Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond

    2003; 440 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Full Title: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  Genres : Ancient History; Human Geography; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction; 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    Outnumbered armies of Western European countries pulled off a pair of amazing victories in the 16^th century.  Cortez and a couple hundred conquistadors vanquished the powerful Aztec Empire in Mexico.  A few years later, Pizarro duplicated that feat against the Inca Empire in Peru.

 

    But both Spanish armies had some huge advantages.  Their soldiers had guns and horses, the Aztecs and Incas had none.  The Spanish also carried germs that decimated the Aztec and Incan populations with deadly plagues.  The Spaniards had steel swords, the Aztecs and Incas fought with stone hatchets.

 

    Those were all decisive edges for the European invaders.  But why hadn’t Mesoamerican civilizations developed similar weapons technologies?  And why weren’t the Aztec and Incan populace infested with their own sets of germs to which Europeans invaders would have no resistance?

 

    Jared Diamond examines the possible root causes of these technological and bacteriological factors of Guns, Germs, and Steel.  He comes to some surprising conclusions.

 

What’s To Like...

    After a brief Prologue wherein Jared Diamond recounts the incident that caused him to research this subject, Guns, Germs, and Steel is divided into five sections, namely:

    Part 1: From Eden to Cajamarca.  Notable conquests.

    Part 2: The Rise and Spread of Food Production.  Farming and animal domestication.

    Part 3: From Food to Guns, Germs, and Steel.  The evolution of armies.

    Part 4: Around the World in Five Chapters.  How each global landmass was populated.

    Epilogue: The Future of Human History as a Science.  Conclusions and Critiques.

 

    I was impressed by the author's meticulous research into the history of global conquests.  Regardless of geographic location, human civilization begins with the formation of hunter-gatherer bands, which still exist in a few, isolated areas of the world.  With some exceptions, those bands grow into tribes, which grow into chiefdoms, which grow into states.  The greater the population of the state, the more likely it will develop centralized government and armies.

 

    There are many factors that can hinder such a natural progression though, which are detailed in the text.  Not all crops are rich enough in proteins to feed sizable quantities of people.  Geographic boundaries, such as deserts, mountains, and oceans can also deter progress.  So does the absence of any sizable animals that are amenable to domestication.  There’s no use in inventing the wheel and chariots if you don’t have any beasts to pull them.

 

    I loved the way Jared Diamond presented the details of the evolution of Civilization.  How do you go about “inventing” writing?  Why did the Norsemen fail to found a permanent settlement in Canada after they discovered it?  And perhaps most curious of all, why did the clunky QWERTY keyboard become the worldwide standard for typing communications?

 

    There are at least three editions of Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, 2003, 2007).  I happened to be reading the 2003 edition, which closes with the author responding to the various feedback—both positive and negative—that arose from people after reading the 1997 version.  Guns, Germs, and Steel won a Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1998, which means it garnered a wide and diverse leadership.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 14,611 ratings and 3,190 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.04*/5, based on 469,675 ratings and 16,336 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Inventing a writing system from scratch must have been incomparably more difficult than borrowing and adapting one.  The first scribes had to settle on basic principles that we now take for granted.  For example, they had to figure out how to decompose a continuous utterance into speech units, regardless of whether those units were taken as words, syllables, or phonemes.  They had to learn to recognize the same sound or speech unit through all our normal variations in speech volume, pitch, speed, emphasis, phrase grouping, and individual idiosyncrasies of pronunciation.  They had to decide that a writing system should ignore all of that variation.  They then had to devise ways to represent sounds by symbols.  (pg. 217)

 

    The striking differences between long-term histories of peoples of the different continents have been due not to innate differences in the peoples themselves but to differences in their environments.  I expect that if the populations of Aboriginal Australia and Eurasia could have been interchanged during the Late Pleistocene, the original Aboriginal Australians would now be the ones occupying most of the Americas and Australia, as well as Eurasia, while the Aboriginal Eurasians would be the ones now reduced to downtrodden fragments in Australia.  (pg. 405)

 

What caveman or cavewoman ever got the idea of “domesticating” a plant, and how was it accomplished?  (pg. 114)

    As would be expected in a work of scholarly non-fiction, there is almost no profanity in Guns, Germs, and Steel.  I noted just three instances, all of which involved the use of the word damn.  I didn’t catch a single typo, but perhaps these were caught and corrected in between the first and second editions.

 

    About the only quibble I can come up with is that the section on Agriculture was how many pages dealt with the way Food Production arose in various areas of the world.  Different crops work well or not-so-well in different climates.  Some were better at being hybridized than others; some contained oodles more protein than others.  Spending pages comparing corn to, say, sorghum got a bit tedious for me.

 

    But overall, Guns, Germs, and Steel thoroughly resonated with me.  I learned a lot from reading it, and since I muchly enjoy reading about Ancient History, this book was tailor-made for me.  It’s actually the first book in a trilogy; with the other two books titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis.  I think I need to go looking for these.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  Chapter 19, How Africa Became Black, deals with the history of the various empires, conquests, and peoples of that continent, particularly in the sub-Saharan and tropical areas.  I don’t recall ever reading such a detailed, informative account of this.  It was freakin’ awesome!

October - China Miéville

    2017; 320 pages.  Full Title: October: The Story of the Russian Revolution.  New Author: No.  Genres : Russian History; Russian Politics; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 8*/10.

 

    Believe it or not, once upon a time, the United States invaded Russia!  It was back in the years 1918-1921, and was a direct response to something called the October Revolution.

 

    To be fair, the United States wasn’t the only invader.  French, British, Japanese, German, Serbian, and Polish troops helped out as well.  The Wikipedia article cites quite few other countries sending troops.

 

    The reason for this broad-based foreign intervention was clear.  The Russians had done the unpardonable sin of installing the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, to lead the country.  Russia had become a Socialist state!

 

    And as everyone knows, Socialism is contagious.  If one country falls into its clutches, pretty soon it will spread like a virus to all sorts of other countries!

 

What’s To Like...

    October is China Miéville’s chronicle detailing the events leading up to, and including, the October Revolution.  The bulk of the chapters focus on  the monthly vicissitudes in February through October 1917, which are sandwiched between an Introduction and a “before” chapter at the beginning and an Epilogue chapter at the end.

 

    In the Introduction, Miéville admits that, although he is going to be fair in describing events in this book, he is not going to be neutral.  This was not unexpected since he is an avowed Socialist and October is arguably the celebration of Socialism’s finest hour.  So I was pleasantly surprised when he portrayed the major leaders of the movement—Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin—in a “warts and all” fashion.

 

    The book is written in English, not American, so you some weird spellings, such as disembowelled, defence, skilfully, programme, learnt, and a variant of one of my favorite words, bowdlerised.  I loved it, although Spellchecker went nutso with that previous sentence.

 

    Before reading October, I knew only a smattering about the Russian Revolution.  Czar Nicholas abdicates early on, a right-winger named Alexander Kerensky takes over, much to the Western World’s delight.  Then Lenin overthrows Kerensky, much to the Western World’s dismay.  That's about the extent of what I already knew.

 

    October filled in the gaps nicely.  I learned that Petrograd, not Moscow, was the capital of Russia at the time.  A slew of coalitions were tried, and failed, in amongst the Nicholas/Kerensky/Lenin regimes.  Factory workers, peasants, lower-ranked soldiers, and women were powerful forces in determining who eventually came to rule Russia.  The fact that Russia was still using the Gregorian calendar, not the Julian one used by the rest of the world makes listing a date for the various events a major pain.  And much, much more.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

    Jacquerie (n.) : a violent, spontaneous uprising or revolt by peasants against the ruling noble class

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 706 ratings and 105 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.91*/5, based on 6,937 ratings and 945 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    The government had equivocated over the issue of women’s suffrage.  Many even in the revolutionary movement were hesitant, warning that, though they supported the equality of women ‘in principle’, concretely Russia’s women were politically ‘backward’, and their votes therefore risked hindering progress.  On her return to the country on the 18^th, Kollontai took those prejudices head-on.

    “But wasn’t it we women, with our grumbling about hunger, about the disorganisation in Russian life, about our poverty and the sufferings born of the war, who awakened a popular wrath?” she demanded.  The revolution, she pointed out, was born on International Women’s Day.  (pg. 93)

 

    “What about people’s commissars?” said Trotsky.

    “Yes, that’s very good,” Lenin said.  “It smells terribly of revolution.” The seed of the revolutionary government, the Council pf People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom, was sown.

    Lenin suggested Trotsky for commissar of the interior.  But Trotsky foresaw that enemies on the right would attack him — as a Jew.

    “Of what importance are such trifles?” Lenin snapped.

    “There are still a good many fools left,” Trotsky replied.

    “Surely we don’t keep step with fools?”

    “Sometimes,” said Trotsky, “one has to make some allowances for stupidity.”  (pg. 284)

 

“One must always try to be as radical as reality itself.”  (pg. 231)

    There’s very little profanity in October.  I noted only five instances in the entire book, and those were mostly from direct quotes.

 

    Despite the trove of well-researched historical information, I found October to be a slow read.  This was mostly due to incredible number of Russian dignitaries and political factions that came into play.  To be fair, China Miéville includes a “Glossary of Personal Names” at the back of the book.  But it felt like every page had a dozen unfamiliar names, so I soon gave up trying to keep track of them.

 

    Finally, although the Epilogue chapter touches briefly on events occurring after October, 1917, I yearned for many more details about them.  The Czar and his entire family are murdered.  Foreign armies pour into Russia.  Lenin dies, Stalin comes to power, and purges proliferate.  Discussions of these things are sorely needed.

 

    But that just means I’m hoping China Miéville is working on a sequel to October.  I learned a lot from reading about a world-changing uprising, and look forward to learning even more.

 

    8 Stars.  One last thing.  Rasputin, the mad monk, who Miéville says was neither mad nor a monk, gets some ink in the first chapter.  He may not be the scariest dude to have walked this Earth, but . . . wait, yes, he *IS* the scariest dude to have walked this Earth.

Nobody's Girl - Virginia Roberts Giuffre

   2025; 382 pages.  New Author(s)?  : Yes.  Full Title: Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice.  Genres : Biographies & Memoirs; Sexual Abuse & Harassment; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 10*/10.

 

    The Epstein Files have sure been in the headlines a lot lately.  There’s a lot of interest as to who partied with him, who went to his Island (aka Little Saint James), and who paid how much to be “entertained”.

 

    But little has been said about the girls in Epstein’s entourage.  Were they happy hookers or indentured servants?  Could they leave anytime they chose or would bad things happen if they failed to show up when summoned?  Were they underage or just heavily made-up to look young?

 

    I bet a lot of people would be interested in hearing about the experiences of those girls.  I bet a lot of people who hobnobbed with Jeffrey Epstein would go to great lengths to suppress any and all information about those girls’ experiences.

 

    That’s what makes Nobody’s Girl such an important book.

 

What’s To Like...

    Nobody’s Girl is the memoir of one of the key girls in Epstein’s fold, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.  The book is divided into four parts, namely:

    Part 1: Daughter  (pgs. 3-63)

    Part 2: Prisoner  (pgs. 65-106)

    Part 3: Survivor  (pgs. 147-256)

    Part 4: Warrior  (pgs. 257-367)

 

    Those section titles give a nice overview of the storyline.  Virginia’s father started molesting her when she was seven years old (Part 1).  As a 16-year-old she gets a job, first at Mar-a-Lago, then at Epstein’s as an aspiring masseuse and sex slave (Part 2).  At age 19, she travels to Thailand, meets her husband-to-be, and quits her Epstein job.  She marries, has kids, and discovers that Epstein will find her wherever she goes, and do anything to her and her family to keep her quiet (Part 3).  She fights back (Part 4), via depositions, lawsuits, interviews, and establishing help groups for others who suffered the same abuse.

 

    If you’re looking for some “great reveals” about Trump, you’ll be disappointed.  He gets scant mention, and that merely has to do with his Mar-a-Lago resort, where Virginia’s father worked as a groundskeeper.  However, there is some mention of unnamed clients such as “Billionaire #1”, “Billionaire #2”, and a “well-known Prime Minister”.  Giuffre admits she’s too scared to reveal these individuals by name, fearing retribution against her and her family., especially from one of the Billionaires.

 

    It’s not surprising that most of the sexploitation tales involve Jeffrey Epstein and the various guests that accompany him on cruises and visits to his island.  He's the chief malefactor, but for sheer depravity, Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, stands above all others.  Her efforts on behalf of Epstein in recruitment, training, participation, and intimidation are jaw-dropping.

 

    If I had to describe the tone of Nobody’s Girl in one word, I would choose harrowing.   Virginia Giuffre is subjected to incredible abuses from a very early age and throughout the rest of her life.  Yet if I could include a second word in my description, it would be uplifting.  There are moments of love interspersed among all the horrors, and it is extremely encouraging to learn that attitudes are changing about sexual abuse.

 

    Laws are being passed to aid the victims in obtaining justice against their abusers, and support programs are becoming available for those suffering trauma from such  abuse.  Nobody’s Girl is contributing greatly to those attitude shifts.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 6,945 ratings and 760 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.57*/5, based on 34,116 ratings and 4,278 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    In July 2009, Epstein was released from jail after serving only thirteen months; he was placed on house arrest for a period of another year.  It would later be revealed that for most of his jail sentence, he’d been allowed to go “on work release” to the office of a nonprofit he’d newly created called the Florida Science Foundation.  As delineated in a handwritten addendum to the nonprosecution agreement, he was permitted to visit this office up to twelve hours a day, six days a week.  He continued to molest girls there, and after he got out of jail, he dissolved the foundation.  (pg. 211)

 

    How entitled and selfish do you have to be to continue hounding and threatening the very victims you’ve hurt before?  It drove me crazy to think these people could potentially get away with silencing me for good.  When someone on Twitter speculated that the FBI might kill me “to protect the ultrarich and well connected,” I felt the need to respond.  If I died suddenly, I tweeted, no one should believe that it was an accident.

    “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal,” I typed.  (pg. 294)

 

“Just get the icky part over with so the good parts of life can go on.”  (pg. 95)

    The cussing in Nobody’s Girl is relatively light, considering its topic.  I counted just 14 instances in the first 20% of the book, although about 2/3 of those were f-bombs.  Needless to say, the subject material recounted numerous adult situations.  I was pleasantly surprised that the describing of these horrors never descended into lewdness.  I commend both the author and her collaborator for achieving this.

 

    My only quibble is with the memoir’s ending.  The final chapter details Virginia Giuffre’s activities in early 2025 and her immediate plans and hope for the future.  Unfortunately, she passed away on April 25, 2025, apparently by suicide.  But the reader learns of this at the very start of the book, along with some disturbing updates about Giuffre’s crumbling marriage.  I think it would’ve been more appropriate to develop these events into an Epilogue.

 

    But I pick at nits.  For me, Nobody’s Girl was a gritty, gripping tale of systemic sexual abuse perpetrated by certain members of society’s power elite.  It shines a spotlight on a very dark aspect of the American dream, but it also provides hope and resources for the victims of this abuse.  Judging from the reviews at both Amazon and Goodreads, a vast majority of others had the same reaction.

 

    10 Stars.  One last thing.  Virginia Giuffre spent quite a few years in Australia, and in the book she utilizes several common phrases that are used Down Under.  Among them are “having a whinge” and “faffing around”.  Who knew that Australians speak a foreign language?

The End of Antiquity - Nick Holmes

    2025; 263 pages.  Book 5 (out of 5, but eventually 6) in “The Fall of the Roman Empire” series.  Full Title: The End of Antiquity – The Last Days of Rome and the Rise of Islam.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Islamic History; Roman History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Really, the Roman Empire in the middle of the sixth century was in pretty good shape.  Yes, the capital city is now Constantinople, because Rome itself over in Italy has been sacked by barbarians several times.

 

    But under the Emperor Justinian, almost all of the land Rome held at its height had been recaptured.  The various barbarian tribes had either melted away, been pushed back into the hinterlands, bought off with tribute money, or given land within the Roman Empire and granted Roman citizenship.

 

    But various threats to the Empire were about to erupt.  Some of them were military in nature—those Germanic tribes were happy with tribute money, but who knows for how long?  In Asia the Turks and the Persians were itching to take some land away from the Romans.  And when they weren’t fighting outsiders, the armies and politicians of the Roman Empire regularly fought among themselves.

 

    But other dangers, more difficult to predict and see, were about threaten Constantinople’s existence.  For if all these factors start happening at once, who knows if the Roman Empire will survive?

 

What’s To Like...

    Nick Holmes divides The End of Antiquity into three sections, namely:

        Part 1. The Ice Age Cometh:  Chapters 01-08; 5%-27%.

        Part 2. The Last War of Antiquity: Chapters 09-16; 27%-54%.

        Part 3. The Children of Hagar: Chapters 17-27; 54%-87%.

 

    The series' timeline segues smoothly from the previous book, Justinian’s Empire.  Justinian passes away here in Chapter 3, and a bitter internecine war of succession erupts.  Eventually a Roman general named Maurice takes the throne and does a decent job of restoring the empire to its former glory.  Maurice is one of two main emperors focused on by this book, the other being Heraclius.  I had never heard of either of them, so this was quite an enlightening read for me.

 

    I love the attention Nick Holmes gives to a new force in the region—the incredible rise of Islam from out of nowhere to being the Roman Empire’s main threat.  There’s a lot of complex interplay between the Christian, Moslem, Jewish, and Persian religions, further impacted by a deep hatred between two major Christian sects: the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians.  The net result was a lot of "killing for God", further weakening the Empire.

 

    But things get further complicated.  We now have evidence that the Earth was hit by something called the “Late Antique Little Ice Age” somewhere around AD 536, which  caused massive crop failures in most of Eurasia.  The affected areas were subsequently hit with a deadly plague, probably a variant of the "bubonic plague", aka the “Black Death”, which greatly reduced their populations.

    Nick Holmes proposes that the global cooling was actually a boon for certain select civilizations thrive.  We’ll let you read the book to find out just who and where these lucky areas were, and why they’d prosper from global cooling when everyone else was suffering.

 

    The End of Antiquity closes with a conflict called “The Great Siege of Constantinople”, which lasted two years, and ended on a high note for the Byzantine (aka “Roman”) Empire by the defeat of a major Arab fleet and army.  For now, the Empire survives, and I’m wondering if the next book in this series will take us to AD 1453, a pivotal date in the history of Byzantium.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.3/5 based on 76 ratings and ?? reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.40/5 based on 40 ratings and 3 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Its central character was the ambitious Lombard king Alboin who vied against his bitter foes, the Gepids (another Germanic tribe), while harbouring a passion for the Gepid king’s beautiful daughter Rosamund.  In 566, he allied with the Avars, and with their help defeated the Gepids and killed their king.  Rosamund was captured and, against her wishes, he married her and, according to legend, at the wedding celebration he forced her to drink from a cup made from her father’s skull.  As Alboin was soon to discover, this wasn’t the best way of ensuring a happy marriage.  (loc. 449)

 

    If Arab victory over the Romans was a surprise, even more surprising was their victory over Persia.

    The historical relationship between Persia and Arabia was much closer than that between Rome and Arabia.  For the Romans, Arabia had always been of limited interest.  It was on the periphery of their empire and their consciousness.  They regarded it a little like they regarded ancient Scotland, or Caledonia as they called it.  Everyone knew where it was but no one wanted to go there.  (loc. 2441)

 

Kindle Details…

    The End of Antiquity is priced at $6.99 right now, as are the other four books in the series.  An earlier work of the author, The Byzantine World War is available for just $2.99.

 

“We beseech that they be received in appropriate manner by your superabundant Majesty, and be allowed to return to us.”  In other words, please don’t chop their heads off.  (loc. 1329)

    I admit it, I’m hooked on this series, and The End of Antiquity only reinforced that.  There is no profanity in the text, and no any adult situations.  The closest we come to such a thing is given in the first excerpt given above.

 

    A quibble might be made that the “Rome” of the “Roman Empire” doesn’t get much ink here.  But hey, although it’s been snatched away from the barbarians, it doesn’t really play a significant part in the events of the 6^th-8^th century Roman Empire.

 

    Nick Holmes’ writing style is both scholarly and folksy, an example of which is given in the second excerpt above.  His books are somehow informative without being dry, which is not an easy thing to do.  Here’s hoping that Book Six is coming along nicely.

 

    9 Stars.  One last thing.  One of the weapons that the Byzantines used to destroy the Arab fleet besieging Constantinople in 716-718 AD was something called “Greek fire”.  The formula for making Greek fire has been lost in the fog of Time, and no one yet has ever been able to rediscover it.  Rediscover it somehow, and you will achieve Fame and Fortune.

Assassination Vacation - Sarah Vowell

   2006; 255 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Travelogue; American History; Non-Fiction; Biographies.  Overall Rating: 8½*/10.

 

    Four United States presidents were assassinated during their time in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy.  Each time, America was stunned and went into a state of shock and mourning.

 

    In every case, authorities concluded a lone gunman was responsible.  In two of those assassinations, Lincoln and Kennedy, the killer also perished: John Wilkes Booth during the ensuing manhunt, and Lee Harvey Oswald during his incarceration phase. In the Garfield and McKinley slayings, the shooter was put on trial and subsequently hung.  There was no national mourning for any of them.

 

    But then comes the remembering part.  What should you do to memorialize the slain presidents?  Heroic statues of the presidents come to mind, but what about the bullets, the blood-soaked clothes, and a lock of presidential hair?  For that matter, what about those sorts of things taken from the assassins?

 

    Sarah Vowell decided to find out.

 

What’s To Like...

     Assassination Vacation is first and foremost a travelogue.  Sarah Vowell travels up and down the eastern United States, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends when she can talk them into it.  The book of her experiences is divided into five sections, namely:

    00. Preface (page 1)

    01. Abraham Lincoln (page 19)

    02. James Garfield (page 121)

    03. William McKinley (page 187)

    04. Robert Todd Lincoln (page 239)

 

    As can be seen, the biggest attention is rightfully paid to Abraham Lincoln.  He was the first POTUS killed in office, had just finished presiding over a heart-wrenching Civil War, and his killer came from a nationally-known acting family.  James Garfield and William McKinley were presidents that most people, including me, know very little about.  Robert Todd Lincoln was Lincoln’s son, who, through incredible odds, was in the vicinity of all three of the aforementioned slayings.

 

    I loved the historical aspect of the book.  Sarah Vowell gives the reader lots of interesting details about each president – where he grew up, what his politics were, and where his life came to an end.  I was impressed that the author also took time to investigate the lives of the assassins.  What was their life like, why did they do it, how did they manage to accomplish the assassination, and what rationale did they express during the limited time after they were apprehended.

 

    Sarah Vowell has an “informal” writing style that I thoroughly enjoy.  This is not a dry presentation of American history.  The reader gets to hear her thoughts as she rummages through museums and tourist traps, and searches for hard-to-spot memorial plaques on nondescript walls.  She often shares her tastes in music (which I found eclectic and excellent).  Last but not least, the she taught me the proper pronunciation of one of the assassins’ last names:  Leon Czolgosz.  Yeah, good luck guessing that one; we’ll divulge it at the end of this review.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 1,176 ratings and 446 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.93*/5, based on 47,128 ratings and 4,142 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    In a museum across town there is another object that is the best indication of the esteem for Lincoln I have ever seen—more than the marble tomb, more than even the marble Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., more than any book, statue, lock of hair, bloodstained collar, top hat, or plaque.

    Any old forgettable rich guy might warrant a marble tomb, an obelisk, or elaborate sculptures after death, but you know you are regarded with a ridiculous, religious amount of awe when they put your dug-up drainpipe in a museum.  (pg. 109)

 

    The wounded president was moved onto a mattress, his head held in the hands of a washroom attendant.  But, as Laurie Anderson put it, “It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole.”  Garfield might have survived the shooting but for what happened next.  Namely, that various physicians summoned to the scene, especially Dr. D.W. Bliss, searched for the bullet’s location in Garfield’s back by poking their grimy fingers into the wound, rooting around in the presidential innards.  (pg. 160)

 

“You sockdologizing old man-trap.”  (pg. 46, and yes, that’s a real word.)

    There’s just a modicum of cussing in Assassination Vacation.  I counted just ten instances in the entire book, and they were mostly the result of direct quotes from persons Sarah was talking to.

 

    It should be noted that although four presidents have been assassinated while in office, only three are discussed here.  There’s almost nothing about John Kennedy being shot in Dallas.  I was okay with this; I’m old enough to remember where I was when this happened: in 8^th-grade civics class.  But younger readers may be disappointed that his assassination wasn’t investigated for this book.

 

    Also, please keep in mind that Sarah Vowell isn’t shy about voicing her political views in Assassination Vacation.  We won’t say what they are, but right-wingers should probably give this book a pass.

 

    Overall, I enjoyed Assassination Vacation., both for its delightful travelogue aspect and its informative history aspect.  It was easy-reading, witty, and above all, tremendously informative.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  Per the author, the name “Czolgosz” is pronounced “shol gosh”.  Now you know.

Confederates in the Attic - Tony Horwitz

   1998; 390 pages.  Full Title: Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.  New Author? : No, but it’s been a while.  Genres : Travelogue; U.S. History; Civil War; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    I’ve always enjoyed studying history.  History classes were my favorites in Junior High and High School, and helped prop up my GPA in college.  The best parts of History studies were the sections about wars.  All sorts of wars, including the American Civil War.

 

    I grew up in Pennsylvania, and the Gettysburg battlefield was about about an hour from our house.  One time I got a chance to walk through the national park there.  I stood behind the cannons of the Union defenses, mentally relived the bloody fighting on Little Round Top, and sensed the desperation that the Confederate soldiers felt as they were cut down during Pickett’s Charge.  I was an avid Civil War enthusiast.

 

    So was Tony Horwitz.  He spent the better part of three summers visiting all sorts of Civil War sites, then wrote a book about his experiences: Confederates in the Attic.  Compared to him, I was a Farb.

 

    I was a what??  Hey, be cool now.  Don’t have a Wargasm.

 

What’s To Like...

    There are fifteen chapters in Confederates in the Attic.  Tony Horwitz’s travels and conversations are presented in chronological order, and for the most part take place in the South, since that’s where almost all of the fighting was done.  My favorite chapters, and yours may vary, were:

    05. Dying for Dixie  (Kentucky)

    06. A Farb of the Heart  (Virginia)

    10. The Civil Wargasm  (Virginia and beyond)

    11. Gone With the Window  (Georgia)

    14. I Had a Dream  (Alabama)

 

    I liked the “balance” in the author’s telling of his interactions with folks in the Deep South.  Tony Horwits is a Yankee (he was born in Washington D.C.), and most of the locals he meets and interviews are staunch Dixie diehards.  Their outlooks on their present situation range from “can’t we all just get along?” to “the war ain’t over yet.”  The “truth” about the Andersonville prison seemed to be an especially contentious issue. 

 

    The author also gets introduced to, and quickly enlists in “Reenactment” squads, which I found fascinating.  I assumed participants in Reenactments were just wannabee actors playing their roles; it turns out that the “Hardliners” in that group go to great lengths to fully experience the miserable life of soldiers in the Civil War.

 

    I loved the attention Tony Horwitz gives to the “myth versus reality” aspect of Civil War history. An example of this is given in the first excerpt below.  There are dozens more.  The Battle of Shiloh seems to have been particularly fictionalized, and the “Minie Ball Pregnancy”, which I was taught as being factual, is apparently pure hokum.

 

    Confederates in the Attic is a trivia lover’s delight.  You’ll learn the etymology of the word “deadline”, and how The Citadel college got its name.  I was surprised to learn that one of my favorite writers, Ambrose Bierce, fought in the Battle of Shiloh, and that you can visit the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.5/5 based on 2,043 ratings and 597 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.10/5 based on 25,050 ratings and 2,165 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Sybaritic (adj.) : fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure.

Others: Coffle (n.); Guidon (n.) .

 

Excerpts...

    Fort Sumter wasn’t yet finished when the Confederate commander in Charleston, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, received orders to “proceed to reduce it.”  Beauregard carried out this dietlike instruction at dawn on April 12, 1861, when the rebels unleashed an artillery barrage from batteries ringing the harbor.

    The Union garrison inside Sumter fired back until the fort’s wood barracks caught fire, forcing the men to surrender.  Incredibly, the only fatality during the thirty-four-hour artillery duel was a Confederate horse.  But when Beauregard permitted his foes to fire a 100-gun salute before lowering the Stars and Stripes, one of the shots misfired and killed two Northern soldiers—the first of 620,000 men who would die in the struggle that followed.  (pg. 46)

 

    The next morning, I toured what little there was to see of Elba, a town of 4,000 perched beside the Pea River.  I asked a Chamber of Commerce official if Elba had any historic sites I might visit.  “There’s that bug statue over in Enterprise,” she said, handing me a pamphlet about the neighboring town.  In a bizarre act of homage, Enterprise had erected a monument to the crablike pest that ravaged Alabama cotton fields seventy years ago.  “In profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity,” the inscription read.  The weevil had forced cotton farmers to diversify, and Enterprise was now a leading peanut-growing center.  (pg. 344)

 

I was midway to Gettysburg with a live chicken slung over one shoulder when I realized my Civil War odyssey had come to an end.  (pg. 379)

    There’s only a small amount of profanity in Confederates in the Attic, 10 instances in the first 20% of the book.  Almost all of the cussing is in direct quotes of the folks that Tony Horwitz is interviewing.  Three of those first ten cusswords were f-bombs and one was a racial epithet.

 

    I only notice one typo in the whole book: hanger/hangar.  Kudos to the beta-readers and editors.

 

    The worst thing I can say about Confederates in the Attic is that after a while, the rationalizations used by diehard Dixie devotees to justify their antipathy for all damn-Yankees get repetitive and tedious.  That’s not Tony Horwitz’s fault; indeed, he mentions this a couple of times in the book.

 

    8½ Stars.  One last thing.  In addition to “farb” and “wargasm”, the other new bit of slang I encountered was “knob knowledge”.  Tony Horwitz cites it as a collegiate term used at The Citadel, but we had this at Penn State when I was there.  Pass your knob knowledge test and you can toss your beanie away!

David and Goliath - Malcolm Gladwell

   2013; 295 pages.  Full Title: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Applied Psychology; Sociology; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    David and Goliath.  Everyone has heard the tale.  It has inspired generations upon generations of readers.  Big, bad Goliath trots out and challenges the Israelites to a one-on-one battle with any champion they choose.  He’s fully armored and is carrying a huge sword.  Out steps puny little David with only a slingshot and five smooth stones.

 

    David plunks Goliath with his first shot, hitting him right in the forehead and stunning him.  David then goes over to the giant, picks up his sword and chops off the giant’s head.  From this we learn to trust in the higher powers, never get discouraged, and bravely do battle against all odds.  Malcolm Gladwell has studied the details of the David and Goliath tale, and admits that there are important lessons to be learned.

 

    But he feels the ones we’ve been taught for generations upon generations are completely wrong.

 

What’s To Like...

    Malcolm Gladwell divides David and Goliath into three parts, each containing three chapters, namely:

    Part 1 : The Advantages of Disadvantages (Chapters 1-3)

    Topics: Girls High School basketball; Classroom size; Choosing a college.

    Part 2 : The Theory of Desirable Difficulty (Chapters 4-6)

    Topics: Dyslexia; the London Blitz; the Civil Right Movement.

    Part 3 : The Limits of Power (Chapters 7-9)

    Topics: Northern Ireland; California’s ‘Three Strike Law’; Vichy France.

 

        Each chapter’s title is that of a person, none of whom I had heard of, whose life embodies the themes of that section.  Gladwell then takes their “lessons learned” and applies them to other, usually more famous, persons and historical events.  Some of those tangential topics will surprise you.  For instance, in Chapter 5, the theme of the London Blitz segues into the fight against Leukemia.

 

    There is also an Introduction, in which Gladwell meticulously examines the David/Goliath affair tale, even suggesting that the latter was afflicted with something called “Acromegaly” (say what?!), which leveled the playing field.  The book closes with an Afterword, which focuses on America’s Vietnam debacle.

 

    I was impressed by the author’s writing skills.  Let’s face it, a story centering on Girls’ High School Basketball sounds like a yawner, ditto for detailing the search for a cure to Leukemia.  But Gladwell somehow turns them into fascinating subjects.  Other interesting sidelights include Lawrence of Arabia, a cameo appearance by Julius Erving, the neuroscience of dyslexia, and the statistical importance of “inverted U-curves”.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 14,018 ratings and 3,706 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.97*/5, based on 188,881 ratings and 11,990 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    Suppose you were to total up all the wars over the past two hundred years that occurred between very large and very small countries.  Let’s say that one side has to be at least ten times larger in population and armed might than the other.  How often do you think the bigger side wins?  Most of us would put that number at close to 100 percent.  A tenfold difference in a lot.  But the actual answer may surprise you.  When the political scientist Ivan Arreguin did the calculation a few years ago, what he came up with was 71.5 percent.  Just under a third of the time, the weaker country wins.  (pg. 21)

 

    Birmingham was the most racially divided city in America.  It was known as “Johannesburg of the South.”  When a busload of civil rights activists were on their way to Birmingham, the local police stood by while Klansmen forced their bus to the side of the road and set it afire.  Black people who tried to move into white neighborhoods had their homes dynamited by the city’s local Ku Klux Klansmen so often that Birmingham’s other nickname was Bombingham.  (pg. 168)

 

The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.  (pg. 85)

    There’s a sprinkling of profanity—I noted 21 instances in the entire of book—in David and Goliath, including four f-bombs and a half-dozen cases of the "n-word" racial epithet.  Most of those occurred in direct quotes of various newsmakers.

 

    Wikipedia mentions that the critical response to David and Goliath was mostly negative.  The criticisms generally accuse Gladwell of skewing the data to fit his arguments. However, that Wikipedia segment closes with a positive review, and also notes that David and Goliath was a bestseller, reaching #4 on a NY Times chart (“Hardcover Non-Fiction”) and #5 on a USA Today chart (“Best-Selling Books”).

 

    Personally, I think the Malcolm Gladwell does a great job of presenting alternate views on various strategies to use when you’re the underdog, the misfit, or the weaker force.  His conclusions are open to debate, but hey, that’s the purpose of this book.  The fact that Gladwell suggests that David beat Goliath because of the giant having an eyesight-affecting medical condition is of course speculative.  Then again, that whole Philistine/Israelite encounter itself is unprovable.

 

    9 Stars.  My favorite chapters were #6, #7, and the Afterword, all of which focus on real life struggles in American history, some of which I lived through.  Your favorites may vary.