American Creation

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic
© Joseph Ellis
304 pages

In Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis used a series of nonfictional 'stories' about the founding fathers of the United States to illustrate how their personal relationships with one another shaped the struggle for independence and later the creation of the Republic.  In American Creation, he uses the same approach, a series of vignettes, to explore moments which defined the course that Republic would take. Most occur after the revolution is won, and demonstrate how differently the founders dreamed from one another despite their accomplishments working with one another.  The result is what I've come to expect of Joseph Ellis: colorful narrative history that doesn't begrudge sympathy to any founder and leaves the reader with a fuller appreciation for the Revolution -- one which sees the founders as men, not demigods, who struggled against not only the prejudices and foibles of third parties, but against one another and their own inner demons.

The titular triumphs are well known, like the Declaration of Independence and  the miraculous survival of the Continental Army after Valley Forge, which was effected by both the persistent support of the people for the struggle and Washington's adoption of a strategy that played to his strengths: avoid battle and focus instead on controlling the countryside. Even so, Ellis may pass along new information to students of the period: for instance,  months before the storied Declaration of Independence was presented and signed,  each American colony drew up a constitution for itself in preparation for the impending separation from England, asserting self-rule in a fashion with immediate practical effects and much less bombast.  Of the tragedies, there are three: the failure to strangle slavery, the lack of any effective and just "Indian policy", and the birth of vicious parties. All three have the same mother: the interests of Southern planters, asserting the sovereignty of their individual states and dismissing the authority of any central government influenced by merchants and bankers.  Although Ellis is not a partisan historian,  the verdict of his pen is more for the Federalists than the Republicans.  The closest he comes to outright favoritism is in the chapter on party politics, "The Conspiracy", in which he attempts to answer the question: why were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison so paranoid about the Federalists, acting as though men who had lead the assault against tyranny would become tyrants themselves?  Adam's authorization of the Alien and Sedition acts hadn't yet come into being, nor had Hamilton suggested to Adams that South America could do with a proper invasion, but both make the student of history wonder if maybe Republican concerns weren't justified to some degree. Jefferson emerges from the section seemingly like an ambitious lunatic, however  -- which, perhaps he was. Though regarded as a man of science, his romantic attachment to the French Revolution, which he devoted service to at the expense of the American government, reveals how profoundly irrational he could be.

None of the founders emerge from this narrative unscathed: even the divine Washington is revealed as only human, unable to will a perfect treaty with a native nation (the Creeks, here) into being:  not are the Creeks cleverly led by a man who is treacherous as any Congressional politician, but American settlers have the damndest habit of not doing what the government would wish them to do. They keep flooding into Creek territory without a care in the world for foreign policy. Parliament would no doubt sympathize -- and just wait until you try taxing them, George. Oh, wait -- the whiskey rebellion is also covered. Men who occupy lesser roles in most Revolution narratives get to shine more here, like Roger Livingston, the Forrest Gump of the revolution, always somehow in the middle of the biggest moments of American history.  American Creation is a fitting read for the Fourth, one which offers a vision hopeful yet sober of what was created, and what may yet be restored: a nation of the people, by the people, for the people.

GoodReads is *Weird*

Witness:

Based on my "Alabama" shelf, it is recommending I read Understanding Power, by Noam Chomsky; Killing Hope, a history of CIA operations; a history of the Russian Revolution; a work detailing how human rights have been destroyed in the rise of corporate power; and a history of anarchism.

Because each of these things reminds me so much of Alabama.  On another page, it is insisting I check out an anthology of wisdom literature based on my Transportation and Urbanism shelves.

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

The Story of my Experiments with Truth
 © 1927 Mohandas K. Gandhi
480 pages

Dover Press cover

The Story of my Experiments with Truth is a piecemeal autobiography of Mohandas Gandhi,  who earned acclaim by leading India to independence from the British Empire through nonviolent means. It includes only the early portions of his life, ending in the 1920s long before the most famous incidents of the Indian movement.   Gandhi establishes early on that he chose to downplay much discussion of his political activism in this work on the grounds that he had already written a history of his early struggles in South Africa, and that his later battles were so widely known they needed no further coverage from his pen.  Despite that intention, politics peppers this story of his life, as he viewed public service as inseparable from any other portion of his being, and especially from his sense of spirituality, the pursuit of truth. Politics was simply a means of acting on the truth, of proclaiming it to the world.

If not politics, what then is this autobiography?  Released in sections through a newsletter, it has no central focus;  his search for truth is at best a recurring theme. There's politics here, interwoven with the accounts of legal cases and the epic quest to find his ashram a hand loom (this merited two chapters), but his reflections on religion, spirituality, and ethics give the work most of its substance. The work allows readers to see the legend of the Mahatma slowly emerge from the life of a passionate Indian lawyer who seems beset by scrupulosity, constantly ashamed of his wretched failings, recoiling in horror from the great sins of marriage and drinking goat's milk.  Gandhi is not a moderate: after encountering a concept and deciding it worthy of an effort, the effort given is mighty: he adopts practices whole cloth. After being introduced to the concept of economic self reliance, he arranges for his newspaper staff to join him at a communal farm. When he became convinced of the spiritual and medical effects of total abstinence, he became celibate and began sleeping in a separate bed from his wife. Period. His ability to make radical changes in his life increased with practice: as a young man, avoiding meat seemed a terrible burden, one difficult to take up -- but a decade later, with much experience, he could declare war against his libido by refusing to engage in so much as an amorous thought, and developing a diet that wouldn't lead to excess 'interest'. (Meat and milk lead to sexy thoughts. Fruit, not so much. )  At the same time, he records some of his religious explorations, his reading of other sacred texts and comparing them to his own.  This was only a minor portion of the content, however.

Those interested in the formative years and experience of Gandhi may find this book of interest; it is also marginally useful to those seeking information about his South African years, in which he fought to help Indians relegated to indentured servitude reclaim their dignity before the law and before themselves.  It is not a cohesive work, however, and doesn't contain any extensive, in-depth writing on any given subject: instead, one sees the big ideas slowly developed over the course of his early life,  coming together year by year, a worldview given life one practice and one belief at a time.  Gandhi is at once inspiring and unsettling in the extremes of his life, dedicated to truth.

Related:
Nehru: the Invention of India; Shashi Tharoor
The Confessions,  St. Augustine (who was also given to literary self-flagellation)

This week at the library..money, Gandhi, and the American revolution

This week at the library, I am in the middle of my Revolutionary War reading, having finally finished the massive biography of Alexander Hamilton. I found it lived up to the recommendation as an antidote to the anti-Hamilton bias of other Revolutionary books I've read. Next in the series is American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, by Joseph Ellis who I read so much of last year.  After that, if there's time, I'll be reading his take on George Washington, His Excellency. (That's the book title. I'm going to guess it's somewhat sympathetic, but then any biography of Washington written by an American would have to be.)

I just finished off an interlibrary loan book called The History of Money by Jack Weatherford, which is just as it says. It's not nearly as comprehensive as Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, which tracked money and finance from coins to paper to bonds to credit and securities.  Weatherford's work doesn't touch on bonds and securities:  the focus is on  ordinary money, which appeared first as a commodity, became coins, then paper backed by specie, then paper backed by nothing, which he finds alarming, and then completely electronic. It's a bit dated at this point; he offers (in 1997) that while the Internet's online marketplace once deem poised to wreak havoc on conventional merchants, it seems that it will remain catering to niche markets.  After all, you can't download a shirt from your computer! (You can get it on your doorstop within two days, though, and you can download books..)  The author is at his best when commenting on how money effects human culture: at one point he offered an analysis of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, writing that it was a commentary on the debate over gold-backed currency vs. silver-backed currency.  Dorothy, the average American citizen, marches off to fairlyland to confront the sinister financiers, backed by the American farmer (Scarecrow), the American worker (the Tinman), and William Jennings Bryan (the...Cowardly Lion).  

In the post this week I'm expecting the rest of a Star Trek trilogy I began in February (Cold Equations: the Persistence of Memory) but forgot to review (oops). I didn't realize that 'til today, when updating GoodReads and Shelfari (they're almost completely current, save for this week's reading), and noting I couldn't find that Geordi-Soong cover.  It's been too long since I got my Trek on. I'm also expecting Getting There: the Epic Struggle Between Road and Rail in the American Century, since I haven't read any train books recently.

Reviews and/or comments are pending for Jayber Crow and The Story of my Experiments with Truth.

Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton
© 2005 Rob Chernow
832 pages

Who is  Alexander Hamilton? The greatest founder save George Washington, or the Antichrist?  The latter is the view of Hamilton one may derive from the accounts of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whereas Rob Chernow’s biography views him in a far more sympathetic light. Though not quite a hagiography, it rings a tribute to a man whose accomplishments are impressive, even to his critics. Hamilton’s life is the story of a boy twice orphaned (losing not only his parents, but two sets of guardians), who emigrated to the American colonies and became not only a leading member of the Revolution, but an architect of its destiny, whose power and influence rivaled and even surpassed that of some of the early presidents. His opinions and policies were at the heart of the controversies and feuds of the early Republic, and though shot down in a duel, his legacy is all but dead, and this grand treatment of his life is a powerful aid to understanding the first decades of the United States' life.

 Unlike most of the founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton was not born in the American colonies, at least not the 'proper' thirteen. He hailed instead from the isle of Nevis, in the West Indies, growing up amid scenes of the sugar trade, of ships from various nations plying the Caribbean routes, hauling trade goods and slaves hither and yon, between islands baked by the sun and hit alternatively with bouts of hurricanes and disease. Orphaned early on, Hamilton found employment as a clerk in a trading firm, and his success there led him to New York, working first on the firm's behalf and then on his own, as he became involved in the colonies' struggle for independence. After completing his education there, Hamilton put his mind to work outside the exchequer's office, engaged as a lawyer and putting his pen to work arguing for independence. During the Revolutionary War, he served first as a captain of artillery, and then as George Washington's attache, a position which forged his destiny. By war's end, he had become Washington's de facto chief of staff, and when 'his excellency' became president,  their long relationship and the strength of Hamilton's writings on politics and economics (including most of The Federalist Papers) earned him a seat in the first cabinet, as Secretary of the Treasury.  There, he helped to create a nation, pushing forward a much-hated plan for the new union to absorb the debts of the old, a move that established the young country's credit and strengthened the position of the federal government over the states.  Hamilton's belief in a strong, efficient central government made him the foe of states-rights proponents like Jefferson, who saw in him the antithesis the revolution. Hamilton and they engaged in ferocious battles of words, railing against one another  in the press. When Washington retired and John Adams became president, it was Hamilton, and not Adams, who led the Federalist party against the attacks of Jefferson and the anti-federalist Republicans. (Such a fact was very much not appreciated by John Adams, whose cabinetmen stayed in constant correspondence with Hamilton and forwarded his advice as their own)  Although Hamilton accomplished his dream of a strong union backed by a strong currency (backed by a strong, national bank), his reputation fell into disrepute through his constant bickering with others, especially after he engaged in a no-holds barred assault on then-president John Adams, splintering the federalists and allowing for decades of Republican domination. His highly colorful career -- festooned with accomplishments and embarrassment -- came to an end in 1804, when he engaged Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel and was shot down, dying in the same fashion as his son a year prior.

 So, the story of Alexander Hamilton is something kin to a rags-to-riches tale, or it would if he actually died rich.  His ascent is stupefying, and Chernow's admiration is hard for a reader not to share. Although I'd expected the book to sing Hamilton's praises, Chernow chronicles the man's persistent faults faithfully. He does couch the criticism in such a way as to soften the blows, frequently mourning over dear Hamilton's all-too frequent lapses in judgment the way readers might tut-tut over their grandparents' foibles.  Chief among them was Hamilton's ability to hold a grudge, and the power grudges held over his opinion, moving him to rail against  opponents so scathingly that even John Adams was taken aback.  Chernow doesn't fault Hamilton's basic approach to governance, which tended toward the cautious: Hamilton was the anti-Jefferson, and promoted more a strong, centralzied government run by 'cool, cool, considerate men', rather than a republic of states run by the mob, which is what he imagined democracy to be.  Although Jefferson & company's skepticism of Hamilton's strongman approach is warranted (as is skepticism of Jefferson's own approach),  his fiscal accomplishments seem to validate them. Chernow goes to bat for his chosen subject, engaging in little arguments to defend claims that Hamilton was corrupt or intending to replace the government with the rule of some Hannoverian scion. Of course, considering he once entertained ideas for conquering South America in the event of a French victory during the Napoleonic wars, maybe his enemies' paranoia was justified. The degree to which Jefferson and others engaged in conspiracy theories with Hamilton at the center is baffling , but Jefferson is as much the villain of the piece as Hamilton is the hero. If Chernow is fair with Hamiliton, being honest with his faults, he is less so with the man's foes.  John Adams receives the kindest treatment,  notable given how hostile he became toward 'that Creole bastard' during his adminstration.

Alexander Hamilton is quite the biography. Not only was his a life fascinating to behold -- an orphaned turned national puppetmaster -- but through it, readers get a glimpse at how debates over the fate of the nation were enacted. Hamilton's personal life is included, but shoved to the side: this is a work about the relationships between Hamilton and other founders, especially George Washington and their relation to the first decade of American politics: it emphasizes policy more than cozy scenes of family life.  Chernow is an able storyteller, and proved to be more fair than I gave him credit for.  This is a massive piece, but I found it very much worth my while, given how anti-Hamiltonian my previous Revolutionary War reads have been. I think next year I shall have to read a biography of Jefferson, since he's much abused in both treatments of John Adams' and Alexander Hamilton's lives.

           

Disrupting the Rabblement

Disrupting the Rabblement: Think  For Yourself, Face Your Fears, Live Your Dreams, and Piss off some Zombies
© 2012 Niall Doherty
~138 pages

There are those who live, and those who simply exist. The majority of people, the rabblement, simply exist, and it's Niall Doherty's mission in life to wake them up, or failing that, to at least ruffle their feathers. Looking to live life more abundantly, Doherty left the trappings of ordinary living behind: he's traveling across the world with his every possession in a 42 liter backpack, and occasionally posts from internet cafes to ask provocative questions and offer advice for better living. Disrupting the Rabblement is an extension of his blog; more than a collection of posts, but not quite a book in its own right. It reads more like an anthology than a cohesive book, but one certainly of interest.

In Disrupting the Rabblement, Doherty calls for readers to ask themselves probing questions to suss out what they really want out of life, to establish their values and then to boldly compare the life they live now, their actions, to their ideals. He suggests practices, like freethought and minimalism, that help people to sort out what is real and what is important from what is assumed, and what we only think is important. This is followed by advice on how to begin creating a more fulfilling life, and here Doherty draws partially from Stoicism, with frequent references to Buddha; he suggests people reflect on and engage their fears.  There are proper reasons to be afraid, of course: it is probably wise to resist that urge to pet the jaguar at the zoo. But why not say hello to the astonishingly interesting girl at the bar?  Sure, people may not respond to us as we wish, but most of the time, the potential rewards far outweigh the potential consequences. One of the more useful sections here is his guide to establishing habits that allow people to learn new skills and wean themselves off of destructive behaviors while establishing healthy ones.

Although I wouldn't go so far as to call Disrupting the Rabblement a book, its informality doesn't diminish from the accuracy of Doherty's observations or the usefulness of his advice, especially considering that he really does practice what he preaches: while writing this, Doherty was a vegetarian, something he adopted after a thirty-day trial. In recent months, however, he has left the vegetarian diet, and done so after subjecting some of his assumptions to scrutiny. He's not afraid to court unpopularity (one wonders if he's ever read the Cynics):  his recent blog and video on quitting vegetarianism have caused quite a stir.

If these ideas interest you, I would suggest  watching some of his videos (like "What would it take to change your mind?")  or reading his posts to get an idea as to whether or not they would be worth your while. I found Doherty accidentally, while looking for videos on simple living, I discovered his "What Minimalism Is Not".  I enjoy his videos, and so figured the $3 ebook would be worth it; and, though I wish it was meatier, worth it it was.  It's not offered as a 'real' book.

Summer reading (Top Ten Tuesday)

Summertime, and the livin's easy...the asphalt's melting,  and sunstroke is nigh...

The summer is a good time for reading, because if you're outside in the Alabama heat you're going to boil in your own sweat. Seriously, this is not a good time to visit us.  If you have a hankering to see the Deep South, wait until October. It'll still be warm, but you can go outside without drawing up a will.  In the summer time I venture outside ever so briefly in the mornings, then hide inside for most of the day listening to the air conditioner spend money. Inside it's a time for reading, and this summer I have quite a few books waiting to be devoured..

1. Gulp, Mary Roach

I love Mary Roach. You have to have a good sense of humor to carry a surname like Roach, and boy does she ever have one -- and she combines it with popular science writing to produce fascinating books with names like Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex and Stiff: the Curious Lifes of Human Cadavers.

2. An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage

Last summer I read A History of the World in Six Glasses, which looked at agriculture through beer,  mercantilism through tea, and  industrial consumerism through Coca-Cola, among others. Definitely light history, but I'm looking forward to this, which I assume takes a similar tack. Related is Michael Pollan's Cooked, which I am definitely interested in. I don't know if my library will acquire it, though, so it may be a while before I pick up a used copy.

3.Starship Troopers, Robert Heinlein

I've yet to read Heinlein, and this is supposedly his most controversial work, mixing SF with political philosophy.

4.  Independence Day celebratory set

Each year it is my custom to honor the Fourth of July with a reading touching the American Revolution. This year I'm planning to tackle a biography of Alexander Hamilton (by Rob Chernow) to start off with.

5. Bastille Day tribute

The French revolution transformed a continent and the world, and it's worth commemorating for the glory of "La Marseillaise" alone.  I like to explore French culture in general around July 14th, and last year I got a bit carried away by it. I had Edith Piaf singing in my head clear into November, I'll tell you. I don't rightly know what I'll be reading just yet: French Kids Eat Everything  would be a way to build on Bringing up Bebe and French Women Don't Get Fat,  and I've heard good things about The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography.

7. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market by Susan Strasser
Susan Strasser's a fantastic social historian of America, and I've been anticipating this one for a while. I may read it in the same week as I finally read Affluenza: the All-Consuming Epidemic, but that may be a bit much. Oh, and then there's Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole...

...hm. Reading three books on consumerism seems problematic.  But one is history, one is more philosophical, and the other is more political, so...I have to read all three, just to get the whole picture. maybe I should throw in Hooked: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume, too. That would...round things out nicely.

Once I've read all four I won't be as much a consumer afterward, I promise!

8. Hannah Coulter or A Place on Earth, Wendell Berry

I'm not particular as to which, but I just finished Jayber Crow and found it to be one of the most intensely moving novels I've ever read. There aren't too many other books I'd put in the same neighborhood -- Big Rock Candy Mountain and Once an Eagle, maybe -- but I definitely want to read more Berry.

9. Your Inner Fish, Neil Shubin

I misplaced this one for a little bit, but it's returned to me.

10. Lost Christianities, Bart Ehrman

Or something similar...it's been a while since I did any religious history.