Category: Reviews

It is both fitting and pleasantly ironic that Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert, was not only the final book I read in 2015 but arguably the most consequential. Every now and again, I encounter a work of a magnitude such as this which offers a truly fresh perspective that compels a reevaluation of core concepts. This was the case, for example, with Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, Maps of Time, by David Christian, and 1491, by Charles C. Mann. Books like these transcend historical scholarship and move in a greater intellectual arena that not only challenges accepted wisdom but literally annihilates it and thereby forces the construction of an entirely new narrative. Empire of Cotton, an epic in the genre “Big History,” does all of that and does it with penetrating insight.

In some four hundred fifty pages of tightly compressed and often dense but readable text, Harvard Professor of History Sven Beckert demolishes the myth of capitalism as it has been traditionally understood. In that model, which Beckert in nearly a single stroke brilliantly renders obsolete, we have long been taught that the industrial revolution, a European triumph, was the product of technology fueled by free markets, liberal democracy and the Protestant work ethic to create the economic miracle of capitalist growth and progress that has literally defined the modern west. But Beckert, a social, political and economic historian, peels back cherished notions to reveal that in fact neither the industrial revolution nor capitalism as we know it could have evolved without state coercion – nor could it have existed without the central staple crop that made it all possible: cotton, the central element that weaves (pun fully intended!) it all together.

Of course, the myth of European exceptionalism has long been dented and bruised by more recent historiography. Only a couple of centuries prior to its ascent to global dominance, Europe was kind of a backwater to the Arab Middle East and China, until the Columbian Experience brought vast wealth and exotic new products that literally shifted the global epicenter from the Mediterranean and the east to the Atlantic trade and the west. Yet, one of those new exotic products was decidedly not cotton, which apparently had been cultivated, spun and woven for thousands of years in geographies as disparate as Egypt, the Indus valley and Peru. Europe was one of the places highly-prized textiles made from cotton were not at all common. As Beckert argues in his complex but persuasive thesis, cotton proved to be the key ingredient that was to change everything, and from the very beginning it was cooked into a stock vigorously stirred by violence and often brutal state coercion that he calls “war capitalism,” amply seasoned by healthy doses of state investment and protectionism. Set aside steel and other more familiar totems of the industrial revolution for the moment: none of it would have been possible without cotton.

Before there was an industrial revolution, there was of course industry, or rather the technology that made mills possible to create great volumes of textiles made from cotton. But cotton does not grow in temperate European climes. Prior to this, the finest cotton textiles originated in the east and especially in India, the very center of global cotton dominance. The first stop for war capitalism, Beckert tells us, was British imperialism and the roots of colonialism that aggressively sought the raw material for its mills at the lowest possible cost. British economic interests propped up by British military might began to transform centuries of Indian cotton cultivation and production, spinning and weaving, and the marketing of the finished product through middlemen and merchants. Britain forcefully remade India as a supplier of raw materials to its mills in a heavy-handed process that over decades transformed it from a powerful vendor to world markets to an almost helpless customer of the British who relied upon state investment and protectionism to dominate cotton textile production. As Beckert notes: “India’s cotton industry was decimated … In the wake of the Industrial Revolution … India lost its once central position in the global cotton industry and, in a great historical irony, eventually became the world’s largest market for British cotton exports.” [p172] So much for free markets and free enterprise …

The central tenet to European textile production was cheap cotton, which meant cheap labor to cultivate the cotton crop. For cheap labor, you cannot beat slave labor, which is why slavery became absolutely central to cotton production and the industrial revolution. The windfall of the Columbian Experience had gifted European overlords with vast territories in the Americas favored with the kind of warm climates conducive to cotton cultivation, but the near annihilation of its pre-contact population due to old world pandemics created a dearth of labor. African slavery had already proved a successful if brutally inhumane solution for sugar and tobacco plantations in the New World. Now that the Industrial Revolution had turned cotton into “white gold,” the availability of high quality cotton textiles proved in a cruel irony to be valuable tender for slave traders as payment for the human chattel who would cultivate new raw materials later turned into the finished products that were the very price of their purchase.

War capitalism – through colonialism, expropriation of territory and slavery – created the empire of cotton and thereby bred its next critical phase, “industrial capitalism,” which created wage laborers: an entirely new phenomenon for vast numbers of people that for a variety of factors were forced to abandon a traditional agricultural lifestyle and become workers in the mills, for long hours, little compensation and often in grueling conditions. But here too state coercion continued to play a significant role, as the power of the state generally aligned with the moneyed interests against the ill-treated factory proletariat, enforcing one-sided contracts, instituting compulsory work laws, and blocking any attempts at reform.

Interestingly, as Beckert points out in his study of the United States, while war capitalism was essential for the foundation of industrial capitalism, the two typically remained mutually exclusive. For instance, the plantation south of the antebellum years hosted very few mills, while textile production flourished in the north. “A society dominated by slavery was not conducive to cotton industrialization,” Beckert insists. “Slave states were notoriously late and feeble in supporting the political and economic interests of domestic industrializers. This was also the case in the slave territories within the United States, the only country in the world divided between war and industrial capitalism, a unique characteristic that would eventually spark an unprecedentedly destructive civil war.” [p171]

Students of the American Civil War are well-familiar with the Confederacy’s unshakeable confidence that Europe could not endure without their cotton, so much so that the CSA withheld cotton shipments early on. Panic and economic depression did indeed ensue in Britain and elsewhere, but rather than the recognition and aid Richmond had anticipated, the shortage of cotton prompted a renewal of war capitalism to seek alternate sources of supply. This persisted long after Appomattox and the result was an even greater commitment to colonialism. Parts of India, for instance, were completely refashioned to force a monopoly for cotton cultivation over all other kinds of agriculture. Railroads and telegraphs, later products of the industrial revolution, permitted the British to penetrate deeper into the interior for such purposes. When cotton prices fell and food grain prices rose in the 1870s, some six to ten million Indians died of famine in the Berar province alone, although there was plenty of food available but economically out of reach to the affected population. This was repeated in the 1890s, when another nineteen million people perished of famine in that same geography in similar circumstances.

Empire of Cotton contains many horrific episodes such as this to reveal the grim realities of both industrialization and capitalism, elements of which persist to this day – something that will no doubt provoke chagrin and loud cries of revisionism by outraged “heritage” historians who hurl the invective of “political correctness” against any new historiography that challenges their more rosy enshrined narrative. And we can expect similar fury to be sparked in the camps of contemporary free market ideologues, as Beckert reminds us that even now: “Violence and coercion, in turn, are as adaptive as the capitalism they enable, and they continue to play an important role in the empire of cot­ton to this day. Cotton growers are still forced to grow the crop; workers are still held as virtual prisoners in factories. Moreover, the fruits of their activities continue to be distributed in radically unequal way – with cot­ton growers in Benin, for example, making a dollar a day or less, while the owners of [otherwise unprofitable] cotton growing businesses in the United States have collectively received government subsidies of more than $35 billion between 1995 and 2010. Workers in Bangladesh stitch together clothing under absurdly dangerous conditions for very low wages, while consumers in the United States and Europe can purchase those pieces with abandon, at prices that often seem impossibly low.” [p442]

Empire of Cotton is a remarkable and extremely thought-provocative book, although it can be a difficult read, since Beckert the careful historian includes many details and much statistical information that occasionally bogs down the text – in addition to some 135 pages of endnotes. Yet, Beckert’s thesis remains convincing, aptly demonstrating throughout this long, complicated work that cotton industrialization is vitally dependent in all phases upon extremely cheap labor, and concluding with a chilling reminder that: “For the past several decades, Walmart and other retail giants have continually moved their production from one poor country to a slightly poorer one, lured by the promise of workers even more eager and even more inexpensive. Even Chinese production is now threatened by lower-wage producers. The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom …” [p440] This is a very important book, in my estimation, and despite the difficulty I highly recommend it.

I am more than a little late to serve as an early reviewer for Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, by John Paul Stevens, which I obtained based upon that commitment back in 2011. Still, guilt eventually inspired me to read it through, after much procrastination and several false starts. Now that I finally did my duty, albeit a long overdue one, I really do not know what to make of this odd little book.

Five Chiefs seems intended as a kind of intimate history of the Supreme Court during the tenure of Justice John Paul Stevens, who served a lengthy term on the bench from his appointment by President Gerald Ford in 1975 until his retirement in 2010. After a whirlwind chapter that takes the reader through the key moments in the history of the Supreme Court by way of its first twelve chief justices, the bulk of the rest of the book – reflecting the title – is structured by chapters named for each of the five Chief Justices that Stevens served with on the Court: Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts. I used the word “intended” deliberately in the first sentence of this paragraph, for it is never really clear what this book is supposed to be. It is too brief for a history of the Supreme Court, too superficial for a study of constitutional law, too Spartan to pretend to be biographical of the named justices, and too parsimonious with detail to be an autobiography. Moreover, if it is really a memoir, as the subtitle insists, then it is a very lean one indeed.

To my mind, Five Chiefs is a rather lightweight but fond anecdotal accounting of the people and events encountered in the three and a half decades the author served as an Associate Justice, told in a respectful, collegial style that is friendly both to the Court and to his fellow justices. Yet, here and there the narrative is unexpectedly punctuated with a discussion of critical Court decisions, which while promising at first frequently disappoints, largely because the greater context is conspicuous in its absence. A legal scholar or member of the judicial elite could easily evaluate his comments and the attendant ramifications; for the rest of us there is only Google.

Far more paragraphs and pages are devoted to matters that may seem trivial to the audience, even if they did not to the author, such as the way offices are assigned to members, or even the unfortunate position of a conference table after a meeting room is remodeled. But to be fair it is not all superficial stuff: Stevens is signally affronted when during the Reagan Administration the swearing-in ceremony of justices is relocated from the Supreme Court Building to the White House, which he views as a consequential if symbolic violation of the separation of powers of the three branches of government. Moreover, he is singularly outraged by Reagan’s comments at the investiture of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Stevens sternly notes that: “. . . the president participated with remarks that welcomed his new appointee as a judge who would follow the law rather than make it up. I thought the president’s remarks were both offensive and inappropriate and therefore decided not to attend similar ceremonies at the White House in the future.” [p207] Later in the text, we learn of Stevens’ warm approval when President Obama moves these ceremonies back to their traditional home at the Supreme Court Building.

This slender volume often reveals more by what is not said or what is subtly hinted at. While emphasizing friendships formed, traditions of respect and decorum among the justices, and never abandoning the collegial tone, it is manifestly clear that Stevens silently objects when Rehnquist adds gold stripes to his robe upon promotion to Chief Justice, and he is just as quietly relieved when Roberts desists from that practice. He does make the point that while the various Courts are known to history by the Chief Justices, in fact every time one seat changes hands an entirely new Court is manifested, a critical reminder that each appointment bears great significance. Stevens notes, almost in passing, that much more attention was devoted in confirmation hearings for the nomination of Rehnquist to Chief Justice, a sitting Associate Justice, than to the nomination of Antonin Scalia who took the vacated Rehnquist Associate Justice seat. There is no hint that Stevens objected to Scalia, but it is loudly unsaid that he felt quite differently when the brilliant liberal Thurgood Marshall was replaced by the middling Clarence Thomas, an ultra-conservative whose votes tipped the balance of the Court in a most unfortunate direction. Stevens is clearly distraught not only by rulings that seemed to undo more than a half century of evolving jurisprudence in areas such as civil rights, the death penalty and the Second Amendment, but more significantly by the decision that denied a legitimate electoral recount and thereby made George W. Bush President, as well as the one that delivered what he clearly sees as a wrong turn in campaign financing reform in the since much-maligned Citizens United ruling.

The tenure of John Paul Stevens seems to correspond in some ways to the transformation of the Republican Party from a bigger tent to the almost exclusive province of the right. When Stevens, a solid business-friendly Republican justice was appointed to the bench by the Republican President Gerald Ford, there were plenty of moderate and even liberal Republicans, a brand that has virtually gone extinct. Hardly a political liberal as most would define it, as evidenced by his own votes on the Court, Stevens nevertheless represented a time-honored tradition that cherished the rights of Americans under the law and always put politics in second place to jurisprudence. When asked a few years ago if he still identified as a Republican, Stevens famously declined comment.

Five Chiefs is probably not a book for everyone, and I have to admit I give it less than stellar marks overall, but it contains elements that make me glad I read it. The “Appendix” contains the full text of the United States Constitution and its Amendments, something that clearly defined Stevens’ life and career and something that every American should probably read, especially in these polarized days when what our central founding document truly contains is often wildly misstated. As for Stevens, at this writing he still walks among us at ninety-five years old. His book, warts and all, characterizes a tradition that we should well cherish and a dedication to justice we should well celebrate.

With the completion of South of the Border, West of the Sun, by Haruki Murakami, I have read everything in the fiction realm that Murakami has written that has been translated into English, which is virtually all of it with the exception of a handful of recent short stories. That rather prolific body of work includes thirteen novels, three short story collections and an oddball kid’s novella. Quite by accident rather than any design on my part, my final notch in the Murakami catalog represents something of the mid-point of the author’s career – South of the Border, West of the Sun appeared first in Japan in 1992 and was later released in English in 2000; six novels were published before it, and six more after it. This review thus affords a kind of opportunity for me to reflect not only on this novel but also upon Murakami’s overall literary impact.

Like the author, Hajime – the central character of South of the Border, West of the Sun – is an only child who grows up to own a jazz bar. Like nearly every Murakami male protagonist, Hajime is a passive, introspective fellow who rather than managing his own destiny more or less lets life happen to him. Approaching middle age, an affluent family man in a stable but colorless marriage, Hajime finds himself haunted both by the memories of an old girlfriend whom he once hurt very deeply, and by a longing for a close female childhood friend named Shimamoto who dragged one leg due to polio. Some two and a half decades have passed since he has seen her, but one day Shimamoto randomly shows up in his jazz bar, a mysterious and now strikingly beautiful woman whose leg has been mended by surgery. Hajime falls deeply in love with her, but the enigmatic Shimamoto disappears and reappears in his life without explanation over the coming months. Still, Hajime finds himself committed to her and willing to give up his family and sacrifice everything to be with her.

The first part of the novel’s title corresponds to a song ostensibly recorded by Nat King Cole; the second refers to an Inuit syndrome known as “Arctic hysteria” where monotony begets a series of irrational acts followed by amnesia. While most critics fail to reflect upon this, the signposts in the title and various other clues lead me to believe that the adult Shimamoto was in fact an imaginary phantom conjured up in Hajime’s mid-life crisis rather than an actual flesh-and-blood lover, but there remains enough ambiguity that – as with the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – it could easily go either way. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – which Murakami has said deeply influenced him and which he himself translated into Japanese – the style and tone of South of the Border, West of the Sun seems rather ordinary while reading it, yet belies a much greater complexity that is only truly revealed once the final pages have been turned.

In the same sense, I suppose, I find myself relishing Murakami’s prose far more than I actually value each book as a finished work. That is perhaps odd, but I’m not certain there is a better way to express it. Of the thirteen Murakami novels, I still would call Kafka on the Shore – the very first one I read – his most brilliant work and the one I enjoyed the most. And by far the one I liked the very least was his most recent, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I recall being frustrated as hell by all of the loose ends that remain frayed at the conclusion of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84, but it is in retrospect that I came to reflect upon these as great literature and among his finest works. Like most critics I loved A Wild Sheep Chase, and find it amusing that so many pseudo-intellectuals simply don’t get it. Unlike many fans, I found the much celebrated Norwegian Wood boring and uninspiring. Still, once you are bitten by the Murakami bug, it remains hard to let go. Like the songs of the Beatles, there really isn’t a truly bad tune.

I am about three years late as an early reviewer of Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, by Andrew J. Bacevich, but even though it slipped through the cracks my uncorrected proof edition has long beckoned to me from the shelf, and now its time has come. I have read Bacevich before: his 2008 The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, a kind of manifesto that essentially calls for a full reset of American military goals and direction grounded on pragmatism and realism, was a radical departure from the kind of analysis one would expect from a former military man billed as a “conservative historian.” Of course, the tragic stumbles into Afghanistan and Iraq and the aftermath of wars with no foreseeable end have provoked critical thinking on all sectors except the most stubbornly ideological, but to his credit Bacevich generally brings a refreshing new perspective to familiar conundrums, while occasionally striking a sort of utopian chord lacking specificity that might more often be found on the left rather than the right-of-center.

There is less ambiguity in Breach of Trust. Bacevich defines his thesis at the outset: Americans lack “skin in the game,” as it were, and thus are willing to tolerate unending wars because in an era of an all-volunteer army their children cannot be drafted and put at risk. Bacevich goes on to unsparingly indict this professionalization of the American military, not only by its reliance solely on volunteers but by the ongoing utilization of security contractors that operate as business entities rather than patriots with the interests of the nation in mind. Moreover, he decries the gainsaying of the “support our troops” mantra, which has become a diluted slogan for the real apathy most Americans lend to our endless wars. The latter especially resonated with me, for I have long said that “support our troops” is simply a forced euphemism for “support our wars.”

Breach of Trust opens with Bacevich as a young platoon leader in Vietnam 1970-71, with “fragging” becoming a popular act of resistance against authority, something no one in the military then or since has wanted to discuss out loud, a telling reminder that as Vietnam has devolved into myth there was indeed plenty of opposition to the war from within. It is worth pausing here to reflect on Bacevich’s background. A West Point graduate and combat officer in Vietnam, he went on to a career of some twenty-three years in the army, including the Gulf War, retiring with the rank of Colonel. (It is said his early retirement was predicated upon being passed over for promotion after he graciously took full responsibility for an explosive accident at a camp he commanded in Kuwait.) He went on to become an academic, and is currently Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History at Boston University. A longtime critic of George W. Bush’s doctrine of preventative war and the Iraqi conflict, which he has rightly termed a “catastrophic failure,” his own son was killed in Iraq in 2007. This resume attaches to Bacevich either enormous credibility or an axe to grind, or perhaps both. Regardless, his books are well worth the read.

Breach of Trust reminds us of our military tradition in the United States, which called for a small citizen army in peacetime that was vastly augmented in times of war by both volunteers and draftees, and then demobilized when the crisis passed. It was this kind of military that ended the rebellion of the Confederacy in the Civil War and defeated Germany and Japan in World War II. The realities of the Cold War era left much larger forces in place after WWII, but that tradition still held, at least until the unpopular draft of the unpopular war in Vietnam. The all-volunteer army was the legacy of that conflict, and Bacevich admits that he once favored this approach. Yet, it is the unintended consequences of this professional military machine that forms the core of Breach of Trust and Bacevich makes a persuasive case that the result has been a disconnect between most Americans and the faraway endless wars we are waging.

The “Prologue” is telling: he relates the story of a Red Sox game at Fenway on July 4, 2011 when the Lydon family – and millions of Americans watching the game on television – are treated to their surprise reunion with their daughter Bridget, a sailor serving on an aircraft carrier deployed in support of the war in Afghanistan, courtesy of the Pentagon and the Red Sox. It was a patriotic celebration while the nation publically renewed its pledge to “support our troops,” and then Bridget returned to war and the rest of the country went on with its business. Americans are always eager to fight the bad guys – with other Americans, that is, or with other Americans’ children. As I write this, in December 2015, the country is oppressed by a kind of irrational fear of ISIL. Still, when polled more than 60% of millennials advocated sending ground troops to Syria to combat ISIL but only 12% were willing to serve!

Breach of Trust reminds us that it has not always been this way and urges that it need not remain this way going forward. Towards the end of the book, however, Bacevich turns to the old notion of mandatory service for all Americans, either in the military or in some worthwhile peacetime endeavor, and I find this less than convincing. There are indeed perils to the professionalization of the American military that transcend public apathy to endless wars – historians can easily conjure up memories of Roman legions and the like; mercenaries always pose a threat to a republic, even if you turn your own citizens into those mercenaries with a uniform and a paid education. But would the country ever support mandatory service? Would a return to the draft ever fly except during an existential threat to our national survival? I don’t see it. Instead, in my view the focus must return to putting pressure on our national leaders to force a conclusion to our current military adventures, and insist that we maintain a strong defensive posture while turning to war only as an absolute last resort.

Bacevich has been a critic of American foreign policy since 911, but he has remained a voice in the wilderness. I would recommend this book, yet I doubt it will have the kind of influence it deserves. War has become almost an intrinsic part of our culture these days, and if we are not very, very careful, our addiction to it may one day destroy us.

On a final note, some may point to the loss of Bacevich’s son in Iraq as the spark to his epiphany that we are on the wrong track, but it actually long predated it. In fact, some less charitable souls contacted him after this tragedy to taunt him with responsibility for the death of his son through his political opposition to the war. At the time, Bacevich wrote, both he and his son were doing their duties to their country. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/25/AR2007052502032.html) In my opinion, it is our duty as citizens to hear what he has to say.

 

 

Rarely do we encounter a work of fiction so unique and thought-provocative that it seems to cut its very own groove in twenty-first century American literature, but such is the case in my opinion with Welcome to Braggsville, the brilliant and delightfully satirical second novel by T. Geronimo Johnson. The last time I was struck so favorably by an idiosyncratic work such as this was upon reading Junot Diaz’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and indeed both novels share an authenticity of voice that not only add credibility to the fictional narratives but actually define these in some sense as their very own sub-genres.

The central protagonist of Welcome to Braggsville is D’aron Davenport, a white rural native of the tiny hamlet of Braggsville, Georgia, population 712, who parlays academic excellence and a clever application letter laden with sarcasm into acceptance at the University of California, Berkeley. An outsider trying to gnaw his way inside what he fondly characterizes as “Berzerkeley,” D’aron finally succeeds in bonding with Candice, a principled and attractive white chick from Iowa desperate to assert her one-eighth Native American heritage; Charlie, an athletic black dude from the Chicago hood of questionable sexual orientation; and Louis, a comedic Malaysian character from San Francisco. When D’aron lets drop that hometown Braggsville hosts an annual Civil War reenactment, he and his new friends – who have collectively dubbed themselves the “4 Little Indians” – uneasily conspire to stage a “performative intervention” protest, which, as events are to prove, decidedly does not go well.

It would not be giving away too much to reveal that Braggsville is a metaphor for the post-racial America that all of us – except perhaps for the snarky pundits on Fox News – have to acknowledge is anything but post-racial, and the “4 Little Indian” millennials represent a slice of its disparate denizens. Johnson, an African-American visiting professor at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has managed through this superb and highly-original satire to write about race in America in a manner that somehow defies cliché and turns out to be both gut-wrenching and funny and ultimately tragic. I detected elements of William Faulkner’s Snopes novels, bits and pieces of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat Cradle phase, John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire era, and even echoes of Allan Gurganus in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, but Welcome to Braggsville is most definitely not derivative. In contrast, Johnson’s innovative style seduces the reader with a multilayered narrative that in the end effectively distills both the awkwardness and the perfidy of entrenched racism that not only still characterizes America in 2015 but ultimately defines it.

Midway through the novel, D’aron’s father, in ridiculing a Berkeley class syllabus, indicts both racism and political-correctness, and thereby points to an uncomfortable truth that cannot help but make all of us squirm just a little bit: “I don’t need to go to college for this stuff. I woulda told you this, son: People generally aren’t too fond of people who are different. No one can warm to everybody. That ain’t never gonna change. Only thing’ll change is what counts as different, from time to time. So, try to take ‘em as individuals. Know you can’t fix the world. Get rid of n—, you get coloreds. Get rid of coloreds, you got blacks. Get rid of blacks, you got African-Americans. It’s all the same if you don’t like ‘em. See, ‘cause if you don’t like ‘em, you’ll make some new shit that’s too clever for them to know all fuck what’s happening. Like Ed down in purchasing, he calls ‘em Mondays. You think that changes what’s in the man’s heart? … No. Why Mondays? … Nobody likes Mondays.” [p239-40]

Every paragraph is not as profound or stylized as that one, and like even the finest literature there are identifiable flaws here and there, but the overall package is nothing short of magnificent. If you want to read a novel that transcends the ordinary and serves up a salient chunk of a quintessential disorder that plagues contemporary America, then I highly recommend that you read Welcome to Braggsville. If you do, I can promise that it will stay with you – not unlike race in America – long after you thought you were done with it.

I read Iron Rails, Iron Men, and the Race to Link the Nation: The Story of the Transcontinental Railroad, by Martin W. Sandler, as part of an early reviewer’s program. My edition is a large format (10 ½”w x 9”h) softcover Advance Reading Copy with low resolution period photographs that are nevertheless breathtaking. The hardcover official edition (released September 2015) makes it a tempting buy if only for the higher-res versions of these photos. This volume is directed towards a young adult audience, grades seven and up, yet the engaging, generally well-written narrative is hardly dumbed down.

There have been many books chronicling the dramatic story of the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860’s, during the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Most Americans have some familiarity with the race from the West Coast by the Central Pacific with its predominantly immigrant Chinese labor force, in fierce competition with the race from the Midwest by the Union Pacific and its predominantly immigrant Irish labor force, that culminates in the driving of the “golden spike” that represented a connection between the Atlantic and Pacific and an America – now reunited after a long bloody rebellion – that had in some respects conquered the continent. Most treatments focus upon the “heroic” aspects of the tale, and there certainly is much heroism and grit in evidence, but of course there are dark sides too that are often overlooked, especially in history books designed for a younger audience.

To Sandler’s credit, without sacrificing the heroic drama of the narrative, the author manages to apply a completely modern historical approach that takes into account the negative consequences of the railroad for Native Americans, the unjust and ungrateful treatment of Chinese workers, the criminality of top executives in both competing companies, and the horrific violence that was endemic to the colorful “Hell on Wheels” towns that materialized suddenly as track-layers came along and then evaporated once they had moved on. Sandler’s style – much like the quality Time-Life series volumes found in many homes when I was growing up – is such that it is often difficult to detect that he is writing for younger readers rather than adults, and the difference is extremely subtle. For instance, conspicuous in its absence in passages describing the gamblers and murderers that populated the “Hell on Wheels” towns is any reference to the prostitutes who were fellow travelers. Naturally, in America it is always forbidden to discuss sex with children, but murder remains fully acceptable!

Still, it is the wealth of superlative outsize black-and-white photographs of the era that dominate this book and enhance the narrative. Sandler tells us that photographers accompanied the engineers and made great efforts to chronicle what they knew was an initiative of epic proportions, and an impressive sample of such photos are included: of the rails, of the trains, of the people, of the spectacular scenery, of the immense obstacles. The text is also enhanced by cut-outs that profile prominent individuals, groups and events of significance, as well as maps, a timeline and an epilogue that follows key figures in the years beyond.

One significant blemish to an otherwise creditworthy effort is a historical error of some consequence that occurs early in the work as the author narrates the backstory to the birth of the transcontinental railroad. “Despite the many different compromises that had been attempted,” Sandler relates, “the northern and southern regions of the nation had grown further apart over the fact that the slaveholders in the South refused to give up their slaves.” [p11] Now that sentence is not simply an over-simplification, it is absolutely wrong. The south may indeed have felt that its “peculiar institution” was threatened, but notwithstanding the rhetoric of the tiny abolitionist contingent in the north there was never any federal attempt to compel “slaveholders in the South … to give up their slaves.” Rather, the southern states that seceded to form the Confederacy did so because of their desire to expand slavery into the vast western territories, something that was resisted by “free-soilers” such as Lincoln’s Republican Party. This may seem like a quibble to some, but it decidedly is not. Such an error is not tolerable to a historian and makes me want to fact-check the rest of the narrative.

That error aside, which I can only hope will be corrected in future editions, I very much enjoyed reading this book and especially admiring the accompanying photographs. As such, I would recommend Iron Rails, Iron Men, and the Race to Link the Nation to readers young and old.

I would not typically combine two works of fiction into a single review, but Hear the Wind Sing, and Pinball, 1973, by Haruki Murakami, are inextricably linked, not only because they date back some thirty-five years yet were only released in the United States for the first time in 2015 – in a single volume entitled Wind/Pinball – but because together these two short novels neatly form the essential foundation for the exceptional artist that Murakami would become. The author emphasizes this connection, fondly tagging these as his “kitchen table novels.”

Murakami’s genesis as a novelist is an extraordinary story that he recounts in an introduction to this edition that is definitely worth the read. Apparently, he and his wife married young, opened a jazz club in the Tokyo suburbs and labored throughout their twenties just to pay the bills. In 1978, the nearly thirty year old Murakami decided one day that he wanted to be a writer, sat down at his kitchen table and struggled to find a style. Remarkably, he put initial frustrations aside and began composing in English, which he later translated back into Japanese. His reliance on direct, simple sentences to construct paragraphs and chapters was born in this exercise. The result was Hear the Wind Sing. He submitted his only copy of the manuscript to a journal, and basically forgot about it. Sometime later, he learned that he had won a prestigious literary prize! All at once, he was convinced he would become a full-time author. The following year, he wrote Pinball, 1973, also at his kitchen table, as a sequel to Hear the Wind Sing, then sold his jazz club and set off for fame and fortune.

Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are considered the first and second volumes of the “Trilogy of the Rat” series, which precede A Wild Sheep Chase, the novel that really launched Murakami’s career. Together these works introduce the quintessential Murakami passive male protagonist who populates most of his novels, as well as “the Rat,” his existentially peculiar drinking buddy who reappears posthumously in A Wild Sheep Chase. There are also the familiar well-drawn quirky female characters who inhabit Murakami’s fiction as lovers and friends: a girl missing a finger in Wind; a pair of utterly indistinguishable twins in Pinball. Conspicuous in their absence for well-travelled Murakami fans, however, are erotic female earlobes, missing cats, or the author’s special brand of magical realism which first shows up in A Wild Sheep Chase. Both Wind and Pinball are composed more as a series of vignettes and character sketches than a narrative storyline; not an unusual Murakami construct but yet far more noticeable here than elsewhere by virtue of their brevity. Yet, the characters and events are both decidedly colorful and strikingly memorable.

To date, I have read all but one of the volumes of Murakami’s fiction. As a devotee, I felt an obligation to read these nascent works, but hardly expected to enjoy them as much as I did. Hear the Wind Sing indeed feels a bit like the writer working to find his voice, as described in the introduction, but it remains a pleasure to read. And Pinball, 1973, despite its brief length and its reliance on vignettes already has the feel of the product of a fully-formed craftsman. As such, I would recommend these first Murakami novels not only to longtime fans but to anyone who appreciates fine literature.

Early on in Greg Grandin’s recently released historical and biographical appraisal, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, the reader meets the young intellectual as a Harvard student and later faculty member. That Henry Kissinger had left the notion of God behind in the charnel houses of the Nazi death camps, but he was deeply influenced by philosophers of history such as Arnold Toynbee and especially Oswald Spengler, and he grappled with the existential implications of morality in the philosophical milieus of Kant and Goethe. This provides a fascinating juxtaposition to the later Kissinger, one of the most consequential men of our era, who seems to operate most successfully and entirely guiltlessly in a decidedly amoral vacuum that advances the geopolitical goals of the great men in politics that he orbits and guides.

The initial orbit was centered upon liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller. This Kissinger was an admirer of Kennedy who was all but repulsed by Richard Nixon, yet handily and opportunistically shifted that orientation as Nixon’s star rose. Grandin reminds us that the glue cementing the Kissinger-Nixon bond was the once secret and ever unsettling fact that it was Kissinger who tipped off Nixon to confidential intelligence gleaned from an insider at the Paris Peace Talks in the waning days of the Johnson Administration that Nixon manipulated to make certain the peace talks failed, intimating to the South Vietnamese that they would fare far better in a treaty negotiated should he become President. This often overlooked historical “factlet” is not only significant but both tragic and ironic, as the terms of the Paris Peace Accords signed off on by Nixon-Kissinger some five years later were nearly identical to the those in the original negotiations that they effectively derailed. In the meantime, of course, tens of thousands of American soldiers were killed along with uncounted hundreds of thousands of civilians as the war was expanded – first in secret and then publicly – into Cambodia and beyond.

Hundreds of thousands of lives. Lives that should haunt all of us when the yet unrepentant elder statesman Kissinger appears as an honored guest on television talk shows or reemerges huddling with top policymakers. All of those lives, euphemistically dismissed as “collateral damage,” for no strategic advantage. Arguably, our destabilization of Southeast Asia while the Nixon-Kissinger team sought an exit strategy they optimistically called “Peace with Honor” actually instead acted against our strategic interests. It is difficult or even impossible to talk about this in the United States today. Americans cannot easily even come to terms with our much more ancient crimes; we often refuse to acknowledge that our republic of freedom was constructed upon the twin poles of human chattel slavery and the willful extermination of Amerindians. Looking back only several decades to crimes of this scale is not only simply resisted but ignored. When Vietnam comes up in conversation, especially on the right, it most often redirects to a demonization of the wayward Jane Fonda, who is assigned an outsize influence that is not only distorted but silly. Kissinger, then and now, frequently gets a pass.

At the end of the day, perhaps, what is even more shocking than the sheer numbers of civilians capriciously sacrificed is that the policies that effected that horror were primarily crafted and executed by a White House that arbitrarily usurped the authority of the Congress, of the cabinet, of the people – and got away with it. The suggestion by apologists that Watergate was a “second-rate burglary” that should not have unseated the President is unsupportable; yet history has established that Nixon committed many crimes that make Watergate pale in comparison.

Kissinger survived both Vietnam and Watergate virtually unscathed and went on to maintain a strong power base in the brief Ford Administration, only to fall victim to relentless attacks by the emerging new right led by Ronald Reagan who blamed Kissinger not only for the loss of Vietnam but also for what they viewed as an ill-considered détente with the Soviets and the approach to “Red China.” But this proved hardly fatal. If historians and pundits have famously tagged Kissinger as Machiavellian, amoral and chameleon-like, Grandin’s portrait both confirms and underscores this and more. Out of power during the Carter years and in the first part of the Reagan era, Kissinger effortlessly tacked right and left to suit prevailing winds, clinging to whatever influence he still maintained until he could emerge as a born-again neocon, shamelessly in opposition to the very policies he had once shaped. Grandin follows Kissinger in his decades of influence and finds his fingerprints smeared in the blood of his realpolitik in Bangladesh, in East Timor, in Angola, in Latin America, in the Middle East with Iran and Iraq, and wherever a hot spot might emerge. Unsurprisingly, today the ninety-two year old Kissinger is allied with the contemporary intransigence of right-wing forces in the ill-conceived “War on Terror” that dominates American foreign policy these days.

Unfortunately, this book is far more of an extended polemic than a work of history or biography. Grandin’s Kissinger is an epic arch-criminal with essentially no redeeming qualities, which stretches the credibility of the work even if the factual basis for this appraisal is often difficult to challenge. I feel as if the chief weak point of this portrayal of Kissinger is that it gives him far too much credit as a mover and a shaker. While Kissinger hardly played a mere Igor to Nixon’s Dr. Frankenstein, based upon my research I tend to agree with the assessment of biographer Richard Reeves that Nixon was the chief architect of Nixon’s foreign policy. Kissinger may have indeed been a consequential member of the team, but he was neither its leader nor even a peer. Except for his brief tenure in the Ford Administration – when he may indeed have led rather than followed the often weak and less-than-imaginative Gerald Ford – Kissinger whatever his level of influence never held anything close to the reins of power again, so it is probably unfair to tar him with every bloody disaster of American foreign policy since the Bicentennial, even if, as Grandin chronicles, he undoubtedly egged these on. Another weakness of the book is an over-reliance on footnotes within the narrative to expand upon the account rather than to simply cite sources. Not since the late David Foster Wallace have I seen diminutive text excursions like these that are sometimes longer than the page containing the referenced material.

I read Kissinger’s Shadow as part of an early reviewer’s program; this review is based upon an Advance Reader’s Edition. For the scholar who seeks to learn as much as possible about Kissinger, this work should probably not be overlooked. For others, I would suggest that Grandin essentially offers nothing new and that there are better options out there for a more nuanced view of Kissinger and his place in American history.

I had never heard of author Anthony Doerr until I was seduced by his magnificent Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the Light We Cannot See. So when I happened upon a worn copy of his earlier novel About Grace at a used bookstore I had to snatch it up and dive in at my first opportunity. Remarkably, while Doerr has written a number of short stories, this is his only previous novel and it was published a full decade before All the Light We Cannot See. It is surprising that a first novel of such style and complexity did not attract far more attention, for it certainly earned it. I assiduously avoid spoilers in my fiction reviews, but that is all but impossible for About Grace, so if you want to avoid these stop reading now and buy the book. For the rest: read on!

About Grace is comprised of three distinct parts. After a prologue chapter that introduces the main character as a fifty-nine year old, the essence of the novel opens decades earlier as protagonist David Winkler, a colorless loner living in Anchorage who is a trained hydrologist – the science of water – dreams of a girl dropping a magazine in a shop and then subsequently happens into that scene in real life. He relentlessly pursues that girl – a bank teller trapped in a childless, uninspiring marriage – until he surprisingly wins Sandy away from her banker husband Herman and they suddenly flee to Ohio, where he goes to work as a meteorologist and a pregnant Sandy quietly pursues a welding hobby that David has encouraged. In the course of the narrative, the reader learns that David’s dream that anticipates his encounter with Sandy is not a singular experience. He has had strikingly prescient dreams before, with sometimes horrific results, including one in his childhood that predicted a man being struck by a bus, which he later witnessed. It does not happen frequently, but sometimes David really can predict the future through his dreams, and the next incidence serves as the pivot point for the rest of the novel.

David dreams that their new infant daughter Grace is caught up in a flood; in the dream sequence David attempts to save Grace, but in the course of his actions instead inadvertently ensures that she is drowned. When an actual flood ensues, David removes his family to a motel for safety, but is so haunted by his foresight and the agony of Grace’s impending doom that in a desperate attempt to protect her from his flawed foretold interference he takes flight to destinations unknown, finally landing up penniless and disoriented on the Caribbean isle of St. Vincent – as part two of the novel is engaged – where he is sheltered by a colorful family of Chilean refugees. Later, David desperately seeks to learn the fate of his daughter. Sandy appears to have returned to her ex-husband and angered at his abandonment wants nothing to do with David. The fate of Grace remains undisclosed and thus unknown.

Here the pace of the novel slows considerably. David finds work as a laborer for a hotel and bonds with Naaliyah, the young daughter of the family that takes him in. In some significant ways, Naaliyah serves as a substitute for Grace as David nurtures her and encourages her curiosity and her intellect in a way her own father cannot. Some two decades slip by uneventfully and the narrative drags to some degree. Then David is again visited by frightening dreams, this time of the now fully grown Naaliyah drowning in a boating accident. His intervention and its result pave the way for part three of the novel, as David takes his leave from the tropics and returns to the states – and finally to Alaska – seeking to determine once and for all the fate of Grace and his own existential meaning in the random events of his troubled life.

Throughout the story, the reader may grow exasperated with David’s character. He is, after all, a frustratingly complacent individual frequently tossed upon the waves of the sea of life, often without the ambition to chart a course or even steady himself adequately to avoid going under. In many ways, he is somewhat reminiscent of the stubbornly passive male protagonist of a Murakami novel, who is surprised to have found that his wife has left him even while yet too unmotivated to unravel the cause for the break. Again and again, David takes the long way around to get the answers he craves, writing letters instead of calling, hitchhiking instead of flying, running in place rather than seizing the day. Yet, there is an unmistakable beauty to the prose in this work and an attractive metaphorical element to the main character and his quest that finally become so irresistible that even the weaknesses of the novel are shunted aside as the epic nature of both David’s questions and the tantalizing potential answers fully consume the reader’s interest. Along the way – as in All the Light We Cannot See – there is a good deal of science to lend strength to the novel’s framework, in this case hydrology and meteorology, as well as the study of entomology in an arctic environment, and the formation of snowflake crystals. Hydrology is not incidental, by the way; water, both real and allegorical, could be said to be the real main character in this multi-layered tale. When all is said and done, both the conclusion of the book and the route to reach the finish line turn out to be rewarding. While there are indeed moments however brief in these pages that produce yawns the author might not have intended, perseverance pays off. About Grace is indeed a fine novel and I would, warts and all, recommend it without hesitation.

I have reviewed other novels by Anthony Doerr here:

Review of: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

Review of: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

The writer of a thesis paper is typically admonished to narrow the topic sufficiently so that it can both bring fresh perspective and be covered comprehensively in a finite number of pages. I would guess that when Charles Bracelen Flood conceived a book about the special relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War, he felt that he had such a narrowed topic. As every thesis writer knows, the next step is to place that narrowed focus within the context of a wider arena that can be quite unfamiliar to the reader. Tough decisions must be made as to what to include to establish this contextual element while suitably limiting the overall scope. The problem with Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War is that neither the author nor his editor seems to have made these critical decisions. The result is a book that in a mere four hundred pages attempts a dual biography of Grant and Sherman and the history of the American Civil War, which compels Flood to cherry-pick telling episodes and oversimplify the war in order to place his twin protagonists in the appropriate milieu to suit the narrative. Significantly, this structure also imperils a deeper character analysis of his subjects within and without their unique friendship.

I am fairly well-read in Civil War historiography, and I have some familiarity with Grant’s story. The primary reason I picked up Grant and Sherman was that I wanted to learn more about Sherman without reading an entire volume dedicated to his biography. This book was recommended to me by a fellow Civil War enthusiast, and I had read Flood before; his 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History is an outstanding work in my estimation. The topic is indeed attractive: Grant and Sherman are the two most iconic Union generals and their successful collaboration was a chief ingredient to the final victory of the United States.

Both Sherman and Grant were essentially pre-war failures with West Point backgrounds, although on the eve of the war Grant’s future seemed far more dismal than Sherman’s. Still, the war made both of them, but not without some bumps in the road. Sherman, over-reacting to the size of enemy forces, was deemed insane. Grant was accused of drunkenness and dereliction of duty. Sherman had powerful political connections that included a brother in Congress which kept him from the abyss. Grant was stubborn and determined; he scored too many victories to be sidelined. The two men had much in common but also much that set them apart. Still, they bonded almost immediately and Sherman became Grant’s loyal subordinate throughout the war. Grant reciprocated that loyalty absolutely, and rescued Sherman when he went off course. Sherman’s famous quotation, taken from a letter he wrote to Grant, sums it up well: “I know wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come – if alive.” Sherman was to get in more than one tight place, and Grant was indeed to come. The most significant episode was in the closing days of the war, after Appomattox and the Lincoln assassination, when Sherman stepped way beyond his bounds while accepting the surrender of Joe Johnston’s army by making unauthorized promises for the restoration of political rights to former Confederates. Overnight, Sherman’s political capital went from hero to zero, and without Grant’s tactful intervention he might have ended the war in disgrace.

I had always assumed that accusations of Sherman’s insanity were hyperbolic attacks by forces unfriendly to him, but Flood’s chronicle reveals friends and relations alike worried about a mental illness that apparently ran in the family manifesting itself. That Sherman sometimes jumped to conclusions, made rash judgments and occasionally saw enemies everywhere underscores the concerns of those who knew him best. He was indeed a brilliant general with often uncanny instincts in the field, but without Grant’s steady guidance one wonders what might have become of Sherman.

Flood is a gifted author and despite its flaws much of this book benefits from a well-written narrative that never grows dull. Those without a strong background in the Civil War and less acquaintance with the main characters will likely enjoy this effort more than I did. Still, I think it would have been far more effective had Flood taken a less macro approach and simply focused upon the specific aspects of the relationship between Grant and Sherman that contributed to ultimate Union victory. A deeper analysis of each of the men would have been welcome, as well. As it is, there is little new material here, just a new way perhaps to relate a familiar story. To those who already possess a strong foundation in Civil War studies, I would recommend skipping this book.