American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars If You Think America is Polarized Now… In American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750 to 1804 (2016) Alan Taylor relates the events and situation in the colonies and the world leading up to the Revolutionary War, the progress of the eight-year conflict, and the aftermath and influence of the revolution on the continent and the world. Taylor casts a broad focus, going deepest into American topics but not ignoring global ones (the Revolutionary War was part of a world war). He reveals things like the elite founders of the USA fearing too much democracy and liberty for common people and not wanting any for blacks or Indians, and the very contingent nature of the US success in the war, depending at key points on bad decisions by British generals, vital help from Spain and especially France, stalwart leadership from George Washington, plenty of patriot propaganda and public acts of “theatrical humiliation” like tar and feathering, plenty of white unity at the expense of Native Americans and African Americans, etc. He exposes how the USA was born with greedy, hypocritical, and thuggish behavior, violence (house burning, mob mayhem, lynching, etc.), political division, conflict between states’ power and the State’s power, etc., and with consciously strengthening white supremacy to bridge class division. He demonstrates how un-unified the revolution was, with the colonies divided among loyalists, patriots, and waverers, as well as slaves and Indians. Taylor has an eye for the complexity of “our contradictory revolutionary history.” I had been vaguely aware of such things before, but Taylor’s book makes them vividly convincing and introduces some elements that were new to me, like the importance of westward expansion into Indian lands as a key driver of the Revolution and of the post-Revolution growth of the USA, with Washington and Jefferson and other slave-owning founders being involved in land speculation, as well as the proliferation of evangelical Christianity, the relation of the continental colonies to those of the West Indies, the relatively low taxes that so outraged the leaders of the Revolution (“We won't be their negroes”), and the post-Revolution worsening of the slave system in the south and the environment for free blacks in the north. Some of the best touches come when Taylor explains how early divisions (states vs. the State, elites vs. commoners, whites vs. blacks/natives, Federalists vs. Republicans, established churches vs. evangelical churches, etc.) are still with us today: “Like a kaleidoscope we continue in every generation to make new combinations of clashing principles derived from the enduring importance and incompleteness of our revolution. The revolution remains embedded in selective memory in every contemporary debate.” Other memorable parts occur when Taylor points out the hypocrisy of the war for liberty (“In the name of Liberty, Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail, and terrorized their critics”) and the roles played and lives led by people usually given short shrift in histories of the Revolution, like women, blacks, and Indians. Taylor writes clean and clear prose punctuated with occasional outstanding witty lines (e.g., “’He [George Washington] possessed the gift of silence,’ said John Adams, who did not”), and he incorporates plenty of quotations from (mostly) the men who lived and made and recorded the history. He brings history and its people and events to life and evokes suspense even when the reader generally knows what’s going to happen. I liked his War of 1812 book The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013) and this one as well. The audiobook, of course, lacks the illustrations, maps, notes, and bibliography of the physical book. The audiobook reader mark Bramhall is fine, but presumably in an attempt to inject excitement and character into the history as well as to make it easier for the listener to know when Taylor is quoting someone, Bramhall assumes rather hokey British or Irish or German or French or Spanish accents and slightly pompous attitudes when he's reading quotations. Otherwise, he does a good job reading the book. Taylor opens his history with a devastating summary and explication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “My Kinsman Major Molineux” (1832), and he closes his book with a provocative quotation from the story: “May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?” View all my reviews
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The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I prefer to do the most interesting thing” Early in Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings (2015), the emperor from a formerly minor and scorned state that has conquered six others, dies, and his 12-year-old son becomes the spoiled puppet of the regent and the chatelain, the former acting like an unappreciated scholar suddenly come into power, the latter working towards a long-desired revenge on the deceased emperor. Inevitably, the six vassal states (who used to exist in rivalrous independence) rebel, shaking the empire. The novel then depicts how a variety of people try to exploit this fluid situation to carve out reputations and new roles, some more self-serving, some more people serving. Two such men stand out: the “dandelion” Kuni Garu, a former ne’er-do-well small-time good-natured gangster about town who wants to live an interesting life and gets serious (i.e., starts working at a real job) in order to marry Jia Matiza, a beautiful young lady into herbs and poetry; and the “chrysanthemum” Mata Zyndu, an 8’ tall, double-pupiled, formidable descendant of the last great war hero of a conquered people. Affable, down-to-earth, kind, clever, married, strategist Kuni and taciturn, reserved, aristocratic, solitary, and larger than life humungous sword and cudgel wielding warrior Mata make a fine odd couple. Kuni is a people person who likes partying and organizing, Mata a cold-hearted and hot-blooded revenge killer hero. It is absorbing to see how far the pair will go together and suspenseful to wonder how long it will take them to fall out with each other. In some ways Liu’s novel closely follows the tradition of the historical Chinese martial arts epic (e.g., The Three Kingdoms, Legends of the Condor Heroes, or Tribes and Empires), in that it depicts a crumbling empire and the resulting chaos of feuding states, into which ambitious real people--bureaucrats, soldiers, scholars, and monarchs with their own agendas, but no epic fantasy Dark Lords--make their marks. It’s full of people doing what people have done throughout history: scheme, fight, build, destroy, etc. There are obvious Chinese touches here like people writing calligraphically, sitting at desks on pillows on the floor, pulling things out of the folds in their sleeves, eating with chop sticks, drinking from three-legged drinking vessels, and living in rigid hierarchies with strong family traditions. And the characters regularly refer to and quote a Confucius analogue conservative patriarchal scholar poet sage from the past, Kon Fiji. The different points are, of course, that this novel takes place in a fantasy world in which the eight gods and goddesses are very much involved with the doings of mortals, so that although they do not directly fight with mortals, they are not above influencing them indirectly through prophecies and inspirations and nudges, as they play their own game with people as more or less free willed pawns. (Compared to the many gods running around in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, the number of gods here is blessedly small.) There is little, if any, magic, Liu instead imagining basically medieval technology, with dirigibles and submersibles making the book what has been called “silk punk.” The writing is clean, fast-moving, and dry, but also capable of flights of simile (e.g., “Zindari letters emerged in the black space on the page, fading into view like ships coming out of the fog” and “his bushy white beard floated up like the whiskers of a carp as he labored to catch his breath”) that give pleasure. There are plenty of gripping and vivid action scenes, from small brawls and assassination attempts to sneak attacks and epic battles on land and sea or in the air. There are neat lines on human nature (including speculation about the difficulty in drawing the line between performance and self) and cool wisdom (“When you learn enough about the world, even a blade of grass can be a weapon”). While at first I thought that Liu was falling down regarding women, especially with an unconvincingly self-sacrificing princess, he finally writes some compelling female characters into the novel, especially Gin Mazati, and Kuni values the women providing vital support to his military effort, which gives him an advantage over his rivals. There are some weak points to the novel. At one point a smaller force tricks a larger one by fashioning 5000 straw puppet cavalry soldiers, mounting them on horses, and sending the cavalry in tight formation into the heart of the enemy army before any of the soldiers notice something’s funny! And there are some corny lines, like “everything she said felt like daggers twisting in his heart.” But it was a fine read, and people who like Game of Thrones (with a smaller cast and a Chinese atmosphere) should enjoy it. The audiobook is capably read by Michael Kramer. Perhaps he has a certain rhythm that repeats throughout many sentences, but it’s appealing, and he enhances the reading experience. There is a pdf file that comes with the audiobook, but it consists only of a list of characters, a glossary, and a note on the Tang Dynasty source of Mata’s chrysanthemum poem, and doesn’t have a map of the seven states of Dara, so I found it helpful to look at the map in the preview of the kindle book. View all my reviews
Alien III by William Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Diverting, but Dated (and Ripley Is a Non-Factor) The Audible original drama Alien III (2019) is Dirk Magg’s adaptation and direction of William Gibson's 1987 sequel to the second Alien movie, Aliens (1986). In addition to being about as long as a movie (2+ hours), the Audible drama features a full cast of voice actors, including Michael Biehn as Hicks and Lance Henriksen as Bishop from the 1986 movie and Laurel Lefkow reprising her channeling of Sigourney Weaver from the Audible drama Alien: Out from the Shadows. Like an old school radio drama, Alien III features sound effects for footsteps, tools, doors, human and alien screams, coughs, and the like, and is enhanced by atmospheric and exciting music. The drama begins with a brief summary of the events in Alien (1979) featuring Ripley, Ash, and company and then a brief depiction of the climax of the second movie with Newt, Hicks, Bishop, Ripley, and the alien Queen. It's always good to hear Ripley growl, “Get away from her you bitch!” The main new action begins when the shuttle ship Sulaco (with Newt, Hicks, Ripley, and Bishop aboard in cryo-suspension) enters the outer space territory of the UPP (Union of Progressive Peoples) and is captured and boarded, with the alien that’s been lurking inside Bishop popping out and doing its face clamp thing. Thus begins a chain of events whereby the alien xenomorph is (of course) foolishly viewed as a potentially useful biological weapon, proves a wee bit more independent and formidable than anticipated, starts impregnating mortal hosts in the good old alien way, and is soon wreaking havoc in a previously clean and more or less self-contained space environment (an “anchor point station”). There are conflicts between assholish Weyland-Yutani corporation weapons division soldiers and cool corporation eco tech scientists, between corporation interests and the UPP (a Cold War esque “commie” culture whose people are “comrades”), and, of course, between aliens and humans. There are unusable elevators but eight levels of space station to descend, alien mucus and slime and nests and cocoons and ambushes and pointy tails, plot-helpful touches like a lack of necessary weaponry and working technology, and suspenseful time count downs. There are plenty of lines like, “What the f*ck was that?” and “Oh dear God” “Holy shit!” not to mention the dread, “I have to go back and get my research.” There are some neat developments (new to me anyway) regarding alien DNA and reproductive systems, and the alien-human hybrids are cool. If you are a fan of the Alien franchise, this would scratch your itch, but. . . With the Cold War relationship between corporation states and the UPP, it does feel dated, like the story from before the fall of the Berlin Wall that it is. Worse, Ripley is woefully underused (spending almost the entire time in cryo or drugged coma and playing no active role in the plot). Newt doesn’t get to do enough. On the plus side, Hicks and Bishop are “on screen” for most of the drama and Biehn and Henrikson are good to listen to--if you’ve seen Aliens, you’ll feel that you are watching Hicks and Bishop. It is diverting! But not much more. View all my reviews
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
“Man makes plans and God laughs” The Yiddish Policeman’s Union: A Novel (2007) by Michael Chabon is a compelling though at times over-written alternate history novel crossed with a hardboiled mystery story. In 1948, the new Jewish state of Israel collapsed, leaving the Jews of the world without a country. A while after that calamity, a US government act reserved Sitka, Alaska for Jewish settlement, but in the present of the novel, some sixty years later (“now” is 2008), the US is in the process of reverting Sitka to standard United States territory, forcing the majority of the Jewish citizens to relocate, and they sure aren’t wanted in the USA. With the Sitka police winding down operations preparatory to vacating, 44-year-old detective Meyer Landsman starts working on a last case, one that nobody wants him to pursue, least of all his new commanding officer, his ex-wife Bina Gelfbish. One of the guests staying in Landsman’s “home,” the seedy Hotel Zamenhof, has been found shot dead execution style. The victim is apparently a former Hasidic and current drug addict called Emmanuel Lasker. Who would have killed him so professionally and why? What is the meaning of the half-finished chess game on the board in his room. Who is the guy, really? In that vivid alternate history setting, Chabon’s book often reads like a Raymond Chandler novel. Landsman ticks off many hardboiled protagonist boxes: divorced, personal life a shambles, only romantic partner a shot glass, friends worried about his mental and physical health, his work the only thing he seems to live for; observant eye, vivid memory, keen instinct, stubborn independence, and strong moral code. But Landsman is Jewish, “the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka,” though he (believes that) he lost his faith long ago. Most of the characters in the novel are Jewish, with a few notable exceptions. And they are usually speaking Yiddish to each other (translated by Chabon into English for us), which leads to a lot of spicy language, including plenty of Yiddish terms like papiros (cigarette) and noz (policeman). (In an interesting interview at the end of the audiobook, Chabon says that he was inspired to write the novel by his love for the work of Chandler and by his reading of a Yiddish phrasebook that made him wonder what country such a book would ever be useful for visiting and then to imaginarily create such a country himself.) There are thus many interesting things related to the Jewish experience, like the belief (hot or cold depending on the era, community, and person) that a Messiah will come, the fraught life in a hostile world, the constant irony and sarcasm, and, my favorite, the eruv, “a scam run on God… something to do with pretending that telephone poles are door posts, and that the wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv you’ve drawn . . . is your house. That way you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place.” The ways in which Landsman’s faith in unbelief is supported and subverted by the novel are also neat. Lines like, “A dealer in entropy… A disbeliever by trade and inclination… To Landsman Heaven is kitsch, God a word, and a soul at most the charge in your battery,” make us think that he might be protesting too much. On the other hand, “A Messiah who actually arrives is no good to anybody. A hope fulfilled is already half a disappointment.” There are interesting takes on detective work (“telling a story”) and police work (helping men “realize that all along just under their boots lay the abyss” by “jerk[ing] back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor”). And the process of disentangling the mystery is well done: orderly, inevitable, and surprising, with thematic and social depth. There are plenty of great scenes, like Landsman trying to sleep in a bed with his partner’s little kids kicking him in their sleep, talking with the impressive wife of a crime lord, escaping from a cell while handcuffed to a bed, and visiting his partner Berko’s father. There are neat lines, like “Landsman’s congratulations are so ironic that they are heartfelt, and they are so heartfelt that they can only come off as insincere, and he and his partner sit there for a while without going anywhere listening to them congeal,” and “They all looked shocked, even Gold, who could happily read a comic book by the light of a burning man.” And the Chandleresque similes! At their best they’re original, vivid, perfect, and funny, like “She looks like she’s wetting her pants and enjoying the warmth.” Some of the best similes refer to Old Testament things, like “Her right arm is raised, index finger extended toward the trash bins, like a painting of the angel Michael casting Adam and Eve from the Garden.” However, I did start feeling that Chabon too often indulges in cool similes and descriptions, fatiguing me by making me appreciate too many similes, which began to numb me to their virtues, especially similes describing relatively unimportant things, like “Mrs. Kalushiner wanders into the back room, and the beaded curtain clatters behind her with the sound of loose teeth in a bucket.” Moreover, some of the similes try too hard, like “with haircuts that occupy the interval between astronaut and pedophile scoutmaster.” The audiobook reader Peter Riegert is excellent, and the interview with Chabon after the novel is interesting. The only downside of the audiobook is the odd music (electric guitar and bongos) that regularly fades in and out. View all my reviews
The Age of Faith by Will Durant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The “Country of the Mind,” from Julian to Dante The fourth volume in Will and Ariel Durant’s epic Story of Civilization, The Age of Faith (1950), begins with Julian the Apostate (332-63) and ends with Dante (1265-1321). The tome (a 60+ hour audiobook) is divided into five books, The Byzantine Zenith, Islamic Civilization, Judaic Civilization, The Dark Ages, and The Climax of Christianity. There are seven chapters on Islamic history and three on Jewish, while twenty-eight chapters concern Christian history. Nonetheless, the Durants often stress the vast and deep influence from Islamic and Jewish cultures on Christian cultures in everything from language, religion, poetry, and music to agriculture, architecture, science, and medicine, demonstrating that “The continuity of science and philosophy from Egypt, India, and Babylonia through Greece and Byzantium to Eastern and Spanish Islam, and thence to northern Europe and America, is one of the brightest threads in the skein of history.” They are humanist citizens of the globally connected “Country of the Mind,” optimistically believing that “Civilization … is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed.” The Durants are much more interested in religion, art, architecture, music, writing, calligraphy, history, philosophy, medicine, textiles, ceramics, metal and wood working, and culture generally, than in the war strategies, generals, armies, and battles. In a sentence or two they glide by turning points of history battles like Tours (where the Franks destroyed the Umayyad army in 732 and stopped the spread of Islam in Europe) or Manzikert (where the Seljuks destroyed the Byzantine army and opened up Anatolia to the Turks in 1071) only to spend pages detailing the construction and decoration of beautiful and sublime mosques and cathedrals or quoting sensual love poetry or inspiring letters or sublime hymns or secular songs or explaining efficient irrigation systems or the crafting of illuminated books or the making of stained glass windows or the encyclopedic and exuberant nature of Gothic cathedral sculpture, etc. This is no military history of the Age of Faith! Perhaps that’s because, as they say, “The ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds.” That is, the Durants serve culture rather than celebrate (or even deplore) war. As they go, the Durants put their belief that “He who would know the history of words would know the history of the world” into practice by revealing many interesting etymologies, like “sterling” deriving from “Easterling” (Hanseatic League members being perceived to be trustworthy) and curfew from French “cover fire” (due to William the Conqueror’s law to reduce fires in English cities). The Durants are not free from condescension to women, referring at one point to "a command sorely uncongenial to the gentle sex" to speak only when absolutely necessary in nunneries. And their homophobia (or that of their 1950 era) shows up here and there, as when they say that Jews had “wholesome” sexual morals because they were “less given to pederasty,” or that one of the things brought back to the west from contact with Islamic civilization was “sexual perversion.” Their demotic bias manifests sometimes as well, as when they refer to Paradise Lost as “dull.” The Durants have a refreshingly humble opinion of their own profession, more than once denigrating “the historian” in asides, as when, describing a free hospital in an Islamic city, they say, “The sleepless were provided with soft music, professional storytellers, and, perhaps, books of history.” Indeed, at times the book is fatiguing because of its many excerpted letters, poems, tales, songs, and the like, often given both in their original languages and in their English translations. But mostly the Durants’ book is an illuminating pleasure to read, because of their open-minded, curious, critical, humane, objective, sensitive, modest, and ambitious vision of human nature, civilization, and history. And because of their writing style: rolling sentences with comma-separated clauses and witty, pithy, ironic comments. They love their material and enjoy telling it, coloring everything with their twinkling eyed, sardonic, too tolerant to be cynical take on things. Like Edward Gibbon, they are informative and entertaining and write in an elegant and strong style (though Gibbon cannot be matched by twentieth-century writers.) From the first sentence of the book (“In the year 335 the Emperor Constantine, feeling the nearness of death, called his sons and nephews to his side, and divided among them, with the folly of fondness, the government of the immense Empire that he had won”), there are many memorable lines. Here are ten: 1. Left sole Emperor, he returned to Constantinople, and governed the reunified realm with dour integrity and devoted incompetence, too suspicious to be happy, too cruel to be loved, too vain to be great. 2. Congregations like to be scolded, but not to be reformed. 3. Statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterities. 4. Sadi was a philosopher, but he forfeited the name by writing intelligibly. 5. Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died. 6. It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization. 7. Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. 8. Virtue makes no news, and bores both readers and historians. 9. There are few things in the world so unpopular as truth. 10. Modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism. With his rich bass voice and clear enunciation, Stefan Rudniki gives a fine reading of most of the text, but he tends to deliver poetry, songs, and impassioned letters in a too uniform declamatory mode. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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