Steve Goddard's History Wire

With McCain, The Revival of the 1930s Generation

The New York Times:

"Much has been made of Senator John McCain’s advancing years. He is, as everyone knows, the oldest candidate in the field, and if things go his way in November he will take office at age 72, which will make him older than any other new president in history. This fact has provoked merriment, most conspicuously on late-night television, where he is often the butt of codger jokes.

"Actually, he inhabits a more serious historic role, as the latest — and almost certainly the last — hope for Americans born in the 1930s to send one of their own to the White House. The 1900s, the 1910s, the 1920s and the 1940s have all been represented in the White House. But not the 1930s.

"It is the missing decade. A demographic blip? Perhaps. But it might also be that Americans born in the 1930s lack the particular qualities we look for in our national leaders.

"It is never wise to generalize too broadly about decades. They are, after all, arbitrary time divisions. And yet our national elections have often been generational tests. John F. Kennedy, the first president born in the 20th century, reminded the world in his Inaugural Address that 'the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century.' As opposed, he plainly meant, to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was born in 1890."

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Book Alert / Party of Defeat

Party of Defeat -- How Democrats and Radicals Undermined America's War on Terror Before and After 9-11 by David Horowitz and Ben Johnson, Spence Publishing '08, $22.95, 197 pages, ISBN #1890626740. Index, source notes, no bibliography or illustrations.

Ah, ain't democracy great? Everyone gets to chip in his two cents. So grit your teeth, Democrats; today, it's your turn in the barrel. The conservative authors contend Democrats backed the Bush administration's entry into the Iraq war, then turned their backs when the war effort went south, putting the nation at risk. No matter that the Democrats were lied to in the run-up to the invasion vote as a way to garner their support.

Polls last week showed Bush's popularity at a record low in the mid-20s. This mystified me; who do I know, I asked, who actually would be left in the pro-Bush camp? Now I know. Authors David Horowitz and Ben Johnson argue that such national leaders as Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi are misguided in their opposition to the war, since they simply misunderstand the nature of our enemy and of the war itself:

"As radical Islam emerged in the 1970s," they write, "it found an ally in a left-wing establishment now thoroughly conditioned to blame America first. Our failure to confront the religious thugs who humiliated us in Iran encouraged the increasingly aggressive -- and deadly -- Islamist movement that eventually drew us into full-scale war."

Book Alert / Nudge

Nudge -- Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Yale UP '08, $26, 293 pages, ISBN #0300122233. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

At first glance, this book has all the earmarks of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or The Missing Link, books targeting a mental construct that somehow has gotten by us, causing us to smack our foreheads and whisper, "You dummy!" But Gladwell doesn't appear in the index, bibliography, or jacket blurbs, so I guess the conceptual framework must have dawned on them anew.

The authors' thesis seems somehow counterintuitive -- that all we need to change behavior positively -- or, for that matter, negatively -- is to be nudged one way or the other. One would have thought that as sensory cues to us multiply, each one would have to be stronger or louder to have an effect. But Let's ask the authors:

Q. You say that people have biases and make blunders. Why? Is there something wrong with us?

A. No, there is nothing wrong with us, we are just human and fallible. We have to make thousands of decisions every day, from what to wear in the morning to which article to read first in the newspaper, and we cope with this complexity by devising mental shortcuts. Some of the most exciting research over the last decades shows that while these shortcuts work well most of the time, they can also lead us astray.

As a result, we make terrible mistakes about our health, our money, and our happiness. And because we are so busy, we can be manipulated by seemingly tiny changes in the way our options are described or "framed." You're much more likely to choose to have an operation if you're told that "90 percent survive" than if you're told "10 percent die," even though the two statements mean the same thing! Since the frame influences the choice, it acts as what we call a "nudge."

                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Book Alert / Girls Like Us -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation

Girls Like us -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon -- and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller, Atria Books '08, $27.95, 539 pages, ISBN #0743491475. Index, bibliography, discography, footnotes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

In a book that attempts to paint the portrait of an era through three of the prime cultural influences of that time, is it credible that the author would have spoken with only one of her three subjects, even though they were all alive at the time of her writing?

As journalist and author Sheila Weller explains it, she asked representatives of singers Carole King, Carly Simon and Joni Mitchell for permission to speak, not with the stars themselves, but with their closest friends. "I set my limits first of all out of realism," she writes, "and also because I didn't want my shaky author's objectivity (I was starting out admiring) to be undermined by access to my subjects." Come on, author. You're not a teenybopper; you're a journalist, shall we say, well into your middle years. Is an interviewee about to make you swoon at this stage in your career?

But then Carly Simon called the author's voice mail, wanting to be interviewed. Weller acknowledges Joni Mitchell actually turned her down, and while Carole King had initially approved interviews, she changed her mind and asked her friends not to speak with the author. So the author proceeds with a book that interrelates the three careers by interviewing only one? And that one, Carly Simon, happens to be the daughter of a named partner of her publisher -- Simon & Schuster?

I'm sorry, Ms. Weller, it's a bit too much. You're writing about a highly important cultural era in American history. But, frankly, I can't get past your acknowledgements. For your sake, I hope other reviewers prove me wrong.

Book Alert / Iraq

Iraq by Gareth Stansfield, Polity '07 paperback. 263 pages, ISBN #0745632270. Index, bibliography, source notes, chronology, map.

The Bush administration, in the days following 9/11, set out to totally transform Iraq.  As the author explains, America certainly did that -- not into the hoped for "beacon of democracy" but rather into a "zone of instability."

Gareth Stansfield, associate professor of Middle East politics in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, argues that what Iraq has become is "a morass of competing ethno-sectarian political and social forces, in stark contrast to the views expressed by Western and Middle Eastern commentators alike before the US-led invasion, who commonly believed in the strength of Iraqi nationalism."

In deconstructing the Iraqi transformation in the days since Saddam Hussein, Stansfield tries to answer such questions as "Why did this fragmentation occur? Have Sunni-Shi'i tensions always been present? Are the Kurds seeking secession, or accommodation within the state? What has been the social and political impact of years of dictatorship, war and hardship? And why have US attempts to restructure the Iraqi state resulted in Iraq being on the verge of becoming a 'failed state,' rather than the first 'democratic domino' in the Middle East?"

Book Alert / Monteverdi's Last Operas

Monteverdi's Last Operas -- A Venetian Trilogy by Ellen Rosand, UCal Press '07, 447 pages, ISBN #0520249348. Index, bibliography, eight appendices, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Fully two centuries before Verdi, Puccini and Donizetti penned operas that still resonate strongly today, Claudio Monteverdi was writing works that would go down in history as the first important operas. Ellen Rosand, who teaches at Yale, is the author of a book on opera in Venice in the 17th century, subtitled The Creation of a Genre.

So in what seems a natural progression, Rosand now deconstructs the final years of one of opera's pioneer creators, by examining his last works -- Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (1642). Interestingly, the author bookends these operas around a third one, Le nozze d'Enea e Lavinia (1641), a work whose music has been lost in the mists of history.

However, knowing the chronology of this trilogy of works, Rosand maintains that viewing them together helps to better understand Monteverdi and the questions of authenticity that have dogged these works since they were discovered in the 19th century. "Le nozze d'Enea," she argues, "also helps to explain the striking differences between the other two, casting light on their contrasting moral ethos: the conflict between a world of emotional propriety and restraint and one of hedonistic abandon."

Book Alert / Hubert's Freaks

Hubert's Freaks -- The Rare-Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus by Gregory Gibson, Harcourt, $24, 274 pages, ISBN #0151012334. Bibliography, no index or source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Step right up folks and welcome to Hubert's, Times Square's premier freak show. Your tour guide will be Bob Langmuir, who knows "old weird America" as well as anyone. In his idiosyncratic new book, Gregory Gibson takes his readers on an obsessive peregrination through Manhattan's demimonde.

As a rare-book dealer, Langmuir chases that one big score that will perhaps make him financially comfortable, only to see his hopes dashed time after time. But today will be different, for he's bought a trunk of photographs at Hubert's from a man claiming to be a member of the Nigerian royal family (who else?), and its heart-stopping treasure trove is never-before-seen prints by iconic photographer Diane Arbus.

What follows is "a roller-coaster ride that takes him (Langmuir) from the fringes of the memorabilia business to Sotheby's, and from the exhibits of a run-down Times Square freak show to the curator's office of the Metropolitan Art. Will the photos be authenticated? How will the Arbus estate react?"

Bob sure deserves some good luck, for he's a fellow who's lucky to be alive. Gibson relates, in great detail, the Vermont auto accident decades earliwer that left him on the brink of death, helped to safety by a man on crutches, dressed entirely in blue, who subsequently "evaporated" into thin air. Only after unearthing his photographic find did Langmuir learn that, at the moment he was hovering near death in 1971, Diane Arbus was curled in a New York City bathtub, slitting her wrists. Had he and Arbus, Bob wondered, experienced a psychic connection?

Book Alert / The Telephone Gambit

The Telephone Gambit -- Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret by Seth Shulman, Norton '08, $24.95, 256 pages, ISBN #0393062066. Index, credits, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"Who invented the telephone?" is the kind of question found in Monday crossword puzzles. We learned the answer in fourth grade, so who would ever think to question it? Seth Shulman, that's who, an author who likes to challenge conventional wisdom.

Shulman argues that Bell and another inventor, Elisha Gray, were both working on ways to send multiple messages simultaneously over telegraph wires in the 1870s. But Gray went a step further, by finding a way to transmit voices electronically. Studying Bell's laboratory notebooks carefully, Shulman found Bell visited the Washington, D.C. patent office in early March of 1876, where gray had filed a "caveat" to protect his patent during its development. Upon his return, Bell  "discovered" the telephone only days later.

Coincidence? Perhaps, until one peruses Bell's notebooks to find "a near exact replica of Gray's crucial diagram of his device," which Shulman's book reproduces alongside Gray's caveat so readers can judge the likeness for themselves. Shulman doesn't shilly-shally with his conclusion -- the iconic Alexander Graham Bell stole the telephone patent from Elisha Gray.

The financial rewards Bell reaped from the telephone allowed him to experiment with kites at his estate on Prince Edward Island and to be an integral part of a government-backed effort to be first in flight. All this might never have come to pass if Gray hadn't been a quiet, non-combative person who just didn't have the stomach for a long, drawn out court battle over the patent. But, as Shulman recounts, Bell reaped a measure of payback in being wracked with guilt over what he had done and steered clear of any role in the new phone company, AT&T.

Book Alert / A Terrible Glory

A Terrible Glory -- Custer and the Little Bighorn -- The Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan, Little, Brown '08, $26.99, 528 pages, ISBN #0316155780. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

Historian James Donovan has already written Custer and the Little Bighorn, an illustrated account of Custer's Last Stand. Now he is back with A Terrible Glory, about the same subject, which he says draws upon "a wide range of primary sources, many of them unpublished or little known, as well as a vital new forensic research of the past twenty-five years."

Donovan's narrative traces Custer's campaign "from the early conflicts between Indians and settlers to the army court of inquiry that sought to assign blame for the stunning defeat. We are there in the village as young warriors paint their faces and grab their favorite weapons in preparation for battle, in the field as desperate cavalrymen kill their mounts to use their carcasses for cover; and in the courtroom as some of the surviving officers of the Seventh Cavalry point fingers in order to avoid being held responsible for the disaster."

Out in Paperback / A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 by Andrew Roberts, HarperPerennial, $18.95, 736 pages, ISBN #0060875992. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

What a difference in perspective an ocean can cause. In the midst of World War II, with the United States ascendant as one of a couple of potential world superpowers, British historian Andrew Roberts writes that Winston Churchill latched onto America's coattails in proclaiming to his cabinet that "This will be the English-speaking century." No matter that, in retrospect, the 20th is nearly universally recognized as the American Century. Of course, Chinese commentators would chuckle at this hairsplitting, secure in the belief that the 21st will nearly certainly be remembered as the Asian Century.

It is almost laughable today, given events of the past six or seven decades, to read Churchill's chest-thumping litany of the virtues of the English-speaking peoples:

"Law, language, literature -- these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all a love of personal freedom....these are the common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples," which Roberts enumerates as America, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the British West Indies and, sometimes, Eire.

To help set the record straight, however, Roberts supplies his own list of "sins and errors" committed by English-speaking people:

"Amongst their crimes, follies and misdemeanours have been: underestimating the capabilities of the Turks at Gallipoli and the Japanese before Pearl Harbor; the failure to dismember Germany in 1919; not doing more to try to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle in 1918-20; Woodrow Wilson's mismanagement of the Senate in 1919 and the subsequent refusal of the United States to join the League of Nations in 1920; Britain treating France rather than Germany as the more likely enemy in the 1920s;" and on and on.

One wishes Roberts had thought of some acronym or nickname for the English-speaking people, a term he uses as often as three times a paragraph, paragraph after paragraph.