A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America by Tom ZoellnerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
First: thanks to Jeremy for introducing me to this book.
In the spring of 2009, Jeremy and I met author Tom Zoellner at the Tucson Festival of Books. We discussed his The Heartless Stone, as well as Arizona, Mormonism, and, briefly, Under the Banner of Heaven. We talked about that book's slant on Mormonism and how Krakauer argued a relationship between a religion and a horrific crime.
Now we have A Safeway in Arizona, about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, and I find that it reminds me quite a bit of Under the Banner of Heaven - a little bit memoir, a little bit history, and at the core, an exposition of a terrible tragedy. But everything Banner did wrong, this book does beautifully right. Zoellner is a Tucson native and a longtime friend of Giffords, so he is in a good position to write about the events of January 2011. He is also a meticulous historian and story teller. There were so many missteps he could have made in crafting this controversial work - it could have overhyped Giffords, or simplified the Arizona political landscape too much, or caricatured Loughner, or been too sympathetic to one side or the other. Instead, A Safeway in Arizona is at once realistic, nuanced, thorough, thought-provoking, and ultimately very moving. As I read, I alternated between wanting to talk to everyone around me about each page, and wanting to just sit and think for a while, alone, to digest the ideas I was taking in.
Here are three of my favorite passages, to give you an idea of the kind of book this is. First, in a section of the book that talks about gun control, there is this:
"Predation is the crux of the whole question. The act of owning a gun is almost a theological statement. It carries an assumption that the universe is hostile and capricious. It assumes that society's safeguards or God's providence will not be sufficient to protect us from Darwinist terrors, and that a person must have access to the easy ability to remove another's life forever and without question, in a decision that might contain within it all the deliberation that three seconds can afford." (p. 203)
The above passage is placed in the context of a larger conversation with a gun enthusiast and I found that one of the most affecting chapters of the book.
At the heart of the book is the question of what effect, if any, Arizona's divisive political landscape had on the crime perpetrated by Jared Lee Loughner. Every chapter relates to this issue, directly or indirectly. And unlike Krakauer (in my opinion), Zoellner makes a convincing case against the shooting having occurred in some kind of social vacuum:
"I don't think that the atmosphere of twenty-first-century Arizona made this crime inevitable or was the motivating cause of it. There was only one responsible human part: Jared Lee Loughner, who is gravely mentally ill.
"The much harder question to examine - which must be looked square in the face - is the context in which the shooting took place.
"James Clarke's study of American assassination demonstrates that those who plot violence against politicians are generally suffering from mental illness, but they are never free of influences from the culture at large. They always come from a specific set of circumstances in a specific time. And even in a case of an illness like paranoid schizophrenia, the social context becomes worthy of scrutiny, not as a direct cause of violence but as an influencing factor: an aggravation." (p. 257)
Finally, this statement near the end of the book gave me pause:
"[Gabrielle Giffords] taught me the difficult lesson that it is not enough to merely dwell in a place. You must make the decision to truly live in that place, take ownership of it, be a citizen of it, and play a part in the common good beyond your own front door." (p. 263)
On this count, regarding my years in Tucson, I am absolutely guilty of dwelling, not living. And that makes me sad. I can argue that some of this lack of citizenship is due to the particular season of my life I was in during that four-year period: pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, the library, the park, etc. My world was made very small by my children. After reading this book, I wish I had engaged more with Tucson, even though I knew from the beginning that I would only be there for a few years. I certainly feel I understand Tucson more now, and understand my own experience there better, after reading this book.
The best and rarest books make you feel like they were written just for you. A Safeway in Arizona is one of those - illuminating, heartbreaking, and just plain interesting!
(PS - since I am so easily offended by sloppy portrayals of Mormons in non-fiction, I have to give a shout-out to Zoellner for being so careful the few times he mentions the members of my religion. Specifically, he talks about Russell Pearce for over a page before mentioning that he is a Mormon. Soon afterward, he points out that the mainstream body of the church does not agree with Pearce, with a succinct and astonishingly correct explanation of this disagreement. It would have been so easy for the author to call Pearce a Mormon first thing, and then not bother to show the other side - which is what I felt like Krakauer did on every other page in Under the Banner of Heaven. Just saying.)