En pocas palabras: Javier J. Jaspe
Washington
D.C.
The 2024 National Book Festival was
held in the nation’s capital at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center on
Saturday, August 24, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Several programs were livestreamed,
and video of all talks can be viewed online after the Festival’s conclusion.
EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2024-national-book-festival/
Una lista completa de los autores que
participaron en el Festival Nacional del Libro de 2024 (FNL2024)
puede verse
EN: https://www.loc.gov/events/2024-national-book-festival/authors/
La serie que continuamos hoy se
refiere a escritores de origen latino que participaron en el FNL2024. Su objeto
no consiste en realizar un análisis de su obra, sino el de publicar material
encontrado en Internet relacionado con la misma y sus autores. Los textos de
Internet se transcribirán en itálicas, en español o inglés, según sea el caso,
con indicación de su fuente. Esta octava entrega se refiere a Carlos Lozada .
Veamos:
Carlos Lozada
Carlos
Lozada is an opinion columnist at The New York Times and co-host of the weekly
“Matter of Opinion” podcast. Previously, he was a book critic and senior editor
at The Washington Post and the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.
Lozada has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and the National Book Critics
Circle citation for excellence in reviewing. He is the author of “What Were We
Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” His new book, “The
Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians,” is featured at the 2024
National Book Festival.
Videos en el FNL2024:
Jeffrey Rosen and Carlos Lozada: Politicians on the
Page
Selected Works at the Library of
Congress
EN: https://www.loc.gov/search/?all=true&sb=date_desc&uf=contributor:lozada,%20carlos
Biografía del autor en el Website de: University of Notre Dame (Institute for Ethics and the Common Good)EN:https://ethics.nd.edu/people/carlos-lozada/
Professor of the Practice for Public EngagementBiography
Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist and co-host of the weekly
“Matter
of Opinion” podcast The New York Times, based in Washington, D.C.
Lozada writes about politics,
culture, history and policy, mainly through the prism of nonfiction books or
other texts, like Supreme Court opinions, congressional investigations or commission
reports. He is the author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief
Intellectual History of the Trump Era (2020) and The Washington
Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians (2024).
Before joining The New York Times in 2022, he spent 17 years at The Washington
Post, where he was the nonfiction book critic, Outlook editor, national
security editor, and economics editor. Previously, he was the managing editor
of Foreign Policy magazine. Early in his career, he was a consultant at the
Inter-American Development Bank and an analyst in the research department at
the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He studied economics and political science
at the University of Notre Dame and did graduate studies in public policy at
Princeton University and in journalism at Columbia University. He was born in
Lima, Peru, and became a U.S. citizen in 2014. He received the Pulitzer Prize
for criticism in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 2024.
/////////////////////////// Biografía en el Website de: New York TimesEN: https://www.nytimes.com/by/carlos-lozada
Biografía en el Websute de: The Washington Post
EN: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/carlos-lozada/Biografía en el Website de: The Pulitzer Prizes
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/carlos-lozada-washington-post //////////////////////
Entrevistas/Reportajes
This article is more than 9 months old
Review
The Washington Book review: Carlos Lozada on Trump and other targets
The New York Times critic won a Pulitzer for a reason – he knows better than anyone how to read the US political scene
Image….
In
downtown Washington, at the house where Abraham Lincoln died, there is a three-storey
tower of books. Thirty-four feet tall, 8ft round, it is made of
6,800 volumes about the 16th president. The cover of Carlos Lozada’s new book,
a collection of the Pulitzer-winning critic’s work from the past 10 years or
so, imagines something rather grander: a whole Washington Monument, all 555ft
of it, made of books about DC.
It’s an apt image.
The Washington Book, Lozada’s second (after What Were We Thinking?,
his “Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era” from 2020) makes for a
monumental read about a publishing glut. Books about American politics –
pre-Trump, of Trump, not yet post-Trump – simply keep on coming.
Once of the
Washington Post, now of the New York Times, Lozada is close to having read the
lot – “So you don’t have to”, as he writes, in fact in a review of Donald
Trump’s own book-length brags about his business affairs. Memoirs of the Bush
administration, of Obama, reportage on Congress and the chaos of Trump, Trump
tell-alls, examinations of Joe Biden’s first term or expressions of the
existential dread a looming Trump v Biden rematch inspires. All are here. Throw
in a meaty closing section on political philosophy that lands a little like
Tolstoy’s second epilogue to War and Peace – I swear I read this one right
through – and you have an authoritative overview of US political publishing in
the last decade.
AD....
Many Lozada reviews
can be read as primers: the sort of thing, concerning multiple books on similar
subjects, he calls a “sampling of the sub-genre”. That line comes from The United Hates of America,
an essay on “America’s descent into negative partisanship”, Lozada deftly
distilling then advising which books to bother to read.
Telling judgments
are passed. In The Premature Redemption of
Mike Pence, Lozada anatomises the perma-pious, ever-obsequious
former vice-president’s memoir, So Help Me God, but also the near-canonisation
Pence received for (ultimately) refusing
to go along with Trump and overturn an election. For simply doing his job, in
short.
“It doesn’t take
courage to break the law,” Pence records himself telling aides and family
members as the Capitol comes under attack on January 6, the mob chanting for
him to be hanged. “It takes courage to uphold the law.”
This “inspiring
scene”, Lozada points out, is “marred only by Pence then asking his daughter to
write down what he said”.
Lozada also makes a sharp point about a simple ellipsis in Pence’s recounting of what Trump said when he finally told the mob to go home, a quiet omission that fundamentally changes Trump’s words from dangerously recalcitrant to apparently semi-sincere. Nor is Lozada done with Pence: “You shouldn’t get glory for pulling democracy back from the brink if you helped carry it there in the first place.” That wasn’t the only time in reading The Washington Book I found myself, like Woody Allen’s intellectual for hire, writing “Yes, very true” in the margin.
Lozada does not
spare Democrats: there is a strong critique of The Truths We Hold,
Kamala Harris’s 2020 campaign book, and Lozada is sharp on how Barack Obama
personalised the presidency before the notion went nuclear with Trump. Happy to
praise, Lozada charitably concedes that Josh Hawley, the far-right Republican
from Missouri, is not wrong to detect a crisis among American men – it’s just
that he could offer more sensible ideas on the page.
Trump and his
supporters present inviting targets. In Three Ways to Write About
Donald Trump, a review of books by Maggie Haberman, Robert Draper
and Peter Baker and Susan Glasser – all bar Glasser employed by the Times too –
Lozada makes a telling point: Trump’s chief political enemy is not Biden or any
other Democrat. It is paper, from
the constitution to notes of meetings, which he sees as a well of desperate
peril. The grabby anecdote is Haberman’s, about Trump trying to lose notes down the toilet. The
telling insight belongs to Lozada.
Pithy pay-offs
abound. In Mueller, Ukraine and January 6,
on official investigations and the reports they produce and publishers flog, Lozada
writes: “Trump told America that he alone could fix it. The January 6 report
tells us that he alone could break it.”
AD…..
One quibble. True to
newspaper style guides, in the reviews that make up The Washington Book, bad
language is obscured. Obscenities – and in a book in part about the cascading
obscenities of the Trump years, there are bound to be more than a few – are not
spelled out in full, even in quoted speech. Being British, and formed on Fleet
Street sports desks at that, I find this odd in the furthest extreme.
A few such instances (.......Omission by the Blog)
Wherever politics is practiced, it’s a dirty business. Among political cities, Washington is dirtier than most. Under Trump, or besieged by him, the blows go low, the fight is as fierce as the F-bombs. Members of Congress swear like troopers. Joe Biden does too. And yet the New York Times and the Washington Post, the paper of record and the paper of Watergate, shy from printing dirty words.
To write about such bare-knuckle battles as if chaperoned by a battalion of maiden aunts? Even while marveling, as Lozada rightly does, at linguistic timidities such as reporters’ reluctance to simply call a lie a lie? It’s little short of bizarre. Not least, in the case of Carlos Lozada, when the writer is so f–––ing good.
·
……………………..
Betsy Reed
Editor,
Guardian US
///////////////////////////
Carlos Lozada Thinks You Should Care About
Political Memoirs
That
self-serving tome you passed on at Politics and Prose? Maybe it actually
matters.
Written
by Andrew Beaujon
Published
on April 15, 2024
Photograph….
Why would anyone want to
read reviews of books that most of us have already forgotten? Do we really need
to be reminded of, say, A Warning, that
momentarily big-deal book by “Anonymous,” or Josh Hawley’s Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs? In The Washington Book, New York Times opinion
columnist Carlos Lozada makes the case that there’s a lot to be learned from
books written by political figures.
Though The Washington Book is based on reviews and
columns Lozada published in the Washington Post and the Times, it’s more than a rehash. It organizes
Lozada’s work non-chronologically, placing it under categories like “Leading,”
“Fighting,” and “Posing,” to create an intriguing portrait of Washington by
examining something often overlooked: the words politicians use in print,
where, he writes, they “almost always end up revealing themselves.”
Lozada, who emigrated
here from Peru as a kid, lives in Bethesda. For this interview, however, we met
up at a coffee shop across the street from the White House, where the authors
of so many Washington books hope to live or work one day.
To start, what is
“Washington” in the way you think about it?
I’ve never been a
traditional Washington reporter—like, chasing a House member down the hallway.
Even though I edited teams of reporters, I always felt like a total poseur
because I’ve never done it myself. So the way I started interpreting Washington
was through reading. It became the way that I felt most comfortable trying to
understand this place where we live. I’m still doing it, in part because I
don’t think anyone else has picked up that beat in a similar way. So I feel
like I’m a political reporter masquerading as a critic or a columnist.
You don’t cover
Washington the physical place–you cover the Washington of the mind?
That’s an elevated way
of putting it. At its best, I hope [so]. Some of it is the big intellectual
debates that happen in Washington. A lot of it is also just trying to
understand some of the political figures who we think we know from television
or speeches but who revealed themselves in a whole other way through books. I
don’t think that reading Mike Pence’s memoir, So Help Me God, is
covering the Washington of the mind—it’s trying to get inside his mind. There were a couple of moments in that
book that, for me, completely define him.
AD…..
You wrote about the
ellipsis he inserted when quoting Trump on January 6. He removed the part of
the quote where Trump said, “We had an election that was stolen from us.” Is
that one of the moments?
The ellipsis is one. The
other is that at every moment when Trump asks him to do something, he says,
“I’m here to serve.” And so the question is: Who are you serving? It’s
not a great book. It’s not beautifully written. It doesn’t feel entirely honest
at times. But it’s so revealing. No one else seems to read political books in
as dedicated a manner, in part because they just don’t want to. There’s other
books to read! But I’m going to keep at it, because I keep learning from it.
I appreciate you doing
that, because I sure don’t want to read any books by people running for office.
I get that all the time. People say, “You read those books so we don’t have
to.”
How do you feel about
that?
I think people will
read, say, fiction criticism in part to decide whether they want to read that
author. But in nonfiction, people often read it as a substitute. If people use
the stuff that I write as a kind of informative excuse to not read the book, I
have no problem with that. But I think it’s a little unfortunate if they think
there’s nothing in these books. You know, “Why wouldn’t you read the great
works of literature”—which I try to on the side—“as opposed to wallowing in Ron
DeSantis’s book or Kamala Harris’s memoir?” I think folks are missing out,
because there’s plenty there.
What’s the Lozada method
for reading?
I try to go through each
book three times. Once, just a straight read, taking lots of notes in the
margins. Then I put it aside, if I have time, for a day or so and then come
back at it with a highlighter and speed-read it a second time, focusing on the
areas that clearly struck me the most. And the third read is with a file open
on my computer. I just start dumping things into the file: notes and ideas and
quotes and questions. And then I put the book aside entirely, and that becomes
the raw material for a review. It works out usually to about 1,000 words per
100 pages of a book. Sometimes if a book is more dense, then it’s a lot more.
Sometimes it’s a lot less, and that tells me, too, what I kind of thought of a
book—how many notes I felt compelled to take down.
AD….
Is that what happened
with the Ben Sasse book that caused you to write, “The problems may be deep,
but Sasse clings to the surface of things”?
I think I mentioned in
that piece that there were only three times that I’d read a book that I
intended to write about and when I got to the end, I literally had nothing to
say. One was Ben Sasse’s second book. There was just nothing there.
I don’t have a problem
with negative reviews, even very negative reviews. But they have to be
interesting. The worst thing you can do is tell people, “Here’s a book you’ve
never heard of, and it sucks.” There’s no point to that. But in this case, I
got to the end and I told my editor, “I have nothing to say about this book.”
It wasn’t bad. It just didn’t say much.
You included that essay
in a section you called “Posing.” What were you trying to do with how the book
is organized into those kinds of sections?
The origin of this book
is: On February 9 of last year, I gave the Red Smith Lecture in journalism at
Notre Dame. Every year, they ask a journalist to give a journalism speech. And
when they asked me to do it, I started reading all my old stuff, which I’d
never done. I started identifying some kind of recurring themes. I always look
for a phrase a politician uses again and again, like Kamala Harris uses “false
choice.”
When I wrote that
lecture for Notre Dame and delivered it, I knew [it could be] the introduction
to a collection of these pieces. I pitched it to Simon & Schuster and they
liked the idea. But my editor’s question was “How do you bring order to this?”
I’m not a fan of gerunds, but I thought it could be interesting if I could
build these clusters of pieces around things people do in Washington. I never
wanted to say “leadership,” because it sounds like a Tony Robbins book. So I’m
just like, okay, these are about “Leading.” I think that’s probably the largest
section. I knew one was going to be “Posing,” because there’s so much posturing
in Washington. Once I had that in my head, everything fell together.
Books can show quite a
lot about a time and place. One of the best courses I took in college was a
history class where instead of a textbook about the aftermath of the French
Revolution, we read the Émile Zola novel Germinal.
Any piece that I’m
writing, I try to write as if my audience is reading five years from now,
removed from whatever the passions of the moment are. It’s useful just to
imagine my kids, when they’re older, reading this, trying to understand what
was happening. In a sense, it’s very relaxing to do it that way. Because I can
kind of unplug from whatever people are screaming about right now.
Was that what you were
thinking about when you did your 20th-anniversary look back on how 9/11 changed
Washington?
I knew I wanted to do
something for 9/11, because I had just moved to Washington when it happened.
I’d read a lot of the 9/11 and Iraq and Afghanistan books, but there were a ton
that I’d missed. The hardest part was finding which ones. I put together a
spreadsheet and immediately I had a few hundred books, and I was like, “Okay, I
can’t do that unless I want this to be an endless project.” That’s probably the
hardest piece I ever did at the Post, in
terms of not just how much time it took me but trying to figure out what I
wanted to say.
I appreciated two things
about that essay. The first was that I just kept thinking, Wow, he read that
many books about this?
It took months.
The second thing was all
the quotes you wove together for your theory of the case: that 9/11 was a test
and that the US failed it. You’re almost sampling, turning all of these books
into something more.
That’s very much what I
was trying to do. I derive the most enjoyment from trying to draw from a lot of
different texts, to tell a story that exists independent of any one of them.
You know, I’m an immigrant to the United States. I’m always on a quest to just
understand it better.
This article appears in the April 2024 issue
of Washingtonian
Senior editor
Andrew
Beaujon joined Washingtonian in
late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com,
and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
/////////////////////////////////////
The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and
Politicians review – unpicking the lexicon of America’s leaders
This article is more
than 8 months old
New York Times columnist
Carlos Lozada examines the speeches, writing and linguistic tics of presidents
and members of Congress to expose ‘inveterate deceivers’
Photograph….
Politicians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes hem artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise: in political jargon, a “narrative” is a storyline that warps truth for partisan purposes. Carlos Lozada, formerly a reviewer for the Washington Post and now a columnist at the New York Times, specialises in picking apart these professional falsehoods. Analysing windy orations, ghostwritten memoirs and faceless committee reports, the essays in his book expose American presidents, members of Congress and supreme court justices as unreliable narrators, inveterate deceivers who betray themselves in careless verbal slips.
Lozada has a
literary critic’s sharp eye, and an alertly cocked ear to go with it. Thus he
fixes on a stray remark made by Trump as he rallied the mob that invaded the
Capitol in January 2021. Ordering the removal of metal detectors, he said that
the guns his supporters toted didn’t bother him, because “they’re not here to
hurt me”. Lozada wonders about the emphasis in that phrase: did it neutrally
fall on “hurt” or come down hard on “me”? If the latter, it licensed the
rampant crowd to hurt Trump’s enemies – for instance by stringing up his
disaffected vice-president Mike Pence on a gallows outside the Capitol.
Text on the left margin….Brackets
are by this Blog:
[Lozada notes that the warmongers enjoy “a
narrative advantage”: peace is boring]
Tiny
linguistic tics mark the clash between two versions of America’s fabled past
and its prophetic future. Lozada subtly tracks the recurrence of the word
“still” in Biden’s speeches – for instance his assertion that the country
“still believes in honesty and decency” and is “still a democracy” – and
contrasts it with Trump’s reliance on “again”, the capstone of his vow to Make
America Great Again. Biden’s “still” defensively fastens on “something good
that may be slipping away”, whereas Trump’s “again” blathers about restoring a
lost greatness that is never defined. Biden’s evokes “an ideal worth
preserving”; Trump’s equivalent summons up an illusion.
AD…..
At
their boldest, Lozada’s politicians trade in inflated tales about origins and
predestined outcomes, grandiose narratives that “transcend belief and become a
fully formed worldview”. Hence the title of Hillary Clinton’s manifesto It Takes a Village, which borrows an African proverb about
child-rearing and uses it to prompt nostalgia for a bygone America. Lozada
watches Obama devising and revising a personal myth. Addressed as Barry by his
youthful friends, he later insisted on being called Barack and relaunched
himself as the embodiment of America’s ethnic inclusivity; his “personalised
presidency” treated the office as an extension of “the Obama brand”. In this
respect Trump was Obama’s logical successor, extending a personal brand in a
bonanza of self-enrichment. The “big lie” about the supposedly stolen 2020 election is another mythological whopper. Trump
admitted its falsity on one occasion when he remarked “We lost”, after which he
immediately backtracked, adding: “We didn’t lose. We lost in the Democrats’
imagination.”
Text on the left margin….Brackets
are by this Blog:
[Though such verbal vices are international, a
difference of scale separates Washington from Westminster]
All
this amuses Lozada but also makes him anxious. As an adoptive American – born
in Peru, he became a citizen a decade ago – he has a convert’s faith in the
country’s ideals, yet he worries about contradictions that the national creed
strains to reconcile. A border wall now debars the impoverished masses welcomed
by the Statue of Liberty; the sense of community is fractured by “sophisticated
engines of division and misinformation”. Surveying dire fictional scenarios
about American decline, Lozada notes that the warmongers enjoy “a narrative
advantage”: peace is boring, but predictions of a clash with China or an attack
by homegrown terrorists excite the electorate by promising shock, awe and an
apocalyptic barrage of special effects. Rather than recoiling from Trump, do
Americans share his eagerness for desecration and destruction?
Changing only the
names of the performers, The Washington Book has a shadowy
local replica. Here in Britain, too, ideological posturing has replaced
reasoned argument, and buzzwords are squeezed to death by repetition. Whenever
Sunak drones on about “delivering for the British people”, I think of him as a
Deliveroo gig worker with a cooling takeaway in his backpack, or a weary
postman pushing a trolley full of mortgage bills.
Though such verbal
vices are international, a difference of scale separates Washington from
Westminster. In America, heroic ambition is brought low by errors of judgment
or moral flaws that for Lozada recall “the great themes of literature and the
great struggles of life”: Kennedy’s risky confrontations with Cuba, Lyndon
Johnson mired in Vietnam, Nixon overcome by paranoia. To set against these tragic
falls, we have only the comic spectacle of Boris Johnson gurning on a zip wire or Liz Truss
vaingloriously granting an interview atop the Empire State Building; neither of
them had the good grace to jump off. American politics is dangerously thrilling
because it is so consequential for the rest of the world. In Britain we are
doomed to sit through a more trivial show, an unfunny farce played out in a
theatre that is crumbling around us.
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