King Leopold's Soliloquy - Book Review

King Leopold's Soliloquy by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If Leopold lived today, he'd probably tweet like Trump did. Or at least that's how Twain's imagining of him seems.

Published in 1905 in the middle of one of the first human rights campaigns of the modern world, Twain's format here reminds me of Sarah Cooper's lip syncing of actual things Trump said; comedy plumbed from the tragedy of reality.

Twain's Leopold is a master of narcissistic self-pity combined with subterfuge combined with throwing blame around in all directions and at all walls, hoping some of it will stick well enough that people will forget the original sin.

Brilliant satire. Combined with excellent reportage, as Twain includes excerpts of some of the written and pictorial evidence of the atrocities, placing them artfully as as fodder designed to elicit a continuation of Leopold's rant but structurally educating the reader as to the realities of the horror in the Congo.

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King Leopold's Ghost - Book Review

King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In the Victorian Era, most Europeans and Americans only knew of the Africa depicted by Henry Morton Stanley (of "Livingston, I presume" fame). Stanley was an influencer. The term might not have existed then but the concept most certainly did and Stanley was an effective practitioner. The tools he used were different than the multiple tools available today; he only had dispatches of his adventures sent to newspapers by wire rather than artfully-composed photos on Instagram and 140-character tweet-storms, but the concept is the same. Stanley created Africa for those who had never been there. His expert voice defined the place and its people. Much of what he created has more to do with fictional embellishment than truth, of course, but worse than his elaborations and embroideries is Stanley's attitude towards the native peoples; he was the hunter and they were the hunted. They were game. Pack animals. His dismissal of their humanity was such an ingrained part of his Victorian psyche that he approached descriptions of the people he encountered without seeming awareness that they were of the same taxonomic species as he was. That was the story he told Europeans. A story they believed. Because it was the only one being told.

"For Europeans, Africa remained the supplier of valuable raw materials--human bodies and elephant tusks."

Joseph Conrad's portrait of Africa, Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, is based on Conrad's experience on the crew of the Roi des Belges, a Congo river steamer, in the early 1890s. It details the horrors visited upon the native peoples of the Congo. But Conrad still approached the horrors through a similar lens to Stanley. Granted, the lens was beginning to fog up and crack, but there's still enough of European supremacy in Conrad's telling that the novel has become controversial. It has been dissected and analyzed and lauded and excoriated. Is it a critique of colonialism? Or simply an example of it?

And those are the two stories we've historically had of European colonization in Africa.

Most people have never heard of Edmund Morel, Roger Casement, George Washington Williams, and William H. Sheppard. These are the voices that Hochschild's book amplifies. Hochschild also amplifies the few African voices that can be found from the era; many of those voices had never been heard or published (including an interesting bit of trivia from the Commission of Inquiry that Leopold set up in 1890 to "investigate" the reports of abuse; he had stacked the commission so that the report would be favorable but the overwhelming atrocity of the stories his three commissioners heard caused them to issue a scathing rebuke of human rights violations in the Congo. But the report did not quote any of the African voices from the thousands of witnesses detailing the parade of horror; it expressed the abuse and murder in generalities, effectively taking much of the bite out of the rebuke. The witness testimony was sealed and hidden away in a closed section of the state archive in Belgium, not to be released again until the 1980s).

The atrocities were horrendous. The European colonizers were violently abusive to the African natives. However the native tribes of the Congo weren't innocent naifs. As Hochschild writes, "Although some Congo peoples, like the Pygmies, were admirably peaceful, it would be a mistake to see most of them as paragons of primeval innocence. Many practiced slavery and ritual cannibalism and were as likely to make war on other clans or ethnic groups as people anywhere on earth. And traditional warfare in this part of Africa, where a severed head or hand was sometimes proof of an enemy killed in battle, was as harsh as warfare elsewhere."

The inherent violent nature of all humanity was used at the time as an excuse for the terrors of colonization.

"Leopold's will treated the Congo as if it were just a piece of uninhabited real estate to be disposed of by its owner. In this the king was no different from other Europeans of his age, explorers, journalists, and empire-builders alike, who talked of Africa as if it were without Africans: an expanse of empty space waiting to be filled by the cities and railway lines constructed through the magic of European industry. To see Africa instead as a continent of coherent societies, each with its own culture and history, took a leap of empathy, a leap that few, if any, of the early European or American visitors to the Congo were able to make. To do so would have meant seeing Leopold's regime not as progress, not as civilization, but as a theft of land and freedom."

But this same thought progress is still used today in the philosophy of neocolonialism, as well as in the current wrestling match of what we do about the complex, non-heroic parts of Euro-centric history. An underlying theme, then and today, is 'if the Europeans hadn't abused the native peoples, the native peoples would have abused one other; with European colonization, they got railroads at least. Right?'

The politics of forgetting are powerful. And, as Hochschild points out, "the politics of empathy are fickle."

That's why books like this one are so important. Culture changes slowly. Soooo slowly. This book was written in 1998. Reading it in 2021, during BLM movements in the US, I see how far we've come but mourn how far we yet have left to go.

"In Berlin, there are no museums or monuments to the slaughtered Hereros, and in Paris and Lisbon no visible reminders of the rubber terror that slashed in half the population of parts of French and Portuguese Africa. In the American South, there are hundreds of Civil War battle monuments and preserved plantation manor houses for every exhibit that in any way marks the existence of slavery. And yet the world we live in--its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence--is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful event we try to forget."

"An ancient English law made it a crime to witness a murder or discover a corpse and not raise a 'hue and cry.' But we live in a world of corpses and only about some of them is there a hue and cry."

"What happened in the Congo was indeed mass murder on a vast scale, but the sad truth is that the men who carried it out for Leopold were no more murderous than many Europeans then at work or at war elsewhere in Africa. Conrad said it best: 'All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.'"

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The River of Doubt - Book Review

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The level of research it took to create this account astounds me. So much stuffed into this book; history, geology, anthropology, botany, ecology, plate tectonics, evolution. Biography is secondary. Or even tertiary.

I spent most of this book in disbelief that people would launch themselves into the Amazon rainforest so woefully unprepared. TAKE THE CANOES, DAMMIT!

And almost as an aside, Millard tells the history of the Cinta Larga, which the footnotes cite as coming from "author's interview." Like she just marched into the Amazon to talk to them. I want a book that tells THAT story next, please.

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Book Review: The Imperial Cruise

The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War by James D. Bradley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Was this a retelling of the cruise? That would have made a good book.
Was this a balanced re-evaluation of Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy? That would have made a good book too.

But it was neither. And both.

It retold the cruise but not in enough detail to make it interesting.

It re-evaluated Roosevelt but lacked the sophistication to make the re-evaluation impactful.

It was like reading high school IB student's IA; full of heady ideas that are over-footnoted but not scholarly. Also full of that idealism one often finds in young people who have not yet come to terms with the idea that there is no black and white in history; there is only gray.

I dog-eared a lot of pages, though. But that's because I was either checking up on his facts (often inaccurate) or tagging Bradley's immature prose (things like calling Roosevelt "Teddy" or Taft "Big Bill" when he was attempting to excoriate them which, of course, weakened the power of his argument)

Bradley's implied thesis is valid; Roosevelt was racist and his ideas about other ethnicities informed his foreign policy.

But Bradley's stated thesis is a stretch; Roosevelt is responsible for World War II in the Pacific because he gave Japan permission to become an imperial power then didn't follow through with supporting them after the Russo-Japanese war.

Yes, Japan was frustrated that they won the war but failed to get reparations from Russia, a sting that reminded them of when they won the first Sin0-Japanese war and then Russia, France, and Germany took away the land they gained.

Yes, Roosevelt was part of the negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese war (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize) but to lay the entire blame of World War II in the Pacific on that moment is high-school-level folly. Again, history is not black and white; it's gray. Certainly, Roosevelt's interactions with the Japanese in the early 1900s contributed to the Japan's growth into a militaristic and hungry imperial power, but that is only one swath of black contributing to the gray of the whole story.

The main problem with this book is that Bradley started with his mind already made up and an agenda to prove.

In his afterword he writes;
"Theodore Roosevelt wrote, 'Peace may only come through war.' In my lifetime the United States has benevolently spent trillions of dollars trying to prove that erroneous notion. In the twentieth century, America extended its military to Asia. Now it's time to work on the human links between cultures. For the past ten years, the James Bradley Peace Foundation and Youth For Understanding have sent American students to live with families overseas. Perhaps in the future when we debate whether to fight it out or talk it out, one of these Americans might make a difference."

Scholarly historians should not have an agenda, however laudable that agenda may be.

And it's a shame, because a scholarly re-evaluation of Roosevelt and the racial attitudes of his generation is sorely needed in our 21st century world.

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Book Review - A History of the World in 6 Glasses

A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think I would have enjoyed this book much more if I didn't already have some knowledge of much of the history it relates. This book is what I call a pop history. And I don't use this term derogatorily; I love pop history. Pop history makes history palatable. Interesting. Like gossip. It is usually lighter on deeper themes and academic prowess but it's readable and entertaining, and usually teaches me a little something. Sometimes I get interested enough in a topic or a person that I look in the bibliography for dour historical tomes to learn more.

But this pop history covers ground I've already covered in the dour historical tomes, so it was less a-ha! and more, oh, yeah, that.

So, really, it's probably a five star book if you don't already know the greatest hits of ancient history (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome), early modern European history (Enlightenment), Chinese history (mostly as it relates to Britain and the opium wars), and American imperialism/isolation/path-to-superpower.

I learned about bappir, "beer bread" (unleavened bread containing the ingredients kept in government store houses and crumbled into the brewers vat) created just so beer ingredients could be stored for longer periods of time without rotting.

I learned that ancient depictions of beer drinking show one large vessel and many people around it with straws. Communal. Standage interpolates that the tradition of "clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid" is a nod to the ancient practice of drinking out of the same bowl.

Alcoholic beverages are intrinsically linked to climate; beer where grains grow, wine where grapes grow, rum where sugar grows. What is so abundant that we don't need to eat it all to survive so we can ferment some of it to get drunk?

Beer gets its reputation as barbaric because wine was the drink of the Roman empire because grapes grow in the Mediterranean climate and grains mostly grew in the north, which had to be conquered and "civilized" by Rome. When Rome fell, beer should have taken over again, as those northern Visigoths and Vandals came from the barbaric beer-drinking north to sack the empire, but Visigoths and Vandals liked wine, too, and passed laws making destroying vineyards illegal.

Wine is also central to Christianity, which, along with its connection to the Roman empire, contributes to its association with civilized humanity.

And why don't Muslims drink wine? Muhammed apparently preached abstention from alcohol because it clouds the mind (though he was known to enjoy lightly fermented date wine), but it could also be because the Islamic culture was trying to erase the Roman culture and Islam was trying to erase Christianity; erasing wine kills many birds with one stone.

And what is distilling? It makes fermented alcohol more-so. The boiling point of alcohol is lower than the boiling point of water, so the vapor collected in the distilling process produces a liquid with a much higher alcohol content than fermented beverages. So distilled wine is brandy. Distilled beer is whiskey.

And sugar and slaves. The Greek and Roman empire enslaved much of its population, but since the empire's fall, slavery in Europe was not as common. The spread of Christianity, which forbids the enslavement of one Christian by another Christian, contributed to the decrease of slavery. But then, in the race for empire and control of sugar, labor was needed. To get labor AND protect profit margin, slaves were needed. So theologians declared that Black Africans were not fully human, therefore they could not be converted to Christianity, therefore they could be enslaved.

Rum is distilled from the left-overs of the sugar trade. The stuff they were throwing away; it was made out of trash and didn't rot, so it kept easily on ships and in hot weather. Therefore, it became the drink of choice in the new world. It gets its name from the the southern England slang word "Rumbullion," meaning a brawl or violent commotion. Admiral Edward Vernon, trying to make the rum supply last longer, mixed it with water and lime and sugar; a primitive cocktail. This drink came to be called "grog" (Vernon's nickname was Old Grogram) and it also prevented scurvy, a bonus.

Did you know the Molasses Act caused the American Revolution? Well, maybe not, but Standage makes a convincing case. Molasses, the byproduct of the sugar industry which is distilled into rum, came mostly from the French colonies in the Caribbean. The British crown passed a law that their colonies in the Americas could only buy molasses from British islands. But the British sugar islands did not produce nearly enough molasses to supply the rum needs of the British colonies in the Americas. So the colonists ignored the law and the crown didn't enforce it. "Henceforth," Standage writes, "the colonists felt entitled to defy other laws that imposed seemingly unreasonable duties on items shipped to and from the colonies. As a result, the widespread defiance of the Molasses Act was an early step along the road to American independence." John Adams wrote at the time, "I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence. Many great events have proceeded from much smaller causes."

And coffee and the Enlightenment. For many years I have taught my history students that throughout much of history, water wasn't safe to drink, so fermented beverages were consumed instead. Coffee and tea, bringing water to a boiling point before ingesting it, makes water safe, too. Once these beverages were popularized of course people got new ideas; they weren't constantly besotted. They were hopped up on caffeine. Ergo, coffee caused the Enlightenment. Standage's chapters on coffee agree with my thesis. The coffee houses of 17th century London were the driving force of not only science and philosophy, but also business and commerce. "The period of rapid innovation in public and private finance, with the floating of joint stock companies, the buying and selling of shares, the development of insurance schemes, and the public financing of government debt, all of which culminated in London's eventual displacement of Amsterdam as the world's financial center, is known today as the Financial Revolution. The need for colonial wars made it necessary, and the fertile intellectual environment and speculative spirit of the coffeehouses made it possible." Standage goes further to interpolate that Seattle is home of Starbucks AND Microsoft...coffee, innovation, networking--just like 17th century London.

Tea. Spread through the Asian continent along with Buddhism (Taoist monks found it an invaluable aid to meditation, enhancing concentration and banishing fatigue). Then became an integral part of Chinese culture. Then adopted by Britain and edited into the height of their culture.

It also made people healthier in England. It made water safer. It had antibacterial antioxidants that passed into breastmilk and helped to reduce infant mortality. Tea helped keep people alive so they could live tightly packed in the cities and run the machines of the Industrial Revolution. It made Wedgewood and Twining household names. And it caused some horrific behavior in the colonies, government-sanctioned illegal drug smuggling, the Opium Wars. All for tea. And profit.

Standage's final beverage is Coca-Cola, which started as a snake oil cure and through serendipity and luck and war became a symbol not only of globalization but of the United States' power and prowess in driving the culture and economics of the entire world. It traveled with the military in two world wars (and was sanctioned and financially supported by the US government; the military built bottling plants for Coca-Cola AND allowed them a pass on sugar rations, all because Coke helped keep morale high).

My favorite anecdote, one I'd never heard before, was Coke as a Cold War weapon;
"Perhaps the most unlikely convert to Coca-Cola was General Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov, the Soviet Union's greatest military leader, who successfully defended Russia from German attack and later led his forces into Berlin to end the war in Europe. Zhukov was one of the few people who dared to disagree with Joseph Stalin, the brutal Soviet leader, who could not do away with Zhukov because of his popularity and heroic stature. During post-war negotiations over the division of Germany, Zhukov was introduced to Coca-Cola by Eisenhower and took a strong liking to the drink. But he was reluctant to be seen enjoying something so closely identified with American values, particularly as the rivalry between the two superpowers intensified. So Zhukov made an unusual request: Was it possible to make Coca-Cola without coloring, so that it resembled vodka, the traditional Russian drink? His request was passed to the Coca-Cola Company, which duly obliged and, with the endorsement of President Harry Truman, devised a colorless version. It was shipped to Zhukov in special cylindrical bottles, sealed with a white cap and labeled with a red Soviet star."

Pepsi, the also-ran, tried to disrupt Coca-Cola's world-wide dominance, mostly by attempting to capitalize in markets where Coke was hated because it was so categorically American ("When we think of Communists, we think of the Iron Curtain. When they think of democracy, they think of Coca-Cola," read a placard at the 1948 Coca-Cola Company annual meeting). In places where America began to be hated (France, the Middle East, the Soviet Union) Pepsi tried to move in. In 1959, Nixon and Kruschev were photographed drinking Pepsi at a Moscow trade-fair of American products. Nixon, after losing the election for the governor of California, joined Pepsi's law firm and became Pepsi's ambassador overseas. Pepsi, not tainted by anti-communist propaganda, started to move into those markets, led by Nixon, the creator of much anti-communist propaganda. Is this irony?

Standage closes with an epilogue predicting that water will be the beverage driving history and politics in the 21st century. Water. Without which none of these other beverages could exist. Full circle.





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Book Review: Katharine Graham - A Personal History

A Personal History by Katharine Graham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started this book and then put it down for two months while I re-read the Harry Potter books for fun. Kay Graham stared up at me from my nightstand every night, her expression a combination of imperiousness, judgment, and cajoling.

When I finally picked her back up again and read the part where she was bedridden with tuberculosis, I understood her annoyance with me. Her daughter, Lally, had ripped a mystery out of her hand and given her Proust. "She was right," writes Graham. "I shouldn't waste this valuable time reading trash or light, amusing books. All I needed was her gentle push and I finished all seven volumes."

And that kind of summarizes Katharine Graham. Titan of the industry yet continuously unsure of herself. Looking for advice in the most unlikely of places and allowing herself to be led along by others who she perceives smarter. Or more experienced. Or more male.

The book is basically divided into three sections of Graham's life; her childhood and young adulthood, under the thumb of her distant but spottily brilliant parents, her marriage, under the thumb of her spottily brilliant but borderline abusive husband Phil, and her season of growth into the publishing icon she became after Phil's death.

The first section bored me. And annoyed me, frankly. She dropped names and described in tedious detail how she flitted about without a plan, cushioned by her money. Oooh, look, I wandered over to Chicago and got a job then I wandered out to California and got a job and then I wandered back to Washington and got a job!

I am, of course, being too hard on her. How can I possibly understand the times she was living in and the life she was reared to live? A life that she eventually bucked completely while wringing her hands the whole time wondering if she had done the right thing.

She was reared to revere newspapers; her father, in a letter to Graham and her husband Phil, wrote this about newspapers; "The citizens of a free country have to depend on a free press for the information necessary to the intelligent discharge of their duties of citizenship. That is why the Constitution gives newspapers express protection from Government interference...It is also possible for the public interest to be defeated by the way a newspaper is conducted since the principal restraint upon a newspaper owner is self-restraint."

Phil Graham didn't quite listen to this wisdom; he used his position as publisher not to create strong journalism but more to be a kingmaker. He wined and dined (well, Kay wined and dined at Phil's direction) and threw around his influence, and the paper's influence, in ways that are now not considered kosher. Kay Graham admits this, often dismissing it with what seems like flippancy, with various phrases that basically say 'it seems suspect now but back then it was just what one did.'

Except she's right. It was what one did. The Grahams donated to many politicians (giving a brief nod to journalistic ethics by making sure that Kay wrote the check, not Phil) and Phil was instrumental in getting presidents elected and peopling presidential cabinets.

So Kay Graham ran about in the upper echelons, not only of wealth, but of political power. While Phil was alive, despite her part-ownership fo the paper, she was only a housewife and hostess, consistently ridiculed and belittled by Phil, but still hearing the stories and listening to the ideas of those around her.

And those around her were mostly men. Chauvinistic men.

She doesn't seem bitter about the chauvinism, though. To her, the men, like her, were a product of her time.

Take this story she heard about JFK, relayed to her by Clayton Fritchey (whoever that is; Graham is often dropping names like we should know who these people are; this book really needs a character list with short bios, like a crappy Agatha Christie mystery that is less worth reading than Proust)

"About three weeks before Kennedy was assassinated, Clayton saw the president in New York, at a time when Adlai [Stevenson] was the ambassador to the United Nations and Clayton was his deputy. The three men were together at a party, and Clayton was helping himself to a drink on the balcony overlooking Central Park when the president came up behind him and said, 'We haven't had a chance to talk much tonight, but we've got a good subject in common,' meaning Adlai. The president then said he didn't understand the hold Adlai had over women, commenting on how much Jackie liked and admired him and confessing that he himself didn't have the ease with women Adlai had. 'What do you suppose it is?' he asked, adding, 'Look, I may not be the best-looking guy out there, but, for God's sake, Adlai's half bald, he's got a paunch, he wears his clothes in a dumpy kind of way. What's he got that I haven't got?' Clayton's response hit on what I think women saw in Adlai and what they shied away from in other men of that era. 'Mr. President, I'm happy to say that for once you have asked me a question I am prepared to answer truthfully and accurately. While you both love women, Adlai also likes them, and women know the difference. They all respond to a kind of message that comes across from him when he talks to them. He conveys the idea that they are intelligent and worth listening to. He cares about what they're saying and what they've done, and that's really very fetching.' The president's response was: 'Well, I don't say you're wrong, but I'm not sure I can go to those lengths.'"

Don't just love women. Like them.

After Phil's suicide, Kay Graham's life was a battle for that status among the men surrounding her. Like me. Respect me. Don't just love me.

She is an unlikely feminist. She spent much of her life tethered to her parents, then to Phil Graham, who is revered as a genius but, despite my certainty that Kay Graham softened her portrayal of him, I think Phil Graham was an entitled punkass. Take this moment;

"He [Phil] began his remarks by describing the company, saying, 'I have been responsible for its affairs for 17 years--and for the last 15 years, since it became a corporation in 1948, I have been controlling owner of its voting shares.' There was no mention of my father or how this came to be or the existence of me as minority owner, of course."

Of course. As she expected. Because why would he? And why would she expect it?

But in this same blurb Graham goes on to say, "He ended his remarks with some philosophical thoughts, including a phrase about journalism being the first rough draft of history, which is quoted to this day: 'I am insatiably curious about the state of the world. I am constantly intrigued by information of topicality. I revel in the recitation of the daily and weekly grist of journalism. Much of it, of course, is pure chaff. Much of our discussions of how to do it better consist of tedium and detail. But no one yet has been able to produce wheat without chaff. And not even such garrulous romantics as Fidel Castro or such transcendent spirits as Abraham Lincoln can produce a history which does not in large part rest on a foundation of tedium and detail--and even sheer drudgery. So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand...'"

So, yeah, Phil was kind of wise sometimes. But he was still an entitled punkass. His affair with Robin Webb, his mental illness and his refusal of drugs or effective treatment, his expectation that Kay would be waiting for him when he returned from the brink (she was)...Punk. Ass.

And Kay Graham kind of accepts this as the way it is and the way it is supposed to be. Until she doesn't.

"I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Pretty soon this kind of thinking--indeed, this kind of life--took its toll: most of us became somehow inferior...When I first went to work, I was still handicapped with the old assumptions and was operating as though they were written in stone...I truly felt like Samuel Johnson's description of a woman minister--'a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.'"

Graham wakes up to feminism slowly. "As a manager, I was aware of the issues but had no clear idea how to lean on male-chauvinist managers to make changes. Women had accepted the dubious assumptions and myths about themselves for much too long. And men had be be helped to break out of the assumptions of which they, too, were victims."

(see, even in her feminism, she is gentle with her men-folk)

"I worked hard to educate the men around me, to raise their consciousness, even as I myself was in the early stages of consciousness-raising," she says, even as she relates a time when she almost accepted an invitation to a Gridiron dinner while the club was still not allowing female members. "My first reaction was that after all these years of being on the outside I was excited to be invited, and I was all set to accept when I received a letter signed by many of the women on the editorial side of the paper and from other papers, asking me not to go until the club accepted a woman as a member. But there was no opening at the club at this time, and the gesture of an invitation seemed to me a beginning. Besides which, I really wanted to go. However, I asked several of these women to dinner at my house to discuss the issue...They made many valid arguments but the clincher belonged to Sally Quinn, who said, 'If a country club excluded you for being a Jew but said they'd like to have you come for dinner, would you go?' That cemented my decision to regret the invitation, which I did."

The last third of the book focuses on the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressman strike. Graham's retelling can be spotty, expecting the reader to know some of the details, but her side of the story provides insight to the story as a whole; her first draft of history recalled 30 years later.

"I believe Watergate was an unprecedented effort to subvert the political process. It was a pervasive, indiscriminate use of power and authority from an administration with a passion for secrecy and deception and an astounding lack of regard for the normal constraints of democratic politics. To my mind, the whole thing was a very real perversion of the democratic system...As I said in a speech at the time, 'It was a conspiracy not of greed but of arrogance and fear by men who came to equate their own political well-being with the nation's very survival and security.' ... I have often been credited with courage for backing our editors in Watergate. The truth is that I never felt there was much choice. Courage applies when one has a choice. With Watergate, there was never one major decisive moment when I, or anyone, could have suggested that we stop reporting the story. Watergate unfolded gradually. By the time the story had grown to the point where the size of it dawned on us, we had already waded deeply into its stream. Once I found myself in the deepest water in the middle of the current, there was no going back."

Kay Graham is an unlikely hero but what makes her a hero is she keeps learning. After the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, defining moments that cemented Kay Graham's place as an icon, she was still insecure. She glommed onto Warren Buffet as a mentee, fondly recalling his advice "'Just remember: We're not going to teach you how to keep your knees from knocking. All we're going to do is teach you to talk while your knees knock.'"

And I feel like this biography is just that. It is frank, it is self-deprecating, it belittles the triumphs and highlights the failures. It's just Kay Graham, talking while her knees knock.

"Why dare write a book? What makes any of us think that someone else would be interested in stories from our own past? I recognize the inherent danger of being self-serving and have tried to retain as much detachment as possible, but I wanted to tell what happened just as I saw it. And in the process, I hoped to arrive at some understanding of how people are formed by the way the grow up and further molded by the way they spend their days."

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Book Review: Death in Ecstasy

Death In Ecstasy by Ngaio Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

**note: I'm reading through all the Alleyn mysteries in order**

Perhaps the greatest thing about this book was the cover art of the edition I read; the Jove edition of 1983, which works really hard to portray the gratuitous sex and occult that is only hinted at. Heroin, which does play a large role, is not depicted. Interesting.

I do enjoy Marsh and her characterizations; even when she's not placing her mysteries in a theater filled with actors, she places theatrical people in the plots. Exaggerations of types. Like the guard who "seems to speak in capitals." And Alleyn, in another character's words, has "British Manufacture stamped some place where it won't wear off. All this quiet deprecation--it's directly from a sure-fireBritish best-seller." And Mr. Ogden, who is "so like an American as to be quite fabulous." Highly entertaining.

Further description of Mr. Ogden; "He was a type that is featured heavily in transatlantic publicity, tall, rather fat and inclined to be flabby, but almost incredibly clean, as though he used all the deodorants, mouth washes, soaps and lotions recommended by his prototype periodicals."

"Oh yeah? Is that so?" continued Ogden; and then, for all the world as if he was an anthology of Quaint American Sayings, he completed the trilogy by adding in a soft undertone: "Sez you?"

Then there's Miss Wade, who the detective keeps forgetting to consider, but is finally interviewed; "Before that I had not been aware of her presence in Father Garnette's rooms. She had arrived before I did and had gone through the hall, no doubt. I left my overshoes outside," added Miss Wade with magnificent irrelevancy.

And Inspector Fox, who "chose the only small chair in the room and made it look foolish."

Then there's the moment when Marsh acknowledges she's writing a mystery of a type and she is walking in some pretty big footsteps. Alleyn ask Nigel, his Watson, who is pick for the murderer is after the initial interviews; "It depends on the author. If it's Agatha Christie, Miss Wade's occulted guilt drips from every pate. Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter would plump for Pringle, I fancy. Inspector French would go for Ogden."

I have said this with Marsh before; the mystery is secondary for me. I just like wandering around in the worlds she creates.



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Book Review: Nursing Home Murder

The Nursing Home Murder by Ngaio Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So a nursing home in this era of British history is not a place where old folks live out their days, so this mystery did not feature a wheelchair chase through a hall-way or a weapon concealed in a walker.

Instead, a nursing home is a private hospital. And the conceit of this mystery is that an important politician dies after surgery, having been poisoned.

Marsh is still trying to do more than a cozy, here, with Bolsheviks who want the proletariat dead being a distracting side plot. But, again, Marsh's strength lies in characterization. At one point, Alleyn speaks with Nigel, who kind of functions as his Watson.
"I have reached that stage in the proceedings when, like heroines in French dramas, I must have my confidante. You are she. You may occasionally roll up your eyes and explain 'Helas, quelle horreur!' or, if you prefer it, 'Merciful Heaven, can I believe my ears?' Otherwise, beyond making sympathetic noises, don't interrupt."

In another moment, Marsh confesses her "laziness." "It would be tedious to attempt a phonetic reproduction of Mr. Sage's utterances. Enough to say that they were genteel to a fantastic degree. 'Aye thot Aye heeard somewon teeking may neem in veen,' may give some idea of his rendering of the above sentence. Let it go at that."

And at the end, Angela, Nigel's betrothed, hopes for a happy ending. Alleyn replies, "'I'm afraid you've got the movie-mind. You want a final close-up. 'John, I want you to know that---that---' Ecstatic glare at short distance into each other's faces. Sir John utters an amorous grow; 'You damned little fool,' and snatches her to his bosom. Slow fade-out.'
'That's the stuff,' said Angela. 'I like a happy ending.'
'We don't often see it in the Force,' said Alleyn.
'Have some port?'
'Thank you.'

The end. Kind of film worth, huh?


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Book Review: Enter a Murderer

Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have embarked on a quest to read the Alleyn mysteries in order. Most of them I've already read, but I picked them up randomly, so there was no through-line.

Marsh hasn't quite yet hit her stride in this book. The main characters--Alleyn, Fox, Nigel--are still trying to figure out who they are; or, rather, Marsh is still trying to figure out who they are. But there are references to the first Alleyn mystery, which indicate Marsh is trying to create the through-line I so hope I will find when I read them through in order.

The characters in this one are all stage actors and this is where Marsh excels in my opinion; creating the caricatures of type that she, being involved with stage productions, seems to know well. Take this description of the actors at the inquest;

"Barclay Crammer gave a good all-round performance of a heart-broken gentleman of the old school. Janet Emerald achieved the feat known to leading ladies as 'running the gamut of the emotions.' Asked to account for the striking discrepancies between her statement and those of Miss Max and the stage manager, she wept unfeignedly and said her heart was broken. The coroner stared at her coldly, and told her she was an unsatisfactory witness. Miss Deamer was youthfully sincere, and used a voice with an effective little broken gasp. Her evidence was supremely irrelevant. The stage manager and Miss Max were sensible and direct."

Perhaps the most charming part of this book is the forward;
"When I showed this manuscript to my friend, Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn, of the Criminal Investigation Department, he said:
'It's a perfectly good account of the Unicorn case, but isn't it usual in detective stories to conceal the identity of the criminal?'
I looked at him coldly.
'Hopelessly vieux jeu, my dear Alleyn. Nowadays the identity of the criminal is always revealed in the early chapters.' 'In that case,' he said, 'I congratulate you.'
I was not altogether delighted."

Suffice it to say, even though I had read it before, and somewhere in my head knew the identity of the murderer, I didn't figure it out until the late pages. I am apparently no Alleyn.





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Book Review: Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A lovely read, marred by the impossibility of it all and by the overwrought construction with flashbacks and flashforwards. It seemed to be working a bit too hard; in plot and prose and dialogue.

But, even so, lovely. Once in a while, Owens hits the sweet spot and the reader feels like Kya when she is just learning to read; "I wadn't aware words could hold so much. I didn't know a sentence could be so full."

But other times, Owens overwrites. By a long shot.

Nevertheless, she got closer than anyone else I've ever read in allowing me to understand Einstein. I mean, I still don't understand it, but her explanation is the closest I've ever come;
"...time is no more fixed than the stars. Time speeds and bends around planets and suns, is different in the mountains than in the valleys, and is part of the same fabric as space, which curves and swells as does the sea. Objects, whether planets or apples, fall or orbit, not because of a gravitational energy, but because they plummet into the silky folds of spacetime--like into the ripples on a pond--created by those of higher mass...Unfortunately, gravity holds no sway on human thought, and the high school text still taught that apples fall to the ground because of a powerful force from the Earth."

And when Kya is trying to muddle through her mother leaving; "...you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she's starving or under some other extreme stress. The kits die--as they probably would have anyway--but the vixen lives to breed again when conditions are better, when she can raise a new litter to maturity. In nature--out yonder where the crawdads sing--these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother's number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in what ever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn't be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive--way back yonder."

But there's the rub. All this is being said in conversation by a kid who grew up without parents or formal education. A little unlikely as dialogue, but fascinating nonetheless.

"The language of the court was, of course, not as poetic as the language of the marsh. Yet Kya saw similarities in their natures. The judge, obviously the alpha male, was secure in his position, so his posture was imposing, but relaxed and unthreatened as the territorial boar. Tom Milton, too, exuded confidence and rank with easy movements and stance. A powerful buck, acknowledged as such. The prosecutor, on the other hand, relied on wide, bright ties and broad-shouldered suit jackets to enhance his status. He threw his weight by flinging his arms or raising his voice. A lesser male needs to shout to be noticed. The bailiff represented the lowest-ranking male and depended on his belt hung with glistening pistol, clanging wad of keys, and clunky radio to bolster his position."


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Book Review: The Revenge of Geography

The Revenge Of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate by Robert D. Kaplan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

But really two-and-a-half stars because the writing style was uber-annoying. Kaplan's favorite phrase seems to be "Let me explain." Well, duh. That's why I'm reading the book.

Kaplan's thesis is that geography still matters, even in a world where environmental possibilism seems to be changing how we relate to the spaces we are in and the spaces we desire. I'm not sure he proved his thesis, really, but along the way, I at least learned a lot.

Kaplan states that a "map is the spatial representation of humanity's divisions." The names in Africa and the border lines, created by European colonization, tell us the history of imperialism. To understand history, we have to look at maps. Mountains and plains divide civilizations; Ottomans from Austro-Hungarians, Kurds from Iraqis, Sunnis from Shia. Western Europe has dominated world history because of wide, fertile plains, indented coastlines providing deep-water harbors, navigable rivers flowing north, and an abundance of resources and despite its harsh climate. In history, transportation and communication outweigh comfort.

Looking at a northern polar map projections shows how close the continents of the northern hemisphere are to one another. A southern polar projection shows how far apart the southern hemisphere continents really are. This has been a driving factor to the dominance of the northern hemisphere in world history.

Geography, according to Kaplan, has always driven history. And perhaps always will.

One of the first pieces of evidence Kaplan cites is the fossia regia, a ditch dug in 202BC by the Romans to demarcate civilized territory (Roman) from uncivilized territory. In the 21st century, that line can still be felt, if not seen. Towns with fewer Roman remains tend to be poorer, less developed, and have higher rates of unemployment.

Then Kaplan sets out to justify Mackinder's Heartland theory, which basically states that whoever holds the "heartland" (basically Central Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe) controls the world. He argues that WWII was basically about Germany wanting to control the heartland and that the Cold War was about the Soviet Union wanting to control Eastern Europe.

Russia, having been overtaken by Mongol Horde, has always valued the need for an empire; expand or die. Germany feels the same, with Raztel's theory of Lebensraum, or living space. The US, too, with the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny. Land means power. And the where of the land matters.

One of the most fascinating discourses in the book falls in the chapter entitled "The Rimland Thesis" wherein Kaplan discusses the addition of Spykman's theory to Mackinder's. Spykman, and American, thought that control of the coastal edges of the heartland was as important as the heartland. Both Mackinder and Spykman's theories played out during World War II.

"Even as the Allies are losing and the utter destruction of Hitler's war machine is a priority, Spykman worries aloud about the implication of leaving Germany demilitarized. 'A Russian state from the Urals to the North Sea,' he explains (in 1942), 'can be no great improvement over a German state from the North Sea to the Urals.' Russian airfields on the English Channel would be as dangerous as German airfields to the security of Great Britain. Therefore, a powerful Germany will be necessary following Hitler. Likewise, even as the United States has another three years of vicious island fighting with the Japanese military ahead of it, Spkyman is recommending a post-war alliance with Japan against the continental powers of Russia and particularly a rising China."

In 1942, Spykman predicted how it would play out. Or, perhaps, it played out that way because he predicted it and the powers-that-were thought his ideas were sound.

With the benefit of hindsight, you can always connect geography with history.

An author named Braudel apparently does this very well. "Braudel’s signal contribution to the
way in which history is perceived is his concept of “varying wavelengths of time.” At the base is the
longue duree: slow, imperceptibly changing geographical time, “of landscapes that enable and constrain.” Above this, at a faster wavelength, come the “medium-term cycles,” what Braudel
himself refers to as conjonctures, that is, systemic changes in demographics, economics, agriculture, society, and politics. Cunliffe explains that these are essentially “collective forces, impersonal and usually restricted in time to no more than a century.” Together the longue duree and conjonctures provide the largely hidden “basic structures” against which human life is played out. My very highlighting of geography has been designed to put emphasis on these basic structures. Braudel calls the shortest-term cycle l’histoire evenmentielle —the daily vicissitudes of politics and diplomacy that are the staple of media coverage. Braudel’s analogy is the sea: in the deepest depths is the sluggish movement of water masses that bear everything; above that the tides and swells; and finally at the surface, in Cunliffe’s words, “the transient flecks of surf, whipped up and gone in a minute."

So I guess I should just read Braudel, who Kaplan as a "historian whose narrative has a godlike quality in which every detail of human existence is painted against the canvas of natural forces." Once in a while, though, I think Kaplan approaches this kind of writing.

"Obviously, human agency in the persons of such men as Jan Hus, Martin Luther and John Calvin was pivotal to the Protestant Reformation and hence to the Enlightenment that would allow for northern Europe’s dynamic emergence as one of the cockpits of history in the modern era. Nevertheless, all that could not have happened without the immense river and ocean access and the loess earth, rich with coal and iron-ore deposits, which formed the foundation for such individual dynamism and industrialization. Great, eclectic and glittering empires certainly flowered along the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages—notably the Norman Roger II’s in twelfth-century Sicily, and, lest we forget, the Renaissance blossomed first in late-medieval Florence, with the art of Michelangelo and the secular realism of Machiavelli. But it was the pull of the colder Atlantic that opened up global shipping routes that ultimately won out against the enclosed Mediterranean. While Portugal and Spain were the early beneficiaries of this Atlantic trade—owing to their protruding peninsular position—their pre-Enlightenment societies, traumatized by the proximity of (and occupation by) North African Muslims, lost ground eventually in the oceanic competition to the Dutch, French and English. So just as Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire succeeded Rome, in modern times northern Europe succeeded southern Europe, with the mineral-rich Carolingian core winning out in the form of the European Union. All this is attributable, in some measure, to geography."

Boom. If this book had been winnowed to engaging large-picture, connective discourses like this, I would have been much happier with it. I love that stuff.

But Kaplan, predicting the critics, I suppose, over-writes in the attempt to premptively out-argue the arguments. And the reader grows weary.

Peppered throughout the book are little nuggets of "oh, of course!" connections. Like the word "Cossack" comes from the word kazak. So Kazakhstan is really Cossackstan.

Also, Turkey controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates. Now THAT is power.

And "the rich forest soil of Northern Europe, which allowed peasants to easily be productive, ultimately led to freer and more dynamic societies compared to those along the Mediterranean where poorer, more precarious soils meant there was a requirement for irrigation that led, in turn, to oligarchies." And also, precarious agriculture led the Greeks and Romans to expand their empires in search of for fertile land.

I don't think I would have enjoyed this book at all as someone completely new to the concepts Kaplan discusses. I am teaching Human Geography this year, though, so my brain is currently wired with a geographic bent and filled with geographic terms and trivia. That base knowledge certainly aided my overall enjoyment of the book.

And a note about the maps in the paperback edition; so much is hidden in the spine crease that they were more annoying than helpful.


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Book Review: Postern of Fate

Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Oh My.

This is the second time I tried this book and, having learned from the first time I tried it that it wasn't really, by any stretch, a mystery, or even a thriller, or even a book with a relatable plot, I had better luck this time.

Apparently this is the last book Christie wrote. She didn't write it, though. She dictated it. There are some theories that she was suffering from dementia at this point in her life.

All that makes sense based on the words on the pages of this book.

Talky, talky, talky. Rambling conversations that go nowhere, only to have a version of that same conversation repeated 12 pages later by the same two characters.

I really have no idea what happened. Or who any of the characters are, save for Tommy, Tuppence, and Albert. Some of the characters seem to be overlap from A Passenger to Frankfurt which is, by all accounts, Christie's SECOND worst book, after this one.

Tuppence is still Tuppence. "He worried about Tuppence. Tuppence was one of those people you had to worry about. If you left the house, you gave her last words of wisdom and she gave you last promises of doing exactly what you counseled her to do: No, she would not be going out except just to buy a half a pound of butter, and after all, you couldn't call that dangerous, could you?"

Tommy is still Tommy. When someone asks how he is, he replies, "Much the same as I always was. Cracking. You know. Decomposing by degrees."

And everyone they talk to seems to be well past their personal prime; "One always seems to get talking about one's old pals and what's happened to them all. When you talk about old friends, either they are dead, which surprises you enormously because you didn't think they would be, or else they're not dead and that surprises you even more. It's a very difficult world."

Things that Christie might have edited out, or never written in the first place, in her earlier books, elevate themselves to a level of charm that is more likely to be found in the stories of your elderly relatives than in a published book. As Tuppence is dissecting and discovering a "clue," (though what that clue actually means is anyone's guess, frankly) Tommy's confusion is amplified in the dialog in a way that an editor might have cut.
"'Grin-he-Lo,' said Tuppence. "We've been reading it the wrong way around. It's meant to be read the other way around.'
'What do you mean? Ol, then n-e-h--it doesn't make sense. You couldn't go on n-i-r-g. Nirg or some word like that.'
'No. Just take the three words. A little bit, you know, like what Alexander did in the book--the first book that we looked at. Read those words the other way around. Lo-hen-grin.'
Tommy scowled."

I mean, you'll never get that 30 seconds back. But do you want them? If you do, don't read this book.

There's a James Taylor song with the lyrics "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time," and I enjoyed passing the time with this book. It's not a GOOD book, but it's a comfortable one. Tommy and Tuppence are "elderly" (I have a real difficulty with Christie's timeline with these two...how old were they really in each of their outings?) and play the doddering old fools quite well. They have a dog named Hannibal, who gets his own chapter, even, in one of the weirdest tangents in print. Christie's ramblings are an insight into her childhood; barely veiled reminiscences about her childhood home and her family. Reminds me of how sad I am that I didn't record conversations with my grandmother, when she would go through old photos and tell me stories. I don't remember nearly as much about those conversations as I wish I did.


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Book Review: The Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way by Bill Bryson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Language is somewhat of a miracle. Bryson writes, "...about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved, lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements. It is unlikely that any of these could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language."

We can infer much about the development and migration of humans based on language evidence. In the Indo-European language family, there is a common word for snow but no common word for sea. Therefore, humans started developing lanaguage somewhere cold and inland.

Bryson goes on to explore the oddities and interesting tidbits about how English came to be what we know as English.

Much of our history of people in England depends on an account written by a monk named the Venerable Bede, but his history was written 300 years after the events it described which, as Bryson writes, "...is rather like us writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay."

But it's the history we have, so even when it's confusing and incomplete, we go with it.

Which is a metaphorical parallel with English. It's a mess. Boil means to bring water to a certain temperature AND also a gross pimple-like thing on your skin. Which are totally unrelated.

Also, sometimes a word means what it means and also means the opposite. Bryson points out, "Sanction, for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stuck together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure but a horse that has bolted has taken off."

And it's not just our vocabularly. There are endless vagaries in pronunciation; "The combination 'ng' is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing. But in fact we make two sounds with it--employing a soft 'g' with singer and a hard 'g' with finger ... We make another unconscious distinction between the hard 'th' of those and the soft one of thought. Some dictionaries fail to note this and yet it makes all the difference between mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb."

Bryson's book is full of little a-ha moments like that. He also has a little fun with the rules of grammar, most of which he thinks were originally quite dubious and originated in the mid-to-late 1700s, "a period of the most resplendent silliness, when grammarians and scholars seemed to be climbing over one another (or each other; it doesn't really matter) in a mad scramble to come up with fresh absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, Shakespeare's laughable ought to be changed to laugh-at-able and reliable should be made into relionable."

Bryson doesn't discuss the Internet or Social Media because this book was published in 1990.


"At the time of writing, a television viewer in Britain could in a single evening watch Neighbors, a Australian soap opera, Cheers, an American comedy set in Boston, and EastEnders, a British program set among cockneys in London. All of these bring into people's homes in one evening a variety of vocabulary, accents, and other linguistic influences that they would have been unlikely to experience in a single lifetime just two generations ago."

So imagine what the internet has done since then. Netflix and other on-demand viewing programs. I would love for him to re-release a new edition with a forward that explores what we've done to language in the last 30 years because of these globalizing resources. Also, now that dictionaries live online, they are ever-changeable and updateable. I think Bryson could have a field-day with that.

Other interesting tidbits:
Did you know tidbit used to be titbit, but then the world went through a fit of properness and it was changed to tiDbit?

Did you know that written Icelandic has not changed all that much so modern Icelanders can easily read sagas written thousands of years ago?

Saint Patrick wasn't Irish. He was Welsh. The only reason he ended up in Ireland is that he was kidnapped by Irish pirates when he was 16.

The Domesday book is pronounced "doomsday" because long o sounds used to be pronounced ooo. But it's not about doom. Domesday refers to "domestic"

The word "roundabout" is of American origin. It was invented by an American, Logan Persall Smith, who was living in England and was one of the members of a 1920s panel of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. This panel decided how things should be pronounced and used, as well as making rules about vocabulary. Before Smith, traffic circles in Britain were called "gyratory circuses."

So, in Cockney, there's a tradition of playing a rhyming game to come up with new meanins for words. For example, bottle means ass; the rhyming phrase "bottle and glass" was a coy rhyming replacement for "ass" which was eventually just shortened to "bottle." This is where we get our term "bread" meaning "money;" bread and honey.

Also, in Bryson's list of dead words, I really want to bring back teetotaciously. I think "helliferocious" is already back, with an alternate spelling (hella ferocious)


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Book Review: The Man Who Loved China

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Simon Winchester picks the most fascinating topics, but this book falls short. As have all of his other books for me, save for Pacific. Pacific is a strong book because it is structured as a collected series of articles; it does not need a through-line. It is loosely connected by the similarity in subject but does not really need to lead from point A to point B.

In this book, Winchester sets out to tell the story of Joseph Needham, a fascinating polymath who rehabilitated western thought about Chinese history.

Ostensibly, it's a biography. It needs to lead from point A to point B. But it is poorly edited and poorly structured; things that don't bear repeating are repeated, ad nauseum. Things that need further explanation are cast aside. And the main question posed, throughout the book, the "Needham" question of why China stopped inventing, is never answered. Because it is unanswerable. But, if so, why plant references to it throughout the book if, at the end, you're going to reveal that there is no satisfactory solution to the mystery?

But, regardless of my annoyance with the structure and the pedantic drudgery of the writing, I learned so much from this book.

I knew that many inventions claimed by the West were actually invented in the East; China is now famously given credit for gunpowder, the compass, and the printing press. What I didn't know is that this "discovery" is so recent. Needham visited China in the 1940s and his books that set out to prove it--Science and Civilisation in China--began to be published in 1954 (and are still being published, the latest of the seven volumes in twenty-seven books being released in 2015)

Needham single-handedly changed how the west viewed its history; the list of inventions originating in China is long (there is an 11 page index that lists all of them, including arched bridges, crossbows, vaccination against smallpox, paper, chess, toilet paper, seismoscopes, wheelbarrows, stirrups, powered flight, etc.)

Though Needham did not discover the Diamond Sutra, Winchester discusses it at some length. It is said to be the oldest printed book in the world, having been created with printing blocks a full 600 years before Gutenberg. The date it was created is helpfully written in the text; 868 AD. A British-Hungarian archaeologist named Marc Aurel Stein found the library in Dunhuang in 1907, and bribed the abbot of the monastic group in charge of the cave, allowing Stein to smuggle thousands of documents, including The Diamond Sutra, out of China.

Despite the Diamond Sutra, the printing press never really caught on in China. Chinese uses pictograms, phonograms, and ideograms to represent words or syllables, with over 30,000 characters, which meant that a printer using movable type would have to have over 30,000 precast blocks. In European languages, there are usually 26 to 35 letters that are reused in endless combinations to create language.

Needham explains this in his book. He also explains Chinese philosophy and religion and how it affected science. For example, from Volume II of Science and Civilisation in China;
"Heaven has five elements, first Wood, second Fire, third Earth, fourth Metal, and fifth Water. Wood comes first in the cycle of the five elements and water comes last, earth being in the middle. This is the order which heaven has made. Wood produces fire, fire produces earth (i.e. as ashes), earth produces metal (i.e. as ores), metal produces water (either because molten metal was considered aqueous, or more probably because of the ritual practice of collecting dew on metal mirrors exposed at night-time), and water produces wood (for woody plants require water). Such is the Dao of heaven."

Winchester does not go into detail about the inventions themselves; he instead tells the story of Needham's travels in China in the 1940s, which also requires background in Chinese history during that era, which requires knowledge of Japan's empire ambitions and WWII, none of which I was particularly familiar with. After reading this book there are some big holes in my knowledge of history that are now partially filled; China was fighting a battle with Japan (they had taken over most of the coastal regions) while also dealing with in-fighting between Chiang Kai-shek and the communist forces under the leadership of Mao Zedong.

Needham was in China at a time when the Chinese government had retreated to Chongqing (Chung King to our western ears) and traveled there under the auspices of the "Sino-British Science Co-operation Office" to help Chinese scientists keep the supply lines open to get the supplies they needed to continue their research.

Needham spent most of his time traveling through the country, learning as much as he could, buying as many books as he could, and flirting with as many women as he could. And then he came home, started writing his book, flirted a little too much with communism for comfort, got himself in enormous trouble when he was duped by Soviet spies into believing, and publishing, that the US government had used biological weapons in Korea, climbed back out of trouble again somehow, kept writing his book, kept living with his wife, with his mistress next door (the wife and the mistress were long-time friends; the three spent lots of time together), traveled some more, lectured a lot, became Master at Cambridge, smoked, preached, danced, sang, and lived. Until he died, at the ripe age of 94, working on his book almost literally until the moment of his death.

Fascinating man who deserves a better biographical treatment than this one.


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Book Review: Travels With My Aunt

Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I simply loved this book the first time I read it, oh, 15 years ago? It outlined a life I could then only dream of. A kind of existence that I thought impossible. And not all the CIA/crime stuff. Just the life of wandering about having adventures.

Now I kind of have that life. Over the past three years, I have wandered around over 15 countries and lived in two locales that bear the markings of being rather exotic.

So on this re-read, I was not as taken with the locales and the idea of just going somewhere to go somewhere. And when that wasn't blinding me, I was open to noticing the flaws of the book, the worst of which is that it is poorly constructed and loosely bound, as if Greene wrote it in 7 different chunks, a month apart for each, and relied on his memory to recall what he'd written in the last chunk when he started the next one.

But I still liked it. The adventure. Aunt Augusta, the kind of woman we love in books and TV but would complain about endless were she part of our lives. A woman who, like the story she tells of Uncle Jo, is prolonging life by making each day something different.

And the periodic moments of Greene's writing that resonate. Like:

"Her hand was on my knee, and the enormous wrist-watch stared up at me with its great blank white face and its four figures in scarlet, 12 3 6 9, as if those were the only important ones to remember -- the hours when you had to take your medicine."

And this moment when two businessmen are discussing ideas about how to get rid of an inventory of plastic straws; "Then we produce medical evidence. That is the modern form of the legend. The toxic effect of imbibing alcohol through a straw. There is a Doctor Rodriguez here who would help me. The statistics of cancer of the liver. Suppose we could persuade the Panama government to prohibit the sale of straws with alcoholic drink. The straws would be sold illicitly from under the counter. The demand would be tremendous."

And this...

"'In a year,' my aunt said, 'what would you two have to talk about? She would sit over her tatting -- I didn't realize that anyone still tatted -- and you would read gardening catalogues, and then when the silence was almost unbearable she would begin to tell you a story of Koffiefontein which you had heard a dozen times before ... You will think how every day you are getting a little closer to death. It will stand there as close as the bedroom wall. And you'll become more and more afraid of the wall because nothing can prevent you coming nearer and nearer to it every night while you try to sleep and Miss Keene reads.'
'You may be right, Aunt Augsuta, but isn't it the same everywhere at our age?'
'Not here it isn't. Tomorrow you may be shot in the street by a policeman because you haven't understood Guarani, or a man may knife you in a cantina because you can't speak Spanish and he thinks you are acting in a superior way. Next week, when we have our Dakota, perhaps it will crash with you over Argentina. My dear Henry, if you live with us, you won't be edging day by day across to any last wall. The wall will find you of its own accord without your help, and every day you live will seem to you a kind of victory. "I was too sharp for it that time," you will say, when night comes, and afterwards you'll sleep well.'"

And this kicker, which stabbed me right in the heart:

"People who like quotations love meaningless generalizations."


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Book Review: A Separate Peace

A Separate Peace by John Knowles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know when I first read this. One assumes I did as a pre-teen or a teen, but I don't remember reading it. I don't remember any specifics. All I knew is that the battered paperback I hauled around with me for 25 years always made me smile every time I would go through books to get rid of them.

And I never got rid of this one.

But, why? Why did it make me smile?

So I read it again.

And, frankly, I expected to be disappointed. I had read several reader reviews here, lambasting how horrible this book is. The hundreds of comments agreeing with some of the most negative of the reviews. The one thread on which the adults who hated this book as a teen gang up on the one or two current teens who piped up to say they liked it.

As divisive as our current political landscape, apparently.

So let me weigh in.

I LOVED it. Again. And one more time. LOVED.

It's ponderous. It's a little foreign, in that I am not a male teen in 1942 at a boarding school. But, you know, I'm also not a British teen wizard. Or a teen archery expert living in a dystopian future. I don't have to directly relate to the situations to directly relate to the characters.

But even though I did relate to the characters, it was really the writing that really made me love it. Not the story. Not the conflict. But the writing. The power. The force of description. The insight.

"cobblestones heaving underfoot like a bricked-over ocean squall"

"Until now, in spite of everything, I had welcomed each new day as though it were a new life, where all past problems and failures were erased, and all future possibilities and joys open and available, to be achieved probably before night fell again. Now, in this winter snow and crutches with Phineas, I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn't make yourself over between dawn and dusk."

"'What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.' I didn't really think that this was true, my seventeen years of experience had shown this to be much more false than true, but it was like every thought and belief of Finny's: it should have been true."

"Dr. Stanpole's car was at the top of it, headlights on and motor running, empty. I idly considered stealing it, in the way that people idly consider many crimes it would be possible for them to commit. I took an academic interest in the thought of stealing the car, knowing all the time that it would be not so much criminal as meaningless, a lapse into nothing, an escape into nowhere."

"The old phrase about 'If these walls could only speak' occurred to me and I felt it more deeply than anyone has ever felt it, I felt that the stadium could not only speak but that its words could hold me spellbound. In fact the stadium did speak powerfully and at all times, including this moment. But I could not hear, and that was because I did not exist."

"We members of the class of 1943 were moving very fast toward the war now, so fast that there were casualties even before we reached it, a mind was clouded and a leg was broken--maybe these should be thought of as minor and inevitable mishaps in the accelerating rush. The air around us was filled with much worse things."

"Finny...you wouldn't be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg ... They'd get you some place at the front and there'd be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you'd be over with the Germans or the Japs, asking if they'd like to field a baseball team against our side. You'd be sitting in one of their command posts, teaching them English. Yes, you'd get confused and borrow one of their uniforms, and you'd lend them one of yours. Sure, that's just what would happen. You'd get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight anymore. You'd make a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war."

"The advance guard which came down the street from the railroad station consisted of a number of Jeeps, being driven with a certain restraint, their gyration-prone wheels inactive on these old ways which offered nothing bumpier than a few cobblestones. I thought the Jeeps looked noticeably uncomfortable from all the power they were not being allowed to use. There is no stage you comprehend better than the one you have just left, and as I watched the Jeeps almost asserting a wish to bounce up the side of Mount Washington at eighty miles an hour instead of rolling along this dull street, they reminded me, in a comical and poignant way, of adolescents."

"...it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart."

I'm really glad I've been hauling this around for 25 years. I'm going to haul it around for at least 25 more.


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Book Review: Tyrant

Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics by Stephen Greenblatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Well, that one took me a while. I'm going to blame an overseas move to China and the fact that, a month ago, 3 New Yorker magazines actually made it to my Chinese mailbox all on the same day, which distracted me from this little tome for several weeks.

But I'm also going to blame my inability to keep looking at the dumpster fire. Sometimes you just have to look away.

But none of those reasons detract from this being an instructive, if challenging, read.

Trump is not named in this book but he looms ominously in the near background much like he did at the televised debates with Clinton in 2016. Greenblatt says in his Acknowledgments that he sat in "...a verdant garden in Sardinia and expressed my growing apprehension about the possible outcome of an upcoming election. My historian friend Bernhard Jussen asked me what I was doing about it. 'What can I do?' I asked. 'You can write something,' he said. So I did."

As the title indicates, this is a study of tyrants in Shakespeare — the Henry VI trilogy, with the rise and fall of Jack Cade, Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Leontes, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus.

Tyrants do not come from a vacuum. They are brought to power by simplifying complicated issues into shouting points. By drawing a line in the sand and requiring the populace to choose sides. Tyrants are aided and abetted by the political systems of their time.

In the chapter entitled "Party Politics" Greenblatt discusses the Henry VI trilogy, wherein Shakespeare tackles the War of the Roses and the fact that, eventually, people forgot what they were really fighting about, which paves the way for a tyrant. "The roses serve as party badges; they designate two opposed sides. With a weird immediacy, the legal argument (whatever it was) gives way to a blind adherence to the white or the red."

In the chapter entitled "Fraudulent Populism," Greenblatt outlines how tyrants use ignorance to further their grasp of total power. "Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader ... surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing in the lives of the underclasses. In fact, he despises them, hates the smell of their breath, fears that they carry diseases, and regards them as fickle, stupid, worthless, and expendable. But he sees that they can be made to further his ambitions."

In the Henry VI trilogy, the tyrant has a patsy, a fellow named Jack Cade. Cade was a real person who led a rebellion against the government in 1450. Shakespeare made him into a tool of the tyrannical ambitions of the Duke of York. It is in response to Cade that the famous line --"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers"--is uttered. Greenblatt writes, "For Cade's ardent supporters, the time-honored institutional system of representation is worthless. It has, they feel, never represented them. Their inchoate wish is the tear up all the agreements, cancel all the debts, and wreck all the existing institutions...The poor whose passions Cade is arousing feel excluded, despised, and vaguely ashamed. They have been left out of an economy that increasingly demands possession of a once-esoteric technology; literacy. They do not imagine that they can master this new skill, nor does their leader propose that they undertake any education. It would hardly suit his purposes if he did so. What he does instead is manipulate their resentment of the educated."

As Cade and his followers become a mob and sweep through London, they capture Lord Saye, whose worst crime, according to Cade, is building a grammar school. Greenblatt writes, "We are meant to find this ridiculous, of course; the scene is quite rightly played for laughs. But Shakespeare grasped something critically important; although the absurdity of the demagogue's rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. Cade and his followers will not slink away because the traditional political elite and the entirety of the educated populace regard him as a jackass."

The Henry VI trilogy is the prelude to Richard III and in the chapter entitled "Enablers," Greenblatt explores the tyrant's need for sycophants. Richard is trying to come to the throne through a campaign that spreads misinformation; the illegitimacy of the other claimants to the throne. It doesn't work at first; the populace simply does not comply. But the tyrant and his sycophants do not stop. "The steady barrage of falsehoods plays its part, working to marginalize skeptics, to sow confusion, to quiet protests that might otherwise have erupted. Whether from indifference or from fear or from the catastrophically mistaken belief that there is no real difference between Richard and the alternatives, the citizens fail to resist."

Richard takes the throne. But he has still not eliminated all the more legitimate claimants; he is keeping one alive in the Tower. Richard, in discussions with Buckingham, alludes to Edward still being alive and asks Buckingham what he thinks Richard should do. Buckingham refuses to say what Richard wants him to say; he refuses to be complicit. Richard doesn't need Buckingham's permission, of course, but he wants his consent. "At this critical moment at the onset of his reign, he [Richard] wants and needs to be assured of his associate's loyalty, and that loyalty is best guaranteed by having Buckingham make himself an accomplice to a horrendous crime."

Greenblatt goes on to write in the chapter entitled "Tyranny Triumphant;"

"For the tyrant, there is remarkably little satisfaction. True, he has obtained the position to which he aspired, but the skills that enabled him to do so are not at all the same as those required to govern successfully. Whatever pleasures he might have imagined would be his give way to frustration, anger, and gnawing fear. Moreover, the possession of power is never secure. There is always something else that must be done in order to reinforce his position, and since he has reached his goal through criminal acts, what is required inevitably are further criminal acts. The tyrant is obsessed with loyalty from his inner circle, but he can never be entirely confident that he has it. They only people who will serve him are self-interested scoundrels, like himself; in any case, he has no interest in honest loyalty or dispassionate, independent judgment. Instead, he wants flattery, confirmation, and obedience."

In the chapter entitled "The Instigator," Greenblatt deconstructs the character of Macbeth. "In Richard III, Shakespeare imagined the beleaguered tyrant torn between self-love and self-hate. In Macbeth, the playwright probes far deeper. What has it all been for, the betrayals, the empty words, the shedding of so much innocent blood? It is difficult to picture the tyrants of our own times having any such moment of truthful reckoning."

In the chapter entitled "Madness in Great Ones," Greenblatt tackles King Lear, those rulers who started out legitimate and who have lost their minds along the way. "They may have thoughtful counselors and friends, people with a healthy instinct for self-preservation and a concern for their nation. But it is extremely difficult for such people to counter madness-induced tyranny, both because it is unanticipated and because their long-term loyalty and trust have inculcated habits of obedience... What he [the tyrant] wants is loyalty, and by loyalty he does not mean integrity, honor, or responsibility. He means an immediate, unreserved confirmation of his own views and a willingness to carry out his orders without hesitation. When an autocratic, paranoid, narcissistic ruler sits down with a civil servant and asks for his loyalty, the state is in danger."

As Paulina says in defiance to the tyrant Leontes in The Winter's Tale "It is an heretic who makes the fire, Not she which burns in't"

But Paulina is a noble. A high-born. Shakespeare never writes in his plays of the common people defying tyranny. Only investing in it.

According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare thought common people "...were too easily manipulated by slogans, cowed by threats, or bribed by trivial gifts..." Save for one nameless servant in Lear, Shakespeare does not depict anyone but elites fighting back.

The power of democracy for Shakespeare was only defined by the example of Rome, which was inherently corrupt and fallible.

Rome fell.

In Shakespeare's last play, Coriolanus, he finally gives the populace a little credit for having the spine to reject a dictator. But not much. It was still Rome, after all. Plebians are easily fooled and manipulated.

Is our example of democracy in America something the might have changed Shakespeare's mind? What would he make of the Tragedy of Trump?

"...Shakespeare reflected throughout his life on the ways communities disintegrate. Endowed with an uncannily acute perception of human character and with rhetorical skills that would be the envy of any demagogue, he deftly sketched the kind of person who surges up in troubled times to appeal to the basest instincts and to draw upon the deepest anxiety of his contemporaries. A society locked into bitterly factionalized party politics, in his view, is particularly vulnerable to the fraudulent populism. And there are always instigators who arouse tyrannical ambition, and enablers, people who perceive the danger posed by this ambition but who think that they will be able to control the successful tyrant and to profit from his assault on established institutions ... There are periods, sometimes extended periods, during which the cruelest motives of the basest people seem to be triumphant. But Shakespeare believed that the tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished."

Tyrants never win, for good, in Shakespeare.

Macbeth's Act V Scene 5 soliloquy after the death of Lady Macbeth is one of my favorite moments of Shakespeare. And one of my favorite lines is, "It is a tale. Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

When read as judgement of the general human condition, the soliloquy is an exercise in hopelessness; what we do does not matter in the end.

But when read as a judgment on tyranny, it is full of hope.


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Book Review: The Monuments Men

The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a great story told with the indecision not only of what to include and leave out but simply how to tell it. Edsel, and Witter, who is credited with co-authoring, decided early in the book to leave out the Italy Monuments Men but, after having read it, I wish they had focused even more. The survey they tried to do left me confused about who was who and jumping back and forth over the continent chaotically, much like the Monuments Men themselves.

I feel like now that this story is being rehabilitated, better popular histories will emerge. I can only hope they will, because these are great stories about the Greatest Generation. I don't think we'll ever fully understand the magnitude of what they saved.

Nor are we giving culture and art the same priority in our current world-wide conflicts. We still have a thing or two to learn, I think.

"If, in time of peace, our museums and art galleries are important to the community, in time of war they are doubly valuable. For then, when the petty and the trivial fall way and we are face to face with final and lasting values, we...must summon to our defense all intellectual and spiritual resources. We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future." Minutes of a Special Meeting of the Association of Museum Directors, 1941

The provenance and ownership of art can be a tangled web and war tangles the tangle. Take the Ghent Altarpiece, one of the masterworks of Western art. Hitler's Kümmel Report, commissioned in 1940, laid Germanic claim to much of Europe's valued art.

"The inventory listed every work of art in the Western world--France, the Netherlands, Britain, and even the United States--that rightly belonged to Germany. Under Hitler's definition, this included every work taken from Germany since 1500, every work by any artist of German or Austrian descent, every work commissioned or completed in Germany, and every work deemed to have been executed in a Germanic style.

The Ghent Altarpiece, though fully Belgian, was deemed Germanic in style. But there was further claim. Prior to World War 1, Germany owned six side panels of the Ghent Altarpiece. The Treaty of Versailles was designed to punish and decimate Germany. It was the thorn in Hitler's side, to him, it was the fullest representation of the humiliation that the rest of Europe visited on Germany and the most concrete example of the failings of German leaders of the past. It was such a flashpoint for Hitler that when Germany overran France in 1940, Hitler had his underlings locate the exact railcar in which the Treaty had been signed. And in that railcar, he forced the French to sign a new treaty.

But Hitler wasn't done. In accordance with the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was required to return the Ghent Altarpiece panels to Belgium as war reparations. So, for Hitler, stealing the panels back, and acquiring the rest of the Altarpiece, was personal.

The Ghent Altarpiece was one of the holy grails of Monuments Men work. Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna was another. The Nazis looted the Louvre (thoughJ acques Jaujard had already secretly removed almost 4,000 of the most important works). But there were also thousands upon thousands of minor works. There were the art collections of prominent Jews. And, near the end of the war, the treasures of Germany hidden from the Allies.

The Monuments men were looking for all of it. They were also trying to protect important buildings from destruction. They were protecting spires, stained glass, Roman ruins.

The Germans hid many works in salt mines. Salt, which used to make the world go round (it was so valuable that Roman legionnaires were sometimes paid in salt, from whence we get our word "salary.") became important again, but only as a bystander to the salvation of the world's art and culture.

They also hid art in aristocratic castles, like Neuschwanstein and others. Lincoln Kirstein (who after the war started the NY Ballet with Balanchine) had a run-in with a German countess that he describes in delicious detail in a letter home. "One lovely old countess received us in bed. She only had one poor little room in this elegant old mansion, and almost broke her neck flying into bed no doubt, as we swept into the court. She was an ancient bitch, Italian, who married a great german name, and is harboring a whole slue of art dealers, young 'sick' counts and barons...and my, have they had a terrible time. They almost didn't get out of Paris in time, and them with their weak lungs...she only had one little insignificant request to make. It seems some displaced Russian jewish polack american negroes had taken to shooting the deer in the animal-park, and it was not in season, and it was giving the chief forester NIGHTMARES."

This was the aristocracy that made Hitler's rise possible. They rode the wave, toasted themselves and their brilliance in Paris, then went home to hide and escape prosecution when the war started going the other way, often with their railway cars stuffed with stolen art.

Then they told fantastic stories about how they were never Nazis in the first place. Some claimed hardship. Some claimed torture. Others claimed they had never believed. Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's photographer, had grown rich off of Nazism. But he had never been a "...believer, only an economic opportunist. Wasn't this the American way?"

Edsel writes that history is "more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance."

And at the end, Edsel encapsulates one of the ironies of the war. Harry Ettlinger, a translator with the Monuments Men, had been born a German Jew. He escaped to America in 1938, right after his bar mitzvah, and then was drafted by the American Army the day he graduated from high school. Growing up in Karlsruhe, he was never allowed, as a Jew, to go to the Staatliche Kunsthalle, where the prized exhibit was a self-portrait by Rembrandt. After the war, Ettlinger was photographed saving the very Rembrandt he had always heard about, but had never been allowed to see. https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/...

I look forward to reading more about the Monuments Men as their story is coming into focus in the 21st century.

And apropos of nothing, this is a description of a Monuments Man named Walter Huchthausen, who was killed in action.

"...the few people who saw him at his job--friend and enemy--must think more of the human race because of him."

We should all strive to be the kind of person about whom things like this are said.




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