Blue Latitudes by Tony Horwitz - Around the World with Captain Cook

Most people are aware of a mid-eighteenth century British explorer named Captain Cook. Fewer of us know that he was the first person from the West to visit the extensive island chains in the Pacific Ocean as well as to explore and map the outlines of Australia and New Zealand. Fewer still know of his huge influence on later explorers, exploiters, and developers of a world-wide view or the development of what became the British Empire. Tony Horwitz in his marvelously informative and entertaining travel cum history book Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Henry Holt & Company, 2002, 480 pages) brings the man, history, and the present together to provide lots of answers while raising not a few issues and some additional questions in a hugely entertaining and informative volume. 

Cook's Ship - Endeavour

As a narrator seeking to write a serious account of Cook’s three voyages of exploration, Horwitz carefully describes the context and times of Cook’s explorations while including how these widespread Polynesian peoples have adapted to and been corrupted by the modern world. To do this, he decides to visit the places Cook visited. To add spice for the reader as well as a companion for himself, Horwitz invites Roger Williamson, an old friend with whom he has travelled and sailed before, to accompany him on his voyages. The contrasting viewpoints, perspectives, and lifestyles between the two men provide humor as well as insight into the world Cook uncovered and the way these far-flung islands have developed as they encounter the modern world. 

James Cook, 1728 - 1779, during three voyages to the Pacific Ocean explored and mapped from the edges of Antarctica to the northernmost navigable waters on the Western edge of North America. He was particularly noted for his navigation skills, which provided maps still in use into the early twentieth century. He proved himself to be a remarkable leader - resourceful, relatively humane and brave. He discovered and/or mapped lands unknown to exist before he arrived, and extended the available knowledge of places already touched. While this book is not a biography, a picture of a smart, resourceful man who would not, under other circumstances, have had the opportunities, because of his humble birth, to rise to command or encounter the difficult situations in which he thrived.

Cook Entering Kealakekua Bay

by

Herb Kane

Horwitz’ book skillfully moves between accounts taken from Cook’s captain’s log and other writings as well as the writings and art of other members of his crew and adventurers who were carried aboard ship, possibly to help defray the costs of the voyage itself. In these segments he accounts for the “unspoiled” islands and their relatively primitive inhabitants. Then he spends time ashore meeting local inhabitants, both former visitors who have been attracted to the Pacific islands through readings and pictures of the lifestyle there who came to visit and stayed, as well as long-time peoples who have settled there earlier. The indigenous population, by this time, no longer contains very many, if any, pure Polynesian descendants. The cross cultural stories of exploration, exploitation, epidemic, and genetic melding create new societies as the tragic disappearance of a traditional peoples’ culture continues.

Tony Hurwitz

Tony Horwitz (1958 - 2019) was a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting on low wage working conditions in Wall Street Journal. He also wrote for The New Yorker as well as publishing several books. Sadly, he died suddenly while on a walk in 2019. He was sixty years old. 

Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Henry Holt & Company, 2002, 480 pages) provides interested readers with variety, enrichment, humor, and vision by showing the primitive paradise Captain James Cook found on his voyages in contrast to the diverse, complex societies which have developed in modern times. Readers of travel as well as those interested in primitive cultures and their introduction to the modern world will find this book a fascinating and worthwhile voyage of discovery for themselves. 

The Chesapeake Bay in Focus by Tom Pelton - Book Review

The structure of Chesapeake in Focus: Transforming the Natural World by Tom Pelton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, 280 Pages, $24.95/19.31) is designed to appeal to both the general reader and to the environmental specialist. In undertaking to appeal to two audiences who share similar concerns, but not identical levels of expertise or understanding, author Tom Pelton has taken on a difficult task, which he, largely, achieves. In each section, he seeks to maintain a focus divided between the various constituencies involved, aware of the contextual history of the use and misuse of the Chesapeake Bay, and describing the efforts to save the Bay from both those who love it and those who couldn’t care about it one way or the other.

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. At least a dozen rivers contribute to its 200 mile long course through Maryland to the sea, with the Susquehanna River, originating in Lake Otsego, in central New York as the largest. Other major rivers include the James, Patuxent, Potomac, and many more. The opening section of the book takes readers to each of the major tributaries to Chesapeake Bay, telling something of its historical and ecological importance, as well as describing its beauty and degradation. As I read, I realized that my own acquaintanceship with the Bay and its contributing rivers goes deep into my own life.

As a youngster, I attended a camp on Lake Otsego, the source of the Susquehanna River, the largest and longest river flowing into and helping form Chesapeake Bay. My early Susquehanna canoeing experience was on a river usually no wider than 25 or 30 feet, at the end of the day skinny dipping in it with my friends. As a high school student, I sailed the upper reaches of the Bay with my mother and sister in small sailboats based near Northeast, MD. As a young married couple, Irene and I spent a wonderful weekend on the Eastern Shore with a school classmate’s family, and later camped on the James river for a weekend with them. As adults we’ve camped on the eastern shore near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, crossing the bridge several times on our way to Myrtle Beach. We’ve walked the shores of the Potomac with our friend Katy Daly and visited Washington, DC, Williamsburg with our kids, and Annapolis. The Chesapeake Bay has often been part of the background of our lives. And it’s been slowly dying for decades, killed by farmers, watermen, politicians, developers, cities, politicians, and more, each seeking to meet their own needs, while ignoring the environmental, recreational, health, and safety needs of a 200 mile long body of water that has been a part of our history since before English explorers landed there in 1607.

Pelton begins the story by describing the Bay and its constituent tributaries, the rivers feeding it and the lands surrounding them. To do this, he must describe cities placed along the river which often introduce raw sewage into the river, farms whose owners permit runoff from commercial fertilizer and animal excretion, factories that allow dangerous chemicals to enter into the river, and developers who build along the Bay as well as in the great suburbs around Baltimore, Washington and other cities, allowing rain and sewer runoff to further pollute the Bay. He also describes the rugged independence of farmers and watermen who refuse to accept responsibility for pollution and over fishing. Pelton uses profiles of politicians, farmers, and environmentalists to give a human face to what might otherwise be only dry statistics, although there are plenty of these, also.

In a series of marvelous portraits, he describes the life cycles of crabs, oysters, striped bass, eels, and sturgeon, showing how each species relies on clean water being in the Bay for reproduction as well as being left alone enough to be allowed to reproduce in sufficient numbers to survive. He also profiles some of the humans who use and rely on the Bay to bring the conflicts and needs of various groups into sharper focus.

Finally, Pelton looks at the policy solutions which often place the needs of rural America in conflict with both cities and suburbs as they each seek to function effectively in an ever more competitive economic environment, and in the face of a changing climate that further threatens the life of the Bay and the existence of towns, cities, and institutions located on and near it. In formulating solutions and policy suggestions for saving the Bay, he suggests that without strong regional and national cooperation at the government level, there may be little help for the Bay. He cannot escape the reality that such cooperation in an age of decreasing cooperation and increasing competition for ever scarcer tax dollars make the likelihood of such cooperation visionary beyond current realities. The larger national implications of his policy prescriptions lead inevitably to consideration of national and worldwide action which, sadly, probably won’t happen under current circumstances.

Tom Pelton

Tom Pelton is the host of the public radio program The Environment in Focus. A former staff reporter for the Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune, he has also written for the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Harvard Magazine, and other publications. He has served on the staff of various environmental organizations focused on the Chesapeake Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay in Focus by Tom Pelton, is a readable, useful, and important book for the environmentally aware, those who love the Bay, policy makers, and as a case study of the broader implications of regional, national, and international planning efforts in an age of selfish individualism and political rigor mortise. While at times the narrative gets pretty deep into the policy weeds, it is largely highly readable, even entertaining. Serious readers interested in these issues will find much of value. I was provided a pre-publication electronic copy of the book by the publisher through Edelweiss which I read on my Kindle app in my Amazon Fire.

Please remember to order any product links found on my blog through the Amazon.com portal found on the upper left hand side of the site. Thanks! The small income helps to support this sight. 

Coolidge by Amity Shlaes - Book Review

Amity Shlaes has written a nuanced and compassionate account of the life of our 30^th President called, simply, Coolidge (HarperCollins, 2013, 595 pages, available new and used, Kindle edition $8.99), touting what are often seen as his liabilities as strengths which brought dignity and acclaim to Coolidge in a difficult time of major changes in America and the world, as we recovered from World War I and adjusted to a country fraught with social, economic, political re-adjustment. Coolidge, while far from perfect, emerges as a model of probity, humility, and service which, given serious attention in today’s overheated political, technological, and media environment, provide a model for behavior and restraint. Often seen today as a “do-nothing” minor holder of our top office, belittled by the nickname Silent Cal, he is shown as intelligent, thoughtful, reserved, and, during his administration, both admired and liked.

Born into an influential but far from wealthy, family of Vermont farmers, small business proprietors, and political functionaries, his family history showed a strain of community mindedness, as his father, grandfather, and uncles had served as school board members, and in the local and state legislatures. Political action was viewed as a responsibility, not an ambition. Calvin Coolidge (born July 4, 1872, the only president born on Juy 4th) was physically slight, reserved, and, as he grew through school and began college at Amherst, unpromising. His lack of what today would be called charisma seems to have been a part of his effectiveness, though, and related to his always upward life path. He became noted as a listener and a quiet doer. People who befriended him found themselves drawn to him, despite (or maybe because of) his quiet, gentle demeanor.

Coolidge, having read the law in a local law office rather than attending a law school, was drawn to politics, but, in his quiet and unprepossessing fashion, sought lower level offices on boards and committees, which helped him to learn local issues as well as grow in his skills of negotiation and finding compromises which would leave multiple parties happy. Shlaes consistently makes reference to large economic, political, and social changes occurring nationally as the turn of the century rolls around. She points to the Spanish American war, the emergence of industrialism, immigration, and technology as Coolidge warns his father that he will be a man of the 20^th century, not the 19^th which will require new skills and perspectives. With each physical and intellectual move Coolidge makes, Shlaes always places it in a larger context, laying groundwork for the president he will become. Coolidge’s posture towards the battles that were continuing to rage between progressives and conservatives became that legislators should not be ideologues, but choose the path that serves the greater good in each setting. He sought a balance between labor and capital that would help corporations thrive while working people received ever higher living wages, leading to the advancement of both.

On the other hand, by refusing to compromise during the 1919 Boston police strike, to find middle ground between the police strikers and their duty as police officers, Coolidge established a line that broke the already crumbling strike. Unlike his usual strategy of bringing factions together to find acceptable middle ground, his position of firing the police and making no compromises with behavior that led to the riots, Coolidge established himself as a man who could be counted on to make a hard decision in a time great difficulty. His choice was met with local and national acclaim. Where President Wilson had hesitated, more interested in his national tour pushing the doomed League of Nations, to speak out, Coolidge, as governor of Massachusetts, had taken an uncompromising stand toward the strike which garnered national attention and the first inklings among political watchers that he might be presidential timber.

Selected by the Republicans to become Warren G. Harding’s running mate in the 1920 election, he was able to keep enough independence not to get caught up in the scandals (Teapot Dome and others) associated with Harding, thus succeeding to the presidency when Harding died in the second year of his term without being associated with Harding’s problems, while able to continue to pursue (at least in name) the policies of his predecessor. For the next six years, Coolidge managed to cut spending, reduce taxes, create a balanced budget, and reduce the national debt. By the time he reached the decision not to run again (“I do not choose to run!”) he was widely admired and even liked as a conservative and public spirited man working for the benefit of all. He maintained his posture that the government had no business in local issues in the face of national disasters growing out of disastrous flooding in the South and New England, always the consistent and even-handed administrator and leader.

Amity Shlaes

Amity Ruth Shlaes is an American author and newspaper and magazine columnist. Shlaes writes about politics and economics from a US libertarian perspective. Shlaes has authored a number of books, including three New York Times Bestsellers (Wikipedia profile)

As Coolidge ages too quickly in retirement, the value of his care with words, his holding back to allow the processes to work themselves through, emerges in public consciousness. In his columns, as in his speeches and interviews as President, Coolidge makes each precious word count for more by husbanding the total. The contrast between his approach to his role and celebrity presidents goes almost without saying. Playing his cardsc honestly, close to the vest, even with changes in communications and technology, clearly gives the president’s words more impact and influence. Amity Shlaes has presented a powerful picture of a man who in public and private life lived within the restraints of humility and service while accomplishing much. Coolidge offers a portrait more students of our history should seek to learn from and emulate. I bought the book and read it on my Kindle. 

The Information by James Gleick - Book Review

James Gleick, noted science writer, has the capacity to take the long view of the dawn of the Universe at the same time he focuses down to the sub-microscopic levels of molecular biology. He takes the reader to the edges of the universe, just seconds after the Big Bang and to the deepest part of a a cell, the chromosome, and finds they're the same place. His large and oh-so-readable book The Information, treats information at the most abstract, content free levels while also examining the world Encyclopedia, the efforts to create a compendium of all the world's knowledge, while differentiating between knowledge and information. In doing this, he helps each reader examine issues like “what makes us human,” and “how we find meaning.” While all this might sound daunting, Gleick is such a fine writer, that the impossible idea become plausible, and the difficult becomes approachable. While, as a reader and a thinker, I must own my lifelong difficulties with math and science, Gleick makes me think more deeply without wearing out his welcome. Other writers present formulas and mathematical ideas in the form of mathematical writing, and my eyes glaze over. Gleick manages always to make me think I'm, at least, on the edge of understanding, and then draws parallels that turn the wonder into insight.

Introducing the inventor of the transistor, Claude Shannon (1916 – 2001), known as the father of information theory, as the central character in his story, Gleick then takes the reader on a journey that leads back to African drum languages, to the beginning of language and, perforce, thought. Gleick makes it clear that without language there is no thought nor thought without language. It seems to be completely true that “in the beginning was the word,” if not in a Biblical sense, then in a real life statement of the beginnings of understanding. In order to make Shannon's contributions clear and to point in directions still not fully realized, but opened by Shannon's work, Gleick takes us back to the beginnings of time, before conscious thought and the development of language, let alone writing.

In every case, as nearly as I can tell, thought, expression, and the invention of technology link together such that great leaps can only happen when they three coincide. For example, Gleick tells the story of early nineteenth century British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, who invented, at least in his head, a huge, mechanical calculating machine which was never built because the technology required reached beyond what could be developed and built at the time. Nevertheless, Babbage is considered to be the “father of the computer,” although such a child always has many fathers.

Similarly, humankind have been in the business of seeking to accumulate information about their own activities and environment almost since the first cave painting. Early dictionaries, mere alphabetical lists of words (Did you know that the very word alphabet is alphabetical – Alpha Beta, the first two letters?) led to efforts to write meanings of the words and then derivations. Similarly, The Encyclopedia Brittanica represents a massive effort over nearly a century's time to accumulate all (or at least a whole lot) the information. Now Wikipedia and Google, almost unimagineably large and comprehensive attempt to continue the effort. But such projects would never have been as successful as they are were it not for the massive increase in speed and storage capacity of the Internet with the continued decline of the cost of computing and memory. Your smart phone is ever so much more powerful and has significantly more memory than the early manned rockets contained as the penetrated into space.

Ahhh, space! Another important strand of The Information is the work of physicists, mathematicians, and, more recently biologists in probing the edges of space and the discoveries in both theory and observation of the DNA strands that hold our entire evolutionary history within their substance, which is repeated in every cell of our bodies. All this might seem ponderous in a less graceful, clear, and, yes, witty writer. Gleick bases much of his discussion on the interaction between seminal people and the development of relevant technology. He writes about both with insight while not making the ideas so difficult to grasp that he turns off non-technical good readers. As he weaves his way through history and the science that developed, he never moves far from the search for meaning within the contentless search for relevant theory to support it. I leave it to individual readers to assess whether this book contributes to their understanding of that beyond all understanding.

James Gleick

James Gleick was born in New York and began his career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter for the New York Times. He covered science and technology there, chronicling the rise of the Internet as the Fast Forward columnist, and in 1993 founded an Internet start-up company called The Pipeline. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He has been nominated for three Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. His next book is Time Travel: A History, for which I asked the published to send me a pre-publication review copy, and was denied. I'll read it when I can afford it.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick (Pantheon Books, 2011, 527 pages, Various Prices) explores the ideas that lead to and encompass what is now called information theory. In order to do that, Gleick has had to look to the beginning of history and before and to the ends of the Universe and beyond. Chances are there are smaller particles and further empty places, and chances are, too, that Gleick will tell us about them, and each of us will understand beyond the limits we thought possible. Who could ask for more?

Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince by Lisa Hilton - Book Review

Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince by Lisa Hilton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, 400 pages, $27.00/12.99) is a dense and rewarding exploration of this remarkable English ruler who happened to be a woman. Elizabeth (1533-1603), Henry VIII's daughter by Anne Boleyn spent much of her life battling to establish and maintain herself as the ruler of a country divided by major issues of succession, religious conflict, and political threat from larger, richer countries Spain and France. Machiavelli's seminal work The Prince had been published in Italy in 1513, influencing the emerging European Renaissance to reconsider the role of its leaders and the conflict between declining feudalism and emerging rulers who learned to understand the developing idea of the nation/stage largely under his influence. Hilton emphasizes the conflict between the chivalric courtly politics of the middle ages and the era of national statecraft that comes to flower during Elizabeth's long and glorious reign. During this period, feudalism begins giving way to nascent capitalism. The book explores elements of Elizabeth's development, education, and precariousness that make her accomplishments seem even greater for their lack of inevitability.

While the world swirled around the religious and political ferment attendant to Henry VIII's sexual appetites combined with his desire to leave a male heir, Elizabeth spent her youth squirreled away, mostly out of the political whirlwind at Court, getting a first rate Renaissance education from a range of tutors, mostly associated with St. John's College – Cambridge. She spoke and read in French, Italian, Latin, and German while studying math, astronomy, natural science, music and geography. Her studies in rhetoric, grammar and logic helped polish her use of reason and argument. In other words, she was educated and smart, trained to become ruler of her nation in the increasingly likely absence of a male successor to the throne. Meanwhile, always in danger, she waited out the accession and quick passing of her sickly brother Edward as well as Mary, the Catholic daughter of Katherine of Aragon and Lady Jane Grey.

Hilton spends significant time explaining Elizabeth in terms of the iconography (artistic symbolism) and conventions of courtly love during the period she was ruler of England. While the political winds were rapidly changing all across Europe, Elizabeth established herself as the symbolic as well as actual ruler of her country at least partly through the manipulation of the symbols legitimizing her divine right to govern. Hilton uses details in contemporary paintings and descriptions of elaborate tableaux and pageants as support. The references to then common allusions to Greek and Roman mythology support her contentions.

The other major support for Hilton's portrait of Elizabeth lies in her description of the uses of the conventions of courtly love in Court relationships. This conventional behavior relied upon symbolic language and elaborate flirtation to develop and maintain relationships which actually had no recourse to ever being acted upon in private liaisons. While Hilton refuses to be categorical in this contention, she suggests that Elizabeth did, indeed, die a virgin queen. She successfully established herself as being beyond gender, except whe it suited her to appear weak and feminine.

The courtiers engage in an almost tidal ebb and flow of influence and power within the Court of Elizabeth as advisers and sycophants vie for becoming favorites or fall from favor, placing their lives in jeopardy. There were so many individuals and powerful families from across Europe discussed in the text that I was forced into fairly frequent referal to Wikipedia to help me keep all the personae straight. This is probably more a testament to lapses in my own education than to Hilton's writing. Within this miasma of interlocking power and betrayal, the use of spies, torture, incarceration and execution leads to plenty of intrigue as well as much blood a gore. The struggle for power and favor within the Elizabethan court was not a game for the faint of heart!

Lisa Hilton

Lisa Hilton grew up in the north of England and read English at New College, Oxford, after which she studied History of Art in Florence and Paris. After eight years in New York, Paris and Milan she has recently returned to England and now lives in London with her daughter Ottavia. In addition to writing biography, she also works as a journalist, lecturer and broadcaster. She publishes widely in popular periodicals as well as in professional journals.

Elizabeth: Renaissance Prince by Lisa Hilton (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, 400 pages, $27.00/12.99) provides readers with a mature and nuanced view of Elizabeth I's life, with particular reference to her growing competence as a ruler and her often brutal responses to opposition or danger to her person or her country. Eventually, Elizabeth sacrifices any hope of personal joy or fulfillment for the sake of the realm and its continued development. The book is a solid piece of careful scholarship developing themes of Elizabeth's rule emphasizing her statesmanship and political savvy rather than her loves and adventures. It seems her major failure seems to have been an inability to achieve both continuity of succession and maintenance of her reign. I recommend this book to serious readers of history who are willing to work at their reading. I received the book as an e-galley supplied by the publisher through Edelweiss: Above the Tree Line. I read it on my Kindle App. 

Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships that Formed America by David O. Stewart - Book Review

Biographers often fall in love with their subject, allowing major flaws to be papered over, diminished, or even ignored. The genius of David O. Stewart's biography of the United States' fourth president is that Stewart shows us the flaws and contradictions in James A. Madison only to allow his often ignored presence and importance to become all the greater. In Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships that Built America (Simon & Shuster, 2015, 432 pages, $28.00/14.99), Stewart takes a fascinating and revealing look at one of the most important and least well-known of the Founding Fathers, with a particular emphasis on Madison's capacity for friendship, serious scholarship, thoughtful advice, and vigorous argumentation in an environment where he could stay in the background as a trusted and gifted adviser while growing a reputation for probity and political acumen that would lead to his becoming the fourth President of the United States. Stewart's writing is clear and uncluttered. His explanations of complex issues are to the point. He provided the best explanation of the Alien and Sedition Acts and the development of political parties I've ever read.

Montpelier - Madison's Virginia Home

I've always though of Madison as the quiet and efficient secretary to the Constitutional Convention and have known him as one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. Otherwise, he has been pretty much a cipher, which may merely be a confession of my own inadequacy as a casual student of American history. In this book, he emerges as one of the principal brains in the development of the theoretical underpinnings of our unique form of constitutional government and then, along with Alexander Hamilton, the constitution's signal defender and advocate as he argued for its adoption in the various state legislative bodies. As a proponent, an enabler, an adviser, and an administrator he excelled. The book is structured through examinations of five critical relationships of his and his ability to maintain those relationships, even in disagreement. Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Dolly Madison and his relationship with each of them form the core of this wonderful account, breaking Stewart out of the mold of chronological history, since there is, to a great extent, a degree of overlap, although the relationships also fall into a sequential pattern corresponding to the flow of history. Only with regard to Madison's difficult relationship with slavery does Stewart break this pattern, but necessarily so as Madison was troubled by his own attitude toward the institution of slavery and the possible future place of black people in America throughout his life, during which he was always a Virginian and a slave owner.

Dolley Madison

Madison himself emerges as a man who prefers to exert influence in quiet and unassuming ways. Small in stature and voice, he was never a dominant physical personality who commanded recognition for his power of rhetoric, or beauty of imagery. Instead, Madison was possessed of a powerful, analytical mind, a mild temperament, usually a sure sense of timing, and a capacity for intense and long-lasting friendships. Each of his important political friends was also a personal friend. Although not either handsome or extremely rich, he met and married Dolley Payne Todd when he was forty-three and she twenty-six. Dolly was not only vivacious and astute, she was, in her own right, a first-rate political adviser and social support to James' aspirations. Dolley Madison, herself, has been the subject of many books and can rightly be called the first First Lady, although the name wasn't created until many years after her death. All his friendships with the four men so crucial to him had their high points and cooling off periods as conditions within the Republic changed. Withal, he was able to maintain personal friendships when political fires might have interfered in the case of lesser men.

One of the highlights of Madison's Gift for me was Stewart's explanation and discussion of the rise of political parties at the end of 18^th and beginning of the 19^th centuries. Washington, in his farewell address, had warned the nation against partisanship. However, the structure seems to have dictated that people taking different sides on issues would join together in political parties based on regional and economic, as well as their attitudes towards the abuses of slavery. Madison, along with Monroe, was a central person in developing what became the Republican party.

David O. Stewart

After practicing law for many years, David O. Stewart began to erite history, too. His first book,The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, was a Washington Post best seller and won the Washington Writing Award as Best Book of 2007. Two years later, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy, was called “by all means the best account of this troubled episode” by Professor David Donald of Harvard. The Society of the Cincinnati awarded David its 2013 History Prize for American Emperor, Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America, an examination of Burr’s Western expedition, which shook the nation’s early foundations. The Lincoln Deception, an historical mystery about the John Wilkes Booth Conspiracy, was released in late August 2013. Bloomberg View called it the best historical novel of the year, while Publishers Weekly said it wasan “impressive debut novel.” Stewart lives with his wife in Maryland. A more extensive profile can be found on his website. (adapted from Stewart's website)

Madison's Gift: Five Partnerships that Built America (Simon & Shuster, 2015, 432 pages, $28.00/14.99) by David O. Stewart illuminates the importance of James Madison throughout the formative years and development of America as a nation and as an idea whose spirit spread across the world. Madison's greatest strengths were his capacity for careful analytical study combined with persuasive, quiet eloquence. His influence among the founders was critical to the formation and development of America at a time when it's success was precarious and uncertain. Stewart's writing is incisive, lucid, and thought provoking, as he follows Madison's career through a series of crucial friendships that helped shape a nation. This biography provides an excellent profile of the emerging United States through the constitutional period and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. I read Madison's Gift as an electronic galley provided to me by the publisher through Edelweiss on my Kindle app.

A Visit to Cross Creek - Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Site

I must have been in sixth or seventh grade when I read The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This coming of age novel about a year in the development of a young boy named Jody raising an orphaned fawn on an isolated farm in central Florida until he must release it into the wild, left a strong imprint on me, while the details have been lost to my memories, the overall sense of wonder, loss, and development of understanding have remained. Wednesday dawned bright and warm, so we decided to drive over to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings State Historic Park, which lies about ten miles from this week's camp at Payne's Prairie State Park.

Located in Cross Creek, Florida, the Kinnan Rawlings park in located on what's left of a seventy-two acre Orange Grove Rawlings (1896 - 1953) bought in 1928 with a small inheritance from her mother. The countryside is mostly characteristic of central Florida flatlands, with a few feet of rise in elevation creating changes from cypress swamps to palmetto grasslands and cattle ranches, interspersed with a number of small lakes, nowadays the home of fish camps. Rawlings worked as a newspaper writer, changing jobs along with her husband while also writing short stories, which caught the idea of super-editor Maxwell Perkins (editor for Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe) who encouraged her to publish. After several other successes, her most successful novel, The Yearling, was published in 1938, won a Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie by MGM after the war. It has become a standard among what are now called Young Adult novels or Juvenile Fiction, read largely in late elementary school.

Walking up the dirt path from the parking lot takes a visitor into the world of the late thirties and early forties in central Florida. Friendly volunteers are pruning an overfilled tangerine tree bearing slightly sour and delicious tangerines with paper thin skins that peel off easily. They welcome us to the site, telling us that the buildings are only open to tour from Thursday through Sunday, but the doors are open for us to look in through the screens.

The farmhouse and the attached work-space Rawlings had built for her are simple, reflecting both the times and the location. The central farmhouse is a Cracker style building built in 1884. Other buildings were added by Rawlings to make living there easier or to accommodate guests and her writing. Much a Rawlings' writing depended on the relationships she developed with local people who were further developed as characters or portrayed in profiles in another major work, Cross Creek. Rawlings' subjects were not always fully enthusiastic about how they saw themselves portrayed in her books.

Rawlings at Work

The Farm House

The Barn

For a more detailed picture of Rawlings' life, see the entry on her in Wikipedia.

First Edition of Cross Creek

 Rawlings Commemorative - Issued 2008

The Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is worth an hour or so stop for a taste of an earlier era in central Florida with the lovely historic village of Micanopy nearby as well as the home of the University of Florida in Gainesville. 

True Yankees by Dane Morrison - Book Review

True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (The Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science) by Dane A. Morrison (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 280 pages, $34.95) uses the voyages, writings, and experiences of American traders and sojourners Samuel Shaw, Amasa Delano, Edmond Fanning, Harriet Low and Robert Bennett Forbes during the period 1785 through 1840 to describe the expansion of American mercantilism in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean in support of his thesis that their voyages helped spread the web of American influence and power while establishing the newly founded country's legitimacy and to develop the distinctive qualities of behavior and belief that firmly established the American character during a period where the existence and development of America a a nation and world power was still very much in question.

The five merchant world explorers in the book stand as representative of those pioneers in post-revolutionary America who sought to build their fortunes by following the China trade to build their lac (fortune) exploring far from their New England origins as they pioneered new routes to the Great South Sea, encountered new people, cultures, and economic opportunities for themselves while helping to build America's wealth back during a period of fragile economic recovery and weak international recognition. They “progressed” from seeking to trade in ginseng, cotton, seal furs and whale oils to Chinese silk, ceramics, and east Indian opium in a triangle trade similar to that between America, Africa, and the Caribbean islands in slaves. Because all five were skilled writers who shared their stories in personal journals, correspondence, and books, they established an extensive record of their activities, developing understandings of the world they functioned in, successes and failures. Morrison weaves their stories together into an intriguing period covering a little over half a century when the emerging American character was developed and established through the success of the efforts of people like them, picturing the excitement their voyages generated in the commercial and popular minds of Americans who were themselves on a voyage from being thirteen autonomous colonies toward a continent-wide nation of distinctive character and disposition. As we follow their voyages and writings, readers see the development from questing merchants following their needs and ideals to established world traders championing American exceptionalism manifested as prejudice and closed-mindedness.

The core of the book describes both exploring and trading. The explorations included some genuine discoveries, but a number of first visits by Americans to places where the British had already made bad impressions, making it more difficult to establish relations. The American traders saw the indigenous peoples of the Pacific islands as barbarians or primitive peoples who were somewhat less than human, manifesting little or no interest in the culture, language, customs, or religions of the people they encountered. In the late 18^th century, when Samuel Shaw began his trips as supercargo on the Empress of China, the Pacific charts were inaccurate and travel extremely dangerous. Yankee traders had been preceded to China by a couple of hundred years of Portuguese, Spanish, and British traders. China, in order to protect itself from cultural mixing, had established a foreign trade zone in Canton, beyond which foreigners were forbidden to go. They had little incentive to wish to discover the real China, anyway. By the late 1830's, when Harriet Low, a New England spinster lived in Macao and Canton, attitudes had hardened as the Opium trade threatened Chinese stability. Low viewed this disruption through the narrow lens of New England superiority and fundamentalist Protestant judgment. Meanwhile, Forbes made his fortune as an intermediary representing traders being banned from China because of Opium.

Dane A. Morrison

Dane A. Morrison is Professor of Early American History at Salem State University in Salem, MA. He has published, written, and presented widely in this his specialty. He has been at Salem State for twenty -one years. This book is, essentially, an academic treatise with the kind of annotation and references you would expect from such a book. Nevertheless, it is a highly readable account of this important, but not widely known component of American History.

True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity (The Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science) by Dane A. Morrison (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, 280 pages, $34.95) is an academic treatise written to demonstrate the thesis of Yankee traders in the development and nurturing of the expansion of American vision of itself, the establishment of the U.S. as a “major player on the world stage,” and the discovery of a unique national identity. The book is fully annotated and contains interesting illustrations. It serves well to fill a hole in the historical knowledge base of many interested in American history and makes a significant academic contribution while remaining highly readable. I received True Yankees as an electronic galley from Edelweiss and read it on my Kindle App.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev - Book Review

I fear that Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev (Public Affairs, 2014, 254 pages, $25.99/14.49) will not be widely enough read nor deeply enough covered by the main stream media to have it gain the sort of attention it deserves. This is an important book presenting the world of contemporary Russia in all the vivid complexity and corrupt duplicity which everyone should be aware of and seek to bring to heel. Since Russia is a land working without a moral compass, a place where how things look and are presented have become reality for those living and working there, its ability to morph to meet current circumstances and to insert itself into supposedly sacrosanct institutions in the “free” world like London banks, world fashion, film, and the NBA always gaining power and weakening free institutions, appears inevitable and almost unlimited. Pomerantsev, a documentary film maker, worked for Russian TV during the first decade of this country, writes with cinematic vigor and intense personal detail, using the reality of his subjects to document the moral and spiritual corruption of Russia's recovery from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vladimir Putin's emergence as a new and ever more powerful twenty-first century dictator committed to restoring Russian power and influence.

Pomerantsev is a British journalist/film maker of Russian heritage who spent a decade mostly in Russia working as a producer for Russian TV network TNT, which is one of Russia's top five television networks specializing in portraying a light and humorous view of life. During his years in Russia, Pomerantsev produced a series which profiled the lives and experiences of the rich and glamorous Russians who emerged on the world scene among the beautiful and powerful people. His profiles of individual lifestyle and fashion leaders become increasingly dark as Pomerantsev realizes he's participating in helping create a vision of beauty, success, and happiness in a world dominated by corruption, greed, and an ethic emphasizing that PR, how things appear, eventually becomes the reality the masses believe in, masking the real abuses of freedom, power, expression, and liberty now dominating the reality of Russia and finding their greatest expression in the annexation of Crimea and the current efforts to reclaim ethnic Russian portions of the Ukraine. Perhaps the most frequently used word in the entire book is “corrupt” and its variations.

In Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Pomerantsev describes the constant remaking of Moscow, historic buildings and neighborhoods torn down to replace them with series of cheesy upscale high rise towers mimicking the posh buildings of Paris, London, New York, and Monte Carlo. Young entrepreneurs, often former gangsters, live in luxury while always on the edge of having it all pulled out from under them if they stray too far from the currently emerging version of 21^st century Russia. The power of Pomerantsev's writing lies in the vivid profiles he writes of a number of representative individuals who become metaphors for the corruption of the whole. He pictures unbelievably beautiful Russian girls who've come to Moscow to find a “Forbes” (rich business men who will enter their lives and make them over). Fueled by sex and booze in Moscow's steamy night spots, the girls, who are known as “cattle” to the Forbses, make themselves fully available and are cast aside when the next one comes along. He profiles Vitally, a former gangster whose school was prison. Vitally rises and falls at the Kremlin's will, but he is a chameleon whose colors change fast enough for him to, perhaps, survive. This isn't a portrait of a country in transition, but some sort of post-modern dictatorship using the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends. The horrors of double think and double speak bring Orwell's 1984 to life a generation after the year has passed.

Ruslana Korshunova

It may be that the most remembered part of this book will be the profile of supermodel Ruslana Korshunova and a cultish organization called Rose of the World, which promises new recruits a total remake of their lives as they gain control over themselves. Using group dynamics techniques which those familiar with the human potential movement in the U.S. during the sixties spawned, particularly a similar cult called est or Erhard Seminars Training offered by Werner Erhard and quite popular during the seventies, Rose of the World promised to help participants gain control of their own lives and those of others through intensive and harrowing workshops. Pomerantsev discovers this cult-like movement while investigating Korshunova's unexplained suicide in Manhattan soon after her participation in a series of workshops in Moscow. The susceptibility of post-Soviet Russia to salvation by cultish devotion centered on a prophet, coach, guru, leader who presents adherents with “the answer” to the doubts and fears plaguing them speaks volumes to the power of fundamentalist religion and belief in other parts of the world. The power of “optics,” how things look rather than how they are, is a central feature of the rise of a sense of Russian purity and power in this new world where public relations are more powerful than reality. The awkward leaps across the fence after elections in our own country mimic the kinds of changes typical in Russia today, and possibly throughout its history.

Peter Pomerantsev

Peter Pomerantsev is a TV producer and nonfiction author. His work appears in The London Review of Books, FT, Newsweek, Le Monde Dimplomatique, and other publications. He spent a decade in Russia between 2001 and 2010/2011 as an international development consultant, film student, and largely, a TV producer and director. He now lives in London and continues to visit Russia regularly.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev (Public Affairs, 2014, 254 pages, $25.99/14.49) provides a first rate portrait of the Orwellian world that is contemporary Russia, written with a clear vision of the social contrasts and mind-bending contradictions between what seems and what is, who people say they are and what they really represent, and how they represent themselves in the kaleidoscopic world that changes every time the lens is turned, even the slightest movement. The world of entrepreneurs, oligarchs, politicians, and bureaucrats at the top of an ever-changing pyramid of power and influence is one which truly needs to be read and understood. Of course, Vladimir Putin does an excellent job of making much of it clear in his absurd posturing. I received the book from the publisher as an electronic galley through Edelweiss and read it on my Kindle app.

George Marshall by Irwin & Debi Unger: Book Review

George Marshall by Irwin & Debi Unger (Harper, October 2014, 560 pages, $35.00/18.99) is a contemporary re-appraisal of George Marshall's life and career. Despite the fact that throughout his long military service, Marshall was always recognized for his character and ability, this biography seems to go out of its way to find fault with the man and his achievements. Whether the issue is the impossibility of any human achieving to the level Marshall's acclaim suggests or a need to find fault with a general widely thought to be one of America's finest military examples, the Ungers seem to go out of their way to fault Marshall for not always getting it right. Never recognized for his brilliance in speech nor given the opportunity to command men in battle, George Marshall still managed to rise to the highest levels of the military and to serve as Army Chief of Staff under Roosevelt and both Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense in the Truman administration. A person of seemingly modest ambition, he was named Time Magazine's Man of the Year twice and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He was promoted to General of the Army, the highest possible rank in the U.S. Army. Despite his recognition, the Ungers are always careful to explore how Marshall falls short of absolute icon status when fully examined. How could he not?

Marshall as Cadet at VMI

Marshall was born in1880 in Uniontown, PA, the son of a local businessman, but he early identified with the Virginia gentry from which his mother was descended. He attended Virginia Military Institute, where his career was acceptable, but not notable, perhaps spurred on by a denigrating remark made by his older brother. He was commissioned in the regular Army, and like so many of his age cohort serving in the peacetime Army, found promotion to be slow and rewards meager. Generally speaking, he was recognized for his organizational ability, his attention to detail, and his encouragement of his subordinates to take the initiative. He gained a reputation as an effective organizer and administrator, a role he functioned in throughout his career, never having the opportunity to command troops in battle, the usual path to top positions in the Army. Unlike his, perhaps, greatest rival, General Douglas MacArthur he neither came from a distinguished military background, nor gained recognition through his skill at commanding men or as a strategist. Marshall was a consummate bureaucrat, always keeping the spotlight on others as he rose through the ranks. Whenever the opportunity arose for him to take a command post, his superior officers much preferred to keep him in staff positions where his judgment and knowledge were seen as being indispensable. After impressing General John J. Pershing with his directness and honesty, Marshall often had the support of Pershing as he rose through the ranks after World War I. As Pershing's personal aide, Marshall came to know the people and the levers of power in Washington. After Franklin D. Roosevelt became President, his rise in the Army ranks became swifter. While not highly articulate or learned, Marshall was persuasive in both the counsels of the mighty and before Congressional hearings.

After World War I, the Army's size was drastically reduced. He foresaw the potential difficulties of Hitler's rise to power and lobbied hard to increase the size of the Army and the level of fitness to serve among officers and enlisted me. However, it was not until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that the U.S. saw the need to mobilize. As Chief of Staff, Marshall oversaw the increase in the Army's size from fewer than 200,000 to over eight million, while helping to organize war production to provide the necessary material support. Seemingly bland and unassuming, Marshall was able to work effectively with the large personalities of men like FDR, Winston Churchill, and even Stalin, as the allies became enmeshed in defeating the Axis powers (Germany, Japan and Italy) around the world. He could see beyond the parochial needs of men like Patton and MacArthur to recognize the importance of maintaining balance and perspective. While never a man of great warmth, humor, or likability, Marshall commanded the respect of all through his probity, honesty, and ability as a fair broker between competing interests. He was a bureaucrat's bureaucrat when the term was not pejorative. The most important moments in Marshall's rise in the ranks seem to have come when he spoke out in opposition to ideas proposed by those in authority. Rather than destroying his career, those moments provided him with a reputation for courage and honesty, and were rewarded with promotions and increases in responsibility, always in staff positions.

Marshall's career did not progress without areas of criticism. In subordinating Army expansion to the needs of domestic suppliers and defense industries, training was compromised and men arrived at the front with inadequate preparation. Marshall, as a consummate compromiser, allowed the U.S. to be involved in the costly campaigns in North Africa and Italy, which served to postpone the invasion of Europe in 1944, but also may have completed the training necessary to succeed. He was strongly criticized in Congress (along with FDR) for the Pearl Harbor debacle, and later was constantly under pressure from the isolationist right wing and from the demagoguery of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the fifties. When President Truman dismissed MacArthur for insubordination, Marshall, too, came under enormous pressure. While maintaining a reputation as a non-partisan, Marshall's greatest success and promotion came under Democratic administrations, which predominated during the height of his career. Nevertheless, Dwight Eisenhower was a Marshall protege whom he happily congratulated on his election as President.

Author Irwin Unger has won the Pulitzer Prize in history for The Greenback Era as well as two Guggenheim fellowships. Together Irwin and Debi Unger have authored LBJ: A Life and several other books. They live in New York City.

George Marshall by Irwin & Debi Unger (Harper, October 2014, 560 pages, $35.00/18.99) is a thorough re-appraisal of the life and career of General of the Army George C. Marshall, who presents interesting problems for potential biographers because he was distinguished for his character and bureaucratic ability rather than for his brilliance as a tactician or strength of personality. To keep this biography from becoming a hagiography, they have resolutely identified areas where Marshall's efforts fell short of the ideal. Tasked with managing an impossibly complex war and then overseeing American efforts as the new post-war country had to confront issues of the Cold War, the emergence of Israel, and the threat of world Communism, it's amazing that one man could manage to keep as many balls in the air as he did. Meanwhile, we still struggle with the outcomes of America's rise and fall in a difficult world with new and ever-changing rules. I received George Marshall by Irwin & Debi Unger from the publisher through Edelweiss as an electronic galley. I read it on my Kindle App.