A Leap in the Dark by John Ferling

The revolution by the American colonies against their mother country and the subsequent founding of the first modern republic is a story highly ingrained into the American psyche. It a tale told repeatedly throughout our education and publicly celebrated on the fourth day of July each year. The standard version follows a Whiggish path of predestined progress toward independence and liberty: the oppressed colonists quickly unite in their opposition to taxation without representation, ally with French comrades to inflict defeat upon the British Army, and then harness an unparalleled burst of political genius that results in the sacred document that united us as a nation, the Constitution.

Trouble is, of course, things were a wee bit more complicated. The country was often deeply divided, from failed efforts to coordinate colonial defenses before the French and Indian War all the way to the hotly contested election of 1800. There are any number of excellent books that have illuminated elements along this time line (such as Edmund & Helen Morgan's The Stamp Act Crisis or Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick's The Age of Federalism), but John Ferling has done something special with A Leap in the Dark, published in 2003. In a single volume he has provided a cohesive account of the American political tumult in the half-century from Benjamin Franklin's first efforts at colonial cooperation in Albany to Thomas Jefferson's inauguration as president:

Each step was uncertain and chancy. The success of the American Revolution was far from inevitable. Years were required to forge an effective opposition to British imperial policies, and that was followed by a protracted war to bring about separation from the empire. Militarily, of course, an American victory was not assured. That has been well remembered by subsequent generations. However, the labyrinthian political struggles that accompanied the war and persisted in its aftermath have been long forgotten, save by a few scholars.

I could spend hours discussing all the insights and intrigues raised in Ferling's book, but I'll limit myself to one (in addition to what I discussed last week), concerning the considerable role that American elites played in the revolutionary struggle. We take for granted the intellectual and political talent of our Founding Fathers. It is actually somewhat counter-intuitive that these hugely successful men of the day, from Washington to Franklin to Adams and so on, would be so willing to turn upside down a world that had treated them so well. This was no mere peasant's rebellion; it was led by men who had achieved great success under the existing system. What explains their involvement? Ferling has some ideas:

Upwardly mobile young men in the colonies had always known that they faced limitations on their ability to rise simply because they were colonists. American politicians would never sit in Parliament or hold a ministerial post. A colonist might be an Indian agent who conducted diplomacy in a borderland wigwam, but he would never be a diplomat posted in the fashionable courts of Europe. Similarly, every aspiring colonist knew that the doors were shut to him in the highest places in the British judiciary, church, and armed forces. John Adams was on the money when he remarked that the most an enterprising young man in Massachusetts could hope for was to someday own an expensive carriage, be a colonel in the militia, and sit in the upper house of the provincial assembly.

Consider one such personage's view of colonial life from the heights at Mount Vernon:

Rich and powerful as he was, Washington could exert no authority over many things that truly mattered to him. Too many crucial issues were decided in London, where the interests of the mother country outweighed those of provincials. On substantive matters, the colonists too often were treated as dependents who were meant to serve the parent state, not compete with it. Colonel Washington, who had clawed his way to the top of Virginia's society through enormous sacrifice and risk, bridled at the thought of being considered second-rate by anyone. It had galled him during the late war that, although a colonel in a colonial army, he had been outranked by every officer who held a royal commission, even the most callow and lowly redcoat lieutenant.

This certainly clouds the simple picture some paint of an egalitarian "Spirit of the Revolution" trumped by conservative reactionaries in the Constitution of 1787. Make no mistake, there was an unparalleled outpouring of patriotic, republican verve during the war against Britain. And Ferling provides ample evidence of forces at work in the 1780s to reign it what some had come to see as "democratic excesses." But he also establishes that the powerful colonial elites had many interests of their own aligned with independence in 1776, and this should be remembered when considering how it came to be that America's native aristocracy led the revolution.

Though A Leap in the Dark reads with the ease of popular history, Ferling has demonstrated his academic chops. At several points in the book he raises an issue of scholarly disagreement (such as whether colonial radicals intentionally provoked the Boston Massacre), explains the competing views, and offers a well-grounded opinion of his own. I appreciate a historian who renders his reasoned judgment but acknowledges conflicting sentiment. The endnotes he provides are stellar, running 44 pages and including abundant primary citations as well as secondary sources for further reading.

The only complaint I can muster about the book is that in order to cover 50 years in 500 pages, some important episodes get less attention. This is particularly true of the Revolution itself, as Ferling never veers far off the political scene into the military details of the conflict. Thank goodness he devoted his most recent title, 2007's Almost a Miracle, entirely to the war.

Three Men in Colonial Pennsylvania

One of the themes John Ferling establishes in A Leap in the Dark, his history of America's political evolution from 1754-1801, is that during this period there was a constantly recurring cycle of friction between the more radical elements willing to push into uncharted waters and those supporting the status quo:

The title of this book was taken from a line in a newspaper essay written in 1776 by a Pennsylvanian who opposed American independence. To separate from the mother country, he cautioned, was to make "a leap in the dark," to jump into an uncertain future. Time and again in the course of the half century spanned by this book, political activists confronted the reality that their actions would catapult them onto amorphous terrain. In every instance, there were those who were ready to take the chance. Always, too, there were those who resisted approaching the abyss that would be ushered in by breaking with the past.

Especially interesting is that amidst this series of "leaps in the dark" that Ferling describes, it was often the very same people who stood at the revolutionary vanguard at one such moment, only to lead the conservation reaction at the next (or vice versa). Three men closely connected to each other in colonial Pennsylvania politics provide a nice illustration: Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, and Joseph Galloway.

After retiring as an enormously successful businessman, Franklin had turned his attention to politics. In particular, he became a strong opponent of the proprietors who ran the Pennsylvania colony, and he wanted the English crown to convert Pennsylvania into a crown charter and rule it directly. He was joined in this movement, dubbed the Assembly Party, by Galloway, who rose to become Speaker of the Pennsylvania House from 1766-1774. As a result, they sought royal favor even amidst growing rumblings of colonial discontent after the passage of the Townshend Acts:

Continuing to adhere to the quest for royalization, the Assembly Party immediately took essentially the same stance it had taken two years before: Pennsylvanians should shoulder a portion of the empire's economic burden, Parliament's taxes would be slight, and if they proved to be onerous, London would happily accede to the province's "dutiful remonstrance" to reduce the level of taxation. Once again, too, Galloway and his party sought to block Philadelphia's participation in a trade embargo.

Dickinson had been leading the opposition to royalization as head of the Proprietary Party, and he was also amongst the first to rail against Parliament's efforts to tax the colonies. As early as the winter of 1768, he was publishing newspaper articles articulating the radical argument that Parliament lacked the constitutional power to impose any tax whatsoever upon the colonies. In the wake of the Townshend Acts, Dickinson and his party "won acclaim as the fervent defenders of American Rights" and "the Assembly Party suffered heavy losses in its urban working-class base."

Flash forward a few years. Unlike Galloway, Franklin had seen the writing on the wall in time and signaled his support for the embargo before he could be forever tarnished as a Loyalist. From his perch in London, he attempted to reach compromises on behalf of the colonies, but eventually he perceived that the growing breach between the colonies and the mother country was irreparable and he returned home. Meanwhile, Galloway attended the First Continental Congress and proposed a Plan of Union involving an American Parliament that would share a mutual veto with its British counterpart; the plan was only narrowly defeated by a vote of six colonies to five, the high water mark for Loyalists in the Congress.

A last-second addition to Pennsylvania's delegation at the Second Continental Congress, Franklin was among the earliest convinced that war and independence were inevitable. Dickinson, the early agitator, was now leading the conciliatory wing of the Congress; he was convinced that the colonies' dispute was with Parliament, not the British Crown. It was he who wrote the last-ditch Olive Branch Petition, appealing to King George to intervene and mediate the dispute. He opposed the Declaration of Independence, which passed unanimously only because Dickinson and another conciliatory Pennsylvania delegate absented themselves the day of the vote. He never signed it.

Franklin, of course, served as one of America's leading lights at home and abroad. Dickinson continued to pursue conflicted positions: serving as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention for a country whose independence he had opposed; defending the Jay Treaty in 1796, but denouncing Federalist belligerence toward France in 1798. Galloway retired from politics when the war began, only to volunteer to serve as British police commissioner of occupied Philadelphia and then flee to London in 1778. He would die there in exile, informed by Pennsylvania that he would stand trial for crimes during the occupation if he returned.

Another Year, Another Reading Goal

Since I embarked on my Great Books Project six years ago, my life has been enhanced in immeasurable ways by a renewed devotion to reading. Well, not entirely immeasurable, since I have kept track of every book I have read since 2003 (439 so far).

Last year's goal of reading 100 books was a great success, and the quantifiable nature of the endeavor made it easier to motivate myself and to track progress. However, it resulted in a notable preference for reading slimmer books. In an attempt to correct that for this year, I am setting a different sort of goal:

I will read 30,000 pages in 2009.

Sounds daunting, no? But figuring the average length of the 105 books I read in 2008 was ~300 pages, this should require no more time or dedication than last year's goal. I'm likely to be in Kuwait for about five months in 2009, so I should have at least as much time to fill with reading as I did in 2008. It works out to be about 100 pages per day, 6 days per week. And as success is measured in pages, rather than books, there should be no inherent bias toward either longer or shorter volumes. I'll still track the number of books read here, but also plan to take monthly accounting of pages read.

Here's to a wonderful year of reading! Happy New Year!

The Year in Books - 2008

While one day is pretty much indistinguishable from any other out here in the desert, my calendar tells me it is December 31. With another year over, it's time to take a look at how I did with my Great Books Project. This year I set a goal of reading at least 100 books, and I am excited to be able to say I met that goal with room to spare:

1. Eventide - Kent Haruf
2. Passionate Sage - Joseph Ellis
3. The Assassins' Gate - George Packer
4. Benjamin Franklin - Edmund Morgan
5. The Survivor - John Harris
6. Atonement - Ian McEwan
7. The Tie That Binds - Kent Haruf
8. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
9. The Immortal Bartfuss - Aharon Appelfeld
10. Cobra II - Michael Gordon
11. Fiasco - Thomas Ricks
12. In the Company of Soldiers - Rick Atkinson
13. State of Denial - Bob Woodward
14. Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse
15. The Sweet Hereafter - Russell Banks
16. Out Stealing Horses - Per Petterson
17. His Illegal Self - Peter Carey
18. Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
19. Ray in Reverse - Daniel Wallace
20. Badenheim 1939 - Aharon Appelfeld
21. Black Swan Green - David Mitchell
22. The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
23. In the Wake - Per Petterson
24. Lincoln - Richard Carwardine
25. Supreme Conflict - Jan Crawford Greenburg
26. The Lake - Yasunari Kawabata
27. Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
28. A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
29. Isaac Newton - James Gleick
30. The Assault on Reason - Al Gore
31. The Nine - Jeffrey Toobin
32. House of the Sleeping Beauties - Yasunari Kawabata
33. The Ice Storm - Rick Moody
34. Harry, Revised - Mark Sarvas
35. Justice For All - Jim Newton
36. Becoming Justice Blackmun - Linda Greenhouse
37. Drown - Junot Diaz
38. The Child in Time - Ian McEwan
39. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
40. The New Face of War - Bruce Berkowitz
41. Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri
42. Ancient Greece - Thomas Martin
43. Obsessive Genius - Barbara Goldsmith
44. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
45. A Separate Peace - John Knowles
46. The Bill of Rights - Akhil Amar
47. Go Tell It on the Mountain - James Baldwin
48. Polio - David Oshinsky
49. March - Geraldine Brooks
50. The Chosen - Chaim Potok
51. Billy Budd - Herman Melville
52. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
53. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
54. Dracula - Bram Stoker
55. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
56. Tartuffe and Other Plays - Moliere
57. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
58. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin - Gordon Wood
59. Companero - Jorge Castaneda
60. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
61. Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea
62. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
63. The Sea - John Banville
64. A History of Modern Japan - Andrew Gordon
65. Russia - Philip Longworth
66. The Cold War - John Lewis Gaddis
67. Peace Like a River - Leif Enger
68. Promised Land, Crusader State - Walter McDougall
69. Polk - Walter Borneman
70. Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
71. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
72. Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris
73. 1948 - Benny Morris
74. Crescent & Star - Stephen Kinzer
75. The American Plague - Molly Crosby
76. The Demon Under the Microscope - Thomas Hager
77. Crossing to Safety - Wallace Stegner
78. First Snow on Fuji - Yasunari Kawabata
79. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle - David Wroblewski
80. The Winds of Change - Eugene Linden
81. The World According to Garp - John Irving
82. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
83. The Story of Britain - Rebecca Fraser
84. The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
85. Reason - Robert Reich
86. Bad Money - Kevin Phillips
87. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown - Charles Morris
88. The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama
89. What's the Matter With Kansas? - Thomas Frank
90. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
91. De Niro's Game - Rawi Hage
92. The Conscience of a Liberal - Paul Krugman
93. To Siberia - Per Petterson
94. Supercapitalism - Robert Reich
95. A Mercy - Toni Morrison
96. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow
97. The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
98. Einstein - Walter Isaacson
99. The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
100. The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
101. 1812 - Walter Borneman
102. When We Were Orphans - Kazuo Ishiguro
103. Charming Billy - Alice McDermott
104. Last Orders - Graham Swift
105. A Leap in the Dark - John Ferling

There was a slight lean toward fiction, with 59 books versus 46 nonfiction. Partially due to the quantitative nature of my reading goal, there was also a lean toward shorter books, with just over half running 300 pages or less. I'll be correcting for that in 2009.

Not every book was worthy of my time. The biggest fiction disappointments were Yasunari Kawabata's The Lake, which is one of his lesser known works for a reason, and Daniel Wallace's Ray in Reverse, which didn't hold a candle to his previous book, Big Fish. I also found two works of nonfiction noteworthy in their awfulness. Rick Atkinson's In the Company of Soldiers was basically a travelogue of hobnobbing with generals in Iraq; it is almost impossible to believe he is also the author of the widely-acclaimed An Army at Dawn and The Face of Battle. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was a presumptuous and condescending attempt to assuage what apparently passes for a conscience in her world.

But most of what I read was pretty good. On the fiction side, my favorite book read this year was Gilead, Marilynne Robinson's remarkable meditation on faith and family. Other strong recommendations include Ian McEwan's Atonement, James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety.

Amongst the nonfiction books I read in 2008, the President-elect's The Audacity of Hope topped the list. I read it just a few days before the election, and it accomplished the impossible task of making me even more proud to cast my vote for him. Of the several books I read on Iraq early in the year, George Packer's The Assassins' Gate was unquestionably the best. I also highly recommend Paul Krugman's The Conscious of a Liberal, and John Ferling's political history of the American Revolution and the early Republic, A Leap in the Dark, which I finished this very morning and will be posting about over the next several days.

All in all, a great year in reading. Tomorrow I'll set some new goals.

Last Orders by Graham Swift

I made no conscious plan to read consecutively a pair of books set amongst mourners in the aftermath of a man's death; they were just the next two books in the pile next to my desk. Yet Alice McDermott's Charming Billy (reviewed here) and Graham Swift's Last Orders both fit that niche. McDermott begins her novel with the whispered conversations at the post-funeral party; Last Orders opens with four men embarking on a road trip to carry out Jack Dodds' last request, that his ashes be scattered off a pier into the ocean:

He said he thought he should old Jack proud, he thought he should give him a real treat. Since it had been sitting there in the showroom for nearly a month anyway, with a 'client' who couldn't make up his mind, and a bit more on the clock wouldn't signify and it don't do to let a car sit. He thought he should give Jack the best.

But it's not so bad for us too, for Vic and Lenny and me, sitting up, alive and breathing. The world looks pretty good when you're perched on cream leather and looking out at it through tinted electric windows, even the Old Kent Road looks good.

Swift avoids one of McDermott's missteps by giving individual voices to the multitude of characters, rather than filtering the story through a single narrator. The structure of Last Orders bears an obvious resemblance to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, what with the quickly shifting interior monologues amidst a journey to carry a deceased loved one to an inconvenient chosen resting place. Like Faulkner, Swift emphasizes the colloquialisms in his characters' speech, to which it takes a few pages to adjust. Swift simplifies the Faulknerian structure by giving one character a disproportionate share of the pages. Ray Johnson, nicknamed Lucky, can trace his friendship with Jack all the way back to the North African desert during World War II. It is through his eyes that we make most of the progress toward the beach:

We head on past the gas works, Ilderton Road, under the railway bridge. Prince of Windsor. The sun comes out from behind the tower blocks, bright in our faces, and Vince pull out a pair of chunk sun-glasses from under the dashboard. Lenny starts singing, slyly, through his teeth, "Blue bayooo..." And we all feel it, what with the sunshine and the beer inside us and the journey ahead: like it's something Jack has done for us, so as to make us feel special, so as to give us a treat. Like we're off on a jaunt, a spree, and the world looks good, it looks like it's there just for us.

The interior monologues are put to good use; as one reviewer said, "they contain what cannot or will not be said aloud... characters speak in confidence." The dramatic irony builds as we pool our knowledge of the conversations, transactions, emotions that the characters are shielding from one another. The four men in the car argue about why Jack's widow, Amy, has chosen to visit her institutionalized daughter instead of accompanying them; we hear not only each man's interior, unguarded answer to the question, but Amy's as well:

But I still think this is where I should be. My own journey to make. Their journey and mine. The living come first, even the living who were as good as dead to him, so it'd be all one now, all the same, in his book. And I've already said goodbye to him for the last time, if not the first. Goodbye Jack, Jack old love. They can say that June won't ever be the wiser if I missed this day with her for the sake of one last day with him, there have been missed days before, about a dozen of them once, long ago, and you don't ever get a second chance to scatter your husband's ashes. But how do they know she wouldn't know? And someone has to tell her.

If she won't be the wiser, he won't either.

The birth of their severely mentally handicapped daughter drove a permanent wedge between Jack and Amy. He refused to ever visit her, while Amy visited twice a week for decades. Still unfulfilled in the desire to be parents, they adopted Vince after he was orphaned by a German bomb during World War II. There was considerable tension between Jack and Vince, who rejected them as his parents and refused to follow Jack in the family business, as Jack had followed his father. Swift devotes a considerable portion of the book to their tumultuous history. This contrasts strongly with Vic, whose sons are already well-established in the family's mortuary business. The foursome is rounded out by Lenny, a man filled with great pain and anger; he is a "stirrer," in Ray's words, offering constant provocation to the other characters, and Vince in particular (with good reason):

Lenny says, "So how's your Kath?"

Vince don't answer for a long time. It's as though he hasn't heard or he's concentrating on the road. I see him looking in the mirror.

"Still working for you at the garage?" Lenny says.

Lenny knows she isn't, and Lenny knows Vince doesn't like "garage." It's "showroom" these days. It was Lenny who said one night in the Coach, "Showroom he calls it, well we all know what's on show."

One of the problems I noted with Charming Billy was how distant one feels from the novel's namesake; Billy is the dead man, but in the end we know little about him, despite the story's focus on his life's events. Last Orders shares that flaw; Jack Dodds is nearly as much a mystery by novel's end as at the beginning; Swift does not follow Faulkner by granting the ashes their own voice. It is less an issue here, however, as so much of the story is actually ancillary to Jack's own life; we are hearing the stories of Ray and Vic and Lenny and Amy, and Jack just happens to be the man who connected them in life, and in death.

Swift won the 1996 Booker Prize for Last Orders, and its not a bad effort. However, it seems this may have been the consolatory result of regrets for not giving Swift the award for his widely-acknowledged masterpiece, Waterland. This is not a unique occurrence; remember that Paul Newman won Best Actor not for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Hustler or Hud or Cool Hand Luke, but for, wait for it... The Color of Money, a minor speck on the canvas of his career. Even the Booker committee did it again, giving Ian McEwan the prize in 2001 for his desultory Amsterdam after snubbing the marvelous Atonement. With that precedent, Waterland should be an extraordinary read.

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

Winner of 1998's National Book Award, Alice McDemott's Charming Billy starts at the end of its story: the friends and family of Billy Lynch gather for a party in a Bronx bar after departing the cemetery where he was just buried. Before food is even served, the debates begin about the merits and missteps of Billy's life, a life damaged and ended by alcoholism:

Not missing the irony of the drinks in their hands and the drink that had killed him, but redeeming, perhaps, the pleasure of a drink or two, on a sad, wet, afternoon, in the company of old friends, from the miserable thing that a drink had become in his life. Redeeming the affection they had felt for him, once torn apart by his willfulness, his indifference, making something worthwhile of it, something valuable that had been well spent, after all.

Redemption will be a theme throughout the novel, and its discursive weaving through the extended Lynch family history; it is an open question how much of the redemption is real, and how much hollow. Our narrator is the daughter of Dennis Lynch, Billy's cousin and best friend. Though a seemingly strange choice (and a not entirely successful one, as I'll discuss below), it reflects the reality that Billy had no children of his own, and that the story is as much about Dennis as Billy. In addition to being best friends, their lives were particularly intertwined at one pivotal moment. In 1945, just back from the war, they spend the summer fixing up a small Hampton cottage belonging to Dennis' new stepfather. While there, they meet and court a pair of Irish girls; lovely Eva casts a strong spell on Billy:

When did he fall in love with her? Probably it was the day before, before she had even come clearly into his view. But that afternoon he fell in love with the rest of his life, and that was better still. The days ahead when he would come to the beach here and the child he held, the children who ran to them, wet and trembling, would be theirs and when the flesh of her arms and her throat and her sweet breasts would be as familiar to him as his own.

At the end of the summer, Eva must return to Ireland. Billy promises to pay to bring her back and marry her, and takes a second job to save the money. Months later, after the cash is sent and no word is heard back, it falls to Dennis to deliver the tragic news to Billy: young Eva has died of pneumonia. The loss forever traumatizes Billy, despite his many friends and subsequent marriage to Maeve. It is this event that occupies much of the conversation at the funeral party, where his family debates the causes of his alcoholism and the depth (or lack thereof) of his love for Maeve. There's just one catch, which Dennis reveals to his daughter at the close of the first chapter:

In our car, crossing the bridge, he would listen with a smile when I told him about the debate that had gone on at our end of the table.

"Well, here's the saddest part," he would say, finally, wearily, as if he were speaking of an old annoyance that time had nearly trivialized, but not quite: "Here's the most pathetic part of all. Eva never died. It was a lie. Just between the two of us, Eva lived.''

Indeed, Eva had jilted Billy to marry her Irish boyfriend, and used the money he sent as the down payment on a gas station. Afraid of how the news will effect Billy, and unable to give him the news, Dennis delivers a lie that changes both their lives. As Billy descends further into alcoholism, it will be Dennis who feels obliged to help Maeve manage him, taking his midnight phone call rants, dragging him up from the gutter or stairwell into his bed.

As the book progresses, the story also travels backward into the Lynch family history: the narrator's grandfather, a boisterous street conductor much loved by his passengers; her grandmother and the German second husband whose beach cottage would prove such a meaningful locale; the courtship between Maeve and Billy, presided over by Maeve's alcoholic father; even the 1975 trip to Ireland in which Billy learns he has spent thirty years in false mourning.

McDermott does not rely on suspense to keep the novel moving forward; she has revealed all the drama up front. Instead she has simply offered up the quirks (and skeletons) that embroider an Irish extended family in 20th-century New York, and the way a single lie, a single mistaken belief, can seem to have such dramatic effects, and yet perhaps none at all:

As if... what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all.

The novel is marred by a few notable missteps: first, the narrator is simply ill-suited for her task. She is both chronologically and physically distant from the family history she presents (she is the only of Dennis' children to have moved away), and it is unexplained how she is able to give so much detail about events about which she can have no better than third or fourth-hand information. The best I can muster is that she is recounting oft-retold family myths, but this raises serious questions about the veracity of her account. There is also a silly conceit that she is directing the story to her own husband (periodically lapsing into the second-person), who she met at the same Hampton beach where Billy and Eva's stillborn relationship began. This is a too cute by half attempt to redeem the emotional hole left at the core of the story by that failed romance.

Most unsatisfying is that even by the end, we know so very little about Billy himself. This may be intentional. The man is, after all, dead. But so are many of the book's characters, yet we get a better sense of Dennis' three parents (father, mother, stepfather) than we ever get of him. He was no doubt a mystery in many ways to his friends and families, but I felt cheated at being offered so much detail about ancillary figures in the Lynch family history, and so little about the novel's namesake.

Merry Christmas From Kuwait!

When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is famous for offering masterful prose via supremely unreliable narrators. Each of his three novels I have read, The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and now When We Were Orphans, offers the perspective of a person highly delusional about the world around them, or their place in it. In The Remains of the Day, it was a butler who could not acknowledge his emotional needs or his employer's misdeeds. In Never Let Me Go, the narrator barely grasped the nature of her own existence. In When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro gives us Christopher Banks, a renowned English detective whose life is haunted by one abiding mystery, the disappearance of both his parents during his childhood in Shanghai, a fact he is in denial about from the book's first pages:

[I]t had become a matter of some irritation to me that my schoolfriends, for all their readiness to fall into banter concerning virtually any other of one's misfortunes, would observe a great solemnness at the first mention of my parents' absence. Actually, odd as it may sounds, my lack of parents - indeed, of any close kin in England except my aunt in Shropshire - had by then long ceased to be of any great inconvenience to me. As I would often point out to my companions, at a boarding school like ours, we had all learned to get on without parents, and my position was not as unique as all that.

Banks recites the gradual introduction he made into London society; after graduating Cambridge, he is slowly introduced to the London scene by old classmates. In so doing, he makes the acquaintance of Sarah Hemmings, an eccentric woman who he connects with as a fellow orphan, and whose path he would cross again. As he recounts his growing success and accompanying public reputation, Banks provides a series of glimpses into his childhood, especially the tension between his mother and father and his friendship with Akira, the Japanese boy next door. Even in these early chapters, we sense that Banks is presenting a rather selective version of his past, either by intention or by an incapacity to make sensible connections with the external world:

[W]hat I had taken exception to was his casual judgment that I had been 'such an odd bird at school.'

In fact, it has always been a puzzle to me that Osbourne should have said such a thing of me that morning, since my own memory is that I blended perfectly into English school life.

This disconnect becomes more obvious as the book progresses (when Banks encounters another classmate, he vehemently denies the assertion that he was a "miserable loner"). Though Banks repeatedly expresses his desire to return to Shanghai and solve "the big case," he fails to do so until 1937, decades after his parents disappeared. Before making the journey, he has convinced himself that not only can he solve the case, but that somehow his return to Shanghai might enable him to prevent the coming war, that the source of his parents' disappearance is also the root of all evil. He further deludes himself into believing that this idea originates not from him, but from a series of encounters in which others have suggested it is his duty to save the world from itself:

"What I mean to say, forgive me, is that it's quite natural for some of these gentlemen here tonight to regard Europe as the centre of the present maelstrom. But you, Mr. Banks. Of course, you know the truth. You know that the real heart of our present crisis lies further afield."

I looked at him carefully, then said: "I'm sorry, sir. But I'm not quite sure what you're getting at."

"Oh come, come." He was smiling knowingly. "You of all people."

Once Banks arrives in Shanghai, things get downright strange. He makes what appears to be a series of forward steps toward unlocking the mystery, but becomes entangled with Sarah Hemmings, caught in an unhappy marriage to an older man. Just as she convinces him to depart Shanghai without any concrete answers, he makes an apparent breakthrough in the case. He begins a surreal journey outside the International Settlement and into the frontline between the Chinese army and Japanese invaders, convinced he is about to find the house here he will find his kidnapped parents, alive and waiting.

The book largely begins to unravel at this point. The novel is consumed by a sense of unreality that favorable reviewers call "Kafkaesque." A better description would be "inexplicable." Just when Banks' quest seems at an end, the absurdity of it all is made so obvious that even he can no longer deny it. When all the answers are revealed, there is no sense of relief, accomplishment, or wonderment. A great mystery leaves clues along the way; here all of the clues were essentially misdirection, and the reveal is utterly disconnected from anything offered in the preceding narrative. The great variety of characters, from Banks' parents to Sarah Hemmings to the orphan girl that Banks abruptly adopts (and just as abruptly abandons to return to Shanghai), are all mere sketches. Wondrous sketches, drawn with Ishiguro's
trademark verve, but utterly hollow nonetheless.

Ishiguro's skill at word craft is undeniable, but he continues to struggle to find a narrative frame as successful as the one deployed in The Remains of the Day, which is still his unmatched triumph. Better to read that novel twice than to bother with this lesser work.

1812 by Walter Borneman

The War of 1812 is little remembered and even less understood. Those that have any inkling at all are probably able to identify no more than that the war involved the burning of our capital by the British, the inspiration for "The Star Spangled Banner," and Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans after the peace treaty had been signed.

There is good reason for our common ignorance: the terms of the treaty that ended the war explicitly returned the belligerents to status quo ante bellum. The casualties of battle were relatively low, particularly compared to the epic scale seen in the contemporary Napoleonic theater. Much of the action took place in the frontiers of Canada or in single ship duels at sea; the exceptions (New Orleans, Washington, D.C.) are those best remembered. And the issues that had Americans (literally) up in arms are as forgotten as the war:

[T]he United States had quite a list of grievances against its former sovereign: impressment of American sailors, provocation of Indian unrest on its frontiers, and the outright seizure of its commercial ships. Taken individually, each might have been enough to demand a course of war. Taken collectively, and fanned by Henry Clay and his Canada-hungry war hawks, to some Americans they most certainly were--no matter how militarily unprepared the United States might be.

Borneman had done a service to popular American history by targeting our lesser-studied wars. Several years after publishing 1812, he would follow up with The French and Indian War; I have now read them both. Each represents popular history at its best and worst; the value resides in providing a gateway for those, deterred by academic history, who want to gain some familiarity with the past in an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand format. Borneman's conversational style offers few obstacles to readers more accustomed to the latest best-selling mystery or thriller, and he distills the basic historical consensus about the war into just a hair over 300 pages. He covers the who, what, when and where of each battle, with particular success regarding the naval engagements. Even for those of us looking for more, it's not a bad way to get one's feet wet on an unfamiliar subject (I followed Borneman's The French and Indian War with William Fowler's superior Empires at War, saving Fred Anderson's magisterial Crucible of War for last).

To accomplish this task, however, Borneman sacrifices the context and detail that a deeper study would provide. He had done no original research, cites few primary sources, and has no fresh insights to offer on any of the war's causes, events, or consequences. There is virtually no discussion of the domestic political scene in either America or Britain, beyond a simplistic division between New Englanders and "the Virginia dynasty." There are a few asides about American relations with France and Russia, but little mention of the history of our international or diplomatic relations after the Revolution. The events of the Napoleonic Wars are only described in the most minimal detail necessary to explain why Britain was alternately more or less distracted from prosecuting the war in America. The importance of the impressment issue is identified, but its history little explained. Borneman makes numerous references to the shores of Tripoli in describing the experience of America's naval officers, but offers not even the slightest explanation of what happened there. And on and on, leaving little more than a narrative recitation of facts.

The subtitle of the book is "The War That Forged a Nation," a nod to the apparent requirement in modern popular history that the subject of any book must have utterly changed the world in some vital way (whether it be a war or a fish). Borneman fails to support this contention with much evidence. If anything, the war revealed a plethora of parochially-minded state and local officials; militias often refused to cross borders to take part in military actions and rumors swirled that New Englanders were debating neutrality, nullification, and even secession. Borneman seems to recognize the thinness of the subtitle's claim; thus it is only in the last page or two that he even addresses it. When he does so, it is with no more than his own bare assertions, and a few quotes from those whose self-interest was served by trumpeting the war's importance. It is hard to forget that within two generations, citizens of the supposedly "forged nation" would be slaughtering each other on the battlefield.

The inescapable fact is this was a boring war with limited consequences. Since Borneman was unable or unwilling to expand the scope of his history beyond the war's narrow confines, it is little surprise he ended up writing a rather dull book. Having read and admired his latest book, Polk, I know he can do better.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

At the beginning of his unlikely bestseller, Michael Pollan makes the case that Americans have lost touch with what was once the most basic decision humans faced: what should I eat? Though a seemingly simple question, Pollan recognizes Americans find the choice more perplexing than ever. He traces his own epiphany about "our national eating disorder" to the rise of the low-carb diets that somehow managed to banish bread, a staple food around the globe for thousands of years, from our national table:

So violent a change in a culture's eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation's "dietary goals"--or, for that matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the "food pyramid." A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely would not be nearly so fat.

In tackling this question, The Omnivore's Dilemma traces three different food chains: "the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer." The first third of the book is by far the best, and the most disturbing. Pollan introduces us to corporate farming, and to the reality that in America, that means corn:

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.

In subsequent chapters, Pollan explores in depth the science of corn, the economics of the corn industry, the politics of corn, and the historical interaction of these elements that has led to the plant's triumph. Suffice it to say that this section of the book is so infuriating and so provocative that my colleagues are getting pretty tired of sharing meals with a guy who keeps pointing to everything at the table and shouting "That's corn, too!"

In the middle third, Pollan looks at alternative methods of farming. His account of his stay at Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms (dedicated to "management-intensive grazing") is fascinating, but his look at organic farming (and the co-opting of that term) was neither as compelling nor as consequential as the exploration of king corn. The final third, in which Pollan relates his efforts to hunt boar and gather wild mushrooms, develops an intimate tone some may favor, but it struck me as a fanciful conceit that said more about Pollan and his eccentric California friends than it did about the virtues or vices of the American diet.

The chapter I was most interested in, that devoted to the ethics of eating meat, was the chapter that most disappointed me. Pollan deserves credit for tackling the issue, and he starts well enough, with a respectful outline of the arguments put forth by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation. Unfortunately, Pollan cannot mask an antipathy for vegetarianism, or at least the people who practice it (as a vegetarian I am "nothing if not self-respecting" and will "burden you with my obligatory compromises and ethical distinctions"). And Pollan has a tendency to sidestep the issue with reductionist anecdotes:

I looked into the black eye of the chicken and, thankfully, saw nothing, not a flicker of fear. Holding his head in my right hand, I drew the knife down the left side of the chicken's neck.

Set aside the presumptive personification that fear or suffering must manifest itself in the eyes of an animal, or that we would recognize it if we saw it; how is this persuasive in any way? To invoke the argument from marginal cases, the power of which Pollan readily acknowledges, why should we take any more comfort from the trusting eyes of a chicken or cow about to be slaughtered than we would the trusting eyes of an infant child, or the mentally ill or handicapped?

To close the chapter, Pollan takes refuge in this nonsense a second time, relating the ever-so-clever (and almost certainly fictional) account offered by Joel Salatin of a man who rides up with a PETA bumper sticker on his car, explains that he decided he could only eat meat again if he killed it himself, slits a chicken's throat, watches it die, and sees "that the animal did not look at him accusingly." One wonders, did Isaac look accusingly at Abraham?

To be fair to Pollan, he does acknowledge the horror of what America does to its animals:

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end--for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

All well and good, but Pollan is still taking the easy way out. He was so swept away by his experience at Polyface Farms, with its more mindful method of slaughter, that he sidesteps the actual choice facing individual Americans. If as a country we were able to decide to revolutionize the way our animals are raised and killed, all farms could be like Polyface. There would be less meat, it would be more expensive, but much of the evil in the process would be eliminated.

That choice is not before us today, however, and likely never will be. Instead, all each of us can do (unless we happen to live very close to Polyface Farms), is choose between eating meat produced as it is now, in all its brutality, or not eating meat at all. For several years, that's been an easy choice for me, and this book only made it easier. As Milan Kundera said in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Man­kind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

How we treat animals is not just a matter of diet, it is a matter of how we comport ourselves in the world. Pollan might have done well to explore that connection.