The book is a study of America’s headlong rush into the 1898 Spanish-American War, viewed through the conflicting perspectives of famously powerful Boston and New York elites and intellectuals like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, William James, & William Randolph Hearst. Along the way, Thomas examines man’s fascination with war itself – how human nature is drawn to it, occasionally revels in it, and fears it. Somewhat less effectively, Thomas also frames the book to underline the similarities between the war fever of 1898 with America’s rush into the Iraq War a decade ago, going so far as to imagine Dick Cheney being the inheritor of T.R.’s famous war lust.

I enjoyed the book, with some qualifications. As a look into the elite Brahmin aristocracy of the Gilded Age, it’s terrific. I liked the character studies of crusted intellectuals like William James (whose pluralism-friendly philosophy of pragmatism has become quite influential, and which I teach in my philosophy class) and the audacious, unscrupulous journalist William Randolph Hearst. The chapters on the war itself were fresh and lean, capturing that strange mix of bloody adrenaline, and confused, dreary boredom.

Having studied Roosevelt a fair degree already, I appreciated Thomas’ treatment of him less. Roosevelt left behind a mountain of written material and speeches, and Thomas seems to have scrounged around for every half-cocked comment about military glory he could find in order to paint him as a man who was close to being dangerously unhinged (and a burden to his family) when it seems to me the record shows him to be nothing of the sort. Similarly, Thomas awkwardly and unnecessarily drops in racially insensitive quotes from T.R.’s letters every now and again, as if to signal his unsympathetic nature to the modern reader lacking context otherwise.

As I’ve written about, Roosevelt is best understood as a moderate who lived in strained times. He was an intellectual savant who could talk himself in circles with “on the one hand this, but on the other hand that”, but usually chose a course of action that was both practical and bold. To insinuate that he was a bigot or racist by the standards of his era is unfair, particularly in the racially hypersensitive times we live in today. It seems to me that Thomas’ thesis on war itself (that it is a dark but inescapable function of human nature) soured him on Roosevelt, who idealized martial virtues. Thomas later offers up a fair, if half-hearted postscript, noting that, as president, T.R. kept the U.S. out of war and that his presidential rhetoric was “not particularly bellicose”.

—

Here are a few stray tidbits from the book that I appreciated:

-My favorite line in the book, and a phrase I intend on making use of myself, was found on p. 357. Roosevelt had returned from war, and was asked how he was doing. He shouted back, “I am feeling disgracefully well!”

-Of all the men studied in the book, Thomas’ sympathies seem to lie most with William James. This is well founded. James was an insightful intellectual with cosmopolitan attitudes and a realistic understanding of human nature and society. The antics of the “war lovers” Roosevelt, Hearst, and Lodge dismayed him, but he was also unimpressed with the so-called “mugwumps” – high society progressives and reformers who sniffed at politics and everyday Americans. This group would seem to have been a natural community for James, but their smug antipatriotism struck him as self-defeating, and their stuffiness left him bored.

-Apparently everybody in 1898 wore black for some reason.

-William Randolph Hearst comes across as a strange guy. For all the crazed headlines and yellow journalism he was responsible for, and for all the publicity stunts he pulled (including sailing to Cuba to insert himself heedlessly into the war), he was an odd, awkward dude. Painfully shy, alternately manic and morose, with a limp-wristed handshake and an affection for chorus girls, he loved influence and melodrama but was pained when attention was placed on him. He filled his newspapers with bloated partial truths and filled his letters to his mother with self-pity. He was like Glenn Beck’s effeminate 1890s doppelganger.

-Soldiers serving in Cuba referred to malaria and yellow fever as “the black vomit”, which is beautifully and disturbingly evocative.

-The 1890s was a golden age for facial hair, when beards were pointy and mustaches robust. Not until the 1970s ascendancy of Dan Haggerty would America’s beards see such warmth and richness again.

-Famously, the 39-year old Roosevelt resigned his powerful post as assistant secretary of the navy (he was the de facto head of the navy much of the time because of the secretary’s long absences) to raise a cavalry regiment of cowboys and Harvard men to personally fight in the war. Of course, this was an insane thing to do, and literally everybody seems to have told Roosevelt this. Undeterred, he wrote long letters to friends and advisors explaining his motivations as being honorable and disinterested. While T.R. was no doubt acting on some of his deepest convictions, Thomas suggests that Roosevelt was also acting to erase the one blemish on his much-loved father’s record: the fact that he had avoided fighting in the Civil War. This was Roosevelt’s chance to avenge the family name, and he did so with gusto – the move would literally launch him into the presidency a few years later.

-Roosevelt loved the vigorous life and fighting. In a letter to Lodge after the fighting was over, he breathlessly began one paragraph, “Did I tell you that I killed a Spaniard with my own hand?” Experts agree that, had T.R. been alive in 1987, he would have fought and defeated Hulk Hogan in Wrestlemania III.

-In 2001, Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Theodore Roosevelt the Medal of Honor for his service in the Spanish-American War. The next night, the ghost of Roosevelt appeared to Clinton and commanded him to annex the Philippines and pardon Mark Rich.

The book is a crisp, concise examination of the the successes, failures, and character of Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, exploring their remarkable friendship against the larger backdrop of the Civil War. Flood does a wonderful job at describing the military progress and maneuverings of the war along with the tangled political web that made up the Union Army brass. (I’d strongly recommend the book to any Civil War novice seeking to understand the major battles and prominent military figures.) While it’s always a pleasure to read about men like Lincoln, Lee, McClellan and Stanton, the figures of Grant and Sherman are the focus, and Flood expertly brings them to life in all their complexity.

Both men were Westerners, both were West Point graduates who had floundered for years before the war (Grant with his drinking, Sherman with his failed business dealings), both began the war as obscure afterthoughts in the Western theater along the Mississippi. Both men were occasionally hounded in the press (Grant as “a butcher”, Sherman as insane, or a traitor), and neither had many natural allies in the Union army. Yet, by war’s end, they stood alone as the men who had delivered victory for the Union and literally saved the nation, along with President Lincoln.

A few thoughts and reactions, mixed with some pleasant lies (please hum “Ashokan Farewell” in your heads as you read):

-The personalities of Grant and Sherman made for quite a contrast. Grant was a man of plain manners whose stooped, stoic demeanor made him easy to underestimate. He was a clear, excellent writer who usually said exactly what he meant, and from an early point was able to see the war in it’s widest scope, and how the many moving parts would have to coordinate to achieve a final victory. He was intuitively aggressive on the battlefield, a fact that set him clearly apart from most Union commanders. On the other side, Sherman had a keen intellect made evident by the ideas that habitually came racing out of his mouth. He grasped problems in all their complexity, and though he was far more prone to racial prejudice than Grant, he shared with his friend a firm empathy for the men of the Confederate Army and longed for a hasty conclusion to the war. Indeed, while both were often criticized for their perceived brutality, they understood early on that the war would could not be won superficially or through maneuverings alone. As Sherman wrote to Grant, “[The South] cannot be made to love us, but may be made to fear us.”

-Contrary to some accounts, Grant’s drinking problem never fully went away during the war. He still drank whisky to excess, on occasion, although such instances always happened during quiet spells and there was never a report that he was unable to carry out his duties. Also, when drunk, he insisted that he be addressed as “General Spiderman”.

-A major newly transferred to Sherman’s command described him as “the most American looking man I ever saw.” Today, that honor belongs to Toby Keith.

-Snippets that illustrate the character of Ulysses S. Grant:

During the Battle of the Wilderness, at a point when it looked as if Lee’s army might overrun Grant’s headquarters, he was asked by an anxious officer if they shouldn’t be moving headquarters back to a safe distance. According to a witness, “The general replied very quietly, between puffs of his cigar, ‘It strikes me it would be better to order up some artillery and defend the present location.’”

Another account from later that day, after a Union general pleaded with Grant to pull back to avoid Lee being able to cut off their supplies and communications: “Grant rose to his feet, took his cigar out of his mouth, turned to the officer, and replied, with a degree of animation he seldom manifested, ‘Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing what Lee is going to do. Some of you think he is about to turn a double somersault, and land in our rear and on both our flanks at the same time. Go back to your command, and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do.’” (243)

After the conclusion of the surrender negotiations at Appomattox Courthouse, Grant stood reflecting on the steps outside a house, when Lee passed him on horseback: “Grant stopped and took off his hat. The yard became silent; every Union soldier there removed his hat and came to attention. Robert E. Lee lifted his hat once and passed through the gate…For the remaining five years of [Lee's] life, he never allowed a word against Ulysses S. Grant to be spoken in his presence.” (313)

-Grant’s beard was brown, Sherman’s was red, and Lee’s was white. The spectrum of death.

-Perhaps Grant’s greatest achievement in the war was his victory in the Siege at Vicksburg, in which he deftly coordinated his movements with ships in the Mississippi to better his angle of attack, and later intentionally cut off his army from his supply line to allow him the mobility he desired. The dramatic victory came after a long spell of Confederate victories and delivered control of the Mississippi to Federal forces. Afterwards, Grant received an astonishing letter from Lincoln. The president began by laying out all the concerns he had about Grant’s plan and how he had worried about Grant’s leadership. Lincoln then closed with, “I now wish to make the personal acknowledgement that you were right, and I was wrong.” To me, this is astonishing. Where most presidents in recent memory would gloss over their misjudgments, or say that they agreed with the plan all along, Lincoln once again displayed his remarkable humility and moral character.

-Sherman liked to say, “The worst thing about war is that there’s never anything cold to drink.”

-The two men displayed an intense, tender loyalty to one another throughout the war. Both stoutly defended the other in the press and to the second-guessers in Washington, and both were quick to defer to the other’s judgement. Sherman vouched for Grant in the early days of the war when Grant was trying to overcome a reputation as a drunk and a screwup. Grant, meanwhile, tactfully smoothed over a political storm created when Sherman negotiated overly-lenient surrender terms with the last large Confederate army (this flare-up was exacerbated by Lincoln’s assassination that same week). Working behind the scenes and travelling to North Carolina to amend the terms himself, Grant allowed his friend to save face and preserve his reputation. As Sherman himself said during the war in a letter to Grant, “I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and that if I got in a tight place you would come if alive.”

-Shortly after the Battle of Shiloh, an aide to Sherman walked into the general’s tent to find him in a shirts-up tickle fight with Grant. When the two finally noticed the young man watching them, they hurriedly straightened themselves up and had the aide executed for treason.

It is the timeless story of shy, lonely girl named Jennifer trying to find love in the compromised world of high school in the early ’80s. Somehow finding herself in a tangled love web between the steady, blowdried Russ and the adventurous, blowdried Gary, Jennifer eventually learns to follow her heart and properly condition her hair. Along the way, she kisses them each on the lips and lets them touch her exposed shoulders but otherwise remains as chaste as a cross-eyed nun.

Look again at the majesty of that cover. The faraway beam in Jennifer’s eyes belies the turmoil below the surface as she wrestles with her feelings for Russ and Gary and the knowledge of her secret pimple. Meanwhile, Gary’s confident charms are evident in his ruffled cuff and the subtlety of his pelvic leaning. That one, simple image tells conveys the emotional truth of the story’s turmoil. It’s like something out of Casablanca, except with better fashion and fewer Nazis.

It goes without saying that Winifred Madison is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Her work in Dance With Me makes To Kill A Mockingbird look like a retarded person’s grocery list. The fact that Dance With Me isn’t mandatory reading for all schoolchildren and that the Lincoln Memorial hasn’t been torn down in favor of an 80-foot high statue of Winifred Madison is pathetic. We’ve got a long way to go as a country to overcome the equal sins of racism and ambivalence toward this book.

In conclusion, Dance With Me is a good book. Read it, and be racist no more.

While the book was zippy and provacative, I confess that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I anticipated. Part of this has to do with the strictures of doing an oral history rather than a traditional one – narrative threads get picked up and dropped abruptly, and context is too-often scarce. The plus side of an oral history is that the reader often gets a sharper sense of the personalities and motivations of the figures involved, liberated from most of whatever the author’s interpretation of them might be. I now know who the biggest a-holes in the history of ESPN were, and these fellows have nobody to blame but themselves.

Another issue that limited my enjoyment of the book was that it seemed to run out of trajectory about midway through. The first half of the book follows the rise of the ESPN from its humble inceptions (conceived as a cable access-style channel covering the hotbed of Connecticut sports) through it’s rise to becoming one of the dominant forces in American media. We hear about all the people who mocked the notion of a 24/7 sports station, and all the seedy behind-the-scenes tales of unhinged parties and sexual misadventures from the network’s early days. Also, lots of business deals happen and are covered in mind-numbing detail. If, for some reason, you’re deeply interested in the changing business models of the cable industry, then there’s lots of juicy stuff for you here. I confess that I often ended up skimming through those pages.

The second half of the book loses a bit of its momentum, tracking ESPN’s steps since its mid-90s ascendance. The authors try to use the various management shifts as narrative guideposts, but this is only somewhat effective. The last 300 pages start looping through predictable patterns: people complaining about management, various episodes where on-air talent said something they shouldn’t have and apologizing, and finding out which people at ESPN hate each other (i.e. Berman and Kornheiser). In and of itself, it’s interesting, but at a certain point it becomes a little repetetive.

Still, the book is breezy, and generally enjoyable. Easy weekend reading for a sports fan.

Here are a few insights gleaned from the text, thoughtfully blended with lies:

-Here’s my impression of some of the major personalities after reading the interviews…

Dan Patrick: Down-to-earth, hard-working, team player. Wrote the textbook on anchoring SportsCenter.

Keith Olbermann: Incredibly smart, gifted writer. Perhaps the best SportsCenter anchor in the show’s history. Simultaneously, unbelievably self-centered and unpleasant to work with. Paranoid, accusatory, and thin-skinned. Suzy Kolber, who never has a negative thing to say about anything else in the book says, “Keith was an unhappy person. He made a lot of people unhappy around him. I’m sure he made me unhappy.”

Chris Berman: Every anecdote blatantly glorifies himself. Energetic, simple, and sincere. (He blew a gasket when ESPN lost NFL Primetime in 2004, and rightfully so. I always felt that was the best show on the network.)

Bob Ley: Smart and grounded. Company guy.

Stuart Scott: Thoughtful and perceptive.

Tony Kornheiser: Nervous and unhappy, and very aware of both. Difficult to work with at times, but gifted.

Bill Simmons: Big ego. Calls the shots at ESPN.com, to the annoyance of his editors and some on-air folks who seem to resent him. Insightful and funny.

Jim Rome: Surprisingly gracious.

—

-Numerous sources describe the boys club that was ESPN in the 1980s. Sexual harassment of female reporters was rampant and ignored by management. In addition, the women’s “restroom” was nothing more than a crude biohazard pit dug in the lawn behind the building.

-Some of the most entertaining portions of the book have to do with the behind-the-scenes antics of management figures. The recklessly hard-drinking, loudmouthed Stu Evey towered over ESPN’s first half-decade, serving as the liaison between the network and the Getty oil company that owned it. Inexperience be damned, he insisted that his opinion be heard on every conceivable matter and spends plenty of time congratulating himself for it in the book. Years later, Mark Shapiro, a young hotshot executive took creative control of ESPN while still in his thirties. While many of his programming choices worked brilliantly (PTI, most notably) he also burned bridges and kept everyone on edge with his blunt, abrasive style.

-In order to ensure that only the most sports-obsessed work at their Bristol campus, ESPN requires all job applicants to complete a difficult sports exam and apply ointment to Tony Kornheiser’s open sores while he groans his approval.

-The folks at ESPN shamelessly credit themselves for popularizing NASCAR, poker, professional monkeybars, and Christmas trees.

-ESPN made waves in 2005 when it landed the prestigious Monday Night Football gig, thanks to the aggressive negotiations of Shapiro. At the same time, he fumbled his handling of the announcers, quickly alienating both John Madden and Al Michaels to the point where they jumped ship to NBC. Things didn’t improve when Shapiro coarsely decreed that ESPN’s own Joe Theismann’s leg be re-broken.

-In one memorable scandal, Chris Berman got in hot water while hosting NFL Primetime when he threw to a commercial break by shouting, “Segregation now, segregation forever!”

Bonhoeffer was, of course, the Lutheran pastor and theologian who helped found the Confessing Church movement which resisted the Nazi party, and was later directly involved in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Before being executed at a concentration camp in the waning days of the war, he had managed, in 39 packed years, to write several hugely consequential books on theology and philosophy, and alter the trajectory of Christian thinking to this day.

Yet while Bonhoeffer is a rockstar in theological circles, he is still a somewhat obscure figure to most Christians. For my part, I knew of him, but not much about him. Metaxas argues during his narrative that this is in part because Bonhoeffer’s ideas have been hijacked at various points over the years by different groups illegitimately claiming him as their own. Bonhoeffer’s fragmented musings written from prison on “religionless Christianity” have been particularly popular among some leftist thinkers and secular humanists in the 60s & 70s. Though Bonhoeffer’s own peers and confidants rejected this particular interpretation, it became influential, and was this apparently enough for many mainstream Christians to look elsewhere for guidance and inspiration.

At times, Metaxas frames his book as a correction to that phenomena, and he consistantly points to the unfailingly Christ-centered nature of Bonhoeffer’s thinking, and reframes “religionless Christianity” as a concept in keeping with Bonhoeffer’s lifelong argument against empty religious legalism. At the same time, he doesn’t shy away from the fact that Bonhoeffer compelled Christians to live in the world, and to fully engage it, rather than seek comfort in some dualistic scheme where all things earthly are wretched and to be escaped. Bonhoeffer posits that the Christian life is one of action, sharing in the sufferings of others, and being a prayerful instrument of justice.

When I originally picked up the text, I was unaware of any such battle between the theological right and left over Bonhoeffer (after all, I’m no theologian). I was even tsk-tsked by a few liberal friends on Facebook over having selected the book. While I can’t pretend that I’m a capable arbiter of Metaxas’s fairness to one side or the other, after having read it I can say that it was stimulating and completely compelling. His history reads fast, and with a flair for language that I really enjoyed. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times both wrote favorable reviews, and a liberal-ish Lutheran pastor friend of mine said that, while he disagreed with Metaxas’s take on Bonhoeffer’s theology, he enjoyed reading it. In short, while it is not a deeply scholarly work (he zips past many intricate political developments with a potent phrase or two), it struck me as a responsible book.

My take: the text is dense and the complexity of the conspiracies can be daunting, but it is also wonderfully challenging to the conscience and, primarily because of Bonhoeffer’s remarkable life, thoroughly inspiring.

A few other notes from the text:

-Bonhoeffer himself comes across as an endlessly interesting individual: highly intelligent, confident, and serious-minded, but also very generous and even playful at times. As a cultured aristocrat, academic, and world-traveller, he was completely unlike the average parochial-minded Lutheran pastor of his day. At the same time, his radically Christ-oriented life and passion for shepherding a parish or seminary distanced himself from the cool, insular world of university theologians. Again and again, Metaxas quotes observers of Bonhoeffer who marvelled at his life and the moral force of his words. That he would ultimately choose to justify political action subverting the state through his Christian theology is paradigm-shifting, but in keeping with his deeply-rooted character. There was absolutely nothing fickle about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

-In 1930, Bonhoeffer spent a fateful year doing postgraduate work in New York. Though generally unimpressed with American seminaries, he enjoyed his experiences at African-American churches, and the trip solidified his universalist view of the church. During that year, he also penned the Lee Greenwood hit “God Bless the USA” and suggested that somebody should shoot Huey Long.

-If Dietrich Bonhoeffer were alive today, he would probably be a rabbit hoarder.

-Bonhoeffer’s role in the Valkyrie assassination plot was two-pronged. On a tactical level, he used his contacts in Great Britain to suss out whether the Allies might respond favorably toward the conspirators (Churchill responded cooly, which Metaxas righly criticizes). On a moral level, Bonhoeffer framed the mission (at the center of which was the murder of a human being, it should be noted) as one of Christian obedience to God’s call through action in this world. Many of his co-conspirators, including Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the man at the center of the assassination attempt, were devout believers who clearly understood the evil nature of the Nazi regime.

-In a colossal blunder, for the 2008 film Valkyrie that depicted the Hitler assassination plot, the role of Bonhoeffer was “reimagined” for Tim Conway’s celebrated Dorf character. In the film Dorf/Bonhoeffer fouls the plan by accidentally pouring hot coffee on Hitler’s lap and is summarily executed.

-As a teacher, I much appreciated this anecdote about the rowdy confirmation class that a young Bonhoeffer inherited from an ailing old minister. Made up of hoodlums from a rough Berlin neighborhood, this class (required for young men in Germany in those days) made it their mission to make their teacher’s life a nightmare. Bonhoeffer’s close friend Eberhard Bethge described Dietrich’s first day, as the boys raised hell:

The old [minister] left the scene in despair, leaving Bonhoeffer standing silent against the wall with his hands in his pockets. Minutes passed. His failure to react made the noise gradually less enjoyable, and he began speaking quietly, so that only the boys in the front row could catch a few words of what he said. Suddenly all were silent. He remarked that they had put up a remarkable initial performance, and went on to tell them a story about [his recent trip to] Harlem. If they listened, he told them, he would tell them more next time. Then he told them they could go. After that, he never complained about their lack of attentiveness.

-Seriously though, the Minnesota Twins suck this year.

-Bonhoeffer fell in love in his late 30s with an impressive young woman only in her teens. They were later engaged, but he was imprisoned shortly afterwards. As best we can tell, his love language was Being Martyred.

-Bonhoeffer was confident and inspiring to the very end. On the last day of his life, after having just completed an informal prayer service among his fellow prisoners, Bonhoeffer was summoned away by the SS. Everybody present knew what this meant, of course, and said their goodbyes to him. One of them later described what Bonhoeffer said to him as he left: “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.” Hours later, after calmly and prayerfully walking to the gallows, he was hanged as a traitor to the country he loved.

The book is a mild, meandering essay about the Marx Brothers’ uproarious 1933 classic, but unfortunately it’s not a particularly entertaining or informative one. I purchased it because of it’s promising title and subject matter (I’ve been a Marx Brothers fan for years) and I had a passing familiarity with Blount from his appearances on NPR. With a subtitle like this one, it would seem reasonable to expect Blount to devote the text parsing the political or philosophical content of the film, but he rarely gets around to this. Instead the book drags as Blount describes other movies from the era that he has seen and enjoyed, and suggests that maybe we could check them out sometime. Thanks but no thanks, Roy.

Truth is, while Duck Soup is gloriously subversive and anti-establishment, there isn’t much thoughtful political content in it. It is thoroughly anarchic (like all their best movies), but also silly and scattershot rather than systematic. Blount, of course, says this, but so have so many others. He never really goes anywhere with it. I’m far from an expert on the Marx Brothers and still I failed to learn anything new from the book.

As far as the comedic rewards of Blount’s writing, I can’t recall if I cracked a smile at anything that wasn’t a quote from the Marx Brothers themselves.

Having said all this, there was one particularly thoughtful passage that I paused over, where Blount demonstrates how to turn a phrase for effect. In the process of describing the movie’s famous mirror scene between Groucho and Harpo (see below) Blount has been simultaneously been detailing the difficult dynamics between the brothers – fond of one another but aloof and cutting.

“You love your brother, don’t you?” Groucho asks Chico, as regards Harpo, in 1940′s Go West.
“No, but I’m used to him,” says Chico.
Groucho and Harpo in the mirror routine are truly, madly, deeply used to each other. (119)

In general, though, this book is a twaddling, frustrating bore. To be avoided.

Far better than anything Blount tries to add are these classic moments from the film:

The Courtroom Scene – Anarchy and wordplay

The Peanuts Scene – Misanthropy and slapstick silliness

The Mirror Scene – Craft and layers of irony

Now go, and never darken my towels again!

(Sorry for the lack of original comedic content lately, I’m using my break to clear the decks of a few of these quasi-serious posts I’ve had percolating for a while. I’ll be back to my usual tasteless stuff in the new year.)

Lincoln’s famous speech at Cooper Union in Manhattan in February, 1860 is famous for having propelled him from obscurity to viability in the runup to the Republican convention that May. Elected to speak in New York by opponents of polarizing Republican frontrunner William H. Seward, Lincoln was keenly aware that this was his one window to present himself as a skilled, capable alternative to receptive delegates.

Having spent months in intense preparation, Lincoln arrived with a remarkable address prepared. The Cooper Union speech is conspicuously devoid of the homespun humor or beautifully poetic phrasing that he was so capable of. Instead, the lengthy speech is a cleanly explained defense of the moderate wing of his party (that wished to prohibit slavery’s expansion into the territories but was willing to abide it where it already existed in the belief that it would eventually whither). Supported with ample historical evidence, rooted in a passionate loyalty to the Constititution, and bound together with what one observer called “sledgehammer logic,” the address spoke plainly and irrefutably. That it still reads so clearly and easily today is testament to Lincoln’s rhetorical taste and incredible ability to communicate. Holzer summarizes that the monumental speech “was characterized by a fresh, lean style of elocution, free of bombast, metaphor, and vituperation, instead constructed out of facts and reason, supported by history and national experience, and infused with moral certainty.” (237)

Holzer’s book offers plenty of insightful analysis on the speech and paints a vivid picture of the unique, uneasy political climate of the time. The text occasionally loses its momentum in the details, devoting pages to the back-and-forth of telegraph messages or travel plans when a few paragraphs would probably suffice. In addition, Holzer’s own political bias seems to come into play as he repeatedly dismisses Lincoln’s appeals to political conservatism (holding true to the Constitition and the intent of the Founders) as mere superficialities disguising his true liberal character. I think modern liberals and conservatives miss far too much of the point when they claim Lincoln as one of their own to the exclusion of the other. Abraham Lincoln was a deeply principled and moral man with a profoundly clear political sense and respect for the law. He had plenty of virtue to go around for everybody.

Here are a few notable tidbits from the book:

-When studying Lincoln, I always appreciate reading the unvarnished first impressions of the people who met him. Words like “awkward”, “ugly”, and “miserable” regularly pop up. His New York debut at Cooper Union was certainly no exception. Viewers remembered the ungainly way he twisted his long legs beneath his chair as he was being introduced, his badly wrinkled suit, his disheveled hair, and the harsh, high pitch of his voice as he began his speech with a rustic twang that pronounced “Mr. Chairman” as “Mr. Cheerman”. Many audience members recalled spending the first few moments of the speech despairing that they had ever put their hopes in such a hopeless specimen. However, as the minutes passed, and the speech began to build its case, it seemed to all that his face deepened and became more animated to the point where, by the speech’s end, rousing cheers and shouts rocked the auditorium. Lincoln was odd and unconventional to be sure, but he was a truly skilled orator.

-[Insert teleprompter joke here]

-On the day of the speech, Lincoln’s image was captured by the famous photographer Matthew Brady, resulting in this striking photo:

The portrait skillfully smoothens most of Lincoln’s rougher edges while illuminating his intelligence and resolute character. Almost miraculously, he looks like a statesman. Mass duplication of photographs had just been invented, and this is the image that introduced Lincoln to the country.

-Abraham Lincoln was the inspiration for Dalton, Patrick Swayze’s character in the 1989 hit film Road House.

-Dental floss hadn’t been invented in 1860, but even if it had, Abraham Lincoln probably wouldn’t have used it because flossing your teeth is pretty much a waste of time.

-My favorite passage from the speech is the conclusion (the capitalized letters are Lincoln’s own from his notes):

“Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is…but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the Territories, and to overrun us here in the Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored – contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between right and wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither living nor dead…
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.” (283)

-Ever the homespun humorist, Lincoln opened his majestic address with a knock-knock joke, culminating with the cutting punchline, “Orange you furious about the Kansas-Nebraska Act?”

Sold in the U.K. under the more accurate (and more provacative) title Why The West Has Won, this book explains the incredible dynamism, ingenuity, and brutal destructiveness of Western armies across history. Hanson doesn’t seek to explore the morality or justness of any cause or culture, instead he examines nine important battles across history (from the Greek victory at Salamis to the Tet Offensive) to draw lessons from them that might help explain the blunt-force effectiveness of Western forces against armies of the Other. He does so with a keen eye for the sickening details of war and while nimbly avoiding cultural chauvenism.

Hanson frames the book as his counterpoint to Jared Diamond’s celebrated Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond famously pointed to geographic and environmental factors as the great engines of history. Hanson argues in this book that culture is a far more potent force in determining the outcome of human events. No one people is any braver, tougher, or more intelligent than another, he asserts, but “[the cultures of the] West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural, and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation, and individual expression than did other socities” (19).

This is a compelling, unsparing, and important book. As always, Hanson doesn’t simplify war, glorify it, or shrink from it. I’ve enjoyed Victor Davis Hanson’s books in the past, but Carnage and Culture is my new favorite.

A few items of note from the text:

-Hanson traces the impact of firearms across Eurasia to make his point. Gunpowder is, of course, a Chinese invention, but it did not reach it’s world-changing potential as a new technology until it reached Europe. Western culture was more receptive to new technologies and allowing free markets and rational inquiry to fan the flame of further improvement and mass fabrication. Furthermore, guns are a radically democratic form of destruction – a mailed knight or samurai with a lifetime of grooming can be blown apart by an ignorant commoner. Centralized societies like China and Japan outlawed or tightly regulated these weapons for that very reason. The West perfected firearms, produced more of them, and mastered the use of them far better than any other society because its way of war was less concerned with religious, cultural, or ethical mores and more interested in what works.

-Hanson points out that what ruined the brilliant Carthaginian general Hannibal was not so much his lack of skill, bravery, or audacity but his society’s inability to produce great numbers of citizen-soldiers as Rome could. Also, they forgot their swords back in Africa.

-Hanson’s exploration of Alexander the Great’s climactic battle against an enormous Persian army at Gaugamela is swift and compelling. He uses the narrative to illustrate how armies of the West are more egalitarian than non-Western ones. While Alexander’s elite cavalry unit of (aptly-named) Companions launched themselves recklessly into the pikes of the Persian army alongside their king, the slave army of the Persians got distracted by the cache of booty when they broke through the lines. The composition of Alexander’s army encouraged staying in ranks for endless rounds of face-to-face killing, while the Persian army, enormous though it may have been, was built to fall apart when the going got tough.

-The great generals Themistocles and Hannibal had beards (like mine), but Victor Davis Hanson is clean-shaven (like Timothy McVeigh).

-An illuminating theme that Hanson often returns to is the Western emphasis on rank and defensive cohesion in battle. In this tradition, dating back to the Greeks, wars are fought at close quarters with close ties of dependency to fellow soldiers. Bravery is measured by staying in position and maintaining group integrity rather than through the individual accumulation of kills as it was in countless other cultures. This ethic, when tied with ordered volley firing (another Western specialty) would again and again allow dramatically outnumbered forces to hold their own against repeated charges by the enemy. This is perhaps best illustrated by the British victory over the Zulu army at Rorke’s Drift (South Africa) where a seriously beleagured force of 139 Redcoats withstood waves of attacks and survived, killing twenty men for every defender lost.

-Hernan Cortes and his marauding conquistadors were appalled by the Aztec practice of ritual human sacrifice and, to a lesser degree, making burritos.

-Hanson’s examination of the U.S. victory at Midway over Japan during World War II is a striking example of how the ingenuity and individual initiative encouraged in Western ways of thinking tilts the outcome of history. The Japanese model of governance and military culture was autocratic to its core, based on blind obedience to the Emperor. The plans drawn up by Admiral Yamamoto on the eve of the battle were needlessly complex, yet none would dare to challenge him. On the American side, while discipline and duty were certainly core values of the military, the enterprising nature of individual soldiers and improvised reactions to adversity were able to pull out an unlikely victory that stopped the Japanese advance in the Pacific. Prior to the battle, U.S. crews worked a miracle in only a few days to jury-rig the heavily damaged U.S.S. Yorktown into something resembling a seaworthy battleship that could be used (far less-damaged Japanese ships remained docked for weeks, following protocol). After the initial stages of the battle proved an unmitigated disaster for the Allies, American pilots and officers improvised and innovated, while the Japanese demonstrated only orthodoxy and obedience.

-If the Persian king Xerxes had been able to witness the creative, cultural, and military power of the modern West that originated with the Greeks, he would have genuflected in humbled reverence and requested an iPod with a bunch of Kenny Chesney songs on it to help him chill out.

-Hanson ends the book on an ominous note about our global age: “Most see in the advance of rationalism, capitalism, democracy, and their ancillary values the seeds of perpetual peace and prosperity. Maybe, but we must remember that these ideas are also the foundations that have created the world’s deadliest armies of the past” (453).

-Western societies pioneered the revolutionary concepts of citizenship, consentual governance, and the Wendy’s dollar menu.

The book is a brisk, exciting tour through the life of Rome’s great re-founder, set against the incredible events in the empire from about 50 B.C. to 50 A.D. Facinating figures like Julius Caesar, Cicero, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Ovid, Tiberius and others come to life in Everitt’s prose while the shadow of Augustus towers over them all. This is no hagiography, however. Augustus was an intelligent, ambitious, hypocritical ruler who did terrible things to return peace to Rome and set it on a stable path to growth and prosperity. This is a warts-and-all look at a man who rose from young Gaius Octavian born of humble origins, to his years as the adopted heir of Julius Caesar, to his rule of Rome as the emperor Augustus where he changed history dramatically.

Here are a few noteworthy tidbits from the text:

-The ‘divine family’ of Augustus did not have a happy history under his thumb as princeps (his preferred title, translating roughly as “First Citizen”). Simply put, he demonstrated a bad habit of treating family members cruelly until they turned on him. Daughters, granddaughters and nieces were treated as pawns to be married off to political friends and rivals regardless of their wishes. His daughter Julia embarrassed him with her brazen sexual proclivities to the point where he banished her to a distant island (she would not be the only member of his clan to receive this treatment). His adopted sons and stepsons bore the heavy burden of his expectations while also being forced to delicately avoid being seen as a threat. In the end, his male heirs either met a premature end, broke down mentally, or in the case of his eventual successor Tiberius, carried out Augustus’s wishes competently, but in a sullen manner.

-If Augustus were an animal, he would be a huge, muscular lion that punched bears.

-Physically speaking, Octavian was not the most remarkable specimen. He was sickly, had terrible acne, and did not have to shave until he was 24. As a military commander, he had a bad habit of coming down with mysterious incapacitating ailments on the on the morning of battle, leaving his loyal (and more militarily capable) advisor Agrippa to do the dirty work.

-The princeps practiced oratorical sleight-of-hand that would be familiar to followers of modern presidential administrations. In addition, his proxies regularly appeared on Roman Sunday morning political talk shows where they forced opponents to commit suicide.

-Mark Antony comes across in the text about how one thinks he would – a popular, skilled military leader, true to his word and politically cunning. At the same time, Antony was prone to make mistakes out of impatience, while his weakness for booze and women hindered him even further. He did not anticipate how his alliance (both political and sexual) with Cleopatra of Egypt would hurt him in the Senate and with the Roman people (sentiments fanned by Octavian’s propaganda). The uneasy alliance and eventual war between the hot-blooded, disdainful Antony and his young, calculating rival make for a fun stretch in the text.

-Though Augustus enacted laws enforcing some traditional Roman norms concerning family life, his own extramarital dalliances were routine and well-known. His personal life made Bill Clinton look like Gandhi Billy Graham.

-Everitt details the so-called proscriptions decreed by Octavian and Antony during the years of their co-rule of Rome. This basically amounted to a list of people who were to be killed for having aided or sympathized with the killers of Julius Caesar. Thousands of names were on the list, including many of Rome’s wealthiest and most prominent citizens. They no longer had any protection under the law, their property was forfeit, and soldiers and mobs went on the hunt for their heads to claim their prize. It’s hard to imagine how horrifying this must have been, even by the incredibly violent standards of the ancient world. The wonderful HBO miniseries Rome depicted the death of Rome’s most famous statesman, the orator Cicero, which was called for by Augustus. It hauntingly details the Roman matter-of-fact attitude toward death as well as their philosophy of stoicism. It’s the scene that has stuck with me after the series ended – watch it here

-Augustus was able to proactively build brand equity using best practices and sustainably achieve value-added enrichment for the Roman empire.

-Augustus hated fat people.

-Much mystery surrounds Augustus’s death in 14 A.D. The Roman historian Suetonius describes rumors that he was poisoned by his wife Livia (a crafty political mind in her own right, but unpopular with other political figures). Everitt argues that there was little in Livia’s past to suggest such a betrayal. She had always been a loyal confidante and advisor to Augustus. Undaunted by a general lack of evidence one way or the other, Everitt posits that perhaps she poisoned his snack (of figs – no thanks) acting in accordance with her husband’s unspoken wishes. We know that Augustus had been in declining health, and plans for the transfer of power had already been set in motion, so perhaps she reasoned (not unreasonably) that the process would be much more smooth and less prone to factional civil war if the princeps was, in fact, dead.

-If Augustus were alive today, he would be Toby Keith.

Noonan worked as a speechwriter for portions of Reagan’s presidency, and the book is a warm, leisurely accounting of a man she deeply and openly admires, but is not afraid to criticize. It is not a scholarly biography by any means, but a loose collection of anecdotes and reflections written in the wise, informal manner that reader familiar with Noonan’s excellent op-eds in the Wall Street Journal will recognize.

Written in the summer of 2001, the book already feels a bit out of date. She spends portions of the text fighting Clinton-era battles over the Reagan legacy that have felt settled since the nation took stock of the man when he died in 2004. I recall the spontaneous weeklong outpouring of grief that seemed to erupt across the country. Since then, even many of the most strident Democrats will acknowledge that Reagan’s presidency was successful and transformative. Most Americans today (including myself) remember him as a man who made us feel proud of our nation and what we stood for, and who enunciated a value system in a way that few other politicians have ever been able to manage. The thesis of Noonan’s book is that the depth of Reagan’s character – his steadfast convictions, his gentle generosity, and his grounded optimism – allowed him to flourish as a great president who used the office to its full potential. In addition, she suggests that those who dismissed him as simple and aloof were correct in a sense, but they missed the larger picture Reagan was busy painting to his audience, the American people.

Here are a few bits from the text I’ll take away with me:

-Noonan points out that Reagan rose from as dire a situation as any American president since the 1800s. He was born in Illinois in 1911 and raised across parts of the Midwest as the son of an alcoholic, embittered shoe salesman. His family was quite poor and forced to move from town to town as his father struggled to hold down a job. Though he rarely spoke of his father and only fleetingly of the troubles his family faced (he wasn’t one to dwell on the negative) he did inherit from his father a profound sense of the injustice of prejudice and from his mother a sunny optimism. In addition, Reagan’s love for his country came in large part from the fact that a man of his humble upbringings could, on his own merits, rise to become governor, and even president.

-Of all the American presidents, Reagan had the saggiest, most disgusting neck.

-I loved an early portion of the book describing the Reagans’ ranch and modest lifelong home in Santa Barbara, California. With its linoleum floors, wicker furniture, and stuffed jackalopes, it’s a place of simple, earnest charm and rugged appeal – like the man himself. Reagan made it a point to bring Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev there, because he believed it spoke volumes about America that this was the home of their president. Gorbachev in particular was flabbergasted, as a veteran of the Soviet system of hypocritical oligarchical spoils.

-Listening to conservative talk radio today, one hears the name Ronald Reagan dropped approximately four times a minute. These sources have confirmed that Ronald Reagan had a corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal. And he’ll be back again someday!

-Noonan’s complaints about Reagan: he repeated anecdotes ad nauseum, he had little patience for intellectuals (I can’t bring myself blame him for that one), and he was generally uninterested in details. Also, she spends time painting the complex picture of Reagan as a parent – engaged and imaginative when his children were young, aloof and perplexed as they matured. Though he is to be admired for his clear-eyed political courage and decency , Reagan was no role model as a father.

-When Ronald Reagan woke up in the morning and sat down on the executive toilet, he crapped American flags.

-The most compelling chunk of the book to me was probably Noonan’s account of when Reagan was shot in spring, 1981. He had only been in office a couple months when the assassination attempt occurred, and many of the most troubling details were shielded from the public at the time. He came frighteningly close to death, with the bullet from Hinkley lodging an inch from his heart. The public, which thus far had liked Reagan as far as they knew him, learned a lot about his good spirits and optimism when stories began to leak out of how he had been responding. Famously, when his tearful wife first saw him, he replied, “Honey, I forgot to duck”, and immediately before surgery to remove the bullet he quipped to the doctors, “I hope you’re all Republicans.” Less famous were the notes he wrote after surgery, when he was weak and under doctor’s orders not to speak. Some of my favorites: “I left something out, I do have an allergy”; “”If I had this much attention in Hollywood I would have stayed there”; “What happened to the guy with the gun – was anyone hurt?”; “Will I still be able to do ranch work, ride horse, etc.?”

-Reagan was known to be absentminded. On one occasion, he accidentally swapped his copies of the START nuclear reduction negotiation papers with a bunch of Heathcliff comics. This explains the peculiar treaty provision that reads: “We must keep that cat from stealing the shopkeeper’s fish.”

-The Iran-Contra Scandal from Reagan’s second term is treated with circumspect fairness. The scandal itself was a Byzantine affair of Israelis illegally selling American-made arms to a moderate faction of Iranians with the permission of the U.S. State Department in hopes of securing the release of American hostages from Iran with the funds being diverted by the state department to fund anti-communist contra forces in Nicaragua. (Everybody got that?) Noonan treats it as an example of Reagan following his worst romantic inclinations and listening to the advice of those of his cabinet urging a daring, unconventional approach to advancing American interests. Instead, he should have sided with his savvy, shrewd Secretary of State George Shultz and seen the inevitable pitfalls. Regardless, in the broad scope of history, the scandal never amounted to much. Reagan recovered politically within the year, and at the end of his term he was still terrifically popular.

-Reagan and Gorbachev managed to share a remarkably warm relationship, given the frosty tensions between their two nations. One night in 1987, they built a fort in the Oval Office out of couch cushions and nuclear suitcases. According to sources, they shared whispered secrets and exchanged nurturing backrubs and dared each other to prank call the East German chancellor.

-The text became most emotionally affecting for me toward the end, when Noonan describes Reagan’s later years when his mind was afflicted by Alzheimer’s. She writes of visiting him in 1998 with her 11 year old son; the president now older, smaller, and often confused. At that moment, she does away with the questions she wanted to ask about his legacy and advice for the young people of today – it was clear that he would stumble through such talk. Instead, she tells him that she once worked with him and that she loves him. He is heartened to hear this and smiles. Not long after that, he can no longer recall that he was once president, or that he once dared Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. The only job he can remember is having once being a lifeguard in Iowa.

-Famously, Reagan loved football and jellybeans. Less famously, he loved mixed martial arts fighting and bouncing checks. These shocking revelations can be found in my forthcoming book, Things That I Thought Of And Are Probably True.

-A favorite anecdote from the book that illustrates Reagan’s humor and grace: a 1981 formal state dinner featured a performance by Robert Goulet, he of the schmaltzy-Vegas variety. So Goulet was doing his act – perhaps a bit more colorful than the usual state dinner fare, but reasonably classy. At one point during his banter, however, he started talking about a recent Lake Tahoe performance where he spent the show flirting with a gorgeous gal only to find out later that she was “the biggest transvestite in Tahoe.” Amidst the tuxedoed ambassadors and various conservative supporters of the president, the joke was met with stoney silence before the show mercifully went on. At the end of the evening, Reagan stood to give his formal thanks and sendoff. Before finishing he added, “And thank you, Bob Goulet, not only for entertaining us with your wonderful voice but for remembering our night in Lake Tahoe.”

-If Ronald Reagan were alive today, he would be Mitt Romney.

Over the years, I’ve grown from a casual Sinatra fan into a serious one (as my wife can wearily attest). What started as enjoyment of The Voice, the style, and the general vibe has developed into a deeper appreciation of his gift of expressive interpretation and for the Great American Songbook. At least for somebody of my generation (born when Sinatra released “New York, New York”) I’m a fairly big fan.

Having said that, his catalogue (300-some CDs in print) is so large that it was sometimes difficult to know where to find quality material. I had learned long ago that some of his bigger hits of the modern era (i.e.“Strangers in the Night”, “Summer Wind”) were also songs that quickly wore thin for me. I was looking for a book that could help me find the best material away from the various single-disk retrospectives on the market. Friedwald’s book is a marvelous stroll through his career, plotting the many high points and occasional missteps (see: most stuff he recorded from 1968 on). His ear for the nuances of Sinatra’s vocal performances is especially illuminating – this is a great book to have on hand when listening to his albums, as he points out many subtleties that add depth and resonance to the experience.

There were some complaints. In the interests of painting a broad picture, Friedwald occasionally gets lost on detours when describing the professional backgrounds of various musicians who played a big role in the backing bands. While an explanation about what made that particular trombonist or drummer essential to Sinatra is welcomed, multiple pages devoted to tracing the other bands he played in usually is not. There were also about 100 tedious pages devoted to Sinatra’s 1940s output that, given the low fidelity and the overly-saccharine performances, don’t do much for me. Finally, Friedwald betrays himself as an insufferable jazz snob pretty regularly. He drops sideways digs at the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond, Bono, and other talented, respected artists from the rock world, alluding to their poor singing and the paper-thin nature of their material. To me, this came across as smug and obnoxious (though, in his defense, Bono’s performance on his 1994 duet with Sinatra on “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was eye-rollingly obnoxious itself).

Here are a few bits from the book I’ll take with me.

-Friedwald mades a pretty good argument that “My Way” represents a masterful performance of a really lousy song. He critiques the banal melody and the brusque, monosyllabic lyrics, but notes that Sinatra is such an expressive interpreter that he singlehandedly lifts the material into something operatic. Friedwald writes, “It’s conceivable that one could be critical of ‘My Way’ from a distance…however, it’s impossible not to be overwhelmed by it in person: how can you not stand up and cheer at the sight of a man who can, at will, grow to be ten stories tall?” (p. 447)

-Ever the man of fashion, Sinatra recorded much of his peak 1950s material in his trademark hat and trademark t-shirt with an airbrushed wolf on it.

-Friedwald does a nice job of characterizing the notable arrangers that Sinatra returned to over the years. The job of the arranger was to take an existing song and write an orchestration to it to support the singer. Thus, they fashioned the sound and the feel of a recording in much the way a modern producer does. The celebrated genius Nelson Riddle comes across as brittle and difficult, the swinging Billy May seems upbeat and easygoing, the strings-loving Gordon Jenkins as patient and sanguine. Friedwald also resurrects the reputation the sometimes-scorned Don Costa (who worked with Sinatra on a lot of his weaker late albums) as a man caught doing admirable work on projects that were woefully misbegotten (“Let’s make Sinatra relevant to the flower people!”). The details on the working relationships between Sinatra and these talented arrangers adds a lot of depth to the listening experience.

-In an attempt to maintain sales, Sinatra lost his way by the late 1960s by turning toward soft rock and away from his usual palette of standards and swing. This resulted in the embarrassing spectacle of him scatting amidst the cheeseball nonsense of “Sweet Caroline”. If Sinatra were alive today, we would all have to put up with him doing Sister Hazel’s “All For You” and pretending we didn’t hear it.

–When Sinatra recorded, he liked to set the ambiance by burning incense and lighting a single candle. He also would relax by loudly indulging himself face-first in a smorgasbord of booze and women while listening to Enya.

-Sinatra’s longtime pianist Bill Miller comes across in the text as a sort of zen saint. Friedwald celebrates the way Miller is able to effortlessly support the emotional tone of the songs while giving Sinatra both the structure and nuance he needed to shine. Listen to any live recording of “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” and this becomes immediately evident. Miller’s quiet, graceful demeanor also comes across as a counterpoint to many of the highly-strung musicians, and to Sinatra himself, who while capable of being generous and gracious, could also hold an ugly grudge with the best of them.

-In concert, if Sinatra ever forgot the words to a song, he later would have the songwriter beaten to a bloody pulp by his goons.

-Above everything else, what made Sinatra such a tremendous artist was his ability to make the audience feel the song. Be it exuberant or sardonic, boastful or broken, Sinatra could embody a lyric and express it like no other singer I’ve ever heard. I was watching some clips on YouTube of vintage live performances and I was struck by how much he seemed to be processing and thinking about every word he sang. There were only rarely moments of rote singing. He famously once said, “When I sing, I believe.” Ultimately, that’s what makes his music worth returning to.

-I bet when Sinatra sang love songs, he thought about me.

McCullough is a tremendous historian and writer, and this volume doesn’t disappoint. Given McCullough’s insight and the endlessly interesting subject matter, how could it? Theodore Roosevelt was one of a kind. He was a forceful politician who would remake the presidency. He was a deeply intelligent thinker fascinated with natural science, literature, and history. He was a driven, hyperactive savant dedicated to living as robust a life as possible. McCullough’s account of his upbringing brings the riveting (and often puzzling) Theodore Roosevelt to life with empathy and wonder, while also painting a vivid picture of Gilded Age politics and aristocratic culture.

Here are a few interesting notes from the book:

-For those overfamiliar with the man Roosevelt would become, the text reminds us what a peculiar person TR was, especially so as a young man. From his time at Harvard, we read one account after another comment on his bizarre mannerisms – endless sentences tumbling out of his mouth, flashing his teeth and seeming to bite the words out of the air, manic gesticulations. The general impression of him was that he was undeniably bright, but a little strange, and more than a little self-righteous.

-As a young man, Roosevelt experimented with various looks before settling on the bushy mustache we all know and love. In college, he grew out his “English-style” mutton chops, and while living in Dakota he grew hockey hair and spit tobacco juice into an empty Mountain Dew bottle.

-The single most significant dynamic in the creation of Theodore Roosevelt was his extraordinarily close family. They were a clan who remained intensely devoted and loyal to each other their entire lives. Theodore Sr., the patriarch, was idolized by all as the ideal father and moral anchor of the family. The children Bamie, Theodore Jr. (Teedie), Bamie, Corinne, and Elliot were best friends for their entire lives (though Elliot suffered an early demise brought on by alcoholism). Daughters Bamie and Corinne each eventually married, but their husbands could never take the central place that their father and brother Theodore had in their lives. Bamie, in particular, served TR as a close advisor and confidante his entire life.

-Roosevelt was a passionate hunter and outdoorsman from a young age. He loved nothing more than strangling wolverines to death and then eating their raw entrails. (This is only barely an exaggeration.)

-Famously, young Teedie was cursed by terrible asthma attacks. McCullough strongly suggests that these were psychosomatic, brought on by the anxiety of the Roosevelt Sunday routine of lengthy church services and an observed Sabbath of inactivity. It says something about the fabulous wealth of their family (from established family businesses in trade and glass) that to address these frightening attacks, they took him on rides through New York in a luxurious carriage drawn by majestic white horses, and even lived on an opulent Egyptian houseboat on the Nile for a year. Must be nice.

-Do you remember a couple years back when they made a third Crocodile Dundee movie for some reason? I bet Theodore Roosevelt would have done something about that.

-TR was undeniably a blueblood. He spoke with a haughty accent (think of his younger relative FDR), dressed in extravagant fashions, and wrote home during his time at Harvard to reassure his parents that he was investigating the “antecedents” of potential friends. Yet, he was not one to luxuriate in his circumstances. Whether researching, politicking, hunting, or reading, he was an incredibly hard worker, tiring out everyone around him. During his famous “Badlands Years”, working as a rancher in Dakota territory, he totally immersed himself in Western life and won the approval of skeptical cowboys with dogged industriousness (though he did raise eyebrows by with his peculiar highfalutin language – “You! Hasten forward quickly there!”)

-A formidable boxer in his own right, TR once knocked a loudmouth cowboy unconscious after he had mocked Roosevelt’s gold glasses one too many times. Later, the chief forced them to become partners and they solved the case, but not before they nearly killed each other in the process!

-Theodore Roosevelt suffered an incomprehensible tragedy when both his dear mother and beloved wife Alice each died unexpectedly, just hours apart on February 14th, 1884 (Valentine’s Day – bummer). McCullough’s prose in this stretch of the book is beautifully understated; I was moved to tears (it probably didn’t help that Bridgette was out of state at the time). The normally loquacious Roosevelt could only manage to ‘X’ out that date in his diary and note “Today, the light of my life has gone out”. He declined to keep a diary for the rest of the year, and couldn’t bring himself to speak of Alice again for the rest of his life, pledging instead to forge ahead at full speed.

-Roosevelt quickly developed into a powerful, dynamic force in Republican politics as a voice for civil reform. To compare him to contemporary figures, he combined the erudite depth of Barack Obama and the spirited independence of John McCain with the frenzied, pile-driving heroics of Hulk Hogan.

I was a huge fan of Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, & Steel; it has influenced my world history and geography classes significantly (I like to have my students consider to what degree societies are bound to environmental determinism). Collapse, on the other hand, sometimes left me cold. By the end, I felt like I was taking my medicine, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop reading a book once I’m 400 pages in.

The best stretches of the book are detailed historical accounts of the collapse of ancient societies like the Maya, the Greenland Norse, and the inhabitants of Easter Island. I was totally engrossed in these sections and haunted by his accounts of their demise. However, I felt that the constructs Diamond used to analyze these collapses were usually too complex to be very insightful – a 12-part inventory here, a 9-catagory breakdown there, etc. Somewhat less interesting, but still worthwhile were sections devoted to contemporary failings in Rwanda (overpopulation leading to genocide), China (overpopulation leading to environmental crises) and Australia and Haiti (deforestation and alien species leading to near ecological collapse). In the end, the most compelling issue to me was that those societies failed to recognize the limitations of their circumstances and adjust their lifestyles and values accordingly. Diamond concludes by attempting to connect the (overly complex) lessons of these collapses and crises with the environmental and demographic issues across the planet today with varying degrees of success.

Here are some other noteworthy tidbits about and from the book:

-One of the things I appreciate about Diamond’s work is that he is an environmental and philosophical realist (unlike the insufferable true-believer, environmental idealists suckling at Al Gore’s bloated paunch). His breakdown of the environmental issues surrounding the logging, mining, and oil drilling industries was refreshing in that he understood that businesses exist in order to create a profit for their shareholders. What’s more, he didn’t write as if to do so is somehow immoral. Diamond laid out how future of the logging, mining, and fishing industries must rely on models that allow sustainable use of natural resources while maintaining or increasing business profits. These rely in large part on the mechanism of an environmentally-engaged buying public.

-Prior to their society’s collapse, the Mayas built enormous pyramids, developed a written language and some fairly sophisticated mathematics. They also predicted, with eerie accuracy, the arrival of a truly terrible disaster film in the fall of 2009. They even carved the name “Danny Glover” onto one of their human sacrifice altars.

-It was Diamond’s contention that much of the logging and oil drilling in the modern first world in the last several decades has been done responsibly (this contention has angered many of his admirers on the left) but pointed to various reasons why companies operating in the third world continue to take a short-sighted, destructive approach. Particularly facinating to me was his analysis about why the convoluted business and distribution model of the mining industry tends to prevent market pressure for responsible practices from reaching the companies. Think about it, do you have any idea where the copper in your car or cell phone came from? Do you have any reasonable way of sending a message to that supplier with your money?

-Do you remember that movie “The Postman” starring Kevin Costner, about a reluctant mail carrier in a post-apocalyptic society who brings salvation to a desperate band of refugees? Well, turns out it will soon prove to be 100% accurate, right down to Kevin Costner’s hair plugs.

-Diamond’s section on the collapse of Greenland’s Norse colony around the year 1400 after over 500 years of existence is wonderful and haunting. He paints a vivid, grim picture of Norse life in Greenland, as they did their best to transpose their European style of life onto their frozen, tenuous environment. Here’s a photo I reflected on for along time of the largest building on their colony – the Hvalsey stone church:

-The Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035, unless they don’t. Either way, anthropogenic global warming is irrefutable, and every weather phenomenon of any sort proves this. On an unrelated note, this Kool-Aid is green flavored!

-There were numerous reasons for the collapse of the Norse Greenland society. One of them is the fact that they were unable or unwilling to adjust their European values and lifestyles to suit a vastly different set of circumstances. Whereas the values and hierarchy of the Catholic church and European society served them well in Scandanavia, they proved destructive on Greenland. Large areas of premium (and scarce) land, crops and resources were collected as tithes and sent back to the archbishop on the European mainland. They immediately seem to have had an antagonistic relationship with the pagan Inuit (whom the Norse referred to as “skraelings”, or wretches). Either out of a desire to separate themselves from the Inuit or to cling to their Europeanness, they did not adjust their diet to what was sustainably available (i.e. fish, seal, and walrus), and continued to graze sheep and other livestock. This grazing eventually led to catastrophic soil erosion as the vegetation was eaten away. In the end, the Inuit outlasted the Norse on Greenland, mostly thanks to the fact that their lifestyle matched their environment.

-The Norse settlement on Iceland proved far more successful than their Greenland counterparts. This was the result of Iceland’s less severe environment, the lack of an outside enemy to compete for resources, and Icelanders greater willingness to drop economic activities and values that didn’t prove tenable. Not to be discounted are the sweet, sustaining refrains of Sororicide, Iceland’s favorite Satanic black metal band.

-The mysterious collapse of the Easter Island society is another facinating section of the book. Diamond traces how the inhabitants of the island gradually deforested the entire island until their own survival was doomed. Their society was divided into warring clans led by chiefs and priests who practiced a primitive form of conspicuous consumption. The famous stone heads found on the island are one result of this gaudy competition, as enormous amounts of energy and resources were put into the carving and transportation of these heads, believed to represent an appeal to the gods to save them. Slowly but surely, as the trees were removed, their ecosystem collapsed to the point where the island was nearly uninhabitable. When they were discovered by Europeans in the 1770s, the inhabitants were a lean, miserable people relying on fish that could be caught from shoreand cannibalism to stay alive.

-In an attempt to make their unfamiliar surroundings resemble home, short-sighted British colonists actually tried and failed to introduce rabbits to Australia’s ecosystem 5 times before finally succeeding with a different breed of hare from Spain. These rabbits then proceeded to overpopulate and infest the Australian countryside and remain a menace. Australians have since attempted to exact revenge by stealthily introducing kangaroos to the British Isles, but the wretched beasts are invariably trampled to death by mobs of soccer hooligans.

Regular readers of my blog know that I’m a huge Beatles fan and McCartney enthusiast. Having read similar (and more authoritative) books like The Beatles by Bob Spitz and John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman, some parts of Carlin’s book were treading overly familiar territory for me. However, he does an excellent job at connecting themes in the music of McCartney and Beatles with the events of their lives and their own personalities. Throughout the text, Carlin posits that McCartney’s music is his truest, most endearing expression of self and reflects not only his unparalleled talent but his need to prove himself and to please others. It’s definitely worth a read for any Beatles fan or serious follower of pop music history inclined to dismiss McCartney’s work as trite or suburban.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the book worth sharing:

-Carlin tracks the arc of McCartney’s character from age 9 (when his mother passed away) to today. McCartney matured from a bright, good-natured kid from a poor neighborhood to the early Beatles days as the group’s most assured talent and yin to John Lennon’s yang to the supreme confidence and accomplishment of the late 60s to his years as a sort of neo-hippy family man prone to losing his musical focus from time to time. All the while, McCartney comes across as genial and ingratiating, but also self-centered and slyly self-aggrandizing in a way the unfilterable Lennon could never manage.

-McCartney wrote the song “Maybe I’m Amazed” about the experience of having a beard and being awesome. In other words, it’s about me.

-Carlin details how John Lennon served a central role in McCartney’s life to an extent surpassed only by Linda, his wife of 30 years. Lennon, McCartney’s childhood friend and collaborator, was the only person who McCartney ever viewed as a true professional peer capable of offering meaningful criticism. Carlin offers one example after another from the 70s and 80s of McCartney indignantly reacting to critics in the studio, while Lennon’s take from afar (usually via a newspaper or magazine interview) was always incredibly meaningful to him. Years later, McCartney offhandedly mentions his songs that John liked, and his friends recall him agonizing over the insults Lennon tossed his way. As McCartney himself said a day after Lennon’s death, “He was pretty rude about me sometimes, but I secretly admired him for it.”

-McCartney has long been able to ingratiate himself with journalists and promoters by affecting a genial, effortless facade and by making silver dollars magically appear from their ears and by kissing them on their special zone.

-For all his musical abilities, Paul McCartney was the primary creative force behind two of the lousiest films of the 20th century, 1967′s Magical Mystery Tour and 1984′s Give My Regards to Broad Street. They are both mind-numbingly inane, pointless exercises in hubris. On the plus side, at least they’re in color.

-In one interesting aside, Carlin throws out an analogy for the dysfunction of the Beatles by the late-60s. Lennon was the emotionally aloof, ne’er-do-well husband and father, McCartney the tidying mother blindly trying to make the best of everything, George Harrison the surly teenager, and poor Ringo Starr was the boy playing with the toy airplane in the backyard.

-Some have speculated that McCartney hired Mark David Chapman to assassinate Lennon. Because this sounds about right to me, those people are accurate. You can find more of my valid, provable ideas at www.911truth.org.

-McCartney’s relentless womanizing exploits as a young man were unsurprising (I’m shocked – SHOCKED – that the Beatles had sex with groupies!) but nonetheless pretty pathetic. He was a serial cheater, while also sure to instruct his girlfriends how to dress, wear their makeup, and behave (not unlike how he tended to direct his bandmates at times). His turnaround once he got involved with Linda is thus all the more remarkable. They were soulmates and basically inseparable for the three decades of their marriage. Admirably, they raised their kids in a stable, loving (and rich beyond imagination) family. All their kids went to neighborhood public schools and have turned out to be the sort of totally unembarrassing celebrity kids you don’t see much of.

-Putting the intelligent, but minimally musically-talented Linda McCartney in Wings was a totally reasonable decision with no downside, according to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

-Carlin’s passages describing Linda’s death from breast cancer in 1998 are incredibly moving. The real heartbreak, however, is following Paul’s heartbroken self-destruction blindly into a new marriage with Heather Mills, who turned out to be a lying, narcissistic bitch to the surprise of none of her ex-husbands.

-Paul McCartney is an animal-loving vegetarian, like my wife and Hitler.

-After avoiding playing many of his Beatles hits in concert, McCartney’s shows since 1989 have featured crisp performances of much of his Beatles material to the delight of his fans. In unrelated news, Paul McCartney enjoys money.

Let me make this clear off the bat – this book doesn’t come close to approaching the quality of the books I usually review on this site. It’s essentially a long essay by one of the industry’s most respected music critics about his long, secret love affair with the music of Neil Diamond. It’s part biography of Diamond (albeit a lazy one, recycling old quotes from just a handful of sources) and part apologetics. My credentials as a Neil Diamond fan are well-established. I don’t feel like I have to apologize about that anymore, especially since his remarkable post-2005 career renaissance.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from this short book:

-Wild’s essential argument: Diamond has written an incredible number of moody, melodic masterpieces, and done so completely on his own terms. Who else’s career mirrors his? Even in the his schmaltzy AOR era of the late 70s and 80s, Wild argues that Diamond essentially created that market, and artists like Barry Manilow, Lionel Richie, and Kenny Rogers followed. He contends (and I would agree) that the fact that he has never even been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is evidence of an elitist bias against Diamond’s unparalleled popular success.

-I saw Neil Diamond in concert in 1996 with my best friend from high school. We had front row seats, and we went so ballistic during “Shilo”, our favorite song, that he pointed at us and nodded. I’m not kidding about any of this. That might be one of my top 10 favorite experiences ever, along with getting married, growing a beard, and the Vikings’ dramatic last-second win on Sunday.

-Neil Diamond puts his form-fitting, glass-beaded pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us.

-Long before Wesley Snipes became America’s sweetheart, Neil Diamond regularly concluded his concerts by saying, “Thank you! Goodnight! Always bet on black!”

-Diamond’s childhood and adolescence struck me for how normal it was. After having read the eyebrow raising accounts of the childhood experiences of other entertainers like Groucho Marx, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Bono, it was somewhat anticlimactic to read about Neil Diamond growing up in a loving, middle class Jewish family in Brooklyn. I kept waiting for one of his parents to get nailed by a bus.

-Neil Diamond devised his hip-wiggling, eye-bulging stage moves after watching a dog suffer an epileptic seizure.

-Though I’d hardly characterize this book as revelatory, Diamond came across in this book as a grounded, agreeable guy with an intense devotion to his work. That intensity has driven him to regularly isolate himself while chasing down his musical goals, resulting in a few broken marriages (to his credit, Wild doesn’t attempt to whitewash this). At the same time, his loyalty is on display when one takes a look at his troupe of backing musicians and collaborators, nearly all of whom have been working with him for 30+ years.

-In addition to his prolific run of hits from 1968-1972 that included “Sweet Caroline”, “Cracklin’ Rosie”, “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” and “Play Me”, Neil Diamond also served as Richard Nixon’s embattled press secretary.

-Wild makes an argument that “America” is a genuinely great, heartfelt song celebrating the immigration experience of Diamond’s grandparents and so many others. However, patriotic American that I genuinely am, I still can’t really stomach the song. It’s just so blasted ham-fisted. (TODAY!)

-Neil Diamond is old enough to be my grandfather, yet still spry enough to elude me in a footrace down a private Malibu beach path.

Ellis has written a wonderful book that provides a large amount of insight into the motives and mindset of George Washington, a man whose austerity, dignity, and aloofness created an aura of authority and mystery around that has not dissipated with time. Rather than coming closer to knowing him over the subsequent years, Washington has remained as lifeless as an ivy-covered statue in our popular understanding. His Excellency is a great, eminently readable study of the personality and greatness of this remarkable man.

Here are a few highlights from the text:

-Ellis contends that Washington’s studied silence masked the fact that he wrestled with his own turbulent passions. Again and again, he to peels back layers of correspondence and to see Washington as a man determined to rise above his mammoth ambitions and ego to project a serene authority. The self-control and character he built in this fashion allowed him to serve and lead this fledgling nation out of its infancy in a way that probably no other man would have been able. Examples of his vigilant self-surrender serving as a benefit to a larger cause include his choosing to adopt a defensive posture midway through the Revolutionary War (against his own highly aggressive instincts), voluntarily surrendering all military and political authority at the conclusion of the war (for this reason, Americans should thank God that Washington was different than Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Lenin, Mao or any other man from history placed in a similar position), and his refusal to accept a third term as president (though he would certainly have won).

-Famously, Washington had wooden teeth. Less known is the fact that he also had wooden eyes.

-George Washington is alive and living in Boca Raton, Florida according to the drunken homeless man who wandered into traffic in front of my car last night.

-Out of Washington’s internal battles arose a tough-minded political realism. He understood innately that people and nations act not out of ideals but out of interest. He was never prone to sentimentalism or clouded by utopian visions like many of his contemporaries (Jefferson, most notably). For these reasons, he harbored no illusions about the reliability of volunteer militia regiments, he welcomed France’s involvement in the Revolutionary War only warily, he was an immediate skeptic of the weak central government of the Articles of Confederation, and he scoffed at the high-minded platitudes of the French Revolution. Washington’s understanding of the evil in himself attuned him to the evil in the world. As Ellis writes, his internal struggles “inoculated him against the grand illusion of the age, the presumption that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony once, in Diderot’s phrase, the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

-During cabinet meetings, George Washington would delight the rotund John Adams by tickling him. Sometimes Alexander Hamilton liked to join in, but he would often get too rough and the three men would have to be separated.

-Washington was not a particularly religious man. He attended church on occasion but did not take communion, and letters from him do not seem to reflect any reservoir of feeling or thought on the matter. If there was an overarching ethic to his life and attitudes, it wasn’t the Protestantism of his upbringing, but the older model of Roman stoicism – accepting of his Providential fate over and above his own desires.

-Late one night in a candlelit Philadelphia tavern, George Washington and Ben Franklin went to third base with each other. Of course, in 1700s terms, “third base” means “writing a respectful but affectionate note of correspondence.”

-On his death bed, Washington requested, “Someday, place my visage on a quarter-dollar coin, but make sure it looks like I’m not wearing a shirt.”

-One of the most fascinating themes in the book involves tracing the evolution of Washington’s thoughts on slavery (he owned over 300 slaves). Up until the Revolution, he appears to have never given the matter a second thought. During the war, the experience of commanding free black men under the banner of individual liberty awoke him from his numbness. Upon his return, he also became acutely aware of the economic problems and contradictions of slavery. He didn’t like the existence of slavery, or the fact that his hands were bloody in the mess, but true to form, he refused to allow it to become an issue of idealism or sentimentalism. He wrote to a friend of his intentions to “liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings” – yet he hesitated until he could do so in a way that made economic and pragmatic sense. That occasion did not arise until his death. His will specified that all slaves in his possession be freed, and that an education and financial support be provided to them. While we might wish for Washington to have made a more unambiguous moral statement about the question of slavery, such behavior would have been out of character for him.

-Washington was just over 6’3”, well above average for a man of his day. In fact, as a young man he briefly played power forward for the Williamsburg Continentals as a rebounding defensive specialist. He was an 18th century Mark Madsen.

If George Washington were alive today, the first thing he would say would be “let me fly a helicopter.”

The book sets out to be a study of the role Thomas Edison played in this sordid spectacle, but Edison the man remains just out of reach throughout the text. The reader knows the basics of his life and Essig’s suggestions about Edison’s ulterior business intentions seem to hold water, but by the last page the reader is no closer to understanding Edison himself. Essig occasionally leads the reader on wonkish detours into the world of 19th century electrical engineering and loses the Edison thread entirely on sections devoted to the New York state government’s move toward “death by electricity” in the late 1880s.

Despite this, the book is an illuminating, at times shocking (hilarious puns intended) look at the move toward a supposedly immediate, painless method of execution. Here are a few items of note from the text:

–

-Edison himself was opposed to the death penalty, believing it to be a barbaric relic of a bygone age. Why then was he involved (albeit in a sideways way) in the development of the electric chair? In part, he honestly believed that a proper electrocution would be instant, painless and thus more humane than hanging. At the same time, Edison was a ruthless businessman and saw an opportunity to cripple his biggest rival in the electrical business, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC) system had many advantages over Edison’s direct current (DC), but a noted disadvantage was the fact that AC was more dangerous. Edison was adamant that AC power be used in executions, hoping to link his rival’s product with death in the public’s mind.

-The term “electrocution” is something of a pop cultural mish-mash of a word that emerged as a public favorite over other suggestions like “electricide”, “electromort”, and “sittin’ on the brain-melter”.

-Each year, Chevy Chase electrocutes dozens of street cats hoping to remind passersby of the wacky holiday hijinks seen in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

-An untold number of stray dogs and old horses were killed in experiments measuring the voltage and electrode placement that would be appropriate to kill a human. Bizarrely, this was a matter of great fascination and amusement to the public, who still saw electricity as something of an untamed novelty. One of the earliest smash hit motion pictures in history was shot on a kinetoscope, Edison’s precursor to the film camera. This 1903 short was imaginatively titled The Electrocution of an Elephant, in which a circus elephant was electrocuted after it killed a human (watch it here). The film won eleven academy awards.

-In 1888, before a kneeling president Grover Cleveland, Thomas Edison publicly electrocuted a bald eagle, declaring, “Behold, America. I am your god now!”

-Thomas Edison was over eight feet tall.

-Essig’s accounts of the first uses of the electric chair are grim and sickening. Despite all the work and testing that went into the development of the chair, the prison warden in question had little idea what he was doing. The voltage supplied was too low and the currents weren’t applied long enough resulting in a horrific, agonizing death for the prisoners. Later electrocutions were less haphazard but often resulted in terrible burns and other disfigurements.

-In the heyday of the sensual 1970s, several Brooklyn strip clubs experimented with on-stage electric chairs, with gruesome results.

-In addition to the light bulb, recorded sound, and motion pictures, Thomas Edison invented laughter.

-Later in his life, Edison distanced himself from any involvement with the electric chair while delighting in any opportunity to talk about any other part of his incredible career as an inventor. His electrical company lost the battle of the currents with Westinghouse, and eventually merged with a third company (forming General Electric) allowing Edison himself to take a back seat in business affairs. Edison spent his last few decades as a relaxed celebrity ambassador of American innovation and industry.

-Edison liked to lick 9-volt batteries, telling reporters that he liked how the tingle made his sphincter clench up real tight. Reporters would then awkwardly look away.

The book is an illuminating reexamination of the life of Genghis Khan and his role in shaping the modern world by connecting distant cultural zones and setting the table for Europe’s Renaissance. Using new sources unveiled since the end of the Cold War, Weatherford goes a long way toward dispelling the myth of Genghis Khan, the bloodthirsty tyrant, ignorant of higher culture and knowledgeable only in killing and herding (a misconception this blog has occasionally furthered). I’d definitely recommend this book for somebody looking for a short text with plenty of adventure and historical analysis about a subject we Westerners are woefully ignorant of.

Here are a few notable tidbits gleaned from the book:

-Genghis Khan’s personality is difficult to gauge – so much has been written about him, but so little from a sympathetic perspective. In Weatherford’s text, he comes across as highly intelligent and intuitive, loyal (particularly to the women in his life), but also somewhat aloof. Certainly he was ruthless – how could one rise from an insignificant peasant to the most powerful world leader in history without being ruthless? The story of his rise to power is simply incredible.

-Genghis Khan himself propelled the Mongol and Tartar tribes from a cycle of perpetual sparring and kidnappings to unparalleled world conquest – this cannot be explained as a matter of impersonal geographical and climatological influences, as so many modern historians are wont to do. The reasons for Genghis’s actions stem from the kidnapping of his wife and the deep-rooted need to protect and avenge himself that grew out of it. Once he set his sights on a target (usually in retaliation against mistreatment of his envoys), he was better at achieving military victory than anybody else in history.

-Before descending into battle, Genghis Khan would ritualistically smell the earth, offer a prayer to the Eternal God of the Blue Sky, and pump his Reebok Pumps twenty times each.

-Though highly adaptable warriors, the Mongol weapon of choice was the bow and arrow. When pressed, however, they also liked to kill their enemies through their second-hand smoke.

-The reasons for the Mongol military success are numerous. First of all, they had the fastest, most mobile army in the world – it was their version of the blitzkrieg. Depending solely on their horses, Mongol armies needed no supply lines. They could survive on drinking horse blood and dried milk curd for days (as could I). Their armies were superbly organized and led, and their maneuvers were centuries ahead of their time. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they meant business. The Mongols under Genghis Khan were the most efficient killers of men the world had ever seen. They scared the living crap out of the known world, and many cities quickly opened their gates to them rather than fight.

-The Mongols lived a spartan life, even as conquerors. Most continued to live in their horsehair yurts, or tents, and ate a diet of primarily meat and dairy products. Also, like simple beasts of the field, they didn’t have cable television.

-If Genghis Khan were alive today, he would use a skateboard and an aluminum baseball bat to destroy the mall in San Diemas, California, while communicating in a series of grunts.

-For all their lethal killing power, the Mongols strongly sought to avoid unnecessary mutilations or disfiguring attacks because both were powerful taboos in their culture. Their conquests didn’t involve the stacking of heads, burning victims alive, or other such grotesque displays seen in Muslim or European wars. At the same time, they weren’t playing backgammon, either. Killing was a way of life for Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Life was cheap on the steppe.

-Genghis’s grandson Khubilai Khan became famous in his own right as the conqueror of China and head of the Yuan Dynasty. He also invented sucking maple syrup straight out of the bottle.

-Not much is known of Genghis Khan’s physical appearance, but ancient Persian historians wrote that he combined the grace and power of Charlemagne with the rugged vitality of Burt Reynolds.

-Genghis Khan was a remarkably tolerant and civil administrator of his empire. He decreed complete and total religious freedom for everyone under his rule. There was no historical precedent for this level of openness. Part of this was an intellectual openness and curiosity – he was interested in religious ideas and interreligious debate (Weatherford describes a lively debate between Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist priests for the Mongol leaders that devolved into drunkenness). Partly, it was a practical solution to the difficult matter of the incredible amount of religious diversity in the Mongol Empire. Lastly, it served another pragmatic purpose – when Mongol armies entered a new area, they immediately gained favor with the persecuted religious minorities they invariably came across.

-The Mongols bred their horses to be stocky and thick-haired, much like my father-in-law.

-Weatherford tracks the curious rise and fall of European opinion toward Genghis Khan throughout the centuries. In his lifetime and in the first centuries after, Europeans held him and the Mongols in quite high esteem as a result of the notably increased flow of new goods and wealth pouring in from Asia. During Europe’s Enlightenment and colonial period, however, sentiment turned sour as the prevailing narrative dictated the inherent superiority of European culture over the uncivilized peoples of Asia, Africa, and North America. Only in recent decades has Genghis Khan’s achievement been reexamined on its merits.

–The Mongols’ favorite curse insult was khorkonaag, a word that translates roughly as, “one who sniffs deep from a diseased mare’s withered anus.” A oft-used variant, knorkonaag-baatar, means “spaceship.”

Since falling in love with the music of the Beatles when I was 13, I’ve always harbored some ambivalent feelings toward Lennon. As a songwriter and musician, is influence is difficult to overstate; dozens of his songs (Beatles and solo) are dear to me. His best material crackles with his legendary humor and wit. Yet, stories of his surliness, his mammoth intake of drugs, his sometimes-bizarre relationship with Yoko Ono, and his fierce advocation of left-wing extremism often left me cold.

I picked up Norman’s well-reviewed, 815-page text in an effort to understand the man. It’s a long, strange trip, but well worth checking out. Ultimately, I came to feel that despite his many shortcomings and personal demons, Lennon was an endearing, engaging man worthy of such a study.

As always, here are some illustrative bits from the text:

-Lennon had a famous temper and, on many notable occasions, behaved like an asshole. Norman traces these behaviors to deep insecurities rooted his his traumatic childhood. His father (a merchant seaman) was often absent until being forced out of the picture by his mother’s family; his mother was a rebellious, irresponsible free spirit (much like her son) who proved unable to care for him. At age six, Lennon was perversely forced to choose between his parents (he chose his mother, and wouldn’t see his father again until he was an adult). Lennon was later raised by his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George, but kept some contact with his mother, albeit in a confused fashion – she behaved like a friendly, flirtatious older cousin to him (many people recount Lennon confessing sexual desires for his mother). Lennon’s Uncle George died when he was reaching adolescence, his mother died when he was 16, and his close friend and confidante (and one-time Beatle) Stu Sutcliffe died when he was in college. Unwinding this tightly-wound bundle of issues, Norman tries to paint a human side to Lennon’s adult blow-ups and irresponsibilities while recognizing the very real emotional destruction he often left in his wake.

-John Lennon bought his first real six-string at the five and dime and played until his fingers bleed during the summer of ’69. Also, he habitually cheated on his first wife before callously demanding a divorce.

-Lennon and McCartney are meaningless imbeciles compared to the unassailable character and entertaining skills of Michael Jackson. Hi folks, I’m the Rev. Al Sharpton.

-For most of his adult life, Lennon was earnestly in search of “the Answer” that would relieve him from his many neuroses and struggles from childhood. From the “illumination” of LSD, to Transcendental Meditation, to an obsessive relationship with Yoko Ono, to Primal Sceam Therapy, to left-wing extremism (advocating on behalf of the IRA and domestic revolutionary factions, among others). At each stage, he preached the gospel of his new awakening, only to cool off with the passage of time.

-The Lennon/McCartney songwriting collaberation was as much a competition as anything else. In fact, the song “I Am the Walrus” is mostly a coded message from John gloating that he drink a half-gallon of milk without puking.

-For all his years spent on stage with the Beatles from 1958-1966, Lennon suffered tremendous anxiety about live performances; his concert appearances in later years were a mix of exhilaration and terror. Also, he was afraid of big dogs with fangs and black, leathery wings who call us out by name.

-For all that’s been said about her over the years, Yoko Ono comes across in the text as a warm, intelligent, insightful woman (albeit in her own peculiar way). Norman argues convincingly that it was Lennon who initiated their whirlwind relationship and insisted on their intense level of constant companionship for four years – these parameters being a result of his own insecurities that he wrote about so honestly on “Jealous Guy”. Ono is certainly no angel, but it was illumninating to examine her beyond her long-demonized persona.

-On the other hand, she’s a succubus from the Orient who used her pagan wiles to break up the Beatles. Let’s get her!

-When Lennon grew out his hair and let his beard go nuts in the late 60s he looked like the Cowardly Lion, except in a pissed-off, heroin-addicted kind of way.

-Lennon finally found a measure of peace in the last five years of his life by devoting himself to family life. After the debauched craziness of his 14-month “Lost Weekend” (an Ono-enforced “pause” in their marriage), he became a doting househusband to his wife and son Sean. He stopped writing music, stopped giving interviews, and got off the merry-go-round, as he put it in one of his best songs. He became the father to Sean that he never was to his son Julian from his previous marriage (his behavior in that marriage and toward Julian was, frankly, pathetic). Tragically, when he emerged from this hiatus in 1980 with Double Fantasy, he was at the happiest, most contented point in his life. That ended, of course, in December of that year.

-Lennon’s cat Alice jumped to its death from their 7th floor apartment in the late 70s chasing a pigeon. According to my wife, this is not funny at all.

-John Lennon lives on in the music of Nickleback.

The text is a spare, compelling account of a bizarre 1876 attempt to hold Abraham Lincoln’s remains for ransom. The details of the heist itself aren’t enough to support a 200-page book, so Craughwell uses it to frame a vivid picture of America in the second half of the 19th century. He covers the crisis of counterfeited money following the Civil War, nativist Protestant resentment toward Irish Catholic immigrants, corrupt Chicago politics, and the development of the Secret Service. All these threads wind their way through the narrative of what happened to the remains of Abraham Lincoln. This is an eerie, haunted story that is sure to stick with me for a while. A fun read.

Here are some tidbits gleaned from the text. Do not bother to question them.

-The heist was a poor attempt by a ring of Chicago counterfeiters to secure a pardon for an imprisoned business partner, along with $200,000. They planned to break into Lincoln’s loosely-guarded monument in Springfield, IL, and remove his casket from the marble sarcophagas it had been placed in 11 years earlier. The grave-robbers managed to break in and had started to remove the casket from the sarcophagas when they were discovered. The entire endeavor had been amateurish and ill-advised; the kidnappers’ litany of mistakes would be more humorous if they hadn’t come so close to successfully desecrating Lincoln’s remains.

-A parallel scheme to kidnap the bones of Chex, Lincoln’s cat, failed when it was revealed that Chex was still alive, and was also not a cat at all, but Lincoln’s human son Robert.

-If Lincoln’s grave desecrators were alive today, they’d be blown away by our iPods and HDTVs. Then they’d go and desecrate Gerald Ford.

-The hero of Craughwell’s story is a man named John Carroll Power, the original custodian and self-appointed guardian of the Lincoln Monument in Springfield. Traumatized by the break-in, Power dedicated himself for the remainder of his life to protecting the remains of the Lincoln family.

-In a interesting historical curio, it is believed that President Andrew Jackson was never buried. Rather, he ascended into heaven on a cloud powered by Manifest Destiny where he punched St. Peter in the crotch to gain admission.

-Sometimes Abraham Lincoln watches me when I take baths.

-As a result the chaos following the break-in, and the ongoing structural problems of the monument itself, Lincoln’s coffin was kept in the corner of the monument’s basement under a pile of lumber for several years. Power and several trusted associates later secretly buried Lincoln’s remains in a shallow corner of the basement for several more years until a more suitable solution could be found.

-Barack Obama is also from Illinois, and is also good at giving speeches, and is also the greatest president since Lincoln or FDR, whichever one came later. I am an editor at Newsweek magazine.

-Troubled by fears that their efforts to protect Lincoln’s remains had failed, Power and several others took it upon themselves to actually open the coffin to positively identify the body in 1887. Later, in 1901, just before Lincoln was lowered to his final resting place, the coffin was opened for a final time. In both instances, onlookers were started at the remarkable preservation of Lincoln’s body (the result of the heavy embalming efforts utilized for the month-long funeral procession from Washington to Springfield back in 1865). His face was immediately recognizable, though the color of his skin had darkened as a result of the shattering of his skull. The men remarked that it was like looking at a bronze bust of Lincoln rather than the man itself. After the viewing in 1901, the lead coffin was sealed shut once again, placed in a cedar casket, and lowered into a concrete-sealed tomb below the monument where he has lain ever since.

-Dairy Queen’s Blizzard flavor of the month for July is Lincolndust.

For those stridently unwilling to look at the above image, the book’s subtitle is “How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think” – basically, Hanson takes three notable battles (Okinawa, Shiloh, and Delium) and traces their cultural impact across history. It’s a good formula for some grim battle accounts mixed with fun counterfactual supposition and broad historical theory. Hanson has crafted a lively, brisk read that I highly recommend to anyone interested in the field of military history, novice or otherwise. It isn’t close to the heavy lifting of Hanson’s more recent A War Like No Other (which I reviewed here).

As always, here are some interesting notes from the text:

-The Battle of Okinawa (1945) was America’s first encounter with organized suicide attacks, and these particular “ripples of battle” are clearly seen in today’s world. Hanson chillingly recounts the strategies of Japan’s military clique in sending out thousands of its men on missions of no return against foreign devils. More significantly, he charts the noteworthy failure of these attacks to achieve their intended goals. Rather than terrify the U.S. army into a queasy submission, the attacks dehumanized the Japanese soldiers in the eyes of American servicemen. Moreover, their attacks were increasingly met with the full might and fury of the Western, industrial way of war. Now, rather than attempt to ferret out Japanese soldiers from the caves of Okinawa, Americans simply blowtorched the caves and asked questions later. Now, rather than engage in a prolonged, blood-soaked invasion of the island of Japan itself, Truman gave the go-ahead to use the A-bomb. Hanson argues that even thousands of suicide attackers are no match at all for Western warfare; instead, suicide attacks only serve the purpose of worsening the inevitable defeat.

-Mr. Miyagi fought in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team comprised of Japanese-Americans fighting for the U.S. against Nazi Germany. In an equally plausible development, as a 60-year old man, simultaneously beat up 5 teenagers in the mid-1980s.

-The Battle of Delium (424 BC) marked perhaps the first use of military tactics like massed columns, reserves, & elite mounted attack units. It also marked the first use of the tactic known as “using sharp things to harm one’s opponent”. (Prior to Delium, most battles were fought by snapping towels at people.)

-Socrates himself fought at Delium, and fought well. At the conclusion of the battle, he is said to have exclaimed, “Spring break ’99!”.

-In his study of the Battle of Shiloh (1862), Hanson focuses on the actions of two Confederate notables – General Albert Sydney Johnston and Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Johnston, at the time the preeminent military leader in the South (more acclaimed even than Lee), died in peculiar fashion after leading a charge. Forrest established his reputation as a feared, courageous maverick with his defiant, astounding behavior. Hanson argues that the legacy of these two men, forged at Shiloh, would do much to create the Myth of the Lost Cause, where the ultimate loss of the Confederacy came down to the mysterious path of a stray bullet or two, or the inability of stubborn leaders to earlier recognize the brilliance of Forrest. This myth gave tremendous power in the Southern minds to the words, “If only…”, and “What if…”, allowing them to cling to their claim that theirs were the better men, theirs was the better cause, and theirs was the proper victory. This belief would make far worse the bitter, acrimonious years of Reconstruction. Hanson demonstrates instead that the South had simply (and poorly) fought an incredibly unwise war against a far stronger, wealthier nation to protect the interests of its wealthy landowners.

-William Tecumseh Sherman made a name for himself with his swift, effective leadership at Shiloh. This was vindication after having lost to George McClellan on America’s Next Top Union General in 1861 on BTN (the Barley Thresher Network).

-Sherman’s beard was not full-bodied, like Santa Claus or Rasputin. Instead, his was neatly-trimmed, like Commander Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Unlike Commander Riker, however, Sherman killed a whole bunch of Indians.

-Hanson ends the book with a vigorous epilogue on the terrible, often arbitrary nature of battle itself. In 1986, a UN panel decreed that war was an aberration in human history. Hanson argues instead that the classical understanding of war as a tragic, propelling, necessary force in human culture and progress is more apt and accurate in understanding today’s world. As the New York Times noted in its review, Hanson’s philosophy is not for the faint-hearted, but it is utterly compelling.

-On one hand, freedom isn’t free; but on the other hand, no blood for oil. Think about it.

-To this day, people still lay flowers at the many monuments to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest across the South. In an unrelated development, Paul Blart: Mall Cop is the 4th highest-grossing film of 2009 thus far.

While not a comprehensive, scholarly work, the book is a brisk, compelling read. Swanson’s prose is occasionally a bit grandiose, and he’s prone to more than a bit of speculation, but the book remains a page-turning, action-packed volume that I’d strongly recommend to anybody even remotely interested in the topic. (Read Ochuk’s excellent review here).

Here are a few notable tidbits gleaned from the text:

-Booth picked a motley crew of conspirators for his plan to decapitate the restored nation’s government. David Herold was an immature 22 year old who idolized Booth, with little will of his own. Lewis Powell went berzerk in his attempt to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, disfiguring the Secretary, nearly beating Seward’s son to death with the butt of his pistol, and stabbing three others (Booth himself was appalled at the grisly details when he read them). George Atzerodt was a dim-witted German who managed to bumble his way to the gallows along with the rest of Booth’s accomplices.

-Lincoln’s last words were, “This play would make a really good movie.”

-Booth’s mustache has been preserved in formaldehyde so that future generations can appreciate its fullness and fine grooming.

-The famous scene of Booth’s last stand at Garrett’s Farm in Virginia is revealed by Swanson to be something of a joke. The Cavalry regiment appeared to be stunningly unprepared to actually find Booth, and botched much of the job, like a gang of Keystone Cops. After a series of inept, halting negotiations, they eventually just lit the tobacco barn on fire. Failing to give orders to their men, it should have come as no suprise that one enterprising soldier pointed his gun through a crack and shot Booth through the neck.

-While Booth and Herold were hiding out in a Maryland pine thickett for four days, it is believed that Booth invented Christian rap.

-Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, directed the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. He had a beard and could not tell time.

-The soldier who shot Booth was an odd duck named Boston Corbett. A high religious man, he adopted the name Boston after the city where he was baptized. In shame after having been tempted by a woman of the night, Corbett took it upon himself to cut out his own testicles. (It’s too bad for Boston Corbett the books of Joshua Harris weren’t around back then.)

-Booth was apparently “double dared” to kill Lincoln by his older brother Edwin Booth.

-Booth lived about two strange, agonizing hours after he was shot and paralyzed. Union soldiers dragged him to the farmhouse porch and propped him up, where commanders carefully documented his last words, in hopes that he might reveal that he was part of some conspiracy they could tie to the Confederate government. He had halting conversations asking how they caught him, and while he was still conscious they searched his pockets and rummaged through his belongings.

-Judging by the many photographs and contemporary accounts of Booth’s appearance, scholars believe he probably used Pert Plus.

-Lewis Powell’s head was removed by an undertaker when his body was disinterred in 1869. The skull was actually discovered in the Smithsonian Anthropology Department (as “Specimen Number 2244″) in 1992. The skull was reunited with the rest of his body and given a Christian burial next to the remains of his mother in 1994. (not kidding)

-In the late 1986s, General Mills experimented with a new cereal they were going to call, “J.W. Booth’s Satisfactory Grain Pellets”, a rooty, millet-based cereal to be marketed to history buffs and Confedrerate sympathizers. The project was abandoned in favor of Wackies.

-Inexplicably, Booth’s horse was named Abraham Lincoln, Part II.

The book is excellent, and while it requires a bit of understanding of the period, Morris’s breezy detail paints a vivid picture of TR the man, and the tornado of excitement that defined the presidency of the man his political opponents called “that damned cowboy.”

Here are a few facts that stuck with me from the text:

-One of TR’s cabinet members described him as “pure act”. The sheer vitality of the man was a shocking change from the expected behavior of a proper Victorian gentlemen, like the men who had preceded him in office. A historian described him by saying, “no matter who you were, TR was the most exciting man you’d ever met.” A few actual examples of his incredible physical exuberance:

-He once interrupted a cabinet meeting in order to demonstrate his ability to jump over a chair.
-On May 28th, 1902, he was seen hanging from a cable over the Potomac, presumably in some effort to toughen his wrists.
-France’s ambassador to the U.S. once found Roosevelt in his office, lying on his couch and kicking his feet into the air. TR continued their brief conversation without stopping this bizarre exercise (seriously, this is not a joke).
-A newspaper photographer snapped a couple shots of TR on horseback jumping over obstacles. TR was so “dee-lighted” that he ordered prints for himself, and distributed autographed versions of them to his cabinet.

Regarding this, a British commissioner close to Roosevelt explained to his peers, “you must always remember that the President is about six.”

-TR liked to watch dogs get ready to barf. Once the pitiable beast had vomited up his supper, Roosevelt would flash his teeth and exclaim, “That was bully!”

-Roosevelt was never referred to as “Teddy” to his face. He preferred the nickname “Dutch Apple Pancake Spaceman”.

-TR was one of America’s greatest scholar presidents. He published eighteen books on topics like history, exploration, and ornithology (people noted that one of the only times TR could be caught standing still was when standing under a tree staring up at birds).

-Roosevelt’s mustache tickled when he kissed you on the lips.

-Among Roosevelt’s remarkable list of presidential achievements:

-Turning the plan for the Panama Canal from a lifeless quagmire to a reality.
-Winning the Nobel Peace Prize for deftly negotiating a peace treaty between Japan and Russia.
-A great conservationist, he saved the Grand Canyon from mining companies and created five national parks and eighteen national monuments by executive order in a time when there was no legislative appetite for such action.
-He strengthened America’s global strength, particularly regarding his great passion, the navy. He pushed until the U.S. Navy ranked second in the world only to Great Britain, and sent his “Great White Fleet” on a worldwide tour of goodwill (and in a few cases like Japan, U.S. power).

-TR was a ferocious tennis player, and liked to shout out slogans from the French Revolution when he played (again, not a joke).

-If Roosevelt were alive today, he would be a mid-level software engineer living in Glendale, Arizona.

-TR was a really great husband and father. A happy, jubilant man, he was constantly grabbing and kissing his children, and celebrated over their achievements. As Morris notes, he was dangerous with his fun, delighting in telling harsh, roaring ghost stories; tackling and tickling his kids whenever the mood struck him. His oldest daughter Alice (from his first wife, who died after giving birth) inherited her father’s rebellious independence. When officials or staff would complain to him about Alice’s behavior, he told them, “I can either be president or control Alice, I cannot do both.”

-When TR was a student at Harvard, he was pretty into Dave Matthews Band for a while.

-Liberals sometimes like to claim TR as a socialist, which is a lazy load of crap. Certainly, among his greatest achievements was reaching a détente in America’s long-simmering labor unrest, and strengthening government’s ability to break up trusts that failed to serve the public interest. Ever the moderate, however, TR had no quarrel with trusts that operated fairly and effectively.

-While summering in his Long Island home, Roosevelt invented Dentyne Ice.

-Toward the end of his second term, TR showed signs of strain as his impetuousness and quarrelousness with Congress started to become exaggerated. Despite this, he would certainly have been elected overwhelmingly in 1908 to a third term had he chosen to run. Roosevelt though, insisted on keeping pledge not to run in 1908 that he made in the throes of his 1904 victory.

-Roosevelt enjoyed chasing squirrels across the White House grounds (the fluffier the tail, the better). When he caught them, he would snap their neck with his bare hands and eat them raw as horrified congressional leaders looked on.

-TR’s diet consisted mostly of raw squirrels and frosting.

-TR was the first truly modern president. He summoned more executive power than any president since Lincoln by using his remarkable personality and popularity with the masses to set an ambitious agenda for the legislature. Preceding presidents (as well as his successor, Fat Bill Taft) let Congress take the lead and took business as it crossed their desk. The presidencies of FDR, LBJ, Reagan, and Bush are unimaginable without TR’s lead.

-TR was, in all ways, a Chipotle burrito in human form.

Shlaes’ basic premise is that while FDR’s New Deal had its successes, its biggest impact was in prolonging and exacerbating the nation’s economic crisis. In her words, the New Deal helped make the Depression Great. For a novice in economics like myself, spells of the book were tough sledding, but the bulk of the book was gripping and clear-eyed. Its lessons are certainly noteworthy in the times we live in. (Shlaes has an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post on this exact topic here)

A few interesting bits gleaned from the text:

-Shlaes again and again returns to the point that the depression was so prolonged because government tinkering and experimental new policies discouraged business growth. Wages were artificially inflated to protect workers, prices and rates were held artificially low to protect consumers, “fairness” regulations made operations unwieldy, and skyrocketing taxes on profit and income punished risk-takers. In his second inaugural address, Roosevelt addressed these policies with the in-no-way-frightening passage: “We are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a morally better world.” The result? Profit margins narrowed, new jobs dried up, and entrepreneurs sat on their money rather than invest it in such uncertain times. Recovery would have to wait for World War II.

-Apparently everyone wore hats during the Great Depression.

-During long cabinet meetings, FDR liked to make sketches in his notepad. Those sketches later became the basis for Sonic the Hedgehog.

-In fall 1937, after four full years of New Deal policy, too much hope deferred led to another economic collapse, similar to 1929. The Dow hit a new low of 129, unemployment topped 18%, and many of the short-term public works jobs dried up. Many industrialized nations had seen production levels rise since the worldwide collapse of the early 30s, but not the U.S. Today’s New Deal apologists blame this collapse on misguided efforts to scale back spending and balance the budget – balanced budgets being so unreasonable, and all.

-There’s an old saying that provides some telling insight into this period, “the Depression wasn’t that bad if you had a job.” Well, that’s true, unless your job is to lick an elephant’s butthole clean.

-In a wrongheaded attempt to win public and judicial support for the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration (which set in place many misguided business codes intended to protect the public good), government prosecutors looked for a lawsuit that might show the merits of the NRA. When few examples showed up, they ended up going after the Schechter brothers, owners of a small Jewish poultry shop in Brooklyn. The sight of the assembled legal might of the presidency going after a 5-man kosher chicken operation would have been comical had it not been so unjust to the Schechters. The charges of selling unfit meat were dropped with the exception of the case of a single chicken, and even in that case, there was no evidence that the brothers sold it knowingly. Government prosecutors also accused the Schechters of ignoring the NRA’s price codes. Court transcripts show the Schechters trying in vain to justify the concept of market competition to lawyers pre-occupied with misguided notions fairness and price controls. The case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the NRA was ruled unconstitutional, a major defeat for the New Deal.

-18% unemployment isn’t really all that bad, if you think about it.

-During his tumultuous second term, a beleaguered FDR appointed the Rocketeer to be Secretary of the Treasury.

-One of Roosevelt’s many redeeming qualities was his frank perceptiveness regarding the growing problems of fascism and totalitarianism in the 1930s. Where the Republicans of the day were a decades-old skipping record of isolationist policy and anti-foreign sentiment, Roosevelt clearly understood the growing threat the Hitler, Mussolini, and to a lesser extent, Stalin posed. At the same time, he did not share the starry-eyed idealism for totalitarianism and communism that some members of his own cabinet espoused. Roosevelt was of his own mind on those matters, and history has vindicated him. He is a great and important president for his handling of world affairs, not necessarily for his economic policies.

-FDR enjoyed a solid rapport with Winston Churchill, and the two engaged in a best-of-three arm-wrestling competition for friends and family which Roosevelt won. Churchill, enraged, challenged FDR to a leg-wrestling match, and triumphed easily.

-I’m just going to come right out and say it: Eleanor Roosevelt was not an attractive woman. She was mule-ugly.

-Despite the slow rate of recovery, Roosevelt was a masterful politician who celebrated easy re-election victories because of his new Democratic coalition of farmers, labor unions, immigrants, and the poor (sound familiar?). Roosevelt re-calibrated an old phrase into a winning one, promising to help “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid”. Roosevelt’s forgotten man was, as Shlaes puts it, “the poor man, the old man, labor, or any other recipient of government help” (including all those new receiving checks from the new Social Security program). The perverse irony of Roosevelt fashioning victory on the votes of the “forgotten man” can be understood when the phrase is read in its original context from the late 19th century Yale philosopher William Graham Sumner:

“As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be from, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X. But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, the man who is never thought of.”

-On Christmas Eve, 1940, Roosevelt invented the snowman. He later had that same snowman melted down into a refreshing pitcher of raspberry lemonade. Then he drank the snowman and peed him into the White House toilet. The tormented soul of that snowman haunts the sewer systems of Washington D.C. to this very day. That snowman’s name? Mr. Plops.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It moved me to tears on a number of occasions, and I came away from it with a deepened appreciation of the political and literary gifts, as well as the moral goodness of Abraham Lincoln, whatever his flaws. It’s a realistic, yet inspiring read.

Here are some selected tidbits from the text you might find interesting:

-Lincoln had a naturally melancholy temperament, and in many ways seemed to internalize the unbearable weight of the nation’s struggles. At the same time, he was a gregarious storyteller with a sharp, lively sense of humor. An illustrative passage from the book reveals an intimate portrait of Lincoln from the perspective of a visiting French ambassador:
“On first impression, he ‘left you with a sort of impression of vague and deep sadness.’ Yet he ‘was quite humorous,’ often telling hilarious stories and laughing uproariously. ‘But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes and all his features would at once bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep.’”

-Abraham Lincoln’s best friend was a blue ox named Babe.

-Lincoln was regularly criticized by Radical Republican abolitionists for his perceived hesitancy to press the slavery issue. Goodwin takes great pains to paint the political deftness needed to assuage the Radicals, keep the slaveholding border states like Maryland and Kentucky in the Union, & pacify conservative Democrats, and even Southerners (with eye toward eventual reunification). In the end, Lincoln moved on the slavery issue as he did with all weighty problems – with great deliberation and wisdom. He said that while he could be criticized for being slow to make a decision, he never wanted to be known to go back on a promise. The promises made by his administration – the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment (abolishing slavery) – were as powerful and hard-fought as any ever made by this government.

-Lincoln once instigated a barroom brawl before getting away in a rusty pickup with his loyal orangutan sidekick.

-Among Lincoln’s many nicknames were “Honest Abe”, “The Railsplitter”, and “Old Muttonsleeves”

-Lincoln exasperated Stanton, his Secretary of War, by making regular use of presidential pardons when it came to military punishments for cowardice or desertion. He made a point to offer clemency in all cases, except “where meanness or cruelty were shown.” Perhaps reflecting the same character elements, he spoiled his children, allowing his young son Tad to constantly interrupt important cabinet sessions.

-Abraham Lincoln really enjoyed Brokeback Mountain, except for that one part…

-I share many similarities with Lincoln; namely, we are both 6’5”, bearded, and quick with a joke. However, Abraham Lincoln never had a blog. How do you like me now?

-Lincoln very nearly lost the 1864 election. Peace Democrats (then known as Copperheads) ran on a platform of seeking immediate peace by ending the war on terms agreeable to the South. Though some Democrats differed on what those terms might be, they would certainly have involved repeal of the Emancipation Proclamation and a return of slavery to the Southern states. Their charges were laden with racist claims that what once had been a noble war for Union had become a “war for the negro.” I would offer that their near-success is a healthy reminder that while peace itself is a worthy end, the costs of such compromise must always be considered.

-Lincoln invented holding your breath.

-Lincoln disliked butterscotch candy and slavery.

-Lincoln showed an extraordinary ability to disregard the many offenses and attacks he faced as president. Time and time again, he extended forgiveness and favor toward those who maligned him (particularly Salmon Chase, his Treasury Secretary, who essentially ran a presidential campaign against Lincoln while in Lincoln’s cabinet). While some historians have claimed that this represented some flaw of passivity in Lincoln’s character, Goodwin effectively argues that these acts instead reflect his ability to set aside his feelings for the good of the nation. Salmon Chase was, after all, an excellent Treasury Secretary.

-Lincoln’s likeness appears on the penny, the five dollar bill, and thanks to my new branding iron, my cat’s anus.

A few noteworthy items from the text:

-This destructive 27-year war, which brought an end to Greece’s cultural apex, had its roots in Athenian arrogance. Though Athens was undoubtedly the hearth of Greek culture and art, the home of its most famed intellectual heroes, and the most powerful of all the city-states, its domineering attitude toward other Greeks proved to be its downfall. The so-called Delian League of city-states was actually little more than an Athenian Empire that Athens used to (somewhat ironically) enforce its democratic ideals against the will of monarchical or oligarchic city-states. Sparta, sensing that the Athenians were corrupting traditional Greek ideals of autonomy and a balance of power, launched an invasion against the Athenians. This history is a good warning for we as Americans to heed.

-Socrates approved of the modern world of San Dimas, CA.

-The Peloponnesian War was an utterly destructive one for the Greeks. It featured civilian deaths on a scale unseen- in classical history, a terrifying plague that ravaged Athens, scattered civil wars across the countryside, and sea battles that killed tens of thousands in minutes. All in all, about a third of the population of Athens and Sparta was killed – in modern America, the equivalent would be over 100 million people.

-Historians agree that if the ancient Greeks had ever tried a Pop-Ice, they would have shit themselves.

-The Athenian national anthem was actually “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits.

-Athens’ famed democracy played a complex role in the long conflict. While the democratic virtue of civic involvement made all men feel invested in the war and willing to personally take up arms, the people of Athens were also grossly impatient for ultimate victory. All citizens were valued, so the loss of any in a battle was considered a grave offense that Athenian generals were to be held accountable for. In an excellent example of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, many of their best military leaders or tacticians were banished or executed.

-Bush lied, Athenians died.

-Greek men had cool names like Aristarchus, Xenophon, Demosthenes, and “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase.

-Greek triremes (pictured above) were brutally destructive, yet cumbersome weapons of war. They operated like a javelin on the water, designed to build up great straight-line speed and ram into enemy ships. Over 200 men were crammed into each ship, with three levels of rowers working like clockwork. The men on the bottom rowed in sitting water in excruciating heat below decks with sweat, urine, and worse draining from the men above them. When triremes received a direct hit, they could sink in a matter of moments, which usually meant that nearly all the men aboard would be killed.

-The Greeks, like all ancient societies, had slaves, but slavery isn’t really that bad if you think about it.

-In addition to their innovations of democracy, philosophy, and theater, the Greeks invented kissing with tongue.

Here are a few bits of insight gleaned from this fine book:

-In the defeats at Long Island, the Battle of Brooklyn, and Fort Washington, George Washington was indecisive and, at times, timid to act. During the second half of 1776, a chorus of disapproval rose against the previously unassailable general, including voices from his own inner circle of military leaders. However, experience proved a fine education, and by the end of the year, Washington proved able to pounce on fleeting windows of opportunity.

-George Washington enjoyed tickling the rotund John Adams, but John Adams didn’t like it. One time, when Washington was tickling him in front of the guys, Adams swore at him really loud and suddenly everybody got really quiet. Washington never tickled anybody again.

-The audaciousness of the American hopes in 1776 is remarkable given the string of defeats suffered at the hands of the British. The Colonial Army was routed in its defense of New York in the Battles of Brooklyn and Long Island, and over 2,000 Americans were taken prisoner in the defeat of Fort Washington. Furthermore, thousands of soldiers were incapacitated by smallpox and other illnesses, and desertion was commonplace. Meanwhile, the British were offering generous terms of political forgiveness to all those willing to come forward and pledge loyalty to the king (which many thousands did). From August to December of 1776, only a fool would have held onto much optimism in the American cause.

-The Battle of Trenton was exactly like the final 30 minutes of Rambo, except without any Asians.

-The famous painting of Washington crossing the Deleware (seen above) though certainly a bit too melodramatic, portrays a major turning point in American history, and a moment of unlikely triumph for the Washington’s army. It was Christmas night, 1776. His troops were physically exausted and mentally beleaguered by defeat. Washington chose to launch a suprise dawn attack on the city of Trenton, which was held by 1,500 Hessian mercenary soldiers. Aware that most of his mens’ enlistments were going to run out in a matter of days, and that morale across the colonies had reached a low point, he felt that a dramatic move was necessary to avert a total American collapse. Washington’s men crossed the icy river at dark, marched through blizzard conditions through the night (at least two men died of hypothermia), and suprised the Hessians with an attack about an hour after dawn on December 26th. The attack was a rout – the Hessian commander was shot and killed, and over 900 were taken prisoner. Some accounts claimed that the Hessians were drunk or hung over that morning, though this is contradicted by a number of other soldiers. Suffice it to say, this victory gave renewed hopes to the army, the congress, and the Americans, and kept alive the dream of an independent United States.

-BRING THE TROOPS HOME!

-One time, George Washington rode into Philadelphia on a donkey and everybody cried out “Hosanna in the highest!” as they laid down cloaks and palm leaves in his path, (though palm trees are not indigenous to the region and nobody knew where the leaves came from).

-Regarding the dramatic, emphatic reversal of fortune Washington led between Christmas day and January 3rd, McCullough cites British historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan, who wrote, “It may be doubted whether so small a number of men ever employed so short a space of time with greater and more lasting effects upon the history of the world.”

-Washington was probably the finest horseman in the colonies and an elite athlete, having won the 1771 Slam Dunk Competition.

-Commanding British General William Howe was a decorated soldier with an occasional predilection for inaction. He also smoked crack.

-Washington’s great strength, emphasized again and again by McCullough, was in his steady perserverence, and his ability to see things exactly as they were, not as he wished or feared them to be. These qualities blessed him with an uncommon mildness and strength that his men clearly drew inspiration from. He also got to wear an awesome uniform while a lot of the soldiers were lucky to have shoes.

-After achieving victory at the Battle of Princeton, General Nathanael Green remarked to Washington, “Sir, one day your face will be printed on the dollar bill,” to which Washington replied, “What the hell is a dollar?”

It was published in 1978, at a time when many of the book’s major figures were still alive to be interviewed (the ones who hadn’t killed themselves, at least). As one might expect, the material was dense, dark, and disturbing.

A few items of note from the text:

-Hitler’s father Alois was born illegitimate, a heavy social stigma in those days. Until well into adulthood, he went by his mother’s name as Alois Schicklgruber, before later adopting his stepfather’s surname Hitler. This is noteworthy for two reasons – one, it would provide fodder for lingering rumors (still unsubstantiated) that Hitler had Jewish ancestry; and two, Hitler is probably lucky that his father was allowed to adopt a new name, as “Heil Schicklgruber!” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

-As a child, Hitler was regularly beaten by his father, and spoiled by his doting mother, which played no small part in the creation of his violent, narcissistic personality.

-As a teen, Hitler had fun, fun, fun till his daddy took the T-Bird away.

-It is believed that Hitler could count to a million.

-Many found Adolf Hitler to be a lazy, somewhat disagreeable youth. Though gifted, he showed little interest in others, and when conversational topics failed to involve or interest him, he grew sullen and detached. Throughout his life, his closest friends were those who indulged Hitler’s sense of his own genius by listening to him expound at length on topics of choice. (Incidentally, an interesting exception to this was during the final few years of his life, when Hitler seemed to enjoy disputes with military generals willing to forcefully defend their point of view, rather than offer meek objections.)

-Hitler composed the hit song “Under the Sea” for Disney’s animated feature The Little Mermaid.

-George W. Bush is exactly like Hitler.

-Hitler’s mother died of cancer when he was 18. In her final stages, she was cared for by a Jewish doctor who went to great lengths to save her. Hitler showed extraordinary tenderness toward this man for years. His mother’s death instilled in Hitler a lifelong fear of cancer – he seemed to spend his adult days in the constant belief that he had only a few years left before cancer would kill him.

-Hitler was a vegetarian, animal loving, neat-freak, like my wife Bridgette. Unlike my wife, however, he was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. Everybody’s different.

-As a young man, Hitler displayed no unusual level of anti-semitism for a person of that day and age. He later traced his virulent anti-semitism back to his days as a teen in Vienna, though there is little evidence to corroborate this. Instead, it appears that his racist attitudes can be traced to the bitter end of World War I, and the German capitulation and collapse that he blamed on leftist Jewish politics.

-Hitler loved studying architecture. He also loved nachos, as long as they weren’t Jewish nachos.

-Hitler seems to have lived a largely asexual adult life. He had no romantic relationships to speak of as a young man (save for the odd encounter with a prostitute, which some scholars speculate left him with unchecked syphillis leading to his eventual dementia), and later seems to have only half-heartedly involved himself with a mistress here and there. Of course, he eventually married his longtime mistress Eva Braun two days before killing himself, so that ended well.

-One time, Hitler bumped into Indiana Jones (who was dressed as a Nazi), and he autographed Indy’s grail diary without realizing what it was.

-During his final weeks in his bunker underneath Berlin, Hitler liked to spend his days being racist playing Skip-Bo.

-It is believed that Hitler’s last words were, “Who ate all the beef jerky? Seriously you guys, I was saving that!”

At 204 pages, it’s a brisk read, and he got so engrossed in it that he had read it by the following morning. Intrigued, I borrowed it and quickly finished it off in similar fashion. It’s a witty, insightful book worthy of the vaunted JLP Stamp of Approval.

Here are a few interesting tidbits I gleaned from the book:

As a teenager, Steve’s act was a vaudevillian routine replete with magic tricks and banjo performances. He borrowed musty jokes from professional magicians to help pad his act, though in time he came to focus more on comedy, using magic and his banjo-playing to supplement the gags.

Martin lost his virginity at age 18 with his girlfriend Stormie Sherk, who would later get married and become Stormie Omartian, the inspirational Christian author of best-selling titles like The Power of a Praying Wife (I’m not kidding). No matter what I experience in 2008, that will be the single most bizarre factoid I come across this year.

During the peak of his popularity, Martin insisted on being paid in emeralds. He later traded his emeralds straight-up for a 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass.

Steve recorded a ripping banjo solo for Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” that the band later erased, citing creative differences.

Early in his career, he was a writer on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. As an introduction to one sketch, he wrote, “Ladies and gentlemen, it has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance.”

Martin’s father was Leopold III, once the crown prince of Prussia. He worked in a lumber yard in Inglewood, California.

Steve Martin taught David Beckham how to bend it. He also taught Victoria Beckham how to make her skin look like a baseball glove.

His comedy act turned the corner when he began experimenting with a type of anti-comedy using heavy doses of irony, intentionally empty punch lines, and a strangely indefatigable sense of enthusiasm. Audiences were initially unsure of what they were watching was terrible or hilarious.

Steve Martin is currently employed as the General Manager of the Atlanta Hawks.

In 1977, Martin and Dan Akroyd were caught doing cocaine and straddling feral cats behind SNL’s stage.

Martin quit standup in 1981, when his popularity had grown to staggering proportions (20,000 people per show) following a long string of television appearances on SNL and The Tonight Show. Unable to experiment with new material in front of such massive audiences, he felt trapped running through catchphrases and routines that his fans seemed to already know by heart.

Steve Martin died in 1986.

Time to read a book like Cool Cos: The Story of Bill Cosby.

This weighty, 138-page tome was published in 1969 and remains the finest, most scholarly overview of the comedic giant’s life available to the public. It is believed by this author that this book won 11 Academy Awards in March 1970, even though no film adaptation of it was ever produced or considered.

A few nuggets of valuable gleaned from the book…

Bill Cosby was born a black child in Philadelphia.

Cosby dropped out of high school, though his IQ was high enough to gain him admission into prestigious private schools. He blamed this failure on a lack of effort on his part.

Atop a blackened mountain in 1964, Bill Cosby destroyed the Fire Queen by stabbing her with a sharpened Amulet of Avercorn. He later turned this into a beloved comedy routine where he made funny faces.

After passing an equivalency exam for his GED, Cosby was a star athelete at Temple University, where he majored in physical education.

Cosby was homeless and destitude from the years 1974-1996. During that time, it is believed that he lost most of his teeth and he earned what little money he had by fighting feral dogs to the death and starring in a family sitcom of some repute.

Cosby was cast as the co-star of the hit television series I Spy, making him the first African-American lead in a television drama series in American history.

Cosby’s mother described him as always being at the center of attention as a child because of his wacky antics.

Before going on stage to perform, Bill Cosby eats raw meat and bays at the moon.

Cosby’s early comedy material was considered very cutting edge. He eventually stopped doing a particular bit where he repeatedly put a loaded pistol in his mouth and would encourage the audience to egg him on to a gruesome public suicide. This routine regularly ended with a three-quarters empty club and Cosby passed out on the stage. Ironically, this bit landed him an appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Bill Cosby pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

Cosby’s bootstraps are now enshrined at the Smithsonian, along with one of his platinum-selling comedy albums and his severed left hand.