Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

The resurgence of interest in America's revolutionary history over the past several decades has led to some adjustments in our founding fathers' historical reputations. David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams, and the recent HBO mini-series adaptation of it, have greatly increased popular appreciation of our second president. The controversies over Thomas Jefferson's ownership of slaves and his relationship with Sally Hemings continue to draw great attention, with Annette Gordon-Reed taking home a National Book Award just this last year for her biography of the Hemings family.

And then there is Alexander Hamilton, hatred of whom was one of the few things John Adams and Thomas Jefferson could agree on at the close of the 18th-century. Hamilton is recognizable to most Americans as either the victim of Aaron Burr's fatal shot or the face on the $10 bill. But even amongst students of American history, there has been relatively little appreciation for Hamilton's role as a leader of the founding generation. In part this was a consequence of his untimely death, leaving decades thereafter for Adams, Jefferson, and their supporters to consecrate for history the least generous interpretations of Hamilton's actions, ideas, and policies. While Hamilton's nationalist and industrialist views won out in the long term, they were unpopular in the early 19th-century dominated by Jefferson and his successors in the Virginia dynasty. But if history proved Hamilton right, it largely failed to give him credit:

Hamilton was the supreme double threat among the founding fathers, at once thinker and doer, sparkling theoretician and masterful executive... If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America's future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together.

With the 2004 publication of Alexander Hamiltion, Ron Chernow has done his part to set the record straight. A seasoned veteran of financial biography after authoring well-received books about John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and the Warburg family, Chernow makes his first venture into the 18th-century with the one founding father who truly understand the economic promise of America and the role that public finance could play in fulfilling that promise. Hamilton was also the only leading founder who was not an American by birth. Hamilton's political enemies made sure that history remembered Hamilton's origins as an illegitimate child in the West Indies. The truth, of course, is more complicated, and Chernow has done revelatory work in piecing together the childhood that Hamilton was so reticent to speak of:

By the time Rachel met James Hamilton for sure in St. Kitts in the early 1750s, a certain symmetry had shaped their lives. They were both scarred by early setbacks, had suffered a vertiginous descent in social standing, and had grappled with the terrors of downward economic mobility. Each would have been excluded from the more rarefied society of the British West Indies and tempted to choose a mate from the limited population of working whites. Their liaison was the sort of match that could easily produce a son hypersensitive about class and status and painfully conscious that social hierarchies ruled the world.

The man who would one day be villainized as the puppet of aristocracy and money interests was born in the Caribbean backwaters, abandoned and orphaned in his youth, and earned his way to America on the sheer prodigious potential observed by those around him. While a student at King's College (now Columbia), he became involved in the political movement that gave rise to the revolution. Hamilton sought military service and so excelled as a young artillery officer that he caught the attention of America's leading soldier:

According to Hamilton's son, it was at Harlem Heights that Washington first recognized Hamilton's unique organizational gifts, as he watched him supervise the building of an earthwork. It was also at Harlem Heights that Hamilton's company first came under the direct command of Washington, who "entered into conversation with him, invited him to his tent, and received an impression of his military talent," wrote John C. Hamilton. It was yet another striking example of the instantaneous rapport that this young man seemed to develop with even the most seasoned officers.

Invited to join Washington's staff, Hamilton would quickly rise from mere aide or secretary to effectively function as Washington's chief of staff for much of the war. Though the relationship was not always smooth, particular when Hamilton started bristling for a field command, it would last for several decades and see Hamilton serve not just as one of Washington's cabinet members, but the most important. Just as he became the virtual chief of Washington's wartime staff, he would become the virtual prime minister of Washington's administration.

One reason that Hamilton gets so little popular credit for his role in creating our government is that his greatest influence was in areas least understood by Americans. Every schoolchild learns about the Revolutionary War, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; thus George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson get their due. Most high school and college students will have some exposure to a civics curriculum, exploring the three branches of government, the checks and balances, and the like. Very few who do not seek degrees in economics will have much exposure to the origins of our public finance or political economy. And yet this was perhaps Hamilton's most lasting gift to the nation, prodigiously captured in his 1789 Report on Public Credit:

Had Hamilton stuck to dry financial matters, his Report on Public Credit would never have attained such historic renown. Instead, he presented a detailed blueprint of the government's fiscal machinery, wrapped in a broad political and economic vision... Hamilton argued that the security of liberty and property were inseparable and that governments should honor their debt because contracts formed the basis of public and private morality... The proper handling of government debt would permit America to borrow at affordable interest rates and would also act as a tonic to the economy... America was a young country rich in opportunity. It lacked only liquid capital, and government debt could supply that gaping deficiency.

Hamilton was unrivaled as a founding father in his ability to contribute to both the political and economic origins of the American government. Hamilton was also virtually unique amongst that generation's leaders as a staunch abolitionist (in his late years Franklin would join the movement), and Chernow makes an interesting point regarding the second-order effects resulting from the shielding of the slavery question from public debate:

The bipartisan decision to shelve the slavery issue had profound repercussions for Hamilton's economic measures, for it spared the southern economy from criticism. In the 1790s, America's critical energies were trained exclusively on the northern economy and the financial and manufacturing system devised by Hamilton. This became immediately apparent in the heated debate over his funding system, which allowed southern slaveholders to proclaim that northern financiers were the evil ones and that slaveholders were the virtuous populists, upright men of the soil. It was testimony to the political genius of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that they diverted attention from the grisly realities of southern slavery by casting a lurid spotlight on Hamilton's system as the paramount embodiment of evil.

If that sounds like a backhanded complement to Jefferson and Madison, that's because it is. It is hard to come out of Chernow's account with particular esteem for either man. Madison seems somewhat more principled, at least never working through proxies or attacking the very administration he was purportedly serving. Between this account and McCullough's biography of John Adams, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that for some years in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Jefferson behaved very poorly and seemed consumed by delusional, if sincere, conspiratorial ideas regarding Britain, Alexander Hamilton, and their oppression of revolutionary France.

Chernow has done a remarkable job putting Hamilton back into his proper place in the pantheon of American heroes. He does not sidestep Hamilton's many faults, from his disastrous affair that ended in extortion and public scandal, to his wrong-headed pamphlet attacking John Adams just before the 1800 election, to his obsession with reputation and honor that ultimately resulted in his own death. But Chernow does effectively defend his subject from the lazy attacks made by so many in the last two hundred years, that he was "a slavish pawn of the British Crown, a closet monarchist, a Machiavellian intriguer, a would-be Caesar." Instead, by the end of the seven hundred-odd pages, there is no question that Hamilton "was the messenger from a future that we now inhabit," "the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government," and that "we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton's America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world."

The Month in Books - June 2009

At the start of 2009, I set a goal to read 30,000 pages by year's end. I am measuring progress in pages, rather than titles, to avoid last year's bias toward shorter books. Here's what I read in June:

1. The Glorious Cause - Robert Middlekauff (review)
2. Home - Marilynne Robinson (review)
3. Seeing - Jose Saramago (review)
4. The Palace of Dreams - Ismail Kadare (review)
5. Death with Interruptions - Jose Saramago (review)
6. Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres (review)
7. Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow (review)

Pages Read: 2,926
Year-to-Date: 17,244

Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres

It was with some surprise that I learned Louis de Bernières was a native of Britain, born in London and inheriting his family name from a French Huguenot ancestor. Between the name and the exotic locales of his books (only his most recent book features any scenes set in Britain), I had figured him to be at least a continental. As it turns out, de Bernières' international exposure simply started a bit later in life:

After four disastrous months in the British army, he left for a village in Colombia, where he worked as a teacher in the morning and a cowboy in the afternoon. He returned to England, where he was employed as a mechanic, a landscape gardener, and a groundsman at a mental hospital.

de Bernières is the author of seven books, of which the most famous is undoubtedly his 1994 novel, Corelli's Mandolin. Unfortunately, most people are more likely to be familiar with the 2001 film adaptation of the book starring Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz, which was a terrible movie that did absolutely no justice to the text that inspired it. Like was done to Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (albeit in a far superior fashion in that case), the novel was largely reduced to a love story for cinematic purposes. As I said in my review of Ondaatje's novel, I normally will not read a book if I have already seen the movie, unless the movie was so good that I wanted to experience the story more fully.

That was, of course, not the case with Corelli's Mandolin. Instead, strangely enough, I was swayed by the overwhelmingly positive reviews the book has received on Amazon.com. These customer reviews are not always a good measure, particularly when dealing with a book that people were drawn to because it won a recent award or was assigned in a class. But for a fifteen year old literary novel to have nearly 400 reviews, and to achieve such a high overall rating, is rather noteworthy.

And it is a good thing I took note, because this is an extraordinary novel. And one of the things that makes it so extraordinary is the complex layer of narratives comprised of fluctuating perspectives and forms. All of which was done away with in the reductionist screenplay adaptation. The book opens with an almost folk-story vignette of rural life on the Greek island of Cephalonia, as the local doctor (a medical autodidact) examines an earache in a half-deaf neighbor:

Dr Iannis tilted the old man's head and peered into the ear. With his long matchstick he pressed aside the undergrowth of stiff grey hairs embellished with flakes of exfoliated scurf. There was something spherical within. He scraped its surface to remove the hard brown cankerous coating of wax, and beheld a pea. It was undoubtedly a pea; it was light green, its surface was slightly wrinkled, and there could not be any doubt in the matter. 'Have you ever stuck anything down your ear?' he demanded.

The evocative details featured in this distasteful episode are one of de Bernières' hallmarks, and he puts this skill to good use in passages of the book both more and less pleasant than the opening pages. In addition to Dr Iannis, the early chapters feature a monologue from Mussolini, the village strongman (Velisarios) hitting a local fisherman (Mandras) with a cannon he fired while holding in the air, and the first of several chapters written by "L'Omosessuale," Carlo Piero Guercio, a young Italian man who has joined the army for a most unusual reason:

I knew that in the Army there would be those that I could love, albeit never touch. I would find someone to love, and I would be ennobled by this love. I would not desert him in battle, he would make me an inspired hero. I would have someone to impress, someone whose admiration would give me that which I cannot give myself; esteem, and honour I would dare to die for him, and if I died I would know that I was dross which some inscrutable alchemy had transmuted into gold.

Of all the problems with the film, the greatest disservice it does to the book is the diminution of Carlo's character. It is his love stories, first with Francisco, and then with Corelli, that are perhaps the more moving romances of the book, if only because they are undiminished despite being utterly one-sided and unspoken. It is his military service alongside Francisco, in the ill-fated Italian invasion of Greece, that brings the most horrific battle scenes in the book. In the meantime, Dr. Iannis' daughter, Pelagia, has become engaged to Mandras, the young fisherman who was brought to her father's home for care after being wounded by Velisarios' cannon. He too goes off to war, and returns a greatly changed man, eventually becoming a member of a militant Greek Communist faction that is focused more on hoarding weapons to stage a civil insurrection after the war then resisting the fascists during it.

Corelli himself does not appear until more than one hundred pages into the book, when Cephalonia is occupied by Italian troops after their German allies came to their rescue, the Greeks having handily repulsed the Italian invaders. Housed with Dr. Iannis and his daughter, Corelli's budding romance with Pelagia is certainly a wonderful part of the book. But this is also a novel about the effects war has on reluctant combatants, like Mandras and Carlo, reluctant occupiers, like Corelli, and the reluctantly occupied, like the residents of Cephalonia. And the madness of political extremism whatever its form, from the bloodthirsty fascism of the Nazis to the ruthlessness of Mandras and his ELAS comrades. And the toll that time takes on one's hopes and dreams. And so much else.

Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago

José Saramago has made quite a career for himself with fanciful parables involving a sudden irregularity in the normal workings of life. Saramago uses these occurrences as a foil by which to study some facet of cultural or political norms, often seeking to expose the flaws, weaknesses, and hypocrisies of modern society. Blindness involved an epidemic of countrywide sightlessness. Seeing (reviewed here) featured an election in which the vast majority of ballets cast are blank. His most recently translated novel, Death With Interruptions, is premised on the cessation of one of life's two supposed guarantees, and I don't mean taxes:

The following day, no one died. This fact, being absolutely contrary to life's rules, provoked enormous and, in the circumstances, perfectly justifiable anxiety in people's minds, for we have only to consider that in the entire forty volumes of universal history there is no mention, not even one exemplary case, of such a phenomenon ever having occurred, for a whole day to go by, with its generous allowance of twenty-four hours, diurnal and nocturnal, matutinal and vespertine, without one death from an illness, a fatal fall, or a successful suicide, not one, not a single one.

The first half of the book explores the country's reaction to this suspension of mortality. It is not, to be clear, a suspension of aging. And those who were on death's doorstep, the infirm, the comatose, do not recover from their wounds or illnesses; instead they are caught in a sort of stasis, hovering just this side of the afterlife. And as the aging process has not slowed, this would seem to be the eventual fate of all the country's residents. Thus the immediate reaction of joy at the seeming surrender of death is quickly replaced by quite a bit of anxiety. Saramago targets several groups in particular, notably the insurance companies, the undertakers, the hospitals, and especially the organized church, which realizes that "without death there can be no resurrection" and thus little need for a church.

Before long families are taking their near-death relatives across the country's borders, where death is still maintaining her regularly scheduled activities. When these foreign neighbors take umbrage at this practice, the country stations militia along the border to prevent further crossings, giving rise to a underground criminal enterprise engaged in the circumvention of death's interruption. Eventually, after several months, death sends a letter, notifying the country that shortly she will be back in business. On that day, death catches up with the more than 60,000 people whose demise had been postponed. But then another seven days go by without any further mortal departures:

The week-long pause, during which no one died and which, initially, created the illusion that nothing had, in fact, changed, came about simply because of the new rules governing the relationship between death and mortals, namely that everyone would receive prior warning that they still had a week to live until, shall we say, payment was due, a week in which to sort out their affairs, make a will, pay their back taxes and say goodbye to their family and to their closest friends. In theory, this seemed like a good idea, but practice would soon show that it was not.

Indeed, rather than use the remaining time allotted to tie up loose ends, the more common path is one of hedonistic excess, giving Saramago another opportunity to let loose against the failings of modern man. This transition in death's modus operandi also brings a transition into the second half of the book, which features death herself as the protagonist of sorts. She does not capitalize her name, to distinguish herself from the Death. She is, after all, just one of many deaths, with responsibility only over the human citizens in this particular country. And it is one particular citizen who is causing her trouble. The problem has to do with that little purple envelope she sends, the one that notifies each individual of their impending death. For one man, the envelope keeps getting returned to its sender. She tries again, and it returns once more. So death decides to make a personal visit to this man, to observe him surreptitiously in his home. She discovers he is a cellist in an orchestra, becomes somewhat infatuated with him, and decides to take human form and make contact with him:

The man didn't know her, but she knew him, she had spent a whole night in the same room as him, she had heard him play and, whether you like it or not, such things forge bonds, establish a certain rapport, mark the beginnings of a relationship, and to announce to him bluntly, You're going to die, you have a week in which to sell your cello and find another owner for your dog, would be a brutal act unworthy of the pretty woman she has become. No, she had a different plan.

The carrying-out of death's plan, which takes up the remainder of the novel, is certainly the better section of the book. The first half, with its focus on society's reaction to the suspension of death, is dull and small-minded and heavy-handed. Saramago takes a subject as weighty as death and uses it to silly effect, taking aim at such easy targets as morticians and nursing homes. But even the better half of the book is difficult to discern. Lovely as death's seduction of the cellist is, it is not at all clear what Saramago intends by the liaison. As one reviewer said, "Maybe this is just Saramago growing old. Writing novels is hard work. Or maybe even this committed novelist has thrown up his hands at modern life."

The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare

It is surely coincidence that in the past week, amidst the election turmoil in Iran, I have read two books in some part devoted to the perils of oppressive government. Yesterday I discussed José Saramago's Seeing, which explores the reaction of a right-wing government to the massive casting of blank ballots by the country's voters. The underlying presumption of the senior government officials is a distrust of the populace, and a belief that some mischievous conspiracy must be at work.

A similar sense abounds in The Palace of Dreams, a 1981 novel by Albanian author Ismail Kadare. The book was banned by Albanian authorities upon its publication, and in 1990 Kadare sought asylum in France to avoid being used as a tool of the country's communist regime.

The novel depicts the ultimate extension of government intrusion into the private lives of its citizens, via the workings of a mysterious institution: the Tabir Sarrail, the Palace of Dreams. It is here that the empire collects, sorts, and analyzes the dreams of its citizens, the subconscious of the nation, in an attempt to foresee important upcoming events. The story follows Mark-Alem, a young member of the powerful Quprili family, as he begins employment at the Tabir Sarrail. His very entrance into the vast building is imbued with Kafka-esque disorientation:

The corridor on the first floor was long and dark, with dozens of doors opening off it, tall and unnumbered. He counted ten and stopped outside the eleventh. He'd have liked to make sure it really was the office of the person he was looking for before he knocked, but the corridor was empty and there was no one to ask. He drew a deep breath, stretched out his hand, and gave a gentle tap. But no voice could be heard from within. He looked first to his right, then to his left, and knocked again, more loudly this time. Still no answer. He knocked a third time and, still hearing nothing, tried the door. Strangely enough it opened easily. He was terrified, and made as if to close it again. He even put out his hand to clutch back as it creaked open wider still on its hinges. Then he noticed the room was empty. He hesitated. Should he go in?

He does go in, and after a tense meeting with the director-general, Mark-Alem is given a plum initial assignment in Selection. This is where the thousands of dreams that are gathered from the reaches of the empire are sorted into those worthy of being forwarded to Interpretation, and those worthy of the dustbin:

He'd put aside forty or so dreams that he judged to be devoid of interest. Most of them seemed to have their origin in everyday worries, while others looked as if they were hoaxes. But he wasn't quire sure; he'd better read them again. As a matter of fact he'd already read each of them two or three times; but he still didn't trust his own judgment. The head of the section had told him that when in doubt about a dream he should put a big question mark against it and pass it on to the next sorter. But he'd already done this quite often. In fact, he'd rejected hardly any dreams as useless, and if he didn't keep back the present batch his boss might think he was afraid to take risks and unloaded everything on his colleagues. But he was supposed to be a sorter, employed to make choices, not to shift the responsibility off onto others.

Even as Mark-Alem is wracked with doubt about his abilities and his purpose in working at the Tabir Sarrail, he is making steady progress up the ranks, quickly finding himself promoted to Interpretation. Despite his progress, he fails to recognize the significance of a dream that crosses his desk several times and ultimately has tremendous consequences for he and the Quprili family.

This slender book is reminiscent of Orwell, Kafka, and others who explore the oppression of the individual under a totalitarian regime, and the dream-like qualities that suffuse life in those circumstances. There are several passages, particularly when Mark-Alem finds himself in the hallways of the Tabir Surrail, that are almost unbearably claustrophobic. This is frightening, powerful novel.

June Classical CD Purchases

After the bevy of classical music purchases I made in April, I had planned to wait until my return from Kuwait this fall to buy any more. But the week before last I saw that Amazon was running a sale on some Living Stereo series discs, and I had to snag a few.

I mean, how could I resist? Beethoven, Chopin, Dvorak, et al played by Rubinstein, Heifetz, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra led by Fritz Reiner? At less than $8 per disc, these were bargains, and the Living Stereo series now compromises a hefty chunk of my collection. I rounded out this month's haul with a used copy of the inexplicably out-of-print collection of four major violin concertos as performed by the incomparable Arthur Grumiaux.

Seeing by Jose Saramago

In his 1995 novel, Blindness, José Saramago depicts a mysterious epidemic of sightlessness in a large, unidentified city, and the unraveling of society and government that follows. Much of the action follows the wife of an ophthalmologist who is solely exempted from the affliction, and the struggles of her and the small band of folks she is able to protect from the chaos that ensues. In 2004, Saramago published a sequel of sorts to his acclaimed novel. Set in the same city, Seeing opens four years after the epidemic, which remains a forbidden topic of discussion. The story begins with a parliamentary election, in which a morning of terrible weather threatens turnout:

However long the presiding officer and his colleagues took to scrutinize documents, a queue never formed, there were, at most, at any one time, three or four people waiting, and three or four people, try as they might, can never make a queue worthy of the name. I was quite right, commented the representative of the p.i.t.m. [part of the middle], the abstention rate will be enormous, massive, there'll be no possible agreement on the result after this, the only solution will be to hold the elections again...

The representative was correct, but not for the reason he stated. As so often happens in Saramago's novels, there is a sudden and curious turn of events:

[A]t four o'clock in the afternoon, an hour which is neither late nor early, neither fish nor fowl, those voters who had, until then, remained in the quiet of their homes, apparently blithely ignoring the election altogether, started to come out onto the streets...and all of them, absolutely all of them, the healthy and inform, the former on foot, the latter in wheelchairs, on stretchers, in ambulances, headed straight for their respective polling stations like rivers which know no other course than that which flows to the sea.

Even more remarkable than the abrupt outpouring of voters is the outcome of their votes:

It was gone midnight when the counting finished. The number of valid votes did not quite reach twenty-five percent, with the party on the right winning thirteen percent, the party in the middle nine percent and the party on the left two and a half percent. There were very few spoiled ballots and very few abstentions. All the others, more than seventy percent of the total votes cast, were blank.

This mass casting of blank votes is viewed by the reigning government (led by the Party of the Right) as spurious, despite the fact that casting a blank vote is a legitimate option under the country's elections laws. Several days later a re-vote is held, and the percentage of blank votes cast is even higher: 83%. The government, again, views the results as invalid.

The remainder of the book is basically divided into two parts. The first follows the machinations of the president, prime minister, and cabinet officers as they scheme to respond to what they view as a veritable rebellion by the voters, ultimately moving the government out of the capital and effectively sealing off the city with a military siege. With few exceptions, they display an utter distaste for the people they have been chosen to govern. Their motivating assumption is that the cause of the trouble is some conspiracy or defect in the people rather than the government, a none too subtle expression of Saramago's views regarding ruling elites. It is a particularly potent message considering recent events in Iran.

The focus shifts midway through as the government sends a small police team into the city to investigate a curious letter they received from a citizen, claiming that there was a woman who did not go blind during the epidemic four years before. Otherwise without any leads as to the cause of the current political crisis, the interior minister gains approval to interview the letter writer and explore his claims. A police superintendent leads the three-person team into the besieged capital. The woman, of course, is the protagonist from Blindness, now a suspect because her immunity to blindness is as inexplicable to the government officials as the mass casting of blank votes. They presume there must be some connection between these unknowns. The unknown, after all, is the most dangerous thing to an incumbent government elected based on the old, usual patterns of behavior.

While displaying Saramago's usual talent for prose, Seeing lacks a good deal of the bite of its sightless predecessor. The commentary on government and society is a bit obvious, and the cabinet officials and the meetings they hold sometimes descend into caricature, a danger implicit in allegory but avoided by Saramago at his best. And while plot is never the point with Saramago, the story told in Seeing lacks the drama and the tension that made Blindness such a well-rounded work of fiction, and the ending may disappoint those who've made it through both books.

Home by Marilynne Robinson

Fans of Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel, Housekeeping, had to wait twenty-four years for the author's second novel. But what a book that was! Gilead, which richly deserved its Pulitzer Prize, is an exceptional rumination on family, faith, and mortality, and is the best fiction I have read in the past several years. Thus you can imagine my excitement when I heard that we would not have to wait another couple decades for Robinson's third novel. Instead, Home was scheduled for publication in the fall of 2008, after a mere four year interval. Even better, the plot summaries indicated the narrative would return to the city of Gilead, Iowa, and feature many of the same characters.

The dustjacket asserts that Home is an "entirely independent" work. I understand the urge to make this claim, as sequels are unlikely to attract those who did not read the first book. But I think it is misleading. While there is nothing in Home that strictly requires a prior reading of Gilead, the narrative is going to appear quite different to those who have read that book. How could it not? Gilead is a fictional autobiography, an effort by the dying Reverend John Ames to leave something behind for his young son, whose childhood will be largely fatherless once Ames' failing heart gives out. Much of the dramatic tension in that book is provided by the return of Jack Boughton, the son of Ames' best friend, fellow clergyman Robert Boughton (and Ames' namesake). Jack's departure twenty years earlier was under tumultuous circumstances, and his two decade absence was a source of continuing heartache for his father. Ames was understandably suspicious on his friend's behalf when Jack re-entered their lives, and the tensions posed by this situation challenge many of Ames' long-held convictions.

The narrative in Home covers much of the same ground, but this time from within the Boughton household. Jack's younger sister, Glory, has returned home to care for her ailing father, and to hide from the failures in her own life:

"Home to stay, Glory! Yes" her father said, and her heart sank. He attempted a twinkle of joy at this thought, but his eyes were damp with commiseration. "To stay for a while this time! " he amended, and took her bag from her, first shifting his cane to his weaker hand. Dear God, she thought, dear God in heaven. So began and ended all her prayers these days, which were really cries of amazement. How could her father be so frail?

Glory, of course, has mixed feelings about the possible return of her brother. As the youngest child, she was a witness to the tragic circumstances under which Jack left twenty years earlier, as well as the effect it had on her parents. She knows how much pain Jack's absence has caused her father, but recognizes that his homecoming is as likely to reignite and deepen this suffering as it is to alleviate it. Thus she waits with bated breath as her father opens a letter from Jack, the first contact in many years:

She thought he might be waiting for her to leave the room, and yet she was afraid to leave. He might be disappointed, or the note might really be from Jack, but upsetting somehow, written from a ward for the chronically vexatious, the terminally remiss. From jail, for heaven's sake. He had better have a good reason for rousing these overwhelming emotions in his father. He had better have a good excuse or exposing the old man to the possibility of inexpressible disappointment. Even if he was dead.

I find it difficult to view this book as "entirely independent" of Gilead. I think it actually quite important to have read that book first. What Gilead depicts, via Reverend Ames, is a life that is fundamentally at peace with itself. Ames' character is marked by a humble confidence grounded in his faith. There are tensions, and doubts, and challenges, but they do not overthrow Ames' core of spirituality, and his narration shows it. Home, by contrast, is riddled with anxiety. Jack is in large part defined by his lack of faith, by the lonely restlessness that this causes in such a religious home, by the distance this puts between Jack and his family, especially his father. For Jack, moments of comfort and certainty are the rare exception. He is the perpetual outsider, largely unable to cope with the stresses of life. And the stresses of Jack's adult life are significant, as readers of Gilead understand by the end of that book (another reason Home will read so differently for those unfamiliar with the earlier work):

He realized he did not please his father, did not know how to please his father. He would probably have liked to believe he had done something wrong so that he could at least orient himself a little, but she had told him a terrible thing, that he had done nothing to offend, that his father had found fault with him anyway, only because he was old and sad now, not the father he thought he had come home to.

One reason I consider Gilead to be such an exceptional novel is that spirituality is an exceptionally difficult concept to satisfactorily integrate into modern fiction, yet Robinson does so with extraordinary force. In Home, she has similar success with Jack's existential discomfort, yet it feels like a less singular accomplishment. The roster of great existential novels is, after all, much deeper. Still, Home is in many ways the necessary complement to its predecessor. Just as a prior reading of Gilead is essential to a proper understanding of Home, spending several hundred pages inside the Boughton home will alter the way readers of Gilead view that masterpiece. For the better.

The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff

One difficulty for any historian tackling the American Revolution is determining the chronological scope of the story they seek to tell. By different measures, the start of the Revolution can be traced to the Albany Congress, the aftermath of the French-Indian War, the Stamp Act crisis, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the start of the Continental Congress, or the shots fired at Lexington and Concord. Likewise, the close of the Revolution can be dated to Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown, the Treaty of Paris, or the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

Even once the historian has determined the chronological limits of his study, he still must decide how expansive or narrow a view to take of those tumultuous years. Some authors, like Gordon Wood or Bernard Bailyn, focus particularly on political ideology and process. Others look at the economics of the time, or cultural or religious issues. There was a war, after all, so military historians get in on the action as well. John Ferling had so much to say that he devoted separate volumes to the political and the military aspects of the era.

Robert Middlekauff did not have that choice. His assignment was to write one volume that covered the broadest Revolutionary timeline commonly accepted, stretching from 1763 until 1789, and address everything from the political and military to the economic, social, and religious. And all in one volume. This was, after all, the first book published in the star-crossed Oxford History of the United States, with its commitment to providing the definitive account for a general audience in a series of volumes, each covering several decades of American history.

Middlekauff's contribution shows all the many strengths, as well as the weaknesses, of this approach. The Glorious Cause, as an entry in the Oxford series, should be able to serve as a single volume history of the period, covering the various historical disciplines, and yet be accessible to a general audience. At this lofty, difficult task, the book largely succeeds. While venturing boldly into political theory, battle plans, economic interests, and religious motivations, and at no point does Middlekauff step too deeply into academic esoterica.

And yet while Middlekauff's text does not presume its readers have deep prior awareness of the era, it has plenty to offer those who do. I have read more than a dozen books covering the Revolutionary period, including John Ferling's superb A Leap in the Dark (review here), so I came to Middlekauff's book with a decent base of knowledge. I found especially informative his coverage of two influences that were not much discussed in other books I have read. The first is the religious history of the colonies:

Although Americans entered the revolt against Britain in several ways, their religion proved important in all of them, important even to the lukewarm and the indifferent. It did because, more than anything else in America, religion shaped culture. And different as the colonies were, they possessed a common culture - values, ideals, a way of looking at and responding to the world - which held them together in the crisis of upheaval and war... beneath the surface their similarities were even more striking - a governance so dominated by laymen as to constitute a congregational democracy, a clergy much weaker than its European analogue, and a religious life marked by attenuated liturgies and an emphasis on individual experience.

On the other side of the Atlanta, Middlekauff provides a fascinating outline of English politics in the latter half of the 17th century:

George III was twenty-two when he ascended the throne in 1760. For the next few years he clung to his prejudices and to Bute with a tenacity that reflected his and Bute's miscomprehension of the political world. He would reform their world, he thought, and make virtue his real consort. Factional politics, which were of course based on interest, not ideology, revolted him - and he would somehow change them. If this dream soon disappeared in disappointment, the king's rigidity did not, and though he learned to play the game - at times with remarkable skill - his early mistakes and his attachment to Bute bred a suspicion in Parliament that introduced a dozen years of instability to his government.

Indeed, the book's strongest sections all occur during the lead-up to the war, exploring the diverse motivating forces in both Britain and the colonies, and the mechanisms by which these forces rapidly shifted the focus of the debate from the scope of Parliament's power to the very legitimacy of that institution vis-a-vis America. Middlekauff also offers a very capable account of the military aspects of the conflict, including not just the blow-by-blow details of the battles, but looking behind-the-scenes at the more mundane (yet equally important) aspects of war: manpower, supply, transportation.

The military account occupies the middle section of the book, from the start of hostilities to the entrance of the French, with a pair of chapters ("Inside the campaigns" and "Outside the campaigns") respectively dedicated to an intricate look at the daily life of soldiers and civilians during wartime, followed by Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris. In order to keep this narrative flowing, however, Middlekauff chose to delay a thorough discussion of the evolution of the political debates until after the close of his military chapters. Thus Middlekauff's discussion of the Articles of Confederation, written in 1777 and ratified in 1781, is awkwardly placed after the war's end in 1783. And after hundreds of pages of military history, Middlekauff compresses into just 80 pages the entire political upheaval of the 1780s, ending in the ratification of the Constitution.

Considering that other titles intended for the Oxford series were apparently rejected for being too narrowly focused (on economics, for instance), it is reasonable to wonder whether Middlekauff intended to write a military history, or to end his narrative in 1783, but felt compelled to tack on some discussion of the Constitution to pad the political history and bring the chronology to 1789. What he provides is adequate, but seems disconnected to the rest of the text and certainly not as thorough as his analysis of the first two decades after 1763. If one is strictly limited to a single volume on the Revolution, The Glorious Cause is a perfectly good choice. But outside of the constraints of a college syllabus, why limit one's reading on this fascinating era to just one book?

Risotto Mantecato with Balsamic Vinegar

One of my wife and my favorite restaurants here in Atlanta is an Italian place called Sotto Sotto, located on Highland Avenue near Little Five Points. Amongst our favorite things about the restaurant, in addition to the romantic atmosphere, is the bevy of vegetarian options to choose from. Even better is that the kitchen will prepare "first course" size portions, so we can actually order two different dishes without feeling like gluttons.

Thus Sotto Sotto was the first place I tried risotto, and their Risotto Mantecato quickly became one of my standbys. While I certainly can't replicate the experience of dining at out a nice restaurant, I thought I might at least see if I could master the dish itself, with this recipe (which I've converted from grams and oz. to cups):

1 cup Carnaroli or Arborio rice
3 tbsp butter
1/2 onion
1/2 cup white wine
3 cups vegetable broth
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
1 tsp vinegar

Cut onion into thin slices, place them in a small bowl, sprinkle with balsamic vinegar, and leave them to soak for 10 minutes. Strain the onions and put them into a pan with half of the butter over medium heat. Once the onions are brown, add the rice. Let the rice simmer for a minute, then steam with white wine. Begin adding the vegetable broth one cup at a time, waiting for the liquid to soak in and evaporate before adding the next cup, stirring constantly. Once all the broth has evaporated, turn the heat off, add the Parmesan cheese, the remaining butter, and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Let it rest for a few minutes and serve.

This recipe was easy to follow, and did not take much in the way of skill. Rather it is an exercise in diligence, with the constant stirring as cup after cup of vegetable broth is poured and then soaked up by the rice. It turned out extremely well, nearly as good as the restaurant. Like at Sotto Sotto, this dish has a very strong flavor, best served as either an appetizer or a side dish, or at least with some good bread.