I offered to host a discussion of Russ Baker's Family of Secrets when he threw down the challenge to us readers to actually read his book before commenting. Today is the day I said I would try to hold this discussion but I am only half-way through and know that other people who expressed an interest are just beginning to read it. I want to get feedback for when a better date would be while giving some reactions to what I have read so far.

The book attempts to put at least a hundred years of the immediate past into the context of the rise of a crime family flourishing in the light and shadows of established power. With such a goal, the book is long but also short since it draws from a massive array of other books and resources. Some of the information brought forward in the footnotes is impossible to verify independently. Other stuff can be easily found on the web. Their is a huge middle ground between those extremes. Each of the books cited have their own circle of promoters and critics (along with a ton of their own footnotes). With the quantity of data to digest, you almost have to be Russ Baker to read this book. On some level, I think that is his ultimate point.

When describing the network of interrelated people in the story, an expression Russ Baker often employs is "at minimum." On page 246, he says "At minimum, it certainly is a small world." Before reading this, I didn't realize how small that world was. And at minimum, Mr. Baker has assembled enough reasons to be doubtful of previous narratives even if his story does not prove guilt. I was trying to make a flow chart that mirrored his description of interrelated people but became overwhelmed by the loops.

I have been tracking the criticism to this book. The criticism falls into two categories, (definitely not mutually exclusive categories). The first category challenges stories told in the book (and the books referred to by the book). The second dismisses the discussion itself as paranoia. Since it is too early to address the book as a whole, I would like to start a discussion about what people thought about conspiracy theories.    

One critic who drove over this book on the way to the beach was Tim Rutten :

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows" is a characterization of Hofstadter's that might have been tailored to fit Baker's book. "It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency . . . [that] all but obsessively accumulate 'evidence.' . . . The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent -- in fact, the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world.

I have seen a lot of instances where the "paranoid style" replaced another kind of thinking. But if enough narratives come together to show that the previously received consensus is wrong, when does the thinking stop being paranoid?