What I'm Reading, by Topic

MUSIC
23/9/3 Opera Anecdotes by Ethan Mordden ★★★★★

A soprano, on a tour in Mexico, was captured by bandits who turned out to be music lovers unwilling to molest a daughter of art. They agreed to let her go - if she proved that she was indeed a prima donna of the opera.
"How can I do that?"
"Sing!"
"What? Sing in a cavern? Before rabble? Without footlights, makeup or costumes? No lords in the boxes? No critics in the pit? No bouquets hurled at the curtain? No money in the box office?"
"Let her go," signed the bandit chief. "She's a prima donna, all right.

As many stories need setups, you can learn quite a bit about the history of opera performance rather painlessly.

The book covers singers, conductors, impresarios from Caruso to Toscanini, everyone but the operagoers. To address this deficit, I have a story of my own to add.

A friend of mine is a big classical music lover, and though he collected many opera overtures, had never been to the opera. Some new friends, however, were opera fans and determined this must be remedied ASAP. So before long there they were in fancy dress, in their seats, the house lights dimmed and music starting to play. Suddenly my friend's eyes lit up and he could not resist whispering to his friends, "Hey, they're playing the Carmen overture!"

Love history, classical music and the work of Greenberg, but somehow the three do not really go well together. The historical treatement is too superficial and often goes into folklore and the like while the musical connection is too slight and the amount of music too small. Greenberg states that the two best national anthems are La Marseillaise (of France) and that of Austria, "by Haydn". However, this is an error. The Austrian national anthem was composed by Holzer. The nation that uses a Haydn composition is Germany.

THEATER
23/5/12 Showstoppers!: The Surprising Backstage Stories of Broadway's Most Remarkable Songs by Gerald Nachman ★★★★

The book's title isn't kidding. It's organized around actual Broadway showstoppers, that is, songs that the audience loved so much that they wouldn't stop applauding unless it was sung again - sometimes up to six times - or encored with special verses written for that sole purpose.

But really the songs are a skeleton of a structure, an excuse for the author to idiosyncratically free associate, much as I'm about to do now.

I used to read the author's theater reviews in the SF Chronicle and listen to him weekly on a radio trivia program. His book, Seriously Funny, about the comedians of the 60s is rather good, probably better than this one.

He was mostly a traditionalist. I remember on the show he used to ask, "Can you explain the TV show FRIENDS to me? Why do people think it's funny? I don't get it." This viewpoint also shows up in the book. Although the introduction mentions Hamilton!, Phantom of the Opera is about as daring and recent as it gets, and it tends to be harsh on more modern works. Wicked, for example, is basically called a work only meant for teenage girls.

This attitude got him in trouble at his newspaper job. At that time SF had probably the most avant-garde theater scene in America and he would routinely pan most of it, reserving praise only for revivals and the occasional lascivious show, such as the Brazilian Oba Oba carnival show that featured topless dancers. (Some of that lascivious attitude pops up in the book from time to time.) After a while, local theater producers tired of it and banded together to write a letter of protest to the paper and to deny it any future complimentary review tickets. One way or another he left the paper not long after. His search for something else to do is probably the reason we have these books.

Much of this book is choppy and a bit sloppy. For a lot of these shows, there will be a paragraph of description of some aspect and then a couple paragraphs later, part of the same information will be repeated. Not word for word, but basically saying the same thing. It doesn't happen enough to be annoying, but it is odd. Similarly, after the main section for each show, there is a special section, in a completely different typeface, that is supposed to be the behind the scenes dish. But the thing is, a lot of what we've just been reading has already been the same kind of material. How something gets in one section or the other is mysterious. Maybe the first section is what the author wrote and the second what researchers found for him? Even more strangely, sometimes this second section will start out in paragraph format and then on the next page suddenly switch to bullet format. Overall, it feels like a much stronger editor was needed here.

Another odd thing are frequent mentions of what's available on YouTube, but only for some shows. It's odd because the author doesn't seem to realize that YouTube is not necessarily a stable offering. Videos come and go with considerable frequency. It's also odd that only some shows get this YouTube coverage; others have nothing at all in this respect. After a while I kind of got the idea that the author just cannot help commenting on whatever he encounters and throws it into the book.

One useful realization from all this is that unlike Fiddler on the Roof, most of these musicals were not well-translated into film. If you can manage to see them on stage, or a filmed version of the stage production, it's a good idea because they're more artistically valid and complete on stage. Movies tend to drop many of the songs, for example, and sometimes warped the story just to to build up the career of a particular star.

It also helps you understand the many different ways that a song eventually does gain showstopper status.

The show quotes Broadway historian Ethan Mordden quite a bit and I considered whether it wouldn't be better to just read Mordden instead, but this seems to offer the larger quantity of behind the scenes reality.

The author is no longer with us. The trivia show continues, probably, but without the Chronicle columnists I knew so well, so I no longer send in contributions or even listen as it isn't the same. This book becomes for me an echo of a half-forgotten past.

FILM
24/6/7 Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood by Ed Zwick ★★★★★

A revealing look at the way movies and series are made from a writer-director with a higher sense of integrity than many. People like Julia Roberts, Matthew Broderick and Anne Hathaway do not come off so well here.

The topic is a great one, but deserved a better account.
The publisher made a huge, heavy book that's more intended to sit on a coffee table than actually be read. They should have been nicer to us and put it out in two smaller volumes.
The author is an academic and, I would venture, very pleased with herself, constantly going on about which celebrities she has talked to in person and which shows she has seen in person. It gets a little tiring.
Some films get very skimpy treatment and the index has problems.
The point of the book should be insights and understanding, but they're not as good and as frequent as one would would expect. Many remarks are rather obvious or simply unsubstantiated opinions.

TELEVISION
24/9/25 The Making of Pride and Prejudice by Sue Birtwistle, Susie Conklin ★★★★★

It reads somwhat choppily at first, the many sections having been written by so many different people – producers, directors, lighting, camera, costume, makeup, script, music, choreography and on and on and on – and the rating was going to be a 4 until I reached the interview with Colin Firth who gave just a masterful tour through his portrayal of Darcy. This chapter alone is worth the price of admission. There are a few areas where more could have been done. They didn't speak to the musician, Melvyn Tan, for example, or explain how they came to cast the principals, but on the other hand there are so many photographs, probably averaging at least a few on every page.

I watched virtually every Siskel and Ebert program from the beginning, have rewatched almost all of them since on YouTube, seen nearly all their ouside appearances, heard them on radio, and read nearly everything written about them, and yet this author still found new things to reveal about them and their show. Hats off to Matt Singer!

One error, though. He states that the only time one of them changed their minds was the time Ebert got Siskel to reverse on the movie Broken Arrow. But that's not true. Ebert also changed his mind once, on The World According to Garp. I was so astonished when that happened that I have always remembered it.

The only possible complaint one could have about this book is that there isn't more, more, more. What all that might be I'm not sure exactly, but I would have liked to have seen at least one of their famous crosstalks in full, just so that readers who haven't seen the show could read an example of what it was like.

The title doesn't really state it, but this is primarily an oral history from the actors, writers and producers, one that contains several new revelations.
It amuses me that the "suits" come off worst.

This is a breezy read covering life behind the scenes on Seinfeld, plus some elements of the fandom. There were several things I had not known before, despite being pretty well-versed – nice! The only thing I couldn't understand was that unlike most of the main writers who go special sections devoted to them, Larry Charles did not. The "other Larry" wrote some of the very best episodes such as "The Subway", "The Trip", "The Bubble Boy", and "The Outing", making his omission unaccountable.

ARCHITECTURE
23/5/2 The Hidden White House: Harry Truman and the Reconstruction of America's Most Famous Residence by Robert Klara ★★★★

Come for amusing stories about the Trumans. Stay to see how even with the very best of intentions, a huge project can still in some important ways go wrong.

It's unaccountable that the most famous story I had heard about this White House restoration - that the builders wanted to blow open a wider main entrance so that they could get a bulldozer inside, but there were stopped at the last second by Truman himself, who told them that they were not allowed the damage the exterior walls and would have to disassemble the bulldozer, reassembling it inside - is never mentioned. Even if the story is a myth, shouldn't it at least be mentioned as one?

I also still don't understand how so many of the interior beams got notch marks on them, or how the 1814 fire would explain that.

Sometimes it bogs down a bit too much in all the rebuilding detail, but usually it's an amusing and sometimes truth-exposing read.

ART
17/3/17 Typographic Milestones by Allan Haley ★★★★+
17/2/26 Alphabet: The History, Evolution, and Design of the Letters We Use Today by Allan Haley ★★★★
09/12/6 Leonardo: the first scientist by Michael White ★★★★
06/8/21 Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling by Ross King ★★★★
06/6/21 The Lost Painting by Jonathan Harr ★★★★
02/07/10 Cave Temples of Mogao by Roderick & Susan Whitfield, Neville Agnew ★★★★★

LITERARY CRITICISM
24/3/27 Breve Introduccion a la novela policiaca latina by Ricardo Vigueras Fernández ★★★★★

The historical mystery novel set in Ancient Rome has become quite popular in recent years, encompassing a large number of sales and authors. This book takes a welcome look at the phenomenon as well as a deep dive into the classical underpinnings and symbology of three of these novels (by Saylor, J.M. Roberts and Borrell). One tends to read these novels as light entertainments with a smattering of learning, but this book shows that the authors have actually embeddded quite a bit of careful and interesting detail that can be appreciated if we but know ow to look.

I would like to thank the author for including prominent mention and praise for my website histmyst.org on the topic, where this book will shortly be available in free English translation.

They went through Herge's files and found the source pictures that many of the illustrations are based on, especially planes, trains, ships and buildings and shows the before and after side by side. There's also a fair amount of biographical information, for example, why he had to stop satirizing Nazi Germany, which had taken over Belgium and France, and move to non-political topics such as in Shooting Star, Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure. You also find out about easter eggs such as when he drew himself or his friends into a scene and about how the art and stories changed from the original black-and-white newspaper strips to to color books, including changes that occurred because times and technology had changed or for cultural reasons.

Warning: besides spoiling Ackroyd, this also spoils Christie's Endless Nights and Curtain.
This is not as good as his book on Sherlock Holmes. It's not as strong and it takes too many diversions far afield of the topic.
Interesting point that the narrative never seems to out and out definitively state who the culprit is. If we think the narrative contains lies, we have to consider which parts are lies and which are true.
Author has no hesitation regarding extreme tangents. Freud, Oedipus, Endless Nights, delusion. It's an interesting idea to think of Oedipus as the first mystery story though.
Ackroyd could have killed himself and done so in that way to frame someone else. It's a little difficult to imagine Ackroyd inviting her to climb through the window, though technically plausible. By the way, the whole thing about footprints on the windowsill doesn't work for me. The window is way too small to allow anyone to put their weight on a foot there. Christie should have put a dirty footprint on the floor instead.

The author suggests that Woody Allen's film Love & Death (which every Russophile should see) got that title because those two topics are what 19th century Russian novels are all about. But I'm skeptical. I think he wanted to suggest a parody of War & Peace. So, like War & Peace, he chose a double-barreled title separated by an ampersand. Like War & Peace, both are grand concepts. War & Peace signals an initial bad time followed by a good time, but like any satirical work, he wants to say thing only get worse, hence, Love is followed by Death.
Says that the great conflict in Russia since Peter the Great has been between those who want to Europeanize and those who want to build on Slavic traditions. Turgenev was part of the former group, while both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky at times would lean toward the latter, without fully embracing that ethos, however.
It was interesting that at one point Dostoesvsky was in such dire straits that he promised a publisher to write a novella within a certain short time span or else give up the rights to all his books for eight years. He wasn't writing and it was becoming dangerous when a friend suggested he try this new thing called stenography. By dictating the book he was able to complete it in time and collect the reward. The fact that he was speaking rather than writing changed the nature of his narrative, making it more fluid and conversational. Then he married the stenographer as well.
Chekhov was a generation or more later than Tolstoy and while he was at first impressed with him, over time he felt more critical. His short stories that have a heroine named Anna are actually critiques of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
This book was not bad, but really depends on one having read the books recently. At times I would have preferred it concentrate more on larger themes rather than assume we know all the plot details it depends on.

A few of the more interesting details I learned from reading this book:

The life ambition of John Quincy Adams was actually to be a professional poet.

Though he read voraciously, Abraham Lincoln could never get much interested in fiction, except for that of Edgar Allan Poe.

Theodore Roosevelt brought his working manuscript on the War of 1812 along on his honeymoon!
Other notes

Missed the ghostwriting of Obama's books, but very harsh on JFK for same.

Surprisingly positive on Truman's book, which nevertheless does not sound very readable.

Quite positive on Reagan's Hollywood biography, which is little praised elsewhere.
Didn't care for organization too much, the flitting back and forth between presidents. The admission in the end notes of heavy reliance on summary books was a bit disturbing.

There's a lot of interesting information in this book beyond the travel sites. Jane Austen came from a smart family. A great uncle on her mother's side was master for fifty years of Balliol, one of the oldest colleges in Oxford. He was one of Jane's favorite relatives. Two of her brothers did amazingly well in the navy, one becoming a rear admiral, the other Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank attainable. The Austens also allowed one of their kids to be adopted by a childless couple and he seemed to have a wonderful life, doing the Grand Tour of Europe for several years. The grand house he inherited may have inspired some of the houses in the books. There's also a lot of information about Jane's activities that might not exactly come up in the same way in a conventional biography. When her books were getting close to publication, she used to live in London and correct proof copies. While waiting for the next printng, she chose to spend her time at museums, plays and shopping. It's also surprising, for a writer, the number of places she went to attend balls. Or maybe not so surprising. Probably she saw these as ripe occasions for close observation of human behavior that she could use in her novels. Turns out she could be a bit harsh as well. She replied to a letter of her sister's asking how she could have danced four times with such a stupid person (p. 151). Crazy editing error on p. 158. In the middle of one of those wall of text paragraphs, you read two sentences and then find them repeated all over again. Also amusing is the situation with the Prince Regent, the future George IV. Jane didn't like this debauched royal at all, but he liked her work! What's an author to do? He even had his people write her that she could dedicate her next work to him. Jane thought to pass on this option, but oh no, the publisher insisted. So she wrote a tersest dedication possible, but even this the publisher found unacceptable, and substituted a long, flowery one. Then she had to deal with the prince's librarian who kept suggesting ideas for her next book, always requesting a character based on the librarian himself. This book covers all six of the novels, and most of the modern movies and series based on them, plus the biographical movies like Becoming Jane and Miss Austen Regrets. Sometimes there's a bit too much detail. Are we really going to visit a place because Austen's cousin or in-law's spouse went there? Doubtful. But this is really an incredible, magisterial work that covers everything anyone could ask for, and beautifully so. There are even extensive appendices that list family trees, further reading, itineraries and lists of locations for each of the films and series, even some locations not otherwise mentioned in the book. There is even a thoughtful end flap to the back cover, very useful as an ever-present bookmark when carrying the book on the go.

Not that much text, but the incredibly charming illustrations just draw you in to a delightful world you will regret leaving when you reach the end.

LANGUAGE
23/11/8 The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins by Anne Curzan ★★★

Weird course in which a language geek pedantically tells us not to be pedantic.

It's main advantage is in its comprehensiveness, delving into many kinds of words, including words shared from other languages, idioms and expressions, slang, words from sports, war, and so on.

The conceptualization of the Anglo-Saxon invasion is not to date.

The Indo-European language is not well-explained.

Claims that the OED states that the origin of the expression "touch base" is in British English. But the OED is online now and I checked: it says it's from American Baseball. Now I'm wondering about the correctness of a lot of the other surprising "facts" she cited. (Actually, my instinct was that the meaning of "touch base" works better with the game Tag than Baseball, but I suppose the OED have spent time on this.)

Her speculations on why words have developed the way they have seem almost always wrong. For example, consider the tenses of drink: drink - drank - drunk. She states that some people are starting to say "have drank" rather than "have drunk" and gives as the reason that the "a" vowel is more similar to what is done with other verbs. Never mind that there is a counterexample of "swim - swam - swum", what about the elephant in the room? "I have drunk" or "You have drunk" can sound an awful lot like I, or you, am/are a drunk. So of course people are going to tend to avoid that.

I didn't care for the way she often tried to be funny, failing every time.

I prefer The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer or The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter for this type of course, even though more dated in the area of slang. But slang changes very quickly and even this course from the 2012 is often obsolete in this area.

PHILOSOPHY
15/12/27 Great minds of the Western intellectual tradition: The Enlightenment and its critics, Part 4 by various ★★
10/1/11 Practical philosophy: the Greco-Roman Moralists, Part 2 by Luke Timothy Johnson ★★
09/11/2 Practical philosophy: the Greco-Roman Moralists, Part 1 by Luke Timothy Johnson ★★★
08/10/25 Plato and Aristotle: the genesis of western thought by Aryeh Kosman ★★★★
08/04/18 Giants of philosophy. Plato by Berel Lang ★★★
07/04/13 The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand ★★★★★
02/05/30 The Solitaire Mystery by Jostein Gaarder ★★★
02/05/16 Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder ★★★★

PSYCHOLOGY
24/2/1 Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather ★★★

I believe the author was an INFJ and this will probably only really be appreciated by types such as INFJ, ENFJ, ISFJ and ESFJ that primary use extroverted Feeling (Fe). Those who use introverted Feeling (Fi) will probably get much less out of it as they are less troubled by the search for identity and authenticity.

TRUE CRIME
22/6/1 Finding Chandra: A True Washington Murder Mystery by Scott Higham & Sari Horwitz ★★★★

TRAVEL ESSAY
23/7/21 The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell ★★★★★
23/5/29 The grand tour in Italy (1700-1800) by Paul Franklin Kirby ★★★

This book is a series of anecdotes and excerpts on 18th century English travel to Italy. It is very well organized, every topic nicely sorted into an appropriate chapter and section. The rhythm of the writing takes some getting used to, not really for me until about page 100. As is often the case for books from earlier eras, there are frequent quotations in Italian and Latin, untranslated. There are also frequent mentions of by now obscure individuals whom one is expected to know about as there is little to no explanation of who they are. In a lot of ways this is more of a set of resources than a satisfying narrative.

It's probably a good thing I didn't read this 1989 book -- though I probably had it -- before I traveled to Guatemala and Belize in 1995 because I might never have gone. The book's tales of guerrilla wars, atrocities and tourists getting robbed are downright scary. Gives a bad mark to the Eisenhower administration as well, which toppled a nascent democracy just because the gigantic United Fruit Company didn't like the looks of what was happening.
As it was, my trip didn't go too badly. Tour groups were often quite small, often just me, and never larger than about 15. My first night in Guatemala City the hotel people told me not to go out in the evening because they couldn't vouch for my safety. I felt cheated by the idea, so I defied them and walked the high street to the end of the urban area and back. No problems, though it was rather boring and few people were out.
I was cheated by the currency exchange people in the hotel who gave me some cash that was no longer valid, the currency having been devalued. This was something virtually no tourist would be able to figure out, until they tried to spend it, that is. I should have just destroyed the currency so that people couldn't perpetuate this trick on foreigners, but I was so incensed that here I was bringing my money to this country that nobody wanted to travel to and still they felt that they had to cheat me. I asked my tour guide for help. He wouldn't take it himself, but he did know someone who was willing to change it for me and did.
I got to Belize by flying via El Salvador. On the way, there was rumor of a bomb on board, so we had to wait while they put everyone's luggage on the tarmac and then we had to go out and identify what was ours and then wait some more while they put it all back on again. Really an anxious time when you don't know Spanish and have no idea what is going on.
Other incidents:

my watch died in the extremely humid Tikal region

the tour jeep stuck in the mud on the way to Xunantunich, so I never reached that site, sadly

one day in Guatemala the tour guide elected to bring about ten family members along
Overall, I would still say it was a good trip. Even went on some dates with other tourists. In a curious development, I found out in Belize that my usual tour guide had three wives, none of whom knew about the others. I asked him how he could possibly handle the Christmas holidays, which were upcoming at that point. He just said he made himself scarce around those times. Three wives weren't even enough for him. He was even flirting with the receptionist where I would book my day trips. I considered telling her, but didn't. He even made a pass at a young, blonde tourist in a narrow tunnel. Bad guy.
Anyway, this was a great book in its time. It's only downside now, as with all journalistic efforts, is that it is no longer up to date.

Only about two of the stories – one about a youthful trip to Mexico with a very special soccer match and one about a shark encounter – were good; the rest bored.

GENERAL ESSAY
07/05/13 Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris ★★★★★

POLITICS
20/12/24 Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein ★★★
15/11/6 Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, Part 2 by Dennis Dalton ★★★★
15/10/28 Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, Part 1 by Dennis Dalton ★★★★
14/7/9 The Liberty Amendments by Mark Levin ★
14/1/27 Five Chiefs by John Paul Stevens ★★★★★
13/12/23 The Oath: The Obama White House and The Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin ★★★★★
13/11/12 What Would the Founders Say by Larry Schweikart ★
13/9/7 The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution through Ten of its Most Curious Provisions by Jay Wexler ★★★★
12/4/19 Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of the President by Ron Suskind ★★★
11/8/17 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House by Charles Osgood ★★★★
09/6/8 Dreams from My Father abridged by Barack Obama ★★★★
08/05/25 Woman in Charge (Hillary Rodham Clinton) by Carl Bernstein ★★★★★
07/03/20 The Truth: With Jokes by Al Franken ★★★★
06/1/14 All Too Human by George Stephanopoulos ★★★
05/10/18 When You Ride Alone You Ride With Bin Laden by Bill Maher ★★★★
05/9/19 Lying Liars and the Lies They Tell by Al Franken ★★★★
05/8/14 Oh, the Things I Know by Al Franken ★★★★

ECONOMICS
15/6/13 The hard thing about hard things: building a business when there are no easy answers by Ben Horowitz ★★
15/2/27 How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg ★★
10/9/4 Googled by Ken Auletta ★★★★★
07/10/23 Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams ★★★
06/10/29 Next by Michael Lewis ★★★
06/8/26 Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ★★★
06/7/22 The Tipping Point - abridged by Malcolm Gladwell ★★★

ARCHAEOLOGY
16/9/1 The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced by Stephanie Dalley ★★★★★
10/11/30 The Seventy Great Mysteries of the Ancient World: Unlocking the Secrets of Past Civilizations by Brian M. Fagan ★★★
03/09/23 Ruins of Desert Cathay by M. Aurel Stein ★★★★★
03/08/09 My Life as an Explorer by Sven Hedin ★★★★★
02/12/08 Aurel Stein by Annabel Walker ★★★★★
01/08/23 On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks by Sir Aurel Stein ★★★★★
Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay ★★★★★
Evolution Man: Or, How I Ate My Father by Roy Lewis ★★★★★

GEOGRAPHY
17/7/30 Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson ★★★
16/11/6 A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton ★★
14/7/23 Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities by Frank Jacobs ★★★★

CARTOGRAPHY
15/9/7 The Mysteries of the Marco Polo Maps by Benjamin B. Olshin ★★★★

GEOLOGY
06/10/23 Krakatoa: the day the world exploded, August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester ★★★★
06/9/9 A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester ★★★★★

CHEMISTRY
17/11/27 Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc by Hugh Aldersey-Williams ★★★★
12/8/3 The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean ★★★★+

GENETICS
13/7/2 "Genome Sequencing and Assembly, Shakespeare Style" by Richard F. Wintle ★★★★
04/2/05 Teach Yourself Genetics by Morton Jenkins ★★★
04/2/05 The Complete Idiot's Guide to Decoding Your Genes by Linda Tagliaferro & Mark V. Bloom ★★★

TECHNOLOGY
16/9/2 Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons ★★★★★
16/4/11 High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems by Karen Southwick ★★★★
10/10/27 The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams ★★★★
05/5/30 PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling & Laura Thomson ★★★
04/8/18 The Essential Guide to Digital Set-top Boxes and Interactive TV by Gerard O'Driscoll ★★
04/8/17 Video Demystified by Keith Jack ★★
03/03/26 Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days by Laura Lemay and Charles L. Perkins ★★★★

HUMOR
23/2/1 Is this Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld ★★★★★

14/7/28 NPR Laughter Therapy: A Comedy Collection for the Chronically Serious by NPR ★★★
06/6/15 America (the audiobook): a citizen's guide to democracy inaction by Jon Stewart ★★★
06/6/12 Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker by various ★★★★★
06/2/17 Mirth of a Nation by various ★★★★

PASTIMES
22/7/16 It's All a Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan by Tristan Donovan ★★★★★

Interesting facts:
• The abstract look of the Chess pieces is not because it's an old game that could support only primitive art. It's because the game passed through Islamic Persia on its way to Europe and the religion disallows anthropomorphic art.
• The Backgammon craze of the 1970s was started by a Russian playboy nobleman. It died out because the Bridge players crossed over into it and make games too long and boring by their analytical style of play.
• Monopoly as we know it today actually reflects decades of development since the original design, all conducted by various unconnected individuals. Fact checking:
  
• States that Thomas Jefferson took a break from writing the Constitution. In fact Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with the writing, being a minister to France at the time.
• In the chapter about Cluedo/Clue, misses that there was a 1937 predecessor game called Mr. Ree.
• Should have said that the inspiration for Pandemic was the Lord of the Rings board game rather than the book. As I should know, having been in that game.
• Incorrectly states that over 150K people attend the Essen convention every year. Actually, that's just the number who go through the turnstiles. So over the four days, the same person could be counted four times.

The surname Hubbell comes from an ancient Germanic language where "hugu" meant mind/spirit/thought and "bald" meant "brave/bold". It was a personal name. In what is now France it became Hubaut. It later came to England where it became Hubbell, Hubble, and so on. All of this is not in the book, but seems interesting. Plus, that means the Hubble telescope means brave thought, which is a happy accident.

The author of this one did a great job reading old newspapers and baseball box scores to discover what happened in Hubbell's games, and duly reports each of them. It's good that these are still available because other types of information such as personal letters or interviews were not. So it's mostly a baseball-only type of biography, not helped by the lifelong reticence of the subject.

I have read amusing quotes previously from the batters in the 1934 All-Star game in which he struck out five Hall of Fame hitters in a row that surprisingly did not appear here.

The author also has an unusual way of presenting material. He first summarizes the outcome and then tells the details. It's as if he first wrote a summary as an aid to himself and then later forgot to remove it. The effect is like hearing a joke with the punch line first, that is, entirely ruining the joke.

A lot of Hubbell's career I read with a sort of unease at the frequency with which they used pitchers in those days. Pitching 18 inning games, pitching on two days rest and so on are horrible. They would never happen today. It's not surprising that he had to retire due to damaging his arm.

The other odd thing is that he appears to have been estranged from his family, but no one has ever said anything about it. From his retirement he lived in a different state. When he made arrangements for after his life he did not ask either of his sons to handle matters. There must be some kind of untold story there.

It's generally an interesting story though and because he stayed in baseball management after his retirement, one that stretches all the way from John McGraw via Joe DiMaggio to Willie Mays.

Here's an interesting opening line for a chapter: PREDICTING THE FUTURE IS A TRICKY BUSINESS, AS THE LACK OF PERSONAL space vehicles and pregnant men proves.

What we today call fans, were before the Great War called cranks. What we call pitchers, or hurlers, were back then often called twirlers. Teams were often called the Bostons or the Brooklyns or the Chicagos rather than their mascot names because the mascot names or nicknamess were changing all the time, sometimes more than once per year. Sometimes there were not even chosen by the teams, but by fans or newspapers.

As I mentioned in my review of A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward, authors of this type of book tend to go off on the wildest of tangents having zero to do with baseball. There are several in this book as well, but at least they appear to have read my review and taken my advice by setting them in separate chapters (called Time Outs) so that one can skip if desired. There were more such sections than there were Time Outs though.

A 1908 rookie for the Phillies named Coveleski was given an amusing nickname by the Philadelphia press: Nevsky Prospekt.

The architecture of the book didn't work for me. It should have followed one league all the way to the World Series and only then picked up the other league. Instead it wanted to interrupt, but I fixed that by just reading chapters in the order I preferred.

I was also disappointed that there wasn't more detail on the American league season and, especially, the World Series.

The heart and highlight of this book is the playoff game between the Cubs and Giants to decide the pennant. It really dives into all the events of that day and is written with verve and excitement. It's very difficult to put down. At other times it bogs down in uninteresting tangents and minutia, however, at least for me.

Was 1908 the craziest year ever for baseball? Quite possibly! The case is strong.

Tris Speaker was one of the greats of the early baseball era, and you'll run into his name constantly in its accounts, but for a long time there was no place to read about his story in full. Fortunately the author and publisher finally addressed this gap a few years ago.
Chapter 1 is like an article that was written for something else because to a large degree it sums up the subject's entire life. Talk about giving away the ending.
It's odd to find a bio that does not provide the birthdate of its subject. You'll need to go to Wikipedia to find that out.
The author keeps going out of his way to emphasize fielding skills. While it's better to have good fielding than bad, modern statistical study has shown that good hitting is far more important in winning ballgames. This emphasis then is sort of a waste of time.
This book was probably written too late. The people who could remember Speaker must by now be almost all dead. Consequently, this is a book drawn mostly from already published accounts. Instead of a day to day or week to week or month to month the story hangs on a few isolated incidents which are then fleshed out with essentially irrelevant information such as local histories and back stories of other players. On the other hand, it's obvious that serious labor was undertaken to scan every newspaper for mentions of the subject, which is appreciated.
Sometimes there are odd sentences, for example, "Cobb and the Tigers won a thrilling 1-0 game that wasn't determined until the final out." (p. 202) Yeah, every game except for those rare cases when the home team takes the lead in the finall inning isn't determined until the final out. That's why they play all those at-bats.
It's interesting that the idea of naming the Cleveland team the Indians - now controversial - came from the fact that an early player had in fact been an Indian. I'm not sure that is well known.
I wish it had gone more deeply into each of the baseball seasons. After all, this should be primarily a baseball book. But the book doesn't seem to be sure who its audience is. In fact it seems like it was written at two different times. The first half goes into depth about every baseball personality Speaker ever met, as if the reader knows little about baseball history, but in the second half it will list names, for example, of the 1927 Yankees, assuming everyone knows all about them. The same goes for the controversy over Abner Doubleday.
The crown jewel of the book is the account of the Cobb-Speaker scandal, as well as the other scandals that beset baseball at that time. It's good to think about what happened that time, not just to condemn the bettors, but also the managers, league presidents and commissioner. Sadly, the players put their energies into gambling rather than forming a strong union, and just as sadly the baseball authorities were more interested in underpaying their players and whitewashing the truth.
Overall, this is a very pleaurable read, full of great, early baseball stories and bringing even pre-Great War characters and events to life - now over a century old - before our eyes and making them seem far less remote.

Mediocrity is everywhere; what makes it worth chronicling? Maybe a book that tries to figure out why some players are retained despite poor performances would be useful, but this just seems pointless.

FOOD
14/7/16 On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta by Jen Lin-Liu ★★

The author should have done more homework. The historical sections need a thorough review. For manta/dumplings she could have learned much from The Silk Road by James A. Millward. The reader on the audio edition mispronounces many words, even important food terms like "cumin".

PRE-HISTORY
08/11/04 The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer ★★★★★
08/09/05 The Ancient Celts by Barry Cunliffe ★★★★
08/09/01 Saxons, Vikings, and Celts by Brian Sykes ★★★★★
08/07/07 Archaeology and the Iliad by Eric H. Cline ★★★★
07/07/17 The Tarim Mummies by J.P. Mallory and Victor Mair ★★★★★
07/06/28 The First Human by Ann Gibbons ★★★★★
05/3/08 Dance of the Tiger by Björn Kurtén ★★★★★
04/8/21 The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe ★★★★★
04/2/28 Becoming Human by Ian Tattersall ★★★★★
04/2/11 Genes, Peoples and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza ★★★★
04/2/09 The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes ★★★★★
04/2/04 Mapping Human History by Steve Olson ★★★★★
03/06/05 The Dawn of Human Culture by Richard G. Klein and Blake Edgar ★★★★★

HISTORY

MULTI-ERA
24/11/20 Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel ★★★

This addresses a very big picture – reminiscent of Toynbee – asking questions such as "why in Europe did only the Romans manage to dominate a large area whereas in East Asia multiple dynasties did so?", "what was so special about the Romans that they managed to do so in the first place?", "what made northwest Europe a special case in the world?", and so on.

But in the end I found this much too long for the number of ideas it has, and the presentation disappointing. There's so much preamble and summary while the actual good stuff is so brief.

In addition, the audiobook reader does not seem to know any foreign or obscure word. Upon encountering one, he first takes a deep breath, like a tightrope walker about to step on the wire, and then 90% of the time proceeds to completely mispronounce it. Is it really so difficult to find talented readers?

24/7/7 Venice: A New History by Thomas F. Madden ★★★★★

This is a wonderful introduction to the story of Venezia and its empire.

Although at over four hundred pages it seems very detailed, a lot is left unsaid. I happened to look up in Wikipedia a couple of events - for example, the Battle of Pola (1379) - and found that there was a lot more to the story than was given here. Ideally, this would have been a several volume work.

The introductory nature of it all becomes bothersome when the information provided gives the wrong impression. For example, it talks about how "the Normans" conquered what became Normandy and later southern Italy. This makes it sound like one force pursuing a path of expansion. But really, the so-called Norman invasion of Italy was the story of some Normans not connected with the ruling family in Normandy who were already in Italy deciding to try to take over, which is very different.

On the other hand I really enjoyed many of the sections, such as those on trade, and on art and architecture. The latter are really fun because it doesn't just describe the works the way an art history does, but also discusses the origins. How did that church come to be? What was the purpose of this painting? And so on. If I were traveling to Venice again, I would definitely reread that chapter before going.

Finally, I completely agree with the author's remark that "guide books are where bad history goes to die". It's great that he is able to debunk some of the more popular myths here.

24/2/5 Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present ★★★★★

With the dramatic DNA discovery that the ancient people living in the Tarim Basin were ANE rather than Indo-European speakers, this book seems surprisingly already somewhat out of date.

It's also a little bit wrong in its understanding of the difference between the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.

The book, supposedly about the Silk Road eras, goes on rather long, all the past the Cold War in fact. I guess it's okay if the author was willing to do the work, but it does make for rather a long read, more than the reader bargains for.

Perhaps the most objectionable part of this is that readers may miss some very important sections at the end:

• An attack on Modernism, here defined as newness purely for the sake of newness, and encompassing everything from government to the arts. It's hard not to sympathize with the view when one thinks about 20th century nationalism, twelve-tone serialism or where painting is now.
• A long essay of myth busting about the nature of barbarians (which however would have been strengthened by more concrete examples)
• The idea that all Indo-European daughter likes, such as Italian, or Greek, for example, are creoles. Essentially they are Indo-European as modified by the newly-colonized peoples.
• an explanation of some important historical words such as Ch'iang, Saka/Scythian/Sogdians and Tokharians/Yueh-Chih.

This very learned book is a good replacement for things like the outdated The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia by Grousset.

21/9/22 Lotharingia by Simon Winder ★★
21/6/16 Spice: The History of a Temptation by Jack Turner ★★★
21/5/28 Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe by Norman Davies ★★★
21/4/6 The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing by John Keegan ★★★
21/2/6 On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace by Donald Kagan ★★★★★
20/12/24 Rome: A History in Seven Sackings by Matthew Kneale ★★★★★
20/11/6 The Foundations of Eastern Civilization by Craig G. Benjamin ★★★★★
19/9/2 Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan ★★
18/10/31 Lodi (Images of America) by Ralph A. Clark ★★★★★
18/6/21 Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors by Peter Ackroyd ★★★★
18/5/28 The Last of the Prune Pickers: a Pre-Silicon Valley Story by Tim Stanley ★★★★★
17/9/10 A Traveller's History of Croatia by Benjamin Curtis ★★★★★
17/8/11 The German-Russians: in Words and Pictures by William Bosch ★★★★
16/2/18 Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan ★★
15/4/23 Alphabetical : how every letter tells a story by Michael Rosen ★★★★
14/5/23 Old man river: the Mississippi River in North American history by Paul Schneider ★★
14/5/19 Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians by Robert W. Merry ★★
14/3/17 The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen ★★★
14/2/10 The Silk Road by James A. Millward ★★★★★
13/10/24 The Silk Road in World History by Xinru Liu ★★★★★
13/10/4 Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden ★★★★★
13/4/15 A history of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts, part 4 by Robert Bucholz ★★★★
13/4/8 A history of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts, part 3 by Robert Bucholz ★★★★
13/3/22 A history of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts, part 2 by Robert Bucholz ★★★★
13/2/28 A history of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts, part 1 by Robert Bucholz ★★★★
12/12/30 The Supreme Court by Jeffrey Rosen ★★
12/8/19 The Swerve: How the World Become Modern by Stephen Greenblatt ★★★
12/7/13 California: A History by Kevin Starr ★★
11/5/25 Epochs of European civilization: Antiquity to Renaissance by Geoffrey Hosking ★★★
11/3/9 Italians Before Italy, part 1 by Kenneth Bartlett ★★
11/1/5 A History of Venice: Queen of the Seas by Thomas F. Madden ★★★★
10/7/6 The Catholic church. a history, part 1 by William R. Cook ★★★
07/03/28 Nonviolence by Mark Kurlansky ★★★★★
06/7/16 The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England by various ★★★★★
06/5/24 Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond ★★★★★
06/4/19 Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky ★★★★
06/1/12 What if? : the world's foremost military historians imagine what might have been partially by various ★★
03/07/21 The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections by Michael Walsh ★★★★★
03/07/02 Along the Silk Road by various ★★★

ANCIENT

MULTI-REGION:
22/6/11 The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World by Robert Garland ★★★★

A lot of it was already familiar to me, but there were new tidbits here and there. One amazing one was about medieval soccer. Apparently they would play between villages, which could be separated by miles! What a field to play on. This tends to explain a few things too, such as why there were originally no substitutions, and why there were so many players on the pitch at one time.

21/6/29 "Long Distance Trade and the Parthian Empire" by Evan J. Jones ★★★★★
19/10/20 Empires of ancient Eurasia: the first Silk Roads era, 100 BCE-250 CE by Craig Benjamin ★★★★★
19/9/13 The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: Rome's Dealings with the Ancient Kingdoms of India, Africa and Arabia by Raoul McLaughlin ★★★★★
19/8/14 The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China by Raoul McLaughlin ★★★★★
18/6/13 The Age of the Parthians (Idea of Iran), edited by Sarah Stewart & Vesta Sarkhosh ★★★

Contents: (1) The Iranian Revival in the Parthian Period by Vesta Sarkhosh; (2) Gondophares and the Indo-Parthians by A.D.H. Bivar; (3) Fars under Seleucid and Parthian Rule by Josef Wiesehöfer; (4) Friend and Foe, the Orient in Rome by Rolf Michael Schneider; (5) Parthia in China: a Re-examination of the Historical Records by Wang Tao; (6) The Videvdad: its Ritual-Mythical Significance by P.O. Skjaervo

17/1/11 Lysander and Sulla by Plutarch ★★★★★
16/9/9 Alcibiades and Coriolanus by Plutarch ★★★★
16/1/27 Hebrews, Greeks and Romans: Foundations of Western Civilization by Timothy Shutt ★★
15/12/13 The Dawn of Political History: Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War by Fred E. Baumann ★★★★
15/12/6 Great Battles of the Ancient World by Garrett G. Fagan, part 2 ★★★★★
15/11/13 Great Battles of the Ancient World by Garrett G. Fagan, part 1 ★★★★★
15/6/18 Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor, part 1 by Kenneth Harl ★★★★★
15/5/15 The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter by Melissa Lane ★★★
10/7/6 A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong ★★★★
08/03/16 Alexander the Great and His Time: Library Edition by Agnes Savill ★★★
03/03/05 The Phoenicians and the West by Maria Eugenia Aubet ★★★★★
02/07/30 From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies by Richard A. Gabriel & Karen S. Metz ★★★

MIDDLE EAST
19/10/4 "Parthia" [in the Time of the Roman Republic 133-44 B.C.] by W. W. Tarn ★★★★★
15/7/24 Origins of Great Ancient Civilizations by Kenneth Harl ★★★★★
13/10/25 Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran by M. Rahim Shayegan ★★ 09/8/28 Between the Rivers: The History of Ancient Mesopotamia, part II by Alexis Q. Castor ★★★
09/8/14 Between the Rivers: The History of Ancient Mesopotamia, part I by Alexis Q. Castor ★★★
09/2/27 Great ancient civilizations of Asia Minor, part 2 by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
09/2/3 Great ancient civilizations of Asia Minor by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
06/6/27 Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell ★★★★

PALESTINE
18/9/17 The Triumph of Christianity by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★+
17/10/21 Jesus Before the Gospels by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★★
11/7/5 Forged by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★★
11/2/13 After the New Testament: the Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, part 2 by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★★
10/11/6 After the New Testament: the Writings of the Apostolic Fathers, part 1 by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★
10/2/3 From Jesus to Constantine: a history of early Christianity, Pt. 2 by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★★
09/11/21 From Jesus to Constantine: a history of early Christianity, Pt. 1 by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★★
09/4/14 Lost Christianities: Christian scriptures and the battles over authentication by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★
07/10/09 The gospel according to Judas by Benjamin Iscariot recounted by Jeffrey Archer, with the assistance of Francis J. Moloney ★★★
07/02/05 Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman ★★★★★
06/9/25 Whose Bible is it? a history of the Scriptures through the ages by Jaroslav Pelik ★★★★★

GREEKS
22/12/30 Four Plays by Aristophanes: The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata by Aristophanes, William Arrowsmith (Translator), Richmond Lattimore (Translator), Douglass Parker (Translator) ★★★★

16/3/6 The Landmark Xenophon's Hellenika by Xenophon ★★★★★
15/12/21 Ancient Greek civilization, Part 2 by Jeremy McInerney ★★★
15/11/28 The Peloponnesian War by Kenneth Harl, part 3 ★★★★
15/11/23 The Peloponnesian War by Kenneth Harl, part 2 ★★★★
15/6/25 Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor, part 2 by Kenneth Harl ★★★★★
15/6/21 The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and economics in fifth-century Athens by Alfred Zimmern ★★★★★
15/5/31 Ancient Greek civilization, Part 1 by Jeremy McInerney ★★★★
15/5/29 The Greek and Persian Wars, part 2 by John R. Hale ★★★★
15/5/27 Greek legacy: classical origins of the modern world by Daniel N. Robinson ★★
15/5/4 The Greek and Persian Wars, part 1 by John R. Hale ★★★★
15/3/1 Athens: A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age by Christian Meier ★★★★★
14/8/18 Herodotus: The Histories by Herodotus (John M. Marincola, Aubrey De Selincourt) ★★★★★
10/11/21 The Peloponnesian War, part 1 by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
10/9/13 The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World, part 4 by Ian Worthington ★★★★★
10/8/26 The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World, part 3 by Ian Worthington ★★★★
10/8/1 The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World, part 2 by Ian Worthington ★★★★
10/6/19 The Long Shadow of the Ancient Greek World, part 1 by Ian Worthington ★★★★
07/12/30 Famous Greeks by J. Rufus Fears ★★★★★
05/9/26 Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter by Thomas Cahill ★★★★
02/08/09 The Wars of the Ancient Greeks by Victor Davis Hanson ★★★★

CARTHAGE
22/1/24 Carthage: A Biography by Dexter Hoyos ★★★★★
18/1/29 Hannibal by Patrick N Hunt ★★★★★
16/10/4 Hannibal's dynasty: power and politics in the western Mediterranean, 247-183 BC by Dexter Hoyos ★★★★★

ROMANS
22/10/6 The Histories by Tacitus ★★★★★
22/7/30 Chronicle of the Roman Republic: The Rulers of Ancient Rome from Romulus to Augustus by Philip Matyszak ★★★★

I have a couple other books in this series - Roman emperors and Chinese emperors - and have read the one on the popes. The Roman Republic is not a good fit for the format though because the two consuls changed annually. If the book had covered the topic that way it would have been awesome. Alas it doesn't, only hitting the highlights, so really, unless you know absolutely nothing about the Republic, you are better off getting a general history, such as by T.J. Cornell, or possibly starting with one of the well done novel series by Colleen McCullough or Steven Saylor.

One thing I have to applaud though is that the photos and illustrations, though mostly not in color, are profuse and well-explained. It's also nice to have an at least somewhat systematic march through the centuries.

A few problems:

Sometimes information is sketchy or skimmed over. For example, the office of praetor pre-dated consul, but this isn't really explained.

It repeats the old tale about Rome finding a wrecked Punic trireme and using it as the basis for making their own, but most historians today doubt this. Rome had plenty of exposure to triremes before this. There were many Greeks living within their empire, for example.

It doesn't call attention to the time leaps it's making between chapters. You have to pay close attention to notice that actually not all these events are following immediately one after the other.

Starts the second Punic war with Flaminius, jumping right over the start of the war and the Scipio brothers.

Claims Liguria is in northeastern Italy, but it's northwestern.

Repeats the old story that salt was sown into the earth at Carthage, which most historians doubt.

Discusses how under Marius the pilum was weakened, but says the purpose was to make targeted shields useless. Actually, the purpose was to make the flung pila worthless (because they separated in the middle). This made them good to use on barbarians who thus did not have the ability to fling them back or the manufacturing skills to restore them to working order.

The story of the civil war battle of Pharsalus is greatly ovesimplified. States that senators forced Pompey to attack Caesar, but in fact Pompey had allowed himself to be surounded and had little choice.

Doesn't really understand Lucullus and what happened to him. Also places him in the wrong chapter. He was a decade older than Pompey, but appears in the chapter after him. Likewise, Cato the Younger should have come after Caesar rather than before. Cicero also appears too late.

Discusses that Clodius changed the spelling of his name and later that he got himself adopted, but misses that the two were connected. The adoption led to the name change.

Spells the name of the infamous Catilina as Catiline.

22/6/26 The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy by Adrienne Mayor ★★★★★

If you were disappointed that Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series pretty much skimmed right over The Mithradatic War, this is the book for you. Really a nice, detailed and thoughful look into all three wars and life of Mithradates in general as well.
The Storm Clouds chapter appears to have a few problems. It mentions that the Pontic fleet was away at the north Black Sea, leading the Roman emissary to encourage Bithynia to raid the southern coast, which they do. But then we read that Pontus has sent the fleet to the north Black Sea. But the last thing we knew was that they were already there. Had they returned without our being told or was this remark anachronistic, in which case, why tell us?
We are also told that Rome, busy fighting the Social War, had only a single legion, usually considered to be about 5K men, in Asia Minor. But at the end of the chapter we are told suddenly that Aquillius commands 40K, Cassius another 40K and Oppius another 40K. Had these legions suddenly been shipped out? Maybe they were allied armies? There is no explanation, though it is mentioned that Nicomedes of Bithynia contributed 56K troops of his own in addition, so allies seem unlikely. Given that I believe Mithradates is about to defeat all these forces, I think it much more likely that the ancient source (Appian) was wrong in this case and it would have been appropriate to question these numbers. I would much rather have a realistic discussion than the painting of a false picture just to make a more exciting setup for the next chapter.
The chapter tells us how Mithradates cleverly manipulated the Romans into attacking him. I speculate the importance was that his alliances with other powers like Armenia and Parthia were defensive in nature, that is, would only trigger if he was attacked, and not the other way around. I suspect the author to be very smart and discerning, but it's a mistake to assume all the readers are as well. The book should tell us things like this rather than make us do all the work. Ideally the editor would have caught these issues as well. This is meant as constructive criticism for future works.
See "siege" spelled "seige". This is the second book in which I've seen this. The spelling of this word is a major hazard for histories apparently.
This book isn't about him, but it made me feel Sulla doesn't get enough credit for his abilities as a general. He really neatly solved a lot of knotty problems in the First Mithradatic War. Maybe if a certain member of the Julii hadn't come along he would be better known for this today.
The long lists in the book are somewhat boring. Lists of poisons. Lists of ingredients. Lists of jewels. Even worse, they are all clumped together. I also would have deferred the section on what happened to his things after he died to the end of the book. I think that would have served the story aspects better. But maybe that's just my taste.
Not too sure about the ancient reports of a meteorite strike just before a battle at Otryae. If it was really as large as a wine amphora, it seems there would have been quite a crater as well as effect on the armies, such as throwing up earth and so on. But in the accounts all that seems to happen is that they calmly inspect it. No crater is even mentioned. I would have liked to see more scientific commentary, perhaps from a geologist, on this reality of this. I would more likely suspect a trick by the tricky Mithradates and a catapult designed to allow him to escape fighting the battle that day.
Lucullus is another general who didn't and doesn't receive enough credit, either now or back then. His main drawback was that he lacked either the common touch or the inspirational words that would allow him to lead, like Alexander, or Caesar, his troops anywhere. Instead they constantly mutinied. The same kind of thing happened when he returned home. He lacked the ability to network so instead of receiving congratulations and power in return for all he had accomplished, all he got was jealousy. Not knowing how to counter it, he simply retired to his estates and allowed others to make up vicious rumors about him. This isn't made all that clear in the book, by the way, but then the book is a little hazy on events in Rome. Recommend using other books as supplements for this.
The book includes a photo of a white Mt. Kazbek (in the Caucasus), which the book describes a perpetually mantled in snow. Apparently not so anymore. A 2019 photo on the web indicates almost no snow at all.
The theories on Hypsicrates are rather fascinating.
The appendix on the legacy of Mithradates in the arts is superb!

21/7/15 The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper ★★★
20/11/19 The Last Generation of the Roman Republic by Erich S. Gruen ★★★★★
20/10/22 Murder Trials by Marcus Tullius Cicero ★★★★★
20/8/13 Trajan and Plotina by David Corson ★★★
19/9/30 Life of Crassus by Plutarch ★★★★★

Great bringing together of disparate sources with excellent discussion of which are more likely to be correct. Also good on the First Punic War, events in Spain between the wars, Hannibal as political leader after the Second Punic War and his subsequent flight and work with Antiochus. One of the few books on this topic willing to critique the Barcas, for example their poor conceptualization of sea power and lack of ability with sieges (the little town of Saguntum took Hannibal eight months and he never essayed Rome at all).

16/5/26 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire abridged by Edward Gibbon ★★★
16/2/11 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Thomas F. Madden ★★★
16/1/29 69 A.D.: The Year of Four Emperors by Gwyn Morgan ★★★★★
10/10/17 The history of ancient Rome, Part 3 by Garrett G. Fagan ★★★★
10/10/6 The history of ancient Rome, Part 2 by Garrett G. Fagan ★★★★★
10/9/24 The history of ancient Rome, Part 1 by Garrett G. Fagan ★★★★
10/8/14 Late Antiquity: Crisis and Transformation by Thomas Noble ★★★★
09/9/27 The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard ★★★★★
08/09/26 Famous Romans by J. Rufus Fears ★★★★★
08/07/23 The War with Hannibal by Livy ★★★★★
08/07/23 Emperors of Rome, part I by Garrett G. Fagan ★★★★★
08/05/19 Emperors of Rome, part II by Garrett G. Fagan ★★★★★
08/05/15 Emperors of Rome, part III by Garrett G. Fagan ★★★★★
01/12/03 Epigrams I by Martial ★★★★

BARBARIANS
20/7/21 The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
19/12/9 The Goths by Peter Heather ★★★★★
19/7/29 Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070 by Robin Fleming ★★★★
19/7/8 The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons: Decoding the Ancestry of the English by Jean Manco ★★★

Good information, but the writing style does not flow. Maps would be easier to read if they did not use different shades of just one color. More on the DNA side would have been welcome.

19/6/25 Visigothic Spain 409-711 by Roger Collins ★★★★★

Answers the question of why the Visigothic Kingdom collapsed so fast when a mere two thousand or so Arabs and Berbers invaded it, and why it seemed to happen in just one battle with no back and forth. Well, actually some of the fault is in the question: there was some back and forth. But the main point is a state of civil war was in progress – the country was divided and being ruled by two antagonistic kings – and as the threat did not seem significant, continued despite the threat. In fact the king may have been murdered when we went to fight the Muslims so that a rival could be enthroned. The Visigoth elites who ruled were relatively few in number and their subjects did not particularly care for them. Some of them in the south readily made peace with the Muslims. In fact there was a long history of conflict at the capital of Toledo where rival families got themselves elected to the throne and started taking the porperties of rivals until there were inevitably killed, upon which the proceess restarted again. Why so much division? Probably because Iberia was a well-defined territory with good natural borders on all sides. They did not have serious external threats that would tend to unite them. Instead they turned such energies on one another, similar to the era of the English Richard II, and in remarkable contrast to the contemporary Franks.

15/5/15 Icons of the Iron Age: The Celts in History by Susan A. Johnston ★★★
08/08/31 Rome and the Barbarians, part I by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
08/08/22 Rome and the Barbarians, part III by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
08/08/14 Rome and the Barbarians, part II by Kenneth W. Harl ★★★★★
01/10/02 Attila and the Nomad Hordes by David Nicolle ★★★★
01/09/27 The Goths by Peter Heather ★★★★★

ASIA
22/5/17 Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History by Nicola Di Cosmo ★★★
22/5/17 Han Civilization by Wang Zhongshu ★★★
22/5/15 Fire Over Luoyang: A History of the Later Han Dynasty 23-220 AD by Rafe de Crespigny ★★★★★

For the towns in western China, wish the book had used the names that are standard for Silk Road studies rather than the outdated period names.
It's disappointing that the book does not tell the story of how General Ban Chao saved the city of Kashgar. It's a good story, but disposed of in just one sentence. I know there is a lot to cover, but still.
Frequently confuses east and west, for example, naming Yunnan as a place in the "southeast" when it's in the southwest. There is a map, the description for which states that the army drove rebels to the east, but the map clearly shows the movement is to the west. When it does not give a named location, for example, "he fled to the southeast", the reader is left wondering which direction is really intended.
Cited reasons that the empire had so many problems:

• Emperors died too young.
• Officials increasingly had little influence, were subject to easy dismissal and ceased to trust the emperor/head of state. Reformers resented the government and distanced themselves from it.
• Central administration suffered a steady loss of revenue (too much stayed in the hands of the great families).
• Widespread corruption led to scandals and loss of ministerial authority. Even if they wanted to do right things, they lacked the authority/ability.
• Short-term rather than long-term considerations drove policy.
• Eventually untalented consort families got power, for example, He Jin, who made major mistakes such as wanting to kill all the eunuchs and invited in Dong Zhuo.
• Ultimately success of the empire depended on cooperation between the court and the landed gentry. When this failed the empire was doomed.

First of all, I think some of these latter problems are effects rather than causes. Some of these problems were also present in other empires, including the earlier incarnation of the Han, but did not have the same effects. Some attempt should have been made to make such comparisons and think about why there was a difference.
My original thought is that a thesis could be made that for a long time the Later Han did not face any external threat. In this environment corruption became much more prevalent, so much so in fact that when external threats did arise, the government was no longer competent to do much about it.
It is odd that the book doesn't seem to discuss the iron and salt monopolies that the government had at the start of the period and later released.
Overall, even if I had a few problems with the book, but it's a great, if long read, that thoroughly covers the history of this empire and constitutes a proper bookend to the history of the Former Han. If you read it, be sure to first find the map which is strangely placed only at the end, not at the beginning where you would most need to know about it. It is most helpful in finding the various locations that are frequently discussed.

22/4/10 The Culture of the Qin and Han Dynasties of China by Vic Kovacs ★★★
21/12/22 After Alexander: Central Asia Before Islam by Georgina Hermann (Editor) ★★★★

This isn't a single narrative, but a series of academic papers by various authors. Most of the topics are not particularly interesting and some are by now out of date. The most interesting bit was contributed by Helen Wang, a nusismatics curator, who wrote about how goods were used for money at Niya: "corn was used to pay for camels; camels for slaves; horses, camels, carpets, corn and wine for land". Sounds like the rules to a game.
Contents:

Central Asia: West and East / John Boardman

Nomads and the shaping of Central Asia: from the Early Iron Age to the Kushan Period / Claude Rapin

Nomad migration in Central Asia / Kazim Abdullaev

Regions and territories in Southern Central Asia: what the Surkham Darya Province tells us about Bactria / Sebastian Stride

Bactria, Land of a thousand cities / Pierre Leriche

Ai Khanum reconstructed / Guy Lecuyot

The culture of Parthian Nisa between Steppe and empire / Antonio Invernizzi

Termez in Antiquity / Pierre Leriche & Shakir Pidaev

The arrangement of buildings in the quarters of a Sogdian City / Grigory Semyenov

Ardashir's Eastern campaign and the Numismatic evidence / Michael Alram

The Sasanian relief at Rag-i Bibi (Northern Afghanistan) / Frantz Grenet ...[et al.]

The fortifications at Gobekly-depe / G.A. Koshelenko

The Bullae of Gobekly-depe / Vasif Gaibov

Gorga^n and Dehistan: the North-East frontier of the Iranian Empire / Olivier Lecomte

The fortifications of the City of Gyaur Kala, Merv / V.A. Zavyalov

Money as a marker of cultural continuity and change in Central Asia / Joe Cribb

Some questions regarding the numismatics of Pre-Islamic Merv / Natasha Smirnova

Monetary circulation in ancient Tokharistan / Edvard Rtveladze

Money in Eastern Central Asia before AD 800 / Helen Wang

Religion iconography on Ancient Iranian coins / Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis

The Fire Temple at Tash-k'irman Tepe, Chorasmia / Alison V.G. Betts & Vadim N. Yagodin

A tower of silence of the Sasanian Period at Bandiyan: some observations about Dakhmas in Zoroastrian religion / Mehdi Rahbar

Buddhism and features of the Buddhist Art of Bactria-Tokharistan / Tigran Mkrtychev.

21/8/12 The Han Dynasty by Myra M. Immell ★★★★
21/8/3 Chinese Ways In Warfare (Han Dynasty chapter) by Frank A. Kierman Jr. ★★★★
21/7/24 Everyday Life in Early Imperial China by Michael Loewe ★★★
21/7/10 "Imperial Chinese Armies 200 BC - AD 589 by Chris (C.J.) Peers, Michael Perry ★★★★★
21/6/19 Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 1: Introductory Orientations by Joseph Needham & Ling Wang ★★★★
21/6/17 The Genius of China: 3000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention by Robert K.G. Temple ★★★★★
21/6/16 The Cambridge History of China, Volume 1: The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.-A.D. 220 by Denis C. Twitchett (Editor) & John King Fairbank (Editor) ★★★★★
21/5/17 The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han by Mark Edward Lewis ★★★★
21/5/4 The Han Dynasty by Michéle Pirazzoli-t'Serstevens ★★★★★
19/11/15 The Yuezhi. Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria by Craig Benjamin ★★★★
19/9/29 The Greeks in Bactria and India by William Woodthorpe Tarn ★★★★★
19/8/18 The early Kusanas: A history of the rise and progress of the Kusana power under the early Kusana rulers – from Kujula Kadphises to Vasudeva by Baldev Kumar ★★★★
16/11/25 From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History part III by Kenneth J. Hammond ★★★★★
16/10/26 From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History part II by Kenneth J. Hammond ★★★★
16/10/15 From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History part I by Kenneth J. Hammond ★★★★★
14/3/21 The Travels of Fa-hsien (Fa Xian) (399-414 A.D.), or Record of the Buddhistic Kingdoms by H. A. Giles ★★★
03/06/26 History of the Civilizations of Central Asia, Volume II: The development of sedentary and nomadic civilizations: 700 B.C to A.D. 250 ★★★★★
03/11/07 A Roman City in Ancient China by Homer Hasenpflug Dubs ★★★★★
03/05/04 Early China by Denise Goff ★★★★★
02/05/21 The Lost Legion by H. Warner Munn ★★★
01/09/27 Ancient Chinese Armies 1500-200 BC by Chris J. Peers ★★★

A vital consideration here is that this is the first history of the late 10th and early 11th centuries written by a Scandinavian historian and translated into English. This is more important than usual because very little was written in Scandinavia during this transitional period. While there are peripheral writings in England, Normandy, northern Germany and even Muslim Spain, for Scandinavia, it's necessary to rely on heroic poetry composed by contemporary "skalds", which were written down later in languages that have changed considerably by today. That makes this the first book to, in English, really perform a detailed treatment of the first part of the North Sea wars using all the available sources.

This transitional period saw Scandinavia changing from the pagan to the Christian religion as well as from the viking model to that of kingdoms similar to those of the rest of Europe. It's a very dynamic story with great attempts to grab power and sudden reversals. The author wisely ties it closely to some of the famous names of the era such as Kings Harald Bluetooth, Æthelred ("the Unready"), Sweyn Forkbeard, Olaf Tryggvason, Cnut the Great and the one this Norwegian author clearly finds the most interesting, King and later Saint Olaf of Norway (though it's clear there was little that was saintly about his behavior). The joker in this deck is Eadric Streona of England, a sort of empathy-free manipulator and wheeler-dealer – a Loki – who would betray anyone at anytime so long as it provided him an advantage. By the way, it turns out Æhelred and Eadric were Tolkien's model for King Theoden and Wormtongue.

So it's a constantly intriguing story as they plot and wage war against one another. But there's also a healthy amount of social history that discusses daily life, religious observances, court life, and so on. One senses that the author is not as interested in these matters as the politco-military history, however, and they are less engrossing. It's not just that the famous people are the ones we prefer to read about. I have read histories of, say, the Anglo-Saxons, that tease out many more interesting facts about medieval life than are apparent here.

While I'm complaining a bit, there should have been more maps and more labels so that the reader knows where the referred-to places are.

One big fail is that there is a (black-and-white) photo at the start of each chapter, but to get the caption for it you must annoyingly go to the list of illustrations at the back of the book.

There is no index, which is unpardonable for a book published in 2022, though there is an ending chronology that helps.

At times the book repeats points, making it seem less like a complete book and more like a series of articles. This might help explain the lack of an index, if this is just an edited collection. But maybe the author just forgot what he had mentioned earlier. There are occasional statements that seem dubious, such as the claim that there were no nuclear families in Scandinavia.

Occasionally the reader feels talked down to, such as when it explains that a man whose nickname was "Wobbly Belly" means that he was probably fat.

The book could have been a bit broader in approach as well. Several times are mentioned developments such as the use of religion to bolster royal power, the use non-noble ministers for the same reason, the collection of a very loyal band around the king and so on. The book does not seem to always realize that these developments were a general trend with all European kingdoms, indeed with all Indo-European kingdoms.

The book seems to need a sequel to cover the events in England between the death of Cnut and the coronation of Edward the Confessor as they seem part of the same cloth. Well, maybe we'll see it one day.

Very good on the Carolingian disintegration and papacy of that time, and very fun writing about about the personalities. Some errors give doubts about accuracy. Once Pepin II is called Pepin III. A Henry is once called Henry the Quareller and once Henry the Wrangler, without any explanation that they are actually the same person. Obermarsberg is called Obermarsburg. Sergius is called a likely Greco-Roman, ignoring that there was a patrician family of that name in the earliest days of Rome.

Great medieval story of a second son with no inheritance forced to make his way in the world who succeeded brilliantly, knowing and serving five different Angevin kings from Henry II to John and including Richard the Lionheart. His experiences with them reflect a lot about their characters. In his long life he fought in virtually all his country's wars and also went to the Crusades.

This turned out to be quite different than expected. Instead of a history of New York during the Gilded Age, it's a cultural study. About the only interesting thing of interest I learned is that a huge number of diamonds were uncovered in the late 19th century and so the resulting glut on the market made them relatively reasonable to obtain in that period.

This is very probably an absolute treasure for anyone writing a novel or video series on the Gilded Age, but for someone just casually interested in the period, can get fairly tedious, and I generally do not care for books that are mostly long lists of objects, which characterized a lot of this.

There's also some of the specialist phenomenon in using obscure terms, such as narghile, that really should have been defined for the reader.

And there is a long description of the torture and execution of a Central Park elephant that may be triggering to some.

Unfortunately, unlike most books, which I borrow, I actually own this one.

Chapter topics:

1. Fashion and high society
2. Art
3. Collecting
4. Class
5. The male gaze
6. Financial downturn
7. Death

It must be a strange experience, writing a biography of someone you dislike. Every day you must again confront facts, events and a personality that are distasteful to you, and in this case it must have taken a very long time, for while this is book is almost five hundred pages, every page is filled with small print quotations, which if normal-sized would probably make it half again as long.

I suppose the main intention was reportorial. Bismarck has been mythologized greatly and this historian of the period wanted to hack at that a bit, to show the details of the other side. So we get this portrait of the Bismarck with no principle save power, who was had few friends because he was nasty to most people, and who competed with, dominated and bullied everyone. There are even some odd side attacks, such as on gluttony. But this book is Bismarckian in the sense that the author makes little attempt to understand either. That part of Bismarck's character stemmed from the way his mother raised him deserves our sympathy. That the new Germany became an abosolutist state because in those conditions there was little other choice. No, the book wants to tell you that here was a bad guy and that's the end of the story.

All great leaders have flaws. We should not be surprised that Bismarck had them as well. A lack of empathy for others is not exactly a pretty one, but it's not the only one. In the ways of ruling that Machiavelli was only able to recommend, Bismarck actually engineered. The prospect of uniting Germany had been in the air for centuries, but during all that time no one had the size of ambition, audacity and finesse to actually accomplish it, until Bismarck. In addition, and the book omits considering this, during Bismarck's thirty-plus year reign, Germany went from a minor power (Prussia) to an economic and industrial powerhouse that dominated Europe. That the nation was governed in a secure and stable way must certainly have enabled and contributed to this. There were a lot of accomplishments along the way as well, such as universal suffrage, a working parliament, secularizing the state, some early forms of social security, considerable prosperity, and so on. The book claims Bismarck was a virtual dictator, but at the same time tries to deny him credit for any of it. Difficult to reconcile.

What makes the book okay is that it goes into sufficient detail that a critical reader can gain enough information to reach their own conclusions. On the other hand, I have some concern about what in this idiosyncratic retelling may have been omitted. Probably reading at least one other source would be a good check on this.

Three smaller points:

Bismarck, even while being a bad guy, would cheerfully admit when he had done wrong and what he had done, in private. In public he would deny all blame. He was also willing to talk to anyone and of any social class, though he preferred intelligent people, even his enemies.

His real genius was in diplomacy. Reading situations, finding opportunities and somehow keeping in his head all the possible paths every other side could take and having a plan for each of them - that's what made him a world class politician. This is what got him control, but on the domestic side he was much less happy and capable. By the way, it's odd that the author never repeats Bismarck's famous and very wise quote that in a world dominated by five great powers, it's better to be in the group of three than the group of two.

This book has many idiosyncratic asides that can get pretty far afield. I never expected to find mention of a cell phone in such a book, for example, or of comparisons to the US House of Representatives.

Notes while reading:

The idea some have that he was charismatic is greatly in error. In fact, until his retirement he never spoke to crowds. For his continuance as Chancellor for 29 years, he depended on only one person: the Kaiser.

His "blood and iron" speech was a fiasco, denounced by all the royals and most educated people, but he was kept on because the Kaiser valued him.

He manipulated the Kaiser via temper tantrums, hysteria, tears and threats.

He sprang the idea of popular suffrage in 1863 in order to prevent the Kaiser from attending a congress of princes called by Austria, and it worked. Later on he would regret it when a sullen working class emerged.

He never led a party in the sense of the British parliament.

Much of his time and energy went into the nuts-and-bolts of administration. He was better at foreign affairs than domestic policy.

He once dictated a letter to the Kaiser for two and a half hours straight, taking up 32 pages.

He wore a military uniform every day, but in fact had only served as a reservist for a short time, and that unwillingly, having unsuccessfully avoided conscription. Thus he was resented by most military men and they felt that they, not he, had unified Germany.

Commanded those around him by sheer force of personality.

His writing has charm, flexibility, seductiveness.

A hypochondriac who had the constitution of an ox. Always complained of having no appetite, but would take second helpings of every dish at dinner.

If Kaiser Frederick had lived, he would have appointed all liberal ministers to make it like the British parliament, that he knew from his wife Vicky, daughter of Queen Victoria. Bismarck would have exited the government at that point.

If you like reading about political maneuvering, there are oodles of it in this academic book about the attempted coup/civil war in France in the mid-17th century.
I got into this because as a kid who had read The Three Musketeers, I wanted to read every single Alexandre Dumas book the library had, which was over twenty books. One of them was the Musketeers sequel (Twenty Years After) which takes place during the Fronde, but which is not fully explained in the novel. So I have wanted to know more about it ever since, but other readings have never touched on it.
The book uses a word that was new to me: "irenic", which apparently means "aiming or aimed at peace" and is generally associated with attempts to unify Christian apologetical systems via reason. This is apropos here because of the many factions contending for power in France at that time.
"The Cost of Civil War" chapter is probably the one that took the most work and of which the author is most proud, but which stuck out from the rest as rather boring. It's a deep dive into climate change of the period and the effects it wrought on food production, into the Bubonic plague, into the depredations of hungry soldiers on the population and so on. All relevant, but not what I'm reading the book for and in a chapter that goes on for far too long.
I found by the end that this is a sur-history, that is, more a commentary on previous histories and as such it does not detail all the basic facts and events. You will need to read something else, preferably first, to get all of that grounding.
In the end this is meant as a corrective to the praise for the first minister Cardinal Mazarin (the successor to Richelieu), so if he's a hero to you, be aware of that.
This might make for an interesting political board game, though requiring an unusually high number of players - eight, or some robot rules.

This book uses a collage-like strategy. Instead of organizing things by topic or endeavor, it does so year by year. Therefore, each chapter is made up of a number of sections as short as half a page, discussing what each of the luminaries did in that year. This bits and pieces strategy takes a lot of getting used to because it's very difficult to focus. Often, just as the story is getting interesting, the rug is yanked.

You will find yourself spending more time with this book than the page count would allow. For when it describes the daring photo of Kiki, the Stravinsky compositions based on Pergolesi, the automobile painted in a checkerboard pattern, the stupendous Mediterranean villa of Coco Chanel or the interesting short films of Rene Clair and Man Ray, you are going to fire up the web to see and hear for yourself. The book really ought to have included more pictures.

It is too bad that the book repeats Gershwin's self-aggrandizing story of meeting Stravinsky, which the latter disavowed.

List of luminaries covered. If you find the majority of them interesting, you should like this book.

LITERATURE - Proust, Marcel; Cocteau, Jean; Joyce, James; Beach, Sylvia (owner of Shakespeare & Co.); Colette; Stein, Gertrude; Pound, Ezra; Dos Passos, John; Fitzgerald, F. Scott
MUSIC - Satie, Erik; Ravel, Maurice; Porter, Cole; Claudel, Paul; Milhaud, Darius; Gershwin, George;
PAINTING - Monet, Claude; Leger, Fernand; Picasso, Pablo; Renoir, Pierre; Modigliani, Amedeo; Sert, Jose-Maria; Miro, Joan; Masson, Andre; Barnes, Albert; Soutine, Chaim; Chagall, Marc
FILM - Renoir, Jean
SCIENCE - Curie, Marie
POLITICS - Clemenceau, Georges; De Gaulle, Charles
ARCHITECTURE - Le Corbusier
FASHION - Poiret, Paul; Chanel, Coco
PHOTOGRAPHY - Kiki; Ray, Man
DANCE - Diaghilev, Sergei; Duncan, Isadora; Baker, Josephine
INDUSTRY - Renault, Louis; Citroen, Andre; Schueller, Eugene (of l'Oreal); Coty, Francois; Michelin Brothers

NEW WORLD

MULTI-ERA
24/8/5 Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House ★★★

Covers Jefferson, Quincy Adams, Cleveland, Taft, Hoover, Carter and G.W. Bush.

The book is written very smoothly and is very readable, but some chapters appear to have needed a deeper dive:

A lot of praise is heaped upon Jefferson's effort to found the University of Virginia, but no mention that at the time Virginia was more in need of primary education than of a university, or, even worse, that the money used to build the university was taken from that set aside for primary education.

Repeats the claim that Jackson won the popular vote in 1824, which is very misleading since six states, including the most populous one (New York) didn't even hold a popular vote in that year. Moreover, had they, Adams almost certainly would have won New York and thus the popular vote. Some chapters appear to have needed a shallower dive:

The first two chapters properly covered only the post-presidential careers, but with Cleveland it's a bio of his entire life, with only skimpy coverage of his later years. One picks up a book based on its title and promise, but here it was broken. Many of us already know Cleveland's life story and did not particularly need to spend time with it again.

Cleveland is not the last case of this either. Perhaps the author thinks we could just skip such chapters, but on an audio book, not so much.

George W. Bush is a pick that doesn't seem to fit in very well with the others, for one because he is still alive, for another because he does not seem to have done that much with his retirement. Could it be that he's here because he was the only former president willing to be interviewed? Or because the author interned for Secretary of State Rice in the Bush administration?

There never seems to be much negative said about the seven presidents chosen, though that rule doesn't seem to apply for other presidents. Given the pattern established here, if the book were discussing Hitler it would say something like "Adolf Hitler led his country to an economic and military resurgence, though some of his other actions were more controversial" and that would be it. In what are basically mini-bios, doesn't the reader want to see an objective portait rather than these puff pieces?

23/10/28 The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians by David M. Rubenstein ★★★★★

I wasn't too thrilled with the parts on Lincoln and the founders. Maybe I know too much about these already, but there didn't seem to be anything I hadn't heard before, and some of what I heard, while not entirely wrong, were generalizations of topics that would differ if one went into the nuance. As usual, I wasn't that crazy about H.W. Brands (on Reagan) who always sounds to me under-researched and presenting things in a surface-y way as if still the high school teacher he used to be.

But I really like the 20th century portions on Lindbergh and Eisenhower. Also it was interesting to hear Bob Woodward's takes on each of the modern presidents – he has met most of them. Finally, the surprise interview with Chief Justice Roberts was quite good. What a down to earth fellow he seems.

23/3/28 Life on the Mississippi: An Epic American Adventure by Rinker Buck ★★★+

Coming to this from the author's Oregon Trail book seemed a considerable fall in quality. Somehow it's just not as funny or engaging, possibly due to nature of the trip companions. It was also somewhat disappointing that the Mississippi flat boat trip could not have been made the way it was in the 19th century, that is, without an engine, but no doubt the river is too busy for that now. Sometimes it gets repetitive and there are excursions that seem too far off topic and too much covered in other works, such as the Trail of Tears section. Disappointingly, it did not discuss what happened to the boat after the trip.

23/3/8 Exploring the White House: Inside America's Most Famous Home by Kate Andersen Brower ★★★★
22/8/28 First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg ★★★★

The friendships this book discusses:

Jefferson (James Madison)

Pierce (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Lincoln (Joshua Speed)

Wilson (Colonel House)

FDR (Daisy Suckley) (not Louis Howe?)

Truman (Eddie Jacobson)

Kennedy (David Ormsby-Gore)

Nixon (Bebe Rebozo)

Clinton (Vernon Jordan)
There are some oversimplifications in the Jefferson-Madison story. For example, states that Madison did everything to prevent majority rule in the constitution. That's not exactly right. His Virginia plan was entirely based around the idea that the majority should be given its voice and to ensure that he intended that both houses of Congress be apportioned by population. That's not against majority rule, exactly. What this book must have in mind is that he also wanted check and balances to ensure the majority did not go too far.
Although there was a great hubbub when the "Lincoln was gay" theory came out years ago, most historians seem to discount it now, and I have also, as does this book. But it's funny. After listening to the details of their friendship, it certainly does lead in that direction. Indeed, Speed wrote Lincoln that he was afraid of not being able to perform on his wedding night and Lincoln wrote back that it was a fear they had in common. Later on they exchange some letters that sound like a lovers tiff. Now wondering if this theory deserves further investigation.
Also interesting that there seem to be several parallels between Jefferson and Lincoln:

mothers both from Virginia

both elected twice

both so devastated by a love interest (wife in one case, fiance in the

that their friends were very worried about them

both instrumental in relocating their state's capital

both lost all but one of their children early
In the chapter on Wilson and Col. House, says the US favored the "Allied" side. Of course this term is anachronistic. It should be "Entente".
The book is very antagonistic toward Col. House. I find this odd as I find him a much bigger picture thinker than Wilson and really the author of Wilson's success and accomplishments. Claims that the split between Wilson and House was the worst since Hamilton and Burr, but really, Hamilton and Burr were never friends.
It was interesting to learn that if Roosevelt in 1944 had become too sick to stand for election, he would have designated a surprising successor: industrialist Henry G. Kaiser. He had some surprisingly out of the box ideas at times, such as his suggestion that the UN be placed on Hawaiian island of Niihau.
Hadn't known much about Nixon and Rebozo. Rebozo was a life of the party type and Nixon was, well, Nixon. Bit of a surprising combination. But they could sit together watching a view from a boat for hours, not even speaking.
Interesting that Al Gore was not in Clinton's original top 3 picks for the vice presidency, though he was great, innovative choice. The originals were Bill Bradley, Jay Rockefeller and Colin Powell. They all turned him down.

21/10/8 Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidency – 21 Presidents, 21 Rooms, 21 Inside Stories by Paul Brandus ★★★★

18/1/19 California: A History by Kevin Starr ★★★★
15/12/23 The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck ★★★★★
15/12/2 The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House by Kate Andersen Brower ★★★★★
15/4/3 Presidential Courage by Michael Beschloss ★★★
15/2/14 The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester ★★
15/1/18 Scandals and Glory: Politics in the 1800s by Zachary Chastain ★
14/9/24 The Cycles of American History by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ★★★★★
14/8/29 Filibustering: A Political History of Obstruction in the House and Senate by Gregory Koger ★★★★★
14/7/11 The Cabinet Politician: The Postmasters General, 1829-1909 by Dorothy G. Fowler ★★★★
14/6/18 Failures of the Presidents: From the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq by Thomas J. Craughwell ★★★
14/6/10 The Keys to the White House: A Surefire Guide to Predicting the Next President (2008) by Allan J. Lichtman ★★★★★
13/8/21 White House Butlers by Howard Brinkley ★★★
13/7/27 Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity and Liberty by Ivan Eland ★★★
13/7/25 Presidential Retreats by Peter Hannaford ★★
13/5/2 Behind the palace doors: five centuries of sex, adventure, vice, treachery, and folly from royal Britain by Michael Farquhar ★★★
12/3/8 Almost President by Scott Farris ★★★
12/1/27 How the States got Their Shapes Too: The People Behind the Borderlines by Mark Stein ★★★★
11/10/10 How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein ★★★★★
11/10/2 The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane ★★★
11/6/15 The Changing White House by Barbara Feinberg ★★★★
11/6/15 How the White House Really Works ★★★
11/5/8 Family of Freedom by Kenneth T. Walsh ★★★★
11/3/23 Secret Lives of the US Presidents by Cormac O'Brien ★★★
09/7/3 The People and the Ballot by Joshua Kaplan ★★★
09/4/1 The White House: Its Historic Furnishings & First Families by Betty C. Monkman ★★★★★
09/3/26 Real Life at the White House by John and Claire Whitcomb ★★★★★
09/3/5 The White House: An Historic Guide by White House Historical Association ★★★★
08/03/27 A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing by Michael Farquhar ★★★★★
08/02/19 Lives of the Presidents: Fame, Shame and What the Neighbors Thought by Kathleen Krull ★★★★★
08/02/16 The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told: 100 Tales from History to Astonish, Bewilder, and Stupefy by Rick Beyer ★★★★★
08/02/08 The President's House: 1800 to the Present The Secrets and History of the World's Most Famous Home by Margaret Truman ★★★★★
07/02/01 A treasury of great American scandals: Tantalizing true tales of historic misbehavior by the founding fathers and others who let freedom swing by Michael Farquhar ★★★★★
06/11/25 The German Americans by Anne Galicich ★★★★
06/3/9 America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 by Richard Brookhiser ★★★★★
06/2/25 First Ladies by Margaret Truman ★★★★★
05/12/22 The American President - abridged by Philip B. Kunhardt, Philip B. Kunhardt, Peter W. Kunhardt ★★★★★
02/08/11 Island in the Crossroads: The History of Puerto Rico by M.M. Brau ★★★

EARLY USA
24/10/28 American Revolution in the West by George MacGregor Waller ★★★★★

The book was made in landscape form, making it a bit awkward to read, but it does make it easier to present maps. It is overviewish, but overviews in the old days seem considerably more detailed than those of later days. This is a very nice description of the little-treated history of the Revolution west of the Appalachians and particularly on the Ohio Valley. The star of the narrative is George Rogers Clark and to a lesser extent Daniel Boone and this book would be a useful adjunct to a biography on either of them. The narrative itself might make an interesting board game as the British are never able to do much more than raid south of the Ohio while the Patriots could never quite manage to reach Detroit.

24/10/20 Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution by Robert H. Patton ★★★

Had searched hard for a big picture view of Revolutionary privateering, but this wasn't it. Besides concentrating on individual incidents, it continually wandered off into side topics such as the Deane-Lee controversy, the career of Nathanael Greene and others that really are much better dealt with elsewhere.

24/10/13 1776 by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards ★★★★★

The historical note that attempts to set straight what in the musical is accurate and what made up also needs a historical note, particularly with respect to Judge Wilson. The real vote for independence differed from the musical. On July 1, Pennsylvania voted against it. Among the delegates, Franklin, Wilson and Morton were in favor, but Dickinson, Morris, Willing and Humphreys were opposed. The next day, in the face of every other colony voting in favor, Dickinson and Morris absented themselves and so the vote carried.

24/10/12 The Forging of the Union, 1781-1789 by Richard B. Morris ★★★★

In what may be a sort of valedictory work (in which authors often feel compelled to throw in everything they know on the subject) - the author was born in 1904, the book published in 1987 - there are about 125 pages of introduction that are outside the interesting period of the title. While what is there is not bad, I would have greatly preferred to have those pages devoted to the period.

Some of the scholarship is outdated. On finance, it's updated by 7 The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 by E. James Ferguson, on the constitutional convention by Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention by Mary Sarah Bilder and on the construction of the House and Senate by lots of works.

But what's here is mostly good, even if slightly overviewish at times.

The author is apparently no relation to either of the founders, Robert Morris or Gouverneur Morris, but did hold the Gouverneur Morris chair of History at Columbia.

24/9/20 The Navy of the American Revolution: Its Administration, Its Policy, and Its Achievements by Charles Oscar Paullin ★★★★

Many books cover the brave exploits of Revolutionary ships at sea. This is one of the only ones to cover th enavy from the administration side, discussing the founding, planning and administration. This is really three books in one: (1) the Continental Congress navy, (2) the navies run out of France and the Mississippi River, and (3) the individual state navies. I was really only interested in (1), but it's good to know the others exist. The book is pretty thorough, but there are times one wishes more of the story would be told. It would also have been good to have had some analysis of the larger picture. For example, how many ships were launched in total? How many prizes did they all take and what was their monetary value? How can we measure the value of the navy activities in comparison to the total war effort? But this is unfortunately missing. The book does offer an extensive bibliography, lists of all the men who served and an index.

A few tidbits:

• From p. 44: on the original rules for the government of the US navy in 1775: "The rules, 8 or 10 pages in length, are brevity itself as compared with the present rules and regulations of the US navy, which make a book of some 600 pages. More than one-half of the navy's first rules are concerned with the feeding, care, rights, duties and punishments of the ordinary sailor; while the present rules of the American navy in large part apply to officers."
• From p. 57: "Hopkins had concluded that his armada might prove vincible on the stormy coasts of Virginia." Not every day you see someone using "vincible" anymore. There's a meme called "lost positives" referring to words like "gruntled". Maybe we could term this a "lost negative".
• From p. 181: "Not a little of the interest and value of a study of the administration of the Revolution comes from the fact that the administrative practices and experiences of this period gave rootage to the later and more perfect executive organs." The word "rootage" is interesting. Today we would probably find "root" instead. The latter is stronger and more concise, but the latter is perhaps more descriptive as an entire system rather than a single factor.
• The curious incident of the Connecticut ship Minerva seems to be a little-told story of the Revolution: Owned by Captain William Griswold, in August 1775 it was selected by the colony of Connecticut for naval service. (Many states had their own navies.) In September of that year the colony issued commissions for the ship's officers. In November, the Continental Congress, governor and his Council of Safety ordered the ship to intercept two transports bound from England for Quebec. The crew, apart from 10-12 sailors and marines, refused to obey this order. The crew were discharged and a new crew hired, but before they could sail, in December the ship was returned to its owner by the Assembly. In April 1778, the ship reemerged under state control. In 1781 it was purchased by the Continental Congress.

24/9/1 Evolution of executive departments of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789, by Jennings B. Sanders ★★★★★

The topic may be too particular for many readers, but is perfect for my current project. I appreciated also that its style is succinct and to the point.

Covers the origins and development of the foreign affairs, war, navy and treasury departments in the Continental Congress all the way through to the first Congress under the 1787 constitution and the establishment of the departments that have come down to us today. There is also an adjunct chapter on Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress, keeper of the records and seals, and much else, who was not carried over in 1789 into the new regime, despite his fifteen years of faithful service.

The book also shows that the concept of a cabinet in the sense of regular meetings of the department heads did not originate with Washington, but was already being practiced in the Revolutionary period, probably orchestrated by the head of Finance, Robert Morris, who invited General Washington to these meetings as well.

24/8/18 Revolutionary enigma: a re-appraisal of General Philip Schuyler of New York by Martin H. Bush ★★★★

This is not a whole life biography, but covers only the early life and time as a general and Congressman of the man accused of losing Fort Ticonderoga. This book attempts to exonerate him.

As a man he seems highly intelligent and also practical. He had military experience at an early age and as the scion of early Dutch forebears had vast holdings in upstate New York. He was also a very successful businessman. Finally, he had great relations with the local Indians and was consistently able to influence them to resist British blandishments to attack the Patriots. All of this made him a natural choice to be the first major general put in charge of the Northern theater.

One shortcoming was that he was frequently ill. As a consequence, the expedition to Canada that he was supposed to lead was taken up by Montgomery as he recovered at home in his mansion at the top of the hill in Albany. Another was that his patrician nature did not seem to encompass the common touch. Soldiers were not eager to fight for him, and at a time when militia volunteers were much depended on, this was a serious problem. Places like Ticonderoga were very difficult to supply because of the extent of wilderness between it and more populated areas in those pre-steamship days, adding another reason for a low volunteer rate.

So although some of it was not his fault, there were many grumblings against Schuyler in New England and eventually, somehow, his command was given to Horatio Gates. Whenever something in Congress is mysterious, look to Samuel Adams, who had a way of making things happen behind the scenes and leaving no fingerprints. But Schuyler went to Congress and got it back, shortly before Burgoyne's massive army began descending from Canada. By the way, while in Philadelphia to make his appeal, he was asked by the state of Pennsylvania to help out in their local planning. He was put in charge of organizing all their military forces. I think that says something about his abilities and willingness to help.

Schuyler opted to direct the coming campaign from Albany and put General Arthur St. Clair in charge of Ticonderoga, which had too few defenders, but they were willing to make a go of it anyway, until the British managed to get two 12-pound artillery pieces up a bluff overlooking the fort. When St. Clair noticed that, he decided to order his entire force to sneak away in the night. If only the Patriots had decided to put their own guns on the bluff, or at least defend it things might have been different. But they did not.

Who was to blame for this? St. Clair to his credit was quick to say it was not Schuyler's fault. Congress saw Schuyler as the overall responsible commander though, and not even present, so they once again removed him in favor of Gates. After a couple years both St. Clair and Schuyler were court-martialed and exonerated. Yet for a long time after and even today the blame has largely landed on them. This book doesn't seem to have an answer for the charge either. It might well be that the less-experienced Patriots did not realize it was possible to get guns up that bluff or they just overlooked it. Whatever the case, someone made a mistake.

But not all is bad. The story eventually had a good outcome for the further Burgoyne marched, the more he was delayed and surrounded and harried - at one point the Patriots created an artificial swamp to hamper his progress - until eventually he was forced to surrender his entire army. This signal victory brought the French into the war, which pretty much doomed British chances. And the planning and logistics that Schuyler had put into motion enabled this, though the credit all went to Gates and Benedict Arnold, with further squabbles about who really deserved the credit for that, but that's another story. Schuyler liked Arnold by the way, seeing him as a decisive and innovative commander.

Schuyler had to wait a couple years for his court-martial. Having gotten him out, the faction in Congress that disliked him preferred that he would just go away. But after his exoneration, he joined Congress.

In Congress, his most important activity was serving on the camp committee. Designed to improve relations between Congress and the army, they actually lived with the army at Valley Forge. Rather than disliking the extra oversight as many would, Washington welcomed the committee and even instructed to army to take their orders as if they had come from him. Later Washington even requested that the committee be given more, indeed, dictatorial powers. This is an indication, I think, that conditions were so dire that Washington knew any reasonable person would be forced to admit it and want to do something about them. Unfortunately, the committee was able to make little progress, their communications with Congress became more strident and eventually Congress decided to disband them.

At this Schuyler quit Congress and returned hom, basically sitting out the war, apart from continuing to talk to Indian leaders and being a subject of a kidnap attempt during a British raid out of Canada. Schuyler foiled this by going to an upstairs room and shouting outside as if giving orders to nonexistent relief forces. The would-be kidnappers got so scared that they took off with their ill-gotten gains. The very attempt indicates that the British still saw him as a player, however, probably due to his influence with the Indians.

Schuyler is an example of a type we don't hear much about. Like Dickinson, a conservative who thought the revolution was a bad idea, he nevertheless fought because he considered it his duty as an American. After his experiences though, we might think he was embittered, but the author maintains that really he had lost hope that the Patriots could win. Considering what Benedict Arnold would do, there was probably more of that self-doubt than is commonly realized. It may be one of the untold stories of the war just how many Americans felt that way.

The book is easy to read and not particularly technical.

Sometimes it seems a little naive. In discussing the fighting back and forth with Canadians, it seems dumbfounded that Candian G.overnor Carleton refused to allow natives to attack the Patriots. Yet it seems so obvious that once the Indians would be encouraged to attack white settlers it would be only a matter of time before they turned on Canadian white settlers.

It also sometimes glosses over what would seem interesting stories and the reader is left to wonder. For example, Congress at one time blamed Schuyler for not giving a job to a Joseph Trumbull to handle the commissary. However, this book reveals that actually John Hancock, President of Congress, was the one who squelched Trumbull's commission. How did he do that? Why? It would be great to know. Again my suspicions lie on Sam Adams. But the book does not provide the answers.

24/8/7 Arthur Lee, a Virtuous Revolutionary by Louis W. Potts ★★★★

Partly a 4 because I'm grateful that a Lee biography exists at all. He became first a doctor – accomplishing some impressive work – and then a lawyer, but it was politics that became his true passion. His reputation has not aged well over the centuries. One of America's first diplomats, he was generally too abrasive, dogmatic and vengeful. Few could work with him. Essentially he was like John Adams, but even more of a perfectionist. Perhaps if any of his attempts to marry had worked out that would have softened him a little. That did happen, it seems, due to age, after around 50 or so.

The book admits all this and still tries to emphasize his good points. That's okay, but on the other hand it seems to take too harsh a line on opponents such as Silas Deane, Franklin and Robert Morris. It's as if the author mainly consulted Lee's correspondence and did not try to consider other perspectives. A more recent work, Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution by Joel Richard Paul, can provide a corrective for that.

24/7/16 The Founders: The 39 Stories Behind the U.S. Constitution by Dennis Brindell Fradin ★★★★

A good introduction to the signers of the Constitution, it should really have been called The Framers.

I'm not sure how they can call John Dickinson "the Penman of the Revolution" considering Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and Gouverneur Morris.

Says that Robert Morris spent a million dollars of his own money on the Revolution. Actually it was closer to three-quarters of a million.

Says that John Adams fired James McHenry from the War Department because he was too "gentle a soul to run the war department", thereby ignoring his traitorous behavior to the president.

Strangely the chapter on Charles C. Pinckney says nothing about what he is most famous for, refusing to pay tribute to France during his stay as a minister there.

John Landon's chapter fails to mention that in 1798, Langdon assisted Oney Judge to evade Burwell Bassett, the nephew of George and Martha Washington, who had intended to kidnap Judge and return her to slavery with the Washingtons.

Oddly refers to Hamilton's wife as "Betsy" Schuyler.

24/7/13 Forgotten Founder: The Life and Times of Charles Pinckney by Marty D. Matthews ★★★★

Pinckney is the man most instrumental, along with Aaron Burr, in getting Jefferson elected in 1800, because he made sure his state voted for him and not for his first cousin, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney.

This book kind of shows the difference between the first tier founders and the rest. While this individual had a lot of talent, intelligence and good ideas, it was not uniformly so. He also made some significant mistakes.

He was similar to Jefferson, in a lot of ways, actually:

traveled to Europe on diplomatic mission

toured the south of France

left his post to visit Italy to study rice cultivation

lost a wife early and took up with a slave mistress

enslaved hundreds

endlessly interested in politics

mismanaged his estates

spent heavily on luxuries

went disastrously into debt

had a sex scandal (being caught in an abandoned Washington house with a "mulatto wench")

But unlike the Virginians, who tried to excuse slavery with the "wolf by the ears" analogy ("we have no way out of it"), the South Carolinians tried to justify it as a positive good.

Pinckney also seems to have had some blind spots in human relations. Even though they were on the same side, Pinckney repeatedly made a major enemy of Madison, though it was not really his fault all that much.

First, in the Continental Congress he wrote a vociferous letter against Jay's proposal to trade away the rights to navigation in the lower Mississippi. While an important issue for the southern states, his letter was over the line of decency. Monroe persuaded him not to send it, but also forwarded it to Madison back in Virginia, who saw him as an overly factious person ever after.

At the constitutional convention, Pinckney presented a plan, even before Virginia presented Madison's plan. This plan was quite close to what the conventioned ended on so that later when Pinckney wrote about this fact, Madison saw it as trying to steal his thunder.

Finally, Pinckney seems to have never understood that Madison did not like him, yet kept writing letters asking for his help in getting a diplomatic assignment. That probably only earned him a lot more eye rolling and disdain. Yet, Pinckney kept a painting of Madison on the wall in the main room of his house.

Pinckney did seem to get along well with Jefferson and Monroe though, always more friendly and gregarious than Madison was.

The book does not seem particularly thorough. For example, Pinckney had a lot to do with getting his state to vote for Jefferson and Burr in 1800, but the book says almost nothing about the process of making it happen in the legislature, even though a great deal of this information is known.

It is also stated in some books that Pinckney was the one who was supposed to arrange withholding an electoral vote from Burr in 1800 so as to avoid an electoral college tie, but somehow failed to do so (and the dreadful tie happened to the disorganized Jeffersonians - in contrast, the more organized Hamiltonians always successfully withheld a vote). There is nothing about this in the book at all. Even if the author doesn't have a definitive answer, he could at least have discussed it.

The book doesn't even explain how its subject was related to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a frequent source of confusion. Yeah, it's easily looked up, but would it be so difficult to recount such a basic fact here? Maybe these complaints are a way of saying that the book is overly academic and assuming a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader.

Look, for example, at this quote from p. 111:

Perhaps Madison's own distaste for Pinckney influenced John Graham before he even began working for the South Carolinian. THis influence may in turn have led to the unflattering letters Graham wrote Madison soon after Pinckney arrived. In any event, one of the people in Washington to whom Jefferson referred in his letter to Monroe of early 1804 likely included his secretary of state. James Monroe, however, continued to support Pinckney.

This is the only reference to this Jefferson letter in the entire book. What the heck! Even if you're a professional historian, do you really know Jefferson's correspondence so well that you remember the content of a letter he wrote to Monroe in early 1804? Would it have killed to author to let the reader know what Jefferson said? By the way, Graham was Pinckney's secretary/assistant, but a Madison protege.

I tracked down Jefferson's letter, by the way, and here is what he wrote:

there is here a great sense of the inadequacy of C. Pinckney to the office he is in. his continuance is made a subject of standing reproach to myself personally, by whom the appointment was made & on a principle of distribution solely before I had collected the administration. he declared at the time that nothing would induce him to continue so as not to be here at the ensuing Presidential election. I am persuaded he expected to be proposed at it as V.P. after he got to Europe his letters asked only a continuance of two years. but he now does not drop the least hint of a voluntary return. pray, my dear Sir, avail yourself of his vanity, his expectations, his fears, and whatever will weigh with him to induce him to ask leave to return, and obtain from him to be the bearer of the letter yourself. you will render us in this the most acceptable service possible. his enemies here are perpetually dragging his character in the dirt, and charging it on the administration. he does, or ought to know this, and to feel the necessity of coming home to vindicate himself, if he looks to any thing further in the career of honor.

The footnote to this online letter states

not only was Charles Pinckney a disappointment to TJ and Madison as minister to Spain, but the Federalist press frequently abused his personal character, especially his alleged fondness for women of low repute. The Trenton Federalist went so far as to describe him as "one of the greatest libertines of the age" (Washington Federalist, 23 Feb. 1803; Baltimore Republican; or, Anti-Democrat, 11 Mch. 1803; Baltimore Federal Gazette, 8 Apr. 1803; Trenton Federalist, 11 Apr. 1803; Madison to TJ, 9 Apr. 1804).

Strangely these newspaper accusations were not addressed in the book.

When Pinckney left for Spain, he hired a cousin as caretaker for his estates. When he got back not only did he owe a lot of money to people, his caretaker, who was also employed at the South Carolina treasury, was accused of embezzling treasury funds. This caretaker in turn accused Pinckney of having encouraged him to do it. The book never reaches any conclusion on whether these accusations were true or not.

24/7/6 America's Forgotten Founders by Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall ★★★

Short bios of ten of lesser known founders. The book contends the ten most deserving are

1. James Wilson
2. George Mason
3. Gouverneur Morris
4. John Jay
5. Roger Sherman
6. John Marshall
7. John Dickinson
8. Thomas Paine
9. Patrick Henry
10. Rev. John Witherspoon

My own list would differ:

1. John Jay - really at the level of the main founders
2. Samuel Adams - the first to push the idea of Revolution and organize to make it happen
3. Robert Morris - the Financier of the Revolution
4. James Wilson
5. John Dickinson
6. Gouverneur Morris
7. Thomas Paine
8. Roger Sherman
9. Patrick Henry - important influence in Virginia
10. Elbridge Gerry - important in Congress

Marshall is not really in the founding generation.

The writers formed by list by polling quite a few people thought to be experts on the subject. Looking through the list, there are some historians, but no famous ones. There are also not a few who are more experts on the subject of religion, which probably explains why most of the book's list are conservatives and there is even a minister. (That the atheist Thomas Paine made the list is a surprise, but perhaps it was seen as an opportunity to point out that even Paine invoked God at times.) In fact, it appears that the authors do not agree with the concept of separation of church and state and this book is a way of highlighting founders who could be seen as being more amenable to that point of view, since the main six are not.

24/7/2 The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen ★★★★★

I was expecting a comparison between the ancient sources the founders had read and their own writings and actions. I found rather more a grab bag that included not just the founders, but also John Quincy Adams, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln, Brandeis and more all the way to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The sources too are not limited to the Greeks and Romans, but include the bible, Bhagavad Gita and so forth, though probably the most frequent reference is to The Tusculan Disputations of Cicero.

It's a good concept for a book, to look at the ancient authors each of the founders read and how they applied or did not apply their wisdom to their own lives. For the most part it's interesting reading, but at times it does not dig deeply enough, not regarding the ancients, but respecting the founders. It implies, for example, that James Wilson originated the idea of the 3/5 clause, but fails to mention that the same idea had already been resolved in the Continental Congress, long before the writing of the constitution.

It discusses George Mason and implies that his chief objection to the constitution, which he refused to sign, was the absence of a bill of rights. In fact he had several objections and a reading of his biography reveals that the matter of the bill was one of the last and least vehement of his arguments.

The discussion of Jefferson discusses the children he had with Sarah (called Sally) Hemings and then draws attention to his writings against miscegenation. But those things happened at different times and in a life of 82 years, a man's views can change a great deal. Indeed it would be unusual if they did not, for anyone. But this book doesn't seem to recognize much possibility of evolution.

There are new things to learn here and the book is certainly a paean to the love of reading. Probably the best chapter is on the late life correspondence of Adams and Jefferson as they discussed the ancients and the pursuit of happiness.

24/6/10 The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Jonathan Gienapp ★★★

The topic is of interest: given that today the Supreme Court is interpreting the constitution on the basis of the founders' intents. What were the founders' opinions on this. In particular, how did they behave?

The book tries to answer this question by examining the constitutional issues that came before the first and fifth Congresses. Since the constitution was new, they were forced to spend time deciding exactly what it meant, and indeed they did. The first Congress spent their first two months just debating a constitutional matter when things like debts were festering and taxes were going uncollected. That's how important they saw these matters.

The particular events/questions the book addreses:

1. Who had the power to fire department heads, the president, the president and senate, nobody, or something else?
2. Should amendments be added to the end or incorporated into the text? Was the original constitution (at that time only two years old) more of a living document or a sacred text? (That they opted for the sacred text idea has probably meant that it has not evolved as much as it might have. My own thought, not addressed in the book, is that on the other hand, interpolating texts probably would have been too difficult to propose to the public).
3. Was the government constitutionally able to incorporate a national bank? An interesting little point here is that the failure of the anti-bank forces led them to start the doctrine of popular opposition to the government, which led to the Jay treaty opposition, political parties and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which later influenced southern separatists. A lot of the way subsequent history developed came out of these early struggles when antagonists reached for whatever weapons that came to hand in attempting to win their struggles. Not that those kinds of developments wouldn't have come later anyway, but their origins are noticeable already here.
4. Did the House have any role to play in foreign treaties? (Jay treaty)

Unfortunately, the writing is very wordy and repetitive. Repeatedly, especially when a bunch of contemporary quotes are being cited, one wants to shout "Get on with it already!". It's important that arguments be solidly based on sentiments actually expressed, but quite prosaic to have to read through all of them. Maybe if all the quotes had been placed in optional to read side panels.

I recommend merely skimming the first two chapters, which set up the context and scene, for otherwise you may not finish the book at all. Only in chapter 3 does it become something that people other than constitutional lawyers want to read. Even then, there are far too many unnecessary words. As just a simple example, every time it mentions Senator William Maclay it cannot resist saying "the irascible William Maclay". We got it the first time. At least this one is only a single word. Elsewhere there are long clauses that could easily have been omitted because all they're doing is restating what was said in a previous paragraph.

There are also a lot of little things left out. Imagine spending a whole chapter on the bank controversy and never mentioning the famous meeting in the room where it happened. This is just one example. It also never mentions how Hamilton sabotaged the Jay treaty, or even the unconstitutionality of the Chief Justice taking on a second office as Envoy. But these are mere quibbles.

The conclusions suggest that today's constitution is mostly seen as fixed rather than flexible, which seems to suggest that the latter might be an option. I don't think it's only because that's what we're used to is the reason it's that way though. Human nature has played its role.

The idea of the book is great. The individual topics are interesting. In examining debates, it has the clever idea of examining what both sides are taking for granted and using this to chronicle undeniable changes in understanding, separate from the points of view. It also points out the danger that a constitution has to be based on words, but the meanings of words can change over time. But the book is also quite long and the writing style leaves a lot to be desired.

24/5/26 Cabal! The Plot Against General Washington by Mark Edward Lender ★★★★★

This is about the so-called Conway Cabal, said to be a conspiracy to replace General Washington during the dark days of the war. But did it happen? Washington wrote only one letter about such a possibility, to a friend, in which he only hinted. cryptically, at such a thing. In a later biography by John Marshall, however, it was described in full (outraged) detail. Other writers picked up thread and it continued as gospel until 1941 when a new history pointed out that there was no smoking gun. Maybe the whole thing was made up? Intereresting, by the way, that a history written during a time of Great Depression and world war, when the country needed to pull together, should assert that in a previous time of great crisis, there had been no signficant dissension. The book was influential and there has been considerable doubt about the existence of the cabal since then. The present work seeks to shed new light by looking deeply at where the supposed conspirators were at different times and doing deep dives on each of their motives.

The author is evidently a big fan of asides. There are perhaps rather more than interest would justify. There are also a few drops into informality, including at one point a "Seriously?".

He also appears to be a big fan of Washington's generalship, though his own evidence seems to contradict such.

There's a great deal of boilerplate here. Even past page 100 the book is still engaged in setting the stage.

The book has a lengthy and somewhat tedious section on the problems of supply that makes it seem like those in charge where generally incompetent. What it fails to mention is that Congress had been printing a huge amount of paper money, unbacked by any hard currency and, after 1776, greatly in excess of what the economy could bear. This is the main reasons they saw rapid inflation of prices and producers not bringing their products to market unless paid in something other than the paper currency that was rapidly becoming worthless.

The author has no compunctions about jumping back and forth and time. Of course it's always difficult to handle things when multiple stories are happening at once, but sometimes that means it's difficult for the reader to fully comprehend the big picture.

There's a tendency to avoid names at times and instead write "the Virginian" or "the Pennsylvanian", for example, which can be confusing because in a discussion about Washington and Gates, both were Virginians.

It would have been good if more had been said about Congress, which is always treated at arms length. Who was in Congress at the time? How many were pro-Washington and how many anti-Washington? Which ones changed their views. There's some information on this early in the book, but objective observers such as John Adams disappear from the narrative without explanation.

In Part III the author recapitulates a great deal of what has already been written. While this might be a good exercise while writing a book, especially if there was a significant break in the writing, it's not really helpful for the reader who has been steadily reading right along. Overall I think a strong editor would have been helpful here. In fact there seem to be many sub-chapters in the early going, one for each of Washington's detractors in fact. It would have been nice if an editor had added a subtitle to each of these sections for the easy reference of the reader. There are a lot of similar things a strong editor could have done to make this book more readable.

The promise to study locations and motivations was not so strongly evident as would have been expected. Still, it was an excellent deep dive into the subject, thoroughly examining everything that was done and written, followed by welcome analysis.

My own take from the evidence? Winners write the narrative. That's what we see here. The narrative Washington and therefore the country adopted was and mostly still is one of the triumphant general eventually triumphing despite many setbacks. Among the setbacks he had to face, according to this narrative, because Washington had to be an unvarnished hero, was a cabal against his leadership by nefarious, no-good evildoers who made secret plans to oust him or at least reduce his role. But even beset by this, Washington managed to triumph and prove that in the end he was right, because did he not, in fact, win the war?

I have two problems with this. First of all, when things are going badly, especially in perilous times like war, isn't it natural, indeed wise, to question the leadership, methods and policies before it is too late? Isn't it natural too for those who think this way to compare notes and discuss with a view to making things better? There's really no reason to conclude that Conway, Mifflin, Gates, the Lees and others were doing anything else. It's just politics, already alive in the young republic, and belying the notion that during the revolution everyone was in lockstep all the time.

Second, Washington being right should be a qualified statement. The men who were critiquing his performance were probably more talented than he was. Maybe not at the court of public opinion where Washington was a master, but in the arts of war. They had more experience and better results. Washington essentially failed at Monmouth. The British had to march from Philadelphia to Sandy Point. Somewhere in that endeavor they were surely vulnerable to having their long baggage train being struck decisively, yet Washington muffed it. (That he still claimed the stalemate at Monmouth just because the British left the field was a nice propaganda move.) Even Yorktown, for which Washington gets credit, was not his idea. He foolishly wanted to recapture New York, which due to the nature of the islands and British fleet was never going to happen. It was the French general, Rochambeau, who made this wise plan. So yes, Washington won the war, but it's pretty clear that his doubters would done so also, and maybe even more quickly and effectively.

24/5/22 The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 by Rick Atkinson ★★★

iWhereas recently I remarked that a book was written at a very high, meta level – To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders by Bernard Bailyn – this one was the opposite. It features almost no analysis, but enumerates everything, down to the number of trees needed to make the masts for the new American fleet, and every other number you can think of. There is little analysis of what the leaders did, but many quotes of what they wrote or were reported to have said. This is a history of a sort, but misses the big picture for the most part, and not the history for me. In addition it covers only the early years of the war and there has never been a sequel.

24/5/14 To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders by Bernard Bailyn ★★★★★

It's sort of a high-level book, more concerned with trends and overall developments than particular acts. It's also less a continuous narrative than a collection of essays.

Chapters discuss

• how it happened that political innovation occurred in the provinces before it did at the centers
• the contradictions of Jefferson, who would have had a great career as an idealistic agitator from the outside, but unfortunately for him, was such a good politician that he managed to govern and then saw the difficulty in putting ideals into practice
• an analysis of the many paintings and sculptures of Benjamin Franklin
• a discussion of the Federalist Papers
• a look at how the constitution has been read and adapted around the world

24/5/8 The Adams Federalists by Manning J. Dauer ★★★★★

First, the book tries to address who the Federalists were. The approach is that people were not Federalists whimsically, but for logical reasons.

These were people involved in
(1) shipping and shipbuilding, and note that this included some related industries, such as forestry
(2) manufacturing
(3) exporting
(4) retail merchandising
(5) banking
(6) professional groups

In addition, Federalist districts correlated with
(7) soil (larger plantations on the coast)
(8) exporting agricultural areas
(9) ratio of slaves to whites
(10) per capita wealth

Then there were social and cultural factors:
(11) Congregationalist Church membership
(12) Episcopalian Church membership
(13) The early Catholics of Maryland (but not the later Irish Catholics)
(14) German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, Lutheran (but not in W. Pennsylvania)
(15) Quakers (except when war loomed)
(16) Scottish Presbyterians
(17) Germans of Eastern Pennsylvania

Other factors:
(18) Some districts voted against their norm due to a popular candidate such as the Federalist Robert Goodloe Harper in South Carolina or Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts.
(19) Far west districts with Indian problems tended to vote Federalist due to stronger support for the army.
(20) Negative reaction to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions

Next it considers the beliefs of John Adams. They changed over time, with periodicization as follows: I. Before 1786 - radical, similar to Jefferson, Madison and other founders II. 1786-1801 - He became more conservative as he acquired an admiration of the British system while minister there, was dismayed by the failure of the Articles of Confederation and Shays' Rebellion and had become more elevated in his social standing. III. After 1801 - He returned to his earlier, more liberal position on many points, still retaining some ideas of (II), however.

This idea of changing views over time is something everyone can consider, particularly in the context of the vehemence of one's current beliefs. One might refrain from being too extreme in any particular direction as there may be more regret later. Better to keep an open mind and consider multiple angles.

After having read many books, this is the first I've seen that mentions that Hamilton's financial program was closely copied, even to the extent of having a sinking fund, from that of Charles Montague, who introduced it in England as far back as 1692-4. This was one reason Adams did not believe Hamilton really understood economic policy or matters of finance in general.

This book is really good on Federalist politics during Adams' administration. A lot of books complain that Adams failed to fire Washington's incompetent cabinet. This book agrees, but asks the question, what real choice did Adams have? Had he fired the cabinet, it would have split his party in two, which by the end of his term happened anyway, but it would have been an extremely dangerous thing to do at the start of the term.

Moreover, not only was Hamilton controlling three members of the cabinet, he also controlled the leadership of both the House and Senate! With a Federalist Supreme Court, Hamilton, not even in the government, was probably the closest the country came to a dictator until the advent of Franklin Roosevelt!

Adams actually sought to appoint Aaron Burr as a brigadier general, mainly to get him out of the Republican party, but it's not clear if he thought working with Federalists would make him appreciate Federalism or whether accepting the post would damage his reputation with Republicans. Perhaps both. Adams reasoned that both Hamilton and Burr were adventurers. Washington had approved Hamilton, why not Burr? But in the end Washington refused.

Noah Webster, yes the dictionary man, was a prominent supporter of Adams, and not of Hamilton. Hamilton did not own the entire party.

Adams felt that if he had not found peace with France then states from New York south would have raised an army led by Burr to march on New England, which would be defended by an army raised by Hamilton, and Burr would have been victorious.

Hamilton had his effect though. Because of the threat of his army marching to take the Floridas, Louisiana and South America, Jefferson wrote to Talleyrand that the situation had become dangerous. He also explained to him how badly the XYZ Affair had backfired. Talleyrand became anxious, feared that he had overstepped and by October finally signaled to Adams that he would accept a new diplomatic mission, which was what Adams had desired to do all along. To get the peace mission confirmed by the Senate, however, Adams had to threaten to resign, which would have made Jefferson president. They acquiesced. Thus, through the efforts of Hamilton, Jefferson and Adams, all operating at least somewhat if not wholly against the others, peace was soon achieved. Strange how conflict results in good outcomes sometimes.

When Adams fired two of the High Federalists in his Cabinet, the war between the High and Moderate Federalists came out into the open. Hamilton published his pamphlet attacking Adams and was even heard to say he preferred Jefferson. Adams was unable to stop the High Federalists and so most moderate Federalists moved over to the Republicans. The Federalists lost the 1800 election and the party disintegrated as a national entity soon after.

It had been a war between commercial and agrarian interests, the High Federalists identifying with commerce, the moderates and Republicans with agriculture. The extreme demands of the commercial group caused the other two groups to unite to defeate them. Together they were far more numerous, if not more wealthy.

Adams drew conclusions from the British political system, but, like almost all Americans, misunderstood aspects of it. They thought that the king stood as an independent executive above party, and that the rich should be represented by the Senate and the commons by the House. Washington and Adams tried to emulate this non-political leader ideal.

But in reality, while George III strove to achieve that, in fact he accomplished more by acting via political parties. Moreover, the prime minister was the true executive, not he. The Senate and the House did not end up working the same as Lords and Commons either.

Adams did do well, however, in choosing a moderate path, avoiding foreign adventure and ending domestic extremism, thus contributing to national well-being, even if he did not have the ability to bring together disparate groups as Jefferson would do in his presidency.

24/4/22 The revolution for freedom - volume 2 - years 1734 to 1783 (Pictorial Encyclopedia of American History) by Bernard S. Miller ★★★★
24/4/18 Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders by Dennis C. Rasmussen ★★★★

The idea of the book is that all of the founders felt, at the ends of their lives, very discouraged about the constitution and the way the country was going, save Madison.

Although this is a different cut at things, early on there doesn't seem to be any new material. All the familiar quotes and stories are trotted out once again. In fact it's easy to predict exactly which quotes are going to be cited. From Franklin there's the "rising sun" and "a republic, if you can keep it." From Jefferson there's the "a fire bell in the night". And so on. They're all there. In 2021 the amount of boilerplate should have been reduced considerably. These may be the problems that crop up when a historian comes in to a well-trod field from the outside.

But after the introductions and chapters on Washington and Hamilton, it picks up considerably with Adams, Jefferson, Madison and other founders. In particular, what they thought, wrote and said in their retirement years has been little treated elsewhere in any systematic fashion.

Another issue is that sometimes topics are explained with enough nuance. For example, the description of Washington's cabinet meetings makes it sound like they occurred every single day that the government was in session. But that wasn't the case. They were called primarily when Washington had some big decision to make and in fact they became rare in the second half of his second term.

Washington's despair about the constitution was about the fact that it led to political parties. On that he was just wrong, not the constitution. He just was not well enough studied in the nature of politics.

Hamilton's despair was that the federal government did not have enough power. He would probably be a lot happier with the way things are now.

Jefferson's main despair was that the federal government would be used to force an end to slavery, creating a civil war. Well, he was right, but the Union survived somehow anyway. He also wanted a lot more decentralization.

Adams despaired, primarily, that good government in the end must depend on a certain level of civic virtue and he saw the want of it everywhere he looked. As a remedy he sought to make the chief executive sound more impressive using exalted titles. Most books do not bother to explain this reasoning by the way, leaving readers to guess Adams had gone slightly round the bend. This Adams section is probably the best in the book, expounding on his reaction to the constitution – he wanted a stronger executive not subject to veto override and a weaker senate which did not have oversight of appointments – and early governance – like Jefferson he disliked much of Hamilton's financial program.

24/4/16 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783 by Joseph J. Ellis ★★★★

Dr. Ellis appears to have the most enthusiasm for personalities and character analysis. Thus, he is not in his natural element when writing not a biography, but the description of an entire war. The result is very idiosyncratic, concentrating on the personalities and omitting tons of information about the course of the war. This should not be anyone's first book on the revolution.

Besides the many gaps, I took issue with some of the narrative, such as the Battle of Monmouth (Courthouse), which appears to take the traditional line and does not reflect more modern scholarship. The perspective on General Greene seems unbelievably positive, never mentioning, for example, that while quartermaster general, he set up his own supply company and would use government money to buy commodities from it, a clear conflict of interest.

I tend to disagree with Ellis referring to Robert Morris as an immigrant. Yes, he moved from Liverpool to Maryland, but was still in the same empire. Same for Hamilton.

He writes confusingly about the Bank of the United States being capitalized at $40K, which seems preposterous considering that the earlier Bank of North America got $400K, but it is good to see an admission that the financial program that Hamilton receives so much praise for was in fact originated by Morris. Too few mention this. That delegate James Madison opposed the bank even at this stage is not mentioned, leading to another myth: that after the Constitution Madison was weaned away from Hamilton's ideas by Jefferson. In fact Madison always thought for himself.

Ellis seems far off the mark on the subject of Washington's compensation after the war. The general famously refused any salary, but agreed to work on an expense report basis. After the war he turned in a report totalling, according to most sources, $449,261. This was no small sum, considering that the value of the entire national economy at the time was worth only $25 million. Among the expenses claimed were a new, fancy coach and horse team, plenty of expensive wine and other exotic items. Congress thought this over and granted him $100,000 and $500 a month for life. In addition, in 1832 it offered his heirs another $200,000. What does Ellis say? That Washington charged a mere 8,422 British pounds. Seems misleading at best.

On the plus side, Ellis writes in a very compact, yet meaningful way that is easy to read and comprehend, as well as generally warm and often amusing.

By the way, the Discontents of the title, mainly discussed in the last chapter, are all those who lost out as a result of the war: the British, the loyalists, the Indians, the enslaved and the proponents of decentralized government.

24/4/2 The Origins of American Politics by Bernard Bailyn ★★★

There is a generally bland section that to me is introductory in nature, but continues to over 100 pages. Then it dives into the subject for real only to reference obscure events that have in no way been mentioned in the long introduction. How many have heard of the "Morris-Hunter settlement", for example? ("Hunter-Morris" rolls much more trippingly off the tongue.) Then there is a long wrap up section. The meat is the middle is pretty thin.

I guess the main point is that in modern times we see the Revolution as having started as a consequence of events in the 1760s and coming to fruition in the 1770s, but this book contends that the problems were ongoing throughout the 18th century. The Glorious Revolution in the UK had created a balanced constitution there, but those ideas had not fully arrived in America where there were provincial governors with all the authority in name, but little in practice. The pressures caused by this situation caused constant strife and conflicts and it is against this background that the Revolution finally erupted.

Learned an interesting word from this book: Subdolous means somewhat sly, crafty, cunning, or artful. Synonyms of subdolous include clever and sly. The word comes from the Latin words sub and dolus, which mean "deceit". By the way, contract this with "sedulous", which means involving or accomplished with careful perseverance, or diligent in application or pursuit.

24/3/13 Thrust For Canada: the American Attempt on Quebec in 1775-1776 by Robert M. Hatch ★★★★★

An excellent account of the American attempt to conquer Canada in 1775-6.

The questions I had going in were why Americans had so much faith in their ability to conquer Canada, as evidenced by the serious numbers of men and materiel they committed to the campaign, when in fact it turned out so badly, and why it had gained only that result.

The conclusions were readily apparent: ignorance, mistakes and smallpox.

Congress greatly underestimated the amount of support they could get from Canadians, only about 500 of them joining their forces and none them wanting their paper money, causing huge problems in securing supplies. Many of the French inhabitants felt well treated by the British regime and distrusted the American Protestants.

The Americans made a two-prong effort, one water-borne via Lakes George and Champlain and then down the St. Lawrence River, the other overland through the wilds of northern Maine. The first took Montreal, the less important city in those days, and the latter might have taken the all-important Quebec City by surprise had they only attacked immediately, but most of the commanders, other than Benedict Arnold lost their nerve, thereby squandering all the hard work invested in a very, very difficult overland march through mountains and swamps.

Another mistake was in not treating Canadians better for then they would have had more soldiers and support.

A third was in not sending their commissioners, including Franklin and Charles Carroll, earlier, as they might have helped in gaining support.

Finally, the smallpox outbreaks of that year generally laid low half the army at any given time. Part of the problem was soldiers intentionally inoculating themselves, which eventually their commanders had to order not be done, but of course it was impossible to control. Washington had encouraged this practice, but at a time when his army was mainly on the defensive and thus could better stand the risk. But for an invading army that desperately needed to attack before British naval serves brought reinforcements up the thawing St. Lawrence, it was a devastating handicap.

The author does a great job explaining all this without an excess of verbiage. Maps show clearly the important locations of the conflict. The story is often quite exciting as individual smaller conflicts are detailed. Benedict Arnold comes out here as quite talented, but also rather poor at managing his image and relations with other officers.

Famous characters who play small roles, but will be more important later include Daniel Morgan, James Wilkinson, Anthony Wayne and Aaron Burr.

24/1/26 Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution by Charles Rappleye ★★★★

A funny thing happened when by happy accident I started reading Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution and also Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution at the same time as both books are set in the same time period.

The first book is about how the efforts of Beaumarchais and Silas Deane to send munitions, uniforms and other supplies to support the American revolution. The second book is how Robert Morris tried to send tobacco ships to France in order to pay for them. Both books thus focus on different sides of the Atlantic and spend a lot of time with their subjects wondering why they haven't heard anything from the other and just what was going on. After a while I felt that if I could just get the two books to talk to one another all would be well!

This author likes, I think, his subject a little bit too much. Although he mentions the critiques of his contemporaries, Morris almost always has the last word.

He also suggests credit for things that he did not actually. For example, it was during the Revolution that the idea of creating a new currency based on the decimal system was invented. (Thank goodness or we might still be worried about pounds, shillings and pence, or even worse Spanish pieces of eight!) Most historians believe it was Gouverneur Morris (no relation) who first made this proposal, but this author does not ascribe an originator, leaving one to think that Robert Morris started the idea.

Sometimes he misses nuances. Discussing the pair of Madison and Hamilton, he says that while Madison was with Morris/Hamilton financial program in 1783, he moved against it in 1790. That's not entirely accurate. Madison was for some of the Morris measures, but always against the national bank. It's a long book, it wasn't necessary to gloss over a point this large. (For more on this topic, see The Power of the Purse by Ferguson, which the author admits to having read.)

On the Compromise of 1790, many popular histories (and the musical) only tell Jefferson's version of the story and omit all the complex negotiations that preceded his involvement. As Morris was a a big part of the negotiation, this book does a good job covering all of that. Regarding his disasters in land speculation, the book only shows us cases of people who failed at it, subtly hinting that it was not so much their fault. But people like James Duane who succeeded at it are not mentioned.

That Morris owned slaves is barely touched upon.

An epilog kindly recounts the significant previous biographies in some detail. The author is at odds with Ferguson's history of revolutionary finance, in particular the suggestion that Morris may have taken advantage of his position as financier for personal gain. To counter that argument, he states that in the thousands of Morris papers published, there is no evidence of it. On the other hand, that's not the kind of thing one would find in a person's papers. That's the kind of document that's destroyed after reading. On the other hand, an independent auditor found that Morris had taken $80K of the government's money during the war. The author barely mentions this, pointing out that Morris always disputed it. However, Morris did pay the government back $93K after this was revealed, and this at a time when he badly needed money and was likely to go to debtor's prison, which eventually occurred. Overall, what can we say about Morris? In his time, the smartest and most capable American in matters of finance and probably indispensable for managing the war, but also he did not stop his personal commercial activities while acting in government roles. This was explicitly approved by Congress because it enabled him to ship army supplies from France legally, for example, without explicitly violating France's treaty with Britain. He also helped Washington greatly in 1781 when he guaranteed various payments on his personal account. But when government and personal cargoes are on the same ship, and that ship goes down or has its contents captured, it gets tricky. It can be so easy to assign the losses to the government rather than to oneself. There's also a question of how he should have been rewarded for doing so much more than the office required, though officially there was no extra compensation for this. Did he justify hiding some profits to fix what he may have considered wrong? Further, he had considerable financial benefit because as the director of national finance, other merchants were much more willing to make deals with him.

In his later years he pushed his luck far too hard in buying millions of acres of land on credit. He was right that eventually the lands would be worth huge amounts, but dead wrong on the rate at which that would occur. He lost it all and wound up in prison. This also hurt not just his family, but many of his business partners.

Finally, a great deal of the program Hamilton put into place was invented by him, and likeminded Congressional delegates, in particular the ideas of a national bank, keeping the debts national, assuming those of the states, and paying them off via the tariff and sales of western lands. Indeed, when Washington formed the first government, it was his great friend Morris he turned to to become the first Treasury secretary. Morris was too embroiled in financial ventures at the time, and his first round doing this had not gone so well, so he recommended Hamilton. Washington was stunned as he had no idea that his young former aide knew anything about finance whatever.

So, like most founders, Morris was capable, sometimes brilliant, but not free of errors.

24/1/17 The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776-1790 by E. James Ferguson ★★★★★

This book is probably not for most readers, but if you really want to dive deeply into the realities of finance during the Revolution, it is likely indispensable. I grew so tired of so many books that merely wave qualitative hands at matters of finance, even in the biography of the Financier of the Revolution, Robert Morris, that I am reading concurrently. This book prints actual numbers so that you can see the realities for yourself.

There are a few mistakes. I found these because a number of the financial tables in the book are ideally suited for electronic spreadsheets. I translated them as such and these found a copy/paste error or two. But they are readily identifiable.

An interesting way to look at this history is stratigraphically. Consider the Compromise of 1790.

1. At the top level one might have an understanding as it is presented in the Hamilton musical. Jefferson and Madison oppose Hamilton and they reach a compromise. (Burr is not in the room.)
2. Readers of popular histories can reach a slightly deeper level and learn that Jefferson and Madison opposed Hamilton's plan to pay off the much-depreciated Continental currency at full value because the original soldiers had already sold theirs off for cents on the dollar and so it would be rewarding wealthy speculators only, and the two opposed assuming state debts because states like Virginia had paid off their debts and so it wouldn't be fair. These are very, very commonplace assertions in most popular histories.
3. But in this book we can reach a third level.
   (a) Hamilton did not originate these ideas, as many claim. In fact they had been the project of the nationalist faction for many years and many such proposals had been attempted in Congress, but all had failed.
   (b) Hamilton did not pay them at full value (more like divided by 100).
   (c) Madison’s opposition on the grounds that the payments should instead go to the original holders – often soldiers – is suspicious. He had never opposed it before and his claim that the financial instruments had only recently been acquired by wealthy speculators is not entirely accurate. They had been acquired over the past many years. Rather, the significant factor appears to be that that was what voters back in Virginia thought about the matter and Madison, who had failed in his attempt to win a seat in the Senate and only barely managed to win one in the House, needed to gain the support of his voters.
   (d) Regarding the federal government’s assumption of the debts of the states, in reality whether a state had already paid the debts made little difference. The debt that solvent states would get rid of in 1790 would be accounted for, so they would pay one way or another in any case. The main states in opposition were Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. In these states, during the war truly awful accounting practices had occurred. Documentation of expenses was very often missing or not properly recorded, and thus in danger of being rejected as invalid. A report to this effect submitted to Congress was quickly expunged and the clerks blamed for errors. In any case, reconciling the accounts in these states would take a long time and might not be completed in time to count. These states were eager to have their version of the debts stand and not have everything re-examined by the Treasury Department.
   (e) The Assumption of the state debts was clearly not essential to the union. It needlessly increased the federal debt, and divided the nation's leaders along the lines of State interest. Assumption passed only as a result of the famous trade that gave Virginia the permanent capital. What is not generally recognized, is that there was another feature of the negotiation: the compromise of 1790 also conceded Southern demands in the settlement of State accounts.
4. But this book is not yet done. There is even a fourth level. It even delves into the details of how the debt was to be assumed. It wasn't just a matter of the government raising taxes and tariffs and then using this money to pay off the states. No, Hamilton in fact proposed three different ways that holders of debt could be compensated, creating certificates that paid varying interest rates and the possibility of being granted land west of the Appalachians instead. Congress reduced this to a single method, but still.

This book is an incredibly impressive effort. The author is an historian, but I believe he must have been at least half accountant as well to deal so competently with so many different financial instruments and technicalities. This is a magisterial work on its topic.

23/12/26 The Continental Congress by Edmund Cody Burnett ★★★★★

I think the way events transpired was that in the late 50s were published (1) the journals or proceedings of the Continental Congress and (2) the letters of all the Congressmen that they sent in this period. These were large books and each was a multi-volume series, so there was considerable information, more than just about anyone could handle. As a consequence, two books were written that present the main threads and highlights. These very well may have been written by the compilers or directors of the above projects. The book about the journals was by Lynn Montross and this book is based on the letters. But I believe both books, each still quite long, use the other source to supplement and round out their presentations. But it means that the first book is more about what happened and the second book is more about what the delegates were thinking about what happened. Neither one is superior to the other and really, to get a good picture, one should read both books, and even then, the picture remains incomplete. One should also read, probably, to fully understand the Continental Congress, some letter collections and some specialized studies on topics such as their finances, the war and foreign relations, and some biographies of the more prominent delegates. But this book makes for an excellent start, although much compressed from the source material and probably still too long and dry for many.

23/12/18 Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution by Joel Richard Paul ★★★★★

A funny thing happened when by happy accident I started reading Unlikely Allies: How a Merchant, a Playwright, and a Spy Saved the American Revolution and also Robert Morris: Financier of the American Revolution at the same time as both books are set in the same time period.

The first book is about how the efforts of Beaumarchais and Silas Deane to send munitions, uniforms and other supplies to support the American revolution. The second book is how Robert Morris tried to send tobacco ships to France in order to pay for them. Both books thus focus on different sides of the Atlantic and spend a lot of time with their subjects wondering why they haven't heard anything from the other and just what was going on. After a while I felt that if I could just get the two books to talk to one another all would be well!

This book recounts very intriguing stories from the European side of the Revolution that are not much told elsewhere, so that's great. It has a very positive view of envoy Silas Deane, which is not the case in every book.

The only complaint I would have may not bother everyone, but it's this: the author knows the facts of certain things, but does not disclose them when it would be normal to state them, instead keeping matters in doubt, presumably because the characters are likewise in doubt, and only revealing them much later. I didn't much care for the cat-and-mouse game, but maybe some readers will enjoy this. (For this reason I won't reveal here what those secrets are).

23/11/20 The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill George Washington by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch ★★★
23/10/24 The Making of the Prefident 1789: The Unauthorized Campaign Biography by Marvin Kitman, ★★★★★

This is primarily a biography of humor, and often very funny! But the author has clearly researched Washington very deeply, and particularly in matters of everyday life, which other historians do not cover, but which do reveal a subject's character. It does contain quite a few legitimate footnotes and notices some interesting trends such as the way Washington would continually manage his image and peoples emotions. He seemed to intuitively understand that the way to get most people behind an idea was not to appeal to their brains, but to their hearts.

Students of Washington are familiar with the way he gained sympathy with the soldiers during the near mutiny at Newburgh by putting on his glasses to read something and complaining that his eyes didn't work so well anymore. But did you know he used the exact same trick on two other occasions?

There's also a considerable amount about the Friends of Washington and the way he cultivated them to further his career.

Then too there are all the ladies who flocked to him, making one wonder what all was in those private letters Martha burned just after his death. And so on.

The book does seem overly harsh on Robert Morris. Maybe his purported corruption was the common understanding in 1989, but is much less so today.

23/10/19 The reluctant rebels: The story of the Continental Congress, 1774-1789 by Lynn Montross ★★★★★

Suppose you're interested in the daily workings of the Continental Congress, but don't have the time to read all eleven volumes of their proceedings, plus all the letters of the 342 delegates and all the diplomatic correspondence of Congress. Wouldn't it be nice if someone read all that and presented the interesting and important bits in a single volume? That's what we have here, and although I detected some errors – for example, not including Josiah Bartlett in the list of delegates (which must disturb West Wing fans everywhere) – on the whole this was well done and an very enjoyable read with a lot of information you won't easily get elsewhere. The author has a peculiar affinity for Congressman Thomas Burke, who is not really ever mentioned elsewhere.

23/10/15 Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership by Edward J. Larson ★★★

Zooming in on just the letters and actions of Franklin and Washington was an interesting idea because it bring out some lesser known facets of the war, but it gets some things wrong.

Maryland was the state that held out on signing the Articles of Confederation, not New Jersey.

Adams and Jay were the ones who changed the negotiations to end the war from multi-lateral to bi-lateral, not Franklin.

Franklin was a lot more ill at the constitutional convention than the book allows, having him make all kinds of speeches whereas in reality they were written out in advance and read out on his behalf.

It's good on the details of the anti-slavery petitions Franklin was involved with at the end of his life, and what happened to them.

In general the book needed to take a deeper dive than it did. One fruitful area might have been Franklin's six terms governing Pennsylvania, where he successfully managed to bring the opposing side together. More details on how he managed that particular trick might be useful to the country about now.

23/9/12 The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 by Edmund S. Morgan ★★★
23/8/13 Diplomacy and Revolution: The Franco-American Alliance of 1778 by Ronald Hoffman & Peter J. Albert (editors) ★★★★

This is not a single narrative, but a series of papers written in anticipation of the bicentennial of the Franco-American treaty of 1778, published in 1981. Oh well, only a few years off, but the papers were read out in a symposium held in Senate Caucus Room 318 in 1978.

Still it has some interesting points. For example, the 1778 treaty was the first and also the last one the US ever had, until 1949, and NATO.

The topic papers are

unconventional interpretations of the French reasons for joining the war

the strangeness of an alliance of republic with a monarchy

participation in the war as a tragedy for France

the perspective of Vergennes, the French foreign minister

NATO and the idea of avoiding entangling alliances

It's conventional that France joined the war after the Americans had shown they could win a major battle at Saratoga. But the spin given here is a bit different. Their minister, Vergennes, may have feared that the Americans would do so well as to not need French assistance in the future and France would not have any kind of most-favored nation status, which would have been bad since they hoped to steal Britain's trade.

Another good story is that in the treaty France and the Patriots had agreed that neither would make peace without the other. However, in the event the Americans did make a separate peace (after the French opened separate peace talks secretly) and when Vergennes found out two weeks later, he sent an angry reprimand. But Franklin replied that while true, Vergennes should not make an issue of it since a clash at this point would only play into the hands of the British, hoping to drive a wedge between France and the US. Vergennes accepted this. What a persuasive guy. It helped that this also permitted France to duck the responsibility of helping Spain retake Gibraltar, which had proven very difficult so far.

There's also an interesting taxonomy on how the history of an event progresses. (The idea is said to have originated with historian Bernard Bailyn in his book on Thomas Hutchinson.)

1. The first generation of historians of an event see things as a contest between heroes and villains.
2. The generation that follows them finds this simplistic and searches in the events for the origins of their own world and a justification of their own values.
3. A later generation has the distance to see great events as "tragic", that is, as fated by circumstance. (As an example, the historical "loser", Thomas Hutchinson, is seen as a man imprisoned by the necessities of his situation and his own limitations.)

This may give us pause regarding our interpretations of events in our own times. I wonder how we would look at recent presidents if we adopted the perspective of (3).

23/7/31 Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King by Thomas J. Balcerski ★★★★

I deplore the increasingly common tendency to summarize with a page or two of text a chapter before it begins and to do so again after it ends. How bad are we as readers that we need to be told twice what we are about to read and have read?

As to the burning question you're thinking about, there's no strong conclusion here. It's not easy, but you can endeavor to reach your own conclusion (platonically gay?).

A strange story: When William Rufus King returned from his ministry to France on the SS Great Britain, sailing from Liverpool to New York, it foundered in Dundrum Bay north of Ireland. Talk about off course!

23/6/28 Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery by Paul Collins ★★★★

It's an entertaining book idea and fun to see Burr and Hamilton on the same case. Hamilton, we discover, is good at sharp, logical cross-examinations. He even asks some oddball out-of-the-blue questions that get surprisingly productive results. Burr is good at slowly speaking the logic of their case so that everyone can understand it, and at planting ambushes to explode the opposition.

Though it gets better once the trial actually starts, in the early going this book is pretty messy, an example of how not to write such a book.

Do not introduce so many characters at the start that the reader cannot remember who is who.

Do not introduce them so skimpily that the reader barely has an idea of what they are like.

Do not continually skip to a different character's storyline after only a one page "scene". The reader gets no sense of what is going on.

Get to the story advertised in the title rather than blathering on about characters who don't even appear related.

Give background information about the city of New York only insofar as it contributes to the story. Don't weigh the reader down with endless irrelevant material.

Sometimes sentences are not well structured. As just one example, on p. 139 we find "True to his profession, his directions were not by street name, but by landmark:". After this colon, we absolutely have to have something about a landmark. But do we? We do not. Instead we have "Benson was a local colonel in the New-York Regiment, and the Union Furnace was a large iron smithy on Broadway, where fires were kept continually blah blah blah". Or, as one tends to read it " gt; ...". This kind of stuff really trips up the flow of the narrative. It's not everywhere, but frequent enough to get annoying.

The claim that Burr was the scion of a powerful New York family is incorrect. His grandfather, Cotton Mather, had once been a popular preacher, but lost support and died in disgrace. His father, also Aaron Burr, had also been a minister and president of Princeton, but died early, with the younger Burr still in childhood, and never had a chance to build a powerful family. Also, neither were in New York, the father working in New Jersey and the grandfather in Connecticut.

23/6/28 The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr by Susan Holloway Scott The Secret Wife of Aaron Burr: A Riveting Untold Story of the American Revolution by Susan Holloway Scott ★★★

The appeal is in the premise. The woman in question was perhaps the first person from India to live in America. What would such a cultural first encounter be like? What would her impression be? What would Americans make of her? Some of this was addressed, but unfortunately not very much.

The story seems well-researched, especially in terms of the history of daily life, and is well told, sometimes too much so. Even though the first person narrator is an uneducated slave, she is often given highly literate phrases, which takes one out of the narrative at times.

Where the book is not as well done is in the political history. For example, terminology. Characters are quoted referring to Washington as "His Excellency", but as far as I can tell, nobody said this until after he became president. Jefferson's party was not called the "Democratic-Republicans" in this period. It is only a later invention by historians.

I don't mind historical fiction writers inventing things, but I do object to their inventing actions or remarks for famous people doing things that if they had done it, we would know about it today. For example, in this novel Washington assigns a spy mission for Burr and Theodosia, which just didn't happen and given Washington's distrust of Burr, is almost certainly implausible.

Similarly, Hamilton was not the one to break the Sarah Hemings story, and not in 1796. This story broke only in 1802, and was written by James Callender, Jefferson's former employee. I understand that the author wants to build up the rivalry between Hamilton and Burr, but there were plenty of things Hamilton actually did against him. It's not necessary to assign to him things he did not do.

Hamilton also did not propose Thomas Pinckney for vice president in order to prevent Burr becoming president. That was just the party's vice presidential pick.

James Madison was not the US minister to France (p. 455, paperback). Maybe the author was thinking of James Monroe.

There are also things that do not jibe with Burr's biography. For example, we learn there that Theodosia was having groups of officers over to her house weekly, but this was not in evidence in the novel.

Another odd thing is that we follow the main character from the age of seven to adulthood, understanding her triumphs and struggles, but certain topics one expects to see such as body development, appearance or even the start of menstruation are not there. While in some characters this latter would be be no big deal, but in this story the character never had a mother and spends every night leashed to the furniture, which would have been rather impractical. Either the leashing is too much a stretch or it should have been explained.

It also seems odd that while the main character has two children with Burr in succession, there are no more. No explanation for this is offered.

As time goes on the story becomes long and slow, and too much in the nature of a romance novel, describing in detail all kinds of mundane meaningful glances and portentous remarks.

23/6/5 Aaron Burr: The Conspiracy and Years of Exile, 1805-1836 by Milton Lomask ★★★★★

My interpretation of this account is that Burr had big picture problems. Whatever his plan was, most likely to detach Texas from Spain and become its leader, it wasn't going to work, but he couldn't see it.

One problem was that unlike others who had idealistic goals, such as Miranda who wanted to liberate Venezuela, Burr was plainly just out for money and power. The necessary followers would have been far less likely to join up with Burr. (Burr and Miranda, eventually a successful liberator in South America, met once. Each despised the other.)

Another problem Burr had was that his plan relied on Wilkinson being his second in command. But Wilkinson would never have agreed to be second to anyone in such a venture. (In addition, for it to work, Wilkinson needed his top subordinate in the army to be part of the plan, but that gentleman refused to show any enthusiasm for Wilkinson's hints around it, so he never even divulged the plan to him.)

Getting funding and the support of a few warships from the British was also problematic. While they would have been otherwise willing, they were a just a leetle busy with a problem called Napoleon at the moment. The chances that they would divert men, funds and materiel to such an adventure were nil. Burr apparently did not see that either, or refused to.

Burr would tell different stories, depending on the sympathies of his hearer. To some he would say he meant to attack Spanish Mexico and to liberate its residents. To others he would say he would split off the western states to create a realm. By saying the latter he actually squeezed $2500 in support out of the Spanish ambassador to the US! To yet others he would say he would do both. But the part he failed to realize is that such a big conspiracy could not be in any way be kept quiet, that it would take a long time to all get organized and that people would begin to act against him.

Really this whole project was doomed from the start. Burr failed to even notice.

Other tidbits:

Burr was a great voluptuary. Whenever he had money he spent it on outrageous luxuries that were far beyond his ability to afford. He was always touching his friends for money and spent most of his life artfully evading creditors.

General James Wilkinson, the one who originally gave Burr the idea, what a guy he was. The highest ranking general in the army at the time, but also in the pay of Spain as their spy/agent number 13, earning $2000 a year, collectible when he arrived back in New Orleans. Once he was gone for quite a while so the money built up and there was a change in the Spanish paymaster so they didn't know exactly how much they owed him. Wilkinson stated the amount at $20K. The Spaniard was dismissive and proud to have cut it down to $12K. Wilkinson was quite pleased as well for they had actually only owed him $6K.

Wilkinson seems to have had few principles, being mainly motivated by money. As a consequence he usually equivocated and played both sides. For example, in 1787 in a Kentucky district assembly he sponsored petitions calling on Spain to open the Mississippi to Americans, but in letters to his Spanish superior he urged them to keep the river closed to encourage westerners to abandon their allegiance to the US.

An even more extreme instance occurred with the appearance in 1788 of Dr. John Connolly, who secretly worked for the Governor of Canada and was trying to raise an army of ten thousand westerners to seize Louisiana from Spain. Wilkinson assured him he would help and then turned around and told his Spanish controller and that he would hire a hit man to target Connolly. But the assassin was stopped by an armed guard dispatched by Wilkinson himself and Connolly escaped. So both the Spanish and the British thought he was a very valuable guy to befriend. But what a tangled web to weave.

The first person to write publically about Burr's plans in the southwest, even as they were happening, was the Spanish ambassador to the US, which was not surprising since Spain was the ultimate target of whatever he was planning. This minister's warnings were first printed in the newspaper founded by none other than Alexander Hamilton, as if his dead hand was reaching out from the grave for revenge on Burr, especially as after publication the essay was reprinted across the country.

Book mentions that Liberty Hall in Frankfort, Kentucky, was designed by Thomas Jefferson. Seemed odd since Jefferson never traveled west of the Natural Bridges. So I looked it up in Wikipedia and asked ChatGPT. Wikipedia states that it's unknown who designed it. I guess this must have been a tall tale that people in Frankfort liked to tell back when this book was written. ChatGPT said he did not design it, but traveled to visit, which is clearly wrong.

After Jefferson made a public proclamation that surely Burr was guilty, the first person to see the problems with it was John Adams. If he was guilty, why wasn't he being tried by a jury rather than being so pronounced by the first magistrate? Adams was no fan of Burr, but he couldn't see that any European power would have given him much aid to sever the union, or that he could have accomplished anything without such aid. But this was typical Jefferson. As John Quincy Adams said, in reference to his claim that he learned Spanish by reading Don Quixote on an Atlantic passage, "he tells tall tales sometimes".

23/5/20 Aaron Burr: The Years from Princeton to Vice President, 1756-1805 by Milton Lomask ★★★★★

The main reason to read this was to look into the suggestion some are making that Burr stole the election of 1800 in New York. At least per this book, the verdict would be no. Although he went to extreme efforts such as publishing a newspaper, provided rides to the polls, intelligently chose excellent candidates (especially in comparison to Hamilton's motley crew of shopkeepers), and so on, there does not appear to be anything illegal here. But fortunately the rest of the book was very interesting reading as well.

Although written much earlier, this is kind of a corrective to that other biography, Fallen Founder. While the latter work tries to depict Burr as some kind of misunderstood big picture thinker, this book presents a great deal of evidence to the contrary that somehow did not make it into the other book, which apparently cherrypicked extensively. It's not that this book takes an explicit view on the question, but the direct evidence of things Burr said and did make the picture much clearer.

The author has an admirably laconic way of writing exactly what you want to know and without any unnecessary words. I appreciate that as it seems to be becoming rarer.

Interesting tidbits:
When Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton undertook their first legal case together, they discussed who would speak last, the most prestigious position. Hamilton said he deserved it. Burr acquiesced. When it was time to speak, Burr spoke his points, and then spoke all of Hamilton's points as well. An embarrassed Hamilton got up and had very little to say. After that there were no more disputes about who would speak last.

"Burr's mind was on the whole an unsuspicious one. Little inclined to harbor malice, he was slow to spot it in others - too slow, on occasion, to protect himself against it. No one detected this quality in him more shrewdly than Andrew Jackson, or better expressed it. 'Burr', the Tennesseean once remarked, 'is as far from a fool as I ever saw, and yet he is as easily fooled as any man I ever knew.' Too wrapped up in himself to see other men clearly, Burr lacked that touch of paranoia so essential to success in politics."

"Hamilton was the more open of the two. What he thought, he said - not infrequently to his personal detriment. Of the precise tenor of Burr's thought, no one, with the possible exception of his wife and daughter, was ever altogether certain. Hamilton's pen was as unrestrained as his tongue. He was forever putting his frequently changing beliefs and even his feelings into print. Burr preferred to keep his own counsel; it pleased him to be an enigma."

When Burr returned to Washington after the duel, he was shunned by Federalists, but welcomed warmly by all Republicans. Jefferson had him over for dinner more times in a few weeks than he had in the previous three years. Gallatin was seen waiting on him. Madison went to see him. Was it because of their feelings about Hamilton's demise? No. The reason was that they were about to start the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, over which Burr, as president of the Senate, would preside. Burr would have to make a thousand rulings about which questions could be asked, what evidence could be introduced and so on, and they wanted to be sure he was on their side. However, Burr conducted the case with exemplary fairness. Chase was acquitted. To top it off, there was a tied vote in the Senate over whether to create a military academy. Burr opposed the administration and voted no to that as well.

Burr, Hamilton, Madison – all of them were about 5'6", or in Madison's case, maybe even less.

23/5/9 The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff ★★★★

It seems complete and correct, but I miss those times when the author steps back a moment and makes thoughtful comments on what we have read, such as we get with other writers in this field like Joseph Ellis and Ron Chernow. Instead it feels like we're constantly pelted by only type types of sentences and those in a rapid fire. The warm personal feeling one would want in a biography is just not there.

23/4/28 The Quasi-War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France, 1797-1801 by Alexander DeConde ★★★★★

Surprising or remarkable passages:

While it's well known that during the Adams administration, the three main secretaries cared more about the ideas of Hamilton than of the president, and sent the former reports about everything that was going on, I've never seen before that when the president asked for reports, Hamilton would write the first drafts. Hamilton was doing their homework for them! What a crazy Cabinet.

Adams was all in favor of diplomacy as the solution to the undeclared war with France, while his cabinet members preferred arming and actual war. Hamilton surprised them, however, by disagreeing. Hamilton, it turned out, was looking at things a level above the secretaries. He foresaw that if the US tried diplomacy and it failed - as he predicted it would - then the Republicans would be entirely discredited and the Federalists would be able to pass whatever they wanted, including the war. To make it even better, he wanted either Madison or Jefferson to be in the diplomatic mission. Both of them were too smart to accept this part, however. But in the end, John Adams, with the help of his son, outsmarted them all and actually managed to reach accord with France after all. Unfortunately for him, this happened too late to help in the election or he would have been a two-termer.

Talleyrand had a bit of resentment for America because when he was here, Washington refused to see him. He never forgot that.

When Adams returned to Philadelphia after the yellow fever epidemic had subsided, he gave a speech regarding the war. Surprisingly, considering Adams' individualist reputation, most of the speech had been written by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering.

The XYZ Affair should really be called the WXYZ Affair since Adams, in the dispatches, also used the letter W as a substitute for the actual name of a French official.

Before the details of the XYZ Affair came out, many Republicans demanded that Congress be given full access to the dispatches as they suspected that President Adams was making the story sound worse than it actually was. One of the only Republicans not to do so was a man I've noticed being wise in many other matters: Albert Gallatin. As it turned out, the dispatches were not better than Adams' report, they in fact showed that the behavior of the French had been even worse than the president had implied. The Republicans lost public support dramatically.

A number of French-Americans sailed for French possessions in the West Indies simply due to nativist anti-French sentiment and harassment. An underreported, shameful episode in our history.

Congress created the office of Secretary of the Navy primarily because Secretary of War McHenry was seen as a bungler. For such reasons were major measures taken.

President Adams wanted Congress to create a measured response, but had the hardest time getting half measures approved. People in Congress wanted either to go all out into war, or, alternatively, not spend even a dime on preparing defenses.

A general hysteria for war with France took over in the summer - it's always the summer when such things happen - of 1798. People even started wearing all-black cockades to replace the tri-color ones. It was amid this Federalist extremism that Congress passed the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts that are the chief blot on the record of John Adams.

The part that lengthened the period of naturalization from five to fourteen years was to reduce Republican political power since immigrants tended to vote for that party.

John Marshall would be the only Federalist to speak against the Sedition Law, and only after it had already passed. All the others, including Adams, Hamilton and Washington, accepted it.

After creating an army, they wanted Washington to command it. To entice him, they offered him another star. That's how he became a three-star general. Washington picked Hamilton to be a two-star.

To fund the war measures, Congress passed a direct property tax.

Hamilton wanted to use the Quasi-War as a pretext for conquering Florida and the Louisiana Territory. This would help the Federalists politically, he thought, by dampening western support for the Republicans as well as their sentiment for secession.

Francisco de Miranda proposed that the US and Britain help him liberate South America, Britain to provide the navy and the US the army. As a reward, the US would receive Florida and Louisiana. Britain, Hamilton, Secretary of State Pickering, and Rufus King, the US minister to Britain were all for it, but John Adams was against. He felt that hte public would be against cooperating so closely with Britain. He also felt that currently the US was friendly with Spain and that it would be wrong to change that just for gains. In later years he wrote that engaging in such policy probably would have had unexpected consequences, much as the French Revolution had had.

(It is interesting to see how many projects were founded based on the power vacuum created by Spanish military weakness. Aaron Burr's later murky plan for the southwest was no doubt yet another.)

To determine whether Haiti was safe for US merchant shipping, President Adams sent there Edward Stevens of Philadelphia. Stevens was born in Antigua. His father, a Scottish merchant was the landlord of Rachel Fawcette, Hamilton's mother, and would later become the adoptive father of the orphaned Alexander Hamilton. Stevens quickly became good friends with his adopted brother Hamilton, displaying many similar mannerisms. Both were interested in classics, spoke French fluently, opposed slavery, were interested in medicine, and were considered clever. Contemporaries often remarked that Stevens and Hamilton looked very much alike. Secretary of State Pickering, who knew both men in adulthood, noted that the men were strikingly similar in appearance and concluded that they must be biological brothers. Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow says many aspects of Hamilton's biography make more sense given Stevens's paternity. It would explain why Hamilton was adopted into the Stevens family while his older brother, James, apparently was not. It may have also been a factor in Hamilton's acknowledged father abandoning his family.

One of the main reasons France refrained from declaring war on the US was that they hoped Jefferson would win the next election and they would thus have a more friendly government. It's kind of amazing to think that others were depending on Jefferson for such important reasons while at the same time he was denying that he was even running.

When Congress published the dispatches of the envoys, they were picked up by British and French newspapers. Talleyrand was now in hot water with his masters at the Directory. His response was to disavow all knowledge of W, X, Y and Z and to demand of Elbridge Gerry, their names. Gerry knew that Talleyrand very well knew the names of his underlings - they had all dined together - but went through with the charade of disclosing the name and writing a statement that Talleyrand and his agents had known nothing about it. They must have been impostors.

Talleyrand cleverly opened a second channel to President Adams. He sent one Pichon to his old friend William Vans Murray, who was US minister to the Batavian Republic. Murray was a great friend to John Quincy Adams, then also in Europe as a minister. Quincy Adams would write directly to his father, bypassing Secretary of State Pickering so in this way the president found out a lot about France's thoughts as expressed to Murray.

Elbridge Gerry was snubbed by Boston Federalists for having stayed longer in Paris, trying to stave off a war. Ruffians had also hung effigies in his trees, shouted obscenities to his wife and left a miniature guillotine smeared with blood on her window sill. President Adams treated him kindly, however. He advised him to bear the Federalist abuse in silence.

Pickering even wanted to dock Gerry's salary!

Nelson defeating the French navy at the Battle of the Nile, August 1, 1798, really made it certain that France would not declare war. Too many French ships had been lost.

Adams considered Patrick Henry as a possible minister to France, considered a moderate Federalist at that time.

Pickering held in Trenton a meeting with Washington, Hamilton, CC Pinckney and not the president to discuss what to do about France. Pickering didn't want peace, but a declaration of war.

Pickering even condemned Gerry in a public letter. Gerry send Adams a defense of his actions and from all the evidence he had received from France, Adams agreed with Gerry and told Pickering to publish the defense. Pickering defied the president and refused. Adams decided it was best to retract his request for the moment.

George Logan, a friend of Jefferson, went to Paris as a private citizen and obtained assurances from Talleyrand that France wanted to negotiate. Logan returned to the US with the news and met with Washington in Philadelphia, but the former president could not imagine that he had achieved something the diplomats could not and refused to believe him. He experience a much friendlier reception from President Adams a few days later, however.

Adams decided to try another negotiation. Meanwhile the Cabinet were suggesting a declaration of war. What a stark difference.

Treasury secretary Wolcott did not write his own set of suggestions, but forwarded some secretly written by Hamilton. This recommended doing essentially nothing, not declaring war, but also not sending an envoy. Rather he wanted to wait for France to send an envoy to the US. This was probably because he doubted a declaration could be achieved at present, but one might be obtainable in future.

When Adams told the Cabinet that he would not ask Congress for declaration, they went to the war hawks in Congress to see if it would be possible to get a declaration over the president's head, but it turned out the votes were not there.

Apparently Adams liked Hamilton's writing, however. He took the suggestions as the basis for his speech, but reversing it in some areas. It must have been funny for Hamilton to hear this, his words used against his ideas. In fact, Hamilton, Washington and CC Pinckney flanked Adams on the platform as he gave his speech before Congress.

Unfortunately the speech was not well received. The High Federalists considered it too weak, Jefferson and the Republicans, provocative and warlike. Moderates on both sides, and Paris, saw cause for hope, however.

Adams heard of Hamilton's recommendation for war and wrote, "This man is stark mad, or I am. He knows nothing of the character, the principles, the feelings, the opinions and prejudices of this nation. He Congress should adopt this system, it would produce an instantaneous insurrection of the whole nation from Georgia to New Hampshire."

When Adams decided to name a new envoy to France, the confirmation request had to go to the Senate, where it was first opened, of course, by Vice President Thomas Jefferson, who lost control a little when he read it. Adams had just taken off the table the number one issue the Federalists had for the forthcoming election, but Adams considered it the Right thing to do nonetheless. JFK should have included Adams in his Profiles in Courage.

Luckily for the president, most of the moderate Federalists - Washington, Jay, Marshall, Knox, Stoddert, Patrick Henry - went along with him. His Secretary of State, Pickering, on the other hand, hadn't even been informed, and was incensed. I get the idea that Adams had already started catching on by then that Pickering was a creature of Hamilton.

The Federalists in Congress mulled over how to stop the president. They decided that voting against him was too injurious to the party. So they sent a delegation of senators to meet with him, but Adams refused, saying that was legislative interference in the executive. But, they said, shouldn't France send an envoy here first, as an apology? Adams said he had been in France for years and understood the situation better than they did. Then they said that the nominee, Murray, was not qualified. Couldn't they add two more envoys? Adams told them no, he had made up his mind. Then they decided to reject confirmation. So Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth approached Adams to let him know and encourage him to add two more envoys. Adams felt forced to agree, but rejected the proposal of Hamilton and George Cabot. Instead he wanted Ellsworth himself. Strangely nobody said anything about confusing between the executive and judiciary, or about someone holding down two offices. Adams nominated Patrick Henry as the third. The Senate felt forced to confirm, not wanting an open break in the party in an election year.

After Congress adjourned, Adams departed for Quincy on March 12 and stayed away for seven months.

Patrick Henry declined the appointment due to his age, so Adams appointed another southerner, William Davie of North Carolina, at Ellsworth's suggestion. It's interesting the way the CJ had suddenly become so influential.

The Quasi-War was the only issue that united the Federalists. If it went away, so would all the other things the leadership liked: the Alien & Sedition Acts, the new army and navy, and direct taxes.

Hamilton's attempts to raise an army of ten thousand floundered. Although he got more than the necessary number of officers, regular soldiers only reached a third of the desired total. The ratio of officers to men was 7 to 1.

The cost of war measures had doubled the federal budget. The government was forced to borrow 5 million at 8% interest, a rate Adams considered much too high.

The Jeffersonian strategy with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions was partly successful in dividing the High from the moderate Federalists. In reaction, some Hamiltonians spoke of the army's need to be ready for civil insurrection.

The 38-gun USS Constellation pursued the French 44-gun Vengeance in Caribbean waters during a five hour running battle. While both ships were damaged, the US ship was less damaged. The French ship actually tried to surrender twice, but failed because weather conditions were so bad that the Americans could not see that colors had been struck.

While President Adams spent seven months working from home, Hamilton encouraged the Cabinet to take matters in their own hands, citing as reasons that Adams had apparently abdicated and because he thought his policies were mad. Hamilton even offered to go to Philadelphia to take a hand in a palace revolution. So neither working from home nor coups are a new thing in America.

The French wanted to appoint Lafayette minister to the US. Lafayette wrote old friend Hamilton to ask whether he could be successful in the role. Hamilton, not wanting peace to succeed, told him not to come.

Pickering disagreed with the peace mission so virulently that he even shared the mission's secret orders with the British ambassador.

It's interesting that this book goes so in-depth in the second round of peace negotiations, but is so skimpy on the first. On the other hand, the book Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father by Marvin R. Zahniser covers the first part very well.

Besides John Adams, the little known, but rather brilliant William Vans Murray is kind of the hero of this book. He seemed to always have an excellent handle on the big picture and used it to be able to predict how the French would think and behave in any particular situation.

Even after Adams learned that his secretaries were in thrall to Hamilton, he kept them, seething with rage on the inside only, because he didn't want to damage Federalist chances in the coming election. It was only after the loss of the crucial state of New York (in its legislative election) that Adams dumped the Hamilton toadies.

Gerry ran for governor in Massachusetts as a Republican, but also, curiously as a friend of Adams, and lost by only 200 votes.

The philologist, Noah Webster, was a moderate and friend of Adams.

Britain saw the election of Jefferson, the friend of France, as a calamity, and share prices of government-funded securities declined as a consequence.

In a bit of clever timing, the day after the peace treaty signing, Spain signed an agreement to turn Louisiana back to France. Had the US peace commissioners known about this, the treaty negotiations might have gone quite differently. This was clever management by Napoleon.

In 1800 Tsar Paul I wrote Napoleon that since Russia and France were so geograhpically distant they could never be in a position to injure each other and that they should therefore work harmoniously. Ha!

When Britain refused to surrender Malta to Russia, she placed an embargo on British shipping and seized 300 ships in Russian ports. Two British ships fought their way out, sinking a Russian ship. The Tsar burned a British vessel. The two nations were practically at war.

23/3/19 Charles Cotesworth Pinckney: Founding Father by Marvin R. Zahniser ★★★★★

Really good on all the details of the doings between Pinckney, Marshall and Gerry in France trying to deal with Talleyrand, who mostly seems to have been trolling them for his own amusement until Jefferson, seen as more friendly to France, would come into power. This level of detail on the XYZ affair is not too available in other works. Talleyrand even employed Voltaire's niece to try to sway the diplomats, and read all their letters home, but got nowhere, particularly not with Pinckney. (This niece of Voltaire's was so agreeable that once Marshall completely missed a planned meeting with Pinckney because she took him to the theater and he felt he could not say no, and did not think to send a message.)

Beaumarchais, generally considered a hero to America for his help in financing the revolution, takes a villainous turn here as Talleyrand's agent, threatening Marshall with a blackened reputation at home.

Pickney lacked the degree of intrigue necessary to be a top-flight diplomat. He was honest to a fault, logical, virtuous and could be kind. For example, in court he represented widows and orphans pro bono. He also worked hard in the legislature to get more funding for education in South Carolina. As a lawyer he never resorted to histrionics like a Patrick Henry would, but spent a long time laying out the case with logic. So long, in fact that one time the judge left in the middle for a break, telling him to keep talking since he enjoyed hearing himself so much.

It was also good to go into the details of election of 1800 in South Carolina, which I have not seen elsewhere. That state was crucial that year because it switched from Federalist to Republican (at one letter Pinckney calls them the "Demos", so that is a second instance of the use that term) and just how that happened is interesting. Turns out that Pinckney could have made himself vice president or possibly even president if he had just been willing to agree to a Jefferson-Pinckney split of the electors. But loyal to his party and not an intriguer, he refused, twice. But in this he was anyway wise as being president is not the same as dictator. He would have had to work with a Republican Congress, who would have hated him.

The other interesting aspect of the South Carolina vote was that its electors were supposed to withhold one vote from Burr so that he did not tie Jefferson. For some reason they did not, so that instead of ascending majestically to te presidency, Jefferson had to deal with a mess in Congress. Just how that happened is unfortunately not explained here.

Politically and temperamentally, Pinckney was closest to Washington, then to Adams. He and Hamilton did not get along and Hamilton did not really trust him. They divided over France and Britain as well as over the importance of assisting the mercantile class.

Unfortunately, on the slavery issue he was dead wrong and could not see it. He worked to extend the deadline ending overseas slave imports by eight years. He was not an original thinker with respect to the constitution as well and at the constitutional convention fought against some of its most valued features.

I had hoped this book would sort out the many different prominent Pinckneys from South Carolina, explain exactly how they all related, and what they thought of one another since they were in different parties, but strangely it didn't. Charles Cotesworth was the older brother of Thomas and both would become generals and also run for president/vice president. The other Charles was some kind of cousin, but we are not told in what way exactly. We also do not get much information about Thomas or even the subject's children. A paragraph or two in this regard would have been helpful in rounding out the story.

Interesting tidbits.

When Pinckney and his wife first arrived in France they were taken to the theater. Mrs. Pinckney, however, was shocked to discover that they were seated next to "two ladies of pleasure", and took comfort only in the fact that very few people were in attendance.

When Marshall left France, he was happy to state that it was forever, and only regretted that the ship was named Alexander Hamilton, "a very excellent vessel but for the sin of the name".

During the Quasi-War, Washington actually first sought to appoint Pinckney as his second-in-command rather than Hamilton. One reason was that the land war would almost certainly have been fought in his territory of the South. He was more familiar there and the South might be offended if someone else were appointed over him. War Secretary McHenry somehow managed to talk up Hamilton and got him placed first, but Washington wrote a letter to Hamilton asking him to give way to Pinckney. Hamilton (correctly, in my opinion) rejected this. Adams himself preferred Knox, Washington's old artillery general. Washington ended up putting Knox in the fourth position and so he in turn refused the offer entirely, probably ending their long friendship. Pinckney, just getting back from France, graciously accepted the inferior position, another reflection of his generally good character.

23/3/7 Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776-1809 by William Nisbet Chambers ★★★★

Published in 1963, a time when new nations were arising, particularly in Africa, one of its ostensible purposes is to discuss how political parties can usefully arise in a new nation. While explaining this kind of political theory, the examples will be drawn from the young US of nearly two centuries earlier. Even eight-generation old government technology is superior to any theory one could have in 1963, apparently, and never mind all the differences in economy, history, demography and so on. So it's a Frankenstein of a book of didacticism, theory and history that I suspect is bound to disappoint all three audiences.

In terms of the history, it cites many incidents, but tends to gloss over a great deal. I started this book in the hopes that it would discuss political parties already in the Articles of Confederation era, but it's not having any of that and will only admit to transient factions. For parties you'll have to go instead to Party Politics in the Continental Congress by H. James Henderson.

The book is also is kind of uninformed about the first presidential election, stating that Adams did not have that much support and there was no evidence of party because nine or ten other candidates also got votes. It's completely unaware that the voting pattern was caused by Hamilton telling electors to scatter their votes to make Washington look more impressive, in fact belying the book's theory since it was a party decision after all.

States that in 1792 Jefferson was 49 years of age and Burr 46. Since there was a 13-year age difference between the two, this is impossible. Burr was actually only 36.

Has some good information on John Beckley that is not much seen elsewhere. Beckley was a Virginia go-between and carried the first letter from Dr. Benjamin Rush to Burr suggesting that he join forces with Madison and Jefferson to oust Vice President Adams, a rare glimpse into the mostly hidden early party activities. In the end Madison, Burr and George Clinton agreed that all their states would support Clinton (who got 55 votes to fall to Adams' 77) although Jefferson still preferred Adams.

Another interesting tidbit is that Albert Gallatin was the first one to suggest creation of the later critical Congressional committee, Ways and Means.

Book routinely describes on Congressman, Samuel Smith, as a marplot, which apparently means one who, by meddling, frustrates or ruins a plan or undertaking. I suppose today we might say spoilsport or spoiler.

Book states that the Kentucky Resolutions eschewed nullification. Not sure how that can be since it states nullification within the document.

It's pretty good on the details of the two parties organizing and turning out the vote for the 1800 election.

Misspells the name "Catiline" (a reference to Burr).

Does a good job on Jefferson's manipulation of Congress and way of dealing with the Tertium Quids.

The analysis of the Monroe presidency is insightful, the way that Monroe wrongly tried to end parties and make himself a sort of king who reigned, but did not rule.

23/2/27 The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers by Thomas Fleming ★★★★

Intimate not just in the risque sense, but discussing their private lives in general, and how they intertwined with the public. Generally very good, but there are some stories that are not fully told, such as Vice President Adams and the presidential title, that thus leave the reader with the wrong impression. Adams was avowedly trying to make the president seem more magnificent because the role had to compete with kings and emperors, but here you get the idea vanity was the motivation.
Mentions that the Adamses rented Richmond Hill and surprisingly does not mention it would later be owned by Aaron Burr.
Describes Adams' decision to keep Washington's cabinet as bizarre, not realizing how bad it would look to suggest that the nearly-divine Washington had erred in choosing the officers.
Strongly suggests that Hamilton had in two different periods at least an emotional affair with his sister-in-law.
Misses that Jefferson and Madison helped Burr after the duel.
Also does not follow the notion of some authors that the marriage of Jefferson's daughter to a man she just met shortly after their return to Virginia represents a rejection of her father, possibly due to resentment of Hemings. Instead it is presented as a love at first sight situation as well as a perfect match.
Surprisingly pretty much dismisses the Sally Hemings relationship, which today is generally accepted.
His story about how Madison and Dolley met differs from everyone else's. Normally we're told that Burr introduced the pair, but here it's a competition instead.
The book wonders why Washington disliked Burr enough to refuse appointing him minister to Paris. It goes back to the war days when Burr was a colonel and felt insufficiently rewarded.

23/2/10 First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country by Thomas E. Ricks ★★★★

A great idea for a book (!), but unfortunately the execution is somewhat lacking. The author sounds like a classicist who dived into online searches of early American history for every classical reference he could find. This is interesting, and the book does some intriguing suggestions, but tends to fail because the quotations of the founders are taken out of context and thus often do not mean what the author thinks, or should at least be contextualized so as to be characterized properly.

I would estimate that the author loves Washington, admires Hamilton, finds Paine interesting and despises Adams, Jefferson and, of course, Burr. But he does not have the background to realize that, for example, the Sedition Act for which Adams is so roundly chastised, was supported by Washington as well, or that the difficult Jefferson governship of Virginia had its reasons that had little to do with him.

The chapter at the end written in the white heat of modern politics, including the naming of Trump, already tends to make the book more dated and cheaper. There seems to be a lack of understanding too about modern politics that mirrors that lack of understanding of the founders, as evidenced by the railing against feckless Congress (which has reasons for its powerlessness that are not its fault) and against money in politics (which lacks the enormity ascribed).

22/10/25 Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 by Elizabeth A. Fenn ★★★
22/10/12 The Perils of Peace: America's Struggle for Survival After Yorktown by Thomas Fleming ★★★★

So far this appears to be a history of incidents such as Washington's stepson and Oneida chiefs wearing French uniforms being at the surrender of Yorktown or Washington's messenger having trouble getting to Congress with the news. New information? Yes. Impressive research? Also yes. Interesting? Mildly. Add up to anything significant to the big picture? Not really.
The author also likes to ascribe decisions to his speculative psychological diagnoses – for example, the failure of French generals and admirals to take back New York and Newport – when those were actually solid military judgments.
Most of the book tends to go on like that, recounting incidents more than the bigger picture, but it is useful in terms of what was going on inside the British government – both parliament and the king's activities – at the time, which isn't generally covered in detail in these books about the founders. So it's valuable for that.

22/9/21 Revolutionary Conservative: James Duane of New York by Edward P. Alexander ★★★★

James Duane was a New Yorker from a merchant family, a lawyer, a delegate to the Continental Congress and important in dealing with treasury matters in the Congress. Not one of the radicals, he was not really ready to declare independence until London proved continually unwilling to compromise whatsoever. At that point he allowed events to drag him into revolution.
This book is a reasonable accounting of his life, but by a non-professional historian, so it presents some matters shorn of their proper context. For example, the rule in Congress was that a delegate could serve up to three years, but then had to take at least a year off, after which they could serve another three years. But Duane never fully left. Instead he would serve about six months and then absent himself for six months and this went on for most of the life of Congress. How this was permitted, or even the very fact of it, is never discussed in this book.
He ended his life as probably the most well off founder I have read about. Although his Vermont speculations did not work out, the ones in Duanesburgh certainly did. And although he didn't make any money during the war, he certainly did from rentals and sales of land after 1781 and was able to live well, plan a huge house and leave each of his four children their own productive farm.
He did own a few slaves, though when he inherited some from his father-in-law, he freed them. Toward the end of his life he veered in the direction of abolition.
But this remains an interesting account of the perspective and actions of a less famous founder - it demonstrates what set the main seven apart - and a worthwhile read from that point of view.

22/8/31 Party Politics in the Continental Congress by H. James Henderson ★★★★★★

This academic book, released in honor of the Bicentennial, is probably not for everyone, but if you are interested in the details of the workings of the Continental Congress, as I am, this is a great resource! It does require a basic grounding in the major issues and personalities in the Congress though, not bothering to give the basic contexts.
What's particularly interesting is that it focuses on politics and the development of parties, which common sense dictates would develop in such a body. Too many people have proclaimed that there were no parties until the Adams-Jefferson election in 1796, which is completely incorrect.
In the early days of Congress there were three parties, Conservatives who wanted no truck with revolution and would become Tories, Radicals who desired revolution, and Moderates who thought there was a way to find a compromise.
Once revolution had been decided, there were regional parties: New England (called the Eastern party), the Middle states, and the South.
Later on, as the weakness of the Articles of Confederation became apparent, there arose a Nationalist and an Anti-Nationalist party. Interestingly, for those who like to say that Jefferson seduced Madison away from Hamilton when he returned to the States, Madison voted with the Nationalists, but not always. He opposed, for example, the Robert Morris-planned Bank of North America, just as he would later oppose Hamilton's Bank of the United States. In fact, for those who proclaim Hamilton an economic genius who thought up all kinds of ways to improve the economy and financial structure, there's not much of substance he did at Treasury that Morris had not already done or tried to do before him (assume the debt-check; create a bank-check; tax imports-check; create a sinking fund-no, but that failed anyway).

22/8/12 Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Vol. 2: With Miscellaneous Selections from His Correspondence by Matthew L. Davis ★★★★

Have been doing some outside reading and apparently most of the letters between Burr and daughter should be read as coded. In particular, "La Greque" or "La Grec" or "La G." means Hamilton (Alexander the Greek). References to Celeste, supposedly a woman he's trying to marry, are initially an actual woman (during the time he is referring to himself as Reuben), but later should most likely be read as British agents he is trying to convince to support his Mexican scheme. And so on. Book should have come with a explanatory guide for the unwary.
Matthew Livingston Davis (1773-1850) was a Republican journalist and politician from New York City. He edited the New-York Evening Post with Levi Wayland from 17 Nov. 1794 until 25 May 1795. In 1797 and 1798 he collaborated with Philip Freneau in editing the New York Time Piece. A member of the Society of Tammany in 1800, Davis was one of Aaron Burr's political lieutenants in the state election campaigns. He was also Burr's first biographer as the author of the two-volume Memoirs of Aaron Burr, published in 1836.
Davis worked for Burr and apparently knew him well, or at least as well as anyone could. He wrote this two-volume book years after Burr had died and left Davis his papers. It's not really a memoir as we think of the term today, and not so much a biography either. It is mainly concerned with addressing particular controversial points in Burr's life and presenting the related evidence in the form of letters and memos.
Burr's letters, according to Davis, indicated "no very strict morality in some of his female correspondents." Acting with the chivalry that his subject supposedly lacked, Davis separated out and destroyed such letters to protect the reputations and virtue, not of Burr, but of the young women and their families. He claimed that Burr wouldn't let the letters be destroyed in his lifetime, but when Burr died Davis burned them all so that no one else could publish them. In the absence of such sources, biographers have largely had only the accusations to work with.
This book isn't only pro-Burr. It is also anti-Jefferson, spending an entire chapter on the story about how in 1800 there was irregularity in the electoral vote counting. The states were supposed to submit their electoral votes on a designated form signed by the electors. However, Georgia just submitted a note stating the votes and the names of the electors. The book points out that the checking of the votes was of course done by the Vice President, who just happened to be Jefferson, not exactly a disinterested party, and moreover that he simply accepted this informality and moved on to the next state. Had these votes been thrown out, Jefferson and Burr would not have been outright winners of the election, but Adams would have also been in the mix, and, considering that the old Congress was mostly Federalist, almost certainly Adams would have been re-elected.
What the book doesn't tell, however, is that four years earlier a similar situation had arisen and Jefferson had been present. His advice had been just the same - accept the information. Only, at that time, the vote had counted against him. He was thus at least consistent. Moreover, in those days of slow travel and communication, it would taken a long time to do things properly. His conclusion to simply understand what was plainly intended and accept it seems to me the correct one.
People today still believe Burr tried to take the presidency from Jefferson in 1800, despite being only the vice presidential candidate. It's funny that they do so. This shows the power of guilt by association. Since he killed Hamilton in that duel, he must have done every other base thing possible. This book shows how actually it was not Burr who did something, but Jefferson, which is where the suspicion should really lie since after all, it was Jefferson who won. Burr knew he wasn't supposed to be the president, and that if he campaigned or connived for it, there was no way he would have been able to work with Congress, the new Congress who were all followers of Jefferson, not the old Congress who were mostly Hamiltonians. Jefferson, however, must have tired of the endless deadlocked balloting in Congress, and so did certain Congressmen. When the latter managed to send an emissary to Jefferson, hoping to get concessions before they surrendered, Jefferson tried not to answer, but like a lawyer, he chose his words carefully so as to have it both ways. They asked if he would undo Hamilton's financial system, which the Federalists did not want to see, and he said he would not make any statement on it, but that in the past he had never advocated removing it. They asked if he would pull the plug on the navy and he said he would not make any statement on it, but that if they had read his book they would know that he favored growing the navy so as the match the size of the merchant fleet. They asked if he would continue to support American commerce and he replied that as minister to France he always had. The Federalists got these answers and were satisfied, but then came back with one more. Would he turn the lower level Federalists out of office? Here apparently Jefferson had no previous record to refer to and here in my opinion he did negotiate, saying no, he would not, except for reasons of malfeasance. So Jefferson did negotiate a bit, but in my opinion there was nothing wrong with it. It's just one more example of political negotiation.
The person who made a mistake was Burr, who apparently failed to consider that by not disavowing his interest in the presidency, he greatly annoyed Jefferson, the new president. I believe from that time on Burr's fate was sealed. The Jeffersonian press assailed him constantly. Then Burr in turn voted against the administration when the Senate tied over whether to amend Jefferson's prized Judiciary act. Jefferson wanted it passed, but Burr voted to send it back to committee to consider changes. So he just made the problem worse.
Jefferson was also an unreliable narrator in his late in life Anas writings. He claimed to have never known Burr prior to their both being in Senate in 1797. But the author shows letters from Jefferson from years earlier and in which Jefferson actually admits having visited Burr. This unreliability calls into question many other things that Jefferson wrote at that time, for example, the famous dinner when the bargain was supposedly struck between Hamilton and Madison.
We learn various odd things from Burr's letters. One is that he would often call himself A.B. Another is that his daughter met Dolley Madison and thought her habit of using snuff vile. Burr also tells the story of a woman he thought to engage in marriage. After a deal of uncertainty as to her interest and getting the go-ahead from the father, he put it out there and asked the question, only to be turned down, being told that as he had previously argued for the point of view that there was no point in any woman getting married, why should she. Well and good, he gave up. But then the lady kept turning up and contacting him on the flimsiest of pretexts. Burr was thoroughly confused. Finally, his daughter, leagues away in South Carolina (Burr was in Philly), diagnoses the problem. She wanted to marry him, but wanted him to talk her into it first. In the end nothing transpired.
In this book we get all the ugly letters that passed between Burr and Hamilton in the days leading up to the duel. It's really quite depressing as you read the deep loathing that's between the lines. Psychology hadn't been invented yet, but after being kicked out of the vice presidency and losing the gubernatorial race, Burr seems to have gone into almost a fugue state where he hated the world. He spent all his time alone and complained about being constantly sick. If only he had gone out and talked to people, all this might not have happened.
After the duel there were four hearings and an attempt to bring Burr in for questioning. He could not be found so they imprisoned the author of the book when he refused to say where Burr was. It's interesting to read Burr's commentary on the newspaper coverage he was getting, and what he thought of the comments of others. He was very surprised that Hamilton's political opponents were suddenly so willing to praise Hamilton.
The general impression of Burr is that he was just a bad, selfish guy. Sure, he valued and mentored women, but he also bought slaves and even complained that his slave misbehaved all the time. Yeah, ever think maybe he wouldn't exactly like being a slave? When he goes to Georgia, there is a hurricane and the only people who die are slaves. He writes about how various masters lost x number of slaves., not about the loss of human life. The duel from the perspective of the letters looks like murder, like something he wanted to do for a long time and finally got the opening when a third party overheard Hamilton badmouthing Burr. It was all very calculated.
There has always been a lot of speculation about exactly what Burr was trying to do in the southwest. It appears from his letters that it was really just the same as what other Americans did later, taking parts of Mexico away from Spain and setting up a republic.
Burr's electability too seems to have been less than what he thought. Although having plenty of ability and presenting a commanding, intriguing impression in person, he never presented any great ideas or commanded a great following. He only initially became a senator because the Republican factions in New York were at war and he was most qualified candidate who neither side hated. His attainment of the vice presidency was not due to his appeal either, but because Jefferson and the Virginians had designated him in that role.

22/7/29 Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World by Thomas C. Buchanan ★★★★★
22/7/28 Somersett: Or Why and How Benjamin Franklin Orchestrated the American Revolution by Phillip Goodrich ★★★★

Often wandering all over the map in terms of topic, and always very pro-Franklin, is very good on his doings in Britain and in Congress, as well as those of Paine, and on factions within the revolutionary movement. The major reason for his trip to Britain was the try to improve things with the corrupt Penn family who owned Pennsylvania. It was while enlisting the help of Quakers that he started giving support to abolition, at first as merely part of a quid pro quo. He also deserves credit for discovering and helping Thomas Paine during this period. His year in Congress was rather uncomfortable as many thought him a spy for the crown and he saw posts for which he was best suited go to others.
Says that the list of attendees at the Continental Congress that framed the Declaration of the Independence reads like a who's who of the founding fathers. Well, yeah, that's a large part of why they're called founders. The statement is mere tautology.
Makes offhandedly the claim that Jefferson as Vice President used to attend Cabinet meetings until he became too bored and quit because Adams persisted in ignoring him. The orthodoxy about this is that Adams invited Jefferson to attend the Cabinet, even be a sort of co-president, and Jefferson was tempted, but Madison, who never liked Adams, talked him out of it. So I wonder where the author got this. I suspect the author is confusing this with the time that Jefferson as There is also shading by deciding what to include and what not. For example, there is almost nothing on the negotiations to end the war. So don't trust this book without double checking its claims.

22/7/19 In Pursuit of Jefferson by Derek Baxter ★★★

This wasn't the book I was led to expect. I was hoping to find a book of someone following Jefferson's footsteps in Europe, in the same order, and discussing what he saw and comparing with what one sees today. This is not that book.
Says that Jefferson sought out the site of a battle with the Goths. Actually, Jefferson was looking for the battle of the Teutoburg Wald, which was not against the Goths, but a whole different set of Germans.
Says that Jefferson's European trip taught him, in the field of architecture, to think for himself, and stop slavishly following Palladio and books. But the author does not seem to realize that years later Jefferson would submit a plan for the first White House that James Hoban, the eventual winning architect, would consider too much a slavish copy of what gone before.
The caption on p. 197 claims the associated image is of an ad that Jefferson placed to try to recapture a slave, but if one actually reads it, the ad is by and about completely different people.
Too little of this book is about Jefferson, too much about other stuff like the doings of the author's family, which really don't bear much intrinsic interest.

22/7/8 Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe by Thomas Jefferson ★★★★★
22/7/1 The Journal of William Maclay United States Senator from Pennsylvania 1789 to 1791 by William Maclay ★★★★★

This is the personal diary of William Maclay, a Pennsylvania senator in the First Congress. It is the story of what it's like to be against the majority in most things and yet, using logic, manage to win a few questions now and then.
This is an amazing book and strangely never discussed by historians. I think I have figured out why, though. This diary of the very first Senate is so much fun to read that they would be embarrassed to reveal they are using such a work as a source (but I am sure that they are).
Maclay was against the administration and ridicules Vice President Adams and his supporters Richard Henry Lee and the New Englanders constantly. He has a few cracks for President Washington as well. He seems to make good points, such as his dismay that the Senate spent a month mostly talking about what titles the president, VP and Senators should have when addressed. Other frivolous discussions included over how the Senate should send and receive messages with respect to the House, whether it was proper to put into the record the details of a resolution that was voted down, whether they should have sergeant-at-arms and what the title of that officer should be. Adams plumped for the Holder of the Black Rod. Meanwhile, important matters like the tariff, meant to be the main financial support of the nation, wait unresolved while ship after ship comes in, their products untaxed, even though merchants have already raised their prices in anticipation of the tax, thus earning the profits that should have gone to the government.
It gets even more ridiculous when the Senate have a message for the president. To deliver it, they all take coaches to the president's office where where they wait in an anteroom with insufficient chairs. Invited into the main room, the vice president reads out a multi-page speech. Then the president pulls out his own speech and read that. While all remain standing. The president then invites them all to have a seat. The vice president refuses. The president repeats his offer. It is refused again and all the senators leave.
It is funny too that in those days the vice president participated almost fully in the activities of the Senate. He made a long speech every day. He would be the last vice president to do so. He also wore a sword, at least at the beginning.
Maclay reports considerable discussion about the residency bill, that is, where the nation's capital should be located. The idea of swapping residency on Virginia-Maryland border for the assumption of the debts of the states appears to have originated long before Jefferson's suggestion of it, if for no other reason that locations other than the Potomac had been suggested.
Maclay sounds wise and prophetic about almost everything. Sadly, he is almost always opposed by a majority of the Senate. The only thing so far that I would disagree with him on is that he believed the president could not dismiss an officer without the Senate's approval. This hasn't endured, though it was tried during the Andrew Johnson administration.
Maclay's fellow Senator was Robert Morris, he comes out very poorly in this. Not only was Morris speculating heavily in Continentals, which he heard from Duer were to be redeemed at full value, he stayed away from the Senate while doing so, so as not to be questioned about it. It is also dismaying that he voted against siting the capital in his own state of Pennsylvania in favor of Delaware Falls just because he happened to have traded for a lot of land there.
It's interesting to see the relationship between Maclay and Madison, then in the House, who one would think would be anti-Hamilton allies. Initially, however, Maclay mistrusts Madison, thinking him in the pocket of Washington. But he goes to listen to debates in the House - how many senators do that today? - and likes what he hears, especially regarding the redemption of the Continentals. He sees, moreover, what Madison does not, that Madison will never get his way. Determined to help, he prepares a moderate compromise and takes it to Madison, but Madison, perhaps steeped in stress and depression, will not hear him out. Maclay gives up. But a few days later, Madison comes to call, which he had never done before. Unfortunately, Maclay happens to be ill and cannot see him.
Maclay considered a standing army a danger as well as an unnecessary expense. He construed the line "a well regulated militia" in the Second Amendment to signify that a militia was sufficient for all purposes.
Maclay on Franklin: "I really never was much of an admirer of the Doctor ... He had every fault of vanity, ambition, want of sincerity, etc."
Maclay is not too sanguine on Hamilton either. Needing some government papers that Hamilton had, he attempted to get them from the bank where they were currently stored. He was told to apply to Hamilton. Hamilton didn't want to do it. Finally, he accepted that Congress had a right to see them and said he would come back with them in half an hour. But never returned. Maclay went right over to the Treasury offices and now after a long delay Hamilton claimed they were locked in a desk for which the key was in Philadelphia. Maclay believed all this was evasion, pure and simple.
Maclay also opposed the government's attempts to coerce Rhode Island into joining the union (by calling in debts).
Maclay was so careful with the public that he didn't even want the US to have ambassadors, though he was okay with consuls, who apparently came free.
Maclay on Jefferson: "Jefferson is a slender man; has rather the air of stiffness in his manner; his clothes seem too small for him; he sits in a lounging manner, on one hip commonly, and with one of his shoulders elevated much above the other; his face has a sunny aspect; his whole figure has a loose, shackling air. He had a rambling, vacant look, and nothing of that firm, collected deportment which I expected would dignify the presence of a secretary or minister. I looked for gravity, but a laxity of manner seemed shed about him. He spoke almost without ceasing. But even his discourse partook of his personal demeanor. It was loose and rambling, and yet he scattered information wherever he went, and some even brilliant sentiments sparkled from him. The information which he gave us respecting foreign ministers, was all high-spiced. He had been long enough abroad to catch the tone of European folly. He gave us a sentiment which seemed rather to savor of quaintness: 'It is better to take the highest of the lowest than the lowest of the highest.' Translation: 'It is better to appoint a charge' with a handsome salary than a minister plenipotentiary with a small one.' He took his leave, and the committee agreed to strike out the specific sum to be given to any foreign appointment, leaving it to the President to account, and appropriated thirty thousand dollars generally for that purpose."
On p. 251 Maclay reports a story out of Georgia. It seems a man had killed himself, cutting his throat with a razor. His male slave refused to be separated from the body. Perhaps this is as close to a gay reference as one can find in this time period.
Maclay employs the expression "a house divided against itself cannot stand", showing it did not originate with Lincoln. I suspect that Lincoln, being an avid reader, would have read Maclay's account, probably prior to or during his own time in Congress.
The Pennsylvanians in Congress invited to a dinner the Vice President, Chief Justice and Secretaries of State, Treasury and War. The first two did not attend, but Jefferson, Hamilton and Knox did. Maclay offers the following impressions: "Hamilton has a very boyish, giddy manner, and Scotch-Irish people could well call him a "skite". Jefferson transgresses on the extreme of stiff gentility or lofty gravity. Knox is the easiest man, and has the most dignity of presence. They retired at a decent time, one after another. Knox stayed the longest, as indeed suited his aspect best, being more of a Bacchanalian figure." This description of Jefferson sounds a bit at odds with the earlier one, perhaps reflecting a chameleon-esque character. Or maybe it's just because Hamilton was there.
Hamilton engaged in stock trading while Secretary of the Treasury.
Some of Maclay's colleagues complained that he wasn't paying enough personal calls to others in government during his off hours, and he even took this to heart. Have things ever changed!

22/6/15 George Mason, Forgotten Founder by Jeff Broadwater ★★★★

Comments recorded while reading.

Tends to be dry and often unengaging. A slow read.

Mason and Washington were neighbors along the Potomac all their lives, and worked together often, yet before the end of it, were no longer on speaking terms. I'm curious to find out the reason for this as the same thing happened between Washington and Jefferson. Probably because Mason refused to sign the constitution, but we'll see.

Page 60 says "track" where it intends "tract". Page 122 says "tenants", but intends "tenets". Continuously spells "siege" as "seige".

Mason wrote the original version of the all-important second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson's version reads so much better though. When one reads the writings of people from this era, there tend to be so many curlicues - extra words and parenthetical phrases. The best writers - Franklin, Paine, Jefferson and Gouverneur Morris - thankfully avoid that and are much more readable.

His main objection to the constitution does not appear to be the omission of a bill of rights. Though it was on his list, he didn't even raise the issue until the final days of the convention. The one he mentioned most often was that Congress could pass navigation acts with a simple majority, thus being able to use them against the South. Others objections:

Congess might change the election rules to its own benefit.

He didn't want the "no ex post facto legislation" law.

He felt the Senate had too much power and would become aristocrats.

He also felt the president had too much power and wanted an advisory council to serve as a check on that office.

In general it didn't do enough to protect Virginia planters.

As to Washington, he considered the fact that Mason had published his objections to the constitution bad behavior and considering the desperate nature of the situation, unhelpful. When after ratification Mason continued to oppose the government, for example resigning a court job rather than take a loyalty oath, Washington's tolerance ran out.

22/6/5 Dinner at Mr. Jefferson's: Three Men, Five Great Wines, and the Evening that Changed America by Charles A. Cerami ★★

The main reason this book gets as many stars as it does is for its choice of topic. But it makes a number of assertions and characterizations that are both broad and not supported by evidence or argumentation, and likely not supportable. He also frequently claims to know what various characters were thinking at various times thought it can only be supposition
There also appears to be a bias in favor of Hamilton, Washington and the rarely-lauded Roger Sherman, but against Jefferson, Madison and Adams.
The narrative often has trouble staying on course. For example, a discussion of the debate over where to locate the nation's capital wanders into irrelevanceis such as archaeology, Phoenicians and even paleontology. In fact there's little structure to the narrative. It's sort of like a rainy afternoon when you're stuck inside with your uncle on Thanksgiving. He's read a couple books on a topic and is going to tell you everything he remembers. Each fact or story reminds him of another one, related or not, and he constantly deviates from his page or repeats himself to tell them.
There is a lot of padding as well. After a while the beginning of each chapter seems to repeat the main points of a previous one, as if the author had taken a long break and were now trying to remember where he had been going. An editor really should have removed these bits.
The account of the dinner must be 95% made up. Jefferson wrote only a few lines about it, yet we have a complete account, including wines and food served! Unfortunately, some readers won't even realize this unless they happen to consult the end notes in the back of the book. This book isn't a history at all, but an historical fiction! I certainly plan to shelve it as such.
This is a good reminder to avoid histories by journalists using primarily secondary sources. Stick to actual historians.

22/4/21 Martin Van Buren and the American Political System by Donald B. Cole ★★★★★

Details how Van Buren recreated the party system after it had almost died. Well, he didn't do it alone, but he was the head of the team of "Bucktails" who became the "Albany Regency" in New York and later transferred their ideas to the national scene. At the same time or slightly later there were similar movements in Virginia -- the Richmond Junto -- as well as New Hampshire and Tennessee.

As to why, Van Buren and his friends were not colossal figures like an Alexander Hamilton or a Dewitt Clinton who could command personal followings from either party. (Add James Monroe as part of that group.) Those kinds of figures were okay at first, but they could become too mercurial. They had no fixed principles necessarily, just a big following who would go wherever he wished to lead them. It was personal or factional politics. This left guys like Van Buren out, but it was also objectionable because the movement didn't stand for anything bedrock principles in the way that a party would. And a party would long outlive any particular candidate, meaning that if you lost that candidate, you didn't lose political control.

How he did it was by finding his team of talented, like-minded individuals, establishing good, frequent and open communications among the team, buying a newspaper that disseminated the group's views, being friendly and open to anyone who wanted to join the movement, setting up a patronage system whereby those friendly to the movement got government jobs and finally by stressing loyalty to party.

Unlike earlier, by the antebellum period there is a great deal more information available in the form of letters, newspapers, memoirs and so on. The author does a great job mastering this material and limiting it to the essentials, finding that delicate line between interest and exhaustion.

Van Buren seems to have mostly been a party first man, not particularly interested in policies and principles, but infinitely so in what could be accomplished in persuasion. He read people well, made strong alliances and tried to restrain people from their worst tendencies and outrages, for example, Jackson. I wouldn't call him a big picture thinker.

When a great crisis - The Panic of 1837 - arrived, he put his presidency first, his party second and the actual issue only third.

His largest idea was simply a regeneration of an old one : to recreate the North-South alliance that Jefferson, Madison and Burr had made and avoid the amalgamation of all parties into one, as had been practiced by Monroe and Quincy Adams. As such, he was a great gray eminence, but as the leader himself, which he definitely wanted, somewhat lacking. He did set the stage for Democratic party dominance for decades as well as the prevalence of the "doughface" types like Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan.

As far as philosophy went, he didn't have one, but merely borrowed the Jeffersonian one, hanging on to it long after its relevance had passed.

22/3/22 Origins of the Whig Party by Eber Malcolm Carroll ★★★★★

Academic and needing a pretty good grounding in the history of the politics of the period, but quite readable for all that. Very pithy. Scarcely a wasted word. Footnotes on the page.
Very interesting on the Nullification Crisis of 1833 regarding party formation. Whatever one may think of John Calhoun, he certainly proved capable of causing a sensation, and more than once. On this occasion, by leading South Carolina into disobedience of the federal government, he triggered a strong, nationalist response on the part of President Jackson, which both went against the feelings of a lot of his friends and earned him new friends among the National Republican party in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. In particular, the former Federalist and Hartford Conventioneer Daniel Webster supported his policy. On the other hand, Henry Clay tended to be sympathetic to the nullifiers, leading to a break between the two main National Republican leaders, just at a time when the Bank of the United States needed their mutual support. It appeared for a time that maybe the existing parties would realign over this monumental issue.
The Whigs were not much of a party, as their name reflects. Really they didn't have much to unite them apart from a dislike of "King Andrew" Jackson and the Democrats. (The British Whigs arose in rejection of the powers of the king.) They were a hodgepodge collection of nationalists (often former federalists), but also pro-infrastructure westerners and Louisianans, anti-Masons, nullifiers like Calhoun and social conservatives. This last group saw lots of problems in the influx of immigrant laborers and their naturalization, the disposal of public lands, the qualifications of office holders (too many ill-educated "nobodies" getting in), and the growth in the power of the federal government. This is why they tended to run without platforms and just choose a popular general to bear the flag; there were few policies they could all agree on.

22/3/17 Memoirs of a Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840s by Isaac, One of Thomas Jefferson's Slaves by Isaac Jefferson ★★★★★

Interesting tidbits:

Jefferson never danced or played cards. (Other sources indicate he did dance as a youth, though.)

Jefferson had five or six guns and liked to shoot squirrels and partridges. He didn't want to shoot them stationary though. Felt it was unfair. He would scare them first and then try to shoot them moving.

Jefferson had one of his slaves trained to be a tinsmith and opened a tinsmithing shop at Monticello. But after two years it failed and he switched over to nail manufacturing, which succeeded quite well.

22/3/16 Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier by Bob Drury ★★★
22/3/11 Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis ★★★★★

Could have been called John Adams: The Retirement Years, and After
Rather harsh on Hamilton, as might be expected. His foolish plan to make war on France with a mere 10K troops. And then to march them to Louisiana, Mexico and even Peru! The American Caesar.
Book has a couple sloppy errors.

Reference to John Trumbull's famous painting of the Declaration at one point says it's about the constitutional convention.

Reference to the "Council of Nice" was no doubt meant to be the "Council of Nicea".
Even though the author attended Jefferson's alma mater, it's pretty clear Adams is his favorite of the founders.
One great thing is that it summarizes or at least provides the highlights of Adams's difficult to read books on politics: Defence of the Constitutions and Discourses of Davila. Adams would have preferred that the presidential veto be final, with no chance of override. And yet he wondered why the Jeffersonians branded him a monarchist. By the way, interesting fact: neither Adams nor Jefferson ever used the veto, not John Quincy Adams either, this despite other early presidents using the veto: Washington - twice, Madison - 7 times, Monroe - once and Jackson - 12 times. Most surprising of all, U.S. Grant used it 93 times and was overridden four times.
Very good on the contrasts between Adams and Jefferson, each great in areas where the other was challenged, and all that that implies. They were shadows of one another.

22/3/7 Emergence Of The Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789-1832 by James S. Chase ★★★★★

This brings out interesting information on the presidency of John Quincy Adams.
• He was so anti-party that he wouldn't even agree on a name to give his supporters. Even today Wikipedia and others calls his party the "National Republican". Actually, he and his supporters did not use this and the term only came into existence via Henry Clay in 1832. They did use vague terms like "Friends of the Administration", "The Adams Convention" or "Anti-Jackson".
• Adams didn't appoint enough Federalists to really get them on his side completely, but did appoint enough to drive away what should have been his Republican supporters. In New York, for example, Silas Wright led his followers to support Andrew Jackson as he would be a more reliable appointer. It didn't help that Adams used a Federalist as his spokesman in Congress, Daniel Webster. Maybe Adams was the last president to really refrain from the spoils system.
• After a huge search, Adams did not choose, in the end, his vice presidential nominee. Clay was suggested, but refused the job, preferring to remain at State. William Henry Harrison sought the job, but no one thought that a good idea; he seemed too ambitious, trying to get any job he could. Adams rejected the suggestions of his old rival Crawford or the old legislator, Nathaniel Macon. Clay supported James Pleasants, former Virginia governor, but he was rejected due to his anti-tariff and anti-improvements sentiments. Adams tried the governor of Pennsylvania, Andrew Schulze, but he declined. Adams thought that politically he should have a southerner and tried James Barbour of Virginia, Secretary of War, but he preferred to become ambassador to Britain, recently vacated by Rufus King. Finally, someone, it's not clear who, but not Adams, chose Richard Rush, Secretary of the Treasury and son of Dr. Benjamin Rush, who had been the one to get Adams and Jefferson to reconcile after their presidencies by telling each that the other wanted to do so, even though in neither case had they expressed such a wish.
• As the sitting president, Adams had huge powers with which he could have organized support, held national conventions and so on, but he refused to do any of it. He left his supporters in each state to try to organize themselves as best they could. This was quite different from his opponents in 1828, who led by Van Buren, Calhoun and Thomas Ritchie of the Richmond Junto, organized nationally quite effectively.
  It also details the rise of the Anti-Masonic party, one of the strangest developments in the history of American politics. It all began with a gentleman who joined the Masons and then began to publish their secrets. The next thing he knew he was jailed, bailed out by Masons, imprisoned in a disused fort and then killed, his body dropped into the Niagara River. The response to this outrage from the governor, law enforcement and grand juries, many of whom were Masons, was either nonexistent or foot dragging. The non-Masonic population was so outraged at this apparent manipulation of the law by Masons in power that they created a political party with removal of Masons as their primary plank. This party never reached national status, but became quite important in New England and the mid-Atlantic states.
• Very insightful summary of Henry Clay: 'Clay had serious faults as a political strategist. [His] American system, despite its latitude, had no overriding appeal to a nation of small farmers; his economic nationalism was a generation away from widespread popularity. Indeed, he lacked any real insight into the popular mind. He was, consequently, often a poor judge of what constituted an effective issue, his most notable lapse being the championing of the Bank of the United States in 1832. Instead of reading the minds of the voters, he often relied on his instinct as a gambler. Adams had also perceived by temperament "he was ambitious and his ambition impatient".'
• Why were a lot of the early nominating conventions held in Baltimore? Because they wanted a place other than Washington to avoid the imputation that they were controlled by Congress, yet close enough that Congress members could participate. Andrew Jackson didn't actually force Martin Van Buren on the party in 1832 as is commonly supposed. Van Buren was the pre-eminent available candidate and, after having been rejected by the Senate as ambassador to Britain, was practically a martyr.

22/2/20 The One-Party Presidential Contest: Adams, Jackson, and 1824's Five-Horse Race by Donald J. Ratcliffe ★★★★★

Begins very promisingly, featuring as it does a challenge to the traditional view of the 1824-8 period, that 1824 was an election purely about personalities while by 1828 political parties had somehow magically arisen. Also, it points out the fallacy in the argument that Jackson won the popular vote in '24. He can hardly have won it when several states did not even conduct popular elections that year. Moreover, if one postulates what the popular vote would have been in those mostly northern states, John Q. Adams has at least a rough parity with Jackson, and more likely, a win. Consider the "Corrupt Bargain" theory exploded, and it as an early, successful use of propaganda in the US.

The book is actually going into internal state politics, state by state, which is really interesting. It could have been a little better organized at times, but there is so much interesting research that it really enables pondering and synthesizing conclusions.

One critical region for this election was the Old Northwest, lying between Adams' northern bailiwick and Jackson's Old Southwest. This regionchad two main issues: unhappiness with government handling of the economy which had foundered in the Panic of 1819 and affected the West particularly perniciously and unhappiness with the Missouri Compromise, which had legalized slavery north of Mason-Dixon line. But which issue was going to be more important and who would win this region?

Ostensibly this would have been Henry Clay, but while his American system of infrastructure improvements was attractive to the west who needed highways and canals reaching the east, they disliked that he was a slaveholder, had engineered the Missouri Compromise and was pro-Bank. Adams, as a member of the cabinet, was too much a part of the establishment for many of them. This left Jackson, popular as a war hero and about whose policy beliefs almost nothing was known, apart from being anti-Indian. He thus became the great hope of all the disgruntled in this region and this permitted him to escape being merely a regional candidate of the Southwest.

One slight error I think. Mentions that Albert Gallatin was chosen by the Congressional nominating caucus for vice presidential nominee as a way of signaling that the presidential nominee wanted to govern in the old, Jeffersonian style. However, I believe another reason was that people knew that Crawford had had a likely stroke and might not be able to serve, or might be partly incapacitated. For that reason an experienced and capable VP was a wise plan.

The book makes another mistake wrt. Gallatin, stating that he could not become president due to his foreign birth. In fact, just as it would have been with Hamilton, a special clause in the constitution grandfathered in anyone who had been a citizen at the time of the founding.

It does offer an alternative to the usual interpretation of why Gallatin was dropped from the Crawford ticket. Not due to his foreign birth, apparently, but because the hope had been to attract Pennsylvania voters, who, however, had fully gone over to Jackson. Thus, Van Buren, acting as campaign manager, preferred to tell states to select whomever they wished for VP.

It's also incorrect regarding electoral votes in Maine, stating that Adams won every district whereas actually Jackson won one.

Book points out that another hole in the Corrupt Bargain theory is that Jackson, who got most of his electoral votes in the South, benefited from the 3/5 clause. Were it not for that, Adams would have had electoral superiority, 83-77.

States that in four years the J.Q. Adams administration spent as much on internal improvements - roads, canals, and so on - has the federal government had spent in the previous twenty-four. At least on this basis it was hardly a failed administration.

One question the book implicitly raises, but does not answer is, what was the composition of the 1824 House of Representatives like? Not because that Congress would decide the presidential election, but because the composition of Congress often reflects the national mood. In fact, it was very close, containing 106 Jackson men, but 107 anti-Jackson men.

22/2/3 Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America by Jack N. Rakove ★★★★★
22/1/16 Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham ★★★★
21/12/28 John Randolph: A New Edition with Primary Documents by Henry Adams and Robert McColley ★★★★

The 17-page foreword by modern historian Robert McColley is really the best part because it discusses what the biography got right and wrong. It almost makes one not want to read the rest. But the rest is interesting as a perspective on the founders that is not celebrating, or apologetic, but openly critical. It's almost as if John Adams rose from the dead in 1884 and shared his thoughts on what had been happening. Just be sure to go back and re-read the foreword again afterwards.

21/12/7 American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis ★★★★

I avoided this book for a long time because the interviews I saw with the author made it seem like it had just one theme, that Jefferson spoke about A, but did B. For example, he was against slavery, but continued it all his life, or he wanted to shrink the federal budget, but never did so with his personal budget.

But the book is much more than this. In fact it's a psychological study as conducted by a lay person that probably makes the greatest attempt to really understand what Jefferson was thinking, and why. This is fascinating reading, but perhaps a little too seductive because these arguments are very difficult to prove. In fact, in an appendix the author, writing before the DNA tests, gets the Sally Heming story completely wrong. Not only is this not good in and of itself, it also causes a problem for the rest of the book, as the author's conclusion about Hemings was based on his analysis of Jefferson's character. If he was wrong about this character aspect, what others might he also have been wrong about?

It's still well worth reading and making up your own mind about though, and I find it more interesting and readable than the Meacham biography. Particularly good is the discussion and analysis of the Adams-Jefferson letters and the highlights it throws off on both of them.

p. 280 "Monroe [the incumbent president replacing Madison]" ought to have been "Monroe [the incoming president replacing Madison]"

p. 281 "may not give umbrage" ought to have been "may give umbrage"

Regarding Jefferson and personality types, this is the first book that seems to try to make Jefferson into an ENFP. His Manichaeaism, his seeing everything from a lofty altitude and ignoring the reality of the details, his visions, his great writing ability, and so on. Those things are true, but there are other aspects of his life that the book kind of ignores. He worked long days at many of his posts, very long days, including in the presidency. Surely at this time he wrested with a great many details. But the book doesn't delve into that. Maybe it's just that the author may be an ENFP and so he sees his subject that way.

21/11/15 Abraham Lincoln by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire ★★★
21/10/19 Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech by Charles Slack ★★★★★

At first I thought this was going to be too surface-y, but no, it really dives into the topic. We get pretty far into several biographies such as those of Bache, Callender, and Matthew Lyon. There's also a very good discussion about how the Sedition Act got passed and about President Adams's involvement in its enforcement.

Makes an interesting point you won't hear about in the Hamilton musical: Alexander Hamilton was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Bill of Rights.

Wish it had gone into similar depth on the writing of the First Amendment, but maybe that would be getting a tad too far afield.

Reading this really makes one despite Justice Chase and readily understand why Jefferson sought his impeachment.

The author claims that there are no more sedition laws in the United States and proceeds with a disquisition about how bad things are in other countries. Seems he didn't investigate thoroughly enough. There's no need to look so far afield. A person can still be prosecuted for this right here in this country. Indeed Joe Biden has discussed sedition.

21/10/13 The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States 1780-1840 by Richard Hofstadter ★★★★★

The book begins with a discussion of different models of how parties should exist, finding parallels in England and the US. Bolingbroke in the UK and Washington and Monroe in the US supported a model of a single party that would provide for everyone (but without the government preventing other parties). Hume in the UK and Madison in the US supported the idea of qualified support for parties. Parties as a necessary evil. Jefferson tended to be with Madison early on, but veered toward the Monrovian attitude later. The third view is from Burke in the UK and (not yet stated in the book) probably from Van Buren in the US, that parties, beyond being a necessary evil, are actually a necessary good. A loyal opposition keeps the government honest and permits synthetic policy arriving out of differing views. Suggests that the American Revolution was special because of the relative lack of internal violence and infighting. Here this 1970 book is a little out of date. More recently, colonial revolutions are construed as differing in basic nature from those that are internal to a nation, such as French and Russian examples. "Washington apparently hoped at first that the unanimity shown in his election would be echoed in at least a near-unanimity on basic ideas. He was bitterly disappointed at the early show of sharp opposition, and in good time, without ever giving up his conception of himself as a man above party, he became a strong partisan of the Hamiltonian Fedearlists. So far as he was concerned, the onus for strife, which at first he distributed almost with impartiality, was in the end placed entirely upon the opposition. When the Jay Treaty was at stake, he angrily charged that the opposition to it was the work of a party, without seeming to realize that its supporters also constituted a party." Very interesting regarding Jefferson and the spoils system. Jefferson began his administration with the following idea regarding officeholders: "Malconduct is a just ground for removal; mere difference of political opinion is not". He expected to replace Federalists with Republicans when the former died or retired. But as time went on, not many Federalists did. Even worse, Jefferson practiced frugal government so he was not adding positions. Pressure to appoint party loyalists grew. So he adopted a new policy. The most politically partisan Federalists would also be removed. "In his eight years Jefferson removed 109 out of 433 men who held office by presidential appointment; and, of these, 40 were in a special category, the "midnight appointments" of the Adams administration, whose validity he never conceded." After Monroe was elected, he received a letter from Andrew Jackson urging him to appoint a Federalist (!), General William Drayton Secretary of War, due to his loyal service during the War of 1812. Others also requested that the Cabinet include at least one Federalist. But Monroe felt this would be too indulgent to the party of the Hartford Convention and refused. Monroe's strategy was not to give the opposition jobs, but to give them ceremonial events to make them feel included, such as his 1817 trip to the North, which proved astonishingly successful. Ah, so it is Van Buren the book was leading up to. Hofstadter was advocating the value of party differentiation in the late 60s and early 70s, a time of relative similarity between the parties. He got his wish, and then some more. One wonders what he would say today amid the numerous complaints of too much polarization.

21/9/20 Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and The Election that Saved a Nation by Chris DeRose ★★★★

Going in I don't buy for a minute the premise of this book, that had Monroe defeated Madison in their election for the First Congress we would never have had the Bill of Rights. There were plenty of others capable of writing amendments. Plus, the amendments hardly entered the constitiution in the form or extent that they came from Madison. Not to mention that there are all kinds of other what-ifs. What if King Charles I hadn't lost the English Civil War? Then Monroe's ancestor would never have come to America so that his descendant could run against Madison. What if Queen Elizabeth I had not died childless? Then the Stuarts would never have come to the throne and King Charles would never have caused a civil war for him to lose. You can go back endlessly with this. BUT... if this is what it takes to get a book that delves into the Congressional contest between Madison and Monroe, I AM ALL IN! (even if I have to skip a few chapters)

Early on it seems like I should probably skip a few chapters. I like the discussion of the ancestries of Madison and Monroe and their early lives, but could do without the recounting of well-known events like the Battles of Lexington and Concord, for example. I very much doubt that this will be the first book about the founders and the Revolution that anyone will read, so it's a bit tedious to revisit all that ground here.

I did go ahead and skip almost all the chapters to go directly the election. Having read biographies of both men, I don't feel I missed anything. The election chapter was detailed and good. I would have even liked more detailed, like a day to day account of what they did. It was most fascinating that the two candidates rode to most campaign stops together, spending hours and hours in one another's company! How many people would do that these days I wonder. And how many have had to contend for an election in January for a February 2 election?

The activities in the First Congress also make for interesting reading.

I think I would have framed this book differently. Since so many know their biographies, I would have omitted that part and instead delved in further detail into the lesser known story of their rivalry for the presidency and days of working together in the adminisration.

Puzzled by the book's statement that in the First Congress the Senate was larger than the House. The Senate had, after North Carolina and Rhode Island joined, 26 members. The House had 65 members. Is it talking about a buildig or room? But who would care about that?

After finishing from that point, started reading backwards, chapter by chapter, from the Congressional election chapter.

Interesting discussion of Monroe's evolution in his view of the Constitution, many of which proved prophetic, although he had some errors as well. Good point about his being the only president to oppose the Constitution.

On p. 21 and in the index, misspells "John Dickinson".

The skimpiness of treatments of topics such as the Battle of Monmouth and the Constitutional Convention cause misleading statements. Books on Monmouth do not blame General Charles Lee the way this book does. Madison's Hand, the book on the Constitutional Convention, reveals a different reality than the one presented here. Why are these excursions being provided at all if they are not going to be presented in sufficient detail to make them accurate?

Congressman David Howell is painted in a very negative light, but later on President Madison would appoint him to a judgeship. So the enmity between them must not have been *that* strong.

21/8/29 Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello by Andrew Burstein ★★★
21/8/11 The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution by Lindsay M. Chervinsky ★★★+

It's an admirable topic and I did learn some things, though not as many as hoped. It's best at getting into the details of the Washington administrations. Jefferson's treatment of the cabinet at the very end is very interesting and illuminating. There are a lot of minor issues though:

• First, if you have been reading the books about the founders you can skip the first three chapters. Apart from a couple pages on Attorney General William Bradford, you will already know everything they contain.
• Disappointingly, once the book finally gets into the main topic, there are so many unnecessary diversions. Supposedly about the cabinet and its workings, it diverts into Washington's trips, outings and many other unrelated topics. There is a long diversion into the previous relationship of Washington and Pennsylvania Governor Mifflin. Althought it might be of interest to those unfamiliar with it, it is entirely off-topic and unnecessary for this book.
• It also does not go deeply enough into the cabinet selection process. In fact before he asked Hamilton, Washington asked Robert Morris. Before he asked Jefferson, he asked John Jay. The text reveals none of this.
• Might also have mentioned that in their early days Jefferson and Hamilton worked quite well together, for example on the problem of standardizing weights and measures. But this is not mentioned. Instead, the book suggests that they never got along, never could get along.
• It's irritating that the ends of chapters tend to summarize what we have just read. Are we still in high school? And that is not all. The start of the next chapter also tends to summarize everything that has been described before!
• There is a lot of material covering events outside the actual cabinet. Of course some such material is required to explain the cabinet's subsequent moves, but there is so much of it that it is really off-topic. The feeling is that not enough effort was made to really dig into the cabinet activities and discussions, but the book had to be completed against a deadline and so this material was easy to put in instead.
• General Henry Lee is mentioned several times in the text, but completely missing from the index for some reason. Same goes for Richard Henry Lee. And at one point the text refers to Richard Henry Lee as Henry, which is confusing as all get out.
• Events are so out of order. The text talks about Randolph's resignation and then a page later relates more events concerning his actions while in office. This happens several times. For example, on p. 318 the text has already discussed the Jefferson administration, but now jumps backwards to that of Adams.
• Completely misses Hamilton's role in sabotaging the Jay Treaty. For more about this, see the book Number 7: Alexander Hamilton's Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy by Julian P. Boyd.
• Sometimes Jefferson's Republicans are called Democratic-Republicans, yet at other times just Republicans. This must be confusing for some readers.
• P. 290: We suddenly get the term "arch-Federalist", which has nowhere been defined before.
• The book's title is inappropriate. The Cabinet implies a history of the cabinet from beginning to the present. It really should have been The First Cabinets. Instead, it gives just a few pages to the Adams and Jefferson's administrations, gives a paragraph to Lincoln and then jumps all the way to Trump.
• P. 317: Suggests that the reason there has been so much turnover in the Trump cabinet is that it lacks diversity. Really? Isn't it obvious that the actual reasons are all the problems connected with working with this quixotic person?
• The book does not understand that since the FDR administration the Cabinet has ceased to exist in fact, if not in theory. They still have periodic meetings, but they're mostly for show, or team-building. There are close relationships between some presidents, such as JFK and RFK, but policy is run now as is shown in The West Wing television program: by the president and his White House advisors.
• I hope that someday there can be a new edition that cleans up all these problems. I hope too that someone will write a better book that discusses the cabinet in every administration.

21/7/14 Washington's End: The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle by Jonathan Horn ★★★★+

Contains a lot of fascinating and new stuff, such as Pickering's thoughts on Washington, how much time Washington spent on the Quasi War, what War Secretary McHenry was like, Washington and religion, how uncomfortable his retirement was, and so on. There were only a couple little things that might have been handled better. One was that the 1800 election did not depend on a "stray vote", but on proper planning to throw one away. There was a lot more planning involved than in what was implied here. Another was that some threads are by the end left untied. Whatever happened to Hercules (search Wikipedia for Hercules Posey, who may have escaped from Mount Vernon rather than Philly)? To James Anderson? The Englishman who came to rent one of Washington's farms? Why didn't the Potomac canal prove profitable? And so on. But a really nice effort, using an unusual style whose ultimate value I remain undecided about. By a Bush speechwriter of all people.

21/6/26 Fatal Sunday: George Washington, the Monmouth Campaign, and the Politics of Battle by Mark E. Lender & Garry W. Stone ★★★★★

One cannot ask for a more thoroughly investigated study of the entire campaign. Indeed, the battle doesn't even start until page 233. By then you've already read an entire book.
Some of the interesting things to learn from this work:

It was 96 degrees there that day. Major General Charles Lee with this forces already tired, found himself greatly outnumbered as Clinton sent about 10,000 against his force of less than a thousand. Having been captured and out of the army for some time, Lee didn't know most of the regimental commanders or units and had few aides able to deliver orders to them. Morgan's rifle group got an unfortunately worded message that made him think the battle was to be the next day and they did not participate. Lee started sending messages via people not his aides and in some cases they were not believed and in another case the person simply failed to deliver the message. The units started retreating on their own to avoid getting outflanked. Washington took a leisurely 90 minute breakfast and was late bringing up the main body of the arm. He also had made little to attempt to find out what was going on at the front. By the time he had reached Lee several bedraggled soldiers had passed, telling stories of gloom and doom. Washington took charge to direct units to various defensive positions, many of the same positions Lee was trying to send them to, and then put Lee back in command. This is a much more nuanced portrayal of Lee's situation than one usually gets.

Another very interesting aspect is that three future notables: James Monroe, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were all in this battle. Who acquitted himself best?

Not much is written about Monroe. He probably saw little action.

Burr must have been in the thick of it as he had a horse shot out from under him while directing his men.

Hamilton also had a horse shot out from under him. Hamilton provided a signal service on the day as he advised an advancing group that the way forward was narrow and that it would be profitable to split and take two separate paths in order to make faster progress.

He also made himself look ridiculous when Washington asked Lee to supervise a holding action. Hamilton volunteered to join, unsheathing his sword and saying something about how he was not afraid to die. Lee looked at him like he was crazy as it had by no means come to that.

In the final evaluations I think there was more to be said about Washington's performance. While he is credited for being inspirational to the troops while Lee was not and for being political enough to manage the aftermath, there are also reasons to doubt his ability. First, he allowed the British to escape Philadelphia scot-free, despite it being a very complicated operation with a huge baggage train. He didn't even bother to leave Valley Forge on the day of evacuation. During the exodus across New Jersey, he failed to nip at Clinton's heels with forces sufficient to make a difference when surely there were times that Clinton's baggage train would have made him vulnerable. On the morning of the battle he did not ensure that he had good intelligence about what was going on in front of him, or that he would have the bulk of his force on the scene in the event Lee should need it. He seems to have failed to anticipate that Clinton might turn and attempt a major counterstroke and was lucky that when he did it things didn't go far worse for him. He also chose to attack on a day when it was 96 degrees out, one gets the idea, more because he needed to answer his critics who claimed he wasn't doing anything, than because it was a good idea. When most evaluators rank Washington as a mediocre general at best, these are some of the reasons.
Misspellings noted:
p. 372 - General Knyphausen's name is misspelled.
p. 399 - "ad hominem" is misspelled.

21/6/1 The Patriots: Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the Making of America by Winston Groom ★★★
21/5/9 Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment by Tom Shachtman ★★★★★
21/4/30 Sea of Glory: A Naval History of the American Revolution by Nathan Miller ★★★★★
21/4/4 The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence by Alfred Thayer Mahan ★★★★★
21/2/28 A History of Colonial America by Oliver Perry Chitwood ★★★★★
20/9/16 John Jay: Founding Father by Walter Stahr ★★★

States that Jay only obtained a few thousand dollars in loan from Spain, but others state that he obtained $170K. The size of this apparent error makes the rest of the text suspect in terms of accuracy.

20/4/8 Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder ★★★
20/4/3 The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed ★★★★
20/3/16 Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr by Nancy Isenberg ★★★★
20/2/17 Political parties and American political development: from the age of Jackson to the age of Lincoln by Michael F. Holt ★★★★
20/2/2 Number 7: Alexander Hamilton's Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy by Julian P. Boyd ★★★★
20/2/2 The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic by Margaret A. Oppenheimer ★★★★
20/1/28 Madison and Jefferson by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg ★★★★★
19/12/14 The Problem of Democracy: The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein ★★★★★
19/12/9 Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 by Cokie Roberts ★★★★
19/10/23 Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants by H. W. Brands ★★★
19/6/6 America 1844: religious fervor, westward expansion, and the presidential election that transformed the nation by John Bicknell ★★★★
18/12/13 His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis ★★★★★
18/11/12 The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis ★★★★★
18/5/14 Financial Founding Fathers: The Men Who Made America Rich by Robert E. Wright & David J. Cowen ★★★★★
18/4/18 The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy by Thomas K. McCraw ★★★★
18/3/31 Gallatin: America's Swiss founding father by Nicholas Dungan ★★★
17/10/12 American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis ★★★★
17/7/12 The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress by Jack N Rakove ★★★★★
17/6/29 Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson by Thomas Jefferson ★★★
17/5/20 Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past by Thomas A. Foster ★★★
17/5/11 Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf ★★★
17/4/20 Alexander Hamilton: the Outsider by Jean Fritz ★★★
16/10/26 The Great Divide: The Conflict between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation by Thomas Fleming ★★★

Quite obviously biased in favor of the first president and against the second through fifth, which is fine, except that it omits many relevant facts, seemingly only discussing events that back its cause and omitting others. It's as if the ghost of the long dead Federalist party has risen again and is attempting to defend itself. But there are reasons this party was the first American one to die, but these are never truly discussed, yet should have been if we are to understand its supposed greatness. In addition, a number of speculations and imputations that cannot be proven are made, often without making it clear exactly, their dubious nature. On the other hand, the book's almost month-by-month chronicle of the first four administrations is really helpful in understanding the whole context of what was happening at the time. It also digs out not a few interesting, though usually unimportant nuggets that other books don't. Just be sure that you have read other books about the period so that as you're reading you can mentally fill in the many lacunae.

16/8/21 Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention by Mary Sarah Bilder ★★★★★
16/8/3 The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government by Fergus M. Bordewich ★★★★
16/7/7 Great Presidents, part 1 by Allan J. Lichtman ★★★
16/3/21 Andrew Jackson by Sean Wilentz ★★★★★
16/1/22 American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham ★★★
16/1/19 Keeping the Republic: Ideology and Early American Diplomacy by Robert W. Smith ★★★★
15/3/7 Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick ★★★
15/2/5 The Founding Fathers Reconsidered by R.B. Bernstein ★★★★
15/1/27 The founding fathers and the politics of character by Andrew S. Trees ★★★
15/1/10 Great Debate: Advocates and Opponents of the American Constitution by Professor Thomas L. Pangle ★★★★
14/10/25 Robert J. Walker, Imperialist by William Edward Dodd ★★★
14/8/11 Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence by Joseph Ellis ★★★★
14/5/29 The Origins of American Public Finance: Debates over Money, Debt, and Taxes in the Constitutional Era, 1776-1836 by Donald R. Stabile ★★★★
14/5/23 First Family: Abigail and John Adams by Joseph Ellis ★★★
14/3/7 Samuel Adams: A Life by Ira Stoll ★★
14/1/2 The Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Fleming ★★★★
13/12/17 John Adams by John Patrick Diggins and Arthur M. Schlesinger ★★★★
13/11/30 The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy by Jeffrey L. Pasley ★★★★+
13/11/22 A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert W. Merry ★★★★
13/10/15 History of American Presidential Elections 1789-1968, volume 1 edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. ★★★★★
12/6/6 Brotherhood of the Revolution by Joseph Ellis ★★★
11/5/17 Before 1776: Life in the American Colonies by Robert J. Allison, part 1 ★★★
12/5/12 James Buchanan by Jean H. Baker ★★★★★
12/5/2 William Henry Harrison by Gail Collins ★★★★
12/4/22 James Monroe by Gary Hart ★★★
12/4/17 A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor ★★★

Interesting information, but such undisciplined writing and bad transitions.

12/3/4 John Tyler by Gary May ★★★★
12/3/3 The History of the United States, 2nd Edition, part 2 by Allen C. Guelzo ★★★
12/2/14 Martin Van Buren by Ted Widmer ★★★★
12/2/7 Zachary Taylor by John S.D. Eisenhower ★★★★
12/2/1 Millard Fillmore by Paul Finkelman ★★★★★
12/1/3 Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution by Richard Brookhiser ★★★★
11/11/16 James Madison by Richard Brookhiser ★★★
11/5/4 The Constitutional Convention: A Narrative History from the Notes of James Madison by James Madison, Edward Larson & Michael Winship ★★★★★
11/4/11 Original Meanings by Jack Rakove ★★★★
11/1/5 The Pirate Hunter: the True Story of Captain Kidd by Richard Zacks ★★★★
10/10/9 A Nation Rising by Kenneth C. Davis ★★★
10/3/16 Polk: the man who transformed the presidency and America (portions) by Walter R. Borneman ★★★★★
09/9/12 A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison by Paul Jennings ★★★★★
09/9/6 The First Forty Years of Washington Society by Margaret Bayard Smith ★★★★★
09/8/18 The Failure of the Founding Fathers by Bruce Ackerman ★★★★★
09/7/14 The Great Decision: Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court by Cliff Sloan & David McKean ★★★★
09/7/4 Triumvirate: The Unlikely Alliance That Saved the Constitution and United the Nation by Bruce Chadwick ★★★
08/08/12 The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution by David O. Stewart ★★★★
08/04/29 The great debate: advocates and opponents of the American Constitution by Thomas L. Pangle ★★★★
07/12/11 James Madison by Garry Wills ★★★★★
07/11/30 "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills ★★★★★
07/07/25 John Quincy Adams by Robert Vincent Remini ★★★★★
07/07/21 1776 by David McCullough ★★★★★
07/06/17 A perfect union: Dolley Madison and the creation of the American nation by Catherine Allgor ★★★★★
07/05/31 The essential Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis; Landon Y. Jones, editor ★★★★★
07/05/17 Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes ★★★★
07/04/23 Revolutionary Characters by Gordon S. Wood ★★★★
06/10/23 The Barbary Wars by Frank Lambert ★★★★
06/10/3 Wars in Barbary by Donald Chidsey ★★★★
06/10/5 Jefferson's war: America's first war on terror, 1801-1805 by Joseph Wheelan ★★★★
06/9/15 James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights by Richard Labunski ★★★★
06/2/10 Founding Mothers by Cokie Roberts ★★★
06/2/10 Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow ★★★
06/2/6 Diagnosing Jefferson by Norm Ledgin ★★★
06/1/30 The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson by William Howard Adams ★★★★★
06/1/5 A Basic History of the United States, Volume 2: The Beginning of the Republic, 1775-1825 by Clarence B. Carson ★★★★★
06/1/4 The History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, abridged and edited by Ernest Samuels by Henry Adams ★★★★★
05/12/25 A Basic History of the United States, Volume 1: The Colonial Experience 1607-1774 by Clarence B. Carson ★★★★★
05/12/22 A Basic History of the United States, Volume 3: The Sections and the Civil War 1826-1877 by Clarence B. Carson ★★★★★
05/12/04 Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis ★★★★★
05/11/22 Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 by John Ferling ★★★★★
05/11/21 Benjamin Franklin - abridged by Walter Isaacson ★★★★★
05/11/18 Inventing a Nation (book) by Gore Vidal ★★★★★
05/11/17 John Adams - abridged by David McCullough ★★★★★
05/11/12 Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism by Susan Dunn ★★★★★
05/11/05 Inventing a Nation by Gore Vidal ★★★★★
06/3/9 The island at the center of the world: the epic story of Dutch Manhattan & the forgotten colony that shaped America by Russell Shorto ★★★★★
01/06/26 Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun by Rhoda Blumberg ★★★★

CIVIL WAR AND THE GILDED AGE
24/10/22 Conversations with Lincoln: Little-Known Stories from Those Who Met America's 16th President Gordon Leidner ★★★

If you were hoping for a lot of funny anecdotes, you would be disappointed. If you would like a lot of heartfelt stories, you may enjoy this. Most of them are about how someone comes to Lincoln needing his help because a soldier they know is sick or imprisoned or in trouble and he provides mercy. It gets kind of repetitive.

24/8/28 An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder by Susan Wels ★★★

This book covers so many topics - life in free love Oneida, psychics, political history, the life of the assassin Charles Guiteau, the assassination and more - all so skimming on the top, that dissatisfyingly it isn't about anything. Or if it is, it's the life of the murderer, and why should he deserve a book about him? The parts about Oneida and Garfield administration politics were probably the best sections, but they could have been in more depth.

23/11/12 The Scandalous Hamiltons: A Gilded Age Grifter, a Founding Father's Disgraced Descendant, and a Trial at the Dawn of Tabloid Journalism by Bill Shaffer ★★★★

The Scandalous Hamiltons!, or "Scand Hams" as I call it, is the story of Alexander Hamilton's Gilded Age great-grandson, who like his forebear was taken in by a comely con artist.

When I first heard of the book, I was surprised that I had not heard this story before, but as I started reading it became apparent why: there isn't that much of a story here. Instead, lots of ancillary information of little interest is heaped together to try to prop one up.

Paradoxically, it's a pretty good read because it's told with a lot of verve and skill and can serve as a nice escape to a different world, America over a century ago, particularly New York and Wyoming.

Some disappointments:

The photos are placed too early in the book as they reveal outcomes that spoil the story.

Mentions "Nucky" Johnson, but surprisingly fails to mention that he was the prototype for the famous "Nucky" Thompson of the Boardwalk Empire television series.

Apparently the editor, and it sounds like, progenitor of the book is one Michaela Hamilton. Whether she is part of the Hamilton clan would seem of interest, but is not included.

23/10/3 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin ★★★★

While the sad and magical Lincoln is endlessly fascinating – often very droll – the same cannot be said, with the possible exception of Seward, for the rest of the rivals. The book is much better before the 1860 election, during which it maintains a firm focus. The rest seems like a different book, wandering from topic to topic, mostly it seems in search of good anecdotes and with little will to cover matters thoroughly, especially with respect to the war, most of which is silently omitted. The book ends with Lincoln's assassination, providing periscope endings for the rest of the rivals. I would have handled this part differently, discussing Seward later and in more detail, as befits his status and contributions.

21/4/6 The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century by Scott Miller ★★★
20/10/11 America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by Edward T. O'Donnell ★★★★★
18/9/8 Grant by Ron Chernow ★★★★+
18/3/6 Prune Country Railroading: Steel Trails to San Jose by Norman W. Holmes ★★★★
18/3/4 Railroads of Los Gatos by Edward Kelley ★★★
18/2/28 The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad by Dennis Drabelle ★★★★
15/10/20 Bodie Bonanza: The True Story of a Flamboyant Past by Warren Loose ★★★★
15/3/7 James A. Garfield: The 20th President, 1881 by Ira Rutkow ★★★★
15/2/23 Rutherford B. Hayes by Hans Trefousse ★★★
15/1/17 William McKinley by Kevin Phillips ★★★★
15/1/9 The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin ★★★
14/12/30 Chester Alan Arthur by Zachary Karabell and Arthur M. Schlesinger ★★★★
14/10/10 History of American Presidential Elections 1789-1968, volume 2 edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. ★★★★★
12/8/4 Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant by Ulysses S. Grant ★★★★★
12/5/31 Benjamin Harrison by Charles W. Calhoun ★★★
09/11/2 Grover Cleveland by Henry F. Graff ★★★★★
09/9/29 Behind the Scenes in the Lincoln White House by Elizabeth Keckley ★★★★★
06/11/17 The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson ★★★★★
05/8/23 Mountain Men to Astronauts: A History of Lodi 1869-1969 by Naomi McCallum Carey ★★★
04/5/30 Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel J. Tilden and the Stolen Election of 1876 by Roy Morris, Jr. ★★★★★
03/09/09 Lincoln by Gore Vidal ★★★★★
01/06/20 Shipwrecked! The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy by Rhoda Blumberg ★★★★★

20TH CENTURY USA
23/11/9 Secret Service chief by Urbanus Edmund Baughman ★★★★

(The last paragraph of this review is kind of a spoiler.)

Served during the Truman, Eisenhower and one year of the JFK administrations. It's kind of ironic that he wrote so much about the steps taken to prevent assassination and then it happened just one year after the book came out, particularly since he had seen that Eisenhower use a car called the Bubbletop that protected the president with a plexiglas cover, but his successors discarded it.

There's a lot here that's not about protecting the president and his family, particularly about stopping counterfeiters. While interesting, I would have preferred a few more stories about the former. There's also a chapter on Vice President Nixon who got close to being assassinated a couple times. The author makes a few statements about people from other countries and the like that would probably get him canceled today, but that was typical of the era.

There's nothing here about JFK's extramarital affairs, but some discussion of Eisenhower's hidden medical crises: coronary thrombosis and ileitis.

The way he got the job was kind of crazy. He was head agent in New York. One day he gets a phone call to get on a flight to Washington immediately. When he gets there they take him to the Secretary of the Treasury who tells him the old Chief is retiring and now he has the job. No interview or anything. I guess that shows how cut off the Treasury Department was from the activities of the Secret Service. Also, the book doesn't mention it, but Truman dismissed Baughman's predecessor James J. Maloney in part because he had dispatched most of Truman's Secret Service detail to New York to prepare to guard New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey. Dewey was widely expected to be elected president but was beaten by Truman in one of the greatest upsets in presidential election history.

23/8/6 20 Years in the Secret Service: My Life with Five Presidents by Rufus W. Youngblood ★★★★
23/4/19 The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War by James David Robenalt ★★

Basically a discussion and contextualization of the love letters President Harding sent to one of his mistresses from 1905-1920. While it seems intriguing, there's not much to see; this book needn't have existed. The letters are fairly pedestrian and apart from a few unsent drafts, we don't have the ones she wrote, so it's not a dialog. One of the worst presidents, he is not much of a letter writer either. There is really little here different than one would imagine.

The spy story is far shorter and smaller, almost a nothing, and only connected rather tenuously to the main plot.

The author espouses some pretty "out there" opinions, praising Harding more than once as a president and politician, though offering little supporting evidence. The accomplishments cited were done by his cabinet members - he had little to do with enacting them. There are plenty of examples of his bad ideas, such as proposing that the US make the president a dictator, which somehow are just mentioned and passed over. We don't read much here of Harding the politician anyway - mostly it's his carefree, playboy life of drinking, smoking, golfing, cardplaying and taking expensive trips - once to Hawaii on the government dime, no less. Otherwise it was on money earned from his newspaper, which failed until he married his wife (who got things into shape while he was suffering from depression in the sanatorium) such that the third newspaper in town became the first. She in fact seems the much more interesting character and one would do better to read a book on her, but here we find little, not even the cause of a long illness, an odd omission.

Another topic the author gets completely wrong is akin to the way most biographers used to write about President Jefferson and Sarah Hemings. The author is strongly skeptical of Harding's affair with Nan Britton - which overlapped this period - but after the book came out DNA tests proved that Harding was indeed the father of Britton's child.

On a smaller note, there is bashing of The New York Times for, in 1917, "misspelling" the name "Lenin" as "Lenine". The author seems unaware that Russian is written in a different alphabet and there are often different ways of transliterating names. Even these days we see different spellings of Zelenskyy/Zelenskiy, for example. This happens even more with Arabic names. Qaddafi/Khadafy had many more spellings. It's too bad that the English-speaking world did not standardize on "Lenine". Maybe then we would pronounce more correctly names like Lenin, Stalin and Putin.

Finally, the book's structure was very irritating because it uses the parallel tracks gimmick. First there is a chapter of the spy story, then the Harding story, then the spy story, then back to Harding, and so on, for a long time. I hate books that do this because just as you are getting into one story, you get violently ripped out of it and put into a different one. It's like relaxing into a dream and continually being re-awakened. So I fixed this by just reading Harding's story and skipping all the spy story chapters until they merged just after page 300. After that I went back and read all the spy story chapters, which worked perfect well.

22/5/9 The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space by Craig Ryan ★★★★★

Signed by the author and kindly gifted by a friend. First impression is of the brilliant use of language. Not surprised to learn Craig was an English major. Second observation is that a lot of techniques are used to make the subject as interesting as possible. For example, the story is not told linearly, but jumping around, Pulp Fiction style.
The wartime and postwar period in America is interesting in terms of all the innovation that was going on, not just with the nuclear bombs, but in other areas as well, the astronauts, rockets, speed barriers and biological studies. What a great time to be a scientist or engineer.
It's interesting too to discover that while their 1960s space race is famous, the US and USSR were competing over it as early as 1933, in the form of seeing who could send a man to the highest altitude in a balloon, which sometimes resulted in death and disaster. The military were funding this competition Jas well. There was even a Russian aeronaut named Prokofiev.
There was a huge competition to see whose balloon could reach the highest altitude. There was even an attempt in Poland. Unfortunately, it was 1939 and the Nazi invasion caused a scrub of the launch. The project had secured 225K of precious US helium (which, unlike hydrogen, cannot be generated) for the attempt, approved by the Secretary of State. Unfortunately, to prevent it being seized by the Nazis, all of it was released to the atmosphere.
Interesting to realize that what is normally the freezing point for water becomes at 112K feet the boiling point.
Also interesting that parachute jumping was such a major sport in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. They even built high outdoor staircases and let little kids drop. I guess it's a relatively cheap form of entertainment. Gravity does most of the work and the parachutes are re-usable.
Readers should skip over chapter 7 as it completely deflates the excitement of chapter 6, and even worse, you might forget what 6 was all about. After 6, go right to 8 and proceed to 9. Only after 9 come back to 7.
It's disappointing that many of the lessons learned by the pre-astronauts were not followed by NASA. For example, a capsule's air should not be 100% oxygen because it makes fires far worse. NASA learned that the hard way. Another one that they have yet to learn is to supply shuttle astronauts with parachutes in case of problems of takeoff. Had they done this, the people in the Challenger disaster might have lived. It's a chilling thought that they were most likely still alive when they hit the water.

21/4/16 The Paris Wife by Paula McLain ★★★
21/3/4 The Guest List: How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication---from the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote's Ball by Ethan Mordden ★★★
20/10/21 The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War by Ben Macintyre ★★★★
19/12/24 Woodrow Wilson by H. W. Brands ★★★
19/9/25 Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission by Bret Baier ★★★
18/3/22 First Women: The Grace and Power of America's Modern First Ladies by Kate Andersen Brower ★★★★
17/7/12 All the Presidents' Bankers: the Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power by Nomi Prins ★★★
16/3/18 Enduring Courage: Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the Dawn of the Age of Speed by John F. Ross ★★★★
15/11/2 Reilly of the White House by Michael F. Reilly ★★★★★
15/9/22 Starling of the White House: the story of the man whose Secret service detail guarded five presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin D. Roosevelt / as told to Thomas Sugrue by Colonel Edmund W. Starling ★★★★★
15/4/30 White House Diary by Jimmy Carter ★★★★
14/11/9 The First Family Detail by Ronald Kessler ★★★★★
14/10/21 History of American Presidential Elections 1789-1968, volume 3 edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, jr. ★★★★★
14/4/19 Marvel Comics: the untold story by Sean Howe ★★★★+

Excellent research and impressive thoroughness. Difficult to put down. Would have liked to see more about the early TV versions, both live and animated. Also misses that we were discussing this world on USENET already in the mid-1980s.

13/9/17 Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy by Mimi Alford ★★★
13/9/6 My 21 Years in the White House by Alonzo Fields ★★★★
13/8/27 The Butler by Wil Haygood ★★★★
13/6/25 Mrs. Kennedy and Me by Clint Hill ★★★★
13/6/14 The White House Doctor by Connie Mariano ★★★★★
12/2/19 The 1906 Eartquake in Mountain View by Barbar McPherson Kinchen ★★★★
11/6/13 From the Door of the White House by Preston Bruce ★★★★★
11/4/22 My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy by Mary Barelli Gallagher ★★★★
10/12/22 For all the tea in China by Sarah Rose ★★★★
09/6/17 "Theodore Roosevelt: American Sissy" by Gore Vidal ★★★★
09/4/15 My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House by Lillian Rogers Parks ★★★★★
09/4/4 Secrets of the White House by Elizabeth Jaffray ★★★
09/3/27 Kennedy and Nixon by Chris Matthews ★★★★
09/3/5 The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil by Lillian Rogers Parks ★★★★★
09/3/2 Backstairs at the White House by Gwen Bagni and Paul Dubov ★★★★★
09/2/13 Forty-Two years in the White House by Irwin Hood (Ike) Hoover ★★★★★
08/04/15 Charlie Wilson's War by George Crile ★★
07/11/6 Dwight D. Eisenhower by Tom Wicker ★★★★★
07/08/14 Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series by David Pietrusza ★★★★★
07/05/09 The Rehnquist Choice by John Dean ★★★★★
06/1/26 Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin by Marion Meade ★★★★★

21ST CENTURY USA
19/7/17 The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes ★★
13/3/14 The Obamas by Jodi Kantor ★★★+
13/2/26 Inside the White House by Ronald Kessler ★★★★

CARIBBEAN
08/11/05 Empire of blue water: Captain Morgan's great pirate army, the epic battle for the Americas, and the Catas by Stephan Talty ★★★★

SOUTH AMERICA
09/5/20 The Incas: inside an American empire by Terence N. D'Altroy ★★★

BIOGRAPHY

WRITERS
22/8/31 How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel by Alain de Botton ★★★
22/7/21 Disturbing the Peace by Václav Havel ★★★★
22/2/10 Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s by Philippe Garnier ★★★★

Has an offhand style that takes some getting used to.
For a book about writers, one would think it would take better care in terms of spelling. For example, p. 44 has "In 1934, an incident occured [sic], inoccuous [sic] in itself, but which would soon have momentous consequences for the nightlife along the boulevard ..." -- two misspellings in a row!
I think in a sense I'm not advanced enough to read this book, as it is about secondary writers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. I would prefer to exhaust learning about the important writers first, even if these are probably the more colorful characters, including as they do, prison inmates, women who slept their way into the job and even members of the Romanoff family.
Has chapters that are off-topic, that is, not about any particular writer. Here's one about a Hollywood bookstore. Another is about a short story magazine. A third about the behind the scenes of a never-made movie about Huey Long, and about I Am the Fugitive of a Chain Gang. Inspired by Moby Dick, maybe.
Wow, two great stories from Niven Busch on the same page. One that explains what the process of spitballing actually was, the other about what it was like pitching a story to the legendary Irving Thalberg. So entertaining as well as revealing of what those folks were like.
The other best chapter is the generic one toward the end on what it was to write at Warner Brothers, including a very good story by, again, Niven Busch.
The book unfortunately lacks an index.

20/7/6 Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin ★★★★★
19/8/9 Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography by Eric Idle ★★★★★
17/2/6 Jack London: An American Life by Earle Labor ★★★
16/8/24 Tennessee Williams: mad pilgrimage of the flesh by John Lahr ★★★★★
15/11/29 In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master by Tim Teeman ★★★★
15/11/15 Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini ★★★★★
15/9/24 The real Wizard of Oz: the life and times of L. Frank Baum by Rebecca Loncraine. ★★★★★
15/5/18 Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 ★
14/9/30 The Love Boat Lady by Sheila Farrell Murray ★★★★
13/7/29 Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind "Star Trek" by Joel Lerner ★★★★★
12/6/21 Life Itself by Roger Ebert ★★★★★
12/2/14 The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom by Simon Winchester★★
11/12/13 The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua ★★

The writer either doesn't know what she wants to do (apart from ambition) or how to do it, or both. Dare it be suggested that this is probably a result of the very uncreative, rote drilling education that the book itself espouses?

10/5/25 Duchess of Death: The Biography of Agatha Christie by Richard Hack ★★★★
09/5/13 Jane Austen by Carol Shields ★★★★
09/1/20 The Mural at the Waverley Inn by Edward Sorel ★★★★★
08/09/27 Bard of the Middle Ages: the works of Geoffrey Chaucer by Michael D.C. Drout ★★★★★
08/07/09 Shakespeare: the Biography by Peter Ackroyd ★★★★
08/03/01 Palimpsest by Gore Vidal ★★★★★
08/02/22 Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal ★★★★★
08/01/6 A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut ★★★★
07/10/01 The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams ★★★★
07/07/09 How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen ★★★
06/12/15 Literary Lives by Edward Sorel ★★★★★
06/8/2 Marcel Proust - abridged by Edmund White ★★★★
06/5/3 Practicing History by Barbara W. Tuchman ★★★★
05/11/04 Shakespeare by Michael Wood ★★★★
05/10/15 The Life and Work of Mark Twain by Stephen Railton ★★★★★
05/10/11 Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt ★★★★★
05/8/02 H.G. Wells in Love by H.G. Wells ★★★★★
04/7/11 The Algonquin Wits by Robert E. Drennan ★★★★★
04/5/03 Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s by Pat McGilligan ★★★★★
04/4/19 Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1950s by Pat McGilligan ★★★★★
04/4/06 Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age by Pat McGilligan ★★★★★
01/12/16 Sir Vidia's Shadow by Paul Theroux ★★★★★
Robert Graves: The White Goddess by Richard Perceval Graves ★★★★★
Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic by Richard Perceval Graves ★★★★★
Robert Graves: The Years with Laura Riding by Richard Perceval Graves ★★★★★

ACTORS/DIRECTORS/PRODUCERS
24/3/4 Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood by Karina Longworth ★★★

The list of actresses covered: Bille Dove, Jean Harlow, Ida Lupino, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Jane Russell, Ava Gardner, Faith Domergue, Jean Peters, Terry Moore, Bette Davis, Yvonne De Carlo, Lana Turner, Linda Darnell, Gina Lollobrigida, Ann Dvorak.

The writing style could be better. I notice from the book jacket that the author started as a podcaster and this is likely the reason. A podcaster has a number of tools a book does not, such as the use of music, tone for emphasis, and other tricks. So it's not enough to just move some podcast text to a book. One needs to adapt to the medium. But at least it seems to get better after the first couple hundred pages.

In particular, introducing characters is consistently handled poorly. A character's name will be dropped casually in the middle of a long sentence. Many of these names we will never see again so they're not worth paying attention to, but then again, some others will get referenced, this time only by their last names, and the reader is mystified. "Who is this all of a sudden?" Then one has to go back and scan to find where the name was introduced.

Then too, there are occasional run-on sentences that really should have been broken up, but probably, since they supposedly worked in the podcast, any editor who tried to do so was probably overruled.

The book doesn't know how to handle a long quote, which is to put it into its own indented text block at a slightly smaller text size.

The story is more Dionysian than Apollonian. The advertised feminist slant isn't particularly evident. It's really more a collection of gossip and anecdotage.

On the plus side, there is a lot of detailed research, probably entirely second source, meaning you might well have read parts of it before. Of course, it's always difficult with research to discern its quality - if something is missing it's easy not to know - but at least there is a lot of it.

If you're looking for a biography of Hughes, or of his studio, RKO, this is not really it. It touches on a lot of the aspects, but a lot is omitted.

For an example of the kind of writing I disliked, see page 180:

Rogers and Stevens fell in love on the set of Swing Time, and carried on a relationship for three years – three years that encompassed Hughes's romance with Hepburn, and fell roughly into the midpoint of Stevens's seventeen-year marriage to former silent star Yvonne Howell. And then, in 1939, after his flight around the world and the fizzling of his love affair with Bette Davis, Howard came back into Ginger's life with a vengeance.

This last sentence that begins "And then" should never have been structured thta way. Four different people have been referenced in the paragraph already and now it starts with a very long introduction during which it's hard to know for a long time who is being discussed. It should have been "In 1939, Hughes, following his flight around the world and the fizzling of his love affair with Bette Davis, came back into Ginger's life with a vengeance." That would have been an effective segue from sentence to sentence and read much more smoothly. If a text does this just very rarely it's okay, but this author does such things quite frequently.

24/2/4 Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today by Valerie Bertinelli ★★
24/1/16 Losing It by Valerie Bertinelli ★★★
23/3/14 You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood's Golden Age by Robert J. Wagner & Scott Eyman ★★★★★
22/11/10 The Big Love by Florence Aadland ★★★★
21/11/15 Cinema '62: The Greatest Year at the Movies by Stephen Farber, Michael McClellan ★★★★
21/10/31 20th Century-Fox: The Complete History of Hollywood's Maverick Studio by Scott Eyman ★★★★★

It's great to have this book, the counterpart to the author's great book on MGM. Not as thick or in-depth, but still includes a lot of great stories and characterizations. Could have used stronger editing as some stories begin, break off and only continue much later. That, lack of section titles and an indifferent index make it a bit tricky to look things up again later. Kind of like listening to a forgetful old man tell his life story, always interesting, but strangely disconnected at times. It did add several films to my to-watch list. Apparently I regard the film Unfaithfully Yours more highly than the author does.

21/2/18 Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage by Robert S. Bader ★★★★★
20/12/16 The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies by Ethan Mordden ★★★★★
19/10/13 Full Service by Scotty Bowers ★★★
19/8/26 Watch Me by Anjelica Huston ★★★★
19/7/10 A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York by Anjelica Huston ★★★★★
18/10/24 Maggie Smith: A Biography by Michael Coveney ★★★★★
18/10/3 Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham ★★★★+
18/5/7 I'm Fine... and Other Lies by Whitney Cummings ★★
17/8/2 Mary Astor's Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel ★★★★★
16/12/9 My Days With Errol Flynn: The Autobiography of Stuntman Buster Wiles ★★★★
16/12/2 Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince by Budd Schulberg ★★★★★
15/9/27 I Don't Know What You Know Me From by Judy Greer ★
15/9/9 Handbook for an Unpredictable Life by Rosie Perez ★★★★
15/7/5 Charlie Chaplin: A Brief Life by Peter Ackroyd ★★★★★
14/6/11 This is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life by Gavin McLeod ★★★
14/5/27 Let's just say it wasn't pretty by Diane Keaton ★★
14/5/6 The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney ★★★★
14/5/1 The cinema of Preston Sturges: a critical study by Alessandro Pirolini ★★★★
13/8/30 Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner ★★★★
13/8/25 To the Stars by George Takei ★★★+
13/8/19 Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman ★★★★★
13/8/14 The Longest Trek: My Tour of the Galaxy by Grace Lee Whitney and Jim Denney ★★★★★
11/10/4 BossyPants by Tina Fey ★
10/9/1 Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood by George Custen ★★★★
10/4/9 American on Purpose by Craig Ferguson ★★★★★
09/12/20 Thalberg: The Last Tycoon and the World of M-G-M by Roland Flamini ★★★★★
09/11/21 Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer by Scott Eyman ★★★★★
09/2/3 Tea at Five (Katharine Hepburn) by Matthew Lombardo ★★★★
08/12/6 Me by Katherine Hepburn ★★★★
08/10/05 Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself by Alan Alda ★★
08/05/31 I'm the One That I Want by Margaret Cho ★★★★
07/12/10 The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans ★★★★★
07/02/27 Never Have Your Dog Stuffed - abridged by Alan Alda ★★★★★
07/02/20 Nothing's Sacred by Lewis Black ★★★★★
07/01/23 Kiss Me Like a Stranger by Gene Wilder ★★★★★
06/9/5 Gasping for Airtime by Jay Mohr ★★★★★
06/8/24 Seriously Funny by Gerald Nachman ★★★★★
06/8/16 The Life and Work of Errol Flynn: A Psychoanalytic Biography by B. Dramov ★★★
06/8/11 Errol Flynn: a memoir by Earl Conrad ★★★★
06/8/10 Inherited risk : Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam by Jeffrey Meyers ★★★
06/7/26 What's It All About? - abridged by Michael Caine ★★★★
06/7/20 The Unruly Life of Woody Allen by Marion Meade ★★★★★
06/5/17 Goldwyn - abridged by Scott Berg ★★★★★
06/4/19 Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales & James Andrew Miller ★★★★★
05/12/14 Kate Remembered by A. Scott Berg ★★★
05/11/02 My Life So Far - abridged by Jane Fonda ★★★★
05/9/15 James Ivory in Conversation by Robert Emmet Long ★★★★★
04/6/26 The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje ★★★★★
04/6/15 Christmas in July: the Life and Art of Preston Sturges by Diane Jacobs ★★★★★
04/5/30 Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges by James Harvey ★★★★★
04/5/14 Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges by James Curtis ★★★★★
04/5/08 Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges ★★★★★
03/09/01 My Life with Groucho by Arthur Marx ★★★★★
03/08/28 Groucho: The life and times of Julius Henry Marx by Stefan Kafner ★★★★★
02/12/21 Harpo Speaks! by Harpo Marx and Rowland Barber ★★★★★
02/04/28 The Ancient World in the Cinema by Jon Solomon ★★★★

OTHER
23/2/1 "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman ★★★★

The great thing about this one is that he goes into the details of his investigations of the Challenger disaster as part of the government commission, though he writes in such a way that the reader needs a fair bit of contextual awareness to understand it all.

There's also an account of his second visit to Japan. In his first book I noticed that he stayed at a traditional inn in Japan, but he avoided discussing a certain matter that I had wondered about, and I assumed would never know the answer. But no, in this one he came back and answered it. I had been wondering, when he stayed at a ryokan, did he choose one of the ones that had the modern, Western toilets, or did he go traditional with that as well, which basically means squatting over a hole? Turns he he was fine with the tradition! When in Japan I was also presented with this choice and stayed with the modern model. I like tradition, but there are limits.

23/1/27 "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman ★★★★★

I feel silly for having avoided this book for so long when it was recommended strongly to me back in the day. I guess I thought it was too much about physics - there's no more physics in it than in The Big Bang Theory - and it was being hyped up by too many people. But I was missing out on the funny adventures of a very smart, but humble, man. This book catches fire a slowly, but grows to become a work you simply cannot put down. It's too bad that I didn't know these stories as I could have been retelling them many times over the years, and probably would have re-read the book by now as well.

By the way, my experience in Japan was quite similar to his. I went for work and first stayed at an odd thing called an industrial hotel where there were offices and a restaurant downstairs with sleeping rooms upstairs. Then I wanted to see sights so they put me in the very fancy Akasaka Prince Hotel in Tokyo, but it didn't feel authentically Japanese, so for Kyoto I asked them to put me in a traditional hotel (ryokan) with no furniture, just tatami mats, the Japanese bath, meals brought in to eat on the floor and so on. Funny to read that Feynman did the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that at least two things from this book made their way into The Big Bang Theory, because when you're writing for a character like Sheldon it must be difficult to come up with plausible storylines. It seems likely that when he goes into the sensory deprivation tank and that he plays bongos was inspired by Feynman.

19/10/23 The woman who smashed codes: a true story of love, spies, and the unlikely heroine who outwitted America's enemies by Jason Fagone ★★
18/9/24 Tesla: Inventor of the Modern by Richard Munson ★★★★
17/8/30 Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams by Louisa Thomas ★★★
13/12/13 Barbara Walters: An Unauthorized Biography by Jerry Oppenheimer ★★★★★
12/10/2 Gallo Be Thy Name by Jerome Tuccille ★★★★

CLASSIC

24/4/20 The Stranger by Albert Camus, Matthew Ward (Translator) ★★★★

This short novel is working at several themes. It is philosophical because the narrator is an Existentialist. It discusses inequities in the justice system. It touches on colonialism and racism with respect to the "Arabs", who probably ought to be called Muslims in this case, as the local people were Moors or Berbers for the most part, the Arab conquerors being only a light overlay on the general population. It discusses also, I think, the problems in inherent in profiling, probably before the word was even invented. Appearing in the 1940s, it reflects a society on the cusp of change, where the people are mentally further advanced than the medieval systems under which they are forced to exist. But the author's main goal, I think, was to examine how an atheist/Existentialist would respond to a death sentence. To not tip the reader's views too far in sympathy or opposition, he cleverly makes guilt or innocence very difficult to judge securely. Then the narrator meets a chaplain and the most important scene plays out. The argument seems to be something along the lines of "before you were born you were in a certain state, then you lived for a while and finally you will return to that original state – is this anything to fear?". Although this was made into a film, it did not do very well, probably because it's difficult to adept an internal monolog, but probably also because a lot of us will be turned off by the Existentialist approach. Although the author is probably rightly thought to be an INFP, the main character seems more like a classic INTP.

22/5/22 The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Kristina Gehrmann ★★★★
22/5/1 "The Immortal Story" by Isak Dinesen ★★★★
20/7/14 The Betrothed: I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni ★★★

Read because I saw the film of the story made by Orson Welles and wanted to clear up a few points that were left vague in the film.
Welles was a huge fan of Dinesen and at one point traveled to Copenhagen to meet her. However, at that point the audacious Welles, he who had created War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, and The Magnificent Ambersons, became a total fanboy and was unable to actually seek her out. He spent three days in a hotel room writing her a long letter of introduction, but in the end gave up and never met her.
Turns out the film is quite faithful to the story, but adds on an implied scene for Welles at the end as well as a dubious decision on the part of the sailor character.
I suspect the author's real purpose here is to claim that this story never happened, for if it did, the sailor involved would never retell it.

20/7/14 The Betrothed: I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni ★★★
20/7/8 The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (Translated by John Payne; edited by Charles Singleton) ★★★★★
20/3/19 Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwell ★★
17/11/21 Three men in a boat: (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K Jerome ★★★
14/11/1 Mythology by Edith Hamilton ★★★★★
12/9/17 Italian Stories by Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Pirandello, D'Annunzio et al., edited by Robert A. Hall ★★★
08/06/04 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen ★★★★★
08/03/07 Sanditon: Jane Austen's Last Novel Completed by Jane Austen and Another Lady ★★★★★
08/02/24 The �1,000,000 Bank-Note by Mark Twain ★★★★
08/02/14 The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain ★★★★
07/10/02 "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" by William Saroyan ★★★★
07/09/26 "Tracy's Tiger" by William Saroyan ★★★★
06/12/21 The Odyssey by Homer ★★★★★
05/1/11 Emma by Jane Austen ★★★★★
04/11/28 Persuasion by Jane Austen ★★★★★
03/12/12 Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen ★★★★★
03/03/14 Lysistrata by Aristophanes ★★★★★
03/02/02 Family Happiness by Lyof N. Tolstoï (Leo Graf Tolstoy) ★★★★★
02/11/20 Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen ★★★★★
02/04/06 Life on the Mississippi by Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) ★★★★★
undated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by "The Pearl Poet" ★★★★★

I take this as a story of the entertainer speaking Truth to Power. Gawain is far too eager to (he thinks) take a life, as probably were most of the powerful knights hearing this story. The moment he discovers his life is in danger instead must have been a harrowing time for the knights. Then too is discussed the topic of taking advantage of women. Even if all turns out all right in the end (probably necessary to permit the story to be re-told) that harrowing feeling must have lingered and given pause.

GENERAL 23/3/27 Orient Express by Graham Greene ★★★+
23/3/6 The Quiet American by Graham Greene ★★★★★
22/7/22 The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser ★★★
22/3/25 Mayan Folktales: Folklore from Lake Atitlán, Guatemala by James D. Sexton (Editor) ★★★

The only really enjoyable story is about a priest who came to lunch. Briefly summarized, a couple who never celebrate their common birthday decided one day to nevertheless do it, if only once. However, they are so odious that the only person who agrees to attend their party is a priest, looking forward to a free lunch. On the day the man goes out to get things for the party and during this time the wife roasts two ducks in a pan and engages in a little adultery with a male friend of hers. While the couple are in the bedroom, the dog smells the ducks, grabs one and eats it. The man emerges from the bedroom first, sees the remaining duck, think it's for him, eats it and leaves. A little later the wife appears, finding the party lunch totally consumed. What to do? The husband returns home and she tells him that as they will need to carve the ducks, would he please go into the other room and sharpen the knife? While he is doing this the priest arrives. The wife tells the priest that the lunch invite was a lie. In reality her husband plans to cuts off the priest's testicles and kill him! Indeed, you can hear him sharpening his knife even now. The priest runs for his life. The husband, seeing this, asks, where did the priest go? The wife tells him the priest stole two roast ducks and he had better go get them back. The man runs out after him, still holding the knife. Come back, come back, he yells to the priest. I only want one!

22/1/6 Overload by Arthur Hailey ★★★

This is the story of Ardythe and Nimrod. I'm not kidding. These are two main character names that the author actually thought would be a good idea. Nice biblical references I guess, but who ever heard of Ardythe? And did he not know and did no editor tell him of the usage of nimrod in common parlance?

The novel has a character make a rather shocking suggestion I never heard before; that the second atomic bomb the US dropped on Japan was unnecessary to winning the war as Tojo was about to surrender, but that it was done anyway just so the scientists could find out if it would work. I have never seen such a suggestion before.

One problem here is that this doesn't really become a page turner until about page 260. That's an awful lot of setup to get through.

Another problem is that the novelist had a lot of axes to grind. He seems pretty clearly against Nixon going off the gold standard, against industrial regulation and also against activists/environmentalists. He also appeared to believe, in 1979, that the world was going to run out of oil in the next year.

He must not have thought much of daytime talk shows either. His description of the problems with them is so dead on that he must have experienced at least one himself.

You can learn a lot about the power industry in this book, but the as to the rest it's pretty meh. Of this, Hotel and The Moneychangers, the last still seems his best book.

17/3/25 The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald ★★★★+
16/9/3 Mozart's Journey to Prague by Eduard Mörike ★★★
12/3/27 Those Daring Young Men in their Jaunty Jalopies: Monte Carlo or Bust by Jack Davies, Ken Annikin, Allen Andrews and Ronald Searle ★★
11/1/18 Sungka and Smiling Irish Eyes by Natalie Gonzales-Sullaway ★★★★★
10/12/31 Sideways by Rex Pickett ★★★★
10/9/27 The Southern Woman: "The Light in the Piazza" by Elizabeth Spencer ★★★★
08/10/25 Jamila by Chingiz Aitmatov ★★★★★
08/10/17 Aimez-vous Brahms? by Françoise Sagan ★★★★★
08/07/28 The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler ★★★★
08/05/01 Fork in the Road by Denis Hamill ★★★★
07/05/24 Tiger, Tiger by Lynne Reid Banks ★★★
04/6/14 "Strictly Dishonorable" by Preston Sturges ★★★★★
04/3/24 The Flower Drum Song by C.Y. Lee ★★★★
04/1/11 Chocolat by Joanne Harris ★★★★
03/06/01 Jungle Lovers by Paul Theroux ★★★★★
03/02/16 The Hours by Michael Cunningham ★★★★★
03/01/15 The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean ★★★★★
02/10/02 Hotel by Arthur Hailey ★★★
02/09/27 Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor ★★★
02/05/25 The Mystic Masseur by V.S. Naipaul ★★★
02/04/14 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen ★★★
02/01/07 Vox by Nicholson Baker ★★★
01/12/28 Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux ★★★★★
01/12/20 Saint Jack by Paul Theroux ★★★★★
01/08/25 World of Wonders by Robertson Davies ★★★★★
01/08/17 The Manticore by Robertson Davies ★★★★★
01/08/03 Fifth Business by Robertson Davies ★★★★★
01/07/09 Burning Bright by John Steinbeck ★★★★
The Fermata by Nicholson Baker ★★★★★

DETECTIVE
24/8/19 Clue by Paul Allor ★★
23/6/12 The Pericles Commission by Gary Corby ★★★

This is an investigation into the death of Ephialtes, one of the democratic reformers of ancient Athens. He was a real person, but the crime has never been solved, though it is usually ascribed to aristocratic forces trying to stop the loss of their powers. He, as well as Pericles, Xanthippus, Callias and Conon are in the board game Athens: The Birth of Politics.

This is a great setting for a story and a great incident to base a case on. I only wish it had been better realized.

Maybe helped by my awareness of the history I guessed the culprit early on.

The book has a big problem with framing. To whom is the first person narrator writing? Athenian contemporaries? Then why describe many things that they would undoubtedly already know? Athenians of the future? Then why not give some words about why this information is being recorded. To everyone of the distant future? Same question.

Sure, part of the reason we read historical novels is to learn something of what life was like at a distant time and place, but this kind of information should dispensed artfully and organically, as part of the story. If it cannot be, put it into a glossary. But here the narrator keeps going into detailed explanations of things his contemporaries would certainly know. Plus, there's a redundant glossary at the back for the same terms all over again! There's far too much indication of the oil lamp here. Yes, author, we see that you studied all night to learn lots of things, but it should not be spoon fed to us like this. It really ruins the credibility of the story.

Another issue is that the narrator has been hired as a paid detective. As there was no such concept, surely some characters should make some commentary about its novelty.

One problem that keeps coming up in murder mysteries where the victim is a beloved figure is that they never really come to terms with the deep sadness and sense of loss inherent in the situation. Authors of the older era kind of dealt with this by making the victim a thoroughly unlikeable person, but that certainly is not the case here, and it makes parts of the book, particularly the funeral, read very oddly.

It also strangely uses Latinized versions of names sometimes, for example, calling Socrates' father Sophroniscus, whereas in Greek he would have called him Sophroniskos. Xanthippus should be Xanthippos. And so on. If the idea is to each about the Greeks, why not use the Greek forms?

At this point in history - 461 BCE - there was no history of professional detectives and all the techniques such as footprints and the like that they use. These things had to be invented, but here the detective tends to just automatically using them as if everyone knows all about them.

There are some dialog problems. For example, this young detective speaks to cheracters like Xanthippus, a major general and hero of Athens, and Conon, the leading archon, as if the two are equals. Really strains credibility.

There are some historical errors as well:

Implies incorrectly that an ostracism vote was regularly held once a year.

Suggests that the Polemarch, formerly the top general, was in this period in charge of all matters related to metics. This appears made up of whole cloth.

The character walks between the Long Walls, but at this point the Long Walls were only beginning to be constructed.

Even more importantly, the Peloponnesian War in which Sparta attacked Athens had begun and must have been on the minds of every single person in Athens and yet the book never even mentions it.

23/4/3 The Return of the Pharaoh: From the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.

** spoiler alert **
• We're to accept that a 65-year old Holmes can scale a 7-story building exterior?
• And he and Watson can crawl up and down a long sloping passage?
• The identities of Holmes and Watson are under question. The person does not believe Holmes is Holmes, so Holmes tells him "this is Watson - he can vouch for me". Watson does, and the guy believes them? It's a circular reference. Why doesn't he rather conclude that the two are in it together?
• The writing is so crufty, clogged with all this unnecessary stuff, and an apparent desire to employ exotic words like "antimassacar".
• But even worse, let's say that's the way Watson writes. But within the story, characters tell stories of things that happened to them, including Holmes, and even Holmes tells stories in that same way. Wouldn't Holmes tell a story in a much more brusque and efficient way?
• Suggests that Akhkenaten & co. suffered from Marfan's syndrome, but DNA tests have found this is not the case.

While the book is pretty slow at first, after page 100 or so it picks up quite a bit and includes some rather good scenes on a train and at the pyramids.

23/2/5 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hercule Poirot, #3) by Agatha Christie ★★★★
22/2/28 Death in Little Tokyo by Dale Furutani ★★★★

Received this book as a promotional giveaway at Bouchercon and so wasn't expecting too much, despite its Agatha Award nomination. It's been a long time, but I believe I heard the author speak there and remember him as mostly funny, in a hammy/cheesy sort of way. It also doesn't inspire confidence that this is the first book in a series that ended up being only two.
First impression is this is designed for mystery nerds. It begins with a murder mystery puzzle party and makes plenty of references to classic detective novels. The adventure launches when someone misinterprets a fake setup for a party as an actual detective office and tries to hire the narrator as a detective. So this plays into a fan fantasy in which the reader gets to imagine themselves accidentally falling into a job as a detective. This may explain how the book got award nominations and at the same time was not that generally popular; it may be a niche work for uber-mystery fans. It's also a problem to keep repeating the idea since it's both improbable that such a sequence would keep recurring as well as impossible for the narrator to continue being a complete newbie.
Once started, the storyline is pretty good at pulling you in, telling not just a detective tale, but also touching on racism, alcholism, economic issues, relocation camps, Japanese culture and even LA civic planning. Things are on a knife edge most of the time, which keeps you reading quickly. If, however, you pause to think about it, you tend to be able to predict how things will turn out, or notice implausibilities.

21/11/25 The Mystery of the Green Ghost ★★★★

This particular entry in the series did a couple of different things. One ways to give the boys an advantage over the adults via use of mine passages so small that only a boy could traverse them. Another is that there is an unexpected dive into Chinese culture, though somewhat cliched.
A funny thing can happen when you re-read an adventure you first read as a kid. Back then you have had little experience of life so such a book is just rollicking fun. But once you have lived a little, certain situations like being in a pitch black mine or running into nasty people can be all too real, so the story actually becomes scarier as an adult.
It's also fun to note some of the things that wouldn't work if the novel were published today:
- The parents of the boys would in no way let some stranger fly them from LA to the wine country.
- People today wouldn't get a reference like "size of a water barrel".
- A book today wouldn't go out of its way to specify that some grape pickers are Mexican when it's of absolutely no importance to the story.
The other thing is that it's now a lot easier to tell who the culprit is.

21/8/8 With a Gemlike Flame: A Novel of Venice and a Lost Masterpiece by David Adams Cleveland ★★★★
21/7/11 "The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols: Adapted from the Journals of John H. Watson, M.D. by Nicholas Meyer ★★★★
19/9/18 The Jefferson Key by Steve Berry ★★★
18/8/15 The Gods Help Those by Albert A. Bell Jr. ★★
18/3/16 The Throne of Caesar by Steven Saylor ★★★
17/5/3 The Year of Confusion by John Maddox Roberts ★★+
17/4/23 Oracle of the Dead by John Maddox Roberts ★★+
16/3/25 Wrath of the Furies by Steven Saylor ★★+
15/8/17 The Eyes of Aurora by Albert A. Bell Jr. ★★★★
14/6/28 Raiders of the Nile by Steven Saylor ★★★
13/8/15 The Roman Games by Bruce Macbain ★★★+
13/7/23 All Roads Lead to Murder by Albert A. Bell Jr. ★★★★
13/4/22 Under Vesuvius by John Maddox Roberts ★★+
13/2/20 A Point of Law by John Maddox Roberts ★★★+
13/2/6 The Princess and the Pirates by John Maddox Roberts ★★★+
13/1/7 The River God's Vengeance by John Maddox Roberts ★★+
12/10/12 Pompeii by Robert Harris ★★★★
12/9/12 The Seven Wonders by Steven Saylor ★★★★
12/3/19 All Roads Lead to Murder by Albert A. Bell Jr. ★★★★
11/12/10 "Beware the Snake" by John Maddox Roberts ★★★★★
11/12/9 "Styx and Stones" by Steven Saylor ★★★
11/8/17 The Blood of Caesar by Albert Bell ★★★★
11/4/29 "The Lost Special" by Arthur Conan Doyle ★★★
10/6/14 The Map Thief by Heather Terrell ★★★★ review
09/8/26 "The Girl with the Silver Eyes" by Dashiell Hammett ★★★★★
08/11/25 "The Problem of the Black Cloister" by Edward D. Hoch ★★★★
08/11/25 "Locked in Death" by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer ★★★★

HISTORICAL
24/11/11 The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet by Colleen McCullough ★★★
24/7/20 Eve in Hollywood by Amor Towles ★★★+

Cannot decide between historical fiction and a caper, and in the end succeeds in doing a mediocre job at both.

24/3/23 Rules of Civility by Amor Towles ★★★+
24/2/8 Chengli and the Silk Road Caravan by Hildi Kang ★★★★

Somewhat disappointingly, the author turns out to have begun life as Hildegarde Smith and later married a Korean gentleman, and so is not an Asian herself. But she wrote a fun adventure set in the Tang Dynasty period, even if somethings seem a bit unbelievable.

22/11/7 The Etruscan by Mika Waltari ★★★★★

This is a good, old-fashioned rollicking picaresque of the ancient world, but also considerably ahead of its time (1956).
The character is actually a kind of divinity, without realizing it and sometimes surprises himself with things he never imagined he could do. Exactly what kind and when he will realize it becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse game that entertains the reader, as well as feeling quite a modern idea.
This Finnish author, who also wrote The Egyptian, which became a major motion picture starring Victor Mature, appears to have done his homework in ancient studies and chose probably the best of all times in which to set his story because the Persians, Greeks, Carthage, Etruscans and Romans were all quite active during the 5th century BCE and the character encounters them all.
The book is often comedic as well as dramatic and adventurous. A lot comes out of the character's relationship with his wife, a rather extreme character. It also uses a phrase that sounds very modern, but surprisingly must be considerably older: "moment of clarity".
He also includes easter eggs, for example, in the mysterious name of one of the characters, which turns out to mean "to vomit" in Arabic. As the character is an endless talker and liar, it's funny for the reader who can figure it out. Today it's easy to use the Internet to do so, but back when the book came out it must have been nearly impossible as he does not even state the language that the name comes from.
In general I was strongly reminded of the ancient setting works of L. Sprague de Camp (An Elephant for Aristotle), Gore Vidal (Creation) and Tom Holt (Goat Song, The Walled Orchard).
I did notice an error. After the protagonist returns from his first trip to Etruria, there is a character present who died chapters earlier. I suppose this is an artifact of a late change in the manuscript.
The end of this book is something special. Because we have followed this man's entire life story and because of what happens and the way the author words it, it is exactly like that moment when one awakens from a dream, being half still in the dream and half returning to normal existence and yet feeling a sudden awareness of things beyond normal knowledge, as the author says, a moment of clarity. I don't think this could be achieved by reading again the last page, but only by consuming the entire book once again. It's certainly a very special feeling.
My history with this book: Around twenty years ago I visited Ashland, Oregon to see plays. During the day I wandered through some used bookstores. I bought this one for a friend. A short time later, she returned it to me and it has sat unread on a shelf all this time. What a shame that I had no idea such an interesting story all this time lay within.

22/5/28 An Elephant for Aristotle by L. Sprague de Camp ★★★★★

There's always something appealing about a travel story, especially when summer beckons.
Before you read, you should know that unlike with most novels, at the end there is a substantial postscript that tells everything you need to know about weights, measures, placenames and the like. Read this first.
The research in this book is quite good, especially for its era. It's not just making things up, but describes actually geographical names and locations on the route from India to Athens. In fact, it's possible to follow them on Google maps, which is quite fun, though it's a shame that Google cannot provide routing information in some parts of Iran. It's only too bad that he incorrectly puts the Hanging Gardens in Babylon when they were almost certainly in Nineveh.
Even more interesting are the discussions the travelers have about the differing natures of Greeks, Persians, Indians and Judaeans, and their religions. They tend to be humorous as well.
Ancient Greeks could tell where others came from by their accents. Even this the talented author is able to represent. Characters who come from northern parts like Thessaly speak in a Scottish Burr. Athenians speak in BBC English. Ionians from the east sport a Cockney accent. Spartans and other southern Greeks use a southern drawl. The Babylonian he causes like Yoda to speak.
This is the kind of book that you finish wishing it would not end, but that the journey would go on and on and on.

21/12/2 World Without End by Ken Follett ★★★★

Compared to the other novels in the series, this one seems overwritten. There are too many characters and too much unnecessary text. For example, after a Prior dies, his brother goes to meet with the new prior without preliminaries, we're told, as usual, something he could do because of their brotherhood. At the end of the meeting, the new prior tells him not to do that anymore because they're not brothers and he should follow the procedure everyone else uses. The author should have gone back and deleted the earlier explanation because he has just showed it. There was no longer any need to tell it in advance.

Again, there is an editing problem. Writers should show, not tell. But with the matter of Godwyn and the nuns' money, this book does both. First, the character says what he is going to do, then he does it. It's as if the author thought of the idea and planned to implement it later, but instead decided to pursue it right away. Someone should have gone back and deleted the original telling.

I really grow tired of the constant scheming in this book, and the way that victims, that is, the heroes, so stupidly allow themselves to be schemed against.

Two nuns crossing the channel to follow the army is preposterous. Even if they find the bishop whom they want to adjudicate the dispute, how in the world is he supposed to do so with no facts at hand and only one side of the story to consider? Never would have happened.

The architecture stuff was very interesting, but now they're back to scheming again. And it's even the same scheme. *sigh*

The Caris character displays a surprisingly modern understanding of psychology at times.

The author must have a deep belief in nature over nurture. Over and over again people tend to be just like their male parent, even if raised by someone else.

Book club questions:
What messages does the book offer?

Did Ralph become a slightly better person by the end? Learning to deal with Philippa in a more mature fashion. Taking Sam under his wing. Agreeing to give Wulfric and then Davey land`.

Do Caris and Merthin grow as well? They figure out how to bargain for what they want such as closing Kingsbridge because of the plague and also getting someone besides Philemon made bishop. Instead of arguing, they seem to have learned to go and talk to people privately first and enlisting their support.

Did the book play fair wrt. the conflict between Gwenda and Annet? Annet claims that Gwenda had Wulfric all along, but did the author really show us this, or only tell us, at the end? Wasn't it possible Wulfric could leave Gwenda tomorrow?

Does the author put too much emphasis on DNA? Sam is like his father Ralph and Roland is like his father Merthin? Wulfric wanted Annet so Wulfric's son wanted Annet's daughter? Doesn't nurture count for anything? And if so, should we also conclude that Merthin and Ralph had two different fathers?

21/9/18 Dominus: A Novel of the Roman Empire by Steven Saylor ★★★

Notes as I go: Map: I have some issues. The area around the Crimea was a Roman client in this period. Not indicated. The indications for India and China (Serica) are up in the northeast heading for Parthia. Where they should really be is Egypt, heading for the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. That's how Romans got to those places.

Family tree: By this period in Roman history, many of the Romans, especially the aristocracy, had much more complicated names, which was the inevitable outgrowth of the way that the Romans recorded adoptions in their names, as well as adding honorifics. For example, the real name of Emperor Antoninus Pius was Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius. It would have been educational to show that in the names for this period. I hope the writer's ideas aren't stuck in the Republican era. It's also rather unlikely in these times that a family would produce a male heir who would survive to produce a male heir and so on, even into ten generations! There were so many problems such as infertility, early death, only birthing girls, and so on. This family tree is very improbable.

The idea that every time a Senator enters the chamber they must stop and honor the victory deity statue. So even if I go out to the toilet and come back in again,I once again have to stop and honor the deity. No, not buying it.

Good to see Galen, a real doctor and writer of ancient times, but the case he comes to solve is so boring and unbelievable. The family, particularly the mother, could not figure out the problem on their own?

Another anachronism. The Pinarius patriarch wears his toga to an event. By this time, even long before, most had abandoned their togas, except for official duties.

The main character is a working and in-demand sculptor. It would have been exceedingly unusual for a Senator from a very old family to do any real work, especially in an artistic way. How would they even get trained to do such things? It would have been far more realistic that his clients perform such activities, to his material benefit.

We meet the future emperor known as Commodus, as a child. He would not have been called Commodus at this age. His full name was Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus and would have been called Lucius.

The goings on related to the outbreak of the plague. Given the above doubts, now unsure how much to trust this version of it. What has really been reported and what is being made up. Very difficult to know for sure. The trust in the author has been broken. May be time to go back to nonfiction.

A character hides his head among the leaves of a fig tree. The author has maybe never picked figs. The leaves of that tree are extremely irratiating to the skin. The main symptoms are burning sensation and pain, itchy erythema, and edema. I don't believe anyone would ever do this willingly.

Finally the story becomes interesting as we explore the views of a Cynical philosopher, set side by side with a Christian, Justin Martyr.

Another of the emperor's sons has died and a character pronounces the last remaining one "priceless, invaluable". But that makes no sense. The last five emperors had all been adopted and the empire had never been better, proving that a genetic heir was in no way necessary.

I had hoped to read more about the Cynic and have a more in-depth discussion of Cynical philosophy, but it appears the character is gone for good.

It's tiring to constantly read about a gold bulla that is supposed to have magical properties. More time should be spent creating three-dimensional characters instead. Although the emperors are developed, the main characters, the ones telling the story, are blanks really.

Arriving at the rule of Commodus begets a fond wish that he will die as soon as possible.

Nice to see mention of Pertinax, one of my favorite little known emperors.

Alas the rule of Pertinax got about a paragraph and thne he was gone. There should have been an entire chapter/story about him. This book probably bites off too much history. As a consequence of going from Aurelius all the way to Constantine, it has to leave an awful lot on the cutting room floor.

The Antonine Plague that occurs near the beginning of this book wrought huge changes in the Roman economy. In particular, throughout the provinces smallhold farmers were unable to keep their properties, which were then acquired by wealthy landowners, who then farmed them via slaves. As a consequence, the army which had drawn its soldiers from this smallholding class, was never the same again. But there's nothing about this process in this book.

Just as with Commodus, the future emperor as a child would have been called Publius rather than Geta.

I have to admit I hadn't anticipated how wise a choice it was to posit the protagonists in the sculpting business. This provides a good excuse to constantly discuss how the various emperors want to depict themselves - what their propaganda messages are - which of course throws light on their characters.

The comparison of Philostratus instructing a future emperor compares them to Plato and Alexander the Great, but it should be to Aristotle to Alexander. Aristotle was his teacher, not Plato.

Developing strong doubts about the book's raison d'etre. It's just a very minimal gloss on actual history. What's added are the author's personal takes on the emperors -- which anyone can do -- and the made-up characters, who are just uninteresting ciphers. I would much prefer to just read actual nonfiction history. A good one is called The Chronicle of the Roman Emperors.

On p. 335 a character named Gnaeus is suddenly called Gaius. This is a simple slip, but there is a problem with the given names. In ancient Rome there were for the most part only seven possible given names and each family tended to give the same given name generation after generation. But here they choose a different one of the seven names in each generation. A missed opportunity to teach readers something about Roman culture.

The period of this book is when the Christian religion was developing in Rome, but we hear almost nothing about it. Nothing about them hanging out in catacombs, the early popes or anything like that. Really seems another missed opportunity.

Aurelian describes his walls as complete, but in reality he died before this occurred.

The fate assigned to Zenobia is dubious, having been written by a chronicler only hundreds of years later. It would be far more likely that she would have been eliminated as was the custom for Rome's enemies in those times. Even more surprisingly, we get page after page about her, even though some Roman emperors barely got a full paragraph.

It's good to see the philosopher Porphyry, however briefly, as his is a mostly forgotten name now.

After Aurelian, the book does not even bother to name all the emperors who preceded Diocletian.

Someone has written that in the second book of this series, Empire, "at the novel's heart are the choices and temptations faced by each generation of the Pinarii." I would have to say that in this book the Pinarii make very few choices. About the only one of significance is the pursuit of Zenobia.

Toward the end the frequent regurgitation of the story of the Rain Miracle really starts to pay off as we see how the story gathers "enhancements" and gets reappropriated for current needs. Thus do histories turn into legends.

The author's bibliographical note at the end is so very excellent. So many good sources that it would be interesting to follow up with!

By the way, here is a video of the author introducing the book: https://youtu.be/gT31KkbqGIw

21/8/19 The High Constable by Maan Meyers ★★★★
21/8/17 The Kingsbridge Plot by Maan Meyers ★★★★
21/7/31 The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett ★★★★★
18/1/11 The Arrows of Hercules by L. Sprague De Camp ★★★★★
17/9/22 The Seven Hills by John Maddox Roberts ★★★★★
17/8/29 Hannibal's Children by John Maddox Roberts ★★★★★
17/4/4 Silence by Shusaku Endo ★★★
16/10/8 The Road to Rome by Robert Emmet Sherwood ★★★★★

Interesting play suggesting reasons why Hannibal may have refrained from attacking Rome.

16/6/19 Dictator by Robert Harris ★★★+
16/1/17 Scipio: A Novel by Ross Leckie ★★★
15/9/27 My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk ★★★★
15/7/7 How Few Remain by Harry Turtledove ★★★★
15/5/31 Walled Orchard by Tom Holt ★★★★
15/5/12 Goatsong by Tom Holt ★★★★★
15/4/27 Antony and Cleopatra by Colleen McCullough ★★★
13/9/14 Tamara: A Play by John Krizanc ★★★★★
13/1/23 Conspirata by Robert Harris ★★★+
12/12/27 Imperium by Robert Harris ★★★+
11/5/19 "The Triumph" by Robin Hobb ★★★
11/5/15 "The Eagle and the Rabbit" by Steven Saylor ★★
11/12/6 The Marsh King: A Story of King Alfred by C. Walter Hodges ★★★★
11/10/22 The Namesake: A Story of King Alfred by C. Walter Hodges ★★★★★
11/9/8 Brother to Galahad by Gwendolyn Bowers ★★★

Hugh of Alleyn is a fatherless teen lord of a castle on the western coast of Britain. He dreams of going to Camelot and with the help of a temporarily disgraced knight is able to do so, stopping at Glastonbury on the way. He takes a job as a kitchen scullion as well as training as a knight in the period at the end of Arthur's reign. He eventually is able to join the quest for the grail and meet all of the famous characters of Arthurian legend.

11/8/22 Khan: empire of silver by Conn Iggulden ★★
11/8/20 At the Sign of the Globe by Gwendolyn Bowers ★★★★

A boy of 14 in Warwickshire, England, about 1610 is working for his uncle as a tanner, but finding it boring steals off to see the fair. There he meets a man who, impressed by his ability to juggle, offers to take him to Stratford to become a glover. Thus begin a series of adventures that lead to William Shakespeare and the Globe Theathre of London.

10/6/14 The Map Thief by Heather Terrell ★★★★ review
09/12/14 The Lost Dragon of Wessex by Gwendolyn Bowers ★★★★★
09/11/9 What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg ★★★★★
08/06/11 The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor ★★★+
08/05/13 The Tribune's Curse by John Maddox Roberts ★★★
08/04/12 Nox Dormienda by Kelli Stanley ★+
08/02/08 The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett ★★★★★
08/01/21 Nobody Loves a Centurion by John Maddox Roberts ★★★
08/01/16 Julian by Gore Vidal ★★★★★
07/10/26 "Convivium" by Kelli Stanley ★★★
07/07/05 Thirteenth night: a medieval mystery by Alan Gordon ★★
07/03/11 See Delphi and Die by Lindsey Davis ★+
07/02/09 Wolf in the Fold: A Robert Hawkins Mystery by Anthony Rotondi ★★★
06/11/10 Death of a Vestal Virgin by A.C. Tassie ★★
06/7/15 The Canary Trainer by Nicholas Meyer ★★★
06/6/5 The West End Horror by Nicholas Meyer ★★★★★
04/11/17 The Judgement of Caesar by Steven Saylor ★★
04/2/10 The October Horse by Colleen McCullough ★★★★
03/11/15 Baudolino by Umberto Eco ★★★★★
02/07/02 Germanicus Mosaic by Rosemary Rowe ★★+
02/06/06 A Mist of Prophecies by Steven W. Saylor ★★★
02/02/09 Five Black Ships: A Novel of the Discoverers by Napoleon Baccino Ponce De Leon ★★★★
01/11/23 Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco ★★★★
01/08/31 The Chinese Maze Murders by Robert van Gulik ★★★★★
01/07/08 Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier ★★★★★
Claudius the God by Robert Graves ★★★★★
I, Claudius by Robert Graves ★★★★★
The Thieves of Ostia (pre-publication) by Caroline Lawrence ★★★
Two for the Lions by Lindsey Davis ★★+
Between the Dragon and the Eagle by Mical Schneider ★★★

SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY
24/10/30 The Orville Library Edition Volume 1 by David A. Goodman ★★★★★
24/10/28 The Orville Season 1.5: New Beginnings by David A. Goodman ★★★★★
24/8/10 The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino ★★★

I didn't care for the mixing of fantasy with the real events of World War II, which sort of trivializes what actually happened.

The book uses the term "vegan" in a Germany of 1940 setting, but the word was only invented in 1944, and in England. Probably should have used "strict vegetarian".

24/7/28 The Quest For Tanelorn by Michael Moorcock ★★★★

This, in some ways, is the final book in the multiverse, though Moorock penned other adventures after this one. It probably contains more explanation of what is going on behind the scenes of the multiverse than any other, but somehow it has always disappointed somewhat, in never being quite as clear as it might have been.

24/7/27 The Champion of Garathorm by Michael Moorcock ★★★★

This one provides a considerable amount of explanation of how the multiverse works as well as considerable dialog from one of the important characters from the Elric series.

24/7/18 Count Brass (Chronicles of Castle Brass, #1) by Michael Moorcock ★★★★

Hard to believe a book this good could be written in just three days. I read this back in college, but could not really remember any of it and so decided to have a re-read.

This is the first book in a sequal series to the four-book History of the Runestaff series. It continues the weird mix of an earth where swords and feudalism still prevail, but they have advanced science like ornithopters and time travel. Kind of impossible, really. Plus, nobody ever needs to take off their armor, even to use a restroom, but that's what you get with high fantasy I guess.

The first thing the author wisely does is, a la The Three Musketeers, get the old band back together again. From there it's a pretty good quest story that holds your attention. The ending is good on a meta level, but disappointing in the vagueness of what happens, just being explained as "the time winds" doing something somehow.

24/4/4 The illustrated Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser & Douglas Arthur Hill ★★★★

Note: This review is for the de-versified illustrated edition that recounts the story in very readable modern language.

This is quite a pleasant fantasy read overall. Although loaded with allegory and symbolism, and you always know that good will utterly triumph in the end, in these times there's a certain comfort in that. Perhaps this type of storytelling will make a comeback.

In addition, his Elizabethan-era fantasy seems to have had a significant influence on modern works. My theory is that since it is relatively little known - occupying a niche mostly visited only by specialists - people have felt free to grab its ideas and have gotten away with it.

J.R.R. Tolkien. Although both his stories and those of this book contain dragons, they aren't really very similar. Instead, he took the main idea itself, that of creating a mythology for England and the English (and succeeded much better than this work ever did). He might also have gotten the idea of the magical palantir from book 3's crystal globes, fashioned by Merlin that could reveal past and future.

The movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Not only did it grab the idea of separate tales for each knight, its famous Black Knight is very similar to the dragon, which repeatedly has significant body parts removed and blood gushing forth, yet somehow still continues to fight. The Bower of Bliss in the second book is reminiscent of the Castle Anthrax storyline as well. So not only is there a similarity of ideas, they are even presented in the same order. There's also the meta quality. The Pythons suddenly put the story into the present day much as the author included in the final book, himself.

The role playing game Dungeons & Dragons seems to have borrowed the idea of strict classification of good and evil characters, as well as lawful and chaotic, the good wild man being an example of chaotic good. It is probably also the sourc of the cleric/fighter, as exemplified by the indomitable Talus character, armed with a flail.

The board game Talisman seems to have borrowed the pools of health and strength. They are reflected in cards in the game, as are some of the characters.

There is a line of text incorrectly repeated on page 122.

22/8/21 City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett ★★★

1 - someone even worse
The opener sounds like Exodus, when Joshua is leading them against the Canaanites.
Hmm, a Slavic name and then a Turkish one. Maybe supposed to be somewhere in Central Asia? Or anywhere that Russia borders a Turkish-speaking country. The name Bulikov reminds a bit of Bukhara, once conquered by Russia and now in Uzbekistan. I wonder if the name Yaroslav translates to something?
Saypur sounds like Jaipur, so maybe they are Indian?
Names that end in "yi" are typically Hungarian, for example, the pianist Ernst von Dohnányi (name in Hungary means "tobacco").
It's odd that the governor even considers trying to reassign her job duties when no doubt she knows what they are.
I suppose the governor dismissed the charges to avoid creating a martyr.
The book seems to objectify women a lot. Three times by page 14.
2 - we must civilize them
Ahanashtan is Afghanistan?
What kind of wrenches have teeth?
In this chapter we learn many secrets such as the identity of the CA, and that both gods and magic exist.
Maybe the Minister of Foreign Affairs is going to become prime minister eventually.
I start to wonder about the character of Dr. Pangyui (Chinese-ish name?). Seems a divisive character. Are we to consider him a good guy or a bad guy? Seems he read a bunch of forbidden books, and that seems bad, but should books be forbidden? So maybe he was okay?
Yes, I'm not sure how Shara feels she differs from Pangyui. In the sense that he was an ivory tower academic whereas she is an operative in the world perhaps? Both like to take deep dives into topics. I hope the author hasn't created in Shara an unbelievable Mary Sue super character though.
3 - unmentionables
They still have cannons. Combined with trains, that means they have about a 19th century level of technology.
Knowing that divinities can be killed raises the question of just how divine they are. Apparently not that powerful? Maybe they are just more advanced visitors from another planet? One was killed, three left and three remain, so there were only seven? As in seven astronauts? Or maybe they were actually magical and this is the story of how technology/knowledge advances destroys magic/old beliefs.
4 - dead languages
It's fun to see talk of board games, but I don't buy the one the author created here. Apparently it's like some sort of Chess, but using dice to decide how far the pieces move or which pieces can move or something like that. But if dice play such a huge role, then there's no way Shara could do the things she's doing such as making a move that will prove to be a win hours later. Or even being sure of defeating everyone in those group plays.
Votrov seems rather glib. Who does he think he is to tell her who she is or isn't? Anyway, he's wrong. In terms of her emotional development she is still very much a girl. She isn't good at reading people at all.
Since Votrov is going to be important to the story, it will be interesting to see in which direction he goes. Is he the antagonist she's going to fight against? Or is he the ally who will help her against the real antagonist? Does it end by a renewal of their relationship or does he die along the way? My guess would be neither and the author will prefer to string us along a while, at least into a sequel.
Beyond spinning an entertaining tale, do you think this book has any greater motive or message? Comparing, say, to the way Tolkien wanted to create a mythology for the English people and to discuss morality and redemption? I'm guessing it might be either for or against atheism? Or maybe to think about if there were multiple beings of godlike powers on earth, what relations between them and humans would inevitably be like?
5 - to do what he does best
Evidently the Continent lies to the north of Saypur, again meant to mirror Russia and India? but now separated by an ocean.
"Shara is almost tempted to test the seams of her clothes for rivets." Really?
Why would Saypur conquering the Continent influence their marital norms?
Hmm, Ernst Wiclov, a German given name combined with a Russian surname.
Is it likely that war could be the largest industry in the world? For example, in our world the largest industries are 5. Life and health insurance 4. E-commerce 3. Commercial real estate 2. Construction 1. Financial services
"Cheyschek" sounds like a Czech name.
The conversation between Vo and Shara doesn't ring true. Ex-lovers tend to want to catch up, ask about what's new, whatever happened to old acquaintances, and so on.
If you're invading a place, why would you wear a head covering with tiny eye holes that provide no peripheral vision at all?
Hmm, apparently they have cars, which would make them at the 20th century level of technology, but then why still old things like cannons? Though the cars still have running boards, as in the 1930s.
Personality-type wise, what I gather is

Shara - INTJ

Vo - ENTP

Mulaghesh - ENTJ

Sigrud - ISTJ
6 - a memory engraved
Seems contradictory that Wiclov would be against immigrants when earlier we were told that after the attack most people in Bulikov fled and the city is now severely underpopulated.
Evidently divinities are not very nice. One is quite willing to possess a human, even knowing that this will cause them to burst into flames. Some deity.
I suppose none of the divinities are actually dead, but just gone to a more removed place. Perhaps the story will eventually turn to the idea of their trying to return to the world.
I wonder why the author made six. Seven would have been a much better number.
7 - dangerously honest
The business about divinities suppressing plagues seems strained. How was this supposed to work? If they are divinities, why didn't they just wipe the plagues out altogether? Or if they couldn't, what are we supposed to imagine? Plague viruses are massing at the border and being allowed in, suddenly infecting everyone everywhere? Something just doesn't seem quite right. Especially in the era before the airplane.
But at least I got the answer to my earlier question about how the war changed marriage customs. Actually, the plague changed marriage customs.
Why wouldn't they know how the Kaj's weaponry worked? That was just a couple generations earlier? They should know everything about it.
It appears that Pangyui was trying to find a powerful relic on the aunt's behest. It also appears that the aunt is now going to send other operatives to Bulikov to make sure she gets it.
8 - (no title)
What, fresh out of titles?
9 - what history tells us
10 (back to No Title)
11 - survivors
I start to think the idea of the book is that if you were to give godlike powers to six people, only one would be benevolent and try to use them for good. The rest would just do whatever they felt like, little caring who was hurt by their actions. Of course, this 1 in 6 is just rounding up. Probably more like 1 in a 1000.
Shara is just leaving the suitcases of magic items in her office? Not locking them up somewhere? Seems unsafe.
What she did to the pet seems unnecessarily cruel. It's not a threat currently. Put it on trial.
12 - RE-CREATIONS
(The title suddenly went all caps.)
Why didn't they think about the glass wall in the sunken temple being a magic item as well?
For all that earlier talk about "we must never go to the warehouse", they sure went in without a moment's hesitation!
13 - you will know pain
Wait, the name of the drunk guy is very similar to Drinksky?
Between the mhovost of last chapter and the Urav in this, we have firmly moved into the genre of horror. By the way, discovered that in Bulgarian the at least somewhat similar word khvorost means illness.
14 - salvation
Probably it was not Votrov who observed the battle with Urav, but someone pretending to be him. Jukov, maybe?
Did Votrov have an ulterior motive in visiting the embassy? To snoop around perhaps? Wanting to start work on a new bridge that night just sounds ridiculous. However, I wonder if they could start working on a temporary pontoon bridge.
If photography was only invented five years earlier, the newspaper photograph seems highly implausible. During the early days of photography subjects had to sit completely still and wait during long exposures. But Shara didn't even realize she was being photographed. It's unlikely that it would have come out perfectly.
Not sure why Vinya would blame Shara for blowing her cover, or why she would accept said blame. Votrov could have told the newspapers about her at any point. If the author needs Shara to become the real ambassador, appointing her as the inevitable consequence of its PR possibilities would have been a more plausible route.
Now we finally revisit the "warehouse is forbidden" idea. I wonder that no one is thinking about other creatures that might still be emerging from it.
Evidently, the plan of the terrorists/Restorationists is to invent the airplane and then what? Bomb Saypur into submission, perhaps, and then the Continent will be self-governing again.
Really hate the publisher for putting in page after page of difficult to read italics. That�'s against every principle of typography. They should have just chosen a different typeface.
Misuse of the word "enormity" by Pangyui. I guess the author gets away with it because the mistake is Pangyui's rather than the narrator's.
Despite her avowed disbelief, it sounds like Vinya does believe one or more gods still live, or else why be so interested in discovering how the Kaj's weapon worked.
If there were so many papers, why wasn't Pangyui given a whole team of researchers?
The author tells us that the journal reveals everything people know is a lie, but is that really the case? There wasn't much to surprise in the journal at all.
In the past two chapters, first the action and now the revelations have ramped up quite a bit.
15 - the divine city
The idea of Shara as ambassador seems somewhat bizarre. Does she even have any experience in diplomacy? Or any aptitude for it? It seems the answer would be no on both counts. So why force her into that role? At least just make her a figurehead and let someone else do most of the actual work.
Since he's always missing, perhaps Wiclov is not a real person, but a god posing as one? Or did Votrov have him killed?
Ah, further confirmation that three of the gods still live.
And further suggestion that someone is masquerading as Votrov.
Don't see why a spent bullet would indicate that Jukov is dead. It rather suggests that the attempt to shoot him missed and that he may still be alive.
I wonder why they insist on making planes of steel. It would have been much simpler to use wood.
16 - family ties
Ah, the evil twin brother plot.
Ah, confirmation that they plan to bomb Saypur.
17 - what is reaped
If all it takes to free the god is a silver hammer and a few words, why wait for this dramatic moment? Why not have done it a long time ago? Is this the Bond villain syndrome where they always delay everything so long that Bond eventually has time to defeat them?
It seems dubious that consuming the pills would have such a powerful effect. Magic in this world seems to derive from power granted by a deity, but which one was powering that? Also, why didn't anyone use this trick long ago?
Air power at the end – another similarity to Tolkien.
18 - what is sown
Seems that when one has godlike powers, there would be many, many great places to hide. After all, Olvos has hidden successfully for centuries. Strains credibility that it would be necessary to hide in that unfavorable location.
Why wouldn't the offspring of two divinities also be a full-fledged divinity? We could have done with some explanation on that.
This book could have been called Three Women – or even Four Women – as they are the most significant characters, which is fine and good, but there should have been some explanation of how that had come to be so in their world when in our world's Victorian era we didn't see that.
So it does seem ultimately to be about the inevitable nature of the relationship between humans and divinities.
He might also be talking about the north-south divide, the have and have-not countries of our world – the Continent being like Africa and Mexico/Central America and Saypur being like the US and Western Europe – and the way they treat one another, which perhaps even has some similarity with the way the humans and divinities treated one another.
Ah, now we discover that people had taken pills and done things before, but the author just never bothered to inform us . Tsk tsk, not fair play.
Ah, my guess about Sigrud turns true.
It's disappointing to learn what we do about the heritage of the Kaj. It would have been a better message that he was a brilliant person because of his own natural abilities and not suggest that a person can only do great things because they had great ancestors. This idea of ancestry is made too much of throughout the book, actually. I'm American. I don't buy into the hereditary claims of kings.
I suspect that if Shara gets involved in politics she will ultimately come to regret it. It might well be just like Kolkan all over again. She has an idea of doing what is Good and Right, but the people have other ideas. The second book ought then to be something more like Dune Messiah, the antithesis of the first book.
Vinya's reason for fearing Shara seems dubious. They would seem to have very different roles so far. Shame on her for polluting the ocean like that.
Not sure if Votrov's outcome is a good one. Too similar to that trite cliche of "you have the wrong orientation and so must die".
I feel disappointed that we didn't learn more about the relationship between Shara and Pangyui, which would have seemed to have deserved more. After all, it was the trigger for the entire story. In the end, it remains a MacGuffin.
By the way, Vinya's earlier heavy criticism of Shara for not having solved the murder seems on the fatuous side now. More believably she would have advised her to forget about it.
It doesn't sound right that Mulaghesh would only have been a colonel. For a role as important as governor of the chief city of the continent, it seems a first level general would have been required, at minimum.
Who was the divinity Shara spoke to in the jail cell? It seems left unresolved.
I dunno, maybe I demanded too much, but I felt the author didn't care enough about getting the details right. Jarring inconsistencies kept pulling me out of the story. As Tolkien wrote, you can create a world that has a green sun, but then you have to make everything in that word consistent and believable as if that sun were real. Although a good attempt, I feel not enough was done here in that regard. Getting that sort of thing right can be the difference between a good novel and a classic.

22/2/12 Remaking History and Other Stories by Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★★
21/11/28 Down and Out in the Year 2000 by Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★★
18/8/5 The Princess Bride: An Illustrated Edition of S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure by William Goldman ★★★★
17/4/9 The Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★
17/2/11 Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★★+

Kim plays thee games in this one: (1) teasing us with is Hiroko Ai still alive or not? (2) who is the father of Zo? (finally revealed only in The Martians) (3) sending characters out into harm's way util we get scared they're going to die, but invariably bringing them home safe again. After reading this and knowing Kim a little bit, I believe Sax Russell is his favorite character to write about as well as the character who is most like Kim.

16/5/5 Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★★+
16/2/29 The Midnight Circus by Peter Collinson ★★★★
16/2/24 Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson ★★★★+
14/3/18 Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers ★★★
14/1/2 "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman ★★★★
12/3/6 The Annotated Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and Douglas A. Anderson ★★★
12/3/5 The End of the Third Age by J.R.R. Tolkien ★★★★
10/4/18 Doctor Who: The Crusade by David Whitaker ★★★★
10/4/14 Knight's Castle by Edward Eager ★★★★★
10/2/2 Moomin by Tove Jansson ★★★
10/1/22 Smith of Wootton Major by J.R.R. Tolkien ★★★★
10/1/10 The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman ★★★
09/12/11 The Peoples of Middle Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien ★★★
09/12/8 Journeys of Frodo by Barbara Strachey ★★★★
09/11/11 Farmer Giles of Ham by J.R.R. Tolkien ★★★★★
09/8/5 The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs ★★★
07/11/20 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov ★★★★★
07/03/02 The Never-ending Story by Michael Ende ★★★★
06/7/2 Captains' Logs Supplemental: The Only One-volume Guide to Deep Space Nine, Voyager and the New Next Generation Movie by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman ★★★★★
06/6/16 The Tenth Planet by Keith Pedler ★★★★
06/5/20 Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman ★★★★★
05/7/03 The Asian Animal Zodiac by Ruth Q. Sun ★★★★★
04/10/11 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire ★★★★★
04/8/04 The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/30 The Magical Monarch of Mo by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/21 Tik-Tok in Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/19 Who's Who in Oz by Jack Snow ★★★★★
04/7/18 Rinkitink in Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/18 The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/11 The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/11 Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/09 Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/07 The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/05 The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/05 The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/04 Queen Zixi of Ix by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/7/02 The Annotated Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Notes by Michael Patrick Hearn ★★★★★
04/6/29 The Tin Woodman of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
04/6/27 The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum ★★★★★
02/11/01 The Lord of the Rings Official Movie Guide by Brian Sibley ★★★
02/08/01 The Minority Report by Philip K. Dick ★★★★
02/06/13 Old Polish Legends by F.C. Anstruther ★★
01/11/09 Who's Afraid of Beowulf? by Tom Holt ★★★★
01/08/13 Silk Roads and Shadows by Susan Shwartz ★★★
01/06/27 The Truth About Dragons by Rhoda Blumberg ★★★
Maui: The Demigod: An Epic Novel of Mythical Hawai'i by Steven Goldsberry ★★★★★

GRAPHIC NOVELS
23/9/9 Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans ★★★
23/4/29 The Life Eaters by David Brin ★★
23/3/20 Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (Tintin #1) by Hergé ★★★★
22/7/16 Cranberry Mystery by Wende Devlin ★★★★★
22/7/10 Cranberry Christmas by Wende Devlin ★★★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Moving Day by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Birthday by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Summer by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Easter by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Valentine by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Autumn by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★★
22/7/3 Cranberry Halloween by Wende & Harry Devlin ★★★★
22/7/3 Big Max and the Mystery of the Missing Giraffe by Kin Platt ★★★★★
22/5/21 Mr. Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown ★★★
21/9/20 Tintin and the Lake of Sharks by Hergé ★★★★
17/6/27 The Avengers, Earth's mightiest heroes. Vol. 4 Chris Yost, adapted by Joe Caramagna ★★★
16/2/23 Witches of Venice by Beni Montresor ★★★
15/3/14 The Mystery of the Great Pyramid, part 1 by Edgar Jacobs ★★★
09/3/16 The Quitter by Harvey Pekar ★★★★
08/03/04 Tintin and Alph-Art by Hergé ★★★★
07/11/6 Lucky Luke: Ghost Town by Morris and René Goscinny ★★★★
06/10/4 The Shooting Star by Hergé ★★★★★
06/9/19 The Blue Lotus by Hergé ★★★★★
06/9/2 Tintin and the Broken Ear by Hergé ★★★★★
06/9/1 The Black Island by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/28 Tintin in Tibet by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/28 Land of Black Gold by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/27 The Crab with the Golden Claws by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/26 Prisoners of the Sun by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/25 The Seven Crystal Balls by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/25 Red Sea Sharks by Hergé ★★★★★
06/8/24 Red Rackham's Treasure by Hergé ★★★★★
05/1/21 American Splendor: Our Movie Year by Harvey Pekar ★★★★★
04/2/15 American Splendor by Harvey Pekar ★★★★★
04/1/09 Bob & Harv's Comics by Harvey Pekar ★★★★
04/1/08 Our Cancer Year by Joyce Brabner & Harvey Pekar ★★★★★
03/12/28 The American Splendor Anthology by Harvey Pekar ★★★★★