Can It Happen Here? by Cass Sunstein - Book Review

The essays in Can it Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America (Dey Street Books, March 2018, 496 pages, $11.99/12.18) vary widely in accessibility, readability, and sense of audience. They represent a set of, largely academic papers that may raise more issues than they settle. Nevertheless, I came away, despite the pessimism of some of the essays, with the sense that if Americans act with courage and fortitude, our institutions will survive the Trump assault on them. Most of the writers, drawn from top, mostly American, universities suggest that, while there seems to be world-wide skepticism toward liberal democracy, we can weather the storm by relying on the checks and balances established in the Constitution, maintaining a free press, and the engagement of the electorate in the political process.

The title of the book is drawn from Sinclair Lewis’s satirical novel, It Can’t Happen Here, written in 1936, which followed the career of a fictional governor, much like Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana, who took a run against Franklin Delano Roosevelt before his assassination in 1936. Lewis’ autocratic, totalitarian character, perhaps modeled on Adolf Hitler is elected president on a platform of populism and traditional values. Sound familiar? The title of Lewis’ book is turned into a question, which each of the writers examine in their own fashion.

The writers aredrawn almost entirely from Academia and selected from elite institutions dominated by the Ivy League and the University of Chicago. Including editor Cass Sunstein, there were nineteen writers distributed thus: Harvard – 5, Chicago – 5, Yale – 2, NYU – 2, Columbia – 1, Princeton – 1, Cornell – 1, Duke – 1, George Mason – 1. In terms of specialties, they were distributed this way: Law – 11, Economics – 2, Diplomacy – 1, varied social sciences – 5. Several were described as being multi-disciplinary. Given these distributions of institutions and specialties, it’s little wonder that many of the entries were jargon-filled and somewhat repetitive. One of the contributors, Samantha Powers, also happens to be married to editor Sunstein, although I can see no reason why she doesn’t belong in this distinguished group.

Can It Happen Here? considers whether the inclinations and indications from the Trump administration can or will lead to the loss of our democracy and the imposition/acceptance of an authoritarian form of government in the United States. While, in his preface, Sunstein suggests that this dark vision of what America might become isn’t yet happening, those who can imagine such outcomes are writing and speaking about it. They belong to a long history of those who’ve written about an apocalyptic view of democracy and freedom.

The essays range from thoughtful and insightful analyses of Donald Trump’s mind and approach to stunningly difficult to read and interpret research studies written for an academic audience. They often are much in need of interpretation for even the intelligent lay reader. As such, it seems to be a book in search of an audience who can find enough sustenance to make it worth purchasing. It contains too much jargon and too many statistics to be useful to the general reader, and too little for the specialist.

The general tenor of this collection is to suggest that while Trump, his authoritarian vision and the alignment of his appointees towards the very forces he campaigned against, while deeply upsetting and destructive, is likely to fail as other efforts to exert control over the government and people of America have failed in the past. But the ride isn’t going to be pleasant and the destruction may take years to heal. Since there are few examples of authoritarian or anti-constitutional governance in this country, several of the writers depend on authoritarian influences in Hungary and Poland, which have pulled back from democracy. They also rely on the rise to power of historical figures like Louis Bonaparte in France, Hitler, and Mussolini, all of whom overthrew representative governments to install autocratic rule before failing.

Most of the essays strike a center-left middle ground, as one might expect from a group of writers dominated by men (only two women contributed chapters) trained in law who also teach it in elite settings. There’s a strong presumption that the principles enshrined in the Constitution and embodied in the checks and balances and the Bill of Rights, with special emphasis on the role of the press, whose voice is guaranteed by the First Amendment will prevail. Meanwhile, the concerns of the unruly extremes of both parties is under-emphasized as the writers place their faith in the good sense of the center.

Cass Sunstein

According to Amazon, “Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, where he is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy. He is by far the most cited law professor in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he served in the Obama administration as Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He has testified before congressional committees, appeared on national television and radio shows, been involved in constitution-making and law reform activities in a number of nations, and written many articles and books, including Simpler: The Future of Government and Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter.”

Canit Happen Here?: Authoritarianismin America (DeyStreet Boois, March 2018, 496 pages, $11.99/12.18) edited by Cass Sunstein consists of seventeen essays edited and curated by Cass Sunstein examining the rise of Donald J. Trump to the Presidency of the United States and its possible outcomes. Relying on the history of several authoritarian rises and failures in world history as well as a social psychological approach to American predictions, the book speculates about the possible continued world-wide rise of authoritarian rule and its possibilities. With regard to the U.S., the essays hold out some optimism, assuming that Americans and our institutions stand tall and act bravely. The essays are uneven, but many deserve careful, thoughtful study. They are marred by their tone and the denseness of the prose in some. The book was provided to me by the publisher as a digital download through Edelweiss, and I read it on my Amazon Fire.

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?

The Geography of Genius by Eric Weiner - Book Review

In the Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (Simon & Schuster, 2016, 368 Pages, $26.95/12.99) author Eric Weiner visits seven cities located around the world during different eras. In this amusing and interesting journey, he seeks to unearth, sometimes literally, the factors that have led to the emergence of great waves of creativity in places that might seem unlikely in retrospect. Weiner asks what factors do ancient Athens, Hangzhou China, Renaissance Florence, 18^th century Edinburgh, turn of the 20 ^th century Calcutta, Vienna in two periods, and contemporary Silicon Valley share the helped create periods of great creative genius? It's as if something in the air, the social/cultural environment of place creates the conditions for genius to flower in such a way that it has an effect rebounding down through history. Wiener has a nice turn of phrase, the ability to make pungent comments that make a reader stop in mid-page to savor the remark. Along the way, he visits the contemporary cities he's writing about, getting in contact with local scholars and high level tourist guides to help acquaint him with the culture and ambience of the past.

As Weiner wanders around the cities which proved themselves to be birthplaces of ideas and art, he also refers to contemporary psychology and sociology where studies have carefully examined the processes of creativity and innovation. By applying the criteria and standards of contemporary studies to ages past, I suspect Weiner may be making cross cultural errors himself, but the tentative conclusions he finds still carry the ring of authenticity. For instance, he suggest that creativity doesn't flourish in an atmosphere of too much plenty or too many choices. With too much wealth, life becomes easy and a person can satisfy needs through buying stuff. Many materials choices, for an artist, make it too easy to make do with what's available, rather than find new ways to achieve a creative goal. He makes a strong argument for restricted space, too. Therefore, cities like Athens, Florence, Edinburgh flourished when they were relatively small and striving to develop.

Social conditions seem to help with the development of creativity. Freedom is important, but democracy is not necessary. Athens achieved its heights under the rule of Pericles, a leader who encouraged art and ideas to flourish. On the other hand, Sparta, a closed society surrounded by walls, was powerful, but not the seat of great creativity. Weiner comments that the Spartans “walled themselves off from the outside world, and nothing kills creativity faster than a wall.” Apparently, the greater a country's openness, the greater its creative achievements. Similarly, in the Vienna of the late 1700's, the Emperor Joseph II ruled, while Mozart and then Beethoven thrived. Later, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jews flocked to Vienna, where they were discriminated against, yet geniuses like Einstein and Freud emerged and flourished, although both were forced to leave, eventually.

Making/seeing connections between elements that seemingly don't go together leads to great creativity. Borrowing ideas across cultures helps to continue to stir the pot of innovation. The Greeks stood at a cross roads where cultures mixed and roiled about, taking the best ideas to incorporate into their philosophy, art, and playwriting. Language shapes creativity as well. The fact that Chinese language is difficult and not based on an alphabet, made developing ideas within their culture more difficult. Conversely, English and German are supple languages. English contains elements of its language from Latin and Germanic roots, and incorporated Asian as well as Amer-Indian vocabulary into its flexible language. German allows its speakers to create appropriate words from others within the speech process. Plato pointed out that “What is honored in a country get cultivated there.” Hence, Greece became the seat for the development of government and philosophy.

Under the Medici family in the 16th century, Florence flourished as a center of art and culture. Florence thrived as a trading city, and Weiner attributes the growth of its power to the development of international currency. During the brief flowering of Florence's great power, a period of around fifty years, art and architecture was encouraged and developed. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others made incomparable contributions to art. Leonardo is used as an example of a great genius who often failed to achieve his goals. Failure and risk are hallmarks of great creativity. Today, in Silcon Valley, which is seen as the center of a great flowering of technological world-changing innovation, many more efforts to develop game-changing ideas into electronic devices and programs for them fail than succeed, but the environment is strongly conducive to a fluid, open society where failure is the result of wide ranging, big thinking but leads to the great next steps that drive it on.

Eric Weiner

Eric Weiner comments, “I’m an author, speaker and former correspondent for NPR, but I prefer to think of myself as a philosophical traveler. My interest—my obsession, really—is the intersection of places and ideas. It is at this intersection, I believe, where the most fascinating aspects of life unfold, be it our search for happiness, spiritual fulfillment or creative expression.” He is the author of Man Seeks God and The Geography of Bliss, both books incorporating his obsession with travel and ideas. He has reported from over 30 countries. Weiner writes a travel column for BBC and his essays and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, The New Republic, and many other publications. . While with NPR, he has also served as a correspondent in New York, Miami, and Washington, DC. In his free time he enjoys cycling, playing tennis, and eating sushi. Weiner is married and together he and his wife have one daughter. The family resides in Washington, DC

The Geography of Genius by Eric Weiner (Simon & Schuster, 2016, 368 Pages, $26.95/12.99) combines witty, insightful travel writing with the exploration of how locations and time periods lead to great leaps forward in creativity and innovation. By walking extensively through cities which became great cultural and creative centers while spending time with local historians who happen to be interesting characters, too, he seeks to recreate in his own imagination the culture leading to such creativity. He then incorporates smoothly, and with good humor, contemporary studies of the conditions which help creativity to grow and flourish in both individuals and societies. The mix stimulates as it teaches, like the good walks he recommends as stimulative of good thinking. This very readable, amusing, and informative book builds ideas about creativity as it entertains. I read The Geography of Genius as an electronic galley supplied by the publisher through Edelweiss on my Kindle app. 

The Millionaire and the Bard by Andrea Mays - Book Review

Andrea Mays' The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obssessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio (Simon & Schuster, 2015, 368 pages, $27.00/12.99) takes what could be a plodding and pedestrian account of an American millionaire industrialist's quest to purchase and hoard every available period piece relating to Shakespeare, with special emphasis on assembling First Folios, turns out to be a stunning page turner. Henry Clay Folger emerges as a gentle, ethical, thoughtful friend, husband, colleague and mentor while amassing the largest privately held Shakespeare collection in the world. Born in 1857 to a middle class family with limited resources, Folger inspired enough friendship and confidence from wealthy friends that they advanced him money to attend Amherst College and later urged John D. Rockefeller to hire him soon after he completed law school at Columbia. By the time Folger died in 1932, he had amassed the largest private collection of Shakespeariana in the world and was well on his way to completing construction of the Folger Shakespeare Library on some of the most coveted real estate in Washington, D.C. The book reads like a fast-paced adventure novel in the real world of competitive collecting and the growth of mammoth American corporations during America's Golden Age.

Folger, as both a business man and a collector, was noted for his discretion, his intelligence, persistence, and thoroughness. He rose through the Standard Oil ranks, becoming an intimate friend of John D. Rockefeller, who trusted him implicitly, relying on his careful analysis and thorough knowledge of the petroleum industry at every level for data-based information and decision-making. During the period of Standard Oil's breakup after the successful muck-raking campaign of Ida Tarbell, Folger was a key person in advising and working with Rockefeller to divide the corporation into, at least seemingly, independent corporations. He rose to become president and later chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York. During most of his career, he and his wife Emily lived in rented housing, using their resources to amass their huge collection of Shakespeare related books, manuscripts, letters, paintings, sculpture, and other artifacts of the Shakespearean age. He bought his first First Folio, the definitive possession for Shakespeare collectors. By the time he died, Folger had accumulated eight-two of Shakespeare's First Folios, of which about 800 were initially printed in 1623, while only 233 known copies exist today.

Mays' account begins with a brief view of Shakespeare's life and career. Since not a single scrap of paper exists in Shakespeare's own hand and there's almost no contemporaneous writing about the man himself, he remains largely a mystery. All we know of Shakespeare is what we find in the church register in his home of Stratford On Avon and his will. As a man of the theater, in his day seen as a less than legitimate calling, Shakespeare was little known beyond his plays. She then goes into some detail regarding the work that fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell did to compile the texts garnered from working scripts, actors' memories, and prompt books into full texts for each of thirty-six plays. None of the original working scripts for presenting the plays is known to survive. She also describes in detail the printing and binding process used by printers William and Isaac Jaggard. The publishing history of authorized and pirated early editions is dealt with at an engaging level of detail. Rarely during this book does Andrea Mays get lost in the weeds of detail, with the possible exception of the acquisitions of several lesser First Folios by Folger.

The First Folio

The main focus of the book lies where it should, with Folger himself, along with his wife Emily, who emerges as his partner in every phase of his collecting efforts. Folger was a complex, nuanced man who functioned well under pressure. He maintained a calm, and calming, demeanor throughout his business career. As a collector of Shakespeariana, however, he was given to acquisitive passions which were often at war with his miserly instincts, hoarding, and obsessive desire to maintain his privacy. These warring instincts led to his thoroughness and to the quality of his collection. Somehow, along the way, he managed to become a fine golfer, too.

Andrea Mays

Andrea E. Mays has degrees in economics from the State University of New York at Binghamton and from UCLA, and teaches economics at California State University at Long Beach. Like Henry Folger, she is a native New Yorker and has had a lifelong Shakespeare obsession. She spent much of her Manhattan girlhood in the New York Public Library listening to vinyl LP recordings of performances by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. (Publisher Profile)

Andrea Mays' The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger's Obssessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio (Simon & Shuster, 2015, 368 pages, $27.00/12.99) provides a detailed yet thoroughly readable account of Henry Folger's manic obsession to collect the world of Shakespeare in all its glorious variety and, finally, to present it to the nation and the world in a format that would preserve for all time the Bard's greatness and supply lifetimes of scholars with grist for further study in a suitably dignified, even worshipful, institution the bears his name. The book has an extensive bibliography and many suggestions for further reading at various levels of depth depending upon the reader. The Millionaire and the Bard is not a Shakespearean specialist's book, nor is it quite a biography. Rather, it's an intriguing and detailed account of an able and ultimately admirable, though somewhat flawed, man who managed his obsession in such a way as to provide a great gift to the world. The book was provided to me as an electronic galley by the publisher through Edelweiss. I read it on my Kindle app.

The End of College by Kevin Carey - Book Review

In The End of College: Creating theFuture of Learning and the University of Everywhere (Riverhead Books, 2015, 288 pages, $27.95/11.99), Kevin Carey presents a view of the modern American hybrid university as dysfunctional and ineffective on the basis of learning, cost, and inappropriateness for the contemporary high tech world in which learning and learners are widely dispersed while educational opportunity is closely held, elitist, and unfocused. His argument is persuasive and his examples of a cheap, learning-based, highly computerized, and virtually free emerging alternative is both inspiring and more than a little unsettling. While the examples of new alternatives for learning and research are clear and real, he is considerably less effective at presenting alternatives for many of the goals of college life, including development of relationship skills, learning to live in a more diverse interpersonal world, and the essentially social nature of youth. His narrative also falls short in supporting his claim of a virtually free education, because the enterprise he describes is hugely expensive, yet he doesn't explain effectively a structure for providing financial support for the development of courses and learning experiences. Nevertheless, this is an important book presenting a seemingly utopian view of a future where opportunity is based on what people have learned and how they perform rather than how well they have taken tests and what they can afford.

Carey makes a strong case for the obsolescence of the contemporary multi-layered university, which he characterizes as the “hybrid university.” He presents a solid history of teaching and learning, going back to the days of Socrates sitting in the Forum of Athens throwing questions at his small group of students. He spends a good deal of time on how, as the dark ages were coming to an end, learning communities developed in Bologna, Paris, and in England, first at Oxford and later at Cambridge, where students came together in groups (called colleges) which organized together to form universities. In America, the first college was founded at Harvard in 1636, largely as a place to train ministers, who spread the gospel and essential learning first throughout the colonies and then across the nation. Harvard was, and remains, the model for the elite American college. However, as America emerged as a nation and spread across its vast continent, three conflicting goals emerged: education for liberal arts, education for vocational ends, and research brought together in what Carey describes as the hybrid university.

Because the hybrid university distributes its rewards based on the research it produces, the goal of teaching undergraduates has become less and less important, although they are necessary for the money they bring in, and to stand as the base of a pyramid with august scholars, teaching few, if any, courses, at the top. This structure is complicated by the difficulty, impossibility, of finding accurate ways to measure learning, set standards, agree to core learning experiences, or define an educated person. The system becomes based on the accumulation of (usually) 120 credit hours distributed among three hour, fifteen week courses and lasting, ideally, four years. Awarding of degrees is, thus, based on time spent rather than material learned. The brand name of the institution becomes increasingly important for being hired in high paying positions, allowing Harvard, Yale, Stanford and their like to emerge as the schools of choice for primarily those who can afford it and gain admission. Thus admission becomes increasingly expensive and families become willing to assume crushing levels of debt. While American colleges and universities have been democratized by the development of land grant colleges specializing in agriculture and technology and community colleges providing low level arts and vocational experiences for high school graduates, the system is top heavy, expensive, and not clearly learning oriented.

But Carey's book is not merely an indictment. He presents what he calls the University of Everywhere and gives clear and clearly superior examples of how it is emerging as the computer becomes increasingly interactive, cheap, ubiquitous and competitive. The centers of this progress are located in some of the hybrid universities Carey has been writing about: Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford. Particularly at these institutions, scholars and technical wizards have recognized the capacity of the computer to respond at the keystroke level to how and what students are learning in order to pace additional instruction at precisely the right speed to assure learning and retention, while developing ways to recognize accomplishment and demonstrate such acquisition to potential employers. In other words, they have revolutionized instruction, evaluation, and certification. This revolution has been developed largely in the soup of start-up corporations surrounding Palo Alto, California (Silicon Valley) and Boston, where vast amounts of venture capital have been made available for people developing ideas about how to tap the broad world of those seeking to improve their lives through eduction, numbering in the billions.

The solutions are based upon the development of MOOCs. Mass Open Online Courses, which can and are made available at little or no cost to students seeking the skills and knowledge made available. Carey writes about the precursor instructional tools (computer assisted education, so-called distance learning, online lectures, and more), presenting them as early primitive efforts in what is an increasingly sophisticated, interactive, and evolving technology. The courses are apparently more widely distributed in math, science, and foreign languages because they are easier to sequence and measure, but also encompass almost the entire universe of introductory and some highly advanced areas of study. As prestige schools begin to offer them, they are, surprisingly, enrolling hundreds of thousands of students from around the world, some from remote areas like Mongolia, where a young student made such an impression he has been awarded a scholarship at MIT. This information is all presented through interesting and lively interviews with and profiles of the innovators, both scholars and entrepreneurs who are making it all not only possible to achieve, but happen now.

While Carey is quite persuasive in presenting the flaws in the hybrid university, and coruscating in his indictment of the importance of big-time sports, college as a sort of late adolescent summer camp teaching sexual and alcoholic mores, he's less thoughtful about how future academic communities will develop and how the humanities will be taught and learned. It remains true that there doesn't seem to be a practical substitute for placing bright students in a seminar setting with thoughtful, attentive, and skillful teacher exploring great ideas. However, this interaction rarely occurs anywhere but in the most pricey and elitist institutions and at the very top of the higher education pyramid. Meanwhile, the ends of training for mass employment in a rapidly changing job environment can be met for motivated students best through online MOOCs. Such students are available among the masses, ambitious people around the developing world, although they appear to be increasingly rare in the United States. Carey is also vague, at best, about how all this will be paid for, except to emphasize that economies of scale make the per unit cost of online education inexpensive. The words advertising and sales are not found in this book.

Kevin Carey

Kevin Carey directs the Education Policy Program at New America, a non-profit policy institute addressing the next generation of issues facing the United States. He is widely published in pre-kindergarten through higher education issues. He has worked in policy and budget areas for the state of Indiana. A graduate of SUNY-Binghampton and Ohio State, he lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, D.C.

The End of College: Creating theFuture of Learning and the University of Everywhere by Kevin Carey (Riverhead Books, 2015, 288 pages, $27.95/11.99) is an important, engaging, and thought provoking book about the changes in higher education to be brought about by the world wide pervasiveness of computers and the economies of scale created by them. His narrative style relies on anecdotal accounts of the involvement of universities, scholars, and entrepreneurs in developing and popularizing this new approach to learning. The book is aimed at the thoughtful general reader, parents exploring with their children the choices they need to make in this new world, and their offspring, who are discovering this alternative on their own. He examines the inertia, even resistance, sure to be encountered from the colleges and universities as they confront re-purposing their missions, plants, and processes. Carey generally ignores the nature of adolescent development as it applies to higher education; his grasp of the technical seems clearer than of the human, but the human impact is also more muddy. While this book has some flaws, I still recommend it highly. I received TheEnd of College from the publisher through Edelweiss as an electronic galley which I read 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. 

The B Side by Ben Yagoda - Book Review

Ben Yagoda's The B Side: The Deathof Tin Pan Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song (Riverhead/Penguin, 2015, 304 pages, $27.95/11.99) provides an invaluable overview, crammed with names and details, describing the the development, degeneration, and rebirth of the song in American popular music. Written by a scholar who is also an avid fan, the book explores the ups and downs of the popular song in American music reflecting changes in taste, copyright law, technology, and the broader society from the early twentieth century through a variety of musical eras to the turn into the twenty-first century. For a reader like me, whose musical influences reach back into a couple of decades before I was born in 1941 through the death of big bands, the rise and fall of major Broadway and Hollywood movie musicals, the emergence of a stronger sense of genre and separation, and the rise of the current crop of singer/songwriters, this book serves to enrich and preserve a song tradition for me and helps to keep it all in perspective. For a younger person, it can help listeners better understand the influences that have shaped their music which has become increasingly democratized and divisive as society changes. In either case, this book provides a wonderful overview as it also serves to introduce and elucidate the importance of many performers whose work might otherwise fall from consciousness. This is an important addition to the literature of music and should be a part of any popular music lover's library.

An important element of The B Side is Yagoda's emphasis on how technology and politics have affected the content, shape, and nature of the American song. He covers the technological changes from the popular late nineteenth century piano rolls through 10” and 12” inch 78 RPM records, the invention of long playing records, the freedom provided by portable radios and cassette tapes, the development of radio and television, and more. I was surprised to discover that the “mechanical” royalties I hear talk about from musicians are actually a reference to the 1909 copyright law which provided for royalties for song writers and refer specifically to a mechanical device, the player piano roll. Another shaping factor was the fact that the length of contemporary songs (three to four minutes) was mandated by the playing time of the twelve inch 78 RPM record, while the LP made it possible to construct longer and more complex compositions. Yagoda does not bring his narrative forward to the day of the You Tube or audio streaming and the possibilities they present, only hinting at the opportunities the new technology offers. Meanwhile, the battles between professional rights organizations ASCAP (founded in 1914 by composer Victor Herbert) and BMI (founded in 1939) to organize, protect, and, ironically, sort into classes, the interests of composers and musicians both restricted and opened the world to new kinds of musical expression. BMI became the professional rights organization of country music and “race” music when the music of rural and black Americans had difficulty getting air play and gaining traction in a world dominated by the Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley composers ASCAP represented. The politics and law of music have helped shape it as much as the technology has.

The portraits of songwriters and song pluggers whose world was the area of the lower west side of Manhattan known as Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building, located in Broadway's theater district,  are interesting and thought provoking. In the early twentieth century a group of largely Jewish songwriters had small studios in Tin Pan Alley where they worked churning out songs which they then sought to sell to publishers of sheet music who employed song pluggers to go out and sell the sheet music and, later, recordings to music outlets, first stores and then radio. The Brill Building became the center of song writing and publishing for the great and not-so-great writers of Broadway musicals as they changed from thinly plotted opportunities to present the songs to the complex musical plays that emerged in the late thirties and then into the height of the Broadway musical in the fifties and sixties. A counterbalancing industry developed in Hollywood from the first sound pictures through the great movie musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as well as Judy Garland in everything from The Wizard of Oz through a series of easily forgotten films with Mickey Rooney of the “lets make a musical” genre, to the wonderful 1954 film A Star in Born. It's all here.

Another feature of The B Side is the profiles of singers and songwriters through this period. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet and others are well represented, but I also met (and listened to) the works of a 50's and 60's singer named Blossom Dearie, her real name, who could really interpret a song standard. It's in the story of the development of standards, the songs which dominated my era of listening, by people like Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennet and Billy Holliday a whose work brought a particular excellence to the works of Gershwin, Berlin, Cole Porter to Burt Bacharach and Carolyn Leigh and so many others, that this book shines. It also emphasizes the importance of the “songbook” influencing the performances of later writers and performers like the Beatles, who took the standards and built a music with other roots in blues, folk and African American music to create rock and roll and succeeding formats.

Ben Yagoda

Ben Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of twelve books, including About Town:The New Yorker and the World ItMade; How to Not Write Bad; Memoir: A History; and Will Rogers: A Biography. He contributes to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Lingua Franca” blog and has written for Slate,The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and The American Scholar, among other publications. Yagoda lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, with his wife.

Ben Yagoda's The B Side: The Death of Tin Pan Alley and theRebirth of the Great American Song (Riverhead/Penguin, 2015, 304 pages, $27.95/11.99) underscores how each succeeding generation takes the music to different places as a reaction to earlier formats and sounds, and how music consumers emphasize the degredation of popular culture as the shifting musical sands beneath their feet cause discomfort and imbalance. It's only when distance can provide a perspective that we see and understand these contributions as being additive. Thus popular music eventually consumes and normalizes each new revolutionary addition as the rough edges are filed down and smoothed over, making the resulting music more widely palatable and less daring. The role of bebop subsumed into contemporary jazz and then later popular song is instructive as will be the contributions of hip hop, grunge, and modern country to later emerging songs. Yagoda's work emphasizes the amount of mediocre and trivial music necessary to generate the kind of quality that eventually becomes standards, and thus part of what will continue to grow as The Great American Songbook. I highly recommend this book as an entertaining and informative overview of popular music in the twentieth century. Reading this book while listening to the music through a streaming service like Spotify will enhance and enrich the experience. It would be a wonderful addition if Yagoda, or one of his graduate students, would construct an online playlist to supplement the reading. I received the book as an electronic galley from the publisher through Edelweiss and read it on my Kindle app.

Big Tent–Small Tent Reconsidered (the Beginning of a Musical Autobiography, Part I) - Essay

This Essay is a lightly edited version of my monthly column which appeared on the California Bluegrass Association's Welcome Page on Tuesday. I'm grateful for the discipline imposed by CBA on me, almost forcing me to step aside from day-to-day concerns in order to explore issues of greater scope. This time of year is particularly appropriate for looking inward at how a person gets to a place. I hope you enjoy this one, and I look forward to reading and responding to you what you have to say.

For about a dozen or so years my wife Irene and I have spent a goodly portion of our lives listening almost exclusively to bluegrass music, that grand amalgam of old English folk music, gospel, jazz, western swing, and, yes, pop that emerged from Bill Monroe's restless search for a way to express the music within him and make a living some other way than in the factories of northern Indiana. My first exposure to bluegrass came in the mid-sixties when a friend gave my mother a reel-to-reel tape of Flatt & Scruggs, I think it may have been the Carnegie Hall concert. I listened to it some, but didn't much like it, although between that recording and the album of a 10” 78 RPM recording from my childhood of the Almanac Singers (Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger) called Sea Chanties sparked lifelong interest in the banjo. But these weren't the only musical influences in my early life.

Our house was filled with music. There was album after album of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan. These now nearly forgotten pieces of late nineteenth century comic musical plays featured operatic singing supporting wonderful melodies and always interesting plots. We also had a book of the plays themselves, allowing me to listen to a song, then read the dialogue. I can still sing a few of these songs. My Dad loved Broadway shows, so soon after the invention of the LP record, albums like South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun, Guys & Dolls, Kiss Me Kate and many more were available, and I avidly devoured them. Finally, the great bass Paul Robeson's 1940 recording of Ballad for Americans captured my imagination so much I wore it out. At the height of the Red Scare in the late fifties, I scoured the record shops around Greenwich Village in New York City seeking a used copy of this wonderful patriotic piece. It was then I learned that Robeson was a communist whose works record shops wouldn't carry. When I went back to my Aunt Dot's home on 15th street, she said, “Oh, we have a copy of that. Why don't you take it?” I was thrilled. At around the same time, Dot's husband Frank Mollenhauer, a fine artist, took me to his studio, where I heard him play his White Lady banjo and his 1940's era Martin dreadnought for first time. Uncle Frank had grown up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. We went to the Yankee v. Cleveland Indians double header in 1955 which the Indians swept on their way to winning the pennant and breaking a five year Yankee run of World Series victories. During the same period, my mother took me to see Arturo Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic. Toscanini conducted without a baton, and she talked a lot about his beautiful hands. Meanwhile, my Dad took me to the Metropolitan Opera to see Rigoletto. During this period, while my parents' marriage was dissolving, I was studying violin, which I not-so-cordially hated. I wish there had been electronic tuners then! It was a pretty big tent.

For me, as for so many people for whom music has been important (that's most of us, isn't it?), high school and college were crucial elements in setting my musical tastes as they coincided with puberty and sexual awareness, where much of our musical consciousness resides for the rest of our lives. Read Daniel Levitin's excellent book This is Your Brain on Music, the best explanation I know of why we love the music we love. I graduated from high school in 1959. Westtown School was a Quaker boarding school in suburban Philadelphia. A bunch of us spent endless hours in the dormitory listening to music - Dave Brubeck's jazz, Chris Connor, a magical, sexy blonde jazz stylist, Ella Fitzgerald's songbook series of Gershwin, Porter, Rogers & Hart and others, The Kingston Trio, The Limelighters, and on and on. Somewhere during this time I picked up my first guitar, and took a few lessons from a graduate student in Philadelphia who later became the chair of the Folk Music department at the University of Texas. There was a group of guys at school who regularly traveled to Sunset Park in West Grove, PA to listen to country and bluegrass music, I wasn't one of them, and the music escaped my attention then. So, for the most part, did Elvis and the Beatles. I think this was because I was fat, awkward, and didn't think I could dance very well, so I stayed away from dance music, although during this period I did see the Louis Armstrong All-Stars at Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown, PA now re-opened after being closed for many years. I also saw live concerts by Pete Seeger, Josh White, the Chad Mitchell Trio, The Stan Kenton Orchestra, and Ray Charles, along with 15,000 mostly black fans in the Palestra at the University of Pennsylvania. During this time I met Irene at a football game and we began our journey together. While she majored in Physical Education in college, she had been an active member of the band in high school, sang barbershop quartet, played the flute and other woodwinds, and (still maddeningly accurate) sang close harmonies to anything we heard on the radio. Her listening background was in her father's beloved Big Band music and her mother's preferred country music.

What has sparked this first effort at exploring my own musical roots? A couple of weeks ago I began reading a new biography of Billy Joel. I also realized that I was at home in New Hampshire with unlimited bandwidth. I re-activated my Spotify membership. Since Spotify streams almost every recording a listener could imagine, I embarked on an orgy of listening to Joel. As I read about his life I was introduced to some of his early music I was unfamiliar with, allowing his intense driving musical hunger to again reach into my consciousness. It was wonderful way to experience his music, even with the ads, and I think I wrote a pretty good review of the book. Next on my book list was a new thriller by Tim Hallinan. At the end of each of Hallinan's wonderful books he attaches a list of the music he listened to while writing. I jotted down Tim's list (he has become a Facebook friend of mine) and started listening to it. He introduced me to a bunch of new Indie musicians I'd never heard of, but some of whom I found I really liked. At the same time, our son Alex, a guitarist and lover of, particularly, the works of Bob Dylan, but also widely literate in rock music mentioned some of his favorites I should try, too. The easy availability of Spotify and some new influences have begun leading me down some new paths. While writing this piece, I revisited many of the artists mentioned, each raising wonderful memories. Next month I'll pick this up after Irene's and my wedding in 1964, and continue down the musical journey, which has given our life such richness during not only the last decade or so, but for the past fifty years.

The Anatomy Lesson by Nina Siegal - Book Review

The Anatomy Lesson by Nina Siegal (Nan Talese, March 2014, 290 Pages, $26.95) is an historical novel written mostly in the first person that seeks to set the personalities, social setting, and historical contexts in the mouths and minds of the people who painted, lived, and died in the remarkable painting The Anatomy Lesson, the first masterpiece in the storied career of Rembrandt van Rijn. Set in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, it successfully adopts the voices and social settings of the characters portrayed in the novel. Rembrandt's assemblage of portraits portraying the Amsterdam physician and political figure Dr. Nicholas Tulp conducting a dissection of a criminal executed that day, January 16, 1632. Beyond the historical vision Siegal presents lies the age old inquiry, still actively present in the 17^th century, regarding the seat of the soul. Tulp hoped, as did Descartes, who was present, that through the dissection of the recently deceased Aris Kindt (alias of Adriaan Adriaanszoon) further information about where in the human body the soul lay would be revealed. In writing this book, Siegal breathes extra life into the painting, making its contemplation still richer and more confusing.

The novel opens in the voice of Aris Kindt (The Body) as he leaves the bed of his lover Flora (The Heart) to return to his habitual thieving and then transitions to Dr. Tulp and his wife (The Hands) preparing a high toned and tin eared speech he will give the next day to the assembled physicians and notables at the annual dissection. Next we see the setting through the eyes of his loving wife, hoping to aid him while not really knowing how. Jan Fetchet (The Mouth) is something of a hustler while also serving as a go-between for various characters, an expediter. Descartes (The Mind) reflects on the history of ideas as he corresponds with friends about the importance of the upcoming dissection. Rembrandt (The eyes) is, not surprisingly, the most fully rendered, seeing everything in terms of shape and color as his concept of the painting matures and develops. Meanwhile, three hundred odd years later, the Conservator works at analyzing the picture as she gives it one of its few cleanings through time. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this intriguing novel is Siegal's keen ear for each character's voice and her ability to maintain it consistently.

The Anatomy Lesson by Rembrandt van Rijn

 

Each of the individual people appearing in Rembrandt's painting had paid for his appearance, and all have already sat for the Master. However, as he anticipates the dissection, which he insists on attending, his conception of the portrait expands, moving from a group portrait to a dynamic portrayal of the corpse and Dr. Tulp in the act of dissection. Each of the characters is affected by the day, its inevitable outcome, the setting of the lecture within the annual winter festival of Amsterdam, the ambitions, the tragedies, the filth, and the glamor all in vivid contrasts. The dissection represents a garish social event within a more serious examination of aesthetics and spiritual discovery. The novel succeeds on all fronts, except, perhaps, the post death wanderings of Kindt's soul.

Nina Siegal

 

Nina Siegal is an author, editor, and journalist. She graduated with a BA in English Literature from Cornell University and received her MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Siegal's journalistic writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including The International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, W. Magazine, Art in America,1stDibs, ArtNews, and Bloomberg News. She has been contributing articles to The New York Times since 1997 and currently writes about art frequently for The International New York Times. In 2008, she was the launching editor for Time Out Amsterdam magazine, which she ran as editor-in-chief until 2012, and thereafter she became managing editor of Flow Magazine International, which launched in 2012. She was born in New York, has lived in San Francisco, Iowa City, Brooklyn, and, now, Amsterdam.

In The Anatomy Lesson (Nan Talese, March 2014, 290 Pages, $26.95), Nina Siegal, has taken a great painting and built a riveting story around it, illuminating the people, the times, and the place through the eyes of the participants, many of whom are the historical figures actually involved. The acknowledgments and glossary show how fully researched The Anatomy Lesson is. The book provides a believable setting for the development of Rembrandt's remarkable work in a narrative form both engrossing and believable. You can't ask much more from an historical novel. I read the book as an electronic galley provided through the publisher by Edelweiss. I read it on my Kindle.