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 AWild 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 AWild 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 AWild 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:
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.
Historically, the seventies in America encompassed two distinct eras that defy definition by decade. The first part was a virtual continuation of the sixties, the period that began with the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and ended with the August 9, 1974 resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. The second was marked by the awkward Bicentennial celebrations and the Carter presidency. In between was a transitional period that feels so strange and foreign to us today that we seem to shy away from recollecting it, a post-Watergate, post-Nixon age of tumult and chaos and violence that was both reminiscent of the sixties that spawned these forces and something else entirely different, a difficult to define intermediate epoch of societal anarchy and a loss of national confidence, a sharp tear in the political fabric that left an accidental President publicly stumbling and tumbling off airplane steps, in public opinion polls, and through domestic and international crises, as well. Much of the action in Rick Perlstein’s massive tome, The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, occurs during this brief but critical and often overlooked transition that most significantly saw the unlikely birth of the New Right with Ronald Reagan literally in the saddle.
The Invisible Bridge opens in the final days of the Nixon Presidency. While Watergate manifests itself as that famous “cancer on the Presidency,” Nixon desperately seeks to change the subject, trumpeting the peace with Vietnam as the great victory it certainly was not, seizing upon the returning POWs as heroic emblems who almost immediately became mythologized instruments for the President’s spin, all the while inventing from whole cloth the MIAs – bodies never recovered that are fictionalized as secret prisoners we are pledged to never abandon. The public could not know this, nor did they know that there was a sharp split between the POWs themselves even before they came home, just as there was a deep palpable split in virtually every cohort of the American population. The spin was actually quite successful, but not nearly successful enough to trump Watergate and the implosion of Nixon’s Administration: there are indictments, a special prosecutor is fired, the vice-president resigns on corruption charges, the tapes are revealed, Congress is defied, the Supreme Court weighs in, and Nixon finally capitulates and resigns.
Much of it is a familiar story, but Perlstein brings a unique new perspective to it: while Nixon is engulfed in flames, the smoke is cleared and the lens is tilted to bring into view an unlikely member of the audience, Ronald Reagan, a former actor, former liberal Democrat, now Governor of California and an unlikely leader of the right. While Nixon’s popularity plummets and his support erodes on both sides of the aisle, Reagan remains an unapologetic supporter of Nixon, of the Vietnam War, of America’s right to do whatever she likes wherever she likes justified entirely upon the doctrine of American exceptionalism. As Nixon goes under, legions of rats flee the sinking ship, yet Reagan lashes himself to the mast and declares that the terrible wrongs that have been revealed by one investigation after another are not really wrongs at all. When the storm is over, Nixon has been jettisoned, but Reagan is still on deck, and he is smiling.
Most Americans have forgotten about this turbulent period, which featured not only the resignations of the sitting Vice President and President of the United States, but ongoing Congressional investigations into criminality at home and abroad, a fuel crisis that touched every American family, severe economic turmoil – Nixon had enacted wage and price controls – and violence that seemed to be everywhere, loudly manifested by scores of terrorist acts that had become almost routine. All of this along with the stark realization that we had actually lost a war shook the American psyche like never before. Hardly a decade had passed since Kennedy’s “New Frontier,” but it was as if the country had grown a full century older, and by all accounts she had not aged well. There was a kind of brief optimism as the solid if colorless Gerald Ford took the helm with the humble declaration that he was “a Ford not a Lincoln,” which was almost instantly shattered by Ford’s unexpected pardon of Nixon, leading many to suspect there had been a secret deal all along.
If the post-World War II political consensus had indeed imploded, in retrospect what we might find most surprising given today’s partisan polarization was the way that antagonists on both sides of the aisle came together to prosecute the crimes in Watergate and beyond while guarding against anarchy. The President resigned. There was a new President. Democrats and Republicans together shepherded that process to fruition. Perhaps also surprising from the vantage point of 2015 was that the Republican Party was much more broadly based with a strong liberal wing, as well as moderates and rightists. The new Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller, was the leader of that liberal wing. Most members of both parties decried the crimes exposed by Watergate, by the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, by seemingly countless other examples that revealed that the Nixon Administration ran the country as a kind of extra-legal mafia organization. Most also cringed as it became increasingly clear that Nixon, who had privately conceded long before that the war was unwinnable, in his quixotic quest for the illusory “peace with honor” needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War and expanded it into neighboring countries, both secretly and later openly, with the resulting senseless deaths of tens of thousands of American military personnel, tens of thousands of Vietnamese north and south – and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodian civilians who were counted anonymously as “collateral damage,” if they were counted at all.
Yet, as Perlstein brilliantly demonstrates, there was no decrying or cringing by the emerging Reagan wing of the Republican Party, which stubbornly defended Nixon and Vietnam and resolutely attacked antiwar elements, investigative reporters, reformist Congressmen and Civil Rights leaders. The latter was an integral part of their continuation of the Nixon strategy to capture the once solidly Democratic south, especially the segregationist wing personified by George Wallace. Reagan, significantly, was on record for opposing the Civil Rights Act. Playing to other disaffected audiences – evangelicals, opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment, cold warriors who felt abandoned by Nixon-Kissinger policies of détente and the opening with China, as well as the nascent anti-abortion movement – Reagan preached for a return to traditional American values with a blend of myth, anecdote and unashamed prevarication.
Ford, unprepared for this attack on his right flank, saw his nomination for a legitimate full term as President put suddenly in jeopardy. He reacted by tacking to the right, dumping the liberal Rockefeller and repeatedly contradicting himself right and left, as he appeared absurdly tripping and falling on camera in between two failed assassination attempts and a string of gaffes. Perlstein takes us move by move through the uneven Ford waltz to the right and Reagan’s graceful quickstep to the twin tunes of honor and patriotism. Reagan almost pulled it off: a few more votes and the convention would have handed him the nomination instead of Ford. Looking back, it is clear that the Reagan challenge deeply damaged Ford’s electoral hopes, and of course he was to be defeated by unknown outsider Jimmy Carter, whom Perlstein depicts as a conniving manipulator who relies on a vague message to win over a dispirited electorate.
Perlstein, a noted progressive historian and journalist, has taken it upon himself to write a history of modern American conservatism. His first contribution, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, received critical acclaim, and his second installment, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, made his reputation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his scholarship has been the subject of attacks by conservatives, but accusations against him have proved to show little merit. And while those of a less liberal bent will no doubt cringe at his inherent bias and his thesis – that as Nixon went up in flames Reagan unapologetically laid the foundation for his national rise on the ashes that remained – the facts he presents are nevertheless incontrovertible. Nixon really said and did all those terrible things that are chronicled – we have it all on tape! And Reagan really did routinely mouth the rhetoric of a fringe right-wing lunatic (Goldwater, of all people, thought him extreme!) while often spouting anecdotes that were entirely imaginary – we have the press clippings for reference!
At a somewhat intimidating 810 pages, I would suggest that The Invisible Bridge is perhaps longer than necessary, yet despite its length lacks a strong concluding chapter that puts all of the massive data it contains in proper context. Still, political junkies will love this book for its detailed analysis, and members of both parties will find fascination in this fine historical study of the creation of the New Right, which later was to force a marked realignment in American politics and is today unequivocally the dominant force in Republican Party politics.
Some years back, I set out to rediscover American history through the best single books I could find to cover each era. I was stymied when I reached the “War of 1812,” where the historiography was pregnant with works that primarily put emphasis upon the military contests with little context on the greater issues on both sides of the Atlantic that provoked the conflict. Noted historian Alan Taylor has done much to redress this gap with his masterful contribution, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies, which offers not only a fresh but strikingly new perspective to the saga. A brilliant and widely acclaimed historian – I consider his American Colonies: The Settling of North America to be one of the finest works ever written in American history – Taylor once again brings a macro lens to the wider arena of a topic and then narrows that focus with great acumen to restore complexity and nuance to that which has long been neglected in both popular and scholarly literature.
Most Americans know very little about the “War of 1812” – it does not even qualify for a real name but has come to be called after the year of its inception. Both its causes and its conclusion remain murky; United States forces lost most of the military engagements – with the exception of the much ballyhooed Jackson victory at New Orleans that occurred once the war was essentially over – and after the termination of hostilities in 1814 in what can best be called a stalemate it came to be largely overlooked. Most students of American history view it as little more than a punctuation mark between the period of the early republic and the Age of Jacksonian Democracy. Taylor artfully resurrects the war, positions it properly in its milieu and reveals why the outcome was in fact quite significant for the future of both Canada and the United States, as well as to a lesser extent Great Britain herself.
The Civil War of 1812 opens in the period that follows the American Revolution, with the British occupying the vast territory of Canada that was a consequence of their victory in the earlier French & Indian War, and bitterly licking their wounds as a result of their loss of the upstart British colonies in North America that were now the United States of America. Ironically, it was the victory over the French in the earlier conflict that ended in 1763 that led to the unraveling of the relationship between Britain and the American colonies as the British sought to get the Americans to pay a fair share for a costly war that benefited both of them. Now, south of the Canadian border was a new nation of former colonies largely hostile to the mother country. The bad feeling was exacerbated by the fact that large numbers of “Tory” Loyalists had fled to Canada when the war went against their interests. These settled largely in the western portion of British Canada known as “Upper Canada,” an administrative division that separated this geography from the former French portion to the east then known as “Lower Canada.” Moreover, economic instability in the new republic following the Revolution brought more Americans – known as “Late Loyalists” – to settle in “Upper Canada,” attracted by handsome financial incentives but deprived of the kind of participatory democracy they had been accustomed to in the United States. There were those among the British who imagined somehow regaining the lost American colonies and sought to position Canada as both a bulwark against the former rebels as well as a staging ground for a war of re-conquest.
One of the few things most Americans know about the war from grade school is that its chief causes included British interference with merchant shipping as well as the seizing and “impressment” of American seamen. We learn from Taylor that while such provocations indeed occurred, it was in the context of a wider war for its very national survival that pitted England (and much of Europe) against Napoleon, in circumstances perhaps not so dissimilar to its twentieth century stand against Hitler. Thus, Britain had little sympathy for its arrogant former colonists in the grand scheme of things when it came to neutral shipping and even the extraordinary “recruiting” methods employed to man its navy against the French menace.
What was never emphasized in school is that much of the action of the war was an attempt by the fledgling United States to conquer and annex Canada in a series of disastrous military campaigns frequently commanded by incompetent martinets who happened to hold to the right brand of politics, leading poorly trained Americans who resisted the authority of their officers and often fled in abject terror from the potential ravages of Native Americans tribes allied with a better trained and far more disciplined professional British army. The exception on the American side was the young General Winfield Scott in the days before his heroic reputation was established, who brings order and discipline to green volunteers whether they like it or not. Alas, as the Americans learned, one great army officer is not enough. Many on the British side were convinced that the “experiment” of an American Republic would be short-lived, and that soon the British would rule again south and north of the Canadian border. As it was, the antagonists shared far more commonality than either could have imagined.
The beauty of The Civil War of 1812 – the book’s title is delightfully both emblematic and metaphorical – is that unlike most accounts of this mostly obscure conflict it does not dwell on the military engagements but rather focuses upon the socio-economic-political dimensions of the war that are so critical to an informed analysis of the conflict and its aftermath. The majority Jeffersonian Republicans, now led by President James Madison, had in the past decade largely dismantled the army and navy, as well as the Hamiltonian central banking system. Thus, they used outrage to provoke a war they were entirely unprepared for militarily or financially. The new United States was hardly old enough to have developed a national identity. Nor had much of an identity evolved for the British Canadians on the other side, many of whom had fled from America. In fact, it turns out that those who lived in proximity on both sides of the long border had much more in common with each other than with the larger identity of their respective opposing nations, which bred an ambivalence over the outcome, at least at the start, for people who most wanted to resume the ordinary trade and relations that had been the status quo ante. Much of that ambivalence, however, was crushed by the depredations visited on both civilian populations by a combination of overzealous officers and rapacious troops, British and American alike. That was one “civil war.” Another less conspicuous one was the tension between the governing class of British in Canada and the former American citizens they at once dominated and largely mistrusted. Still another was between the ever-oppressed Irish, who hated the British yet fought on both sides and often found camaraderie with each other, whether garbed in a red or a blue uniform.
All combatants spoke the same language – except for the Native Americans allied with one side or the other who saw traditional tribal loyalties jeopardized in yet another kind of mini civil war. The British, stretched thin upon an immense long border, relied upon Native American allies, but habitually found themselves unable to control the Indians, which raised issues with the rules of “civilized warfare,” at least as defined by Europeans. Many of these tribes had rules of war that permitted the torture and execution of prisoners, and sometimes women and children, as well. Hence the sometimes hyperbolic fears that drove American troops to sheer terror and retreat at even a hint that Indians might be a component of enemy forces.
Perhaps the most fascinating example of civil war revealed here was the surprising one conducted within the fragile developing American political system. As the war broke out, the largely out-of-power Federalists held the moral high ground over the Republicans, who not only put the nation in jeopardy through its reckless bellicosity against a far stronger enemy, but did so after dismantling the military and the banking system put in place by Federalist founders. Moreover, the rough politics of the 1790s that saw Republicans generally favoring the French and the Federalists favoring the British still generally defined the nascent political parties, but with Britain at war with a France led by Napoleon there was indeed much more at stake both at home and abroad. Unfortunately, this moral high ground was soon abdicated as the Federalist forces not only loudly disapproved of the war – as was their right in a democratic system of government – but actively sought to assist the enemy in a series of actions that passed sensitive information on to the British, aided the escape of prisoners, and even actively toyed with the idea of the secession of New England states and a separate peace. Thus, the Federalists strayed radically from the cherished role of loyal opposition to that of aiders-and-abettors of treason.
The war itself ended in an uncomfortable stalemate. Having defeated Napoleon, the British had no heart for continuing a conflict that offered little long-term reward, and retarded trade and economic development. Both sides more or less agreed to walk away with lines drawn as they were before the outbreak of hostilities. The Americans, who lost most battles, achieved no territorial gains and endured the humiliation of the burning of their capital city, spun it as a great victory, which it most certainly was not. Critically, however, as Taylor makes clear, the war had extremely important after effects that are perhaps only clear in retrospect. First of all, the British accepted the United States as a separate nation in a way that it had never done before, and abandoned dreams of reconquering the lost colonies. Likewise, Americans gave up the notion of annexing Canada and accepted it as its northern neighbor. Finally, and perhaps of the greatest significance for students of American history, the war doomed the Federalist Party, which had shown itself to be composed of “fifth columnists.” That left the United States as a one-party nation for the time, which would have certain underlying repercussions as sectional tensions later developed and there were no longer James Marshall Federalists — who championed a strong central government — in Virginia or elsewhere in the south.
The Civil War of 1812 is not an easy read. There is more than four hundred fifty pages of text to navigate, all of it densely packed with information, plus a hundred pages of notes, great period illustrations and select fine maps. It gets off to a slow start, I felt, and parts of it can be a bit of a slog. Yet, Taylor is an excellent writer and the narrative is quite compelling, especially as it becomes clear how many pieces of the larger mosaic are effectively explored and deftly analyzed. I would recommend this book very highly as an essential read for anyone who seeks a better understanding of a central event in American history that has long been overlooked, as an outstanding scholar unwraps the cobwebs it has long been shrouded in to untangle strands of history that still inform our national identity today.
Note: [June 2025] I was honored when the Early Settlers Society of the Western Reserve asked my permission to republish in the latest edition of their newsletter The Pioneer this book review of The Civil War of 1812, which originally appeared here on this blog back in 2015. Link for The Pioneer below; scroll down to page 5 for the reprint of the review with link to the blog: The Pioneer Spring 2025
Note: I have reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:
When A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks by Stewart Gordon showed up in my early reviewers program, I eagerly bid on it because the title at once conjured up for me Uluburun, the spectacular Bronze Age Mediterranean shipwreck that revealed to underwater archaeologists a long lost era of ancient international trade that contained vast numbers of artifacts of widespread provenance, including Mycenaean, Syro-Palestinian, Cypriot, Egyptian, Kassite and Assyrian. Thus, I imagined sixteen snapshots like that, each focused upon a single shipwreck that would communicate the significance of a historical period through its contents.
It turned out that was not quite the case. There are indeed sixteen chapters and each one is technically devoted to a ship, although in fact some of these are not actually shipwrecks at all. The first chapter, for instance, focuses upon the Dufuna Dugout, a remarkably preserved dugout canoe from Africa that dates back at least eight thousand years. Much of the narrative explores the history of dugouts over the following centuries, rather than the culture that produced Dufuna. The next one is also not a shipwreck, but the Khufu Barge, a ceremonial buried boat excavated near the base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt, which serves to spark a discussion of trade in the ancient world that is only peripherally related to the boat in this burial.
I was pleased to find the next chapter actually devoted to Uluburun itself, and it is arguably one of the best portions of the book – or maybe I just feel that way because it corresponds more closely with my interests. I am fairly deeply read in Uluburun, but to Gordon’s credit his treatment manages to reveal elements that were entirely new to me, such as the incredible story of the mouse trapped in a food storage jar whose DNA was extracted some 3400 hundred years later to determine its provenance in Ugarit in north coastal Syria! I often champion the marriage of history and technology: perhaps nothing better captures its essence and potential than this. Gordon goes on to describe other components of the cargo and how scientific analyses determined their respective source geographies. He also explores the surprisingly interconnected ancient world of trade among Hittites, Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and others in the era prior to the mysterious collapse of Bronze Age civilizations circa 1150 BCE.
Regrettably, the Uluburun chapter is hardly typical of the rest of the book. While the volume does contain other wrecks with cargo, such as the Intan (circa 1000 CE), with some exceptions many of the subjects under discussion lack tangible remains and are utilized primarily as examples of ships in service at the time. The chapter that follows Uluburun, for example, is devoted to another ship burial, this one the sixth century CE Sutton Hoo in England. What becomes clear is that Gordon’s book is less a history of the world told through shipwrecks than a nautical history of select vessels that he has chosen to study and write about. The ancient world is strangely underrepresented: some two millennia separate Uluburun from Sutton Hoo. Conspicuous in its absence, for instance, is a full chapter devoted to the famous trireme that so dominated the ancient Greek world, or any of the various warships that comprised the Roman imperial fleet. (The trireme does receive some oddly placed peripheral attention in a later discussion of Barbary war galleys, but it certainly merits much more.) We have no surviving triremes, so the omission of these and other ancient boats with no physical remains would make sense if the book was limited to actual physical wrecks with artifacts, but it is not.
To his credit, Gordon is a fine writer and much of his narrative is clearly a labor of love of all things nautical. The non-initiated, such as myself, will appreciate his detailed descriptions of how boats and their component parts function on a body of water. Also, the book is well-documented with a thick sheaf of notes at the end and plenty of illustrations, although a certain lack of maps. More than half of the volume is focused upon the last five centuries, right up to the 2012 Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster. Each chapter stands alone and while arranged chronologically do not need to be read sequentially. Some are more stimulating than others, but I suspect that is less due to Gordon’s talents than the interests of the reader. One of my favorites, for instance, was the one devoted to Lucy Walker, the steamboat that exploded and sank on the Ohio River in 1844, which fit neatly into my studies of antebellum American history.
The chief problem with the book, as I see it, is entirely thematic: it seems that each chapter would make a fine article for a magazine, but there is almost nothing that connects one to the other as part of a larger narrative. Even the title is unwieldy as an effort to unite the respective essays in a common thread, since as I have noted earlier, many of the boats are not actually shipwrecks. I suspect Gordon himself was aware of this flaw: neither the “Introduction” nor the “Conclusion” – each only about two and half pages in length – convincingly explain why these studies of the sixteen selected ships belong together in one volume. I would nevertheless recommend A History of the World in Sixteen Shipwrecks to students of nautical history, with the caveat that the component segments arguably are of greater value than the sum of these parts.
When I am really impressed with a fiction writer, I often endeavor to read all or most of their works. Alas, William Faulkner was too dense and too prolific for me to succeed, but if I live long enough I may crack that nut. I had better luck with Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy. I’m almost there with Haruki Murakami, who has quite the long catalog.
The problem with reviewing the same author of multiple works is that it is sometimes difficult to find new ground to cover. My latest Murakami read was After the Quake, a collection of six short stories – or are these long stories? – centered around the cataclysmic Kobe earthquake in 1995. Except they are not. The characters in these six stories, all narrated from the third person, do not actually experience the earthquake directly, but are made aware of it peripherally, primarily through television news. Still, the event clearly unsettles them all and it is a pronounced sense of resonating palpable unease that binds these tales into a coherent collection. Another natural adhesive is the fact that these stories were all written in 1999-2000, so we have a snapshot of the kind of writer Murakami was during this phase of his career as well as a logical rationale for including these in a single collection. That image is sharpened because we also know by the author’s own words that he never writes short stories and novels at the same time: he either works on one or the other.
Murakami has had a long writing career that dates back to 1979, which has seen a marked evolution in style and presentation while retaining some elements present at the creation, so to speak. After the Quake originally appeared in Japanese in 2000 (and in English translation in 2002), which for Murakami fans means the time between the novels Sputnik Sweetheart (1999) and Kafka on the Shore (2002). I have read two of his other short story collections – The Elephant Vanishes and Blind Willow, Sleeping Women – which together contain a medley of forty-one stories written over the long period of 1980-2005 that are neither arranged chronologically nor thematically. Like a carelessly arranged anthology album of a rock band that has been performing in various iterations since the 1960s, there is the potential for a kind of dissonance in this kind of jumble, even if the quality of the tracks are impressive. (Side note: no such dissonance in Hemingway or Faulkner, for instance, because their respective writing styles and thematic approach remained so similar over time.) Because After the Quake was written in the same era and orbit (however peripherally) around a central event, there is a logic that enhances the ability of the review process to effectively compare and contrast the contents. At the same time, it should be underscored, each of these stories can stand on its own and does not need to appear in a volume with the others in order to succeed.
“UFO in Kushiro,” opens the collection and makes reference to the earthquake more frequently and in more detail than the others. Here it serves as a tectonic shift (pun fully intended!) of sorts for Komura – one of those dull, passive Murakami male protagonists – whose wife walks out on him while he is at work five days after the earthquake with no notice, little explanation and an irrevocable determination to never return, in circumstances similar to that in the earlier novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Komura’s sudden divorce makes for a series of unlikely events to follow for him that include smuggling an unnamed object, cavorting with a couple of edgy young women, a funny story about a bear and a bell, sexual dysfunction and existentialism. Not bad for twenty pages of text! I cannot be certain what the story means, but I enjoyed it enough to read it twice through.
“Landscape with Flatiron,” perhaps the finest story in the collection, is also manifestly existential, involving a young woman’s platonic bond (but perhaps that could change …) with an older man who collects driftwood to build masterful fires on the beach that she is powerfully drawn to for emotional succor. This is an especially rich tale pregnant with metaphor that is enhanced by Murakami’s gift for crafting female characters who often are far more developed and complex than their male counterparts. “All God’s Children Can Dance” is a strange, disquieting tale of religion, the potential for incest, the prospect of virgin birth, an unusually large penis, and a man with a missing earlobe that has been bitten off by a dog – in a strange contrast to the author’s typical use of a woman’s ear as an object of sexual fetish. It is as if Japanese literary doppelgangers of Stephen King, Rod Serling, John Irving and Edgar Allen Poe got together for a weird collaboration. I’m not sure how I feel about the story, but it is by all means worth the read.
Of the remaining stories, I very much enjoyed both “Thailand” – which contains familiar Murakami elements of jazz music and a hint of magical realism – as well as the quirky love story “Honey Pie.” I was less impressed with “Super-Frog Saves Tokyo,” an attempt at magical whimsy that seemed to me to fall flat whether intended as an allegory, a comedy or a psychodrama. But perhaps I just missed something.
Whether you are a diehard Murakami fan or simply curious about an author who gets a lot of press in the literary world, I would recommend this slender volume for your reading pleasure.
