The problem of income inequality in Capital in The 21st Century

From The Week of May 1st, 2014 Wealth has become one of society's most enduring obsessions. Its acquisition preoccupies our musicians, its distribution fascinates our economists, and its possession enables our powerbrokers. Perhaps, this is unhealthy. After all, to ascribe so much value to something is to virtually guarantee that it will become a point of serious societal contention. But while some may successfully convince themselves to deny its seductions, wealth, and the money it represents, is much too deeply embedded in human civilization to simply shrug off. For it not just conveys prestige, its pursuit has endowed our greatest minds with the will and the drive to strive against all risk, a truth that has revolutionized our world and brought us wonders our agrarian ancestors couldn't have imagined. But for all of its unimaginable influence, wealth still starts more arguments than it ends. How much is too much? How much should be freely given away? How much should be taxed? How much should be invested? Wealth is hardly a new invention, and yet, even after all these centuries, it remains controversial, a state not at all alleviated when it is examined by the inquisitive regard of Thomas Piketty who attempts to explain wealth, in all its forms, in his dense and sprawling work. For centuries, economists have understood that economic growth comes in two basic varieties: income and capital. The former is any wage that one might receive for services returned, money that one can then spend on wants and needs. The latter, meanwhile, is the equity that one has invested in what one owns, anything from shares in companies to the roof over one's head. Over time, both of these forms of wealth can accumulate value; technological advances can make products cheaper and thus cause one's money to possess more buying power than it once did while land can become more scarce, as the human population expands, increasing its value sometimes overnight. These forms of growth have allowed human civilization to rise beyond subsistence farming and into the rarified air of industry and technological innovation. Traditionally, economists have equally connected the value of capital and the value of income to the health of national economies. After all, it seemed safe to assume that, in the event a national economy fell into recession, the value of a factory would suffer as much as the value of one's wage. Conversely, should a national economy grow at an auspicious rate, the values of both capital and income would grow equally. But on this vital point, Mr. Piketty begs to differ. Drawing upon 300 years of economic data from numerous western nations, he has reached the conclusion that the growth of capital, thanks to its greater durability, its capacity to weather purely financial shocks, and its concentration in the hands of the wealthy, is considerably more than the growth of income which is not only far more destructible, its value is much more subject to the fluctuations of national fortune. Charged with this insight, Capital In The 21st Century becomes more than a 700-page slog through a veritable forest of charts and research. It becomes a work of disturbing intensity that coalesces around a single, compelling argument, that capitalism is fundamentally flawed. Drawing on centuries of data, Mr. Piketty, a decorated French economist, argues that because the value of capital is more stable than the value of income, and because most of the available capital is owned by the rich and not by the many, the wealth of the few is accelerating away from the wealth of everyone else and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. In this way, the author has set himself in opposition to prevailing opinion, that the fortunes of capital and income are linked, rising and falling together. This bold stance is no doubt part of the reason for such a lengthy laying out of his case. There's no doubt that Mr. Piketty's argument is intriguing. He contends that economists have been tricked into believing growth of capital and income are linked because of the peculiarities of the 20th century which experienced two colossal world wars which destroyed much of the capital of Western Europe. Additionally, this blood-soaked century also labored through decades of Left-leaning governments whose socialist tendencies caused them to implement steeply progressive income taxes which harnessed the profits of the wealthy, thereby precluding their wealth from racing away from the pack. After Europe recovered from WWII, and once the policies of these governments were rolled back in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of capital returned to its more typical state, of outstripping income growth two to one. If Mr. Piketty is right, and assuming the 21st century avoids capital-destroying calamities like those experienced by the 20th, then the chasm between the haves and the have nots will only continue to dangerously widen. But however much we may be exercised by his assertions here, there is far less excitement for his proscription, a global tax on wealth, between one and two percent, aimed at redressing the imbalance between capital and income, thereby narrowing income inequality. Only a fool would declare this an impossibility, but neither would anyone but a fool think it probable. The United Nations doesn't even harbor a full complement of the world's nations. And if a body designed to unite the world in a single, diplomatic congress can't even agree on membership, how are we to implement a truly global tax on wealth that would undoubtedly prove even more controversial than a global tax on carbon emissions which are arguably just as consequential to civilization? The hope for such movement seems dim unto darkness. In some respects, it is foolish of me to have penned this review; I am by no means a trained economist. And it is clear, to anyone who reads even a dozen of the pages herein, that no less a figure is required to properly assess Mr. Piketty's case on economic grounds. But as a work of literature, it is profound. Yes, it is difficult, yes, it is stifling, but when one comes to understand the man's contention, the implications elevate the text into something well worth exploring. A fascinating and disturbing slog... (3/5 Stars)

The thorny history of a famous cemetery in On Hallowed Ground

From The Week of March 24th, 2014

Our relationship with the dead, and the bodies they've left behind, is as revealing as it is complex. For while some dismiss the body as nothing more than empty vessel that can be discarded now that the soul no longer abides within it, many others hold such a deep connection with human remains that anything less than respectful reverence is cavalier and insensitive. For these individuals, the only way they can honor those who have past beyond this life is to ensure that they lie peacefully in undisturbed ground, that their graves, like them, are not forgotten. However, such reverence implies that, on some level, the spirits of the dead still care what happens to their bodies, that it means something to them to have been returned, with grace, to the earth in which they began.

Is there a connection? And should it matter? These are two unavoidable questions in a book about a cemetery. Mr. Poole may not have any immediate answers, but the clarity of the snapshot he has taken here of death, of ritual, of grief, and of ceremony is of such quality that answers seem unimportant.

Arlington National Cemetery is one of the worlds most famous landmarks. The exclusive preserve of those who have died in the defense of the United States, it is home to tens of thousands of veterans, from at least nine significant wars, whose graves are visited by more than seven-million people each year. Popularized by the televised burial of President Kennedy, Arlington is a shrine to ritual and respect. For its very ground holds what remains of those who died for their country, making it, outwardly, a monument to duty and patriotism.

Arlington's history, however, is far more troublesome. Originally the primary residence of Robert E. Lee, the legendary civil-War general, it was appropriated by the Union government after the Lees decamped to Virginia at the beginning of the American Civil War. Initially, it was to be used as a military camp, but once the war came to the doorstep of the capital, it was deployed as as a burial ground, for the bluecoats who died during that great American schism. Despite Mary lee's vigorous efforts to reclaim it, the government refused to surrender the sprawling farm, eventually, over the decades that followed, expelling everyone who lived on the property and converting it into a full-fledged cemetery that would be subjected to all manner of cultural winds that would force many of the graves to be dug up and reburied in order to satisfy the whims of the day.

A fascinating history of a lodestone of grief and remembrance, On Hallowed Ground is a surprisingly engaging journey through a famous monument. Robert Poole has produced a thorough chronicle of this sacred place, walking the reader through the many storms it has endured. His portraits of the stewards of Arlington are fond without fawning, showing respect for the work they have done without neglecting the ways in which their egos have shaped it. But perhaps most instructive are his careful descriptions of the key moments in the Cemetery's long existence, capped off with a detailed paean to the televised funeral of JFK that is both moving and vivid. Lush descriptions of the place not only evoke its grandeur, but remind us of the conflicts, both political and actual, that have defined it.

All literature makes some form of contribution to the culture. And yet, there are occasions when one is surprised by the size of such a contribution. On Hallowed Ground fits that bill. For what looks to be an ordinary history of an extraordinary cemetery becomes, in the author's hands, a revealing chronicle of an institution that, if it avoids scandal, does so just barely. From Arlington's controversial origins, to its mistreatment of black soldiers, to its preferential treatment of officers, it reminds us that even the bodies of the dead are subject to the politics of the day, however revolting we may find them now, and that, for all the reverence and ritual we may grant the dead, the institution that cares for them is, like all institutions, beleaguered by biases. One wouldn't expect a cemetery, no matter its fame, to attract such strong opinions, and yet, they reveal just how much meaning we invest in a place that is only, truly made significant by the value we the living give to it.

A work as revealing of human nature as it is of Arlington itself... Its beauty and its ironies won't soon be forgotten. (4/5 Stars)

Corporate greed and a righteous cause in Tom's River

From the Week of February 17th, 2014

Capitalism has built and furnished our world with the stuff of our dreams. In providing a tangible, monetary reward for the risks inherent in the creation of products, it has given us a society in which we travel on airplanes, entertain ourselves with televisions and and accumulate knowledge with networked computers, all of this in the span of little more than 200 years. The innovation it has spurred has literally transformed our planet, making it and the humans who live on it, unrecognizable to the generations who came before.

And yet, for all of capitalism's incalculable benefits, it sometimes extracts a terrible cost. For in incentivizing humans with the promises of wealth, and in valorizing the pursuit of that wealth, it has created conditions in which the societal costs of mass-production are, at best, minimized and, at worst, utterly ignored, its toxic consequences sloughed off for later generations to deal with, a point powerfully made in Dan Fagin's thorough account of one of the United States' most shameful episodes in its corporate history.

Tom's River, New Jersey has been, for much of its 300-year existance, an idyllic town. Nestled on the mid-Atlantic coast, it is part of the famed Jersey Shore, a stretch of American beach front popular amongst vacationers and tourists. In recent decades, its population has grown, elevating property values and turning tidy profits for those who bought when it was still a sleepy community.

However, for 30 years, a toxic secret lay beneath Tom's River's charm and beauty, one that oozed out of the ground and into the public consciousness in the late 1980s when parents and hospital workers began to notice an unusual preponderence of sick children within the town. Investigations of these clustering cancers would eventually lead to the doorstep of Tom's river chemical, a subsidiary of a Swiss dye manufacturer that had, at least since the 1960s, been dumping its carcinogenic waste products into the town's ground and the nearby ocean. This waste eventually seeped into Tom's River's wellwater, likely causing the statistically significant uptick in cancers from the 1970s onward.

An account of the dumping and the long, torturous battle on behalf of the concerned citizens to have tom's River Chemical held to account, Tom's River is a powerful and moving work of non-fiction. Mr. Fagin's history of the idyllic town, and the chemical plant that poisoned it, unfolds like a car crash in slow motion. Its linear narrative ruthlessly explores Tom's River Chemical's greed and negligence, the agonizing grief of the parents who paid the price for its malfeasance, and the many government inquests and scientific investigations that tried to sound out the when, where and why of what it had done. The gestalt is nothing short of a gut-wrenching tale of soulless capitalism butting up hard against the love of parents for their children who play in an increasingly polluted planet.

Peculiarly, Tom's River is made all the more potent for the messy and controversial resolution of its subject. Fearing the years of life-destroying litigation that would almost certainly result from trying to take on Tom's River Chemical in the courts, and lacking any sort of scientifically grounded smoking gun tying the cancer cluster with the chemical dumping, the parents of the affected children negotiated a controversial truce with the company, robbing this multi-decade odyssey of anything like a satisfactory conclusion. And yet, this is precisely why the work is so extraordinary. For it leaves the reader with no doubt that the concerned were forced by circumstances into such a peace. The limitations of science and the perfidy of politicians left them bereft of any muscle to bring to bear against the company , reducing them to two bad options, a foul-tasting peace or a Pyrrhic war in the courts.

This conclusion, however, in no way diminishes the heros who devoted nearly 20 years of their lives to bringing Tom's River Chemical to heel. From the concerned nurses to the EPA officials, from the determined parents to the stoic scientists, Mr. Fagin introduces us to a swath of honest and earnest Americans trying to right a wrong that no one else wanted to acknowledge. In doing so, we come to understand not only the frustration of the unheard but the pain of the healer who can only look on and watch as cancer, in all its varieties, eats away at the innocents in their care. If there's any flaw with the work, it is the absence of interviews from Tom's River Chemical and its Swiss masters who are utterly silent throughout. Whether this is due to bias on the part of the reporter, or heartless lawyering on the part of Novartis, is not at all clear.

Environmentalism, bureaucracy and science all have their moments here, but Tom's River leaves no doubt that, if we are to change our world for the better, it will have to come at the expense of unbridled capitalism. Regulation is a wretched tangle of thorns into which only the foolish wish to plunge, but we must also acknowledge that it is the nature of publicly traded companies to maximize profits at the expense of everyone and everything around them. Their soul drive is to earn. And over two centuries, that drive has given us an amazing world. But the price we pay for that world is too high, for us and for the people who come after us. Incentives must be put in place, penalties so cripplingly severe that they leave no doubt, in any boardroom, that it is more economical to do the right thing than to do the irresponsible thing. To ignore this truth, for reasons of politics or ideology, will devastate our planet which is, after all, the cradle of the generations to come. (4/5 Stars)

America's tragic and emotive decline in the outstanding The Unwinding

From The Week of October 20th, 2013

Despite our monumental efforts to secure the stability of our world, all things end. We know this not only through our experiences with the world around us, but thanks to our preserved history which, if nothing else, is a long, bewildering catalogue of the rise and fall of people and civilizations, conquerers and cultures, that now are dust. Those comfortable with the notion of change accept this entropy as a universal truth of existence, one which adds urgency and gravitas to our fleeting lives. However, those who find change discomfiting reject this all-too-natural cycle of destruction and evolution, insisting, for reasons of pride and tradition, that the now must remain thus forever. While neither view is perfect, the unchanging, in their valorizing of the now, blind themselves to the very decay they want so much to resist. Rarely has this truth been more exquisitely demonstrated than in George Packer's disquieting work.

For more than two centuries, the United States has been a beacon of hope and progress to a world often buffeted by war and oppression. Open borders, limited government, and a strong entrepreneurial spirit has not only made it the world's leading manufacturer for most of the last century, but ensured that it was considered the gold standard for innovation and entertainment dispensed throughout the world. For decades, this reputation acted like a virtuous cycle for the US, luring the talented and the beleaguered to its profitable shores and thereby ensuring its continued dominance. But now it appears as though that unbroken run of exceptionalism is slowly coming to an end.

For the last 40 years, successive governments have been undoing these glorious advantages. A combination of profligate public spending, economically ruinous wars, ideologically divisive politicians and massive income inequality have deeply damaged the social contract and allowed the wealthy and the powerful to capture ever greater amounts of the national resources. This avarice comes at the expense of not only the poor but the nation's once-dominant middle class which, in its ubiquity, ensured that a sense of fairness and brotherhood was shared through most of society. It has been a slow, agonizing fall, one spread out over many years and across many small setbacks. These are their stories.

A remarkable document, The Unwinding is a shattering, first-hand journey through the decaying social fabric of the United States. Mr. Packer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, gathers up the stories of every-day Americans, deploying their experiences to reveal just how hard life has gotten for people born on, or even near, the margins. From small-scale entrepreneurs to community activists, from the retired to stock clerks, we watch as the country in which they have all invested so much time, belief and love slowly, relentlessly chips away at their hopes and dreams until there is nothing left but bitterness and failure. One would expect, naturally, that such a chronicle be difficult to consume, being that it contains such miserable multitudes. And yet, their unwillingness to be crushed, their dogged determination to press on despite having little hope for a better tomorrow makes this a far less depressing experience than it would seem.

Though Mr. Packer largely refuses to comment, generally, on the American decline, he supplements his work with a few profiles of some of the one-percenters who either helped accelerate this decline, or were near the halls of power while it was taking place. Through this, he is able to communicate a fascinating insight. For none of these men -- and they are all men -- appear to be overtly greedy or even cruel. They merely succeeded within a system that allowed them to rocket so far beyond their fellow American's that they might as well not even share the same country. Yes, the system in question is a human creation and, therefore, humans are ultimately responsible for its flaws and its inequities. But that responsibility is spread out across too many people, and too many generations, to reliably assess.

Which brings us to the work's underlying theme. One cannot fix what one does not think is broken. Those in the halls of power have invariably succeeded thanks to a myriad of advantages both within and without of their control. Despite their testaments to the contrary, they can't relate to the lives of the poor, or the disenfranchised, or the sick, or the duped. But they can relate to those with whom they spend their days: political operatives and party moneymen, opportunists and egotists. They are creatures of narratives and ideologies which pedal the notion that everyone can succeed while knowing, all the while, that this is a pipedream. It's this cynical disconnect, not any particular law or moment, that has lead the United States to this moment.

But for a few moments of narrative dislocation, as the reader is forced to jump between wildly different points of view, The Unwinding is splendid and revelatory work. A must-read for anyone remotely interested in the real-world workings of a nation, in all its dirty, hard work. (5/5 Stars)/

A tumultuous and revolutionary season recounted in Freedom Summer

From The Week of October 1st, 2013

As much as the religious would have us believe in the holiness of an ideal standard of conduct, an unchanging set of views and values from which one may never need to deviate, we know this is absurd. After all, such standards are informed by the times and the cultures in which they were enshrined. And the merest glance at human history, both recent and ancient, tells us that social mores change over time. What is inexcusably taboo in one culture might not even be worthy of a whisper of controversy in another. Which leads us to an inescapable conclusion. As our physical forms evolve, so too do our morals and mores, taking us on a long and winding journey to freedoms both of the flesh and the mind. This should not be feared. On the contrary, it should be embraced. For to do so is to accept that we can always be better.

But there's a deeper question here, one that cannot be so easily dispensed with. How do mores evolve? What motivates social change? Is it the introduction of foreign elements that must be grappled with, incorporated into our cultural worldviews? Or are mores changed by insurgency, an upheaval from within the culture that has woken to an injustice that must be corrected? Both may be applicable, but I cannot think of a better argument for the latter than the remarkable story of hardship and endurance laid out here by Bruce Watson.

Fully a hundred years after the Americans fought a great, transformative war to expunge their nation's original sin, slavery, life in parts of the racially divided American South had changed amazingly little. African Americans were still segregated, forced to use different washrooms and schools, restaurants and churches, distinctions imposed upon them by their white masters, men and women who had refused, since the end of the Civil War, to admit defeat. Their rage and humiliation coalesced into a movement to deny the rights of their black neighbors, not only disenfranchising them, but igniting the creation of a culture that caused the law to look the other way while the descendents of their slaves were beaten and murdered, raped and marginalized.

Tired of the indifference and the status quo, and chafing at the soulless, forced conformity of the homogeneous, 1950s white culture, a group of young, rebellious, earnest and devoted students, from schools all over the country, descended on the South, in 1964, armed with a mission to compel change upon the ignorant and the backward. With songs and leaflets, energy and passion, they helped to shield the African American community from the slings and arrows of their white peers while they organized to do what most of them hadn't done in their lifetimes, register to vote. The riots and killings that flowed from this hellish summer would change forever the way the world viewed the American South, inspiring lasting legal and social change worthy of Lincoln's memory.

From the policy arguments to the tactical disputes, from the mobilization to the execution, Freedom Summer collects the stories of these legendary rebels that helped to finally abolish this most enduring stain on the American fabric. Shaping his narrative around a number of the Summer's key figures, revealing them in all their admirable passion and headstrong determination, Mr. Watson allows his chronicle, of those few, memorable months in Mississippi, to telescope back and forth between the heatedness of the view on the ground and the more calculated coldness of the view at 20,000 feet, where politics and necessity trump individuality. In this, the reader is afforded an excellent overview of this reckoning with the old South that is as comfortable sitting in the White House, with a conflicted and annoyed Linden Johnson, as it is roaring along at 100 MPH through the Mississippi heat, with the bringers of change and those who sought to snuff them out before they could work their will.

As of this writing, we're less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary summer, a fact which will surely author thousands of recollections, white and black, liberal and conservative, of what happened in 1964. There will be analyses of what it meant, some arguing for everything, others countering with nothing. Freedom Summer may not have all the definitive answers to these inevitable disputes. What it does possess, though, is far more important, a knowledge of the means by which positive change can be wrought. These rebels didn't have to have a coherent message -- on the contrary, the author is quite clear about the many, ruinous disputes that convulsed the SNCC. No, all they needed was the will, and the courage, to enable, and to motivate, the criminally disenfranchised to vote. The poisonous snakes obstructing them, envenomed by their irrational hatreds and burdened by their cultural conservatism, would happily expose themselves at this provocation, slithering out into the bright lights of the national spotlight where they could be judged and found wanting.

Freedom Summer is not a perfect work. It could have spent more time on the lead up to, and the aftermath of, this critical conflagration. Moreover, Mr. Watson virtually ignores the terrible optics of white people, however good-intentioned, riding bravely to the rescue of the beleaguered and uneducated blacks. This must have created fallout, both at the time and thereafter, but these are small quibbles with what is otherwise a wonderful work that exposes, and largely celebrates, the lives of heroes of all stripes who recognized an injustice and, instead of whining about it, chose to attack it directly. Would that they were better remembered by the culture at large.

Inspiring work... (4/5 Stars)

An explosive and engaging The Year Without Summer

From The Week of September 2nd, 2013

Civilization is so massive, so ubiquitous, with its cities and monuments, its billions of souls and countless technologies, that it is easy to forget the degree to which its existence is poised on the razor's edge. We, its builders, had to be born on the right planet, orbiting the right star, inhabiting the right region of the galaxy. We had to come along at a time in Earth's evolution in which our natural predators had mostly died out, their remains spending millions of years being converted into fossil fuels for us to exploit. We had to avoid ice ages and killer asteroids, global plagues and seismic catastrophes. In other words, we had to be incredibly lucky. And yet, we do not think of it this way. For us, civilization is a permanent blessing conveyed upon us by the generations who came before us and passed on by us to those who will efollow. This is folly, a truth wonderfully demonstrated by William K. Klingaman's excellent work.

When, on April 10th, 1815, Mount Tambora erupted, sending millions of tons of superheated rock, gas and other debris into the atmosphere, no one could have conceived of the consequences. Even observers of this once-a-millennia explosion assumed it to be little more than guns being fired at distance. And yet, not only would tens of thousands of people parish as a direct result of this colossal eruption, but millions more would be threatened by its long term impact on the climate. For in launching 55-million tons of sulfur-dioxide gas into the stratosphere, the Tambora event supplied the fuel for the creation of sulfuric acid light enough to disperse throughout the atmosphere, helping to reflect sunlight, that would normally make it to the ground, back into space.

This triggered an episode of significant global cooling which, over the coming months, not only robbed the world of a warm summer but lead to the failure of crops and harvests necessary to feed millions of humans in the northern hemisphere. In Quebec, snow would be reported falling as late as June and as early as September, a dire circumstance experienced throughout Europe and North America. In time, conditions normalized and the climate settled back into a more typical disposition, but not before igniting apocalyptic fears and scientific fascination that would drive the former into the arms of faith and the latter out into fields and labs where they could begin to discover just what had happened to the world in that fateful year.

An excellent primer on volcanic eruptions and a disturbing reminder of our incredible dependence on the vicissitudes of the climate, The Year Without Summer is an entertaining and innovative work of popular science. Mr. Klingaman draws upon the surviving letters and works of temporary figures to describe the awful, summerless conditions that lasted, to some degree or another, for three years. But while first-hand observation forms the core of this account, the author has liberally supplemented it with not only scientific explanations of the Tambora eruption but detailed accounts of the other factors, like the solar minimum, that may have exaggerated the impact of the volcanic event.

It is impossible to read this work, however, and not be deeply affected by the tenuousness of our existence. The Tambora eruption lowered global temperatures by no more than two degrees. And yet, this was sufficient to kill off harvests and, thus, send millions of humans scrambling for food. And this in a time in which the human population was a mere fraction of what it is today. If such an incident was to occur now, hundreds of millions might well starve to death. Volcanos and earthquakes, comets and asteroids... These are dangers over which we have absolutely no control. And yet, we live as though we do, not only by reproducing in unsustainable numbers but by choosing to live in the center of most of our world's most dangerous zones. Only the powers of denial can be sufficient to keep us from completely surrendering to the fear of what may well come at any moment.

This is not perfect work. Mr. Klingaman would've done well to discuss in more detail the inner workings of volcanos at the expense of some of the internal lives of early Americans. Moreover, he might've done well to speculate on the impact the weather had on the politics of the period, but these are very minor quibbles in what is otherwise a rewarding and sobering read.

Fascinating work... (4/5 Stars)

An engaging study of the lifecycle of civilizations in Revenge of Geography

From The Week of July 22nd, 2013

Though it is an exercise fraught with failure and misapprehension, there are few tasks more worthwhile than the effort to improve our understanding of the cultures from which we come. For, despite the challenges, despite having to constantly check for ones biases and preconceptions, there is no better way to advance one's culture than to grasp the influences, the logistics and the the history that informs it and to separate these truths from the stereotypes that so often characterize national cultures. There are reasons for why our countries are the way they are, why some are rude and others prickly. And the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can begin to predict the future with some modest accuracy. This Robert Kaplan studiously demonstrates in his examination of the world viewed through the lens of geography.

For ten-thousand years, civilizations both grand and small, both coastal and landlocked, have risen and fallen. Some crumbled into dust with barely a lasting mark to remember them by. Others immortalized their legacies through engineering and enduring monuments that have left no doubt of the links they forged in the unbroken chain of humanity's march towards a more knowledgeable future. However, despite having different languages and assets, populations and ethics, lifespans and legacies, they did, all possess one common trait. They all eventually collapsed, their prowess and their vigor consumed by younger, energetic states. This inescapable fate has prompted both historians and interested parties to analyze this perfect mortality rate and divine from it lasting clues that might help stave off the inevitable deaths of current cultures.

Though this has given rise to nearly as many universal theories as their are studiers of this question, few are as simple as Mr. Kaplan's. Setting aside the monumental fields of economics and law, politics and multiculturalism, he contends that the ultimate fates of nations are written into their geographies. From the vital rivers that organized and then gave rise to cohesive cultures in China and Egypt to the sweeps of coastal-rich territory in Europe and North America, he argues that these invaluable resources concentrate populations which in turn innovate and inflate until they've become regional powers capable of spanning entire continents.

This would seem to be a wise, and even pleasingly unbiased, assessment of why some nations stabilize and succeed while others disintegrate and fail, but is it applicable in a 21st-century world where bombers and drones, have overcome the once-formidable natural barriers that have historically held nations back? Mr. Kaplan believes so. In fact, he is convinced that these technologies which have so effectively reduced mountains to molehills have created a whole host of new existential problems for humanity's various national tribes. After all, prior to the age of flight, India never had to worry about China. The Himalayas took care of any fear of invasion on both sides of that question. The same for nations separated by substantial waterways that would've taken weeks to traverse in centuries past that now take hours. The globalization of the world may have revolutionized trade, but it has opened up theatres of conflict that would have been unthinkable in times past.

The Revenge of Geography is an engaging analysis of 21st-century geopolitics informed by a first-rate mind. Mr. Kaplan has an admirable grasp of the present that is informed by both an intriguing read of geography and an educational grasp of the past civilizations that comprise known history. It explains south Asia, the Middle East, Europe and North America in a manner that is no less explicable for it being erudite. And yet, there's a blitheness here that haunts his study no less than it does all those that purport to boil the world down to a single, defining trait. There can be no doubting that geography has played vital role in the shaping of our nations and our cultures, but can the success of he United States really be put down simply to the fact that it had manageable neighbors to north and south, plentiful coast to east and west, and abundant heartland in which to spread out and thrive? Factors all, surely, but far from the only ones to be heard in the formation of the defining nation of the last 200 years...

But though Revenge of Geography may state its case too definitively, it does so in an unforgettable manner. For Mr. Kaplan introduces us here to intellectuals who conceive of the world, and even history, as a series of existential conflicts for dominance. Art and science, philosophies and customs, are discarded by the minds of these men and replaced with a heartless pragmatism that is predicated on the idea that governments seek always to expand not only their powers but their borders as well. There's plenty of evidence to support this cynical view, but there's just as much evidence to counter it as well. For while states may act in the interests of the people they contain, willing to go to war for gains both economic and territorial, people are often far more emotional and far less strategic than this. They would rather live in a world that is not zero-sum, a world where everyone has a fair shot of progress and comfort, rather than one in which their interests are mercilessly advanced at the expense of everyone else. The utterly pragmatic approach here is as striking as it is narrow.

There's much of value here, but for all Mr. Kaplan's skill, he fails to convince us that geography trumps ideology or cultural ethos. Nonetheless, well worth the read... (3/5 Stars)

The devastating history of eugenics chronicled in War Against the Weak

From The Week of July 8th, 2013

Though the question of what we individually owe to our fellow man is the pressing, sociological issue of this new, global civilization, there's an equally important debate to be had. What do we owe the least fortunate among us? From the mentally ill to the physically deficient, millions of people never receive a fair shot at a successful life. Is this merely a necessary outgrowth of a democratic, capitalist system, that some of us simply will be left behind, or is this inequality a consequence of poor ethics and poor morals? Perhaps, some day, we will have answers to these questions. Perhaps one will help solve the other. But until that day, we have only our past actions to go by. And where misfits are concerned, this is decidedly grim, a truth relentlessly demonstrated in Edwin Black's thorough examination of eugenics.

A scientific movement that grew out of nineteenth-century revelations of the remarkable role evolution plays in the advancement of life on Earth, eugenics is an ethical framework that argues for the purification of the human species through proper breeding and genetic engineering. Popular in the first half of the 20th century, it was originally confined to agricultural and horticultural fields before being seized upon by scientists and philosophers as a means by which to eliminate human malformations. After all, would the world not be better if disabilities from Spina bifida to blindness could be erased from the gene pool? Imagine the benefits to society if it, and its people, could be relieved of the costs of caring for those who, because of some genetic deficiency, cannot care for themselves.

However innocent the origins of this view of humanity's future, eugenics soon took on a sinister air, made all the more obvious with hindsight. For how could the enfeebled and the disabled be trusted to remove themselves from the gene pool? Would it not be prudent for society to sterilize them as a means of assuring that such genetic mistakes would die out with them? Armed with scientific funding from powerful, turn-of-the-century trusts, an American organization set out to lobby state legislatures to pass sweeping laws that would make commonplace the forced exclusion of deficients from the gene pool. Drawing on biased, reprehensible science, the American Breeders Association became a haven for racial purists who disseminated their ugly conclusions not only throughout North America, but to a receptive Europe eager to have its white, Nordic superiority re-affirmed by sham science. Of these new, European adherents, none were as enthusiastic as the group of German scientists who would go onto play key roles in Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jewish population, participating, in the name of eugenics, the worst crime in modern history.

A lacerating account of the history of eugenics, War Against The Weak is a shattering examination of one of organized science's darkest hours. Mr. Black, who possesses a first-class mind for research, has not only assembled an authoritative account of the attempt by a small group of humans to play god over the future of an entire species; he has brought to light, with color and compassion, the many thousands of souls who suffered at their hands. For the eugenics movement was not a victimless crime. It was not simply a foolish idea rooted in a series of unfortunate misapprehensions. It was a systematic attempt to strip groups of innocent people of their basic human rights, passing judgement on them in a manner that is both abhorrent and obscene. From the American Breeders Association's first steps into the arena of public policy, through to the unimaginable Holocaust into which it eventuated, the work reveals the corporations and the actors, the governments and the bodies that sought to destroy the individual freedoms we all hold so dear.

Though the work's most obvious quality is its exceptional thoroughness -- Mr. Black presents the reader with pages and pages of sources that must have taken years to organize and compile --, its most enduring virtue is the manner in which it exposes us to an inescapable truth about the human mind, that it is unavoidably biased. Shaped by its social, cultural and economic environments, and hardened by personal experience, it favors conclusions it likes and ignores those it finds unpleasant. In this, it creates for the individual a narrowed view of the world that, while agreeable to the individual's sensibilities, is colored in the extreme. We now know, thanks to the work of both social and scientific crusaders, that the physical, intellectual and emotional differences between the races are at best negligible. And yet, seeking to find an explanation that justified their distaste for the tide of non-white, non-Nordic ethnicities flooding into their homeland, these eugenicists created pseudo science, convinced receptive governments of its voracity, and then implemented a program of social engineering criminal in its intent and tragic in its scope.

War Against the Weak has its blind spots. For all its rigor, Mr. Black's account is nonetheless a polemic against eugenics. He has no time for seemingly any argument in its favor. Given eugenics' costs, this is understandable, though, regrettable. We should be able to have a debate about what society owes the individual. We should be able to have discussions about the blessings of genetic engineering. But these are areas now profoundly poisoned by the sins of our past, certainly where the author is concerned.

An absolute must-read for anyone even mildly interested in science, justice and human nature... (5/5 Stars)

The techniques of modern counter-terrorists revealed in The Terror Factory

From The Week of July 1st, 2013

Though technology will eventually liberate human civilization from all forms of political control, government is, for the moment, a necessary evil for the continuance of our march towards a brighter future. For until we can delegate the functions of the societal machine to impartial and intelligent algorithms, organized around the public good while being immune from public pressure, this messy assemblage of technocrats and politicians is the best and only way to regulate commerce, normalize international relations and lend aid to the less fortunate. In order for them to perform these duties, however, governments must be given considerable power over our individual and collective affairs, a reality which eventually, and inevitably, tempts them to seize yet more power in the aim of doing more good. Rarely has this truism been better exemplified than in Trevor Aaronson's shattering examination of the counter-terrorism policies of the FBI.

Despite numerous presidential statements calling for American citizens to exonerate mainstream Islam for Al-Qaeda's nihilistic attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, the United States' intelligence agencies have spent the years since 9/11 alienating the Muslim community. Employing a series of strongarm tactics, they have aggressively recruited both willing and unwilling informants within targeted communities and unleashed them upon people of interest, individuals who have, through anger or foolishness, braggadocio or malice, harbored some intent to harm the United States. Prior to 9/11, this would not have been possible. For not only did the FBI not possess the financial resources to execute such missions, they lacked the networks of human spies necessary to carry them out.

Since 9/11, however, these chains, which once prevented the FBI and its sister agencies from digging into every dark corner of American life, have been lifted, an evolution that has allowed these agencies to infiltrate religious institutions and everyday businesses, all in the aim of preventing the next attack. But though this is a commendable goal, one that a majority of the populous would undoubtedly support, their tactics have been as crude as the informants they've paid to execute them. And though the these agencies claim numerous successes in this dirty war against extremist elements, their methods have been so manipulative, so self-serving, that they've sparked some to wonder just how legitimate the attacks they've prevented actually were.

Enter The Terror Factory, a devastating catalogue of government misdeeds. Mr. Aaronson, an American journalist, investigates the high-profile prosecutions of terrorists since 9/11 in a manner so systematic, so unrelenting, that he leaves the reader gasping in horror at the sheer audacity of government agencies who, in acting in the name of society's protection, are willing to bend-unto-breaking every law cherished by the citizens they are charged to protect. Informant by informant, victim by victim, the author explores the anatomy of this system of government-sanctioned entrapment of immigrants made vulnerable by Byzantine laws that leave them open to the threat of deportation if they fail to become double agents for counter-terrorist agents who are, in turn, in no way disincentivized to act reasonably, cautiously, or with much respect for the broken lives they leave behind. No price is too high when the stakes are the protection of the homeland.

This is far from a neutral account of this shadow world of informants and their sting operations. In particular, Mr. Aaronson devotes little time to trying to assess the guilt of the individuals caught up in the FBI's various nets. In fact, some of these individuals appear, superficially, to be quite willing to carry out attacks on the scale of 9/11. However, for all his reluctance to speak to the ugliness of some of these characters, the author's point supersedes such concerns. After all, whether or not one harbors the desire to commit a terrorist attack is entirely apart from whether or not one is willing to actually plan it, collect the means to do it and then to execute it. That the FBI eagerly enables these individuals to take all three of these fateful steps merely to arrest them and parade them for the world to see, is abhorrent. That they do so seemingly indifferent to the fact that they have recruited thousands of morally dubious, and sometimes outright criminal, spies in order to complete this self-beneficial mission is tragic.

The Terror Factory is a mesmerizing read that makes it abundantly clear that the United States will stop at nothing to prevent another large-scale terrorist attack on its soil. That it does so at the expense of all its hard-won principles is nothing short of frightening, not only for its citizens but for the rest of the world as well. (4/5 Stars)

The dawn of womens sufferage thoroughly remembered in Seneca Falls

From The Week of May 13, 2013

though the advance of human civilization can be characterized in many different ways, surely none are more appropriate than the march towards personal freedom. From the technologies that have reduced our labors to the philosophies that have opened our eyes to injustice, the last few centuries have seen a great flowering in individual liberty along with the dawn of the great experiment of multiculturalism that is the hope for a peaceful, cooperative future. But though every important indicator, from crime rates to legal rights, is pointed in the right direction, there are still many among us who resist these societal changes, clinging to the old, familiar ways at the expense of the rights of individuals to be whatever they wish to be. Call it traditionalism; call it conservatism. Its name is meaningless next to the damage it does, not just to the reputation of our societies, but to the lives of the minorities crippled by its narrowmindedness. Few works demonstrate the cost of this conservatism better than Sally McMillen's excellent and edifying history of women's suffrage.

But for the last 150 years, the history of the west has been the history of privileged white men. They were the scholars, the lawyers, the judges, and the legislators. They wrote the laws and voted in the elections. They were society. Not until the rise of Mary Wollstonecraft in the mid-eighteenth century did the wider public gain a female voice not born of royalty and even she was marginalized by man's almost complete inability to see, in the masculine, monochromatic nature of his colleagues, a devastating bias towards homogeneity. Privileged man believed himself superior to other forms of humanity. He possessed the sharper intellect that carried him through his schooling and into the work place. Woman was simply too innocent, too soft for his work. And black man, well... He belonged out in the fields, working alongside his brutish brothers.

But with the coming of the nineteenth century, this male dominated world began to crumble. As education began to proliferate through the west, society's marginalized groups began to wonder why they were excluded from society's most vital arenas. The placating words and the patronizing head-pats were no longer sufficient to keep them quiet. For though they were of a different gender, a different color, a different culture, they were still human, capable of reason, of compassion, of intellect.

In America, this inchoate movement coalesced around a handful of key figures who rebelled against the roles society proscribed for them in order to state clearly that they deserved to be equal with the white man. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Frederick Douglass, from Susan B. Anthony to Sojourner Truth, this movement gained voices and leaders that resulted in conventions and platforms, in rallies and protests, in newspapers and lobbying. And though their drive for freedom from the expectations of white men would not be realized for nearly 70 years, their tireless advocacy would eventually pay off in the most spectacular expansion of rights in human history, one that far eclipsed even the enlightenment of Ancient Greece. This is their struggle.

As thoroughly researched as it is wonderfully realized, Seneca Falls is a work of history worthy of the extraordinary women it chronicles. Ms. McMillen, who has written extensively on women and the American South, draws upon the writings of the key figures in both the abolitionist and women's rights movements to animate the standardbearers of a most remarkable fight for human equality. Stanton, Anthony, Mott and Stone explode off the page, their deeply divergent personalities realized in a manner that convincingly portrays not only their singular devotion to the cause, but the inevitable sparks and conflicts that arose between them over the leadership of the movement they'd all, in one way or another, given themselves to advance. Their steadfastness in the face of both internal conflicts and the appalling patronization that they suffered from the ruling class is nothing short of an enduring model of how to change the world for the better.

Though Ms. McMillen's ability to capture the movement in all its trials and tribulations is first rate, she also earns plaudits for not shying away from the warts on the characters of the towering figures that propelled the women's rights movement. Elizabeth Stanton's resentful racism is revealed here in shocking detail, so much so that it should put to bed any criticisms of the opinions Abraham Lincoln held at the time. Moreover, the personal disputes that saw the women's rights movement unhelpfully fracture into two rival organizations are also extensively covered, causing the chronicle to be as much a work about the difficulties of minority movements as it is the women's movement itself. For it possessed its absolutists and its collaborators, its fiery speakers and its quiet workers, figures who clashed with one another as often as they did with those set against them.

This is outstanding work that has personality and flow, rivalry and diligence, rage and triumph. It devastates and informs. We can ask for nothing else from a work of history. (5/5 Stars)

The remarkable, collaborative effort to put man in space in Rocket Men

From The Week of April 29, 2013

We all endeavor to inject life with meaning, to ensure that, after we are gone, we will be remembered as more than just a single link in a near-infinite generational chain. For some of us, this legacy is rooted in concrete notions of meaning:the rearing of children, the writing of books, the holding of public office. Such deeds cannot easily be forgotten. But for others, meaning is found only in less tangible locales, in ideas of achievement, of philosophy, even of freedom, concepts so ethereal as to be dismissed by our concretists who can only endow meaning in what they can hold.

And yet, this would be a narrow view. For while the concretists keep our world moving, the dreamers inspire us to heights of accomplishment and understanding that their contemporaries could have never fathomed. They accelerate, sometimes literally, the progress of civilization towards its enlightened endgame. There is no higher legacy. And that much Mr. Nelson demonstrates in his excellent history.

The 20th century's relationship with the rocket was one of moral and technological complexity. Originally born centuries ago in Greece and China, this awesome assemblage of violent propulsion took modern form in the fertile mind of a German scientist who, in the 1930s, had his dreams funded by a Third Reich seeking a means to defeat a pugnacious and physically isolated Britain. This destructive partnership produced the V-2, a machine of terror that launched from Germany and France and landed explosively amidst English industry, seeking both to cripple and subjugate that nation. This advancement was so notable in its day that, when the Second World War ended, those scientists and their families and fellow rocketeers were secreted away from a defeated Germany, protected from charges of war crimes and relocated to the American south to kindle a new dawn in military technology.

That dawn, though not without its consequences, kickstarted a revolution in 20th-century technology. For the powerful rockets, developed for the US military, not only made possible a whole range of satellite technologies, they bore aloft, for the first time, man from the planet upon which he evolved. In the early days, these missions were quick and dirty, barely controlled flights through near orbit of largely symbolic value. But as time advanced, and with efforts focused by a president's vow to land on Earth's only moon by the end of the 1960s, man finally left Earth orbit and joined the stars, planting a flag on the moon and, in doing so, igniting the imaginations of generations to come.

A history of both the rockets and the men who built and flew at their behest, Rocket Men is a sublime and exhilarating work of non-fiction that both inspires and enthralls. Drawing heavily from the personal accounts of astronauts and engineers from NASA's space program, it is, at times, an oral history of the Apollo program, one that documents deeds of already famous and well-chronicled men in a manner that is as refreshing as it is unbiased. For there is no lionization here. Mr. Nelson certainly admires the dedication of the 400,000 souls who worked to send these precious few into space, but he's equally willing to acknowledge not only their faults, but the early faults of NASA which saw the Apollo missions conducted with a substantial degree of disorganization and disunity.

Despite the rhetorical strength of Rocket Men's first-hand accounts, Mr. Nelson's effort to step back and adopt a wider, more historical view is equally potent. The reader is furnished with a brief but thorough summation of the Soviet rocket program that raced the United States to the stars. Moreover, he is filled in on historical details such as how the defeated German scientists found themselves working in Alabama, how that transition took place and what became of it. Finally, he is blessed with a broader view of NASA's cultural impact on the United States of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when American power, excepting the Vietnam War, seemed endless.

Rocket Men is not a perfect history. But for a brief mention of the means by which women were senselessly disqualified from the Apollo program, Mr. Nelson pays almost no heed to the rampant sexism of NASA during this period. Moreover, he dispenses with the rocket's pre-20th-century history with a few casual paragraphs about the deeds of past civilizations. A harsh marker would certainly characterize these as unforgivable omissions from a work such as this. But one senses that Mr. Nelson was more interested in the taste and feel of Apollo, the enormity of the rockets that powered it, the complexity of the systems that nourished it and the exceptional natures of the men who populated it, a reality which makes these omissions understandable if regrettable.

A riveting history of an inspiring era that makes clear all that America has lost in turning away from its dangerous and difficult manned missions. Excellent work... (4/5 Stars)

Police corruption and "the trial of the century" in Dash's Satan's Circus

From The Week of February 25, 2013
Though the truism "absolute power corrupts absolutely" has been proven far too many times to be doubted, it is perhaps too pithy to capture the full truth. For it is not enough to simply say that power is corruptible. We must understand why it corrupts. We must grasp precisely what forces, temptations and inclinations lead men and women of good character down the road to autocracy and authoritarianism. Is it that self-doubt is an essential and underappreciated aspect to the good life that keeps in check our worst excesses? Are we not built to bear the responsibility for the lives of the many? Or is it that we simply lack the proper understanding of institutions and their capacity to corrupt those who rise through its ranks to helm its tentacled arms? These are but a few theories amongst many that attempt to answer this most important mystery. If Mr. Dash's excellent micro-history is any indication, he too considers this a question of serious note.

Since "the trial of the century," New York City has changed beyond recognition. Today, it is a clean city of power and finance with safe streets, a thriving multiculture and gentrified boroughs that make it an ornament of human urbanism. But a hundred years ago, it was something else entirely, a lawless sprawl of immigrants and hedonists, honest laborers and cunning thieves, all vying for a piece of American prosperity. Prohibition was on the horizon, a foolish law that would only further empower the city's criminal element while institutionalizing the kind of widespread corruption that had been the city's hallmark for decades. From glorious city hall to the most fetid back alley, everything in this American melting pot was purchasable. A price had only to be named for negotiations to begin.

Into this fast-talking, gun-toting maelstrom plunged Charles Becker. The child of German immigrants, he came to new York City looking for a life of opportunity. He joined a notoriously corrupt police service which, in the early decades of the 20th century, not only allowed the criminal element to run unchecked, it encouraged it in exchange for its slice of this most profitable pie. However, rather than simply following in the footsteps of tradition, Becker took NYPD corruption to the next level, helming a special anti-vice unit that oversaw much of the extortionist activities within Satan's Circus, the colloquial name for one of Manhattan's most iniquitous districts. Despite Becker's legendary influence and control, however, his empire quickly fell when he was personally fingered for having orchestrated the murder of a legendary gambler about to blow the whistle on police corruption. What resulted was the Trial of the century, a grandstanding affair that not only cost Becker his life but lead to the dawning of a new era for the NYPD and the city it was meant to protect.

Though it revels in the sensationalism of the period, Satan's Circus is, nonetheless, a breathless and breathtaking examination of a now forgotten time. Mr. Dash, an Welsh writer, deploys becker's life and trial as a lens through which to view turn-of-the-century New York in all of its sinful splendor. From prostitutes to gamblers, from crooked cops to immigrant gangs, the author chronicles the haunts, the practices, the legends and the schemes that characterized this gin-soaked period of American history, doing so with style and veracity. In this, Mr. Dash lucks out. For though Becker himself is something of a predictable creature, a man who could not resist the twin seductions of power and money within a corrupt system, the host of long-since forgotten gangsters and gamblers pulled to the surface by Becker's literary excavation are as delightful as they are utterly ruthless.

While Satan's Circus succeeds on the merits of its aspirations as a cultural micro-history, it is equally adept at highlighting the political corruption of the period. The 21st-century media is obsessed with the downfall of American politics, but one glimpse of the machinations of the 1910s reveals a nation where not just votes but candidates were bought and sold, promoted and discarded, by a relentless and unstoppable machine that had been in place since the mid 19th century. Though this will hardly be a revelation to some, the detail here is nonetheless an excoriation of the notion that politics are today in a bad state. For what today can compare to a sham democracy run by crooked administrators who selected their own candidates for the most powerful offices imaginable.? Truly very little.

Satan's Circus delights in the debauchery of pre-prohibition new York. It gets down with the gutter snipes to tell the tales of some decidedly slimy characters. But though it may, at times, openly root for some of its villains, it is so charming and shocking that these relatively minor sins can easily be forgiven. An excellent romp through a blood-soaked time of injustice and corruption. (4/5 Stars)

America's Founding Fathers and the land they loved in Wulf's Founding Gardeners

From The Week of February 11, 2013
All nations are shaped by the thoughts, dreams and ambitions of their founders. For the generations that follow these men exult them, elevating their beliefs and their deeds until they are legend, a reality which ensures that their fundamental ideals are perpetuated down through time, even unto the present day. Naturally, as decades become centuries, there are more and more disagreements over what these founders intended, as cultural dislocation causes the meaning of their words to be dissipated by the winds of time, but we still try to live up to the standard they set which makes of them creatures of endless fascination. What was their vision? And how would their views have changed in the face of a rapidly evolving world? Short of availing ourselves of a time machine, we will never know, but we can sift among their letters and their musings for clues, something Ms. Wulf does here with mixed success.

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America are giants of history. The power and the resonance of their names exceeds virtually every one of their contemporaries, even those most royal. And yet, thanks to the success of their glorious experiment, Jefferson and Adams, Madison and Hamilton, Washington and Franklin, commoners all, are the names celebrated in books and memorialized by monuments, their actions having helped to usher in an entirely new world free of the decrepitude of authoritarianism in all its forms.

But who were these men? And what influenced them while they were shaping their legendary ideas? Summoning their journals and their proclamations, interpreting their symbols and their analogies, Founding Gardeners argues that the Founding Fathers filtered their experiences through the lens of environmentalism, a naturalistic approach to the world that began at home and extended out to the rest of the world. From the plantations they so assiduously cultivated to the farmers they hailed as heroes, they celebrated ones connection to the earth, describing it as the most profound and moral partnership man could forge. When all else is uncertain and troublesome, when temptation lurks behind every corner, working the soil will never steer a good man wrong.

Though too narrow in scope and too deprived of analysis, Founding Gardeners is a fascinating read. Ms. Wulf draws upon the copious correspondence of America's legends to establish both their connection to the land that gave them a second life, free of the aristocratic strictures of the old world, and to describe the ways in which these men manifested from this connection a code of conduct, for themselves and the world, that they considered upstanding. In this, Ms. Wulf is most thorough, excavating declarations and obsessions about the earth that seem downright radical by today's standards. Were one to present these quotes, stripped of attribution, and ask the public to guess who spoke them, surely their most common answer would be treehuggers and Gaia-worshippers, minds without any grasp of the complexities of the modern world which brings us to the book's central problem.

It is difficult to imagine how the views of these founders are relevant to our era. Ms. Wulf claims to have written the book after journeys across America's landscapes inspired her to investigate what the Founders thought of the land to which they'd devoted themselves. But it is nearly impossible to read her work here and not imagine that she sought to demonstrate the degree to which modern society has deeply drifted from the ideals the Founders had for the country they birthed. This is a point worth making; for if we're to celebrate these men for their vision and their views, then we have to take in their environmentalism as well. And yet, Ms. Wulf at no point acknowledges the extent to which the intervening centuries have transformed the world. In the time of the Founders, America claimed a population of ten million. Today, that number is 315 million, nearly a 32-fold increase that does not even come close to representing the manifest change that industrialism and technology has wrought upon a crowded planet. This needs to be said. We cannot go back to what we were. Nor should we wish to. That world is as unchanging as it is rife with illness.

There's much here to admire. Ms. Wulf has perhaps overemphasized the role the land played in the lives of these men, but in highlighting it she has humanized them in ways both fascinating and endearing. But if Founding Gardeners wished to be more than a piece of nostalgia, it needed to confront the question of how the thoughts and dreams of the Founders could operate in our world, not theirs. (3/5 Stars)

The rise and fall of the American Mob in Cuba in Havana Nocturn

From The Week of February 04, 2013 The rise and fall of the American Mob in Cuba in Havana Nocturn
For decades now, the American gangster has been a figure more of celebrity than ridicule. From Godfather to Goodfellas, pop culture has celebrated his anti-heroism, identified with his restlessness and cringed at the violence he's meted out to those who've wronged, crossed, or obstructed him. He embodies that strange disquiet that lives within all of us, that feeling that the strictures of our lives are far too confining and that a life beyond rules, beyond laws, beyond the boundaries of a conventional existence can only thrill us with its chaos and rebellion. The reality, naturally, while still glamorous, is far more grim. For the life of the gangster is much like one of their favorite businesses, one big gamble upon which a life's fortunes are bet. This much and more is captured by Mr. English's intriguing, if somewhat infatuated, history of the Mob in Cuba.

Prior to Fidel Castro's 1961 communist revolution, Cuba was nothing like the grim, socialist nation we know today. Open to trade from the United States, it, like other islands in the Caribbean, was a primary destination for American tourists coming down from the east coast. Much of Cuba's economy relied upon this inflow of American cash which naturally manifested in the creation of businesses to service the needs of the tourists. Unencumbered by the same morality laws that constricted behaviors back home, Americans, like most other tourists, were able to enjoy all the pleasures the island had to offer and then some, confident that their transgressions would never make it back to their native shores.

Though this tourism existed prior to the Mob's interest in Cuba, it skyrocketed when, after being deported from the United States, Lucky Luciano settled there in the late 1940s, intending to create, with the backing of the local dictatorial government, a gangster's paradise where sex, booze and gambling were as ubiquitous as the cigar smoke that would fill the beautiful hotels harboring all of this libidinous activity. Though Luciano was soon pressured out of this scheme by a furious US State Department, Meyer Lansky, the Jewish gangster immortalized in the second Godfather film, ran with their shared dream, inspiring the creation of a strip of hotels to rival Las Vegas over the next decade. These schemes would make many a gangster rich, for, this time, the mob had successfully sunk its fingers into a national government, incentivizing the politicians to encourage, rather than resist, this criminal trade. It was a beautiful dream that lasted for nearly 15 years, until the depravities of a president inspired a socialist revolution that would sweep not only the political old guard from Cuba's shores but the Mafia filth as well, leaving fortunes to dissipate into the white sands of a newly communist country.

Animated by charmers and celebrities, criminals and con-artists, Havana Nocturn is Mr. English's guided tour through an attempt by the American Mafia to create the closest thing to a sovereign state of their own in 1950s Cuba. In detail, the author describes the lengths to which the Mob linked their profitability with that of Cuba's general economy, creating all the incentives a dictatorial government would need to enable the Mob's elicit activities. This financial tapdance, along with an engrossing chronology of highlights of Lansky and Co's exploits on this most infamous Caribbean island, forms the backbone of a work that largely succeeds in its attempt to characterize the golden age of the American Mob, an age that, for inventors in Cuba, would come to an abrupt end with the rise of Fidel Castro.

Mr. English's account, full of murderers and sex tourists, beautiful girls and devilish dictators, would be dead on arrival without the unique contributions made by Lansky and his crew. Relying on details published in their own memoirs, the author amalgamates their colorful deeds with the austerity of Castro and his movement to create a captivating juxtaposition of political and economic forces. He's so successful in weaving together these narrative threads that, at times, Havana Nocturn feels like nothing les than a ticking timebomb as these two such disparate factions, criminality and communism, authoritarianism and revolution, thunder towards an inevitable, devastating collision. However, as much as the work entertains, its sincerity is not entirely convincing. Castro, here, feels white-washed, a sympathetic hero whose motivations are rarely probed. This may be thanks to a lack of eyewitness material on his rise to power and the years that would immediately follow. Nonetheless, we're left with a figure somewhat discordant with the man we know today.

This is more a work of entertainment than education. There's no question that it shines a light on a time now lost to the gloss of Hollywood history, but it lives too much in the heads of its criminals and revolutions to be completely trusted. (3/5 Stars)

An American Insurrection honors a forgotten moment in battle for civil rights

From The Week of January 14, 2013
Historical firsts are never easy and rarely peaceful. For as much as we may wish otherwise, humans resist change, some to such a degree that violence and hatred results from change being forced upon them by an evolving world. And yet nothing can ever stay as it was, and nor should it. For the progress of humanity is a march out of the darkness of ignorance and into the light of respect and understanding for all creeds, all genders, all races and all lifestyles. It is a march towards universal acceptance that rests on but one enduring principle, that the individual is free to decide how he ought to live so long as his choices do not harm others. This is our destiny. And yet arriving at such an obvious truth is, sadly, for some, cause for apocalypse. This lesson is decisively driven home in Mr. Doyle's shattering chronicle of racial integration in 1960s america.

With one of its most landmark decisions, the supreme Court of the United States, in 1954, ordered that all schools in America freely integrate their classes with no eye to racial bias. This ruling, a critical catalyst for the battles for civil rights that would characterize the next twenty years of American life, was accepted, with varying degrees of trepidation, in a majority of this sprawling country except for one notable and predictable exception, the American South where this repugnant decree came as just the latest federal insult in a long line of slights from a national government whose authority they only reluctantly acknowledged. This cynicism, the legacy of the South's defeat in the Civil War, was alive and well a hundred years after that great schism, so much so that the governor of Mississippi felt bold enough to not only resist the Supreme Court's decision but to oppose it with such rhetorical force that violence was inevitable.

For several years, Mississippi, along with other Southern States, refused to integrate, a provocative show of insubordination to the state that culminated in September of 1962 when James Meredith, a veteran of the integrated US military compelled, through the pursuit of the law, the federal government to enforce the Supreme Court decision and allow him to attend the university of Mississippi which, up until then, had cynically and despicably refused to admit Mr. Meredith onto their campus. With support from the governor, the school continued its stubborn resistance despite the Kennedy administrations orders otherwise, compelling Mr. Meredith to be escorted onto campus by US marshals, a provocative show of force that ignited a riot between federalist forces attempting to enforce the law, and a mixture of students, Clansmen and other radical elements who wanted no part of a black man in their white world. Besieged on all sides, the marshals witnessed Mississippi violently resist, over the next 48 hours, the will of the federal government, nearly triggering a second civil war and obligating President Kennedy to deploy, for the first time in a hundred years, combat veterans on American soil.

Though not without flaws, An American Insurrection is a spellbinding recount of a now nearly forgotten flashpoint in American history. Eclipsed by both the Cuban Missile Crisis, which followed it by three weeks, and by the broader struggle for civil rights, which centered on the efforts of Martin Luther King, the riot on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi was arguably the most important moment in US race relations since emancipation. For as Mr. Doyle describes in vivid detail, James Meredith orchestrated a campaign against the federal government to compel it to enforce the laws of the land's highest court. And in doing so, he forced the government to commit to racial integration with a rigor and a vigilance that no other prior government had ever exhibited. In this way, Mr. Meredith laid the cornerstones for the march to equality that would eventually culminated in a black president being elected to office 46 years later.

Mr. Doyle divides his chronicle evenly between the lead-up to the riot and to a moment-by-moment deconstruction of the violence which is all the more shocking for it having been neglected by history. The sheer audacity and narrow mindedness of the men and women who resisted Mr. Meredith's admission lends Mr. Doyle's prose an incendiary force that nearly makes the work combustible. An American Insurrection's only drawback is a half-hearted portrait of Mr. Meredith himself who Mr. Doyle clearly did not personally interview. This would have been a welcome addition to a work which is fundamentally about one man's struggle to compel change on the unchanging. That it was omitted here makes James Meredith even more of a mystery than he already is.

First-rate work that inspires as much as it dismays... (4/5 Stars)

The Island At The Center Of The World by Russell Shorto

From The Week of October 15, 2012 Though we cannot recognize all the ways in which its influence manifests upon us and our society, the past is always with us. It lives in our language and our culture, in our institutions and in our customs, the seeds of another time flowering through our present. This is why we study history, why it is more than dates and times, battles and fetishes, because to understand them is to understand how we are like them. It is to comprehend the unbroken chain of cultural and biological genetics that have been handed down to us across countless generations. We do not invent things or generate ideas in a vacuum. They emanate from our training and our society, from our experiences and our backgrounds, all of which falls under the banner of history. To understand it is to understand ourselves and this is what Mr. Shorto endeavors to do in his exhaustive chronicle of an unfairly forgotten American colony.

Before the English and the French, before the Boston Tea party and the American Revolution, there existed, on an island we now call Manhattan, the headquarters for a colony named New Netherland. The result of Dutch efforts to find a route to Asia not already claimed by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, it was Holland's western-most colony, an ambitious, and even at-times prosperous, stab at empire that claimed a considerable portion of what is now New York's coastline. Established in 1614, it was governed by several iron-fisted Dutchmen whose heavy-handed policies drove their own colonists, who then enjoyed more rights than most European subjects, to discord and rebellion, disharmonies which went a long way to preventing the colony from flourishing and becoming a desirable destination. However, what the Dutch did not themselves ruin by dispute the English finished with war, deploying a measure of their increasing navel power to capture the colony and bring it under the banner of Britannia.

However, though New Netherland persisted but for some 50 years, its presence left enduring marks on the island which would one day be the beating heart of business and commerce in the human world. Its physical layout and even some of its legal codes were adopted there by the British, ensuring that more than the Dutch names for streets and neighborhoods would survive into the 21st century. Its people endured on the land they'd chosen, carving out lives expanded by their descendents, leaving a legacy that would long outlive the names of the men who fought over and shaped the forgotten colony of New Netherland.

As much a tale of archaeological history as colonial, The Island At The Center of The World is an engaging, if overly exhaustive, examination of a brief but fascinating period of pre-American history. Mr. Shorto, a historian, capitalizes on the somewhat recent discovery, and ongoing translation of, Dutch histories of the colony previously ignored. From these documents spill a treasure trove of information about the colony's leaders and the political rivalries in which they disastrously embroiled themselves in the years prior to the English conquest of what would come to be called New York. To the author's credit, New Netherland's strong, formerly neglected characters are fully realized here, their actions held up against the backdrop of the three Anglo-Dutch wars which saw the colony traded back and forth before being firmly settled in the English camp, ironic given that the English crown itself would soon be worn by Dutchmen.

This is an interesting chronicle, full of personalities and difficult deeds. However, while Mr. Shorto does yeoman's work in reviving the importance of the Dutch history of early America, he does less than a stellar job grounding these deeds in a coherent chronology. The importance of rivalry and dispute are elevated well above dates and times, leaving the colony's 50 years to blur together in a seething mass of discord and trailblazing. That said, this shortcoming does little to diminish the degree to which he has brought New Netherland into focus, all while popularizing the astonishing efforts of the dedicated souls who work, even now, to complete the difficult translation of 400-year-old records.

Verbose but valuable... The united States is a nation of inputs, blood and power, culture and custom, poured into it from the immigrants who swim for its shores. It should then come as little surprise to find that one of its first colony's was a microcosm of what was to come. (3/5 Stars)

Outlaw Machine by Brock Yates

From The Week of October 08, 2012 Freedom is an elusive state. For as much as we proclaim its virtues and celebrate its proliferation, true freedom is antithetical to civilization, arising only when the individual is able to shrug out of the shackles of the state to become a liberated man, answerable only to himself. The truly free do not bow to anyone. They do not allow themselves to be enchained by restrictive laws or womanly vows. They are countries unto themselves.

Given the degree to which civilization has swept across the great body of humanity, there are but few places for the truly free to hide. There is no land they can claim, no banner they can rally to. They must exist as singular units within the broader superstructure of society, lampposts of righteous anarchism positioned along the dark road to the welfare state. They must hold tight to their values while the world moves away from them, towards its apparent destiny as a homogeneous melting pot into which all must be sucked and made to conform. Thus, to distinguish themselves, individuals must take on symbols, badges of honor and courage that signify them as creatures of enlightened thinking and singular attitudes. Mr. Yates covers the history of their most important symbol in this breezy and moving history.

Since the first of its kind hit the road more than a century ago, the Harley Davidson motorcycle has been a laborious machine only its owner could love. Prone to inexplicable dysfunction and hobbled by retrograde design, this infamous American bike lacks the power of its British brothers and the graceful perfection of its Japanese cousins. It is obnoxiously loud and notoriously difficult to drive, especially on the open road where more advanced models put it to shame. And yet, the Harley has not only stubbornly persisted, its popularity has, since its low ebb in the 1970s and 1980s, exploded, its fickle performance and its general inferiority transformed from drawbacks to virtues by its community of drivers seeking a means by which to separate themselves from the masses and express their unwillingness to conform. Every flaw, every drawback, becomes a badge of honor, a point of pride that, when repaired and endured, demonstrates to fellow riders a skill with ones hands and head that allow him to belong to a prized club of individualists who do not depend on society for their pleasures. This is a motorcycle that says something about a man, loudly and truly. He is not like you.

From its design to its corporate stewards, from the wars that gave it life to the gangs that made it infamous, The Outlaw Machine winningly captures the Harley Davidson motorcycle. Here, Mr. Yates chronicles not only the band of intrepid immigrants who envisioned it and actualized it, he gathers up the tricky skeins of cultural history that determined its fate. Though, at times, he waxes a bit too romantic over the bike's influence on the American psyche, this is a flaw easily forgiven in light of his unflinching analysis of the Harley Davidson Motor Company which, but for its most recent management, is rarely acclaimed. And yet, the fact that the motorcycle has not only survived but flourished successfully demonstrates Mr. Yates' argument, that, in some inimitable way, this flawed Hog is a perfect fit for those men and women who, though born too late to be cowboys, nonetheless wish to live beyond civilization's blazing lights.

This is not a story of corporate triumph. This is not a tale of engineering genius. It is not a history of a visionary. The Harley Davidson is antithetical to these clean, easy and even inspiring 21st-century narratives. No, this is a story about how a thing, almost accidentally, came to represent the angst of a subset of humanity who feel as though they have no place in the great, well-oiled machine that is civilization. It is a story about the limitations of order and about the means through which we all try to tell the world who we really are. And in this, it is beautifully done.

A vivid demonstration of how perfection can be overrated... (4/5 Stars)

L.A. Noir by John Buntin

From The Week of September 03, 2012 Corruption is a pervasive force. An infection as rife among the righteous as it is among the morally bankrupt, it plays no favorites. Why should it? It matters not to corruption what manner of man falls beneath its seductive sway, only that he does, only that he tastes its sweet fruit, learns its cunning ways and extends its dark doctrine. Corruption does not have an agenda. It offers only opportunities by which the willing, and the desperate, can avail themselves, opportunities sure to enrich them while swelling its ranks of converts. The golden age of Los Angeles learned this lesson all too well, a truth demonstrated with style and skill by Mr. Buntin's excellent biography of the coming of age of a global city.

Originally envisioned as a white spot, a safe harbor for caucasian Americans in an ever-more immigrant United States, Los Angeles would swiftly shake off this narrowminded mantle to explode onto the world stage as the foremost destination for glitz and glamour. Thanks to Hollywood, it would come to be invested with the hopes and dreams of millions the world over, millions who would sacrifice all but the shirts on their backs to arrive in its beautiful basin, to sample its seductive wears, to try to make it big in a town with the power to vault the nameless into the stratosphere of the celebrity.

With fortunes being minted on a nightly basis, it's unsurprising that Los Angeles would become a magnet for crime. However, the degree to which the powerful institutions of this city of dreams were corrupted by outside influences would leave even hardened cynics slackjawed with shock. After all, for nearly two decades, from the 1920s to the 1940s, a Combination of crooked cops, hardened gangsters and officials on the take ran Los Angeles. They established rackets, endorsed black markets, profited off of gamblers and skimmed off all manner of vices. Through a mixture of brutality and ruthlessness, they ensured that justice would be available to the white man, scarce to the criminal man, and all-but non-existent to a man of any other color or minority.

This amoral status quo was challenged in the 1940s by the methodical rise to power of William H. Parker, one of Los Angeles' most zealous cops. Notoriously straight-laced in this city of sin, he became a crusader for police power, using a combination of intelligence, legal expertise and persistence to finally elevate himself to the cultivated post of chief of police. From this lofty height, he set out to reform his sprawling town of millions, coming up hard against not only resistance within his own crooked ranks but the powerful interests of organized crime, represented by the infamous Mickey Cohen, entrenched in the city. Time and again, Parker and Cohen would square off for control of the city, driving the former into paranoia and authoritarianism and the latter repeatedly into prison where justice was no less scarce than on the star-studded streets of L.A.

A fascinating stroll through the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles' most golden era, L.A. Noir is a dark and delightful clash of powers that have long since lapsed into legend. Mr. Buntin's lively prose captures the stylishness and the impishness of these gilded decades, managing to induce, in the reader, as many laughs, at the exploits of its unforgettable characters, as grimaces, at the blood and corruption that drenched and controlled its streets. Cohen and parker, natural enemies, provide the work an excellent framework upon which the author fills in the history, good and bad, of a unique city in the grips of a unique time. Moreover, they permit the reader to conceive of just how thin a line exists between cop and criminal. For while one may swear to uphold the law and the other may swear to trample upon it, both can be equally and devastatingly ruthless in the per suit of their aims, leaving behind not only the ravished body of the law but the corpses of those many obstacles that had to fall in order for them to achieve their ends.

though Cohen, the boxer turned criminal, and parker, the hard-head turned police chief, provide the work an axis around which all else rotates, and though their life stories stand in for the numerous other figures who must have worked L.A.'s streets for good and or ill, they pale in importance to L.A. Noir's latter chapters. For as much as humor and panache enliven the first half of Mr. Buntin's history, the latter is consumed by a serious examination of the miserable race relations between the city's minorities and its police force from 1965 onward. From the Watts Riots to the Rodney King incident, Mr. Buntin soberly captures the scandals that deeply tarnished the reputation of the LAPD and the degree to which these incidents were outgrowths of the ambitions of men like Parker who sacrificed all for the sake of their own goals. Thus, while L.A. Noir entertains, it also leaves its readers humbled by a true taste of ruthlessness, both its execution and its costs.

A well-balanced history of a city enchanted by vice and power... Mr. Buntin neglected to do justice to the final years of Mickey Cohen, but in every other respect a captivating read. (4/5 Stars)