Favorite books of 2002 - includes poems

Progressive, The, Jan, 2003 by Kate Clinton, Ruth Conniff, Anne-Marie Cusac, Elizabeth DiNovella, Andrea Lewis, Fred McKissack, Jr., John Nichols, Matthew Rothschild

Bradsher spares no one, not the auto companies, which consistently dodged regulations and successfully strong-armed Congress; not the United Auto Workers, which played an instrumental role in helping to lobby legislators; not the government regulators, who got outfoxed time and time again; and not the environmental groups, which oddly did not awaken to the hazards of SUVs until just a few years ago.

Given his perch at the Times, Bradsher got unparalleled access to senior auto executives and engineers, who spoke to him with amazing frankness. "The only time those SUVs are going to be off-road is when they miss the driveway at 3:00 a.m.," J. C. Collins, Ford's top marketing manager for SUVs and minivans, told Bradsher.

Gerald Meyers, vice president of vehicle development at American Motors at the time of the Kaiser Jeep, now refers to himself as Dr. Frankenstein, Bradsher reports. After Meyers and other auto execs got their way in Washington, they were exultant. "We didn't have to worry about fuel economy much at all, we didn't have to worry about bumper height standards, we didn't have to worry about side-impact standards, we didn't have to worry about emission standards," Meyers told Bradsher. "So you see, it was a dream for us."

That dream has turned into a "public policy disaster," Bradsher writes. And it's a disaster, he warns, that is only going to get worse in the years to come unless regulators, consumers, or trial lawyers stop the automakers in their tracks.

Every year, I try to recommend a book of poetry, and this year I've found a great one: Alicia Suskin Ostriker's the volcano sequence (University of Pittsburgh).

A mature, philosophical, yet playful voice comes through in these tight poems that revolve around two themes: Ostriker's endless wrestling match with God, and her poignant embrace of her mother, now ill.

Her ambivalence toward God is on almost every page: "listen you are the hope of my heart / quarrel of my art," she says in one poem, and, in another: "you are the wild driver of my vehicle / the argument in my poem." At times, she refers to God as "the absent mathematician," but when she appreciates the natural world, she chides herself for bemoaning God's absence: "You have done enough, engineer / how dare we ask you for justice."

But she is far too wise to let God off the hook so easily.

Her argument is not only the obvious one that God (for all you believers out there) allows so much suffering and injustice, but that human beings emulate the wrathfulness and cruelty that God exhibits in the Bible: "No wonder imams cut hands off sinners / no wonder the Jewish lunatic murders worshipers / in a place of reconciliation."

In her more personal poems, she contends with what it means to "honor your mother" while fleeing her, even "despising" her early on:

  unasked for disappointing hateful
   life
   it is the mother's fault

   [...]

   what a pity she does not eat us
   and be done with it

Her mother, who appears to have Alzheimer's and to be in a nursing home, represents a challenge. But Ostriker is up to it at the end: