Book Review

I spent a good part of the past three months immersed in the world of colonial and antebellum America. Christmas brought me Ron Chernow's biography of George Washington, David and Jeanne Heidler's biography of Henry Clay, and Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers. All three were good reads and I would recommend any and all of them.

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that these historical figures were real people reacting to real events and while we know how the events worked out, the people involved didn't. These historical figured were capable great good, and tolerating and even advocating for serious wrongs.

The real strength of all three books is they place the lives and actions of these historical figures into a context. Everything they did or said was in response to certain realities. All 3 books put these historical figures back into the time in which the operated and it is much easier to see why they acted the why they did.

Certain historical realities dominate all three books and should influence how we look at the formative decades of American history. One is that there was no consensus on what the Constitution said and meant. Compromise and ambiguity were needed to write and ratify the constitution. and not everybody agreed with it. Somehow the constitution won the strong support of Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, George Washington, and the reluctant support of Thomas Jefferson. Any document that can do that is by necessity full of vagueness and open to multiple interpretations. Even Hamilton and Madison, who helped pen the Federalist Papers, eventually split over the policies of the Washington administration.

It is also important to remember that slavery was always an issue and the spirit that guided the early days of the republic was to keep all discussion of slavery and abolition off the table. However, every issue was always understood in the light of slavery. This created a dynamic where discussion of the issue was viewed as a threat and as a result the U.S. twisted itself into knots over the one issue that dominated all others. The same contradiction, of course, applies to the personal views that individual founders had on slavery.

It is easy to view the founders as caricatures as noble patriots. Instead they were real people who lived in a specific time and place. All three books do a marvelous job of recapturing the the people, time, and place of the founding decades of the U.S.

Book Review

Good fiction will often open up a previously unknown world and make you care about characters that you might not even like. That is exactly what Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants does. The world that Gruen opens up is the traveling circus of the 1930s and it is the circus itself that becomes the star of the novel.

Gruen's circus is world of brutality, vice, sex, and humanity and she renders this world is such great detail that you can almost smell the popcorn. Told through flashbacks by the show's vet, Gruen's novel is the story of a man trying to get come to terms with his life.

About halfway to 2/3 of the way through the novel, the direction of the narrative is clear but the precise the daily life of a traveling circus will keep you hooked until the last page.

Book Review

This summer I decided to see if reality really does match the hype and so I read all three volume of the Steig Larsson trilogy. In a period of about 10 days(that often included staying up late) I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. After finishing all three, I can definitely say that the all three books are worthy of the hype.

Lisbeth Salander is the main character and most interestingly she is also the moral fulcrum of the trilogy. If a charcter is good then they will, directly or indirectly be on Salander's side and like wise if they are bad then the person is antagonistic to Salander. Making such a complex character the focal point and moral focal point gives the books their drive. There should be a couple of warnings attached: there is some sex and violence and a combination of the two that make you uncomfortable. The other warning is that you should be prepared for a few late nights and a few late nights is a small price to pay for three great reads.

Book Review

Reading Bob Woodward's Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and The American Boom is an exercise of reading about the pride that goes before the fall. The book only covers up until Greenspan's reappointment in 2000 and doe not cover the events leading up to the economic collapse.

This is not Woodward's most engaging book and it is good thing it is one of his shortest. Unless you are just enamred with in depth reporting on the Fed meetings and the debates over 1/4 percentage points in the interest rates.

The past couple of years have not been kind to Greenspan's record and if Woodward had been willing to engage more deeply we might have a book that could serve as a record of penetrating foresight. Woodward explains Greensapn's upbringing as an acolyte of Ayn Rand and often talks about his belief in an almost unregulated market as the answer to almost any problem Woodward's weekness comes in exploring those ideas; he treats his intellectual roots as a fact of his life.

Woodward also fails to examine the American boon he mentions in his book's subtitle. What was the American boom like? Woodward never explains except in terms of the stock market. During this period the gap between wealthy and poor increased and much of the boom was financed by debt. Woodward also goes to great lengths to explain that one of the great conundrums of Greenspan's time dealth with an increse in productivity. By eventually figuring that workers were producing more but not getting paid more, Greenspan effectivly managed the changes in the encomy and helped Wall Street and U.S. Treasury but Woodward never explains how boom that fails to increase worker's wages is really a boom. Woodward's title builds the expectation that there will be a telling of the story of the boom but their is no indication how average Americans experienced the boom.

I am not really impressed with Greenspan even though Woodward really wants me to be as enamored with Greenspan as he is. Woodward makes it clear that Greenspan is not the all knowing oracle that myth makes him out to be. He often does not understand what is going and sometimes appears to have gotten lucky at times with the economy. This, of course, is Woodward's biggest failing. He mistakes luck for expertise and minuta for in depth understanding.

Book Review

My reading has focused on the recent history of the Supreme Court. Reading Bob Woodward's The Brethren followed by Jeffrey Toobin's The Nine gives a reader a pretty complete history of the Supreme Court over the past forty years. If there is a theme of both books it is how the center held throughout the past forty years of jurisprudence. For Woodward this means a focus on the work of Justices Potter Stewart(Woodward's main source), Byron White, and Lewis Powell. For Toobin this means celebrating Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. This two books combined tell the story of how a liberal court became a moderate one and a moderate one became a court with conservative leanings.

An underrated figure in this book is Richard Nixon. Soon after his inauguration, Nixon had the opportunity to replace Chief Justice Earl Warren with Warren Burger and Justice Abe Fortas with Henry Blackmun. Later in his administration, Nixon was able to appointment two more justices, including future Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The Court went in a very short time from a liberal one to a more moderate one.

The next big change came when Samuel Alito replaced Justice O'Connor. A court that had stayed pretty moderate became a court with strong conservative leanings. Some of this is O'Connor's responsibility and the fact that she was a very political creature while on the court and she continued to hold to her Goldwater type Republican leanings. Through Toobin tries to obscure her role, and engages in some unwarranted pox on both houses interpretation, it is clear that O'Connor along with Justice Kennedy played a decisive role in placing George W. Bush in the White House. This allowed Bush to eventually replace O'Connor with the hardcore conservative Justice Alito.

Since Toobin wrote his book, both Justice Souter and Justice Stevens retired from the court. Obama replaced Souter with Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Obama is currently working on nominating Steven's replacement.

To change the direction of the Court, the key is to replace Republican appointees with Democratic ones. Nixon and Ford replaced 3 Democratic appointees with Republican ones and George H.W. Bush replaced one Democratic appointee. Only President's Clinton's replacement of Justice Blackmun with Justice Breyer allowed a Democrat to replace a Republican appointee.

Unless there is an unexpected change, for example Justice Kennedy leaving during the Obama administration, there is little chance for President Obama to drastically change the Court's direction. However, Sotomayer and the next justice will both replace Republican appointees. Though Stevens and Souter were both considered liberals, that was more because of the change of the composition of the Court. Obama will at least be able to place younger and more comprehensively liberal justices on the Court.

Forty two years have passed since the first term chronicled by Woodward. It took that long to change a liberal Court to a Conservative Court and it will probably take just as long to fully change direction. President Obama's has the chance to begin the long march back towards a jurisprudence that pays more heed to the voiceless and those on the margins. Jeffrey Toobin describe Chief Justice Roberts, and consequently the Roberts Court, this way:

"In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

President Obama has the chance to be figure as important to the Court's history as Nixon. If Obama is willing, he can seize the opportunity to moderate a conservative march and start the process of starting a liberal one.

To understand how the stakes became so important and how Obama and the Supreme Court reached this moment of history then read both Toobin and Woodward.

Book Review

I am trying to expand my understanding of the American system of government and the area that I understand the least is Federal Judiciary; especially the Supreme Court. The beginning of my quest to understand the Court, it's justices, and the Constitution is with Linda Geenhouse's study of Justice Harry Blackmun titled Becoming Justice Blackmun.

Greenhouse did not try to write a comprehensive biography of Blackmun but used the release of his papers to study the man and the Court during his time of service. Blackmun is best known as the author of the opinion in Roe vs Wade. The decision, which came early in Blackmun's term as a justice, is the fulcrum for understanding Blackmun's jurisprudence.

Even though Blackmun initially viewed Roe as a means for preserving doctor's ability to treat women, the case began to expand Blackmun's view of justice. He slowly began to expand his conception of justice to include the poor, victims of sex discrimination, and those who have no voice in our legal system.

Greenhouse won a Pulitzer for her coverage of the Supreme Court and it appears it was well deserved. She explains constitutional issues well and makes the world of the Court very accessible. Greenhouse is helped by having the good fortune to chronicle a jurist whose thinking evolved towards a more inclusive understanding of the law.

Book Review

From my days in seminary, I have been interested in English soccer. My roommate was a fan of Arsenal and I often went with him to an English pub in Atlanta to watch the games on satellite. I read, and enjoyed, Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and I now like to watch Premier League games on ESPN.

I thought I was ready to take my enjoyment of English soccer to the next level and it turns out that I was not quite the connoisseur I thought I was. My attempt came in the form of reading David Peace's tale of soccer legend Brian Clough's disastrous managerial tenure of Leed's United titled The Damned Utd. Peace's book is considered a modern classic and for good reason. The probing of the inner workings of Clough's mind is brillant.

The problem is I lacked the requisite understanding of 1970's English soccer. I felt like I was adrift in a world that I knew little about. It just seemed like I knew very little about he inner workings of a soccer team and the writer wrote with what appeared to be an assumption that his readers would be die-hard soccer fans. An American writer would probably have similar assumptions about baseball or football.

Perhaps in another few years, if my understanding of English soccer grows, then I might return The Damned Utd. and enjoy it more.

Book Review

For a long time I have been interested in reading E.L. Doctorow, and this week I dived in by read City of God. It is clear why people consider Doctorow to be one of our greatest living novelists. Doctorow is able to take difficult and complicated ideas and through his use of language and narrative mastery make those ideas accessible. There is no bigger idea then the idea of God and that is the idea that Doctorow tackles in City of God.

Doctorow addresses the the issue of God by intertwining a series of narratives, reflections, and commentaries. The tie that holds all these narrative threads together is the story of the theft of a cross from an Episcopal church and its subsequent discovery on the roof of a synagogue. This theft and investigation bring together the iconoclastic priest of the episcopal church and the female rabbi at the synagogue.

Doctorow's theme is the necessity to strip away all the trappings and build a belief system based on the most primal yearning for God. For Doctorow that means religion and God are what brings us closer to each other in either love or a quest for justice.

City of God is thought provoking and so well written that it draws you in as you read it. However, Doctorow's method of jumping from thread to threat is distracting. For me, I was almost a third of the why through the book before I was able to untangle the threads to get a handle on what is going on. As a card carrying(and paycheck receiving) member of the professionally religious, I have my doubts about being able to strip away all the trappings to get to the essence of religion.

Doctorow focuses on Christianity and Judaism and the essence of those religions is that God communicates through the events of history. In effect the method and the message are indistinguishable from each other. To strip away the method is to strip away the message, and Doctorow seems to want to do both; even though his different narratives make underlie the idea of the method is the message.

Even though I had some quibbles with City of God, I am impressed enough by Doctorow that I want to read some more of his books.

Book Review

I took a trip to Savannah, GA and I was able to read two books on my vacation from winter. One disappointed me and the other provided me great joy as I read.

The first book I read was The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. A follow up(but not a sequel) to Zafon's masterly The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game does not live up to its forebearer. Zafon creates a tale with a great number of plot twists and unexpected turns. However, the book reads like Zafon got so carried away with creating plot twists that he was unable to find a good way to end the story. Zafon also seemed to get wrapped up in the spiritual aspects of the story that it did not seem that he was able to weave this strain into the story in an effective way. In spite of these disappointments, Zafon is such a gifted user of language that the book was a pleasurable disappointment.

Due to an unusually long mechanical delay on my flight to Savannah, I ran out of reading material and needed to buy more books. The book I bought was Clyde Edgerton's The Bible Salesman and I am glad I did. The book focuses on a 20 year door to door Bible salesman in 1950's North Carolina. The salesman is a little on the naive side and ends up getting involved in a multi-state car theft ring because he believes he is actually helping undercover FBI agents. Along the way, our salesman begins to read the Bible and realizes what it says isn't what his fundamentalist upbringing led him to believe the Bible said. As someone who grew up in a religious culture that revered a certain view of the Bible, and tried to pretend it was still 1953, I greatly enjoyed the gentile satire that recognizes the good that people in that culture are capable of but also recognizes the mental childishness that thrives in fundamentalist religion. Oh, and the book will make you laugh out loud. It is that funny and that good.

Book Review

Once he found out he was dying, Ted Kennedy gathered his journals, diaries, and the interviews he did for an oral history project and turned them into his memoir True Compass. True Compass is a very engaging and readable book and is a quicker read then a lot of political memoirs.

A great deal of the book's readability comes from Kennedy's natural talent as a storyteller and the quality of the stories he has to tell. Many of the best ones deal with the lengths Kennedy was willing to go to during the 1960 presidential election(a photo at rodeo in Wyoming illustrates this point). Kennedy also went to great lengths to speak at the 2008 Democratic Democratic Convention soon after doctors diagnosed him with a brain tumor. I thought I had followed the 2008 campaign closely but Kennedy shed light on a couple of details that I had not previously known.

The most difficult part of the book was reading about the 1980 election. Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination because of disagreements over health care. I admire Jimmy Carter and it hurt me to read of the continuing and long lasting rupture between these two men.

As to be expected from a younger brother(and a considerably younger brother at that) there is little critical said about his family. It is clear that Ted Kennedy has no time for many of the stories about his family and that John and Bobby could do no wrong. John's mediocre record of President is due to it being unfinished and that most the Great Society was passed because it was based on JFK's ideas and not because Johnson was better at getting legislation passed then Kennedy was. Also the book tries to protect Robert's image as ruthless and ignores such facts that it was Robert as Attorney General who acquiesced with J. Edgar Hoover's campaign against Martin Luther King. I can fully understand why Ted Kennedy is not critical of his family but I wondered if Ted might have been better served if he had been more critical of the lessons he learned from his family.

Kennedy's greatest success came in the Senate and he talks at lengths about many of them. He is also not shy about talking about his greatest political struggle and that was trying to achieve universal health coverage. Interestingly his proposal during the Clinton administration looks a lot like what the final product of this year's health care debate will look like. Kennedy's proposal included a "pay or play" version of the employer mandate and an individual mandate that included subsidies and a more regulated health insurance industry. I feel better about the this year's proposals after reading about what Kennedy wanted.

You cant' tell the story of the last 50 years. without including the Kennedy family. There success and tragedies are integral part of American history. Ted Kennedy's role and importance is indisputable and True Compass allows a major player in a half century worth of history to tell his story in his own voice.

Book Review

The blue posts in the above photographs mark where the San Andreas Fault crosses the the southern portion of the Point Reyes Peninsula(about 50 miles north of the epicenter of 1906 earthquake).

I spent part of my childhood in the San Frncisco Bay Area, and I have been fascinated with th 1906 earthquake for as long as I can remember. As a boy I had a calendar commemorating the San Francisco earthquake and fire. I would often open the calendar and stare at the photographs show ing the damage the earthquake caused.

This week I read a comprehensive history of the earthquake and fire. San Francisco is Burning is Dennis Smith's narrative history of the 1906 disaster. Dennis Smith is a retired New York City firefighter and the author of Report From Engine Co. 82(the best book about firefighting ever written).

Since Smith is a retired firefighting, there is a lot of focus on the efforts to fight the fires. However the theme of the book might be how the disaster transformed the city of San Francisco. The disaster brought about the fall of the corrupt forces that ran the city and led to a rise of a government based on progressive reforms.

Smith's tale does have its heros and they are first and foremost the San Francisco Fire Department and a group of naval sailors led Lt. Commander Frederick Freeman and Ensign John Pond. The villains of the disaster are the corrupt mayor Eugene Schmitz and the political boss Abraham Ruef. Brigadier General Frederick Funston and the army come off not as villains but as people in over their heads whose mistakes add to the disaster. One of the devices Smith uses to tell the story is focus on a small group people and incidents as way to draw a wider picture of the devastation.

Smith's real gift has always been the ability to combine an understanding of the technical details of a fire or a disaster with an insight into the human dimension of people caught up in such a cataclysm. This gift makes for an engrossing an informative read.

Book Review

Carlos Ruiz Zafon uses a simple concept in his book The Shadow of the Wind but he uses that concept to build a fantastic novel. Zafon's novel is built around the idea that some books are so powerful that their stories will in some very meaningful ways mirror our own lives.

The main character is Daniel, the son of a used book dealer, who finds an obscure novel. The book makes such an impact on Daniel that he attempts to find and read more books written by the same author. This desire to read more leads Daniel into a mystery that touches on issues of love, revenge, and life in post revolutionary Spain.

The summary in the previous paragraph does not to justice to the story. The real power to the story is that he reminds you of what it is about reading that you love. The book grabs a hold of you and just never lets go.

Sometimes a book is great because it grants some new insight about the world you live in and some books are great because they open up a new world to you. The Shadow of the Wind is great because it does both.

Book Review

Since my days in seminary, Nick Hornby has been one of favorite writers. A seminary roomate introduced me to Hornby first through Fever Pitch. From there I read High Fidelity and everything Hornby writes. What drew initially drew me to Hornby was the why he used music, sports, and pop culture to convey deep truths about the people in his stories.

With his book Juliet, Naked Hornby has returned to that formula and it works rather well. The story is about the devotion that many men have to an obscure pop culture figure and how that devotion affects their relationships. In a change in style for Hornby, he tells story not just from the perspective of the obsessive fan but also the pop "icon" and the love interest.

The obsessive fan resonated with me because I know many men like him who obsessively study every detail of the music and life of their favorite musician(Jeff Buckley and Glen Phillips were some of the more common targets of in-depth fandom). However the two characters that I like the most were the musician and the story's love interest. I though both of them were far more interesting and developed then the fan.

I'm not sure if it is the result of growing and maturing but Hornby's books increasingly deal with ambiguity and frustration. Due to this development, Hornby's book ends not with a happy ending but with a more ambigious one and in the end a more hopeful one.

Book Review

I like to travel and I am always looking a way to add depth to my travel experience. In an effort to do so, I read Rick Steves' Travel as a Political Act. Steves is most famous for his PBS travel show and a series of travel book he writes about visiting Europe.

The best part of the book is the large middle section where he goes to various countries and sees how they address certain issues. For example he goes to Switzerland and the Netherlands to study drug policy. Steves also goes to Morocco and Turkey to learn about moderate Islamic countries and he travels to Iran to learn about the United States' current enemy. While usually he usually concentrates on Europe, Steves' does detour to El Salvador to learn about libertation theology and the role that globalization and U.S. Foreign policy play in the developing world.

Steve's book does present a lot to think about and how travel can force to confront some delicate issues. While encouraging people to travel to begin the process of confronting long held beliefs, Steves is short on ways to do that in the specific countries he visited(perhaps that is what his travel books are for).

Even if I travel to only a few of the places that Steves visited, his book does encourage me to travel more and increase the opportunities to step out and learn directly from other cultures.

Book Review

My vacation reading was Richard Aldous' The Lion and the Unicorn. The Lion and the Unicorn tells the story of the rivalry of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. These two men dominated British politics during the Victorian era. During the second half of the Nineteenth Century, these two alternated power and the office of Prime Minister. Stoking their rivalry is the fact that the men were complete opposites and personally detested each other.

I found it fascinating to reed how two people can dominate a political scene for so long. It is impossible for the American political scene to experience such a thing as the rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone. The idea of the separation of powers and term limits for President mean that the most powerful person in the country never has a consistent rival and is off the political scene within a decade. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil were the two most powerful rival politicans in the 1980's but they never faced off directly. All of their conflicts were indirectly through the press and through campaigns. Disraeli and Gladstone regularly faced each other in direct debate in the House of Commons. The closest American analogy that I can come up with is when Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun dominated debates in the Senate during the Antebellum period. However none of the three 3 ever became President.

Gladstone and Disraeli debated every major issue in British politics. The clashed over budget issues and the role of religion in public life. The two debated electoral reform and the questions surrounding Ireland. In foreign affairs, Gladstone and Disraeli had some of their most explosive clashes over issues regarding Turkey and the Middle East, and relations between the great powers of Europe.

Spicing up the political rivalry between the two is the personal qualities of both protagonists. Disraeli was a flamboyant dandy who also wrote popular novels. On one trip to the Middle East, Disraeli came back with a "butler, a pirate outfit, and a case of the clap." Gladstone, on the other hand, was a stern, upright, and pious man. His only weakness was that he frequented some of London's most notorious red light districts searching for what he called "rescue cases."

The book is well written and easy to read. Unless you just be happen to be a geek about British politics and history like I am then you don't need to view this book as vacation reading. However, it is one of the best books on the subject of British political history that I have read.

Liturgygeek was concerned on finding out who was the lion and who was the unicorn. The title is an illusion to a scene in Lewis Carroll"s Through the Looking Glass. William Gladstone is the lion and Benjamin Disraeli is the unicorn.

Book Review

I was educated by professors and mentors who were steeped in the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible. Most of what I learned about understanding the Bible came through the lens of the historical-critical method. Marc Zvi Brettler attempts to make the insights of the historical-critical method accessible in his book How to Read the Bible. Brettler is Jewish and his book only deals with the Jewish Scriptures or what Christians know as the Old Testament.

Ultimately, Brettler fails in his attempt to make the historical-critical method relevant. The problem is not with Brettler but with the historical-critical method itself. I must first admit that I am a strong believer in interpreting the Bible in the light of insights gained by modern scholarship. I think it is important to understand the sources that lay behind the text because in doing so illuminates hard to understand passages and gives insight to the original purposes of a particular text.

I do not reject the historical-critical method but I feel I have moved beyond it. What makes the Bible the Bible is what it does. It provokes, it questions, it comforts, and it confronts. It tells a story about God, humanity and the interaction between the two. The Bible invites us into a dialogue with the it; a dialogue that at times can be very argumentative. It is a dialogue that occurs in the present and draws our attention to the future. The critical method of interpreting the Bible can help clear away some of the clutter to hear the voice of the text but it is not the message of the text itself.

I define myth as a story whose truth is greater then sum of its facts. The Bible is a myth. However, the historical-critical method is not a substitute for a real engagement with the text because the historical-critical method often ends up making the Bible to be no more than the sum of its sources.

Book Review

Over the past couple of weeks I have read two books about historical presidential elections. The first is Lynn Hudson Parson's The Birth of Modern Politics and the second is James Chace's 1912. A first I thought the books might be a little boring but instead I found both of them very readable and enjoyable. If anything, I wanted them to go into even more depth.

What I found most interesting about both books is m=how much the issues is the campaign of 1828 and 1912 parallel current issues. In 1828 one of the major issues was banking and specifically, the 2nd Bank of the United States. The 1912 election centered on the best way to rein a corporate sector that had run amuck. The parallels between those elections and the current political debates over regulating the financial sector and Wall Street were fascinating. It is clear that almost since the earliest days of the republic, the idea of effectively dealing with banks and large corporations has a long history of political viability in our elections. It is alao worth noting that both victors campaigned in opposition banks and big business and then governed in a manner closely aligned with their campaign promises. Populism, even if co-opted, has a long history of being politically successful.

It is also true that the big issues of the American political debate have not changed much over the years. The questions of the size and role of government dominated the eras covered by both books. In 1828 the question was on using government money on internal improvements and in 1912 the debate centered on the regulatory role of the federal government. While it is clear that our political systems has made progress, it has done so within defined limits of the American political system. I am not sure if this is a good thing or not.

What both books point out is that if you are unwilling to fight and defend your beliefs in the political arena then you don't deserve to be there. John Quincy Adams had a defensible record as President but his failure to use the leverage of his office to build political support ensured his defeat. William Howard Taft is a little different case. He never wanted to be, and never enjoyed being, the President; his life's dream was to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. This lack of desire when coupled with his distress over a very public rupture with Theodore Roosevelt led Taft to not fight very hard to remain as President.

I once heard someone say that "history does not repeat but it rhymes." If that is indeed the case then both of these books provide a good basic understanding of where our country's politics have come from and what we can learn from our past when it rhymes with our current situation.

Book Review

I like Graham Greene and this week I finally read Our Man in Havana. Our Man in Havana tells the the story of a Mr. Wormold; a vacuum cleaner salesman who is recruited to be British intelligence's man in Havana. Wormold has no idea to run a spy network and decides to make things up including passing off a drawing of a vacuum cleaner as secret weapon. Things begin to spin out of control when everyone assumes that what Wormold reports is true.

The easy parallel is to The Quiet American and there are quite a few similarities. They are both satires of Cold War adventurism and both aim to criticize western interference in other countries. However, Our Man in Havana is not nearly as scathing and it does not attempt to take sides in the way The Quiet American does.

The real them of Our Man in Havana is love. Womold is both motivated and haunted by his love for his teenage daughter and for the wife who left him. In fact, Wormold's scheme is an attempt to gain enough money to provide his daughter a better life. Later Wormold realizes he is in love with the Beatrice; the aid British intelligence sent to him. Beatrice gives the theme of the book when she tells the assembled military and intelligence chiefs that "a country is more a family than a Parliamentary system."

I always enjoy reading Greene and Our Man in Havana is a quick, enjoyable and fun read.

Book Review

One of the reoccurring themes of this blog is my attempt to find and read good fiction.  I trust my ability to find good non-fiction but I feel like I need help to find good novels.  This time, I followed the advice of blogger Matt Yglesias and read his father's most recent book titled A Happy Marriage.

The book tells the two intertwined stories of how the main character(who is a stand in for the author) meets and falls in love with his wife, and how he prepares to say good-bye to her as she dies of cancer.  Using flashbacks the book moves from the present day, where plans are being made to say good-bye, to 30 years ago when the protagonists first falls in love.  The chapters alternate between the present and the past with a couple of detours thrown in that explain revelations the main character has about his wife and his marriage.

The only criticism comes because the book is autobiographical the setting is among the literary set of upper middle class Manhattan.  The couple in this book have access to more resources and advantages then an average person and they press those advantages to get the best care.  Since this is autobiographical, this is only a small complaint but I do wish the more novelists writing about the struggles of a similar couple without the advantages being well off brings.

That said, the story is a good; especially the last half.  As the twin narratives move toward a consummation, the tension in both narrative arcs draws the reader into the story.  Most importantly the author tells a story and tells it well.  There is enough tension and emotion in the subject matter of love, life, and death that a straight forward approach is all that is needed.  All the writer needs to do is tell the story and tell how he felt.  He does and the book is better for it.

A Happy Marriage is really a good piece of writing.  It tells a story in a straightforward, honest manner and it does so with showing off how much work was behind the production of the story.

Book Review

Thanks to the combination of a trip to Chicago's Abraham Lincoln Book Shop and my 33rd birthday I ended up with two books about Fort Sumter.

The first book is called Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War.  Allegiance is a narrative of the events in Charleston that led up to the bombardment of Fort Sumter.   The larger picture is discussed but the focus is on the city of Charleston and on Fort Sumter.  Great pains are therefore taken to explain the details of life in antebellum Charleston and life in a fort in the pre Civil War army.  This focus on the minute details of life in Charleston harbor give the book a tense, claustrophobic feel; just like I suspect things felt in charleston in 1860.  

The second book Maury Klein's Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War.  Klein's tale gives a much broader view of the events leading up to the start of the Cvil War.  Defiance explores the pre-inauguration and early days of Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the early days of the Confederacy.  Klein also takes time to explore the wider political issues that swirled about the start of the Civil War.  When I say wider political issues I don't mean to imply that something other than slavery caused the Civil War.  What I mean to say is the Klein explores the politics and culture of South Carolina and that culture led many South Carolinians to favor secession.  Klein also explore the debates in Washington about various plans to compromise and how those debates paralyzed Congress and tore apart the administration of James Buchanan.  Ultimately, the political debate was paralyzed because the debate over slavery could not be separated from the debate over secession and there was no compromise to had on the issue of secession.

I found two people who played major parts in the drama to be particularly fascinating.  The first is Major Robert Anderson who was the commander of the Union forces at Fort Sumter.  Anderson was a southerner who was friends with Jefferson Davis, married into a slave holding family, mentored the Confederate general opposing him, but somehow managed to be a stuanch unionist and refused to surrender the fort.  The second person I found fascinating was South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond.  Hammond is best know for his "Cotton is King" speech that gave the broad view to the importance of a slave based plantation economy to the South.  Hammond's personal life contained the contradictions the also gripped the South.  Hammond was so hemmed in by the stifling life among the South's elite that he turned to taking some of his slaves as mistresses and to engaging in inappropriate relationships with his 2 nieces; who just happened to be the daughters of the Wade Hampton who was perhaps the richest and most powerful man in the entire state.  Hammond's life became a metaphor for the hypocrisy that lay at the heart of southern antebellum culture.

Both of these books are good by themselves and together they give a great view of the events leading up to Fort Sumter.  However, if you can only choose one then I would recommend Days of Defiance.