Book reviews: 'Baldwin: A Love Story' and 'The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces'

'Baldwin: A Love Story' by Nicholas Boggs

"Love was a crucial subject for James Baldwin," said Chris Vognar in The Boston Globe, so it's appropriate that this first major Baldwin biography in 31 years "can be seen as an act of love." Author Nicholas Boggs "has no interest in depicting his subject as Saint Jimmy," but he "comes about as close as anyone has to wrapping his arms around Baldwin, embracing him, if you will, in his entirety." Boggs has organized his book by presenting the life of the revered Harlem-born writer as defined by a string of intimate, mostly nonsexual relationships with four other men, starting with a mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney. Boggs also shows that Baldwin was fiercely committed to the idea that love is the cure for bigotry and hatred, and his book is "a reminder that we could really use Baldwin right now, and his instinct for cutting through nonsense like a lithe, sharp sword."

Baldwin (1924–87) makes an attractive subject in many ways, said Louis Menand in The New Yorker. His life story is "full of historical incidents and famous names," and features as its protagonist "a complex, quotable, and slightly otherworldly human being." But Baldwin also poses challenges, because many of the claims he made about his life are hard to verify, especially given that a few key correspondences won't be unsealed until 2037. "Still, Boggs' biography makes a hugely important contribution, because it takes us to the heart of Baldwin's message—the fear of love—and shows how urgent that problem was for him." In everything he wrote, including 1963's The Fire Next Time, his most impactful book, Baldwin stressed that people create meaningless categories such as Black and white because doing so is easier than loving, and he predicted that there'd never be equality in America until white people learned to love.

As Baldwin moves through life, trading in one core relationship for another, said Hamilton Cain in The Minnesota Star Tribune, his life story "passes from man to man like a baton." After Delaney came the Swedish painter Lucien Happersberger, the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, and the French painter Yoran Cazac, who allows Boggs to turn the book's final section into "a feast of gossip and speculation" that "succeeds brilliantly as narrative." Baldwin clearly enjoyed the peak years of his celebrity. And though Boggs "keeps aloof from his protagonist's dalliances with vulnerable young men," this is no hagiography. Instead, "Baldwin is a fiery, fiercely researched biography worthy of an American genius." Because it simultaneously dissects our nation's myths with "dead-eye accuracy," it's also "an indictment of enduring racism and homosocial panic."

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'The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces' by Seth Harp

Seth Harp's new nonfiction best-seller is "the most depressing book I've read in a long time," said Thomas E. Ricks in The New York Times. The Rolling Stone writer, an Army Reserve veteran and former lawyer, builds an indictment of today's U.S. special operations forces by focusing on the criminal careers of two special ops veterans in Fayetteville, N.C. Billy Lavigne and Timothy Dumas were murdered near Fort Bragg in December 2020, their deaths the price they paid for their active roles in a multimillion-dollar drug-trafficking ring tied to the base. "These were not isolated cases, Harp makes clear." Though Harp "can be tendentious," he's correct that there's been a meltdown in the conduct of special ops forces at a time when they're frequently the point of the spear in U.S. military operations around the world.

Harp's book is "bursting with colorful if choleric characters," said Lyle Jeremy Rubin in The Nation. He opens with a "slow-drip" account of how Lavigne wound up killing his best friend while the victim's daughter watched. But Lavigne, in part because he was special ops, got away with it, just as Dumas was arrested several times without being charged. The deaths of Lavigne and Dumas were just two of 105 suffered in 2020–21 by soldiers assigned to the base. While most of those deaths were suicides or overdoses, an "appalling" share were murders, and Harp ties them all to the military's entanglement with drug cartels in Afghanistan and elsewhere as well as to the violence that Fort Bragg's special ops soldiers are directed to carry out.

Dumas' main partner in running the Bragg drug ring was a dirty ex-cop named Huff, said Matthew Peti in Reason, and "by itself," Huff's wild story "makes the book worth reading." But Harp's larger story is about the Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command, which is failing at the responsibility of overseeing special mission units such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six. While you could blame JSOC's malignancy on the violence and corruption its members see overseas, "what all the characters involved in this bizarre saga had in common was a total lack of accountability."