Rebeccanyc Reads Nonfiction in 2012

Delighted to join this group as I regularly read and enjoy nonfiction even though I mostly read fiction. I'll post reviews of my nonfiction reads here as well as on my Club Read 2012 and 75 Books threads. Looking forward to hearing about interesting books and enjoying interesting conversations.

My Favorite 2011 Nonfiction Reads

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

Gulag is an eye-opening thought-provoking, comprehensive, nuanced, and readable examination of the Soviet Union's network of forced labor camps, from their origins in 1917 in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution (with a look back at earlier Russian uses of slave labor and exile), through their rise and fall, largely under Stalin, to their adaptations in the 1980s eras of glasnost and perestroika. Applebaum had access to secret Soviet documents preserved in their archives, the records Gulag administrators needed to keep to operate the camps (as opposed to the more public political reports), but what makes this book so compelling is not only her impressive scholarship but also her quotes from the prisoners themselves -- from their memoirs, from interviews, and from literary works. Their testimony, and the quotes from poets and other writers that begin each chapter, bring life to grim, and still not well known, evil of the 20th century.

Applebaum brackets a lengthy middle section on prisoners' experiences in the camps -- from arrest, prison, and transport to food and living quarters, work, punishment, survival strategies, and rebellion, with special looks at guards, women and children, and the dying -- with historical sections covering the periods 1917 to 1939 and 1940 to 1986. This allows her to delve into the actual lives of prisoners while also exploring the political, historical, and economic forces behind the origins, expansion, and fall of the camps. Without fanfare or drama, she vividly illustrates both the magnitude and the telling details of the monstrosity that was the Gulag This is essential and horrifying.

In the introduction and final chapters, Applebaum tries to put the Gulag, and her history of it, in context. She analyzes some of the reasons why the evils of the forced labor camps, particularly at their peak under Stalin, are not as well known in the west, nor taken as seriously, as the evils of the Nazis and Hitler. She explores the attitudes of contemporary Russians and people from neighboring countries (those that were part of the former Soviet Union and those that were under its domination) towards remembering, documenting, and studying the camps. She points out that this lack of interest in remembering can have consequences in the present, citing in particular the Chechen experience. She notes that she doesn't discuss the parallel system of internal exile, which affected millions more people and their families.

And, reluctantly and with many caveats, she takes a stab at the numbers, estimating that some 18 million Soviet citizens passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953 and that there were also perhaps 6 million exiles, 4 million POWs, and 700,000 postwar detainees, for a total of 28.7 million people who experienced the camps. She explains that there are so many ways of looking at the question of how many died, and such inadequate data, that it is difficult to come up with totals. In the camps themselves? More than 2.7 million. In political executions, more, maybe a lot more, than 786,000. Under the entire Soviet regime, "unnecessary" deaths are "pure conjecture," but could range anywhere from 10 or 12 to 20 million.

In the end, Applebaum focuses on humanity and the individual. Noting that "statistics can never fully describe what happened. Neither can the archival documents on which so much of this book has been based," she gives the "last word" to a writer and former camp inmate, Lev Razgon, who, upon seeing his own archival file at the age of 82, wrote: "I can remember and recall them, each one. And if I remained alive, then it is my duty to do so."

What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes

I would not have read What It Is Like to Go to War if I hadn't read Marlantes' stunning novel Matterhorn earlier this year, and I can only admire Matterhorn more now that I've read WITLTGTW. The personal, historical, psychological, spiritual, and mythological perspectives on war and warriors that Marlantes discusses with great perception and great humanity in this book offer another, lens on the themes of the novel, a more explicit and reasoned one; it is a mark of Marlentes' talent as a writer that the important issues of WITLTGTW emerge organically in Matterhorn.

Among the topics that Marlentes covers -- killing, guilt, numbness and violence, the enemy within, lying, loyalty, heroism, home, and the temple of Mars -- perhaps the most important are those affecting the soldier's attitude towards his job and his return to civilian life. Marlantes never loses sight of the fact that our military is made up largely of very young men (and now women), men who need to know what it means to kill as much as what it means to risk being killed, men who need to understand the ethical and spiritual components of being a man and being a warrior, men who have to learn to integrate their strength and violence, thrill-seeking and grief back into life at home, away from the field of battle.

As is now well known, Marlantes is a Yale-educated Rhodes scholar and much decorated Marine who served in Vietnam and then spent forty years working on Matterhorn and, presumably, this book too, forty years in which he eventually learned to deal with his own PTSD and thought deeply about the meaning of war and the nature of warriors. Much influenced by ideas of Jungian psychology, he focuses also on the meaning of manhood and spiritual issues. Another focus is the changing nature of war, in which soldiers are ever more removed from direct contact with the enemy, killing them from behind computer screens half a world away or, when in the actual battlefield, can hours later be talking on the phone, or e-mailing, or posting to Facebook, maintaining a kind of contact with home, and dual reality, that was unheard of in earlier conflicts.

This is a moving, personal, and yet rigorous look at important issues, especially for we in the US where we've been at war for 10 years with almost no impact on the substantial percentage of the population who live outside the regions of the country from which the volunteer army is largely drawn. Many people, as noted in other reviews here on LT, should read this book. It is clear, well written, and compelling. Nonetheless, Matterhorn, covering the same territory in fictional form, is for me a greater accomplishment.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante

This is a lively, informative, and fun look at the underside of downtown New York City from approximately 1840 to 1920, chock full of gangs, corrupt politicians and policemen, bars, drugs, prostitutes, theaters of varying degrees of nonrespectablility, graft, crime, cons, would-be reformers, and more. Sante combines detailed research, including many quotes from writers and songs of the period, with compassion for the lack of choices facing poor people and a feeling for the continuity between then and now. Both the people and the gangs had fabulous nicknames: one of my favorites was the Dead Rabbits gang, "dead" being slang for "best" and "rabbit' for "tough guy." On the other hand, we continue to use a lot of the slang that originated then: Sante cites blarney, kicking the bucket, pal, and swag, among others.

I find New York City history endlessly fascinating, and one of the things that most intrigued me about this book was that the author and I both lived on the old lower east side (renamed by the real estate business as the East Village and Alphabet City and now hopelessly gentrified, largely by the expansion of NYU) in the late 70s and the 80s, a time when change was beginning there. He explains that living there, among the old tenements, got him interested in the less well known history of the area.

Sante doesn't dwell of the "plus ça change" aspects of the stories he tells, and in fact he is so immersed in the details of the period they aren't obvious, and yet . . . we still have poor people, criminals, corruption, theater, bars, drugs, prostitutes, gangs and would-be reformers. The form may change, technology may intervene, but human nature and social realities are still with us.

Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole

Like the Geniza, the crowded storeroom for discarded documents written in Hebrew characters (although in many languages) in the attic of an old Cairo synagogue, this wonderful book is filled with a multiplicity of discoveries, from insights into the medieval development of the Jewish religion, including a variety of sects, to poetry from the cultural flowering in Muslim-ruled Spain, to business transactions, to personal letters; and, like the palimpsests that were found in the Geniza, it reveals its treasures on two levels, that of the scholars who found, lived with, and deciphered the finds from the Geniza and that of the Jews of old Cairo, or Fustat, whose daily activities sprang to life from these old pages.

In the middle ages, Cairo/Fustat was at the center of the Jewish world, with travelers, students and scholars, traders, poets and others passing through from Spain in the west to Jerusalem and even India in the west. As a result, their writings ended up in the Geniza where they sat for centuries until the late 1800s when two British women showed a document, written in Hebrew, that they had bought in Cairo, to Cambridge scholar Solomon Schecter. While some other material from the Geniza had filtered out earlier, Dr. Schecter immediately and dramatically realized its value and traveled to Cairo where he convinced the rabbi in charge of the old synagogue to let him take whatever he wanted. Since then, the study of these documents has kept scholars happily busy, investigating what seems to be an inexhaustible treasure trove of information on religion, history, poetry, the relationships between Jews and Muslims, cultural life, daily life, personal relationships and dramas, language, and much much more, from the 10th through the 13th centuries, a time when the vast majority of Jews lived largely peaceably in what was largely a Muslim world. In their preoccupations with family and business, love and death, celebrations and study, they seem a lot like us.

Just Kids by Patti Smith

This is a book about art and becoming an artist, and about love. Patti Smith, the rock singer, artist, and poet, and Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist and photographer, met when they were "just kids" in 1967, having both come to New York City with dreams of becoming artists. They were lovers, friends, each other's muse and biggest supporter until Mapplethorpe died of AIDS in the late 80s. In this book, Smith tells the story of their young explorations of art, portrays the 70s scene in the Chelsea Hotel and Max's Kansas City, mentions a lot of famous and not-so-famous people, and speeds through their becoming the artists they are famous for being, he as a photographer who shocked people with his depictions of sadomasochistic and gay sex, and she as a rock star.

The most moving parts of the book are the places where, through her words, Smith illustrates what it means to be an artist, describing how both she and Mapplethorpe were driven to create, driven to find meaning in all sorts of objects. I don't think I've ever read a book (which says more about my reading) that so vividly captured the essence of being an artist. I also found their devotion to each other over the years touching, and the insight into the art "scene" interesting. This is a poetic book.

Classic Crimes by William Roughead

William Roughead was a Scottish lawyer who practiced at the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century. But what really fascinated him was crime, especially murder, and especially the drama of the trials, and he became a connoisseur of Scottish murder trials, attending as many as he could and writing detailed descriptions of them for a series called Notable British Trials, as well as shorter but perhaps more literary versions, aimed at a more general audience, of ones that struck his fancy for one reason or another. This volume collects twelve of those tales, ranging from ones Roughead only read about because they happened before his time to ones he not only attended but in at least one case participated in.

In most of the stories, Roughead briefly describes the people involved in the crime and the crime itself, and its aftermath, and then devotes most of his time to how the case unfolded at the trial. What makes these stories much more than a legal tale is how Roughead tells them: he brings his "characters" to life, with insight into their personalities; he makes wonderful biting remarks that reveal pretension and stupidity; he is content to leave threads untied, as they are in real life but rarely in fictional mysteries; and his point of view is clearly though largely obliquely expressed, especially in the several cases that involve miscarriages of justice. The cases vary widely, and some are inevitably more interesting than others, but I found the book as a whole fascinating for what it revealed about life in earlier times, and how in some ways things never change. In particular, aside from the fact that people still murder for money or to get rid of their husbands or wives, I was fascinated by the way the news media of the day -- dozens and dozens of newspaper reporters, first without and then with photographers -- crowded the trials and relayed the proceedings to large and eager audiences. Sound familiar?

Roughead's writing style takes getting used to. It is old-fashioned, filled with words, and occasionally discursive and, as Luc Sante says in the introduction to the edition I read, Roughead "seldom fails to introduce a barrister without summarizing the now obscure highlights of his illustrious later career," but after a while I got into the rhythm of his prose and rather enjoyed it.

Other Nonfiction Reads in 2011

Yalta: The Price of Peace by S. M. Plokhy
The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms and Other Scenes from a Climate-Challenged Planet by Heidi Cullen
The Factory of Facts by Luc Sante
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt
Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser
Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm

My reviews of all these books are available on the book pages.

Welcome, Rebecca! I'm glad to see that you've posted your nonfiction reads of 2011 here.

Welcome! I've been following your threads elsewhere, now it's nice to see the non-fiction concentrated in one place.

Adding one more to the 2011 list.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

This fascinating book by Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, explores how our minds work, especially as we make decisions. He uses a construct of two "systems" of thinking to explain many of his ideas: System 1 is our quick, intuitive, method of thinking, which gets us through the vast majority of our daily activities and choices, although not always in the best way, and System 2 is our more thoughtful, logical, bigger picture way of thinking and making decisions, a system which we unconsciously avoid using a great deal of the time. His research, much with his colleague, the late Amos Tversky, to whom he dedicates the book, identified many of the ways our "System 1" deceives us, and opened up new ways of thinking about decisions to economists (who often resisted), and people in business, marketing, medicine, and many other fields.

So how do our minds keep us from making the best decisions? After noting that our mind is designed for making sense out what we encounter and thus for jumping to conclusions, and that something he calls WYSIATI, for "what you see is all there is, helps us do this, Kahneman describes a whole slew of ways. For example, faced with a complex question like "how happy are you?,' we tend to answer an easier but related question like "how do I feel right now?" We try to make coherent stories out of statistics we hear; to pay more attention to the content of stories than to their reliability; to focus on a number presented to us as an "anchor" for answering questions or making decisions; to be deceived by the availability of information in our minds (for example, if we heard of two plane crashes in the past month, we are likely to overestimate the frequency of plane crashes); to be influenced by details and causes more than statistics; to completely ignore the law of regression to the mean; to overly trust our intuition; to be overconfident about our ability to make predictions as compared to relying on statistical probabilities and formulas; and to be swayed, when making choices, both by risk aversion and risk seeking.

What makes this book so much fun to read, aside from the ideas, is that Kahneman introduces his concepts by posing the kinds of problems he posed to students and sample groups, so that the reader can see how he or she would answer them. Even knowing that there is some "catch," it is difficult not to answer spontaneously. By engaging the reader in this way, Kahneman makes the examples and ideas much more personally interesting.

Towards the end of the book, Kahneman introduces two other ideas: Econs versus Humans and the experiencing mind versus the remembering mind. Econs, as he describes them, are the ideally logical thinkers posited by economic models, people who always answer consistently and in agreement with whatever is the statistically better choice; Humans are real people who are influenced by how their minds work, by their feelings, and by other factors such as those explored earlier in the book. Kahneman discusses how an understanding of how Humans respond can help businesses, government, and others solve problems better than by assuming we can be trained to be like Econs. In the exploration of the experiencing and the remembering minds, he shows that people rely on their memories of events, both painful and pleasant, more than on the actual experience. In one example, people who endured an painful, but short, medical procedure described it as worse than people who had a slightly less painful procedure that went on for much longer, and people whose pain tapered off before its end found it more endurable than people whose pain ended abruptly, even if the pain went on for a longer period of time. He also explores how people can experience greater well-being.

This is a book filled with ideas, and what could be more fascinating than learning about how our minds work?

I am starting the year off with a nonfiction read, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse which I bought both because I read an interesting review of it and because my interest in medieval times was re-sparked last year by reading Arthurian Romances and Parzival and Titurel and I have a a bunch of other medieval fiction on my TBR. I also may reread (after some 30 years) Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror; she is one of my favorite nonfiction writers.

I heard Karl Marlantes talking about What It Is Like to Go to War on the Pritzger Military Library and added it to my tbr pile. I'm glad to hear it was the right choice.

I've just finished To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson, and here is my review.

This fascinating study, both broad and detailed, of the ideas and actions that led to the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, is almost as interesting for its flaws at its successes. At once intellectual history and biography, literary criticism and economics, it examines the lives and thoughts not only of people who are famous, if not notorious, such as Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, but also of those who are lesser known (at least to me), such as Michelet, Babeuf, and Lasalle. In essence, Wilson traces the revolutionary tradition from the ashes of the French revolution through the Paris Commune to the dawn of the Russian revolution.

Subtitled "a study in the writing and acting of history," the book starts in 1824 when Michelet, a young French historian, discovers the work of Vico, an Italian who wrote a century earlier, and was inspired by his vision of examining history through the lives and social culture of ordinary people and the interplay between people and their society. Michelet is most famous for writing a comprehensive history of France in which all the important people through the ages come to life, and also for being so caught up in his work, especially when he came to the sections on the French revolution, that he became engaged in contemporary issues including the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. Wilson goes on to discuss the decline of the revolutionary tradition in France and the beginnings of socialism, ranging from France to Britain to the US.

But the heart of the book is the material on Marx and Engels, especially on Karl Marx who seems to both fascinate and repel Wilson. He provides a detailed personal and intellectual biography over the course of many chapters; we see Marx developing his ideas as a young man, collaborating with Engels, forcing his wife and children to live in squalor while he begs for enough money from Engels to keep writing, excoriating his political enemies, struggling in his life as an exile, and thinking and writing, always thinking and writing. A chapter, in the middle of all this, on Hegel and "the myth of the dialectic" is as complex and confusing as the dialectic itself.

The weakest part of the book is the third and last section, on Lenin and Trotsky. The biographical information about their early lives is fascinating (although, as noted below, it comes from Soviet-supplied material), but the discussion of their ideas and especially of their actions is not nearly as clear, detailed, or compelling as the earlier sections. Perhaps they were too close to Wilson, both in time and in the political issues of the day.

And so I come to the flaws. Some were noted by Wilson himself in an introduction to a later edition of the book (the original was published in 1940 just after, as noted in a foreword to my NYRB edition, the assassination of Trotsky and the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact). Wilson concedes that his portrait of Lenin is "too amiable" and is based on Soviet-censored family memoirs and other materials (and that he should have written more about the ongoing development of socialism in France). As the foreword author also notes, if this book were written today, the arc of history would end not, in hope, at the Finland Station, but instead in the gulag of Siberia. The other flaws, words and passages that took me aback, are probably due to the time Wilson wrote: the use, twice, of the word "nigger," and the occasional discussions of ideas or actions that are "typical" of Jews. I recognize standards were not the same in 1940 as they are today, but I thought they would be more advanced than that for one of the leading critics of the day and a leading publisher; I found them shocking and disturbing.

All in all, I was swept along by this book: by its scope, by its depth, by the new people and new ideas it introduced me to, by the breadth of Wilson's research and interpretation, and even by the complexity of his writing. History -- how we look at it and how that determines how we look at the possibilities of the future -- is the real subject of To the Finland Station; it is indeed "a study in the writing and acting of history."

9: I do not know enough (or, frankly, care enough) to wend my way through such a book, so I rely on reviews such as yours for the gist. Thanks.

Great review, Rebecca!

I've just finished Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse by Jay Rubenstein. I was intrigued when I read a good review of this book, since I had started reading some medieval literature last year, so I decided to get it. And it does indeed present a fascinating chronicle of a period and series of events I knew next to nothing about. Rubinstein, who received a MacArthur "genius" fellowship, tells the tale in a narrative fashion, supporting it with quotes I never imagined existed from contemporary writers, people who were actually on the crusade.

The story begins in the early 11th century. Vague millennial and apocalyptic ideas were circulating in Europe after 1000 years of Christianity, the caliph of Egypt ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in 1009, pilgrims increasingly started traveling to Jerusalem, and a priest named Peter the Hermit began preaching about the need to recapture Jerusalem, not only so that Christians could freely worship there but also because it would bring on the "Last Days" and the Apocalypse. The pope, Urban II, took up the cry, seeing a large military campaign as a good way to solve some of his political problems at home, and it was further enhanced by other preachers who roused crowds around Europe, but mostly in France. Various princes responded, each for his own reasons, and soon there were several nobles raising their own armies to make the trek to Jerusalem. Needless to say, before setting off to fight the unbelievers in the east, many took the time to turn on the unbelievers closer to home, namely the Jews, and the pre-crusade period saw a large increase in pogroms (not yet called that) and massacres.

So the armies, along with large groups of ordinary people, set off, on several routes across Europe, planning to meet up at Constantinople, where the story really takes off. Rubinstein describes the intricate politics once they got there, with some of the leaders seeking to make deals with Alexius, the Byzantine emperor, for his protection, and indeed they helped retake Nicea from the Turks for Alexius, although it is unclear whether the Niceans wanted to be retaken. Then it was on to the country of the "Saracens" and brutal battles and sieges ensued as the crusaders slogged their way over many months to Jerusalem. While it was interesting to learn about siege technology, the cruelty, and joy in cruelty, of both sides, but particularly the crusaders, was horrifying, and some of their behavior shocking. The 20th and 21st centuries have no monopoly on the disgusting actions of warriors in battle.

Mixed in with all this is the idea of holy war, that the Christian god is supporting the Crusaders, and that therefore they must behave in "Christian" ways (which doesn't seem to preclude cutting off the heads of the Saracens, or worse), so that their god will show them miracles. Surprisingly some miracles do seem to happen, while others are clearly faked. Rubinstein takes a lot of time to discuss what he considers to be apocalyptic beliefs among some of the priests and other clerics accompanying the armies, and the political maneuverings among the different nobles leading the armies, both with each other and with the holy war contingent. He often discusses different versions of the events, as told by various contemporary writers, and tries to tease out the truth. This, along with the narrative of the crusade itself, is the crux of the book, and I found it remarkable how Rubinstein was able to pull all these threads together into a compelling story while also providing an explanatory framework.

As I finished the book, I realized I would have gotten more out of it if I hadn't read it over the course of a month, interrupting it with other books. There were a lot of people to keep track of, and I had to keep checking to remember who they were. It is interesting to look back at this period, now nearly a thousand years ago, from the perspective of today, particularly to see that political maneuvering has a very long history. And while it is easy, and perhaps unfair, to make direct connections, the kind of holy war the crusaders were undertaking, their hatred (and fear?) of the Saracens, has both echoes and repercussions today, and it is my understanding that there are some strands of the evangelical movement in the US that still believe the Apocalypse is coming. It hasn't, so far!

Nice review!

Thanks!

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff



The turbulent times of the last century BC and the varied cultures, wars, and characters of the period spring to life in Stacy Schiff's fascinating biography, making Cleopatra, as compelling and remarkable a woman as she was (and not in the ways you may imagine), almost a hook for a book about the classical world at a time of dramatic change. Schiff is a wonderful writer who packs a lot of detail and research into a very readable writing style; while there are, alas, no contemporary sources for Cleopatra's life, she has delved into both the classical authors who wrote within a few centuries of the period as well as modern scholarly works, and is careful to discuss differences among these close-to-primary sources and how she believes politics may have influenced what they wrote.

The outlines of Cleopatra's life are well known, that she inherited the throne of Egypt as a teenager but had to outsmart her brother to claim it, met and became lovers with Julius Caesar and subsequently Mark Antony, and ultimately killed herself. In the course of the book, Schiff makes the claim that Cleopatra has been misinterpreted all these centuries, maligned as "the wickedest woman in the world" and the seductress who caused men to throw away their kingdoms, because it is easier and more comfortable for people (read: men, mostly) to think of powerful men being undone by a woman's sexual power than by her intellectual and political power. And she provides strong evidence for this.

In the last century BC, Alexandria, where Cleopatra reigned, was a cosmopolitan city, a center of intellectual life (the famed library was there and people knew that the earth was round, that the moon controlled tides, and much more that was lost to the west for centuries), art and the decorative arts, music and entertainment, great wealth and excesses of hospitality, and people who appreciated and expected all of these. As Schiff writes, "it was a scholarly paradise with a quick business pulse and a languorous resort culture, where the Greek penchant for commerce met the Egyptian mania for hospitality, a city of cool raspberry dawns and pearly late afternoons, with the hustle of heterodoxy and the aroma of opportunity thick in the air. Even the people watching was best there." As a side note, some of the most interesting aspects of this book for me were the differences between the Roman system and culture and the Alexandrian system and culture, and the turbulence of the times, with civil wars in Rome and shifting loyalties among the varied rulers who were part of the far-flung Roman empire

Furthermore, women had for centuries had rights in Egypt that were unheard of in the west, among them the right to make their own marriages, to be supported after divorcing, and to inherit and hold property. And, Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, descended from Macedonian aristocrats who had ruled Egypt for centuries by the time she was born and the inheritor of a strong tradition of Ptolemaic queens: she was educated and groomed to rule. All evidence suggests that she was an extremely competent, politically savvy, and ultimately beloved queen, who as ruler of Egypt had powers almost unimaginable today: not only did she determine military strategy, oversee all commerce, issue currency, receive petitioners of all sorts, put on fabulous entertainments, travel among and gain the support of the Egyptian population who, through a bureaucratic taxing system of immense proportions, essentially worked for her, but she also aligned herself with goddess Isis and was worshiped almost as a goddess herself.

Schiff portrays Cleopatra as an extremely intelligent and politically accomplished woman, yet writes: "The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all. We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty."

Thanks for an informative review! I'm trying to keep my historical reading confined to America this year, because it'll stick in my mind more if I'm not scattered all over the place, but this book goes onto the wishlist for the future.

Thanks for the review! Cleopatra has been on my wish list--you have moved it up a notch.

Thanks. It was both a fun and extremely informative read.

Definitely a good review. Thumb up from me!

Great review, Rebecca.
ETA: I saw an autographed copy of this one on the shelf at the bookstore today. Into my bag it went (after I paid, of course).

I enjoyed your review of To The Finland Station very much. Wilson is a very good writer and he picked out a fascinating topic. As you pointed out the scope of the book is a significant aspect of what makes the book so good. I will have to star your thread to see what the future brings.

Vesuvius by Gillian Darley

I picked up this intriguing-looking little book from the counter of my favorite bookstore when I was buying something else, and I am glad it was little because it wasn't as intriguing as I had hoped. Darley looks at how others have looked at Vesuvius, from the classical era to the Renaissance to the romantics to the budding scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries to today, from artists and writers to diplomats and impressarios and tourists. While this is mildly interesting, although more than I wanted to know, I would have preferred a different book, one that talked about the geology and the impact on the people who lived and live near Vesuvius, including the ones who even today are building their houses further and further up the slope of a still active volcano. So I can't really criticize the book; it just wasn't completely to my taste. Fun pictures, though.

22: I would prefer the same book as you would, so I'll skip this one. :-)

The Emotional Life of Your Brain by Richard J. Davidson with Sharon Begley

I heard the author of this book interviewed on my local public radio station and thought it sounded intriguing enough to buy. Although written in a relatively chatty style, it includes considerable scientific data and information about experimental work.

Davidson is a psychology professor who has focused his research on learning how the brain is involved in emotion. This was not a popular idea when he started work as a graduate student in the 1970s, as most leading scientists though of emotions as "neurological fluff" when compared to memory, problem-solving, perception, and other attributes studied by cognitive psychologists; there were also few tools to look at what was happening inside the brain. Although Davidson conducted experiments for decades that began to show how emotion is indeed something that happens in our brains, the emergence of MRIs has enabled scientists to pinpoint the parts of our brains that become active when we are experiencing different kinds of emotions.

In this book, Davidson identifies six dimensions of "emotional styles" that can be mapped to particular areas in our brains and the communications among them; everyone falls somewhere on a continuum for each of these dimensions. The six dimensions are resilience (from fast to recover to slow to recover), outlook (from positive to negative), social intuition (from intuitive to puzzled), self-awareness (from self-aware to self-opaque), sensitivity to context (from tuned in to tuned out), and attention (from focused to unfocused). He is careful to note that there are benefits at both ends of each spectrum, that society benefits from having people with varied emotional styles, and that the issue is not where someone falls on each continuum, but whether some aspect of emotional style is creating problems in his or her life. To give an example, one's degree of resilience (recovering quickly from a setback) depends on the communication between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Davidson goes on to stress that the brain is plastic; not only does it change in response to how we use it and what is going on in our lives, but we can also consciously work to change where we fall along the continuum of each emotional style.

Another aspect of this book involves Davidson's lifelong commitment to meditation, and his interest is studying the brains of people who meditate, including those who meditate a lot, like Buddhist monks, and those who are novices to meditation, like volunteers he involved in studies, to see how the brains change in response to meditation. He is in the early stages of this research, but does believe that meditation changes the strength of different pathways in the brain.

I find neuroscience fascinating, and although I shy away from self-help books, there was enough science in this book to make me take the quizzes to determine my emotional styles and consider the idea of trying meditation once again, although I've never quite taken to it in the past. The book is a relatively quick read, but there's a lot of interesting information in it, not just about emotional styles and meditation, but also about how scientists figure out how to structure and interpret experiments.

24: I'd be more interested in the experimental side than the self-help side too, e.g. how he came up with six dimensions, and the limits of malleability. Also in the process of emotions shifting from "neurological fluff" to worthy of study.

>24 rebeccanyc:: very interesting! My younger daughter is interested in neuroscience so I will share this book with her.

qebo, I found the parts about how he designed experiments particularly interesting. And it's hard to imagine how people could think that the brain was involved with emotion, but that is what they used to think, and not so long ago either.

Laura, this book looks at neuroscience from the psychology end of it.

>27 rebeccanyc:: excellent, that's exactly what she's into right now. Thanks!

The First Crusade: The Call from the East by Peter Frankopan
(cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads)

I would not have bought or read this book if I hadn't read Jay Rubenstein's Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse earlier this year. And I have to confess that I more or less skimmed through it. Frankopan is a scholar of and fan of Alexios, the Byzantine emperor at the time of the first crusade, and in this book he argues that it was Alexios's plea to Pope Urban II that led the pope to call for the crusade and that Alexios oversaw at least the staggered scheduling of the arrival of different armies in Constantinople, their provisioning, and some of their initial targets once they reached Asia Minor. He gives short shrift to much of what happened during the crusade itself. I don't know enough (nor do I care to know enough) about the politics of the era to know if Frankopan has placed the emphasis properly. It is clear to me that Rubenstein's focus on the apocalyptic thinking behind some of the crusaders' actions doesn't conflict with Frankopan's focus on Alexios, and I found that earlier read much more interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking.

Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U
(cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads)

This was a fascinating book, although it was not the book I expected based on the title. Burma is the center of the story, but Thant Myint-U takes the reader on a tour, geographic, historical, economic, and cultural, of the surrounding regions in China and India, regions that are very far from the political centers of their respective countries and that in various ways have functioned as frontiers. At the beginning and end of the book, he talks about the potential role of Burma as the gateway for China to the Indian Ocean (without going through the narrow Malaccan straits) and as the pathway for India to Southeast Asia.

But the heart of the book is his travels through Burma, the Chinese southwest, and the Indian northeast. In these sections he delves into the history and culture of ancient kingdoms and contemporary ethnic groups, the long and partially continuing isolation of these border areas from the mainstream of their country's culture and economic development the formidable geography, the vital importance of the major rivers coursing down from the Himalayas, politics, military events and strategy, the Chinese need for oil, religious and linguistic diversity and similarity, and much more. For me, this provided insight into areas and history I knew nothing about and broadened my awareness of the complexity of the region.

Thant was born and grew up in the US and did his graduate work in England, but his family returned to Burma to visit during his childhood summers (he is the grandson of former UN Secretary General U Thant). One of the parts of the book that interested me was his awareness of people's appearances: whether they look "Burmese" or "Southeast Asian" versus looking "Chinese" or "Indian." There was a long history of Indian presence in Burma, and he finds people and communities in India's Northeast (a region, connected to the main part of India by what's called the "chicken neck," that still is largely under military control because its various ethnic groups, who formerly had their own kingdoms there, don't feel they are Indian) similar in many ways to the Burmese.

The Chinese are building roads, railways, and pipelines through Burma, and Burma is poised to become the crossroads between China and India, as the title states. But as the author writes, "Burma would not be connecting the parts of India and China most familiar in the West, the maritime Asia that runs from Bombay to Shanghai and Tokyo, via the beaches of Thailand and Bali, Singapore and Hong Kong -- the Asia that is developing fast, the Asia of high-tech manufacturing, glittering fashion shows and luxury tourism. Instead, Burma would be connecting the vast hinterlands of India and China, much less visible, poor and with a spine of violent conflict running right through." Furthermore, it is not clear how the Burmese themselves would benefit from this.

I have one quibble. I love maps, and enjoyed looking at the maps at the beginning of the book. But the contemporary map was printed so the spine of the book goes right through Burma, making it impossible to see some of the most important locations in the book.

Sounds like a fascinating book. That part of the world has its own history and very few connections with the cosmopolitan society of the modern world.
I understand your frustration about the map. That type of problem is one reason I have a good world atlas.

The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death by Jill Lepore
(cross posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads)

Be virtuous then and forward press,
To gain the seat of happiness.

Historian Jill Lepore begins her entertaining, enlightening, and disturbing "history of life and death" with the story of "games of life," board games initially designed to instill moral and Christian values in children; hence the one called "The Mansion of Happiness" from whose instructions comes the above quote. In 1860, Milton Bradley (yes, that Milton Bradley) introduced the Checkered Game of Life, which takes players from birth or just after to "happy old age." In earlier games, players advanced through virtue and fell back through sin, but in Bradley's game they lose by failing to take advantage of opportunities to succeed. As Lepore writes, "he took a game imported from India and made it into the story of America. He turned a game of knowledge into the path to prosperity." She goes on to note that with "the secularization of progress and the rise of individualism . . . the shape of a life was changing. . . . The sun still set at the end of every day, but now you could turn on the lights and day would never end. . . Novelty replaced redemption."

And so begins the collection of interconnected essays that, through portraits of individuals, their work, and their social environments, plot changes in our thinking, largely from the mid-1800s through the early and mid-20th century, about everything from birth to death, with mother's milk, children's literature, learning about sex, contraception, eugenics, marriage counseling, household efficiency, instructions for parents, old age, the right to die, and cryonics in between. In the course of these essays, she discusses the politicization of issues relating to the "rights" to life an death.

Lepore has the wonderful ability to take a point that seems obvious once she mentions it and then develop its implications. One that particularly struck me is that for centuries there was no concept of "parenthood" because adulthood implied parenthood since adults had lots of children and often died while there were still children at home. Older siblings helped care for younger siblings, and thus learned about baby and child care. But once women, especially educated and middle class women, started delaying marriage and children and reducing the size of their families, children grew up without the experience of caring for younger children and thus, when they became parents themselves, felt at a loss about what to do. Enter the concept of parenthood, the creation of Parents magazine, and the beginning of articles that promised to tell parents how they could avoid perils they previously never knew existed. Similarly, and largely for marketing purposes, the classical three ages of man (youth, adulthood, old age) have been extended to include adolescence (and now "tweens"), middle age, and more

I've been a fan of Jill Lepore since reading her more conventionally historical New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan and her pointed and extremely witty The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History in which she debunks the founder obsession and anti-historical approach of the Tea Partiers. In fact, one of the things I love about Lepore is that how witty she is, in addition to being insightful, thought-provoking, and readable. So I will end this review by quoting from the book, first from her introduction and then from her conclusion.

"A great many questions about life and death have no answers, including, notably, these three: How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when you're dead? These questions are ancient; they riddle myths and legends; they lie at the heart of every religion; they animate a great deal of scientific research. No one has ever answered them and no one ever will, but everyone tries: trying is the human condition. All anyone can do is ask." (pp. xvi -xvii)

"I have come to believe that what people think about life and death has a good deal to do with how they think about the present and the past. Hiding between the covers of this book, then, lies a theory of history itself, and it is this: if history is the art of making an argument by telling a story about the dead, which is how I see it, the dead never die; they are merely forgotten or, especially if they are loved, remembered, quick as ever." p. 192

32: Well that sounds fascinating. I'm a fan from her New Yorker essays.

I read her there too. Some of the chapters in this book appeared in slightly different forms in the New Yorker.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge

Crossposted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads

Victor Serge was born in exile in Belgium in 1890 and died in exile in Mexico in 1947. In between, he was jailed at least three times (once in France, twice in the Soviet Union) and internally deported to Orenburg in the the Ural Mountains, fled Paris just ahead of the Nazis, and barely made it out of occupied France. Also in between, he participated in the innermost circles of the Russian Revolution, fighting in one of the fiercest battles of the civil war, going on foreign missions for the Communist Party, and having access to both Lenin and Trotsky, before becoming disillusioned by the totalitarian turn the Communists took and, ultimately, by that same authoritarian trait in Trotsky. Throughout all this time, he was writing, with his work mostly published in western Europe.

Born of Russian parents who fled to the west because of their own revolutionary activities, Serge became interested in socialist and anarchist politics as a teenager and began his life-long connections with most of the European activists and revolutionaries of the first part of the 20th century. After being jailed in France, he traveled to Spain and met Catalan rebels, returned to Paris, and wound up in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd, later Leningrad), at the Finland Station, in 1919. In the course of his years in the Soviet Union, he not only clearly saw the perils and evils of the path the Bolsheviks were taking, but spoke up about them, as a member of the so-called Left Oppositionists that initially clustered around Trotsky. The inevitable happened: he was jailed, then released, jailed again, and then sent to Orenburg, where he was allowed his books and his family, but where starvation was never far away. Because of his western citizenship, and because his writing was published in France and elsewhere, the Soviets were under pressure to release him, and he was ultimately expelled to the west. Once there, his life was made difficult not only by the anti-communists but also by the left, because he was persona non grata for having criticized what was going on in the Soviet Union and both Stalin and Trotsky. Nonetheless, he maintained his connections to a vast network of socialists and others who, like him, believed in democracy, free speech, and the rights of the individual as well as social revolution.

What makes this book so fascinating, in addition to Serge's presence at some of the seminal events of the last century and in addition to his sparkling writing (also evident in his excellent novels), is his amazingly clear perception of what was really taking place, when the vision of so many others was clouded by wishful thinking; his total commitment to tolerance and individual freedom; his ability to continue to look to the future despite the horrors he personally endured; his remarkable prescience and psychological/political insight (e.g., of why Stalin had to kill off the entire first generation of Bolshevik revolutionaries, and of the direction the second world war would take); his sharp portraits of dozens and dozens of people, some I'd heard of and many more I hadn't; and the broad perspective it opened up for me of the extent of the revolutionary activity in Europe and the mixed reaction to that by the Soviets (e.g., they appeared to help the republicans in the Spanish Civil War by sending them arms, while at the same time killing all the leaders who didn't toe the Stalinist line).

Serge clearly saw that the world had changed after the First World War, and that it was once again heading to disaster with the Second. Nonetheless, he believed in progress, perhaps slow and halting, but inevitable. As he says in the final section of his memoirs:

"The men of my generation -- those born around 1890 -- above all the Europeans among them, cannot help the sensation of having lived on a frontier where one world ends and another begins. I have seen the face of Europe change several times. . . .

"Here we are, with the nightmare of war behind us, but without peace having been made, without a feeling of man's deliverance, without even a vague reawakening of the great hopes that signaled the end of the First World War. We feel trapped between the aggressive crushing power of a totalitarianism born of born of a victorious socialist revolution and the routines of an old society committed, in spite of itself, to changes it refuses to recognize. On both sides, primitive man, barbaric and narrow-minded, greedy and mendacious, is working against better man. . . .

"The future seems to me, despite the clouds on the horizon, to be filled with possibilities vaster than any we have glimpsed in the past. The passion, the experience, and even the errors of my fighting generation may perhaps illumine the way forward, but on one condition, which has become a categorical imperative: never to give up the defense of man against systems whose plans crush the individual." pp. 446- 447, NYRB edition

The NYRB edition I read is the first complete translation of this book; the publisher of an earlier edition forced the translator to cut a significant portion of the text because he thought it was too long. For this edition, a new translator uncovered the deleted portions and retranslated them, but I couldn't tell where one translation merged into another. The edition is also enhanced by a lengthy glossary of people and revolutionary movements.

Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads.



Journalist Blaine Harden's story of Shin Dong-hyuk's escape from the North Korean slave labor camp in which he was born is by turns horrifying, shocking, deeply saddening, and modestly inspirational. Camp 14 is one of the six labor camps in North Korea, camps large enough to be visible on Google Earth that have, as Harden points out, "existed twice as long as the Soviet Gulag and about twelve times longer than the Nazi concentration camps." Estimates of the number of prisoners in these camps range from about 150,000 to 200,000. The camps vary in the degree of severity with which the prisoners are treated, but Shin's camp, number 14, was a "complete control district" for "irredeemables." According to Harden, it "holds an estimated 15,000 prisoners. About thirty miles long and fifteen miles wide, it has farms, mines, and factories threaded through steep mountain valleys."

In Camp 14, sex between the prisoners was forbidden, but Shin's mother was "given" to his father as a "reward marriage," essentially a means for rewarding prisoners who exceeded work demands as well as breeding new workers for the camp. Children born in the camp were sent to school, but received only a minimal education in writing and arithmetic from the guards who served as teachers (they didn't learn much reading because the only book in the classroom was the teacher's). They learned nothing about the world outside the camp, not even the usual North Korean propaganda, and there were no pictures of the Kim dynasty anywhere to be seen. Instead, they learned to inform on their peers and their parents, to obey the guards and meet work quotas, and (on their own) to scrounge for food without being caught (including rats and insects). They were always hungry. Mostly, as school children they were sent to help out at various work sites.

Remarkably, Shin's mother and brother tried to escape. He was tortured to "find out" what he knew (described in horrific detail, not for the faint-hearted) and ultimately witnessed their executions. The book, which is based on Harden's interviews with Shin, as well as a document Shin wrote for a South Korean human rights group, then describes the various kinds of work Shin was forced to do from the easy (working on a pig farm), to the the difficult but well fed (building a hydroelectric dam), to the challenging (repairing sewing machines in a textile factory). In Shin's world, nobody trusted anybody, but eventually he is paired with a new prisoner, one who had experience in the outside world, and his eyes are opened and he starts planning his escape.

Harden mixes his discussion of Shin's experiences in the camp and during his escape and subsequent attempt to adapt to a life of freedom with information about what was going on in North Korea during this time period and how it affected Shin's ability to escape; he also describes how South Korea is responding to the influx of North Korean escapees. Once free, Shin has to learn how people interact with each other when they are not terrorized and how to cope with his horrific experiences and newly developing conscience and sense of guilt. As he says towards the end of the book, "I did not know about sympathy or sadness. . . .They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I have learned to cry. I feel like I am becoming human. . . . I escaped physically. I haven't escaped psychologically."

I snapped up this book when I saw it in a bookstore because I was so fascinated when I read Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy. It is a compelling complement to the stories she told.

Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



This is a charming, slight book by a man who has a personal library of more than 40,000 books. At first, I was enchanted by it, as many fellow LT book lovers might be, as he discusses what other people ask people who have lots of books, accumulating books versus collecting them, finding kindred spirits, the comfort of having books we just might want to read someday, systems for arranging books on the shelves, and more, interspersing his own thoughts with quotations from other writers and references to books he has read, many of which sound intriguing (there's a bibliography at the end). I found too many wonderful comments to even think of picking ones to quote here. But as I read on, I felt he was trying to write enough to make it a book (it's only 123 small pages) and the topics he was discussing were less compelling. Still, it's a quick read, and there's a lot that's fun. The introduction by James Salter, one of my favorite writers, was enjoyable too.

36: Once free, Shin has to learn how people interact with each other when they are not terrorized and how to cope with his horrific experiences and newly developing conscience and sense of guilt.
This, even more than the prison camp experience, would be reason for me to read the book. How does someone learn this basic stuff as an adult?

qebo, He doesn't talk about how he does that as much, but the story of his life and struggles in the US is fascinating. It's hard to know how he will adapt.

Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books threads



Globalectics is Ngũgĩ's combination of globalism and dialectics. In this book, a collection of the talks he gave for the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California at Irvine, he discusses the fight to convert the English literature department at the University of Nairobi into a Literature department, and world literature generally, and the fight to give orature (a coinage to avoid the oxymoron of "oral literature") an equal place with the written word in the academic world. These are the interesting parts of the book. Unfortunately, at least for me, because perhaps I am theory-challenged, a lot of the book involves putting his theses into the theoretical formats of Hegelian dialectics and what he describes, in an introduction, as "poor theory," which seems to mean doing a lot with a little, or perhaps just using the simplest idea that will work. I found these sections added to the length of this slim volume, but didn't necessarily add to my appreciation of his ideas.

And his ideas are interesting, if not entirely novel. Initially, he focuses on the relationship between the "English master" and the "colonial bondsman," and makes the point that the "bondsman" always knows a lot about the "master," while the "master" knows next to nothing about the "bondsman." More interesting, perhaps, is his discussion of the education of the "bondsman" and how African and other writers educated in the European system have been able both to view some of the European classics in different ways (e.g., Shakespeare not just as an example of the height of English culture but also as a writer whose works depicted people in different relationships with power) and to take aspects of European literature and use them in their own works (e.g., titles of books such as Achebe's Things Fall Apart or his own Weep Not Child, or styles or themes; he cites Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood, which I've read, having "affinities" with Zola's Germinal, which I hope to read soon).

In the later lectures, he discusses how we define and understand the term "postcolonial" as different cultures can be postcolonial at different times and in different ways, and more generally how we can read literature from a variety of perspectives as well as from the perspective of the writer and his or her times, and he focuses on the vitality and significance of orature, which includes not just story-telling but song, and he adds in dance and music. In one section I found particularly interesting, he talks about how orature reflects a world view that "assumes the normality of the connection between nature, nurture, supernatural, and supernurtural" and that this derives in some cases from the language itself, giving the example of some words in Gĩkũyũ. I certainly felt when I read Matigari that Ngũgĩ was using the tradition of story-telling, with each version of the tale a little different, in this work.

All in all, I found some interesting ideas in this book, in between the theoretical parts. It was marred, shockingly for a book published by Columbia University Press, by some outrageous typos: "Virgina Wolfe," "As You Like" instead of "As You Like It" for the Shakespearean play, etc.).

Thanks for that excellent review of Globalectics, Rebecca. I bought it, of course, but I probably won't read it for awhile.

You were the one who alerted me to its existence, Darryl! And, thanks!

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
Cross-posted from my Club Read and 75 Books thread.



Catherine the Great was a remarkable woman; indeed, she was a remarkable person. Born Sophia Augusta Fredericka, the daughter of a minor German prince and his teenage wife who never cared for her, but who hoped to fulfill her ambitions through her, she was taken to Russia at the age of 14 to marry Peter, the extremely peculiar and emotionally stunted nephew of the Empress Elizabeth (a daughter of Peter the Great), who was next in line to the Russian throne. Her job was to produce an heir to continue the Romanov line. Shunned by her husband (who flirted incessantly with her ladies in waiting but who may have had physical problems as well as emotional ones that interfered with sexual activity), she remained a virgin for seven years until pressure to produce the heir led her to take a lover.

During the the long years of unhappiness and torment while Elizabeth was empress, she read incessantly in both Russian (which she learned) and French, developing an interest in the Enlightenment writers and philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot), and became very well educated through her own efforts. In a phrase that charmed me, Massie writes, "Books were her refuge," something I have always thought about myself, and goes on to say that "She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket." She was not only well read and curious, but had great strength of will and determination; people enjoyed talking with her and became devoted supporters, as evidenced their encouragement and active participation in the overthrow (and subsequent death) of her husband when he briefly became emperor after the death of Elizabeth.

Catherine is perhaps most famous for her lovers, just as Cleopatra was perhaps most famous for hers, but she should be recognized for her array of accomplishments during her more than 30 years as empress. Not only did she negotiate the complex personal politics of her court and successfully put down a rebellion, but she opened up a southern route to the sea for Russia (by taking land, especially land providing access to the Black Sea and the mouths of rivers, from the Ottoman empire), built a southern naval fleet, and built up towns and villages in the Crimea and southern Russia generally; she tried but failed to improve life for the serfs; in collusion with first the Prussians and then the Austrians, she annexed a huge portion of Poland to Russia in three partitions; she became the premier art collector in Europe and created the collection that became the Hermitage; through her own example she demonstrated the safety and benefits of smallpox vaccinations, modernizing medicine, and built hospitals; and she brought western European philosophy and culture to Russia, among other accomplishments.

She was an autocrat, and believed in the monarchy, but also believed that autocracy should be enlightened and that the key to success was taking heed of what the public wanted. She is quoted by an aide to Potemkin as having said, "It's not as easy as you think. . . .I examine the circumstances. I take advice. I consult the enlightened part of the people, and in this way I find out what sort of effects my laws will have. And when I am already convinced in advance of good approval, then I issue my orders, and have the pleasure of observing what you call blind obedience. That is the foundation of unlimited power. But believe me, they will not obey blindly when orders are not adapted to the opinion of the people." Nonetheless, "the people" were probably the nobility and the intelligentsia, not the millions of serfs; she was terrified by the French revolution because she could see what could (and did, about 125 years later) happen in Russia.

Massie introduces the readers to dozens of the people who were important in Catherine's life, from family and lovers to kings, courtiers, ministers, writers, and generals, and vividly depicts how she interacted with them, winning many to be devoted to her and some to oppose her. At the same time, he illustrates how much in her personal life was unhappy, starting with her relationship with her mother and with the Empress Elizabeth and continuing with her alienation from her own son and her heartbreak with some of of her lovers.

Although Massie had access to Catherine's memoirs (which did not cover her whole life) and other primary sources, I found he relied heavily on secondary sources, at least in his end-of-book selected bibliography and notes. I was captivated by the stories he told, but I did wonder how he knew what he knew. There was the same problem with lack of primary sources in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra: A Life, but she played fair and discussed her sources in the course of the book. I also thought the maps could have been better.

Great review of Catherine. I am hoping to read it soon.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama



I've been immersed in this history of the French Revolution, and the period immediately leading up to it, for nearly two months, 875 pages of dense, albeit readable and often witty, prose, enlivened by many contemporary illustrations. Schama announces in his preface that he is taking a revisionist approach to the history, and that he is reverting to a 19th century style and writing it as a narrative. I am not sufficiently versed in the history of 18th century France (actually, I'm not versed in it at all) to evaluate his analysis, except to say that it seems to make sense as he tells it, but I definitely appreciated the chronological (as opposed to thematic) organization, even though I sometimes completely lost track of who people were, as Schama brings in dozens, if not hundreds, of secondary characters. In the end, although I enjoyed and learned a lot from the book, I often felt as though there were lots and lots of trees and it was hard to see the forest.

So what is Schama's revisionist approach? It takes a variety of forms. He argues that the prerevolutionary period, far from being only a deadening morass of ancient customs, was actually a time of great change. spurred by news of the American revolution, enlightenment philosophy, the writings of Rousseau, scientific exploration and experimentation (including, dramatically, hot air balloons), early steps towards manufacturing and industrialization (which upset the guild system), and more frequent and rapid transportation of goods around France. Often nobles, more than the bourgeoisie or the peasants, were the ones behind these advances (after all, they had the time and the money). He also argues that "a patriotic culture of citizenship was created in the decades after the Seven Years' War, and that it was thus a cause rather than a product of the French Revolution." In fact, he spends so long on the prerevolutionary period that it takes him 368 pages to reach the storming of the Bastille.

Schama believes that violence was built into the revolution from the beginning, that "it was not merely an unfortunate by-product of politics, or the disagreeable instrument by which other more virtuous ends were accomplished, or vicious ones were thwarted. In some depressingly unavoidable sense, violence was the revolution itself." Some examples: the "September massacres" of some 1400 Parisian political prisoners, the brutal repression of the brutal uprising in the Vendée and elsewhere, and later, during the Terror, with perhaps one-third of the population killed in certain regions, and with some of the revolutionary military leaders coming up with ideas (unused) that were "sinister anticipations of the technological killings of the 20th century."

Another of Schama's ideas is "the problematic relationship between patriotism and liberty, which, in the Revolution, turns into a brutal competition between the power of the state and the effervescence of politics." Indeed, the chaos of the Estates General and its successors soon turns into absolutism and the need to exterminate enemies. "Revolutionary democracy would be guillotined in the name of revolutionary government." The analogy with the Russian revolution is obvious.

Economically speaking, the Revolution didn't really help the peasants or the poor in the cities, and the revolutionary government still had to deal with bread prices; indeed, in some ways the revolutionary years were harder on the poor than the prior old regime. Schama also makes a convincing argument that "the "bourgeoisie" which Marxist history long believed to be the essential beneficiary of the Revolution was, in fact, its principal victim" because of the attacks during the Terror on mercantile and industrial enterprises in port towns on the Atlantic and Mediterranean and in textile centers in northeastern France.

Perhaps most importantly for the way he tells the history, Schama argues for the importance of individual actions as opposed to theories of the inevitable progress of history. As he writes in the preface, "Nor does the Revolution seem any longer to conform to a grand historical design, preordained by inexorable forces of social change. Instead it seem a thing of contingencies and unforeseen consequences . . . For as the imperatives of "structure" have weakened, those of individual agency, and especially of revolutionary utterance, have become correspondingly more important." Throughout the book, Schama uses quotes from people involved in the actions to illustrate what they were thinking.

I only knew the broad outlines of the revolution before reading this book, and became interested in reading it after I read Hilary Mantel's novel about Robespierre, Desmoulins, and Danton, A Place of Greater Safety, several years ago. So there was much I didn't know anything about, much I learned that was quite fascinating (the origins of the Marseillaise, for example), and much I learned that was quite depressing, especially when Schama focused on the widespread and obsessive violence.

This is such a complex book that I really can only touch on some on the major themes. Schama weaves together a vast number of contemporary sources: philosophical musings, letter-writers, records of speeches, newspaper articles (the revolutionaries were prolific writers), diaries, and more, in a remarkably impressive way. The illustrations of contemporary artists and political cartoonists add immeasurably to the book. Finally, Schama also has a wonderful way with words.

Thanks for the review--I had intended to read Citizens but was scared off by the length. You makeit sound do-able--maybe I will give it a try.

Thanks for stopping by, banjo. It is readable but dense, and requires time and concentration. Plus, it takes a long time to get to any revolutionary action.

The Forgetting River: A Modern Tale of Survival, Identity, and the Inquisition by Doreen Carvajal



Well, this was a disappointing read on a variety of levels, and I confess I only skimmed it. I have long been interested in the so-called "crypto-Jews," people in the US southwest, and also elsewhere, who have been raised as Catholics but who have "family traditions" that are Jewish customs; these are people descended from conversos, Jews who ostensibly converted to Catholicism because of the Spanish Inquisition and its aftermath but who secretly retained their Jewish faith. In this book, Carvajal, whose family came to the US from Costa Rica, comes to believe her family has converso, and therefore Jewish, roots, and tries to explore this and find out if it's true.

Alas, the book is mostly the story of her thoughts and the people she talks to as she moves her family from France to a little town in Andalusia. Every now and then, she discusses conversos, the history of the Inquisition, symbolism in art, and genetic testing to determine family origins -- but when she does, I wish she cited sources. She is a journalist by profession, and writes in a breezy style, but there are places where the information is crying out for footnotes or endnotes so the reader can have a sense of where it comes from. And, although this book is partly about Carvajal, the reader, or this one anyway, doesn't get a real sense of her, or of the people she describes. Additonally, it definitely could have used an editor -- Carvajal repeats the same information in different parts of the book in several places..

So, this book, partly the story of her exploration, partly a portrait of a little Spanish town, partly a little bit of history, didn't work for me.

48: Too bad, because it sure looks like it would be interesting... history, mystery, genealogy...

87. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander



There have been several excellent reviews of this book, but it is so chilling, so shocking, so important that I feel compelled to add my own. In a well researched, clearly written, step-by-step progression, Michelle Alexander shows that the number of people in US prisons has grown from around 300,000 in around 1980 to more than two million today, with some three-fourths of all those incarcerated for drug offenses being black or Latino, thanks to the impact of the "War on Drugs" and associated legal policies, all of which are "colorblind" and never mention race (and despite the fact that blacks and whites use and sell drugs at the same rate, at that therefore the vast majority of drug dealers and users are white). Further, because people leaving prison enter the parole and probation phases of the penal system, and are stigmatized as felons, they lose access to many of the necessities of life: jobs, government-funded housing, government aid, etc., not to mention the right to vote. Hence, Alexander explains, the drug war has initiated the new Jim Crow.

There are so many horrifying facts in this book that it is difficult to pick and choose what to include here. Alexander first reviews the history of slavery and Jim Crow as techniques for denying African-Americans the rights that white US citizens have. She then goes into detail about the origins of the drug war, announced by President Reagan at a time when drug use in the US was actually going down and when less than 2 percent of Americans thought drug use was an important issue. Alexander notes, "By waging a war on drug users and dealers, Reagan made good on his promise to crack down on the racially defined "others" -- the undeserving." Essentially, making the drug war a federal issue enabled Reagan to get around the fact that most law enforcement is almost entirely based at the state and local levels. Budgets for federal law enforcement agencies exploded, the media exploited the use of crack (thought of as a "black" drug), the federal government provided military equipment to local law enforcement and allowed local law enforcement agencies to keep property forfeited by drug dealers, and the courts (including the Supreme Court) rendered decisions that made it possible for the police to obtain "consent" to search people more or less at will and to have "probable cause" to search almost anybody. Further, the volume of drug arrests became so high that many people had no legal representation and were encouraged/pressured to plead guilty to lesser charges, charges that nonetheless made them end up in prison and be labeled as felons when they were released. It is important to note that most of the people arrested (four out of five in 2005, for example) were arrested for possession, not for dealing (and most of the dealers were people dealing a little to friends), so that the war on drugs is failing to arrest the high-level traffickers.

Alexander then goes on to describe how a "color-blind" program can end up almost completely incarcerating black people, especially when study after study shows that while "people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates . . . whites, particularly white youth, are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than people of color." For example, one study showed that "white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students." Further, "white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as have their African-American counterparts."

Alexander attributes the vast discrepancy in incarceration to discretion. As drug use and dealing are both "ubiquitous" and "consensual," unlike crimes such as murder, robbery, and rape, police have to look for them and also have to decide where to look. She says that once politicians and the media defined drug use as a black problem (see the discussion of crack use), conscious and unconscious bias led the police to focus on poor black communities. In what for me was the most shocking part of this book, Alexander describes a series of Supreme Court cases that systematically allowed police officers broad discretion in investigating people for drug crimes, eliminated the use of statistical evidence to challenge racial bias in sentencing, denied defense counsel the ability to obtain information relating to racial bias through the discovery process, upheld the use of ridiculous "non-racial" reasons for striking black jurors from juries, allowed police to use race as one factor in stopping someone if it isn't the only factor, and denied citizens and civil rights and other groups the right to challenge racial bias in court. As Alexander says, "The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias."

Alexander further discusses the impact of the "felon" label on people released from prison, and how it effectively denies them the ability to earn a living, support their families, find affordable housing, and vote, and she discusses the parallels and differences between the system of mass incarceration and the Jim Crow system. While slavery exploited black people, and Jim Crow subordinated them, she says, mass incarceration marginalizes them. Finally, she discusses some ways we could try to get out of this system, pervasive as it is. She writes:

." . . we need to talk about race openly and honestly. We must stop debating crime policy as though it were purely about crime. People must come to understand the racial history and origins of mass incarceration -- the many ways our conscious and unconscious biases have distorted our judgments over the years about what is fair, appropriate, and constructive when responding to drug use and drug crime. We must come to see, too, how our economic insecurities and racial resentments have been exploited or political gain, and how this manipulation has caused suffering for people of all colors. Finally, we must admit, out loud, that it was because of race that we didn't' care much about what happened to "those people" and imagined the worst things possible about them. The fact that our lack of care and concern may have been, at times, unintentional or unconscious does not mitigate our crime -- if we refuse, when given the chance, to make amends."

I must confess I am less optimistic about this than Alexander, although she is not terribly optimistic herself. The drug war has continued unabated since the time of Reagan, through both Republican and Democratic administration (both Clinton and now Obama have been enthusiasts for it), and there are now generations of poor African-Americans who have been subjected to the humiliation of searches, the horrors of prison, and the bleakness of life post-incarceration. I know that I'm a pessimist, it's difficult to seen what can be done. I am ashamed for my country.

Great review--thanks. I really need to read this book to help me in my arguments with law-and-order coworkers.

Excellent review, Rebecca.

Fascinating and depressing review, Rebecca.

That was an excellent review of what sounds like a very good book. It provides a coherent story backed by research of a situation I have seen in my work as a criminal defense attorney for over thirty years. The State where I live has a population that is 35% African-American and a prison population is approximately 65% African-American. My fellow attorneys and the population use a phrase "being pulled over DWB", which stands for driving while black. That refers to a police officer making a traffic stop of someone for a missing tag light or a window tint that is too dark for a car when the driver is African-American.
Particularly in rural counties this will lead to the search of the car after the officer indicates they can smell marijuana around the car. Once an individual is marginalized with a felony conviction illegal activities become the only way to put food on the table. This starts a cycle of going in and out of prison for the rest of their life.
I am really glad to hear about this book and it will go to the top of my wish list.

DWB is a fact of life here too, as my African-American friends tell me. And of course in NYC, we have a lot of people affected by the "stop and frisk" policy, which could also be described as WWB -- walking while black.

It is an excellent book, something everyone in the US should really read, from the president on down. There is some discussion of it on my Club Read thread, starting with post 35.

Great (and helpful) reviews! Definitely adding Memoirs of a Revolutionary to my list. I'm still dithering on Catherine the Great, in part because when the subject is a woman whose history was altered in the public perception by men who hated her power I'd rather have the biography written by a woman who can understand those aspects more clearly.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who disliked The Forgetting River. I kept seeing insanely positive reviews and wondering what kind of books those reviewers normally read that they were in love with that one.

Thanks for your comments, Meredith, and for stopping by!

The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore



In this collection of essays, Jill Lepore, one of my favorite writers, tells not the story of America, but stories about the stories we tell about America. Ranging chronologically from "Here He Lyes" (in both senses of the word), which discusses Captain John Smith's mid-17th century chronicles of the failed Jamestown colony, to "Rap Sheet," which starts from a particularly gruesome 21st century family murder and then considers the shockingly high US murder rate, and "To Wit," which looks at inaugural addresses, Lepore also covers writers' impressions of the United States (e.g., Dickens and Poe), books and documents (e.g., the first Webster's dictionary, the I.O.U., the dime novel, and paper ballots), politicians and political writers (e.g., Thomas Paine, George Washington, and Andrew Jackson), people, books, and ideas that stirred the popular imagination (e.g., Uncle Tom's Cabin, Clarence Darrow, the story of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and Charlie Chan), and more.

Lepore is a historian, and her intention in writing about these topics is to tease out ideas about how Americans think about themselves, including how they delude themselves (or how we delude ourselves). As she says in her introduction, "One way to read this book, then, is as a study of the American tall tale." She also says, about her motivation in writing these essays:

"I wrote them because I wanted to learn how to tell stories better. But mostly I wrote them because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn't quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak. Also, what people will tell you about the past is very often malarkey., p. 15

What I particularly like about Jill Lepore, in addition to her way with words and her sharp wit, is her eye for making connections that aren't immediately obvious and for finding subtle nuances in the stories she tells. The essay on Longfellow's "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," for example, makes the point that Longfellow was writing as much about the abolitionist movement as about Revere's ride. And the essay on printed paper ballots, adopted in the late 19th century based on the Australian system, notes that while they cut down on corruption and violence at polling stations, they also enabled the literacy tests that were used to discriminate against poor African-American voters.

I certainly learned a lot from this book but, perhaps more importantly, reading Lepore is a delight.

Great review! I haven't heard of Lepore before--sounds fascinating. Definitely on my list to read.

58: I really like her too, and I'd wishlist the book if I had any remote hope of ever getting to it. These are not New Yorker essays?

Yes, qebo, many of them were in The New Yorker, which is where I first encountered Lepore several years ago (when I was better about reading my New Yorkers!) and I've been reading her ever since. She has been prolific in releasing books this year; earlier this year I also read The Mansion of Happiness, which was another collection of her essays. I've also read New York Burning, the story of a series of arsons blamed on enslaved African-Americans in 18th century New York, and my favorite, The Whites of Their Eyes, which skewers the Tea Party obsession with "the founders" by quoting both contemporary Tea Partiers and 18th century writers and at the same time shows what history is and what it isn't.

"History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence."

There is a lot to think about in that sentence.

I did a closing argument in a trial recently. I had to tell a story that was in my client's favor that fit the evidence. Maybe reading a lot of history helps to do that, we won the case.

It takes a combination of skills to see connections between different historical events that are not obvious on their face. A lot of knowledge, a subtle intelligence and a good dose of common sense.

I keep saying that I am not going to buy any more books until I read what I have and then you put this terrific author in my path.

Still in Sandy now; more later

99. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum



Anne Applebaum has written another thoughtful, readable, and important book, although one that is not quite as impressive and moving as Gulag: A History. Through a focus on three countries -- East Germany, Poland, and Hungary -- she tells the story of how the Soviet Union engineered and then maintained a communist takeover of eastern Europe starting before World War II was over and continuing, not to the fall of the Wall in 1989, but to the rebellions and the somewhat relaxed control after the death of Stalin. She chose these three countries, although she refers to others, "because they were so very different," particularly with respect to their roles in the war and their histories in preceding centuries.

Applebaum starts the book with a look at "zero hour," the moment when bombs stopped falling and the guns stopped shooting, and at the physical and psychological devastation spread across eastern Europe. Not only did the victorious Red Army take revenge by looting and raping its way through the liberated/conquered territories, but the communist leaders in Moscow had already been training eastern European communists both in ideology and practical matters (including the importance of secret police), and also in their "peculiar culture and rigid structures . . . (and) strictly hierarchical organization and nomenclature." These leaders were to become known as "Moscow communists" (as opposed to those who sprang up in their own countries) and were flown back to their home countries on Soviet planes to play their role in the communist takeovers.

With chapters on the secret police, continuing military activities, occupation and ethnic transfers/"cleansing" (where she notes "ethnic conflict -- deep, bitter, violent ethnic conflict, between many different kinds of groups in many countries -- was Hitler's true legacy"), an emphasis on youth indoctrination and organization, the central importance of radio, international and national politics, and efforts to force Marxist economics, including nationalization and industrial growth, on the various countries, Applebaum demonstrates how the Soviets were able to take control in eastern Europe. In the second part of the book, she focuses on these countries a few years later, in the period of "high Stalinism." Here she discusses how the countries dealt with the church and with internal "enemies," the role and nature of education for both children and workers, socialist realist art and the impact on writers, artists, and musicians, and the building of new "ideal" cities and how they led to the perpetuation of a class system in a "classless" society.

Towards the end of the book, Applebaum turns to how such an oppressive system could have been maintained for so long, discussing, in turn, "reluctant collaborators" and "passive opponents," before turning to "revolutions." For the reluctant collaboraters, she notes:

"Yet most people in the communist regimes did not succumb to dramatic bribes, furious threats, or elaborate rewards. Most people wanted to be neither party bosses nor angry dissidents. They wanted to get on with their lives, rebuild their countries, educate their children, feed their families, and stay far away from those in power. But the culture of High Stalinist Eastern Europe made it impossible to do so in silent neutrality. No one could be apolitical: the system demanded that all citizens constantly sing its praises, however reluctantly. And so the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their souls to become informers but rather succumbed to constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure. The Soviet system excelled at creating large groups of people who disliked the regime and knew the propaganda was false, but who nevertheless felt compelled by circumstances to go along with it." (p. 392)

In the passive opponent chapter, she examines the role of jokes (and tells some of them), of odd clothing choices, and of escape. Finally, she discusses the impact of the stunning news of Stalin's death in March 1953, and the changes this caused over the next several years -- the slight lessening of control, the impact of communist visitors from around the world and especially from the west, the new feelings of freedom -- that led ultimately to Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest in 1956.

In her epilogue, Applebaum briefly covers what happened in eastern Europe between 1956 and 1989, and subsequently. She notes that as time passed, the countries began to have much less in common with each other, and that groups engaged in an "independent life of society" began to flourish, such as unofficial "peace" groups, underground Scout troops, poetry readings, independent trade unions, and more, and that these posed "a fundamental -- and unanswerable -- challenge to regimes that strove, in Mussolini's words, to be "all-embracing.""

In writing this book, Applebaum had access to recently released documents from eastern Europe, and was able to interview aging survivors of the Iron Curtain years. As with Gulag, these help to bring the general and the political back to the personal, although she does not, in this book, include nearly as many literary quotes.

Finally, a warning.

"In their drive for power, the Bolsheviks, their Eastern European acolytes, and their imitators farther afield attacked not only their political opponents but also peasants, priests, schoolteachers, traders, journalists, writers, small businessmen, students, and artists, along with institutions such people had built and maintained over centuries. They damaged, undermined, and sometimes eliminated churches, newspapers, literary and educational societies, companies and retail shops, stock markets, banks, sports clubs, and universities. Their success reveals an unpleasant truth about human nature: if enough people are sufficiently determined, and if they are backed by adequate resources and force, then they can destroy ancient and apparently permanent legal, political, educational, and religious institutions, sometimes for good. And if civil society could be so deeply damaged in nations as disparate, as historic, and as culturally rich as those of Eastern Europe, then it can be similarly damaged anywhere. If nothing else, the history of postwar Stalinization proves how fragile civilization can turn out to be." pp. 467-468

In the House of the Interpreter by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o



In the second volume of his memoirs, Ngũgĩ tells the story of his time in Alliance, the elite boarding school he was admitted to at the end of Dreams in a Time of War, the first such school for African students in British-ruled Kenya. It is the time of the so-called Mau Mau rebellion against British rule and, for Ngũgĩ, the reality of that conflict and its direct impact on him and his family intrudes into the excitement he feels about excelling at school and absorbing some of the character and other skills imparted by headmaster Carey Francis and his staff. The reader acutely feels the humiliation -- and, far worse, the torture and killings -- the Kenyans suffer at the hands of the British, even while enjoying Ngũgĩ's coming of age. Having recently read Tsitsi Dangarembga's presumably somewhat autobiographical novel about her time in a boarding school during the Rhodesian/Zimbabwean conflict, The Book of Not, I found it interesting to contrast their experiences.

The title of the books comes from an excerpt from Pilgrim's Progress about the Interpreter's House, which the headmaster, in a scene in the book, compares to Alliance, "where the dust we had brought from the outside could be swept away by the law of good behavior and watered by the gospel of Christian service." Ngũgĩ's writing is just as perceptive as always in this memoir, and his story is interesting and well worth reading. However, it is much more straightforward than his memoir about his younger years, and doesn't have all of the magic and nuance of that work.

36: Shin Dong-hyuk of Escape from Camp 14 will be on 60 Minutes tomorrow.

Cool, but probably will be driving home then. Maybe I'll be able to find it on the internet.

The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes



This is a strange book about strange people in a strange time -- and yet, are they that different from us, and is our time so different from theirs? Originally published in 1928 and recently reissued by NYRB, The Stammering Century portrays a series of 19th century revivalists, religion/cult creators, founders of idealistic communities, temperance proponents, spiritualists, medical quacks and more -- mostly in their own words and those of their contemporaries. The title is a quote from Horace Greeley who described, in Seldes's words, the people who "were vehemently stammering out God's curse on material progress, and announcing Christ's Kingdom on earth, or the New Eden in Indiana" -- as opposed to those who were conquering the West, building businesses, and developing engineering advances.

He starts with Jonathan Edwards, an uncompromising, intellectually rigorous 18th century minister, to illustrate what the people in the rest of the book were rejecting, and moves on to the revival meetings at which thousands of people came together and hysterically "jerked" to show that they were saved; religious leaders who rejected sexual relationships because the second coming of Christ had already happened and thus people were sinless and those who advocated sexual freedom for the same reason (strangely, or not so strangely, the religious leaders were always the ones with the most sexual freedom); and what he calls a "messianic murderer." He also portrays "radicals" (although not in the sense we would use the term today) and "reformers," people who tried to found idealistic communities, such as Bronson Alcott and others, often with a "religious" underpinning, sometimes with an associated business (as with the community that for many years manufactured Oneida silverware). He displays how the original temperance movement, which advocated individual rejection of drinking, morphed into the prohibition movement which forced the ban on alcohol on everyone, and illustrates some of its leaders. He covers the beginning of spiritualism (communication with the dead) and shows how it was exposed as fraud, as well as the infinite variety of medical quackery. Finally, as the 19th century draws to a close, he portrays the completely permissive and confused "New Thought," which claimed that if you focused on something good you could make it happen (sound familiar?), and Christian Science, which claimed there was no such thing as illness and death.

Throughout, Seldes lets these "fanatics and radicals," "messiahs and mountebanks" speak for themselves, reveal the looniness and grandiosity of their own thoughts, although he occasionally interjects the perfect understated zinger to deflate them. He notes:

"The underlying motive of the radical cults was salvation -- in modern jargon they were escape mechanisms -- and the underlying motive of nineteenth-century America was the desire for mastery. Through cults, escape was offered: from the terror of sex, by refraining from intercourse or by a special sanctification of intercourse -- the means differ but the motive is the same; from working for a living, by communism or cooperation; from ill health, by Christian Science; from awkwardness, by the cult of Personality; from moral responsibility, by Phrenology; from the drabness of life, by imagining a Utopia; from loneliness, by accepting the friendship of Christ; from fear, by accepting his intercession; from death, by Spiritualism, Christian Science, and Christianity." p. 402

He also makes the point that it was not just the uneducated masses who fell for these cults, as Mencken would have had it but, at least initially, by the educated. "The astounding thing about all the quackeries, fads, and movements of the past hundred years in America is that they were first accepted by superior people, by men and women of education, intelligence, breeding, wealth and experience." (Yes, he was writing in the 1920s.) He notes, "I came gradually to want to prove nothing. What I did want was to compose a sort of anatomy of the reforming temperament and to follow it, by winding roads, to the spiritual settlements it made for itself. What the man thinks who sets himself apart from humanity and expects humanity to follow him . . ." Finally, in a summary chapter, he writes:

"A dry world, a world of sanitary tenements, a world of sexless friendliness, a world without bawdy plays, a world in which capital and labor are friends -- all these are the concerns of a single temperament: the idealist. In the service of an Ideal there can be no compromise. As Carry Nation put it, one meddles. The radical-reformer-Prohibitionist is convinced of his God-given authority to interfere with the lives of other men, in order to improve them. Eighty years ago, he withdrew from society, founded his own community, and preached Abstention. Today, he passes laws and cries, I forbid. He believes still in the depravity of man as he is. He still has the ideal of Man before the Fall." pp. 407-408

I should note that there are no footnotes/endnotes in this book, which is filled with quotes. This is intentional, according to Seldes's "Sources" section, in which he quotes a writer who felt it was inappropriate to show the "machinery" of a book is to "stress the toil which has gone into its making, not the pleasure." "It is perfectly obvious that in a book of this kind," he writes, "the principal sources are the works of each of the people studied, and . . . the principal biographical studies." It works, but it seems odd by contemporary standards.

And that's it for 2012! Here's my 2013 thread.

68: Oh, that looks interesting. Onto the wishlist. But 2013 is to be a year of delayed gratification...

Interesting book. I'll have to track it down.

Moved review of My Century to my 2013 thread.

My Century is now on my wishlist. Thank you.

Robert

Oops! Just realized I posted this on my 2012 thread! Will move later ( on iPhone now).

Thanks, Robert.