The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, by Jamie Loftus, and new nonfiction

With Memorial Day weekend nigh and the summer picnic and barbeque season stretching out ahead of us, how could I resist reviewing Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs, by comedian and writer Jamie Loftus, published today. Since this is a book about hot dogs, a content warning is prudent, and the author herself opens her book with one:

Before we begin, a few content warnings. “But Jamie, content warnings are for babies, I don’t need a ‘content warning.’” Well, mind your business and turn the page then.

In this book, there are occasionally frank (pun not intended but cannot access better word at this time) discussions of disordered eating, drug use, violence, and descriptions of working slaughterhouses. Much of the book isn’t about these topics, but some of it is, and I’ve tried to give you a heads-up where those sections are in case you’d rather read ahead. Take care of yourself; it is not worth it to sacrifice your mental health over my hot dog book even though I think it’s pretty good and thanks for picking it up.

Well, this review is going to skip over those unpleasant sections (well, the slaughterhouses and ingredient parts at least, but maybe I’ll keep the sex and drug use bits), because it’s Memorial Day weekend, dammit, and we’re gonna celebrate hot dogs whether you like it or not!

The book for the most part is set up as a cross-country road trip in the late-Covid summer of 2021, with the non-driving author being driven thousands of miles hither and yon by her boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend), accompanied by a cat and an actual canine dog. My state of Arizona is one of the early stops, and here we explore the history and delights of the Sonoran hot dog, grilled and served in a bun sliced at the top but NOT end-to-end, with bacon, tomato, onion, salsa, mayo, mustard, and beans.

They also took a side trip to see The Thing! My heart went pitter-pat, because every time we’ve passed the The Thing? Mystery of the Desert! A Sight to Behold! billboards while driving in southern Arizona, I’ve begged ummm, suggested to my wife that we pull off at exit 322 and see it for ourselves. Alas, she has always nixed the idea. And alas, the author and her boyfriend actually get to the building housing The Thing, but then balk at paying the five-dollar admission. Dammit, they’d just paid $3.50 for a hot dog, but then passed up The Thing over a lousy fiver. I guess I’ll never know the Mystery of the Desert that lies within.

It seems rather fitting that after stopping at a gas station in Texas, Loftus sidetracks into a long, second-by-second description of a five-minute video uploaded to YouTube in 2012 entitled “How It’s Made — Hot Dogs.” Okay, I know I said I would skip the gross, disgusting parts of the hot dog story in writing this review. And so I shall. But let me just say that her five pages describing the video were absolutely hilarious. I would advise you NOT to eat a hot dog while reading these pages, not because of the disgusting details about what you are ingesting, but rather because you will be laughing so hard you’ll probably choke. At the very least, have someone familiar with the Heimlich Maneuver close by.

OK, I lied. I can’t resist. Here is a short sample:

A gigantic pile of randomized, pale raw meat said to include fatty tissue, sinewed muscle, head meat, and some liver is pushed into a tenderizer with a metal rake and pulses pornographically, bouncing as it smooths out in the same pulsed motions of a married couple doing doggy style on a Tuesday night. These are the cuts left on the slaughterhouse floor, only to find a third life in the soon-to-be-thick goop I will spend an entire summer punishing my body with.

Are you still with me? That wasn’t so bad, was it? Believe me, it gets worse. And funnier.

In the New York section of the book, we get a very extended look at the Fourth of July Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island. We learn the history, we meet the competitors, and we learn about other competitive eating contests. We learn the strategies and techniques used to getting over seventy hot dogs down your throat in ten minutes. World Champion Joey Chestnut set the current world record of 76 hot dogs that very summer of 2021 when Loftus was there to witness it. The day before the contest, she writes of Joey Chestnut, “I’ll have a crush on him in twenty-four hours, but you couldn’t pay me to believe that now.”

To be honest, I found the descriptions of the contest, and of competitive eating in general, to be much more horrifying and stomach-turning than any description of vats of pink hot dog precursor goop or even of slaughterhouses. I didn’t laugh nearly as hard or as often, which only shows that each of us carries within our own private catalogue of horrors.

She enters New York City and immediately has a Sabrett hot dog cart delicacy. But then it’s off to Coney Island, and the contest went on for so many pages that I was beginning to think she would leave NYC without partaking of my favorite: Gray’s Papaya. But Loftus does not disappoint. She does indeed give an extended account of the hot dog and papaya drink rivalries in New York. Ah, how I used to love my ‘two dogs and a papaya’ for $3.50 back in the day.

And so it goes around the country, stopping in the most famous hot dog joints in the nation, along with carts, holes-in-the-walls, and other venues. We even get an extended look at the increasingly scarce but beloved Home Depot hot dog, and the famous Costco hot dog, first offered as a $1.50 all-beef hot dog and a drink in 1984, and still only a dollar-fifty today, for an even bigger hot dog and a bigger drink. All you need is that sixty dollar per year membership. As one story goes:

Costco President and CEO W. Craig Jelinek, a man worth more than $100 million, confronts the business’s co-founder Jim Sinegal about the losses incurred by the hot dog deal, according to an interview from 2018.

“I came to [Jim] once and I said, ‘Jim, we can’t sell this hot dog for a buck fifty. We are losing our rear ends,’: he said. Sinegal, a billionaire, replied: “If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”

The stop at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, DC is especially enjoyable. Barack Obama dropped in just ten days before his inauguration to this eatery steeped in Black history. It was a favored stop for the U Street ‘Black Broadway’ musicians like Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. ate there, and did some planning for the March on Washington. During the riots after King’s assassination in 1968, the restaurant stayed open at the express request of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael, in order to make sure activists in the streets could eat.

Loftus mixes plenty of serious politics in with the hot dogs. She offers extended riffs on low wage labor in restaurants and slaughterhouses, on the slaughterhouses themselves, on the exploitation of both animals and human labor in the meat industry. We are reminded that Trump ordered the meat industry to stay open as Covid ravaged the nation, leading to a great loss of life among its laborers. We learn about the rape and sexual abuse by her pastor of Anne Beiler, the woman who started Auntie Anne’s Pretzels.

At one point, Loftus cites a purported study that claimed that each hot dog you eat will take 36 minutes off your life, but I think if you enjoy a hot dog now and then, that’s an acceptable tradeoff. There are some 42 million minutes in an 80-year lifespan, which means in order to cut your life in half, you would have to consume around 580,000 hot dogs by your 40th birthday. Even Joey Chestnut isn’t going to do that.

Overall, it was a fun, enjoyable and informative journey, and I recommend it. And I’ll never forget the line “I would have unprotected sex with anything from a Wawa.” If you know, you know.

BOOK NEWS

A few interesting articles on the ongoing war on books and libraries. All links should be free to read. From the Washington Post, School librarians face a new penalty in the banned-book wars: Prison. And from El Paso Matters, Banned books exhibit at city libraries provide access to important literature. And in Michigan, a school district banned the acclaimed Marine Corp memoir Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles, by Anthony Swofford, because they didn’t want kids to learn that war is violent and sometimes soldiers are interested in sex. Read about it here: Bestselling military memoir banned from Hudsonville Public Schools. And finally, in Florida, a school has banned the book version of the poem Amanda Gorman wrote and performed at Biden’s inauguration, The Hills We Climb. Again, it was based on the complaint of one person, per Florida’s insane law. Here is Gorman’s response:

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THIS WEEK’S NEW NOTABLE NONFICTION

• Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir, by Rachel Louise Snyder. For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women’s lives. Women We Buried, Women We Burned is her own story. Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age 16. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe. Survival became her reporter’s beat. In places like India, Tibet, and Niger, she interviewed those who had been through the unimaginable. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place. A piercing account of Snyder’s journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir that embodies the transformative power of resilience.
• Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks, by Scott J. Shapiro. It’s a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understanding how our information is stored, used, and protected, we are vulnerable to having it exploited. In Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, Scott J. Shapiro draws on his popular Yale University class about hacking to expose the secrets of the digital age. With lucidity and wit, he establishes that cybercrime has less to do with defective programming than with the faulty wiring of our psyches and society. And because hacking is a human-interest story, he tells the fascinating tales of perpetrators, including Robert Morris Jr., the graduate student who accidentally crashed the internet in the 1980s, and the Bulgarian “Dark Avenger,” who invented the first mutating computer-virus engine. We also meet a sixteen-year-old from South Boston who took control of Paris Hilton’s cell phone, the Russian intelligence officers who sought to take control of a US election, and others.
• V Is For Victory: Franklin Roosevelt’s American Revolution and the Triumph of World War II, by Craig Nelson. As Nazi Germany began to conquer Europe, America’s military was unprepared, too small, and poorly supplied. The Nazis were supported by robust German factories that created a seemingly endless flow of arms, trucks, tanks, airplanes, and submarines. The United States, emerging from the Great Depression, was skeptical of American involvement in Europe and not ready to wage war. Hardened isolationists predicted disaster if the country went to war. In this fascinating and deeply researched account, Craig Nelson traces how Franklin D. Roosevelt steadily and sometimes secretively put America on a war footing by convincing America’s top industrialists such as Henry Ford Jr. to retool their factories, by diverting the country’s supplies of raw materials to the war effort, and above all by convincing the American people to endure shortages, to work in wartime factories, and to send their sons into harm’s way.
• Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China’s Superpower Future, by Chun Han Wong. The Wall Street Journal reporter shatters the many myths and caricatures that shroud one of the world’s most secretive political organizations and its leader. Many observers misread Xi during his early years in power, projecting their own hopes that he would steer China toward more political openness, rule of law, and pro-market economics. Having masked his beliefs while climbing the party hierarchy, Xi has centralized decision-making powers, encouraged a cult of personality around himself, and moved toward indefinite rule by scrapping presidential term limits—stirring fears of a return to a Mao-style dictatorship. Today, the party of Xi favors political zeal over technical expertise, trumpets its faith in Marxism, and proclaims its reach into every corner of Chinese society with Xi portraits and hammer-and-sickle logos. Under Xi, China has challenged Western preeminence in global affairs and cast its authoritarian system as a model of governance worthy of international emulation. Wong has drawn on his years of firsthand reporting across China—including conversations with party insiders, insights from scholars and diplomats, and analyses of official speeches and documents—to create a lucid and historically rooted account of China’s leader and how he inspires fear and fervor in his party, his nation, and beyond.
• Why Politics Fails, by Ben Ansell. The dawn of the twenty-first century had the promise of a golden age. The economy was stable and growing, social peace seemed possible, and technology appeared benign. The past years have awakened us from this complacency.
  We have long known what needs to be done to save the world from climate disaster. Why do we continue on the path of self-destruction? The immense wealth of the United States should make poverty a historical curiosity. Why is income inequality growing and the scourge of poverty increasing? The vast majority of people around the world want to live in a society with democratic values. Why is democracy receding? Ansell, one of the world’s leading experts on the dilemmas facing modern democracies, vividly illustrates how our collective goals – democracy, equality, solidarity, security, and prosperity – are undermined by political traps and why today’s political landscape is so tumultuous. In every case, we want a collective goal, but are undermined by our individual actions. Our aims are altruistic, our actions governed by self-interest. Ansell then comes full circle and through brilliant storytelling and pathbreaking research vividly illustrates how we maneuver through the traps of the messy, complicated world of politics that block common sense solutions to the just, equitable, prosperous, and environmentally sane society we all want.
• Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence, by Keith Ellison. With this powerful and intimate trial diary, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison asks the key question: How do we break the wheel of police violence and finally make it stop? The murder of George Floyd sparked global outrage. At the center of the conflict and the controversy, Keith Ellison grappled with the means of bringing justice for Floyd and his family. Now, in this riveting account of the Derek Chauvin trial, Ellison takes the reader down the path his prosecutors took, offering different breakthroughs and revelations for a defining, generational moment of racial reckoning and social justice understanding. Each chapter looks at another spoke along the wheel of the system as Ellison examines the roles of prosecutors, defendants, heads of police unions, judges, activists, legislators, politicians, and media figures, each in his attempt to end this chain of violence and replace it with empathy and shared insight. Ellison’s analysis of George Floyd’s life and the rich trial context he provides demonstrates that, while it may seem like an unattainable goal, lasting change and justice can be achieved.
• Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street, by Victor Luckerson. A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification.  When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to Greenwood, Tulsa, in 1914, his family joined a growing community on the cusp of becoming a national center of black life. But, just seven years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people. The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the most brutal acts of racist violence in U.S. history, a ruthless attempt to smother a spark of black independence. But that was never the whole story of Greenwood. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt it into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived, small businesses flourished, and an underworld economy lived comfortably alongside public storefronts. Prosperity and poverty intermixed, and icons from W.E.B. Du Bois to Muhammad Ali ambled down Greenwood Avenue, alongside maids, doctors, and every occupation in between. Ed grew into a prominent businessman and bought a newspaper called the Oklahoma Eagle to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry. He and his wife, Jeanne, raised an ambitious family, and their son Jim, an attorney, embodied their hopes for the Civil Rights Movement in his work. But by the 1970s, urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood, even as Jim and his neighbors tried to hold on to it. Today, while new high-rises and encroaching gentrification risk wiping out Greenwood’s legacy for good, the family newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists.
• An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created, by Santi Elijah Holley. An enlightening history of the rise and lasting impact of Black liberation groups in America, as seen through the Shakurs, one of the movement’s most prominent and fiercely creative families, home to Tupac and Assata, and a powerful incubator for today’s activism, scholarship, and artistry. They have been celebrated, glorified, and mythologized. They have been hailed as heroes, liberators, and freedom fighters. They have been condemned, pursued, imprisoned, exiled, and killed. But the true and complete story of the Shakur family—one of the most famous names in contemporary Black American history—has never been told.

  For over fifty years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans. Many people are only familiar with Assata Shakur, the popular author and thinker, living for three decades in Cuban exile; or the late rapper Tupac. But the branches of the Shakur family tree extend widely, and the roots reach into the most furtive and hidden depths of the underground. An Amerikan Family is a history of the fight for Black liberation in the United States, as experienced and shaped by the Shakur family. It is the story of hope and betrayal, addiction and murder, persecution and revolution. An Amerikan Family is not only family genealogy; it is the story of Black America’s long struggle for racial justice and the nation’s covert and repressive tactics to defeat that struggle. It is the story of a small but determined community, taking extreme, unconventional, and often perilous measures in the quest for freedom. In short, the story of the Shakurs is the story of America.

• Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, by Melissa L. Sevigny. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first.
• On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, by Elise Loehnen. Since being codified by the Christian church in the fourth century, the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth—have exerted insidious power. Even today, in our largely secular, patriarchal society, they continue to circumscribe women’s behavior. For example, seeing sloth as sinful leads women to deny themselves rest; a fear of gluttony drives them to ignore their appetites; and an aversion to greed prevents them from negotiating for themselves and contributes to the 55 percent gender wealth gap.  In On Our Best Behavior, Loehnen reveals how we’ve been programmed to obey the rules represented by these sins and how doing so qualifies us as “good.” This probing analysis of contemporary culture and thoroughly researched history explains how women have internalized the patriarchy, and how they unwittingly reinforce it. By sharing her own story and the spiritual wisdom of other traditions, Loehnen shows how we can break free and discover the integrity and wholeness we seek.
• The Fly Girls Revolt: The Story of the Women Who Kicked Open the Door to Fly in Combat, by Eileen A. Bjorkman. In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. From the first women in the military in World War II to the final push in the 1990s, The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who served in the 1970s and 1980s, and her personal experiences in the Air Force, Eileen Bjorkman weaves together a riveting tale of the women who fought for the right to enter combat and be treated as equal partners in the U.S. military. Although the military had begun training women as aviators in 1973, by a law of Congress they could not fly in harm’s way. Time and again when a woman graduated at the top of her pilot training class, a less-qualified male pilot was sent to fly a combat aircraft in her place. Most of the women who fought for change between World War II and today would never fly in combat themselves, but they earned their places in history by strengthening the U.S. military and ensuring future women would not be denied opportunities solely because of their sex. The Fly Girls Revolt is their story.
• In Sardinia: An Unexpected Journey in Italy, by Jeff Biggers. Based in the bewitching port of Alghero, guided through the island’s rich and largely untranslated literature, the author embarked on a rare journey around the island to experience its famed cuisine, wine, traditional rituals and thriving cultural movements.  “Sardinia is something else. Enchanting spaces and distances to travel,” D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1921.  On the 100th anniversary of Lawrence’s visit, Biggers opens a new window into the history of the island, chronicling how new archaeological findings have placed the island as one of the cradles of the Bronze Age. From the Neolithic array of Stonehenge-like dolmens and menhir stone formations to the thousands of Bronze Age “nuraghe” towers and burial tombs, the vastness of the uninterrupted cycles of civilizations and their architectural marvels have turned Sardinia into the Mediterranean’s “open museum.” Beyond its fabled beaches, reconsidering how its unique history and ways have shaped Italy and Europe today, Biggers explores how travelers must first understand Sardinia and its ancient and modern history to truly understand the rest of Italy.
• The West: A New History in Fourteen Lives, by Naoíse Mac Sweeney. In this groundbreaking, story-driven retelling of Western history, Naoíse Mac Sweeney debunks the myths and origin stories that underpin the history we thought we knew. Told through fourteen figures who each played a role in the creation of the Western idea—from Herodotus, a mixed-race migrant, to Phylis Wheatley, an enslaved African American who became a literary sensation; and from Gladstone, with a private passion for epic poetry, to the medieval Arab scholar Al-Kindi—the subjects are a mind-expanding blend of unsung heroes and familiar faces viewed afresh. These characters span the millennia and the continents, representing different religions, varying levels of wealth and education, diverse traditions and nationalities. Each life tells us something unexpected about the age in which it was lived and offers us a piece of the puzzle of how the modern idea of the West developed—and why we’ve misunderstood it for too long.
• Lost Son: An American Family Trapped Inside the FBI’s Secret Wars, by Brett Forrest. 

  Sept. 11th roused Billy Reilly’s curiosity for religions, war, and the world and its people beyond his small town near Detroit. Online, Billy taught himself Arabic and Russian. His passions led him into jihadi Internet forums, attracting the interest of the FBI. An amateur drawn into professional intelligence, Billy became a Confidential Human Source, one of thousands of civilians who assist FBI agents with investigative work, often at great hazard and with little recourse. When Russia stirred rebellion in Ukraine, Billy set out to make his mark. In Russia, Billy’s communications dropped. His parents, frantic, asked the FBI for help but struggled to find answers. Grasping for clues, the Reilly family turned to Brett Forrest. Commencing a quest of his own, Forrest applied years’ worth of research, along with decades of extensive experience in Russia, illuminating the inner workings of the national-security machine that enmeshed Billy and his family, picking up the lost son’s trail. A masterwork of reporting, composed like a thriller, blending political maneuvering and international espionage, Lost Son illustrates one man’s coming of age amid new global dangers.

• Orwell: The New Life, by D. J. Taylor. A fascinating exploration of George Orwell–and his body of work–by an award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, presenting the author anew to twenty-first-century readers. We find ourselves in an era when the moment is ripe for a reevaluation of the life and the works of one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors. This is the first twenty-first-century biography on George Orwell, with special recognition to D. J. Taylor’s stature as an award-winning biographer and Orwellian. Using new sources that are now available for the first time, we are tantalizingly at the end of the lifespan of Orwell’s last few contemporaries, whose final reflections are caught in this book. The way we look at a writer and his canon has changed even over the course of the last two decades; there is a post-millennial prism through which we must now look for such a biography to be fresh and relevant. This is what Orwell: The New Life achieves.
• Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music, by David Remnick. The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing “Respect” or Bob Dylan performing “Blind Willie McTell,” have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians, songwriters, and performers of the past fifty years. He portrays a series of musical lives and their unique encounters with the passing of that essential element of music: time. From Cohen’s performing debut, when his stage fright was so debilitating he couldn’t get through “Suzanne,” to Franklin’s iconic mink-drop at the Kennedy Center, Holding the Note delivers a view of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE