Look Away!

Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America
© 2003 William C. Davis
496 pages

While most Civil War histories concentrate on military campaigns, Look Away! chronicles the history of the Confederacy from a political and social perspective. Its attempt to ignore military matters is almost futile given that the Confederacy was born in war and perished amid it, as its every institution (civic, social, economic) was ravaged by the war and driven into failure. The story of Look Away is one of a doomed nation, riven in contradiction from the start.  Examining the feuds between the southern Congress and its president, the implosion of slavery, the breakdown of law and order,  the trials of women and economic woes, it looks at the southern nation that lay behind the battlefront.  Though I initially avoided reading this on suspicion that it was the work of neo-Confederate ideology (I've seen it sold beside titles like The South was Right!), it proved appropriately moderate, neither overtly friendly nor hostile -- not that its presentation of slavery as the driving force of the war pleased the sputtering reviewer who announced that Gone with the Wind was a superior text to consult.

Davis  begins with the crisis leading to the secession of the southern states, and their gathering together to create a new constitution. The form of their confederate government makes plain slavery's role as a cause of the war; even if one ignores all of the defensive rhetoric from the time,  the fact that no Confederate state could ever dispense with slavery within its borders has challenges the "states' rights" crowd who maintain slavery was incidental. The southerners attempted to create a modified version of the US Constitution which emphasized the sovereignty of the individual states,  but the stresses of war would the dream.

Attempting to forge a nation from scratch in the midst of a war is no easy feat;  while the Continental Congress accomplished it, their task was somewhat easier. Their foes was an ocean away, its resources and attention scattered, its means of communication and transport largely the same as in the days of William the Conqueror.  The north and south, however, were intimate neighbors with intertwined borders: both could and would field armies in the hundreds of thousands, supported by the best of modern technology -- trains, telegraphs, and a robust factory system. The war would be total from the beginning, as Davis' account bears out.

His examination of the home front demonstrates how widespread military enlistment and conscription led to much of society simply failing apart for want of the men needed to maintain it. Not only were civil servants like postmen, peace officers, and the like taken, but so many men were absent either through enlistment or conscription that the farms were left undermanned and vulnerable not only to slave insurrections but raids from bands of highwaymen and deserters.

Complicating matters from the start was the divided political sentiment of the southrons who, though avowing agrarian democracy and political liberty, were led by a plantation elite jealous of their own power and dependent on slavery. The Confederacy was an oligarchy in the form of a democracy, Davis writes, and as the war continued the form of democracy wore off. Civil order collapsed, leaving parts of the south running on martial law, naked power, and the government proved no less dangerous to struggling farmers than raids as it began seizing crops as quickly as they could be grown. Not only was the army of little use in countering the violence of highwaymen, beset on all sides by the Union force, but  the state it served had become an agent of abuse itself. The best of the south's political class had fled Congress for the Army (war being less distasteful than the tenor of debate), leaving the government in the hands of woefully inferior personalities who were only too happy to spend their time bickering while Rome burned, and corrupted by all of the power coalescing in their hands. The longer the war wore on, the more power Richmond collected; not only through self-willed expansion, but by people depending on it as a last resort.  The Confederacy, having begun as a decentralized confederacy, was by war's end a welfare state; an astonishing journey that only war could taken a nation.

Although it offers brief military recaps to give readers an idea for the general course of the war, Look Away!  is first and foremost a history of the southern country at home as it attempted to be a people and a nation at war.  Not only does it offer readers a view of the chaos that the  average family would have been enduring through the war years, it imparts an understanding of the Confederate government far different from the one which exists in popular myth. It's a grimmer view, but one softened by the fact that Davis is plainly sympathetic to his subjects.  Look Away should definitely be of interest to anyone fascinated by the Civil War or southern politics.

Related:

Bitterly Divided: The South's Inner Civil War, David Williams

What's Wrong with the World

What's Wrong with the World
© 1910 G. K. Chesterton
200 pages

What’s wrong with the world? Too many people are proposing answers to the wrong questions.  What’s Wrong is a curious collection of thoughts, voiced at the turn of the 20^th century, in response to the merry hell industrialism was wrecking on traditional forms of human society as the fields became the province of machines, not people, and the cities swelled with displaced farmers. Such urban swelling led to mass movements – spectator sports, popular politics,  and the odd mob, and sociologists, economists, and the like began to view society as one great machine, with ordered parts.   Written in opposition, What’s Wrong is a defense for the human-ness of people,  which examines flaws in the way men, women, children,  education, and politics were being handled – and have been handled further, from our  viewpoint. 

What’s Wrong with the World is from the start an eccentric book, for its author was an eccentric man, a personality given to wandering around in a cape and swordstick. He is neither ‘conservative’ nor liberal, and not moderate;  unlike Russell Kirk-esque conservatives, he scorns practicality and preaches the values of ideals and the abstract. How can we change society, he writes, if we do not have a conception of what it is supposed to look like?  What is the picture of health for human society, and what prescription might be writ to achieve it?  Chesterton’s goal here is not prescription, however, but description, and in several sections he writes about  the mistakes we have made concerning man, woman, and child.  The arguments he builds are steeped in religion and tradition, and a kind of sexual psychology.  They probably do not credit his reputation today, for he writes in defense of traditional gender roles and against female suffrage, but to dismiss him as an mere traditionalist is to miss the point.  The question, he writes, is not whether women deserve the vote, but whether the vote deserves women.

The prevailing spirit of What’s Wrong is, as its title suggests, that there is something wrong with the world of progress the people of the West were creating in the 19^th century.  Civilization is a forced endeavor in specialization;  at least since the agricultural revolution, certain groups of men have had to make their life’s work a matter of doing one thing; one man is a farmer, another a potter.  This is sad, since the good life consists of a variety of experience, but required. What is not required is the way industrialism forced that monotask tendency to become so extreme that one man might spend his entire day doing the same simple movement over and over again. Such work is not fit for men, and the idea of  taking women from the home – where they are masters of many different tasks, from sewing to cleaning to teaching  -- and forcing them into the place of a machine-cog is beyond the pale.   The same applies to politics, and here Chesterton plays the anarchist as he criticizes all governance as being based on the use of coercion. It is bad enough that men have to participate in such foulness; they at least can enjoy the war-like antagonism of party politics, which allows them to bear it.   The solutions to societal problems have been in the main a case of more of the same, a case of eating the hair of the dog;  to counter the monopolization of property by big business trusts, people  propose letting it be monopolization by the state.   The issue is monopolization;  the bigness of society itself has to be addressed.

While Chesterton doesn’t go into any solution, he does address the ideal form that society ought to have: people need to be regarded as the image of God, not a mass to be managed; property must be distributed  more equally across the population so each man will have his Home. The home is enormously important to Chesterton; it is a sanctuary of natural law, of the order of ancient anarchy; it is where children ought to receive their education, to learn from their father and mother’s wisdom and trade;  public education is good for nothing more than becoming than little coglets. It is the accumulation of trivial information, grounded in neither tradition nor skills.   What’s Wrong with the World is thus considered one of the fountainheads of distributism, with its  emphasis on decentralization, locality, and widespread property ownership.

Although some of its points are moot now (women’s suffrage is not a political issue these days),  What’s Wrong still has lingering relevance; we are more specialized these days than the 19^th century, not less; the gulf between the propertied and the poor is wider, not diminished;  education is wholly institutionalized, and considering how much time adults spend at work and children in school, even if parents knew a great deal about anything in particular they haven’t the time to teach it.  We are even less the image of Chesterton’s god;  even more ants on the anthill he predicted with such dread.  The book has its varied flaws; Chesterton’s opposition to evolution is on ideological grounds, for instance, as he abhors anything that looks on people as a mass, even as a biological ‘population’. His enthusiasm for writing about something he clearly does not understand (his perception of evolution resembles Lamarkianism, with the rich breeding bow-legged stable boys and such)  casts doubt on other criticisms, but he did live in the age of the insidious dream of eugenics, so his intentions were not terrible.  Discussion of actual evolution would have out of place in a work like this, loaded with literary references, chatty social critiques, and aphorisms aplenty. (This is the source of his “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has  been found difficult and not tried.”)  

What’s Wrong with the World is a peculiar book, dated but relevant, hopelessly old-fashioned but in an endearing way. The author’s convivial contrariness makes considering his arguments possible,   as does the fact that he is seemingly against modern work and modern politicking in general, not just women doing them. But in his day,  the political and labor arguments were a lost cause as far as men went, at least barring the distributive revolution, but the women and children can or could still be saved.  I think he is serious in his criticism, but I am predisposed to like him given my own contempt for inhumane work and corporatism. Readers will find Chesterton odd, but personable and thought-provoking, even if they have objection against his ideas. It’s not the easiest read, but considering his chattiness  the work isn’t difficult, either; just look out for the flourishing sword-stick and  spectacular prose.

The Gift of Good Land

The Gift of Good Land
© 1981 Wendell Berry
281 pages

Wendell Berry is a philosopher, poet, and more, but before all else he is a farmer. He is a faithful son of Kentucky devoted to the land, to the stewardship of the Earth, to the obedience to the first commandment given in his religious tradition: to dress and keep the garden. Berry has produced other collections of essays that focused primarily on agriculture, but this is the first I've read, and while I haven't set foot on a proper farm since elementary school, Berry's crafted hand makes a man ache to experience the gift of land he writes on here.  Although these essays primarily address farming, life is the subject; when Berry writes on the virtues of mowing with scythes, the essay is on man's relation with his tools. Does he use them to his intended ends or is he compelled to use them toward theirs?  A piece on the role of horses addresses the need for appropriate solutions, for sensible and sustainable approaches to the cultivation of food. A few essays simply reflect on the thoughts a farm naturally brings to mind, like those of motherhood when Berry is helping deliver a calf; he is profoundly grateful, not annoyed, to have been able to play a part in bringing the new life into the world.  Berry is an author who radiates wisdom; he notes, in considering the discovery of the New World, that we, like our ancestors come "with visions, but not with sight. We did not see or understand where we were or what was there, but we destroyed what was there for the sake of what we desired."  The partial purpose of these essays is to generate an understanding, not of what we know, but of how little we know.  As Berry muses on the patterns of nature, and attempts to teach readers how to discern and plan within those patterns -- to solve agricultural problems through agricultural means, for instance -- his study reveals how painfully arrogant we have been in the 20th century, to simply decide life was a machine that could be engineered to produce whatever outputs we wanted. Life remains stubbornly organic, temperamental even,  and responding to it requires the watchful eye, gentle hand, and sharp mind of a careful husband of the flock, a steward of the land; a farmer.

Related:
Folks, This Ain't Normal, Joel Salatin

The Martian

The Martian
© 2013 Andy Weir
369 pages

I was elated!  This was the best plan ever! Not only was I clearing out the hydrogen, I was making more water! 

Everything went great right up to the explosion. 

p. 43

Mark Watney never thought his Mars mission would make history. He was the eighteenth man on the planet, a member of the third  mission there; who remembers the third man to set foot on the Moon, let alone the fifteenth?  But when a dust storm threw a communications setup into his chest and his colleagues were forced to quit the planet before recovering his body lest their ride home be destroyed,  Mark woke up to find himself the only man on the planet – the only man around, in fact, for millions of miles. Robinson Crusoe, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.  Fortunately for Mark, not only did the aborted mission leave him with his five crewmates’ supplies, but he’s a botanist and a mechanical engineer.  Mark’s own mind – his scientific experience and creativity,, along with a   if-this-doesn’t-work-I’m-dead-anyway intrepidity -- is his best resource, though. Not even rationing his rations will see him through the four years that will pass before the next Ares mission lands. And so Mark tries to find a way to survive, to turn his limited equipment and Mars' land and air into life.  The result is The Martian, a captivating and absolutely hilarious memoir of survival that sees him battling physics with ingenuity and despair with laughter 'til the very end.

The Martian is easily the most entertaining science fiction novel I've read, a story of  relentless problem-solving and dogged humor.  It's not Mark's story alone -- Weir  occasionally zooms back to Earth as NASA tries to cope, and  he occasionally shifts to a third-person narrative when something colossally bad is about to happen to our stubborn survivor -- but most of The Martian is told, journal-form, recording Mark's reactions, plans, and thoughts on life so far from humanity. He is never free from worry; no sooner has he found to solve a problem by physics, chemistry, botany, or setting something on fire, than does something else go wrong. Sometimes solutions create their own problems, because his resources are limited and not even an engineer-botanist can think of everything. Add to that the fact that Mars is an environment hostile to human life, a severe place that punishes mistakes with death (freezing, exploding,  starving, take your pick), and there's no end to his troubles. But he never stops trying, and he never becomes dispirited permanently. There's no one on the planet to have  a pity party with, and nothing to do but try to put the pieces back together again and move on.  Eventually the story widens; Mark can't communicate with Earth, but they do have satellites, and the only bit of life on the entire planet can't avoid being noticed forever. If he can only find a way to endure!  Despite the seriousness of his situation, the narrative is easy-going, almost light-hearted. Mark is keeping logs to keep track of his progress and maintain his sanity, not give an audience a respectable tale of man vs. the elements. He records in detail his thinking about wrangling technical problems, but he's also constantly joking or complaining or chattering.. ("I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for.")  Part of the appeal of The Martian is the fact that, though this is science-fiction, it's not far removed from contemporary technology; the people in this novel  don't need any background, because they're us. This is an immensely personable science-adventure story, abounding in puzzles and smart remarks.  It's quite impressive considering it's Andy Weir's first work, and I would definitely recommend  it, especially to those with any interest at all in space flight.

"[The laptop] died instantly. The screen went black before I was out of the outlock. Turns out the 'L' in 'LCD' stands for 'Liquid'. I guess it either froze or boiled off. Maybe I'll have to post a consumer review: 'Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10'."

Related: 
"Founding Father", Isaac Asimov. Also about astronauts trying to survive in a hostile world after things go badly.

Forgotten Voices of the Great War

Forgotten Voices of the Great War
© 2004 ed. Max Author
336 pages

                        Forgotten Voices of the Great War is a chronicle of the first great war,  a story told not by one author but many. Interviews and written recollections from soldiers and civilians, young and old, give readers a first-hand view of the debacle as it unfolded. The editor divided the book into five year-by-year sections, and begins each with a brief (two-page long) summary of the year’s fighting before allowing the participants of history to give the full, intimate account.  Aside from the occasional insertion of dates and battle names, the narrative consists of first-hand excerpts, generally no more than a paragraph long.  There are distinct home front and military sections, and no bias as far as the soldiers’ attitudes go:   the account begins with feelings of thrill and anxiety at the war’s declaration, but by the first few months virtually everyone sounds weary. There’s no polemicizing here, though after witnessing the despair of soldiers enduring these long years at the front  what reader can escape antiwar sentiment?  All of the combat accounts are set on the Western Front or in Gallipoli,, but there are accounts of Germans, French, and Americans mixed in with the Commonwealth nations’ excerpts,  constituting half the work. Forgotten Voices leaves grand narrative behind and allows readers to experience the grisly details – the stories of soldiers tripping through dark trenches filled with cables, of the wounded sinking into muddy shell holes and attempting to effect their rescue by singing loudly amid the clamor of combat;  and of course, the rats, living in the legions of bodies and growing as large as dogs, with shooting them a dismal option because their own bodies will only add to the stinking foulness. It’s not pretty, but such is the nature of war and modern readers would do well to heed these voices instead of those singing of war’s glories.

From Chunk to Hunk

From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man
© 2003 Fred Anderson
242 pages

Fred Anderson had an epiphany while munching on snack cakes and watching TV; as he witnessed the amputation of a diabetic man's leg, he realized: this is my future.  Horrified at the thought of losing mobility, and frustrated by not being able to play with his daughter, Fred began watching what he ate and exercising daily. Two years later, he was down over a hundred and fifty pounds. From Chunk to Hunk is his record of that time, a journal doubling as a fitness coach to readers. Its focus is mental;  Anderson makes no dietary claims beyond Pollanesque observations that if a foodstuff needs a tv commercial, it's probably no good for you; instead, he preaches throughout on attitude adjustments, on how to form new habits, how to change attitudes towards food and exercise, and so on. In this two-year account, Anderson not only sheds a man's weight worth of fat, his health-focused lifestyle frees him from diabetic treatment. He doesn't forth a dietary or exercise regimen, maintaining that people are sensible enough to recognize "real" -- healthy -- food. The challenge is consistency, both in eating well and exercising. Anderson begins by treading water,  but shifts to daily intensive walks and adds in weight lifting, eventually alternating running days with weight-lifting and cycling days. Persistence is his motto: it doesn't matter if he makes the odd mistake, he exercises every single day, aside from a once-weekly rest day, and eats well the overwhelming majority of the time.  He isn't a puritan about coveting or abhorring one element or another;  he instead makes his ally Time, by simply making the same good choices every day.  Aristotle observed that our character is the sum of our actions; excellence is achieved by habit.   Anderson's candor, and the absence of a program being sold, make this a refreshing weight-loss account, one that doesn't pretend to nutritional wisdom. It's a bit on the preachy side -- despite not being religious, Anderson often quotes from the Bible and uses the same communicative tropes as some folksy preachers --  but this is forgivable, as is the sometimes too personal details he includes sporadically. I read this primarily to see how his journey paralleled my own -- both of us, in the twilight of our twenties, had a wake-up call and lost over a hundred pounds, with no magic except daily, vigorous exercise and moderate eating of natural foods.   I haven't embraced weight-lifting or running as enthusiastically as he have, but I very well may..

And Then There Were Nuns

And Then There Were Nuns: Adventures in a Cloistered Life
© 2013 Jane Christmas
292 pages

When Jane Christmas' boyfriend proposed to her, she gave him the most obvious reply: she said she wanted to join a nunnery.  It wasn't that he had driven her to the cloister; she had been tempted by it for most of her life, but it wasn't until her beau was down on bended knee that she realized it was now or never. And so she spent the better part of a year living in monastic communities, with nuns and monks alike, in Canada and in Britain, while her extraordinarily long-suffering fiance kept in contact by letter. And Then Were Nuns is a slightly humorous account of an endeavor seriously undertaken: to see if the author truly felt called to be a nun. The result for readers is a look into a world normally out of mind, and an exploration of the value of a monastic life to the religiously-inclined.

Religious orders are the Anglican church's best-kept secret, Christmas writes, and that's probably the case, for whoever associates nuns with the Church of England? Nuns are black-habited sisters stalking the halls of private schools or hospitals, thumping children with rulers or humorlessly flipping protesting hospital patients on their backsides to administer shots in their hinterlands. But the Anglican church does have religious orders, male and female, throughout the world, and Christmas begins by spending four weeks at a convent in Toronto, where she's treated as if she's on retreat. The initial bit of self-examination unlocks some inner demons, and before making a decision whether to marry her finance or Jesus, she decided a more intensive sojourn is in order, a multi-month stay at a convent in Britain. As she travels there, she stays with nuns and monks at two religious communities on the Isle of Wight, flirting with the Catholic church before an indignant mother informs her that no she bloody well can not join the Romans and become a nun with three marriages to her name. Her experiences there affirm her association with the Church of England, however theologically indecisive and socially regressive it might be. Eventually Jane realizes this time spent living among religious orders wasn't meant so much to help her make a decision about becoming a nun as to face down a harrowing sexual episode years before.

Christmas has a reputation as a humorist, and Then There Were Nuns combines serious introspection and discussion about the spiritual and material value of the nuns' work with wry reflections. Awed and nervous by the exploration she's undertaken, Christmas sometimes escapes the intensity with jokes to herself. This isn't a laughing trip through the world of intentional religious communities, however; she is a woman on a mission. Eventually the mission bears fruit, if not exactly in the way she would have predicted; always a seeker of the simple, quiet life, Christmas is drawn to the convent for its freedom from outside distraction,  constant exhortations to spiritual mindfulness, and above all -- meaningful work.  The monotony of everyday experience, however, and the inviting presence of her children and would-be spouse outside, diminish the allure. She finds her path, however, and for the religiously-inclined or spiritually-interested reader, And Then There Were Nuns will prove informative and engaging; it is a humanizing look at people who seem to have an otherworldly existence.