Empire of Liberty

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Author: Gordon S. Wood 2009 738 pp
My rating: 4*
Started November 13 2009, Finished February 15 2010.

Better than the preceding volume of the Oxford History of the United States, but not quite as edifying or engrossing as those that follow, this volume follows the new nation from “what do we do now?” period of its first constitutional governments to the “we’re a real nation now” solidification that resulted from the war of 1812. One of the most interesting topics covered is the bootstrapping of the government, where despite, or maybe because of, the vague guidance provided by the constitution, the President -- the essential and magisterial Washington whose common sense and commanding presence were often all that kept the loosely cohering assemblage of states from flying apart -- and the Congress, were more or less making it up as they went along. Other major themes include:The emergence of political parties, starting with the Anglophile Federalists and the Jefferson lead Republicans who opposed the strong centralization that the Federalists’ beliefs implied.The singular set of genius included among the Founding Fathers, a very lucky historical fluke, where in particular Washington, Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson each contributed different and critical talents towards setting the foundling nation on its course.Themes that echo down through the ages, including fear of a developing “licentiousness” in the population and the rise of the “middling” man , that person between nobility and peasantry who came to define the essence of being American.The book is not without flaws, including a surprising number of typos e.g. “dociety … of artists” (p 574), and an overly long and repetitious chapter on the arts (15). The book’s organization along thematic rather than chronological lines could be confusing for a reader not firmly grounded in the basics of the era; e.g. one encounters in depth discussions of aspects of various presidencies before rereading about the elections that put those presidents in office.

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French immigrant and author Hector St. John Crevecoeur … in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) … described the American as “this new man,” a product of “that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.” (39)Compared to Great Britain, America had a truncated society; it lacked both the great noble families … and the great masses of poor (44)White Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, and goods of all sorts were widely diffused throughout the society (46)In 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. (48)The secretary of the treasury began in 1789 with thirty-nine members in the central office … By comparison, the other departments were tiny: at the outset the secretary of state had four clerks and a messenger, the secretary of war had only three clerks, and the attorney general had none … A French visitor to the treasury office in 1794 was startled to find the secretary attended by only a single crudely dressed servant, seated at a plain pine table covered with a green cloth, his records laid on makeshift plank shelves in a ‘ministerial office’ whose furnishings could not have cost more than ten dollars … (92)… all the states’ expenditures in the early 1790s totaled only a little more than $1 million a year, the federal government’s expenditures in 1795 were $7.5 million (103)… it became increasingly difficult to find gentlemen willing to sacrifice their private interests in order to hold public office. After Henry Knox retired, President Washington had to go to his four choice for secretary of war … and to replace Randolph as secretary of state he had to go to his seventh choice. (234)Believing that most of the evils afflicting human beings in the past had flowed from the abuses of inflated political establishments, Jefferson and the Republicans in 1800 deliberately set about what they rightly believed was the original aim of the Revolution: to reduce the overweening and dangerous power of government. (287)The Jeffersonian revolution was an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment in governing with the traditional instruments of power. Governments in the early nineteenth century were not supposed to cut taxes, shrink their bureaucracies, pay off their debts, reduce their armed forces , and diminish their coercive power. No government in history had ever voluntarily cut back its authority. (301)For centuries it was assumed that most people would not work unless they had to. “Everybody but an idiot,” declared the enlightened English agricultural writer Arthur Young, … “knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.” (324)… to the astonishment of foreigners, nearly all Americans -- men, women, children, and sometimes even babies -- drank whiskey all day long. (339)[During he first decades of the Republic] Premarital pregnancies dramatically increased, at rates not reached again until the 1960s. (342)… on the eve of the Revolution … Harvard and Yale abandoned the ranking of entering students on the basis of their families’ social position and estate. (342)At the heart of the Revolution lay the assumption that people wer not born to be what they might become. (470)… on the eve of the Revolution … the nine [American] colleges together awarded fewer than two hundred B.A. degrees a year … [472]In 1790 it had taken more than a month for news to travel from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia; by 1794 that had been cut to ten days. [479][As part of the trend of treating criminals more humanely] In Massachusetts in 1785 a counterfeiter was not longer executed. Instead, he was set in the pillory, taken to the gallows, where he stood with a rope around his neck for a time, whipped twenty stripes, had his left arm cut off, and finally was sentenced to three years’ hard labor. [493]In 1804 and 1807 Ohio required blacks entering the state to post a five-hundred-dollar bond guaranteeing their good behavior and to produce court certificates proving they were free. (541)Many of the states outlawed blasphemy, which they defines as attempts to defame Christianity, and they sought to retain some general religious qualifications for public office. Five states -- New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina and Georgia -- required officeholders to be Protestant. Maryland and Delaware said Christians. Pennsylvania and South Carolina officials had to believe in one God and in heaven and hell; Delaware required a belief in the Trinity. (583)In 1795 the United States agreed to a humiliating treaty with Algiers that cost a million dollars in tributes and ransoms -- an amount equal to 16 percent of federal revenue for the year. (636)Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was only one of many Republicans who in the early months of 1812 voted against all attempts to arm and prepare the navy, who opposed all efforts to beef up the War Department, who rejected all tax increases, and yet who in June 1812 voted for the war. After much hand-wringing over the problem of paying for the war, the Congress finally agreed to some tax increases … Taxes would only cover a portion of the cost of the war; the rest would have to be borrowed. Of course, in 1811, even as war seemed increasingly likely, the Republicans had killed the Bank of the United States, which some knew was the best instrument for borrowing money and financing a war. This failure to re-charter the BUS proved to be disastrous for the war effort. (672-3)By 1816 [clergyman William Bentley’s] dreams of newspapers becoming agents of education for the public had dissipated. The press, he now realized, has become simply a source of “public entertainment,” filled with inconsequential and parochial pieces of information. (732)[Post presidency Jefferson] loathed the new democratic world that America had become -- a world of speculation, banks, paper money and evangelical Christianity; (736)

Chronic City

Chronic City
Author: Jonathan Lethem 2009 467 pp
My rating: 4*
Started November 3 2009, Finished November 9 2009.

At first, Chronic City came across as something of an update of Bonfire of the Vanities, a study of the lifestyle of Manhattan’s well to do populated by characters with not quite believable names. Then it began to seem vaguely Pynchonesque as characters with utterly absurd names try to go about there business in the midst of a far ranging conspiracy. Finally there were plentiful overtones of Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale and its depiction of a perpetually snowbound city that seems a lot like New York.

While Chronic engrossed and amused -- Lethem’s refractions on our current reality are often quite funny and even insightful -- the book fell a little short of greatness due to its basic plotlessness and characters who are just a little too surreal to engage readers as meaningful reflections of themselves. By comparison, the probable highpoint of Lethem’s oeuvre (so far, as he seems to have even better work ahead of him) 2003’s The Fortress of Solitude, which strongly grounds its characters in a relatable emotional and physical reality, thus instilling novelistic credibility to the magic they partake of.



Names of some of the major characters: Perkus Tooth, Oona Lazlo, Chase Insteadman, Mayor Jules Arnheim, Georgina Hawkmanaji, Richard Abneg

I live in capital’s capital, but I root against the Dow. I feel and instinctive lizard-thrill on those days when it collapses. (65)

I’m truly a vacuum filled by the folks I’m with, and vapidly neutral in their absence. (121)

His self-regard was like a grand pipe organ visible in the air between us, which he played with shameless gusto. (191)

Russ Grinspoon of Grinspoon and Hale. “’The Night Takes Back What You Said’ the act’s early Dylanesque hit and one tolerable song.” (264) [Could be read as Art Garfunkle of Simon and Garfunkle … ‘The Sounds of Silence’ … ]

Who needed computers to simulate worlds? Every person was their own simulator. (267)

Biller knew how to live off the grid, even in a place like Manhattan which was nothing but grid. (343)

In The Lake Of The Woods

 In The Lake Of The Woods
Author: Tim O’Brien 1994 306 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 29 2009, Finished October 30 2009.

Though I have by no means read all of O’Brien’s oeuvre, my sampling of it leads to the conclusion that this author has a single primary objective: coming to terms with his experience as a combat soldier in Vietnam. This suspenseful tale is no exception, addressing the issue from the POV of the veteran trying to live a “normal” life twenty years down the road. In the feeling of foreboding it generates this book reminded me of Robert Stone’s Outerbridge Reach, another novel which instilled in this reader a sense that nothing good was going to come of a man and all that water.

The book moves at a very brisk pace and scores high marks for readability -- for a serious literary undertaking, it is quite the page turner. It probably would have benefited though from a slower pace resulting from more interior development of the two main characters as I felt O’Brien was somewhat pat in conveying how they carried their repsective emotional and psychological burdens. Vietnam was the 800 pound gorilla in their lives and stretched credibility that they had not seriously addressed it in fifteen plus years of marriage.

The first word of the title had me thinking that “Of”, “At” or “By” would have worked just as well, but O’Brien seems to be disambiguating his otherwise post-modernisticly inconclusive tale with the preposition he choose.

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Love wasn’t enough. Which was the truth. The saddest thing of all. (177)

To know is to be disappointed. To understand is to be betrayed. All the pretty hows and whys, the unseemly motives, the obsesses of character, the sordid little uglinesses of self and history -- these were the gimmicks you kept under wraps to the end. Better to leave your audience wailing in the dark, shaking their fists, some crying How?, others Why? (246)

Swatting flies -- yes. Maybe. But still, it’s odd how the mind erases horror. (301)

My own war does not belong to me. (301)

Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. (304)

A Fiery Peace In A Cold War

 A Fiery Peace In A Cold War
Author: Neil Sheehan 2009 480 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 4 2009, Finished October 20 2009.

The story of the development of the US ICBM fleet, framed by the career of the air force officer who lead the program in its first decade, Bernard Schriever. While this book would be of particular interest to military hardware geeks, I strongly recommend it for those also interested in post-war politics and the back room workings of our government.

I felt the book’s strongest section was the one in which Sheehan describes the onset of the Cold War, depicting that standoff which was the dominant factor in world relations for 40 years, not as an inevitability, but as a result of constant misperception and miscalculation on both sides, resulting from Stalin’s paranoia on the one side and the intellectual arrogance of US leader’s and opinion shapers on the other. The book’s surprising dramatic highlight describes the months of bureaucratic maneuvering required to place a briefing about the nascent ICBM program on President Eisenhower’s schedule; the resulting presentation to the president and consequent fast track granted the program was likely the zenith of Schriever’s career if not his life.

One of the book's strengths is its character sketches of important players in the saga, particularly those of Air Force general Curtis LeMay and Presdient Eisenhower.  LeMay went  from been an open-ears innovator in World War II to a power corrupted nutjob as leader of SAC in the '50s, so over the top in his god-like delusions that was the model for the General Jack Ripper character in Dr Strangelove.  Eisenhower comes across both as tough, reasonable, open-minded and fiscally conservative; the author depicts him as a remarkably effective president by recent standards.

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For every American lost in the Second World War, approximately twenty-seven Soviet servicemen and women died: 11.285 million including the 2.7 million who died in German captivity. (77)

[Re Cold War leaders’ understanding of Soviet motives] The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. (106)

Their overall budget for each fiscal year also had be approved by, in turn, the budget committees of the ARDC and the Air Materiel Command, and then by the Air Staff, the Air Force Budget Advisory Committee, the Air Force Council, the secretary of the Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget. (269)

… Bernard Schriever was without a doubt the handomest general in the United States Air Force.(295)

The Silver Swan

The Silver Swan
Author: Benjamin Black 2008 290 pp
My rating: 3*
Started September 22 2009, Finished September 24 2009.

Benjamin Black is an alias for John Banville, a Booker Prize winning Irish novelist, who has taken to slumming or at least paying the bills by writing detective novels under the name of Black. As one might expect, The Silver Swan consequently has considerable literary merit. Alas, it does not rise above the pack as a compelling who-done-it, failing to generate much suspense or interest in its central mystery. At the very end, however, it does find itself in a memorably indefinite and bleak place.

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Strange, she thought again, this business of people dying. It happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as birth. To not be here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny. (72)

Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. … When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably. (272)

Service Included

Service Included
Author: Phoebe Damrosch 228 pp
My rating: 3*
Started September 20 2009, Finished September 22 2009.

This book, subtitled “Four-Star secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter” is touted as the story of the author’s experiences working at Per Se, one of New York’s most highly regarded fine dining establishments, during its first two years of operation. I found the parts of the book in which Damrosch recounts the insider’s view of such a palace of privilege -- the culinary imagination, attention to detail and vast amount of effort required to be the best -- to be quite revealing; without having eaten there, I have a pretty good idea what a meal at Per Se would be like. However, despite the successfully execution of its stated objective, the book was much less than it could have been since so much of it was devoted to the ostensible filler of the author’s life outside of the restaurant . It feels as though the author and her editor realized they did not have a book length of primary material available so rather than do more research they decided to pad the work by letting us get to know the author; the sections in which the author pointlessly describes a café where she spends many of her off hours seem intended solely to build page count while the various chic-litty sections detailing the author’s love live are intrusive enough to be annoying but not probing enough to be interesting -- I started and finished this book much more interested in the restaurant than the author.
  The shame of it is that Damrosch is fairly engaging writer from whom this reader at least would have been happy to learn much more about the restaurant itself e.g. I would have been quite interested in more detailed descriptions of the many other jobs performed at Per Se and the inside perspective of those who perform them. As one who routinely bemoans the indifferent food preparation and service of the eating establishments I tend to patronize, I was fascinated by the near fanatical preparation (including weeks of training for the entire staff before the opening), solicitousness and attention to detail of the Per Staff. A fair amount of get-a-life entertainment was provided by the entire organization’s preoccupation with identifying the New York Times’ undercover restaurant reviewer and ensuring that his experiences at Per Se (he visited six times while forming his four star review which by itself seemed to ensure Per Se’s success) were even more perfect than those of all other patrons. Ultimately the book left me quite impressed by the level of professionalism and pride demonstrated by the Per Se staff ; I was encouraged to learn that Americans still excel at something.

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“She’s fabulous,” she would tell her guests with a grand gesture toward me, as if recommending a house specialty. The guests looked at me skeptically, waiting for me to be fabulous. (181)

Not liking to discuss my writing with strangers, I had been privately auditioning possible conversation stoppers … “Actually, I’m writing a biography … About a man in Alaska who makes foie gras from penguins.” (207)

Methland

Methland
Author: Nick Redding 246 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started August 18 2009, Finished August 26 2009.

This examination of how illegal methamphetamine drug affects small town society succeeds most when in explores the nuts and bolts of meth usage, addiction, manufacturing and distribution. I found the first section quite compelling, the second, in which the author tries to draw far reaching connections between the rise of big pharma and agribusiness, the spread of meth and the collapse of small town America to be stretching-it-to-book-length filler and the third, where Redding follows up on people introduced in part one and provides an up to date assessment of the effectiveness of anti-meth legislation, well worth reading. The book clearly depicts the devastating addictiveness of this drug and the cataclysmic consequences for those addicted to it, their families and their communities. The book also makes a compelling case that big pharma has contributed mightily to the meth crisis by lobbying strenuously against measures that would have greatly reduced the availability of precursor drugs used to manufacture meth because such restrictions would have modestly inconvenienced the makers of over the counter cold medicines. When more effective legislation is put in place, albeit still watered down as a result of concessions to the drug lobby, and seems to be effective, anti-drug authorities quickly proclaim that the battle against meth has been won and the media declares the crisis over and possibly overblown in the first place; as the mucky-mucks rest on their laurels, the drug cartels figure out how to exploit the loopholes in the law to restore their supply of precursor drugs. As the author writes his final chapter, arrest statistic indicates that whatever progress had been had been lost and that meth is more prevalent than ever.

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… high on crank … Jarvis could easily go for sixteen hours without having to eat, drink, use the bathroom or sleep … he could have sex with his girlfriend for hours on end, drink without getting drunk and be awake for work the next day without ever having slept. (49-50)

Twelve hours is roughly the length of meth’s half-life, and a measure of how long it takes one’s body to completely metabolize the drug, as well as an indicator of how powerful the drug is. (The half-life of crack is only twenty minutes …) (51)

… the reasons to do crank are in fact quite often -- initially, at least -- more numerous and compelling than the reasons not to do it. … the ability to make something in your basement that promised work, success, wealth, thinness and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true. (54)

The lengthy description of the décor in the Mexican restaurant on page 170 was completely irrelevant and struck me as pure filler.

Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant. In my telling, meth has always been less an agent of change and more a symptom of it. (183)

He was working hard -- at staying clean, at raising Buck, at making money. But without meth, Major found it impossible to feel, as he put it, “happy.” … Even when Major did the right thing, he couldn’t quite believe in its rightness, for that thing didn’t satisfy him -- meth did. (230-231)

Meth seizures that year went down, along with purity, signaling the first major DEA triumph over the drug’s spred. Of course, the victory was pyrrhic, once traffickers switched to the pill-form pseudo that drug lobbyists demanded remain unmonitored. (238)