As a follow up to The Guns of August, I listened to The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890 – 1914, which Barbara W. Tuchman published as a sequel to The Guns of August, so I feel like I did this in the correct order.
The Proud Tower isn’t so much a cohesive narrative book as much as a series of essays Tuchman published in various periodicals collected in one volume, and each describes a different part of the world in the 25 years prior to the outbreak of the war, focusing on political, cultural, and economic climates in various regions of the world of the time.
This book was informative although extremely disconnected, which I suppose makes sense as the pieces in it were all originally separately published. Each chapter did have a main idea and one difference between this book and The Guns of August was that this book had a chapter devoted to the United States, with Tuchman’s central idea for the chapter that the USA gave up its century plus policy of neutrality and pacifism to embrace the imperialistic attitudes of nineteenth century Europe.
I found this book interesting although the lack of overall message/theme renders it a bit useless as anything but exactly what it is – a collection of essays. That said, as usual I liked Tuchman’s writing, humor, and the way she presented information in an accessible way. It’s a good popular history of supplemental reading. Again, as someone whose knowledge of European history from 1800 – 1914 is spotty at best, any popular history book that can hold interest and provide insight into the world during that time is a valuable resource (presuming of course, it isn’t completely wrong). Tuchman’s book does that.
Final note: the title of the book comes from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem ‘The City in the Sea.’ The passage reads While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down.
Tag Archives: genre: non-fiction
White Fragility
In 2020, when I listened to a few books about racial justice in the United States in part due to the clear violence shown to black people by police of all stripes, Robin DeAngelo’s White Fragility was the first book I listened to…and I hated it. For a lot of reasons.
You know how Alex Jones spouted far right conspiracy theories and reality denying bullshit (Sandy Hook massacre didn’t happen) for the grift? White Fragility is the same thing for a very specific brand of woke leftist person. This is a grift.
DeAngelo sets out to instruct white racists (because we white people are all guilty of racism by literally existing as white) how to do the work and to self examine the new original sin. But we white people are not allowed to ask questions (because it is not the job of black people to educate us), we are not allowed to deny charges of racism (this is just more evidence of said racism), we are not allowed to show emotion of any kind (because this makes it ‘about us’ and not the black folks we are racist against). White people are now allowed to feel unsafe, only black people are. White people are there to sit and agree as DeAngelo declares us all morally stained with no hope of redemption and no solution to overcoming any implicit bias or bettering the country in which we live.
In addition to being informed that I was hopelessly morally compromised, a lot of DeAngelo’s anti-racist evangelism involves infantilizing black people. Like, a lot. I’m not going to pretend that I had tons of black friends, but I had some. I’m not going to pretend I fully understand the black American experience. I do not. But I’ve met enough black people and had enough black friends to know that they are 1) not some monolith of experience and 2) they do not require me (or any white people) to sit in a corner and silently contemplate my innate and all permeating racism so that they can feel equal or whatever it is DeAngelo is pushing. It’s insulting, frankly, and my friends deserve better.
If you’d like to read an article about White Fragility that very much states my feelings on the issue with the added bonus of being written by a black man, you can do so here. John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and I saved his article because I knew one day I’d be writing this review and his eloquence and experience on these issues far outmatch mine.
The reason I say this book is a grift is because DeAngelo is a white woman who ‘consults’ about social justice and race relations for educational institutions, in the corporate world, wherever she can pedal her snake oil. McWhorter says she’s well intentioned, but I think he’s being generous. I think she’s a con artist. As per DeAngelo, I have no hope of ever improving either myself or the world I live in. I am irredeemable and so is American society, and so what is the point in her engaging with us except to make money on our guilt and a desire to improve the world for our fellow human beings? If she’s not helping to make things better because things can’t be made better, then what is she doing besides selling snake oil for an ailment that can’t be cured?
I’m not an expert on race relations, or social justice, or history or anything, really. But I try to be a good person to everyone, I try to fight any implicit bias I may have when I realize I have it, and I’m pretty damn good at spotting a con artist when I see one. Robin DeAngelo is a con artist and I’m out on her bullshit. Everyone else should be too.
Democracy in America
This one was dense. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was definitely one of the thickest books of 2020. I listened to it based on the recommendation of one of my Twitter acquaintances, who, sadly, has mostly left the platform (not that I blame him). Anyway, de Tocqueville came to the United States to see the relatively new republic in action, and the work he wrote when he returned to France remains one of the most timeless books about the United States. It’s quoted by Colin Woodard (who I love), and while I haven’t noticed it quoted in other place, my Twitter acquaintance claims its frequently cited, and I tend to believe him because he loved books like this.
Anyway, I found this book extremely interesting and insightful, and I’m rather devastated I lost most of my notes on it (I took a lot of them) in a great notebook tragedy of 2020 (my cat spilled a pitcher of water over all my stuff). de Tocqueville’s purpose in writing the book was to examine the ‘revolution’ taking place – not an actual bloody revolution, but the social and economic conditions happening in a republican experiment in which the majority of the population bought in.
It was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840 and focused on several main themes, including the impact of a Puritan founding (which was a lot about the separation of church and state and religious freedom, not common in Europe at the time), the Constitution (the Puritans originally developed the concept of popular sovereignty in some early piece of American political thought and the Founding Fathers developed institutions to protect popular sovereignty, but de Tocqueville argued that freedom is protected more by American habits of thought than any real institution) and the situation of women (where women at the time did not have much more freedom than anywhere else but de Tocqueville did predict they would become ‘just as equal as men.’)
I found Democracy in America a valuable and insightful history book and apparently it’s still studied in political science, sociology, and history spheres. Lots of different view points on the political spectrum like to be able to claim it as a document of support, which I suppose means it does a pretty good job of being well written and neutral.
Readers beware: this book is pretty dense. It’s probably going to take you awhile to get through, but it is interesting and still relevant today.
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
Fun fact: Thomas Jefferson used to be my favorite founding father. In my twenties it changed to Washington but that’s another story.
I’ve always been interested in Jefferson, since I was a kid. I think one my first book reports was on him when we had to do a biography. This book came out in 2012, I think but I didn’t get around to it until 2020. It had been on my radar for several years but Jon Meacham’s books are thick and I wasn’t entirely sold on them until I listened to his book about Andrew Jackson. After that I decided to give some of his other books a try.
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power explores Jefferson’s ability to be both philosopher and politician. Philosophers think and politicians maneuver, and Jefferson was one of the rare men who could do both. Meacham presents Jefferson’s world as he saw it, and what shaped him in his formative years as a boy and a young man. He was interested in and passionate about many things, including but not limited to science, architecture, gardens, books, his friends, family and women. Jefferson loved his home, Monticello, and the city of Paris, but he loved his country most of all and he was constantly looking for ways to achieve what he would consider a founding principle: creation, survival, and success of popular government.
This book takes us through his time as a leader – marshalling ideas (and cohorts), learning from mistakes, forming coalitions in a bitterly partisan time and a time of economic upheaval. Meacham presents Jefferson as possibly the most successful leader of the early American republic with possibly the most widely ranging influence – he championed individual liberty but recognized the new nation’s promise lay in progress, he argued for a small executive branch but he bought the Louisiana Territory, plus he wrote the Declaration of Independence and he established the University of Virginia. He had the usual complicated relationship with race, as did many men of his time.
I enjoyed this book greatly. I especially appreciated the look at Jefferson’s formative years, where you could begin to see that traits that would so clearly appear later on. Meacham does a commendable job explaining one of our most enigmatic founders, and the book is well researched.
Fun fact: My favorite quote from this book was “Jefferson found himself in a debate with a seven year old.” I just started laughing when I heard it read. The context was that Jefferson had to convince his daughter, Polly, to come to Paris with him and her sister, Patsy. Polly didn’t want to go.
Curly Girl: The Handbook
I don’t remember how old I was when I decided to stop straightening my hair. I think I was in college. I was tired of all the extra work, and the damage all the straightening caused. Plus, dudes liked my curly hair more than my straight hair, and if that wasn’t the kind of external validation I needed, I don’t know what was.
I didn’t pick up Lorraine Massey’s Curly Girl: The Handbook until a couple of years later though. I skimmed through it when I got it, focusing on a couple of parts, but didn’t read the whole thing cover to cover until … COVID, you guessed it.
I’d recommend this book to anyone looking to understand their curly hair. Learning what my curl pattern was, plus how to take care of it (curly hair is not a monolith) was invaluable. Things I learned on closer examination of this book:
+ ingredients that are good for curly hair (as well as ingredients that are not)
+ tools to use when dealing with curly hair
+ how to style my hair
+ how to wash my hair so as to be gentle with and support the curl pattern
+ foods that support healthy curly hair
…among other things.
I would very much recommend this book to anyone trying to embrace their natural hair. There’s tons of good information and I went from hating my curly hair to loving it. That’s a great feeling.
American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good
American Character is the second book I’ve read by Colin Woodard, with American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America being the first. You don’t need to read American Nations to understand American Character, but it does help – Woodard advances the argument in American Nations that the United States is one large country actually made up of eleven smaller regional ‘nations’ – that is, geographic areas that are culturally entirely different from each other. (FWIW, American Nations was one of the best books on this I ever read/listened to. It was everything you already subconsciously knew put forward in such a way that you kick yourself for not fully realizing it sooner).
American Character takes this idea a step further – the American republic has always been built on argument. That’s the point and – hundreds of years later – is still the most brilliant thing about our Constitution. There’s not usually a ‘right’ answer. The argument is meant to be reframed and changed over and over again as the people living under the Constitution change with it. Freedom is change – always changing for the better idea. The trouble is, each ‘nation’ has a different idea of what the better idea is.
Individual rights vs. the common good has been a central argument for as long as we’ve been around. Woodard follows both these philosophies through from when we but thirteen humble colonies (lol) to today, guiding us through four hundred years of social experiments. Who doesn’t love a good social experiment?
I did like this book. Woodard’s historical examples are pertinent and I enjoy his skill in building a narrative. The book is well researched and it follows the arguments laid out in American Nations to their next logical steps. I found his suggestions for maintaining balance between individual liberties while benefitting the collective pragmatic and attainable as long as we want to attain them.
Woodard has put out a third book in 2020 that ties into his ‘American Nations’ trilogy, called Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood. It’s already on my TBR pile.
Say Nothing
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is a 2018 non-fiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe. It focuses on The Troubles in Northern Ireland following the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten children, whose family was ultimately destroyed by her murder.
I would like to start off by saying how I just cannot get over, since I was old enough to know what it was, that the Irish/UK named this bloody, armed conflict ‘The Troubles’ like they’re discussing a pair of disobedient shih tzus and not several decades worth of paramilitary organizations terrorism and guerrilla warfare. It absolutely floors me to this day.
Anyway, Say Nothing was probably my favorite non-fiction book in 2020. I didn’t do as many non-fiction books in 2020 as in years past, but I did do a fair few (some dense) and this was probably my favorite one. In a conflict with no shortage of characters and role players, Keefe did a very good job of digging into the personalities and politics of key players in the IRA since 1972, including Dolours and Marian Price.
I didn’t – still don’t – have a particularly good grip on the history and politics surrounding The Troubles. Keefe did a good job explaining a lot of the key elements of the conflict, but there’s obviously a lot more than can fit into any single volume. He combines the history, politics, and biographies into this book and ultimately uses Jean McConville’s murder as a lens to reflect on what these extremely brutal conflicts meant to the people affected by them.
Keefe also claims to have solved McConville’s murder. McConville’s murder was considered particularly outrageous as she was the only caregiver of ten children. Keefe used the testimony of two of three of McConville’s kidnappers – Pat McClure and Dolours Price – as well as other independent corroborators to deduce the third ‘Unknown’ (a highly secretive group within the IRA) that pulled the trigger. The former IRA members had said that they wouldn’t be naming the person because the person was still alive, but considering Keefe’s deductions I’m inclined to say he was right.
Say Nothing was an excellent book that I went back to physically buy after completing the audiobook. It’s a keeper. Last item of note: Keefe takes the title from Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.’
Napoleon: A Life
My friend Kevin recommended this book to me when I asked him for a book about Napoleon. This is one of the last books I listened to while I was still commuting to work and before the pandemic really kicked off.
I don’t know a lot about Napoleon or much about what was going on in Europe during that time because, frankly, it’s a gaping hole in my education.
As this is the only book about Napoleon I’ve read, I don’t have anything to compare it to. That said, I found this to be a very informative biography. I only had a sketchy idea of the French political circumstances surrounding Napoleon and his rise to power, and this really helped me understand how he became one of the most notorious rulers in the history of France/Europe. Further, I read that author Andrew Roberts was able to take advantage of a recently, never before published thirty-three thousand letter correspondence which further clarified Napoleon’s character. Ambitious, resentful of French rule over his home island of Corsica, he eventually joins the French military, rises through the ranks during the French Revolution, out foxes his co-conspirators in his coup d’etat, and became the Emperor of France. Easy.
This biography is 926 pages, I think the audiobook was about 35 hours. It was fascinating. I didn’t notice the length. It was a brilliant, fascinating book. As I understand, Napoleon understood the importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs (dictated in exile?) became some of the most popular books of the nineteenth century and this only enriches the narrative.
I very much enjoyed this biography. If you’re looking for a definitive biography, this is definitely the place to start.
The Man From the Train
The Man From the Train is a true crime book by Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James, in which the James’ lay out the case for discovery of a previously unrealized/overlooked serial killer in North America from the 1890s until about 1912.
Bill James, a baseball historian and statistician by trade, originally started his research in an attempt to solve the Villisca axe murders, which were the rather famous unsolved murders of an entire family in Villisca, Iowa in June 1912.
In the course of investigating the Villisca murders, James expanded his search to similar cases in the United States during that time frame – and found a lot. Like, I thought it was a surprisingly large number of family murders. From 1890 to 1912, there were approximately 8 entire families murdered per year in the United States. James gave this number as average. Most of these murders were not related to the murders the James’ connected in this book – the murders linked in this book involved several pieces of evidence present/reported on at all the scenes but not linked as a pattern by law enforcement at the time. Sharing information was hard to begin with due to distance, plus law enforcement can be territorial, and most law enforcement believed there was a local connection between the dead families and whoever killed them. You can understand their reasoning. Why would you wipe out an entire family for what appeared to be no reason?
The James’ found family murders that occurred in Nova Scotia, Arkansas, Oregon, Kansas, Florida and other locations that all fit certain patterns: all of the families lived only a few hundred feet from railroad junctions in small towns with little to no police force, none of the families had a dog to warn of an intruder, the families had barns where the killer probably spent a few days watching them first, the murder weapon was always the blunt edge of an axe, the victims were usually covered with a sheet before being killed (probably to prevent spatter), the axe was left in plain sight, the bodies were moved/stacked after death, the parents almost never showed signs of a struggle but the young girls usually did, there was no apparent robbery, and some other details that consistently showed up throughout the linked crimes. James believed the motive for/major factor in the murders was a sadistic attraction to prepubescent girls – hence the girls frequently showed signed of a struggle and signs that they’d been molested after death, and that the killer had ejaculated at the scene. (Gross).
They eventually reveal a suspect in the case – an immigrant named Paul Mueller. Mueller is only ever linked to the case of a murdered family in West Brookfield, Massachusetts by contemporary sources at the time, but a physical description of a short but well built German immigrant who spoke little English and who was a German veteran of WWI appears in a local paper. He had unusually small and wide spaced teeth, and worked as an itinerant lumberjack with good wood working and carpentry skills. Considering most of the family murders investigated by James took place in or near logging communities and with an axe, the possibility of Mueller jumping on and off trains for jobs in different parts of the country and murdering an entire family as a hobby isn’t implausible.
The only year the James’ didn’t find any family murders who fit the pattern was 1908, leading them to speculate the man from the train was imprisoned for a minor crime during that time. The murders stop not long after the Villsca murders, and the James’ believe Mueller may have left the States when private investigators and the media begin to call attention to the fact that a single person may have been traveling on the nation’s railway system and killing people at an alarming rate. They’re fairly confident the same person committed at least 14 family murders for a total of 59 victims, and are less certain of his involvement in another 25 for a total of 93 victims. They also ruled out the man from the train from being the Axeman of New Orleans. Same fun axe but different patterns at the crime scenes.
James also goes into the consequences of some of these murders – one particularly haunting story was in the deep South (Georgia? Florida?) where a couple of black men (including a mentally challenged man) were lynched for a family murder the man from the train probably committed. Police targeted them and harassed them into confessing, telling the man with the IQ of a seven year old if he just tells them he did it, he can go home – you know , all the usual heartbreaking fun you find in these recurrent nightmare stories of criminal “justice” in the United States.
As one last thing to think about, James calls attention to the 1922 Hinterkaifeck murders in Germany, noting the similarities between that family murder and the murders committed by the man from the train. Again, James theorizes Mueller left the United States when the family murders began being linked by journalists and private investigators in 1911. Since we know serial killers don’t stop unless they’re caught or die, it’s not impossible Mueller committed these murders too, although there’s no proof. Even James admitted it was a toss up.
I found this book really compelling, and for whatever reason, very scary. Just the idea of someone jumping off a train, hiding in your barn/house for days/weeks/months, watching your every move, then murdering whole families was so creepy and upsetting to me. Scholars of this sort of thing find James’ & McCarthy James’ theory plausible and even the best possibility for solving the Villisca murders. It’s safe to say that after 110+ years, we’ll never know what happened for sure, but the case for a serial killer who went undetected for two decades is quite compelling here. And as we know, the term “serial killer” wasn’t used until decades later and are weren’t understood (better understood, anyway) until much later.
The writing could be a bit informal at times, but for the most part I found the writing engaging and interesting. I highly recommend The Man From the Train. Is some of it speculating? Yes. But while the named suspect (Paul Mueller) might not be correct, I think the case that the same person committed multiple family murders over a vast swath of North America has more than been made here. Fascinating book, wonderful job by Bill James and his daughter.
Calypso
Calypso is the latest of David Sedaris’ collections of essays that I listened to on audiobook. As always, I liked it, but some of these essay collections are becoming a bit repetitive? I don’t know if it’s because I’ve heard so many of Sedaris’ stories before or if it’s because they’re really repeating, but I felt like I knew several of these pretty well already, including ‘Now We Are Five,’ which Sedaris wrote after his youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide.
Anyway, in spite of the fact that I felt like I had heard some of these stories before, this is an excellent collection of stories. Sedaris’ observation of the world around us and his wit in interpreting them and sharing them, are not fading as he ages. And this book is very much about middle age and the stark reality that most of his future is now behind him.
Anyway, Calypso did not disappoint. I very much loved listening to Sedaris’ tell us about getting a stomach bug while on a book tour and his realization that his body will eventually betray him. It was a darkly funny book that offered belly laughs.
words in scarlet ink 