, recognized Ali’s victory as a celebration of African independence. Immediately after the bout he sent a congratulatory message to Ali, “the greatest militant of Black civilization.” Senegal’s Daily Sun added that, ‘in Senegal, Ali’s victory is considered like that of Africa, as the triumph of the oppressed.” One proof of this veneration of Ali as a symbol of black African liberation occurred as Norman Mailer was flying home soon after the fight. His airplane landed at Yoff Airport in Dakar at one in the morning for what was intended as a brief stop, but it was prevented from taking off for several hours because thousands of local Senegalese had received word via a radio bulletin that the new champion might be on board. Surrounding the plane, they demanded that Ali come out to greet them. So insistent were they that they had to see – and believed they had a right to see – their newly crowned heavyweight champion that they refused to allow the airplane to take off until a delegation had come aboard to observe for themselves that Ali was not among them. Needless to say they found no Ali and were exceedingly disappointed. Finally, however, they let the plane take off.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt twelve)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Equally important, the bout not only featured standard-bearers for opposing positions on the war; in a number of ways it symbolically reenacted America’s frustrating experience in that long and fruitless conflict. As a symbol of American power, Foreman relied on his overwhelming size and strength, rather than finesse, in the match, and he relished his ability to knock out opponents early and in convincing fashion. This led to overconfidence in his own power and underestimation of the enemy’s strength. In addition, the champion followed the lead of his corner to a fault and at crucial moments in the battle proved unable to change his tactics as the situation demanded. Instead, he kept throwing bombs that time and again failed to subdue a weaker and more resourceful enemy. In the end he exhausted his energy, lost his confidence and will, and was defeated because of his own failings rather than as a result of the strength of his clever foe.

As the avowed opponent of the Vietnam War, Ali managed to transform Zaire into his home field and stun his powerful foe to achieve an upset victory. Much like the Viet Cong and its North Vietnamese allies, Ali surprised the world – not only by winning but by winning so convincingly that the whole idea of victory culture was placed in doubt. Using an impenetrable defense, the challenger unleashed just enough sneaky offense to weaken Foreman’s resolve. Even as Foreman continued to throw the heavier punches and win the early rounds, Ali, as Foreman himself acknowledged, “owned their hearts and minds more completely with every punch he absorbed.” At the same time, Foreman proved incapable of winning the support of the Zaïrois people. His aloofness and distance was a clear indication that was “miserable about being in Zaire, and in Africa,” noted Suruba Ibumando Wechsler, a Zaïrois woman who kept up with the event via local radio and newspapers. By contrast, she declared, Ali “seemed to be having the time of his life, here in the very heart of Africa. He mingled with everyone, young and old, rich and poor, black and white.”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt eleven)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

African Americans celebrated Ali’s victory as a matter of racial solidarity, a pattern not seen since Joe Louis’s heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though his opponent was black, Ali’s triumph was viewed as a victory over the injustices of the white world. As president of Morehouse College, Hugh M. Gloseter, told Ali in front of four thousand students: “As much as you are admired by boxing fans in general, you are admired even more by the members of your own race. You are our main man.” Taking back his title that “’they’ had taken from him” because of his religion and his refusal to be drafted, made him an overarching symbol of racial pride in an era when black pride was at its apex. As the Chicago Defender put it, “Now the self-appointed Messiah of black everywhere, to Harlem, to South Africa, to the slums of the cities of all the world, he preaches pride in being black, pride in the determination to overcome, to meet the white man’s world on its own terms, and to defeat it.” He amuses many, frightens some with his tirades: “There are blacks who greet him with laughter and glee as he excoriates the white world, but there are also blacks who take his vitriolic, militant speeches as a green light to overthrow the white man’s establishment.”

Ali’s antiestablishment stance was highlighted when he returned to Louisville, Kentucky, on November 8 for Muhammad Ali Day. At a central plaza, seven thousand people, mostly black, but many whites too, gathered to honor a “black folk hero and the most famous defender of the faith of Islam.” Although a boxer, he stood before the crowd “like a Black Prince,” with his face unscarred and, “as men’s faces can be, . . . something approaching beautiful.” A triumphant living symbol that black was beautiful, Ali received greetings from “those who genuinely loved him,” as well as, finally, “some of the bigshots who shied away from him in the old days when he was considered a traitor and a bum for refusing to enter military service and for changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali.” As he walked through the crowd, people nearly trampled one another to touch him. “It was,” wrote Charles Sanders in Ebony, “an outpouring of black love upon a man for whom black people have gained profound respect – for refusing to knuckle under despite the cruelest pressures; for standing up for what he believed even though it cost him, in dollars and otherwise, far more than most men are willing to lose, and for refusing to give up and for trying hard enough and often enough to eventually triumph.”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt ten)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

That sense of fulfillment and liberation was felt all over Kinshasha. It was dawn when Ali left the stadium, and at every village and crossing crowds were leaping and yelling as he passed, many holding up babies so that they could see the victor who had set their hearts aflame. Hundreds of fans remained in the stands and in the ring itself, mimicking the dramatic manner in which Foreman was knocked out. While Foreman lay awake in his hotel room tortured by his inconceivable loss at the hands of a seemingly washed-up former champion, Ali and his wife Belinda sat in the back seat of their Citroen as they were driven back to N’Sele. As Ali told George Plimpton, he and Belinda were struck by how odd it seemed to be leaving the arena in the light of day. They just could not stop talking about how unusual it seemed. Normally, they knew, prizefighters arrive at the arena during the daylight hours and when the fight is over they exit while it is dark. “It seemed so symbolically appropriate that on this occasion he should be coming out of darkness into light.” After seven years of battling the government, the boxing establishment, and the ravages of Father Time, the newly crowned champion indeed felt that he had survived the dark days of struggle and doubt and emerged into a lighter, more optimistic future.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt nine)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Whatever the causes of Foreman’s defeat, they did little to restore his reputation or his pride after such a humiliating performance. Indeed, Ali’s dramatic victory destroyed the myth of George Foreman’s invincibility. One fight fan put it succinctly. Ali, the Chicagoan Seely Hagan wrote The Ring magazine, “is the only interesting fighter in the business. He made a monkey out of the greatest hitter in years. George knows as much about boxing as he know[s] about flying to Russia. How did he ever stop Joe Frazier?” Promoter Don Fraser was equally adamant. “George Foreman turned out to be the ghost of Sonny Liston.” At the hands of Ali, “within a few minutes, Foreman’s portrait went from invincible, unbeatable powerhouse to pathetic chump.” Indeed, asked Foreman’s supporters, where was the Foreman “who had smashed Joe Frazier down six times to win the championship and destroyed Ken Norton in defense of it.” How could it be that a Foreman who had “mastered those two with contemptuous ease, was a stumbling amateur against their victim.” The answer according to Chicago Tribune sports columnist Rick Talley was this: Ali “did it the simplest way. He just sat back and hit him in the face.” Instead of dancing, he lay back on the ropes and counter punched against Foreman’s head, a target that was always right in front of him.

In destroying Foreman and his myth of invincibility, just as he had done to Liston ten years earlier, Ali sealed his legend as the greatest heavyweight boxing champion of all time. “Can the world beat it?” asked Los Angeles Times boxing columnist John Hall. “If not a legend before, the strutting, swaggering, shouting Ali most certainly is now. Instantly, the promoters rush back to beat upon his door.” The shock of the upset and the seeming magic of Ali’s accomplishment brough the skeptics to their knees. No matter what other fighters thought, and “never mind what the critics say,” Hall continued, “Ali is king. He’s magic. He’s magnificent. He’s a hypnotist. He casts a spell over himself as well as his people, all the people.” Speaking for his former critics, Hall admitted that “we bow and scrape at the Ali shrine.” Even more, boxing experts had to take responsibility for building up Foreman into a myth of invincibility. “It was the ghost of Liston,” he wrote, “another swift disintegration of a myth we all helped to create.”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt eight)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

When Ali returned to his corner, his handlers pleaded with him to stay off the ropes, to dance as they had planned or else be killed by any one of Foreman’s mighty blows. Seemingly calm and collected amid the storm, Ali told everyone, “Shut up! All of you. I know what I am doing. Don’t tell me nothing! I don’t want to hear another word. Shut up.” Then, according to Ferdie Pacheco, he explained: “The champ has nothing. He has nothing. He can’t hurt me. I’m going to let this sucker punch himself out.” All during training Ali had planned on using his speed to dance away from the champ’s power and tire him out by rounds eight to ten. Gregorio Peralta had gone the distance with Foreman earlier in the champ’s career, but in that case it was fighting off the ropes. Having watched tapes of the Foreman-Peralita match, Ali’s camp planned to test Foreman’s stamina, but not by laying on the ropes right in front of the champion. Rather, the challenger would dance around the ring and tire Foreman out. Echoing the feeling of the entire camp, Dundee recalled that “when he went to the ropes, I felt sick. I thought Ali would win but not that way.” The goal was to dance for five or six rounds and against a stand-up fighter who didn’t move his head much, Ali could jab him silly. Then when Foreman tired, Ali would knock him out in the late rounds. “But,” Dundee recalled, “everything we planned was built around not getting hit.”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt seven)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

By his own admission, Foreman was miserable in Zaire, “not least because of the food.” His cook Tyree Lyons, who had worked at the Pleasanton, California, Job Corps site, searched all over Kinshasa for food that George would eat, but he found little that pleased his employer. No one in either camp developed a fondness for monkey meat. Lyons did, however, develop a mysterious ailment that swelled his hands and eyes, which must have been a further deterrence for Foreman’s mixing with the local populace. Rats, insects, and lizards infested his quarters in an old army base, up the hill from Ali’s more luxurious digs. Rowdy, beer-sodden soldiers patrolled the base fully armed and cyclone fencing and barbed wire turned Foreman’s camp into a prison. Except for daily press conferences “we’re restricted,” noted the champ’s publicist Bill Caplan. “Nobody is allowed in the Foreman camp. Government orders.” Seeking relief from the claustrophobic environment, the champion demanded a suite at the Inter-Continental Hotel. Even there, however, Foreman worried that someone might break in and mess with him and his things. As a deterrent, he hired guards to watch his room twenty-four hours a day. Never much of a social being, he would have to live surrounded by so many people who favored Ali.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt six)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

The world first learned of Zaire 74 when Don King, in an effort to make an epic global sporting event even more spectacular, announced that the Rumble in the Jungle would include a three-day music festival that would precede “the greatest sporting event in the history of the world,” on September 20-22. As Ali declared, the Rumble in the Jungle was “much more than a sports event. It’s a symbol of the Black American Awakening, with . . . all those beautiful black people goin’ home to share their experiences with the black musicians who never left.” Financed by the brother of President William Tolbert of Liberia and organized by Levine, Hugh Masekela, and R&B singer Lloyd Price, the festival featured the Americans James Brown, B. B. King, Bill Withers, the Spinners, the Jazz Crusaders, Sister Sledge, the Pointer Sisters, Etta James, and Price. Representing the Caribbean, where enslaved Africans has also deeply influenced the region’s musical traditions, were Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Mexican artists Johnny Pacheco, Celiz Cruz, Ray Barretto, Jorge Santana, and Héctor LAvoe, among others, including the Caribbean music devotee Jewish pianist and bandleader Larry Harlow—the top names in salsa. Like the fight itself, Zaire 74 highlighted a global black consciousness that was an important element in the cultural politics of the era.

The festival also sought to bring the music of Africa to the attention of the world. Among the major stars on the bill was transatlantic singer Miriam Makeba, the South African expatriate who had built an audience in the United States and Africa for her international repertoire or protest, popular, and native songs. In addition, Manu Dibango, the saxophone and keyboard dean of Paris-based African musicians, and the composer of “Soul Makossa,” an Afro-beat hit that moved global dance floors, was also expected to perform. Zaïrois bands were scheduled too, including the Madjesi Trio, Franco and the TPOK Jazz Band, Abumba Masikini, the Pembe Dance Troupe, Abeti, and afrisa with singer Tabu Ley.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt five)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

When the Congo achieved its independence in 1960, white Americans viewed the political infighting through a Cold War lens deeply influenced by the colonial discourse. Molded by book and movies such as Tarzan of the Apes (1912), King Solomon’s Mines (1950), Watusi (1959), Something of Value (1957), and Congo Crossing (1956), white—and many black—Americans continued to see black Africans as naked, illiterate, and emotional savages prone to irrational revolt. Indeed, US officials depicted Lumumba, who rejected the colonial discourse of white paternalistic leadership, as the devil and equated him with a history of black African savagery and chaos. Without a strong man friendly to the United States in charge, the Russians would have taken over. After all, Africans could not rule themselves.

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt four)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Given his role in sparking the athletic rebellion, Ali verbally supported the boycott movement while Foreman remained removed from the controversial protest. “Giving up a chance at the Olympics and a gold medal is a big sacrifice,” Ali declared when the boycott was first announced. “But anything they do that’s designed to get freedom and equality for their people, I’m with 1,000 percent.” Foreman first heard of the boycott movement when Edwards and some of his supporters came to the New Mexico Olympic training site to recruit athletes to their cause. They made speeches, but because there were no big-name boxing stars, they “passed us by the way a freight train would a hobo,” Foreman recalled. “Not one of us high school dropouts [on the boxing team] were ever asked to be part of what they were doing. They never asked the poor people to join.” Nor did they ask female Olympic athletes, because the radicals were focused on demonstrating their defiant black manhood. Foreman later asserted that the boycott worked best for UCLA basketball star Lew Alcindor and other college athletes who were accustomed to radical issues and protest movements on their campuses. “Whether the students’ anger was righteous, I don’t know,” Foreman recalled. “I know only that their world wasn’t the one I saw.” He put it succinctly: “How could I protest the Establishment when it had created the Job Corps for guys like me?” Besides, Foreman rejected the black nationalist message that only white people were prejudiced. In Houston, he claimed that black teachers, some of his relatives, and members of the black community were prejudiced when they summarily labeled him a failure.

While Foreman’s class resentment against the boycott’s organizers alienated him from their cause, it is also true that Olympic boxing coach Pappy Gault made sure his team ignored the protests. As the first black coach for the US team, Gault was older, forty-six, a World War II veteran, and, like many of his generation, more conservative in his views. Having fought with the marines at Iwo Jima, he ran the boxing squad as a quasi-military unit. Both he and assistant Ray Rogers, also an ex-marine, were addressed as “Sarge.” Six of the team’s eleven boxers were black, Gault maintained: “My fighters believe in me. They do what I say.” His major goal, in fact, was to make the notoriously individual sport of boxing “into a team sport. I don’t want stars or individualists,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I believe in unity. I think this will show a new side of the US. We are never individuals when we support the US.” Victory surpassed racial protest. His boxers, he bragged, were not “involved in any of this demonstration stuff . . . . We’re proud to be fighting for the United States. This is our country. We’re all brothers, aren’t we?”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt three)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Finally George made a friend, Richard Kibble, a hippie from Tacoma, Washington, who introduced him to the new youth culture that was beginning to sweep the nation. On their first meeting Kibble asked him why he fought with everyone all the time and asserted that fighting was not important. Together they listened to Kibble’s Bob Dylan records, which, according to Foreman, was when his real education began. Although he continued to fight with anyone and everyone, George discovered a love of learning. He learned grammar and vocabulary and for the first time in his life read a book. In fact, he began to devour books, especially the Autobiography of Malcolm X, which given its story of an alienated black young man who descends into crime and prison before being redeemed, must have spoken forcefully to him. It was through Kibble that he also made a few friends, most of whom he had beaten up at one time or another. While listening with them to the radio broadcast of the Muhammad Ali-Floyd Patterson bout on November 22, 1965, one of his new friends asked him why he did not take up boxing, since he liked beating up people so much. Excited by the challenge of the sport and the glamour of the heavyweight champion, six months later George transferred to the Camp Parks Job Corps Center run by Litton Industries near Pleasanton, California. Located about forty miles east of Oakland, the center would allow George to continue his education and make use of its excellent physical education facilities, including an already-established boxing program.

The boxing program at Camp Parks was run by Nick “Doc” Broadus, one of the most important influences in George’s life. More than boxing, the forty-eight-year-old amateur and professional fighter strove to provide Foreman with a discipline, direction, and a strong adult male role model. Only five foot five, Broadus had a boxing résumé and a background in martial arts that earned George’s respect and made the coach fearless toward his towering young pupil with the hair-trigger temper: “You bigger than me, but I can handle you baby. Size don’t mean nothin’ to me.” Broadus told him: “I been in that jungle, too, George. Whatever you did, I was doing’ myself not long ago. But that’s ol’ history now, an’ our job is to make history.” As an amateur boxer Broadus had won one hundred straight bouts and twenty-four out of twenty-five as a professional. As soon as he lost, he turned coach, first in the air force, then in the Job Corps. Even with his vast experience, however, steering the angry Foreman proved challenging. When George threatened a counselor, he was nearly expelled from the Job Corps as an irredeemable hoodlum. “I was held responsible for him,” Doc noted. “It was going to be his last opportunity.”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt two)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

As he campaigned for a title match with Liston, Clay’s fresh-faced challenge to boxing’s accepted rules invigorated a dying sport. Floyd Patterson seemed a nice-enough fellow, but except for Liston, his manager Constantine “Cus” D’Amato kept him away from tough opponents, especially any with mob ties. In his battles with Liston, Patterson was “the good Negro,” humble and modest, versus the surly, amoral black man from the ghetto, a Bigger Thomas with boxing gloves. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) did not want Patterson to fight Liston, fearing the consequences of a black champion with criminal ties, but once the fight was announced, the civil rights organization, like President Kennedy, rooted for Patterson and was horrified when he was humiliated in 1962 and again in 1963 by the former mob enforcer. From the moment he won his Olympic gold medal in 1960, Cassius Clay stepped into this gloomy picture to help establish a new era in boxing. “Whether you like Clay or not,” noted Ring’s Dan Daniel, “the fact remains that he performed for boxing a tremendous benefice similar to that which Babe Ruth achieved for baseball” after the Black Sox scandal had shaken public confidence in the sport. Clay knew how to capture the spotlight. He was “fresh, new, and filled with the liveliness of a new age,” argued Angelo Dundee. “Put them all together and all of a sudden it was the Age of Cassius.”

the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt one)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Three days before a match with Duke Sabong in Las Vegas in 1961, Clay met the outrageous wrestler “Gorgeous George” Wagner, with his dyed blond hair, flashy robes, and a habit of insulting opponents while touting his own good looks and wrestling skills. To Clay’s surprise, the wrestler drew fans by the thousands who hoped for his defeat. A light went on. The more Clay bragged about himself, the more he sassed his opponents, the more outrageous his self-presentation, he realized, the more fans would come out to see him lose. He began touting his looks and his skills and denigrating those of his opponent: “I’d never been shy about talking, but if I talked even more, there was no telling how much money people would pay to see me.” Lots of fighters boast, but Clay also took to ridiculing his opponents in rhyme, seemingly making up doggerel on the spot, using the black verbal art of the dozens. Boasting “I am the greatest,” he took charge of his own identity in and out of the ring.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt eleven)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Notwithstanding the political posturing, right-wing extremist violence not only persisted but accelerated. Indeed, the amount and degree of such violence offers a hidden history of the Obama years. The roll call of such acts runs into the dozens. Days after the 2008 election, a Marine corporal at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina was arrested and charged with planning to kill Obama as a “domestic enemy” in “Operation Patriot.” In January 2009, a Boston white supremacist raped and shot an African immigrant and then killed her sister when she tried to intervene. He then killed a homeless African immigrant, and he was arrested before he got to a synagogue for a planned mass shooting. In May, a member of the right-wing vigilante group Minutemen American Defense in Arizona murdered a man and his young daughter during a home invasion to steal funds for his anti-immigrant activities. Also in May, a “sovereign citizen” (which Terry Nichols also claimed to be) named Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who provided abortion services. In June, a white supremacist attacked the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shooting and killing a security guard. This was all in the first six months of the Obama presidency.

The pace of extremist violence never slackened in the Obama years. A tax protestor burns down his home, boards his private plane, and flies it into the building that contains the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. A pipe bomb at an Islamic Center in Jacksonville, Florida. A handgun attack on security guards at the Pentagon. Firebombs at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Madera, California. (Among other attacks on Planned Parenthood operations.) Four “sovereign citizens” in Alaska plot to murder state and federal employees. Another “sovereign citizen” in Texas tries to hire a hit man to kill a federal judge. A Georgia militia plot to poison employees and bomb offices of the ATF and IRS in Atlanta. A different Georgia militia plot to kill a onetime accomplice whom the perpetrators feared would become an informant. In Spokane, a white supremacist’s bomb at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade malfunctions at the last minute. Another white supremacist kills six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Militia operatives in Minnesota plot to bomb the local police and (in a separate scheme) steal military IDs for use in militia operations. A shooting rampage aimed at Transportation Security Administration officials at Los Angeles International Airport. A plot to bomb government buildings in Katy, Texas. Three North Carolina extremists assemble bombs to fight the federal government. A plot to bomb the federal courthouse in Elkins, West Virginia. A man in New Hampshire tries to buy rockets and grenades “to bring forth the original constitution.” A white supremacist named Dylann Roof guns down nine parishioners in a historic Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof leaves behind a manifesto that reads like updated McVeigh: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well, someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt ten)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Despite these obstacles, the extremists persisted. In July 1995, three months after the bombing, Michael Gray, who was a longtime friend of Randy Weaver’s (the central figure in the Ruby Ridge saga), was arrested in Washington State for plotting to bomb the federal courthouse in Spokane. He had stolen blueprints to the courthouse and planned to build a fertilizer bomb like McVeigh’s. In September 1995, Charles Polk was arrested after trying to buy large quantities of C-4 explosives to bomb IRS buildings throughout Texas. Two months later, Willie Lampley, who was a leader of the Oklahoma militia, and three others were charged with conspiracy to bomb gay bars, abortion clinics, and an Anti-Defamation League office in Texas. Georgia militia members were arrested for stockpiling bombs. Militia members from West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were charged in a plot to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center. On April 12, 1996, a white supremacists named Larry Shoemake shot eleven Black people, killing one, in Jackson, Mississippi, before dying in a fire he had set. (The Turner Diaries “was like an eye opener for him,” his wife later said.) On July 27, 2996, Eric Rudolph, a white supremacist, set off a bomb in Atlanta’s Centennial Park during the Olympic Games. Over the next two years, he detonated three more bombs, at gay bars and abortion clinics, and then disappeared into the woods. (He was caught in 2003.) On June 7, 1998, three white men killed James Byrd Jr., a Black man, by dragging him behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas. “We’re starting The Turner Diaries early,” one of the killers was reported to have said during the assault. Apart from the Olympic bombing and the Byrd murder, these investigations drew little national attention, largely because they took place far from big cities, with their concentrations of media outlets. It was not a full-fledged national rebellion, as in The Turner Diaries, like McVeigh wanted, but he did set off a string of attacks on his enemies.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt nine)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

“If you leave the site of the Murrah Building at 9:02 a.m. and drove the posted April 1995 speed limit on interstate highways, where would you be at 10:17?”

“It would put me at the same spot of the arrest between Mile Marker 202 and 203,” Hanger testified. In other words, if McVeigh had set off the bomb and then driven north at the speed limit, he would have been exactly where Hanger found him on April 19.

The story of Hanger’s arrest of McVeigh had a revealing postscript. Though McVeigh remains a reviled figure in Oklahoma, his views about the Second Amendment have been ascendant in that politically conservative state. In 2019, the state changed its laws to allow individuals twenty-one and older to carry guns without permits. If Hanger had stopped McVeigh under the new law, he could not have arrested him, because he was now allowed to carry his gun. All Hanger could have done was give McVeigh a ticket.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt eight)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jones, Coyne, and others on the defense team indulged McVeigh for months regarding the necessity defense. They researched the use of the defense in the United States and even around the world and wrote detailed memos on the subject. They all reached the same conclusion. As Coyne put it in one memo, “there was no way a court would allow the issue to go to the jury to balance the evils” between Waco and Oklahoma City. Amber McLaughlin, one of Jones’s Enid firm alums, wrote a thirteen-page memo that concluded, “The limitations of the defenses of necessity and duress will prevent us from being able to assert either one of them at trial.” The handful of cases where the defense had been successfully used explained why it was a nonstarter for McVeigh. For example, in a South Carolina case from 1991, a defendant was convicted of driving with a suspended license when he went to call for help for his wife, who was pregnant and experiencing intestinal distress. He had no telephone at home. The appeals court overturned his conviction because the trial court forbade him from raising a necessity defense. To invoke the defense, the court said, the defendant must reasonably believe that there was an imminent threat and that he had no realistic alternative to the action that he took. Moreover, the defendant’s behavior must create no more substantial danger than the situation he is attempting to address.

No lawyer could, with a straight face, argue that McVeigh had a “necessity” to bomb the Murrah building and kill 168 people in order to prevent future violence by the federal government. The argument was worse than nonsensical; it was offensive. The idea that Jones and his team even deigned to research the issue demonstrated the way they coddled and indulged McVeigh. The “necessity defense” episode illustrated how the intense public focus on the case invested McVeigh with a kind of celebrity status; as a result, his opinions, even on legal issues, had to be taken seriously. The vast number of lawyers on his team meant that every silly idea could be explored. In a normal case, even one involving the death penalty, a defendant raising such an idea would have been told to stop wasting his lawyer’s limited time.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt seven)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

During his rambling sessions with his attorneys, McVeigh heard an idea that gave him hope: the necessity defense. The defense applies when a defendant violates a criminal statute in an emergency situation to prevent greater harm. This was it, McVeigh decided. Clinton’s federal government had created an emergency with Waco and the assault weapons band, so McVeigh had to take action. He instructed his lawyers to research the necessity defense and prepare to present it to the jury at trial.

James sent more than a dozen lawyers and investigators on visits to the prison, but McVeigh bonded most closely with one of them—Randy Coyne. They were an unlikely pair. Coyne was a hippie of sorts, whose great passion in life was jazz drumming. (He majored in music in college and spent a couple of years as a band instructor in Massachusetts before going to law school.) After a clerkship in Washington, he found a job teaching at the law school of the University of Oklahoma, where he developed a specialty in the death penalty, which he passionately opposed. In light of his background and politics, as well as his shaggy looks, Coyne never fit in very well in his adopted state. His alienation from his surroundings was reflected in a macabre sense of humor. For years Coyne represented Roger Dale Stafford, a notorious Oklahoma outlaw, who had been convicted of killing six people at a Sirloin Stockade restaurant in Oklahoma City. Two days after Stafford was finally executed, Coyne sent the prosecutor a five-dollar gift certificate to Sirloin Stockade.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt six)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Jones was born in 1940 and raised in the Houston suburbs of the post-World War II boom in Texas. When Jones came of age, Texas was still a one-party Democratic state, but his town was a harbinger of the region’s future—a Republican stronghold. A high school debater, Jones wrote fan mail to Richard Nixon, who had just lost the race for governor of California and moved to New York to practice law. The former vice president flabbergasted young Jones by writing back with an offer: come to New York to work as a researcher as Nixon plotted his political comeback. Jones spent about a year with Nixon before toiling for the next three as an aide to various Republican congressmen on Capitol Hill.

Jones returned to Oklahoma with a singular goal—to win a seat in Congress. He chose to settle in Enid, the eighth largest city in the state, where he had no previous ties, because he thought the area offered him the best chance to run for office. And Jones did run for office—over and over. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Republicans were coming to dominate Oklahoma politics, but Jones never caught the wave. He ran four times, starting in 1974 as the Republican nominee for state attorney general; he lost with 32 percent of the vote. His political career ended sixteen years later, when he was routed, with just 17 percent of the vote, in a U.S. Senate race against David Boren, the incumbent Democrat. The common touch eluded Jones. A regal Anglophile, with a gray comb-over atop a six-foot-plus frame, Jones bought his suits on London’s Savile Row and favored such pretentious expressions as “sanctum sanctorum” for his office. He lived with his wife and four children in a house in Enid modeled on George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The house had a name—Elmstead—rather than an address.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt five)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Two days earlier, on Easter Sunday, Rick Wahl, a sergeant assigned to Fort Riley, had taken his eleven-year-old son fishing at Geary Lake State Park. They cast their lines from the bank, but figured they’d do better if they rented a boat and a depth finder. Thus equipped, they returned to the lake around 9 a.m. on Tuesday, April 18. When they arrived, they noted a curious sight toward the end of the dirt road that circles the lake.

A large Ryder truck was parked next to the water. Right behind it was a GMC pickup. What was a Ryder truck doing there? With a pickup no less? Why were they so close together? It was a windy day, and the fishing was disappointing, so Wahl and his son didn’t stay long. But the sight of the vehicles was unusual enough that it stuck with Wahl.

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt four)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

At around 4 p.m., McVeigh swung by the Dreamland Motel to register. The Dreamland was a regional landmark of sorts, with its distinctive sign—a five-cornered red star—visible to motorists passing through Junction City on 1-70. Lea McGown, the motel owner, was a local institution herself. A German immigrant with a strong accent and big personality, she kept a tight rein on her place, leaving the premises for only two days a year, Christmas and Easter. The nearby presence of Fort Riley guaranteed a steady stream of customers, but she had no patience for loudmouths or deadbeats.

The moment that McVeigh registered at the Dreamland was momentous, though it did not seem that way at the time. He had spent at least the previous seven months, since Clinton signed the assault weapons ban, singularly focused on the plan for the bombing. He’d assembled the ingredients and was ready to begin final preparations. But Nichols had told him earlier that day that he would be on his own for the critical moment in Oklahoma City. Now, with a certain weariness, McVeigh accepted the idea that he was going to get caught or die in the process. He wasn’t going to hide anymore. He had planned to use the name Kling throughout the final days and wear a disguise when he rented the truck and checked into the motel. But that plan had already fallen apart when Tom Manning recognized him as he bought the Mercury. At the Dreamland, McVeigh didn’t bother with a disguise, and when Lea McGown asked him his name for the motel registry, he said Tim McVeigh. For his home address, McVeigh listed 3616 North Van Dyke Road, Decker, Michigan—the Nichols family farm. As he told Jones, “I’m sure subconsciously it was like giving up because I know for a fact giving them a composite”—that is, the chance to prepare a sketch of him—“was giving up.”

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt three)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

McVeigh started listening to Rush Limbaugh, who was in his heyday. He was carried on more than five hundred radio stations; he published his first book, The Way Things Ought to Be, which became one of the best-selling nonfiction books of all time. He also started a television program. Limbaugh’s rhetoric—comparing feminists to Nazis, accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of committing untold numbers of crimes—matched and encouraged McVeigh’s views. McVeigh wrote to his boyhood friend Hodge, “As they say, ‘Rush is right,’ (double-meaning), and many people (opponents) consider his views extreme.” McVeigh also helpfully informed Hodge of the local time and station for Limbaugh’s television show.

Limbaugh’s success persuaded McVeigh that there were lots of people who shared his own worldview. Later, McVeigh would talk about his belief that an “Army” of fellow believers was somewhere out there, but he admitted that he never figured out how to reach them. What McVeigh lacked was something that hadn’t yet been invented. McVeigh needed the internet and social media—places where those of similarly extreme views could convene and plot together, as they did before January 6. Instead, McVeigh tried to use the analog tools of this time. He wrote letters—a handful to his local newspapers and his congressman and many to his friends, like Hodge, where he pressed his views. “What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials?” "AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE. We have no proverbial tea to dump; should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports?” he wrote in a letter published in the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal on February 11, 1002. “Is a civil war imminent?” he continued. “Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn’t come to that! But it might.”

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt two)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

Tim needed work and thought he could parlay his military experience into a job with the U.S. Marshals Service. In a story that he would tell over and over, McVeigh said he did very well on the written test, but was turned down because he was a “white male.” Just as McVeigh felt the Army cheated him out of sniper school because of affirmative action, he thought the Marshals didn’t consider hiring him because they only wanted women and African Americans. (This story is impossible to verify and likely untrue.)

McVeigh found a job in the Buffalo area that was a lot like his last one. With a pistol permit and a security clearance from the Army, he became a supervisor at Burns Security. Making a decent salary with few expenses, he found a new and risky way to spend money. He started betting heavily with a bookie on his beloved Buffalo Bills. He promptly lost $1,000 when the Bills lost their second straight Super Bowl, this time to the Washington Redskins, on January 26, 1992. (At about the same time, the Army demanded that he return, with interest, the $3,000 reenlistment bonus that he received in 1991, because he did not complete his commitment. This damaged his finances and contributed to his bitterness against the federal government and now, the Army.)

the last book I ever read (Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, excerpt one)

from Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin:

It is difficult to overstate the influence of The Turner Diaries on McVeigh. In a letter to his childhood friend Steve Hodge, which was written four years before the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh enclosed a copy of the book and wrote, “Read the book when you have time to sit down and think. When I read it, I would have to stop at the end of every paragraph and examine the deeper meaning of what I had just read …. I am not giving you this book to convert you. I do, however, want you to understand the ‘other side’ and view the pure literal genious [sic[ of this piece.” (Not withstanding some imperfect spelling, McVeigh turned out to be a skilled and forceful writer.)

McVeigh’s gun obsession, as well as his fixation with The Turner Diaries, fed an interest in self-dramatization, which was striking in someone who had led such a circumscribed life. Hodge told McVeigh’s lawyers that Tim “wanted to go out with his finger on the trigger and empty casings all around him. Tim seemed to feel destined for a violent death.” Inspired by Earl Turner, Tim began building primitive explosives, which he stored in the basement of the house in Pendleton. His father indulged Tim’s new hobby, which also became a nervous family joke. “If we have a fire, are we going to blow up?” Bill would ask his son. Tim said yes, adding, “So if the fire department ever comes, we are just going to stand back and watch it go, right?”

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt fifteen)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

I was flying back from England with Graeme. After making sure he was okay, I opened up my laptop to do some work on The Casements. But my attention wandered to the seat-back screen, and I found myself watching an engrossing film called Captain Underpants. Once back at the house and in my nightie, I realized that I’d left my laptop on the plane, and… it was open.

This was dire. Stomach churning, I refrained from throwing up and shot into action. I sent a direct message to Air Canada via Twitter, and two angelic beings on @AirCanada worked their magic. The plane was still at the airport, they reported. New message: The laptop had been located. If I would drive out to the airport right now, someone would wait for me and meet me at the curb outside Terminal One, laptop in hand. My walking partner Coleen drove me out: sure enough, there was the promised laptop. And that’s how I regained the highly embargoed Testaments, thus escaping a hanging at the hands of my editors.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt fourteen)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

For some time, the condition moved slowly or stayed the same. I could notice no change. Graeme cheerfully told everyone, “I have dementia!” as if announcing he had a new puppy. He was curious about the process, as he had been curious about every process. No one could believe that he was afflicted: he seemed to be carrying on as normal.

When he was eighty, he made the decision to stop driving. He’d continued to be an excellent driver. “But,” he said, “if I’m involved in an accident, even if it’s the other guy’s fault, the fact that I’ve been diagnosed will tell against me.” We had to think up other stratagems for getting around. For Pelee, through our friend Rick Masse, we got hold of two four-wheeled electric scooters with roofs and detachable waterproof sides. The batteries were good for getting to the liquor store and back. We rollicked on as before. Still, there was the sensation of treading water.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt thirteen)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Since Canadians are prone to be offended by the success of other Canadians, I knew it was only a matter of time before someone got in the knife. I walked around looking over my shoulder, but the blow came from an unexpected quarter. My Canadian publisher had been agitating for an interview with the national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, and I finally agreed to do one with a female reporter unknown to me. Her name was Jan Wong. I didn’t know that she’d been a student in China during the Cultural Revolution, by her own account had been all for it, and had denounced her roommate to the Red Guards. It’s hard for anyone to get out of the habit of betraying people, overthrowing the ruling class, or stabbing anyone you perceive as an unfairly bloated target, once you’ve had a taste of the sense of power such stabbings can confer.

As soon as we sat down to lunch, Ms. Wong announced that she herself would not be eating. Having read “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” I knew that refusing to break bread with a meal companion was a bad sign. My spidey-sense tingled, but I didn’t need a spidey-sense to detect the hostility radiating from Wong’s every pore. She began asking intrusive personal questions, and I began avoiding them. I refrained from saying “None of your goddamned business,” but it took an effort. “And your daughter?” she asked. This wasn’t a subject I was willing to discuss: children and young people should be protected from the notoriety of their parents as much as possible. I got out of the restaurant as soon as I could.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt twelve)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Soon after we moved in, Shaughnessy Cohen of the raccoon sanctuary came rushing over. “Guess what the locals are saying?” she asked breathlessly.

“What?”

“They’re saying that Margaret Mead has just bought a place on the island!” Margaret Mead had been dead for ten years.

Once they’d figured out who I was and where I lived, the islanders were very discreet. Tourists would ask them, “Does Margaret Atwood live around here?” “Margaret who?” they would say. Or, “I think she’s way down there at the other end of the island.” I didn’t ask them to fib like this, they just knew. Country manners.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt eleven)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

In February 1985, our old friend and co-founder of the Writers’ Union, Marian Engel, died of the cancer she’d had since the late 1970s. We said farewell to her intelligent, savvy voice. She turned up in a dream to reassure me: “It’s fine,” she said, meaning death. “You just kind of go out, like a television.” In those days the picture shrank toward the middle of the set before turning off. Later I wrote in my journal, “Seeing my piece on Marian in Saturday Night with a wonderful photo of her—jumping—in Paris—made me realize again how much I miss her.”

It was in Tuscaloosa that we met Valerie Martin, a novelist—originally from New Orleans—who was also guest-teaching at the University of Alabama. She and I had daughters of roughly the same age, so a connection was made. Valerie was smart, funny, and forthright, and has remained a friend ever since. In April, I finished The Handmaid’s Tale. I was worried about it: surely I would be accused of being anti-Christian, an evil feminist, and a heretic re: the religion of America, land of democracy. Valerie was its first reader.

“I think I’m gonna get in trouble,” I said to her.

“I think you’re gonna make a lot of money,” she replied.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt ten)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

“Don’t ride a bicycle here,” we were told. “People will think you’re a Communist and run you off the road.”

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt nine)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

In early 1985, we drove down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I’d accepted a guest lectureship—creative writing and a course in Canadian literature I called “Southern Ontario Gothic”: Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Marian Engel, Graeme Gibson, James Reaney—all from that region of Ontario we nickname Sowesto, between London/ Stratford and Windsor and the southeastern shore of Lake Huron. PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM highway signs and Black Donnelly Massacre country, at that time. The Alabama students loved these books: twisted secrets, small-town gossip and scandals, ghosts, village idiots, feuds, and murders were old news to them.

We were eager to see the birds of that region: for instance, the large, slow-moving, tasty, and rare limpkin. Graeme found that if we followed the instructions given to us by our colleagues, it was perfectly safe to watch birds. You should park your car by the side of a promising stretch of forest. You should wait. Shortly a pickup would come along. It would have a shotgun in it. The man driving it would ask—politely enough—what you wanted. Once you had explained, he would give you permission. If you walked onto the land without such permission, you’d risk being shot as a trespasser.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt eight)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

The novel I turned to was one I’d been considering off and on since 1981. I’d tried it out in my writing room on Manning Avenue, but had shelved it because I thought it was too weird, even for me. A future United States that was a totalitarian theocracy? Surely not. However, the book had continued to percolate.

It was initially called Offred. This was the name my central character had been given when forcibly enlisted in the ranks of the Handmaids—fertile, divorced, and therefore Biblically sinful, women assigned to elite older men in order to bear children for them and their wives, just like the handmaids of Rachel and Leah in the Bible. Offred was renamed when assigned to a Commander named Fred. (“ Commander,” as in “Commander of the Faithful.”) We are never told what Offred’s real name is, though readers and television scriptwriters have since decided that her name is June. They made this decision because “June” is mentioned in the first chapter while real names are being whispered among the Handmaids, but the name “June” never occurs in the book again. I’m happy with the readers’ choice: it makes sense.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt seven)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

I didn’t undergo a McClelland & Stewart sea-to-sea Kill an Author tour, but I did do some media in Edmonton. The interviewers—all male—were either apprehensive or hostile. “I haven’t read your book and I’m not going to” was a snappy radio opener. “Tell me in twenty-five words or less what it’s about.” The stringer for the Canadian edition of Time magazine asked whether men liked me (The answer: Why don’t you ask some men?) and what did I do about the housework (The answer: Look under the sofa). This gent was wearing white cotton ankle socks with dress shoes, which immediately disqualified him in my eyes. Thus began my reputation for eviscerating interviewers. It’s only partly deserved. I never eviscerate interviewers unless they attempt to eviscerate me first.

I did my first official book signing in the men’s sock and underwear department of the Edmonton Hudson’s Bay Company. The theory was that this site was near the escalator, and shoppers going up and down would see me sitting at my little table with copies of The Edible Woman and would rush over to buy some. This didn’t happen. Instead, I stampeded herds of men who’d wandered in to pick up some Jockey shorts and were spooked by me and my alarming title. I could hear the sounds of their winter overshoes galloping away into the distance. I sold two copies.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt six)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

During the interval—the two-hour seminar was divided in half—the female graduate students were expected to prepare and serve tea and cookies for everyone. There have been several scandalized comments on this practice since, but at the time nobody, including me, gave it a second thought. My Grade Five teacher, Miss MacLeod, had done the same. Betty and Veronica in Archie comics also dished up the cookies, minus the tea: it was no doubt cocoa in their case. Serving up the tea and biscuits was what women did, especially in a crisis such as the Blitz; and graduate school was always a crisis, in a slow-moving kind of way. When The Handmaid’s Tale was published, Jim is said to have quipped, “Hasn’t anyone said that The Handmaid’s Tale is about the Harvard English graduate program?”

Another memorable seminar was called “Literature of the American Revolution,” taught by Alan Heimert, a disciple of Perry Miller. Professor Heimert began by saying that there wasn’t any literature of the American Revolution, since everyone had been too busy revolting, so we would study the literature leading up to the revolution and the literature that immediately followed it. Thomas Paine, Franklin, and political pamphlets before the revolution, and then, after the revolution, various bemused essays in the equivalent of small literary magazines. The writers of these essays were wondering—now that the utopian New World vision was in full swing—when the Great American Painters and the Great American Novel were going to show up. These worries were so much like the despondent musings about Canadian identity that were going on in my country in the early 1960s that I was fascinated by them. Of course, when the Great American Novels did show up—Moby-Dick, The Scarlet Letter—the critics of the day didn’t applaud or understand them. This too was not lost on me.

the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt five)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Every weekday I went to my job. I put on my office clothes, which included a skirt, a blouse, a garter belt, two stockings (pantyhose not having hit the scene yet), and medium-high heels. I then clopped over to Bay Street and took the bus. Downtown Toronto was still filled with sooty Victorian-looking brickwork, and Canadian Facts was in one of these solemn and ponderous office buildings. It did not have air conditioning—large fans were suspended from its high ceilings—but it did have an elevator, and it was in this elevator, coming back from lunch break, that I learned John Kennedy had been shot. Everyone then alive can remember where they were when they heard the news. This event was the end of something—some dream of America we’d all thought was real.

The work at my job was varied. Sometimes I was revising questionnaires; sometimes I was testing them, either in person or over the phone. People still answered their phones then. Or I might be doing a face count in a supermarket—how many boxes of Brand X noodles were face out at eye level? Or I might be participating in a taste test—we had a kitchen, and were called into it to eat things. We tried out the mini rice puddings in tins. Who would buy these? I wondered, forgetting about school lunches. We deployed the first Pop-Tarts to a housewife panel and had to replace a number of toasters when the Pop-Tarts exploded, spewing hot jam. I thought that would be the end of them, but I was wrong. Their maker added more adhesive, and they went on to become a raging success.