October

By Louise Glück. Quarternote Chapbook Series, Sarabande Books, 20 pages, $8.95 (paper).

With October, U.S. poet laureate Louise Glück transcends categories of genre and publishing economics: this is no mere autumnal meditation and no mere chapbook. Independent readers might wish for a less blatant blurb than Mark Strand's bald statement, "October is a masterpiece," but the folio-length poem is truly seductive. Moderately long and in six sections, October is grounded in literary tradition even as it attempts to flee from artifice. "Come to me, said the world. / This is not to say / it spoke in exact sentences / but that I perceived beauty in this manner." A few stanzas down, Glück explicates: "What others found in art, / I found in nature. What others found / in human love, I found in nature. / Very simple. But there was no voice there." Simple enough; yet there is always a voice in the wilderness when human, word-wired consciousness is present.

Glück is obviously aware of this paradox, as her voice illustrates. The poem's tone is impersonal, with the stream-of-consciousness feel found in the works of Jorie Graham and Leslie Scalapino. But it sounds less affected, a formal yet lyric melding of person and persona. Sylvia Plath's intensity also enters the first section, pared of its occasionally hysterical rhetoric. The first section is a 28-line long sentence, a series of questions interspersed with commentary: "Is it winter again, is it cold again, / didn't Frank just slip on the ice, didn't he heal" – that bit of real or fictional detail a purposeful incongruity, with the question mark postponed until "didn't the night end, wasn't the earth / safe when it was planted // didn't we plant the seeds, weren't we necessary to the earth, // the vines, were they harvested?" The question mark suggests hope of an answer, unlike the similar final question in Plath's "The Bee Meeting," punctuated with, as the English appropriately call it, a full stop: "Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold."

Still, hope can be of dubious value. That may be why Glück echoes the controversial Ezra Pound with her italicized line "You will not be spared, nor what you love be spared," which pretty clearly negates the consolation of his "What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee" (Pisan Cantos). Glück slips in other intriguing allusions but in the end prefers to be as a finger pointing to sun, earth, and moon, even if she feels she must inform us that the earth "wants, now, to be left alone; / I think we must give up / turning to her for affirmation." Such candor, however, may be the most useful affirmation. (Alexandra Yurkovsky)

MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change

By MoveOn.org. Inner Ocean Publishing, 145 pages, $10.95 (paper).

Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity

By Robert Jensen. City Lights Books, 160 pages, $11.95 (paper).

For those of us depressed and frustrated by the rampages of the U.S. government around the globe, two new books aim to offer glimpses of hope. But they go about it in completely different ways. MoveOn's first compilation, 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change, is a collection of stories by the Internet organizing group's members about individual contributions toward political change, ranging from creative ("Express Your Views Through Art") to naive ("Email the President"). The book aims to encourage people through these testimonials and "dispel any foolish cynicism about public apathy." Then there is Robert Jensen, associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, who in Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity tries to motivate people into action by making them afraid. Jensen doesn't have much use for the idea that "talking politics" should be done in a polite and inoffensive manner; he tells it like it is, presenting the reader with a harsh picture of the United States.

MoveOn, which staged such events as the "Virtual March on Washington" and the "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest, now boasts almost 2 million members and has become an influential force in U.S. politics. Motivated by a sense that democracy is endangered by the power of the media and corporate money, MoveOn tries to inject progressive ideas into the mainstream discourse. In most of the stories in 50 Ways, MoveOn members use readily available political channels and outlets to express themselves, playing along with campaign donations, petitions, and ads. But if MoveOn agrees that our political process is fundamentally broken, can it really be fixed by encouraging people to participate in it? While many of the stories end in defeat, they nevertheless provide an encouraging meta-narrative of active citizenry. After every anecdote, MoveOn provides tip boxes, which are often helpful and informative, although hints like "wear comfortable shoes" (when walking precincts) can make the book read like democracy for dummies at times.

While MoveOn cloaks its dissent in patriotism, Jensen believes patriotism is "morally, politically, and intellectually bankrupt" and, given the awesome destructive powers of the United States, all the more dangerous. Generally, Jensen sets out to examine "the intellectual and political collapse of the United States" and laments the ever-declining nature of public political discourse in the media and the nation's universities. Furthermore, in his uncompromising manner, Jensen also warns that the Democratic Party, with its "kinder-and-gentler imperialism" and "fake multilateralism," isn't the answer. The answers Jensen does offer are unfortunately rather vague and idealistic. He calls for "radical citizenship in reactionary times" and repeatedly stresses the importance of collective action. Jensen occasionally loses his thread and goes off on tangents and personal anecdotes, which is sometimes irritating and sometimes makes for quite interesting reading.

Although the two books differ greatly in tone and outlook, both somehow manage to motivate and inspire. Cynicism is often a by-product of inertia, and doing something – anything – is better than reveling in self-pity and apathy. In the afterword to 50 Ways, Eli Pariser, MoveOn's 22-year-old campaign director, writes that we are all characters in our national story, so it behooves us not to sit there waiting for it to be told to us. (David Moisl)

The Merry Month of May

By James Jones. Akashic, 290 pages, $15.95 (paper).

In 1968, James Jones, author of an acclaimed World War II trilogy that includes From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, was living in Paris as a student revolt and massive strikes paralyzed all commerce and transportation in the city. Like George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Jones's novel The Merry Month of May (just reissued after being out of print for 15 years) is an intimate, firsthand account of a particularly thrilling chapter in recent European history from a celebrated outsider. Deserving a place among the great books detailing the upheaval and revolution of the 1960s, The Merry Month of May has an unlikely narrator in Jack Hartley, "a failed writer at a variety of forms," who's 47, divorced, and the publisher of a review that's a rival to the late George Plimpton's Paris Review. This very sweet, earnest, ordinary man hangs out with a group of American expatriates that includes his closest friends, the slowly dissolving Gallagher family. Harry Gallagher is a successful screenwriter who's lost interest in his wife and instead pursues his sexual fantasy of sleeping with a pair of lesbians. Harry's son, Hill, is a film student and radical who wants nothing to do with his bourgeois parents. But both father and son fall for the same temptress, the African American free spirit Samantha Everton, who claims to be in love with Harry's uptight wife, Louisa.

The novel contains lively anecdotes involving real people, including one in which movie director Luis Buñuel is offended by Harry's home cocktail bar (crafted from a church pulpit) and attacks him with Harry's own sword. And one of the book's most charming facets is Jones's elaborate descriptions of Paris, from the paving stones that students used as weapons (they were meticulously replaced by Italian specialists) to the complicated waiter hierarchy at Jack's favorite restaurant. The Merry Month of May expertly captures Paris in 1968, the ferment, the politics, the street life, the excitement – and the eventual disappointment and downfall. (Adam Bregman)

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

By David Callahan. Harcourt, 295 pages, $26.

Although David Callahan's The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead blasts steroid-addled pro athletes, two-faced politicians, and Bible-banging CEOs, the goal of this broad critique isn't to topple these larger (and richer)-than-life icons but to demolish the crumbling ivory pedestals on which they perch. Callahan, founder of a New York public policy think tank, argues moral conservatism in the past decade has succeeded in decreasing street crime, drug use, and sexual promiscuity, while promoting an economic agenda that rewards greed, materialism, and inequality, resulting in a trickle-down corruption that has smeared the ink on the social contract of American society. When the captains of industry can write off criminal fines as business expenses and still pull the strings on their astronomical golden parachutes, the myth of a fair system is deflated and "cover your own ass first" becomes a universal, Darwinian mantra.

A chorus of cop-outs resonates throughout the individual anecdotes that illustrate the pervasive deception in academia and the health, law, and insurance industries, and all the fingers point to the System. If doctors won't push name-brand pharmaceuticals, they can't afford to pay off staggering student loans. If lawyers won't overbill clients, the firm will replace them with someone who will. If professors try to blow the whistle on pill-popping college football stars, they're gagged by the administration. Unfortunately, when money talks, it's ethics that takes the walk.