Steve Goddard's History Wire

Book Alert / The Man Who Sold The World

The Man Who Sold the World -- Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, Nation Books '09, $26.95, 371 pages, ISBN #1568584105. Index, sources notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

Now that American liberals can bask in the glow of a left-leaning national administration, they continue to have one burr under their saddle -- the seeming deification of President Ronald Reagan, their bitter foe during most of the 1980s.

Now veteran New Jersey crime reporter William Kleinknecht puts forward a book that aims to set the record straight, arguing that the biggest onus for the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and financial meltdown lies not with George W. Bush but with Reagan himself:

"The financial deregulation launched in the 1980s freed banks and securities firms to squander hundreds of billions of dollars and make a shambles of the economy. Boom-and-bust cycles, obscene CEO salaries, blackouts, drug-company scandals, collapsing bridges, plummeting wages for working people, the flight of U.S. manufacturing abroad -- these are all products of Reagan's free-market zealotry and his gutting of the public sector."

And the idea that Reagan was the little man's friend the author finds laughable: "Far from an advocate for Main Street America, Reagan's gutting of the public sector enacted wrenching social changes that have decimated small town life and undermined values that were once at the core of traditional conservatism."

William Kleinknecht reports for the Newark Star-Ledger and previously covered the crime beat for the New York Daily News. He authored the book, New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America.

Book Alert / That Infernal Little Cuban Republic

That Infernal Little Cuban Republic -- The United States and the Cuban Revolution by Lars Schoultz, UNo. Carolina Press '09, $35, 745 pages, ISBN #080783260X. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

With Fidel Castro celebrating the silver anniversary of the revolution he fomented in 1959, only senior citizens remember pre-communist rule in Cuba. Yet this little island has bedeviled American leaders for generations, even well before Fulgencio Batista, whom Castro overthrew. As early as 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt fulminated, "I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth."

In a brief Q&A, University of North Carolina political scientist Lars Schoultz discusses the writing of his new book:

Q. What's the problem with Cuba?

A. "...while Cuba has always been a pain in the neck, Fidel Castro's revolutionary generation -- the focus of my book -- has been especially annoying. It has sent us wave after wave of refugees. It has also supported governments and political movements we oppose in Latin America and Africa and even the Middle East, as if we didn't have enough problems there already. And most galling, it has refused to accept the position of inferiority to which we have traditionally assigned the peoples of the Caribbean. The Cuban revolution is a challenge to U.S. hegemony, and as one White House official commented in the late 1960s, 'that especially bugs us.'"

Q. Why is the U.S.-Cuban relationship important?

A. In itself, Cuba is unimportant, especially since the Cold War ended. But the U.S.-Cuban relationship is the best-ever illustration of why it is no longer easy to be a hegemonic power, to take up the White Man's Burden. The behavior of great powers is constrained in the contemporary world.

At a rudimentary level, this book is simply a case study in the trials and tribulations of realism, an intellectual tradition stretching back to the fifth century B.C., when Thucydides, chronicling the conflicts among Greek city-states, perfectly captured realism's bedrock principle: the strong will do what they want, and the weak will accept what they must.

Q. What does this book reveal about the future relationship between the U.S. and Cuba?

A. Today's aging generation of Cuban revolutionaries (and Florida-based Cuban Americans) is rapidly fading away. When the next generation makes changes in Cuba, as it inevitably will, then Cuban Americans' assessments of these changes will slowly diversify until at some point the pollsters will tell everyone it is safe to declare victory without risking the alienation of Florida's Cuban-American voters. The 2008 election suggests that this moment might be closer than many think.

When it arrives, the easy part will be over. The difficult-to-answer question will be whether the United States will ever abandon the ideology of benevolent domination that appears on nearly every page of this book.

Book Alert / Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet

Khubilai Khan's Lost Fleet -- In Search of a Legendary Armada by James P. Delgado, UCalifornia Press '08, 225 pages, ISBN #0520259769. Index, notes, sources, grouping of b&w glossy images.

For more than seven centuries, an Asian mystery has haunted Chinese and Japanese scholars. After conquering China in 1279, the Mongol ruler Khubilai Khan dispatched forty-four hundred ships to invade Japan. The gargantuan fleet never returned. Over the years, folklore evolved that Khan's ships fell victim to a "divine wind," in common terms, a typhoon so fierce as to send so many ships and 100,000 troops to the bottom of the ocean.

In recent years, a Japanese team set out to search for the remains of the failed expedition. James P. Delgado not only narrates this archaeological saga of momentous proportions; as a prominent archaeologist and historian himself, he was part of it. He describes the task of his team members as they examine sunken ships, hand-painted scrolls, drowned bodies, and historical and literary records:

"They practice a unique form of science, stripping away the mud and mapping with care the well-preserved but shattered remains of ships that are surrounded by scattered provisions, weapons and more intimate finds like the bones and shredded leather armor of a drowned soldier. These scientists then bring their finds to the surface to begin years of treatment in laboratories to ensure the relics and remains do not disintegrate after their long burial."

James P. Delgado is the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and has written many books.

Book Alert / Beaumarchais -- A Biography

Beaumarchais -- A Biography by Maurice Lever, FSG '09, $35, 411 pages, ISBN #0374113289. Index, bibliography, no source notes or illustrations.

In this new translation, the biographer of Marquis de Sade shines his spotlight on another Frenchman, whose life is just as notable but is much less well known. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais may be best known as the author of The Marriage of Figaro, but his self-made career contained many other facets of note.

In the words of Susan Emanuel, who translated Maurice Lever's biography from the French, Beaumarchais was "an inventor and an entrepreneur, a musician and a dramatist, a diplomat and a spy, a confidant of both kings and revolutionaries, a libertine and a family man -- and a social reformer who was one of America's prime advocates at the court of Louis XVI." Lever credits his subject with markedly contributing to America's victory in its battle for independence.

The late Maurice Lever is the author of more than a dozen books, largely in the field of 17th and 18th century French literature. Susan Emanuel, who lives in Burgundy and outside Boston, has been a translator for 15 years.

Dutch Seen: New York Discovered Anew

The New Yorker:

"The Museum of the City of New York celebrates the four-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the original Dutch colonies in New York with an exhibition of works by twelve Dutch photographers, most residents of the city, who explore our shared history. The result, 'Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered,' is, inevitably perhaps, a hodgepodge—uneven but vivacious and full of feeling.

"Most of the photographers selected by the curator, Kathy Ryan, chose to focus on people, establishing an emotional common ground. Rineke Dijkstra’s Coney Island bathers, Hellen van Meene’s young girls, barefoot on trash-strewn streets, Morad Bouchakour’s jostling constellation of fascinatingly ordinary citizens, and Arno Nollen’s grid of close-up head shots all capture the combination of fragility and flintiness that the city values most. Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s studio portraits of local celebrities (Lou Reed, Mia Farrow, Björk) are considerably cooler and more theatrical, but Charlotte Dumas warms things up again with her studies of shelter dogs, photographed with such tenderness."

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Back to the Futurists: Italy's First Avant-Garde Turns 100

Slate.com:

"If there's one place the Futurists couldn't stand, it was Rome. You can't go a block in this city without stumbling over yet another ghastly ruin, yet another dreary museum with its 'reservoirs of boredom and nausea.' (That's from the 'Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture.') One minute you might pass a lingerie shop with purple bras in the window; the next, you round a corner and run straight into the Pantheon. A 2,000-year-old temple right there in the middle of it all, en route to the gelato place and across the street from an ATM. Magic.

We'd spent the morning at the Villa Borghese museum, marveling over the cultural legacy that Marinetti loved to loathe: lush Caravaggio portraits, Bernini's transfixing marble sculptures. I kept circling back to Bernini's 17^th-century masterwork 'Rape of Proserpina.' The indentations Pluto's fingers make in the back of Proserpina's thighs as she struggles from his grasp are almost unbearably lifelike. With a flash of sympathy, I wondered if this was how Marinetti felt—frozen in an eternal struggle to shake free of history, fearing, deep down, that he never would."

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Book Alert / Deliver Me From Pain

Deliver Me From Pain -- Anesthesia & Birth in America by Jacqueline H. Wolf, Johns Hopkins UPress '09, $50, 277 pages, ISBN #0801891108. Index, notes, glossary, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The author nicely summarizes the thrust of her new book in its introduction:

"Like other public debates about women's reproductive health and medicine, the century-and-a-half long discussion of the necessity and efficacy of obstetric anesthesia has been characterized by hyperbole. Voices of moderation have been drowned out by the proponents of two extreme and contradictory views of labor. The words of two nineteenth-century physicians exemplify these views. One argued that birthing chambers were principally scenes of 'cheerfulness and gayety.' The other portrayed labor as 'terrible torture, hopeless of relief.' These diametrically opposed views have persisted. The statements of two mothers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries paint the same irreconcilable pictures. One described her unmedicated labor as 'the most ecstatic, interesting, adventurous, exciting, enjoyable and personally triumphant accomplishment I have yet known.' The other condemned unanesthetized childbirth as 'a barbaric ritual.' No matter the century, proponents of the 'cheerful' and 'ecstatic' view of labor contend that obstetric anesthesia is wholly unnecessary and extremely dangerous; proponents of the 'terrible' and 'barbaric' view declare anesthesia to be an unequivocal necessity for all women who care about dignity, comfort and health.'"

The author, associate professor of the history of medicine in the Department of Social Medicine at Ohio University, divides her text into six chapters, dealing with: Ether and Chloroform, Twilight Sleep, Developing the Obstetric Anesthesia Arsenal, Giving Birth to the Baby Boomers, Natural Childbirth and Birth Reform, and Epidural Anesthesia and Cesarean Section.

Book Alert / First We Read, Then We Write

First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process by Robert D. Richardson, UIowa Press '09, 112 pages, ISBN #1587297930. Index, notes, unillustrated.

"Every spirit builds itself a house," Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote in Nature, "and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven." The quote is quintessentially Emerson, underscoring his belief that the inner world which the least of us spins is no less rich and worthy to its creator than that of the great writers and thinkers.

As author Robert D. Richardson writes in his engrossing new book, Emerson lived to write: "...in practically every moment of his adult life he was either preparing to write, trying to write, or writing." If anyone ever doubted his commitment to his craft, Richardson disabuses them: "Emerson advised that 'the way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent.'"

Some excellent books touching on Emerson have been written in recent years, most notably Sam Schreiner's The Concord Quartet and Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury. There, we see "the sage of Concord" at the lecture podium or relaxing with such friends as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the father-and-daughter team, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. Richardson eavesdrops on Emerson in new contexts -- expounding at length on writing to one of his students in a dorm room, for example.

Emerson approached writing surgically. Rather than simply opening a vein and letting it flow, he broke down the discipline into its component parts, so the author is able to gather whole chapters on "words" and "sentences." The placement of words within sentences and movement of a key word to the end of a sentence to give it "snap" are among the lessons he imparts in this slim volume.

Richardson, who has written biographies of William James and Henry David Thoreau as well as Emerson, is a winner of the 2007 Bancroft Prize.

J.D. Salinger Prevails In "Catcher in the Rye" Lawsuit

The New York Times:

"In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Tuesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of 'The Catcher in the Rye.'

"The judge, Deborah A. Batts, of United States District Court in Manhattan, had granted a 10-day temporary restraining order last month against the author, Fredrik Colting, who wrote the new novel under the pen name John David California.

"In a 37-page ruling filed on Wednesday, Judge Batts issued a preliminary injunction — indefinitely barring the publication, advertising or distribution of the book in this country — after considering the merits of the case. The book has been published in Britain."

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Evolution To Your Rescue: Q&A With Dr. William Meller

The Los Angeles Times:

"When you think of evolution, you probably imagine a fish that becomes a bird that becomes a primate. You might also think back to cavemen, or early ancestors who held answers to our genetic makeup today.

"However, when it comes to your health, you might think that medicine has…well, evolved to a point where we, as a species, no longer need to listen to cues from days of old. Modern medicine will fix us.

"Dr. William Meller, a board-certified internist who runs a medical practice in Santa Barbara, argues to the contrary. He writes in his new book, 'Evolution Rx: A Practical Guide to Harnessing Our Innate Capacity for Health and Healing,' that health concerns today are best remedied by listening to our bodies more, and paying attention to evolutionary clues that explain exactly what we should do and how we should take care of ourselves."

“'Sunlight is life,' he writes, for example. We know we need the sun to survive, and yet many of us shun it -- it has become a common practice to stay out of the sun as much as possible and lather on sunscreen everywhere we go."

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Book Alert / Saviors and Survivors

Saviors and Survivors -- Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdami, Pantheon '09, $26.95, 398 pages, ISBN #0307377237. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

To understand the dispiriting crisis in Darfur, argues Columbia government Prof. Mahmood Mandani, one must first understand the history of Sudan. In his new book, Mandani retraces the impacts of the forty-year civil war in Chad and demonstrates the genesis of the 1987-89 civil war in Darfur between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south.

Mamdani probes the British colonial involvement in the country, including the division of its population into "native" and "settler" tribes, creating homelands for the former but not the latter. He shows how the resultant conflict helped lead to the creation of two rebel movements and both the insurgency and counterinsurgency that followed. And yet he challenges the label -- genocide -- that the West has attached to this conflict.

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University.

Out in Paperback / The Myth of an Irish Cinema

The Myth of an Irish Cinema -- Approaching Irish-Themed Films by Michael Patrick Gillespie, Syracuse UP '08, 276 pages, ISBN #0815631936. Index, bibliography, source notes, five appendices, b&w images sprinkled through text.

In his new book, Marquette University English Prof. Michael Patrick Gillespie challenges the notion that one umbrella called "Irish national cinema" can encapsulate the breadth and depth of Irish filmmaking today. "Given the social, economic, and cultural complexity of contemporary Irish identity," Gillespie argues, "filmakers can no longer present Irishness as a monolithic entity."

To prove his point, Gillespie devotes chapters to such cinematic expression as middle class, urban life, rural life, religion, and politics. Among films visited in this survey are John Ford's The Quiet Man, Kirk Jones's Waking Ned Devine, Bob Quinn's Budawanny and The Bishop's Story.

Gillespie is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University and has written several other books.

Kill Dill: The New Dillinger Disappoints

Time.com:

"To become rich and famous in the depression '30s, a fellow could make movies, play baseball or rob banks. John Dillinger chose Way 3, and for a while he enjoyed the celebrity of a Clark Gable or a Lou Gehrig. Newspapers breathlessly limned his exploits as he made sizable withdrawals from vaults throughout the Midwest, using his machine gun as collateral.

"But killing cops puts a man at greater risk than hitting a homer or kissing the girl. Dillinger stirred the hunter's blood in J. Edgar Hoover, the young director of the FBI, and Hoover's most resourceful agent, Melvin Purvis. They, and Dillinger too, knew that a life of crime was not a profession from which one gracefully retired. Purvis and his team caught up with their public enemy as he emerged from a theater showing a Gable gangster film. The real-life tough guy was 31 when he died on that Chicago street.

"Dillinger gets the genial touch of Johnny Depp's star quality in Public Enemies, the gigantic, meticulous but finally perfunctory new biopic from director and co-writer Michael Mann. There's not a soupçon of psychopathy in this Dillinger; rather, he's a smart, charming, efficient entrepreneur whose career would've lasted much longer if he hadn't been surrounded by klutzes, sharks and a betrayer from a brothel."

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War and Peace, 1984, Ulysses Top All Time Book Meta-List

Newsweek.com

"Declaring the best book ever written is tricky business. Who's to say what the best is? We went one step further: we crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John's College reading list, Oprah's, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time. It's a list of lists — a meta-list. Let the debate begin."

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Book Alert / Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age

Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age -- Technological Innovation in the United States 1790-1865 by Ross Thomson, Johns Hopkins '09, $68, 432 pages, ISBN #0801891418. Index, works cited, source notes, patent and invention data sets, unillustrate, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"The greatest invention of the nineteenth century," wrote British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, "was the invention of the method of invention." How else to explain the meteoric rise of new product development in the United States between the nation's creation and the end of the Civil War?

Just consider a few of the new inventions rolled out during that time: the locomotive (actually invented in Britain), the sewing machine, the telegraph, machine tools, including the tool-and-die process; the reaping machine, and improved firearms. But, as University of Vermont economist Ross Thomson argues, none of these inventions arose from a vacuum. They depended on what the author calls "an integrated innovation system that generated, disseminated, and employed new technological knowledge across ever-widening ranges of the economy."

Individual inventions made possible new ones: Henry Bessemer's blast furnace, allowing impurities to be removed from iron, made possible structural steel. Combining that with Elisha Otis's elevator enabled the skyscraper, although such buildings didn't emerge until after the Civil War.

In the course of his research, Thomson analysed 14,000 patents, census data for 1,800 companies, hundreds of business directories, and the records of two dozen machinery firms. Collectively, they were the product of such knowledge-diffusing institutions as the patent office, machine shops, scientific societies, public colleges, and the civil engineering profession.

Thomson is associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont and author of The Path of Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States.