What I've been reading

The Will by Reed Arvin. 2000, 325 pages, Scribner.

This is a legal thriller in the potboiling vein of John Grisham, with some very important differences: Grisham can barely string two simple sentences together in a coherent fashion (seriously, the man's prose is awful), while Arvin can actually, you know, write, and this book is much less a thriller than the Grisham books I've read. It stars a lawyer, Henry Mathews, who must go through the same kind of journey we see in several Grisham books (I've only read one, but I've seen the movies): from ambitious and greedy lawyer to conscience-ridden lawyer, but again, it's more nuanced than what you might expect. It's not a great book, by any means, but it's entertaining because Arvin keeps the book out of the courtroom, for the most part, and concentrates instead on the characters in the story.

Henry is a hot-shot Chicago lawyer who one night receives a phone call from a man whose father has died. Henry is the executor of the will, so he must head off to rural Kansas to execute the will. We learn that it's his home town, and his father, an idealistic but dirt poor lawyer, actually handled the will, but died before his client. The dead man was the richest man around, and when he leaves his fortune to the local kook instead of his ambitious and greedy son, the shit hits the fan. Henry gets pulled further and further into the reasons why the old man left his fortune to the crazy guy, and of course, this puts his future as an up-and-coming lawyer in jeopardy, not to mention his relationship with an up-and-coming financial expert.

Fret not, though, because Amanda Ashton, an idealistic government worker, shows up in Henry's life, poking around at the old man's oil reserves and getting in trouble with a state senator because of it. All of this is connected, of course, and Arvin does a nice job making sure it's not too outlandish and conspiratorial, which would be kind of goofy. It's grubby and messy, like a lot of local politics, and even though there's a bit of danger, the real problems lie with uncovering the past, something Henry wants to do when it concerns his client but not when it comes to himself. His secrets are a bit prosaic, but the development of his character, while predictable (will Henry become a crusader who sees more of the law than a way to make a lot of money - you be the judge!), is handled well.

Although not on par with great psychological drama, Arvin does a fine job peeling back the layers of secrecy surrounding these characters and making it feel like he's doing it naturally and in the course of the investigation. It's always interesting reading books in which people are hiding things and the truth has to come out. Henry has to make choices about whose lives he wants to destroy, and they don't always deserve it. This makes the book better than your standard legal thriller, because Arvin does a good job making the characters real, so when the truth comes out, it has a bit more bite to it.

The Will isn't a great book, but it's entertaining. It's not a bad way to spend a few days, which is more than you can say for a lot of novels.

What I've been reading

Young J. Edgar: Hoover, The Red Scare, and The Assault on Civil Liberties by Kenneth D. Ackerman. 2007, 472 pages, Carroll & Graf Publishers (the paperback edition is from Da Capo Press).

Recently, I read a different Ackerman book about James Garfield. I liked it a lot, so when I saw this, I picked it up. Technically, I shouldn't have read it, as I had already passed this point in the alphabet, but rules are made to be broken, damn it! Plus, this is an extremely relevant book, as you can probably tell by the title.

Ackerman frames this book with an interesting device: he begins in 1924, when Harlan Fiske Stone, the new attorney general of the United States, appointed J. Edgar Hoover, at the tender age of 29, as head of the Bureau of Investigation (which was not yet called the FBI, but it's the same thing, so I'll call it that). Hoover followed Stone's lead in cleaning up the wildly corrupt Bureau, which had been stained (like most of Washington) by the Teapot Dome scandal. Hoover cleaned it up and went on to lead the FBI until his death in 1972. In his later years, of course, he became extremely controversial for the secret files he kept on American citizens that he considered "dangerous," which to him meant anyone who believed in any kind of liberal political ideology. Stone was proud of his choice, but Ackerman makes the point that Hoover was already corrupt. Stone was most disturbed by the so-called Palmer raids, which were anti-communist sweeps that detained hundreds of American citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants - most of whom had broken no laws - in 1919 and 1920. They were named after Stone's predecessor, A. Mitchell Palmer, but Hoover, a 24-year-old special assistant, was the driving force behind them. Unbelievably, by 1924, Hoover had managed to convince Stone and the rest of the country that he had very little to do with the raids. So Ackerman goes back in time to show exactly how involved he was, and how the tactics he devised in his mid-20s would serve him well as he built the FBI into a powerful secret police force.

Ackerman turns the story into a thriller, even if it ends limply (the book doesn't, but if it were a thriller, they'd have to change the ending, as it wouldn't work in a movie). He starts with the bombings in June 1919, when several political figures were targeted by "anarchists." One of the targets was Palmer himself, and he barely escaped with his life. In the aftermath of World War I, with social upheaval wracking the world, with a civil war in Russia that involved, for a time, American soldiers, with unions strong throughout the country, the bombings became the spark for a crackdown on "communists" everywhere. Hoover was tasked to head the Bureau's new Radical Division, which investigated, well, radicals. Ackerman goes into Hoover's early life and his home life, which was dominated by his mother, but he doesn't try to draw too many conclusions about the connection between that and his professional life. He ignores any salacious speculation about his sexuality, mostly because there's absolutely no proof that he was gay at all. More likely he was so devoted to his work that he had no interest in sex, whether with a woman or a man. Ackerman mainly focuses on how he came to believe that anyone who criticized the government was naturally a criminal - remember, during World War I the government promulgated laws against criticizing the war effort, and those laws were still in effect in 1919 - so while he was investigating the bombings, he might as well start rounding up radicals and kicking them out of the country. He needed the help of the Labor Department, which was in charge of deportation, but he got it when he offered to help prosecute Emma Goldman, one of the most famous anarchists in American history. Goldman's lover, Alexander Berkman, had tried to assassinate Henry Clay Frick during the Homestead strike in 1892, and later Leon Czolgosz, who killed William McKinley, said Goldman's speeches inspired him (even though she always said the crime horrified her). Goldman had come to the United States in 1885 and had never become a citizen, although she claimed citizenship through her husband, even though they were divorced. Goldman was a thorn in the side of the Labor Department, because she kept inspiring workers to strike. So Labor agreed to help Hoover deport anyone he wanted if he gave them Goldman. Which he did.

Hoover decided to round up as many anarchists as he could in quick sweeps. He figured this was the easiest way to keep the targets from alerting other cells, and he was right. In two big raids in November 1919 and January 1920, Hoover and his Bureau agents went into legal meetings of communists and other radicals and simply arrested everyone they found. In many cases, Bureau agents posing as communists arranged the meetings to make sure everyone was in one place. The Bureau took the people to holding areas, including Ellis Island, where they were crammed into small cells and deprived of their rights, including their right to lawyers. Of course, most of them were not illegal immigrants, so their only "crime" was attending a meeting. In many cases, the immigrants, whether legal or not, had no idea what kind of meeting they were attending. The Socialist Party was an accepted political entity in 1920 (Eugene Debs, their perennial presidential candidate, received almost a million votes in 1912), but in 1919 and 1920, communists split from the mainstream Socialist Party and in many cases didn't bother to tell those who attended their meetings that they, the communists, were more radical. As many members didn't understand English too well, very often they thought they were going to meetings of a social club and had no idea the group had been radicalized.

The conditions in the holding areas were atrocious, and many people were held for months without access to legal representation or even contact with the outside world. Palmer and Hoover continued to look for the actual perpetrators of the bombings, but when they finally got leads in the case, one witness committed suicide rather than testify against his comrades and two other key figures fled the country, never to return. Hoover and Palmer overreached when they starting arresting prominent Americans like William Bross Lloyd, the so-called "Millionaire Socialist," who wanted to be arrested so he could drag the whole case into court. Clarence Darrow, who hated communists, got involved in the defense of some of the Americans who had been jailed, and his courtroom histrionics made headlines. As the tide slowly turned against Hoover, one man stepped up and became a hero. His name was Louis Post. It's a shame he's not more famous in American history.

In March 1920, through a set of circumstance, Louis Post became acting secretary of labor. Post had always resented Hoover and the Justice Department ordering Labor around to get deportation orders, but he had never had the power to do anything about it. With the actual Secretary of Labor, William Wilson, away for weeks at a time dealing with a sick wife and illnesses of his own, Post decided to sit down and go through every warrant that the Labor Department issued to Justice in order for Hoover to carry out his raids. He decided most of them were fraudulent and started cancelling them. Hoover was blindsided. He managed to get Post in front of a special committee of Congress, but Post dazzled the judges with his friendly manner and his utter devotion to the facts. He had gone over every single case file of the people who had been arrested, proving that Hoover had illegally acquired warrants, arrested people without cause, and suspended habeas corpus while keeping detainees in squalid conditions for months. Post tore apart Hoover and Palmer's case, at a time when Palmer was running for president, destroying the attorney general's political career and ruining Hoover's attempts to squash any and all dissent. It was during this time that Hoover began keeping files on all his political enemies, but he couldn't stop Post. The great quote of the book (and one that should be taught more) is when Edward Pou, one of the committee members grilling Post, said, "You realized, of course, Mr. Secretary, that all of these rules that you have laid out operate to make it more difficult to deport the alien?" Post responded, "Every rule in the interest of personal liberty makes it more difficult to take personal liberty away from a man who is entitled to his liberty." Yeah!

As Hoover's scheme unraveled, another bodyblow came, ironically, from Harlan Fiske Stone, the man who would later promote him. Stone wrote a letter summarizing the views of several lawyers who disagreed with the government's tactics. Stone wrote:

It is inevitable that any system which confers upon administrative officers power to restrain the liberty of individuals, without safeguards substantially like those which exist in criminal cases, and without adequate authority for judicial review of the actions of such administrative officers will result in abuse of power and in intolerable injustice and cruelty to individuals.

Ackerman's book is timely, obviously, because of what is happening in our country following 11 September 2001. Hoover's Bureau of Investigation is one of the first "modern" intelligence agencies, in that the world was connected enough at this point so Hoover could communicate relatively quickly with agents across the country and could also amass a huge file system detailing the indiscretions of his enemies for use against them when he needed it. Hoover's efficiency and ability to deflect blame is chilling, because we have to consider how many lives he ruined for the almost 50 years he ran the FBI. He never changed, either, as he believed people like Martin Luther King, Jr. should be arrested for preaching equality. The parallels between what happened then and what's happening now is disturbing, too. A terrorist attack leads to crackdowns on anyone even remotely linked to the perpetrators (meaning, back then, anyone who argued that people weren't treated well by rich capitalists, while these days it's anyone who's slightly swarthy in skin color) and the denial of due process, while the real criminals remain at large. For all of Hoover's efficiency, the Justice Department never caught the bombers. Maybe they're living in a cave with Osama bin Laden.

This is a tremendous book. It's a scary story about the abuse of power, but more than that, it's disturbing because we haven't learned anything in 90 years. In fact, many of the people in power today would probably read this and think that Hoover got hosed by some crazy radical within the Labor Department. The statements that Post made in front of Congress and that the Stone and other lawyers made to reporters should be self-evident, but too often we forget them. It's certainly easy to, when we experience terror. But as Ackerman makes clear, it's when these ideals are hardest to promote is when we should. I just wish more schools would teach about this period in history and about Louis Post, who really is an American hero.

What I've been reading

Last Team Standing: How the Steelers and the Eagles - "The Steagles" - Saved Pro Football During World War II by Matthew Algeo. 270 pages, 2006, Da Capo Press.

I've mentioned before how keen I've become recently on the early (pre-1960) days of the NFL (and football in general), and this is the second book I've read recently about that time (here's the other one). This is also the second one I've read in which the author claims that his topic "saved" pro football. Fleming has a stronger case. In fact, I'm not sure if Algeo even has a case.

That doesn't mean this isn't a fascinating book. This is a rather nice social history of America during World War II, with some football thrown in to make it a "sports" book. The social aspects of the book, especially when compared to the state of our society today, is what makes the book compelling. The football parts of exciting, but somewhat anticlimactic. It's interesting how Algeo tries to make them more exciting than they are. But that's okay.

The book is about the "Steagles," as the title indicates. In 1943, the National Football League was in trouble. In those early days, franchises folded with stunning regularity, and scheduling games was extremely messy. A decade earlier, the NFL had finally gotten around to having a championship game, but there was still a perception that pro football was bush league. This was emphasized when World War II broke out. President Roosevelt sent a "Green Light Letter" to Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the baseball commissioner (Algeo calls him "rigid and humorless," which is probably the nicest description anyone can use for Landis), imploring him to keep baseball open through the duration of the war. Roosevelt, who was a football fan, didn't mention pro football or send a letter to Elmer Layden, the NFL commissioner. Pro football just didn't matter. But Layden and the owners assumed that Roosevelt's stamp of approval for baseball meant that football should continue, as well. What they didn't count on was that by 1943, the second war season, they would run out of players. Yes, something that we can barely imagine was threatening to shut down the National Football League. The Eagles were in a better position than the Steelers, who had six players under contract, but neither team was in a good position. Add that to the fact that both teams were pretty awful, and there was a good chance one or neither would play football in 1943. But the owners (Bert Bell, who had owned the Eagles, was at that point the co-owner of the Steelers, a complicated situation Algeo goes over quite well) came up with a solution: merge the team. The team would play two games in Pittsburgh and four games in Philadelphia, and they would be coached by two men: Earle "Greasy" Neale and Walt Kiesling, who had coached the Eagles and Steelers, respectively, the year before.

If this situation sounds untenable, well, it almost was. Neale and Kiesling hated each other, while Lex Thompson, the Eagles' owner, would only allow the team to be called the "Eagles." The team wore Philadelphia colors, and all of this naturally led the Pittsburgh contingent to feel like they were second-class citizens. However, somehow the team came together and finished with a winning record of 5-4-1 - the first winning record in Philadelphia history and only the second in Pittsburgh. Until the very end of the season, they were in contention to play in the Championship Game. On 7 November 1943 they tied the Washington Redskins, led by Sammy Baugh, ending Washington's 13-game winning streak. They went one further on 28 November, thumping the Redskins 27-14, the team's first loss in over a year. But the Steagles couldn't beat the pathetic Brooklyn Dodgers (football teams were often named after the city's baseball team, an indication of the NFL's second-class status) a week after their tie of the Redskins, and they lost to the Packers a week after their glorious victory over Washington, which put the final nail in the coffin. Still, they had a successful season, which was pretty shocking.

The football side of the book is interesting, although because the Steagles turned out to be a mediocre team, it's not as fascinating as it could have been. Sure, the book would have been better if Phil-Pitt ended up winning their division or even the NFL Championship, but the cards were too stacked against them. Algeo doesn't really make a very good case that the merger saved pro football - the stronger teams, such as the Redskins, Giants, and Bears, weren't hurt too much by the war and the fact that the Cleveland Rams folded for the year didn't destroy the NFL - but that doesn't really matter. Where the book really shines is as social history. Algeo focuses on a few core players on the Steagles - Ted Doyle, Al Wistert, Bill Hewitt, Jack Hinkle, Roy Zimmerman - to tell the story of football players and America during the war. These men were 4-F, so they were looked down upon by able-bodied men who went off to war. Many of them were scorned as well for the injuries that made them 4-F - Hewitt had a perforated eardrum, for instance. Many who went to war wondered why people could play football but not fight in a war, but Algeo makes the point that the Army itself said that someone with a perforated eardrum could not serve, and it wasn't Hewitt's fault. The players were often deeply ashamed about not being able to serve their country, and they played harder because of it. Algeo also reminds us that these men were making very little money playing football, so they worked jobs during the week. The owners and coaches of the team got the men into "essential" jobs - one of them worked on the Manhattan Project - so that they contributed to the war effort even if they didn't fight.

Algeo also makes an interesting point about the current war, although I'm sure he didn't mean it. Reading about the "war at home" during World War II reminded me, again, why I'm so opposed to our current shenanigans. I'd probably be opposed to the Iraq war no matter what, but the fact that our president didn't try to get us all behind the war is ridiculous. In this book, we read about all the things that were going on in the country and how the government tried to make sure everyone felt like they were contributing. It didn't work completely, but it was still a lot better than what we have now. As you read this book, you can't help but wonder what the state of the country would be like if Bush had asked Americans to make more sacrifices to help the soldiers. From interviews with the players, we get the sense that life was hard, but they were constantly reminded how much harder it was for the people fighting the war. It's a fascinating portrait of a country that was united far more than it was now, not because everyone was naturally more patriotic, but because the government actively encouraged (not ordered) the citizens to become involved. We're not involved in this war unless we know someone fighting, and that's Bush's fault. And, I believe, it's a reason everyone is sick of it.

But this shouldn't be a screed about our current situation. Algeo's book is a very interesting look at sports and its relationship to the American public, as well as telling the story of one of the odder episodes in professional football history. If it doesn't quite live up to the title, it's still a very interesting read. Unless you don't like American culture. Is that you? Huh? I bet you like rugby, don't you, you Commie!

What I've been reading

Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman. 551 pages, 2003, Carroll & Graf Publishers.

Long-time readers of the blog may recall that I absolutely adore the Gilded Age. It is by far my favorite time period of American history. One problem with this era (let's say the end of the Civil War, 1865, to the beginning of the United States' involvement in World War I, 1917) is that there aren't a lot of books written about it, or at least books you can find in your average bookstore. I mean, there's plenty written about Theodore Roosevelt (not that there's anything wrong with that), but there's a lot more to the time period than Teddy, right? I mean, that Grover Cleveland - he was a pretty neat, guy, right? Where's his biography???? (Okay, they exist. But you get my point!) The other big topic of "Gilded Age" writing is the expansion of the white man into red man territory. Again, there's nothing wrong with that, but I'm a bit sick of George Custer.

So I was happy to see this book, as Garfield's assassination is probably the least well-known of all the presidential killings. Granted, there have only been four of them, but Lincoln's, McKinley's, and Kennedy's are of much more interest to the general public, even if McKinley's is only such because he was succeeded by Roosevelt. I mean, Garfield was succeeded by Chester A. Arthur, whose name does not resound in the Presidential Pantheon (although he, as well as Garfield, probably doesn't get as much respect as they ought to). I certainly didn't know much about Garfield's life and death, and even after reading Assassination Vacation, I didn't, as Vowell focused more on Charles Guiteau, the assassin, than Garfield himself. This book doesn't focus on Garfield's life as much as it focuses on the events surrounding his nomination and brief presidency, and it's a fascinating read.

Ackerman begins with an argument in 1866. Two titans of the late 19th-century American political scene, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York and Senator James Blaine of Maine, got into an argument over a piece of a bill, and this tiny little disagreement escalated into a name-calling donnybrook on the Senate floor. Both men were extremely proud, and this argument led to a lifetime of acrimony that influenced the political course of the country. It's fun to read about these bitter fights in Congress because these days, everyone is so polite. Sure, the two parties don't agree with each other and take shots at the policies of their opponents, but Conkling and Blaine were both Republicans, for one, and it's rare that one senator calls another from the same party a liar in public, as Conkling did to Blaine that day in April 1866. That's just a taste of the political scene during the Gilded Age, where the men spoke high-mindedly but were far more insulting than they are today.

Then we flash to the Republican Convention in Chicago in late May 1880. Remember when conventions were held in late May? Okay, probably not. The other interesting thing about conventions back in those days was that no one knew who the nominee was. There were no primaries, so the two parties just got together to decide on a candidate. In 1880, the Republican party had developed a rift between the "Stalwarts," those who supported Ulysses Grant's bid for a third term as president, and "Half-Breeds," those who didn't back Grant because of the scandals of his two terms. Grant had left office in 1877, but in the years since, he had become more popular, mainly because of the ineffectiveness of Rutherford Hayes, the man who replaced him. Conkling was Grant's biggest supporter, and he threw the weight of the New York Republican machine behind him. James Blaine, who had run for president in 1876, was another candidate, representing those who wanted to move past Grant. John Sherman, the Secretary of the Treasury (and brother of Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman), was the dark horse candidate. He counted among his supporters James Garfield, the senator-elect from Ohio.

The backroom dealings of the parties is fascinating to read about, especially because the actual wannabe candidates back then didn't attend the convention - campaigning was considered unseemly. So their proxies campaigned for them, and they had to convince delegates to throw their lot in with a certain candidate. Sherman didn't have much support, but it was hoped that he could swing the nomination one way or the other. Conkling had heard rumblings about a group of Republican delegates from New York breaking from him and not supporting Grant, something he could not abide. Parties ran things with iron fists back then - you voted for a party, not really a candidate - and the idea of New York Republicans breaking with their party boss was astonishing. Yet break they did, as did delegates from two other supposedly "solid" Grant states - Illinois and Pennsylvania. Without all of the delegates from those states, neither Grant nor Blaine got enough votes on the first ballot to secure the nomination, and led to more wrangling.

Garfield was a long shot to get the nomination, obviously, as he was actually in Chicago as a supporter of Sherman. As the balloting went on (this was the longest Republican convention, at 36 ballots; Democrats needed a two-thirds majority to select a nominee, so many of theirs went longer), Garfield suddenly became a viable compromise candidate. Blaine would never allow his delegates to support Grant because of his vitriol toward Conkling, and Garfield was seen as someone whom Blaine would support. When his name was first mentioned, Garfield actually protested, but soon the support for him became a groundswell. Unbelievably, Garfield became the nominee, and as a compromise, he picked Chester Arthur, Conkling's protégé, as his running mate. Actually, based on the rules of the day, the convention picked Arthur. Garfield had no choice in the matter.

Ackerman then has to bring Charles Guiteau into the proceedings, which he does efficiently. Guiteau was a huge fan of Conkling and the New York Republican Party, and he began writing speeches in order to get the Garfield/Arthur ticket elected. He even wrote a speech that he later claimed was crucial to Garfield's win. He hung out at the headquarters of the campaign and spoke often to Arthur, believing that he was friends with the vice presidential candidate. Of course, he barely registered with the higher-ups of the party, although they later recalled speaking to him. Ackerman makes the point that patronage was the way business got done in 19th-century politics, and Guiteau was just doing what many others did - he helped out the campaign with the expectation that he would be rewarded in the new regime. Of course, he was basically a nobody, so that probably wouldn't happen, but it didn't stop Guiteau from believing that he was more important than he really was.

Garfield won the election, of course, and then his problems began. He had to satisfy two powerful members of the party who hated each other - Blaine and Conkling. As he had Arthur as a vice president, he offered the job of Secretary of State to Blaine, which angered Conkling, as that position was far more important than that of VP back in the day. Conkling was peeved that Rutherford Hayes had fired Arthur as Collector of the Port of New York, the most lucrative job in the civil service, and he wanted one of his men installed in that post. Garfield balked at it even though the Stalwarts claimed he had promised it to them. When this became public knowledge, it sent Guiteau over the edge. Ackerman makes it clear that Guiteau didn't shoot Garfield because he didn't get the job he wanted; he shot him because he believed Garfield was screwing his "friend" Chester Arthur and Arthur's mentor Conkling.

Garfield became more revered for standing up to Conkling and garnered sympathy after he was shot. Ackerman goes into detail about the doctors basically killing Garfield with their inept care, as they often stuck unwashed hands into the wound and didn't even know where the bullet was until they did a postmortem examination. Arthur, of course, was horrified that Guiteau shot the president because he wanted Arthur to succeed to the office. The mood in the country was ugly for months afterward, because most people resented Arthur and his boss, Conkling. When Garfield defied the New York senator, Conkling resigned his seat in protest. Back then, senators were appointed by the state legislatures, and Conkling just assumed he would be sent back in triumph. The legislature, however, sent a different man, breaking Conkling's power. Arthur distanced himself from Conkling and gained a measure of respect from the country at large. It didn't help him in 1884, and he wasn't nominated.

The book is riveting, not only for the story Ackerman tells, but the little facts he drops into the narrative about the way politics worked 120 years ago. We learn about the backroom deals, the patronage system that Guiteau inadvertently destroyed (Hayes had begun reforming the civil service, but Arthur took it further and created a meritocracy), and how conventions and elections worked. Ackerman gives us an interesting statistic: almost 80% of those eligible voted in the 1880 election (of course, women weren't eligible, but that's still an impressive number). He also writes extensively about the Republicans' relationship with black voters, as this was a time when the Republicans were the party of the black man and the Democrats were often connected to ex-Confederates. This is only four years after Reconstruction ended, after all, and the ex-Confederates were re-asserting their power in the South. It's interesting reading some of the statements the Republicans made about African-Americans, because many of the politicians said things that some of today's Republicans would find reprehensible and some of today's Democrats would agree with. It's a fascinating shift.

There's a ton to like about the book, and I encourage everyone in this political season to read it (or at least a political book!). I mean, a senator who resigns with Conkling got caught having sex with a prostitute in his hotel room, and other legislators lined up to take turns looking at him through the transom. That's pretty awesome. It gives us a glimpse into a relatively forgotten age of American politics, shows us that many powerful people in American politics were not president (in case you didn't already know that; Conkling and Blaine were very powerful kingmakers), sheds new light on a president who showed a great deal of potential in only a few months in office, and is surprisingly tense even though we know how it ends. It's easy and fun to read yet is amazingly complex. I blazed through it, and you can too!

What I've been reading

Nanjing 1937: A Love Story by Ye Zhaoyan. 355 pages, 1996 (translated by Michael Berry, 2002), Faber and Faber Limited.

Before I get into this, I should point out that this is my last book in the alphabet. I read my books in alphabetical order by author, because I'm weird. Well, actually, it's because I buy so many books (and yes, I know I should stop, but I love books) that I found I would read books I bought more recently and ignore books I bought further in the past that I hadn't gotten a chance to read yet. So I decided to simply read my books in alphabetical order. I break the pattern occasionally, but for probably a decade I've been doing it. This is my second time through the alphabet, and now I have to go back to the beginning. I've already started a new book by an "A" author. It's oddly gratifying finishing the alphabet and going back to start over, even though it's a somewhat arbitrary way to read my books. But I feel good. And isn't that all that matters?

So let's delve into this book. As you can tell by the subtitle, it's a romance, and it's one of the odder ones you might ever read. It's certainly not bad, just ... odd. I'll get to that. I should say something about the writing style. I'm not sure if it's the translation (probably), but Ye's prose is often difficult to get through. Obviously, the story of Nanjing in 1937 is well known, especially to the Chinese, so Ye doesn't feel the need to explain some of what's going on in the grander scheme of things with the Japanese and the Chinese. We do get plenty of historical context, but there are some odd references to events that we're expected to understand, and I assume if we were Chinese, we would. The prose itself is occasionally turgid, and again, I have no idea if it reads differently in the original language. The heavy hand of the third-person narrator is evident very often, and sometimes it feels as if Ye is guiding his characters through the narrative rather than letting things play out naturally. It's a fairly dense novel, so Ye has to keep track of several main characters, so it doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would as I kept reading, but it's tough to get into. There's your fair warning!

Nanjing 1937 tells the story of Ding Wenyu and his strange love for Ren Yuyuan. Ye begins his story on the first of January and follows Ding throughout the year. Ding first sees Yuyuan at her wedding to Yu Kerun, a rising star in the Chinese air force. This is, naturally, a problem, but Ding is an unusual person. He's 20 years older than Yuyuan, and spent several years in Europe after lusting after Yuyuan's older sister two decades before. He has a amazing ability to learn languages, and has spent his life womanizing and wandering around the world. When he returns, he becomes a professor in Nanjing and builds a reputation as a eccentric fellow who ignores all social conventions. This is evident from the wedding, where he stares inappropriately as Yuyuan for several minutes while gossip swirls around him. This begins the strange romance between the worldly professor and the naïve young soldier (Yuyuan is a confidential secretary in the army).

It's not what you think, though. Ding becomes more and more obsessed with Yuyuan, but he doesn't pursue her. He begins writing love letters to her, usually more than one a day, and delivering them to her. Yuyuan is the model of propriety, however, and she never responds to the letters. She simply reads them and keeps them, but the fact that she never leads Ding on and, in fact, tells him whenever she sees him that she isn't interested and finds him ridiculous doesn't deter him at all. His father forces him to marry the daughter of an important steel magnate, but Ding ignores her and the story of their divorce forms part of Ding's attempts to form a relationship with Yuyuan. Yuyuan's own marriage is far from perfect, as Yu Kerun is immature and besotted with the fame of being a star pilot, using his celebrity to pick up whatever woman he chooses. Ding also has an interesting relationship with a rickshaw driver, Monk, whom he always used to search the city for prostitutes. Once he meets Yuyuan, however, he swears off his former lifestyle and dedicates himself to his love for her.

Ding is a fascinating character, because of the cultural differences between the 1930s and today and between China and the U. S. Ye continually narrates how ridiculous he is, sending two, three, or even four love letters a day to Yuyuan, staring at her inappropriately whenever he sees her, telling her how much he loves her and how his love is totally spiritual and beyond the realm of the flesh. Everyone in the book feels that he's ridiculous, too. However, we come to realize how noble he really is - yes, he wants to divorce his wife, but only because it was an arranged marriage, and he never cheats on her anyway. He's speaking truly when he says that his love for Yuyuan is totally spiritual - he never tries to pry her away from Yu Kerun, and he never makes any moves on her. The other characters in the novel act far worse than Ding does, yet in the eyes of society, he's the one who acts horribly. Yu Kerun flaunts his affairs, even moving in with a girlfriend late in the novel, but because he's a hero, his poor treatment of his wife is overlooked. What makes Ding fascinating, as Yuyuan comes to realize late in the book, is that instead of worrying about everyone liking him, all he cares about is making sure that Yuyuan is happy. Everyone else is concerned with their image, but Ding simply doesn't. This makes him seem ridiculous, when in fact he is the most steadfast person in the book.

Ye introduces several subplots that help illuminate the main relationship. Monk, the rickshaw driver, is besotted with a young girl, and her mother (with whom he's having an affair) offers her in marriage. When she rejects him, he reacts far differently than Ding does, and the subtle commentary is that the low-class Monk is less deserving of love than the upper-class Ding. This also shows the two ways obsession can turn - ugly, like in Monk's case, or ethereal, like Ding's. Yu Kerun, who cannot relate to Yuyuan in any meaningful way, falls in with Qu Manli, a teenaged girl who traps him into a more tightly-knit relationship than his own marriage. She doesn't want to marry Yu, but she does want him to divorce Yuyuan so that she can toy with him without guilt. It's ironic that Yu Kerun, who treats his wife so poorly, finds himself ensnared by a woman with far more guile than Yuyuan. Only then does he begin to realize what a fine woman she is, but by then it's too late.

As Yuyuan's marriage falls apart, she can't help but be drawn to Ding and his abiding love. Ye continues to refer to the political events in China during 1937, as the year saw the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Yuyuan is in the army, so when the government abandons Nanjing (it was the capital of China at the time), she must stay behind as part of the last-ditch effort to stop the Japanese advance. Ding, naturally, stays with her. Ye refers to the major events of the year, such as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and several historical personages appear in the book. As the book moves toward its conclusion, we keep wondering how Ye will write about the horrors of the Rape of Nanking. Ye, however, chooses an interesting way to end the book that allows him to avoid it. Ding and Yuyuan must make horrible choices, of course, and any book set in this city in this year can't really end well, but the ending is unusual in that it's far more "real" than what we might expect, in that it's somewhat random. That's the way life is, after all.

This is a difficult novel to get into, mostly (I think) because of the translation. Once you do get into it, however, it's a rewarding love story, because it's unlike most romances you read. In most love stories, something is keeping the lovers apart, but in this book, the obstacles aren't contrived, like they often are in romances. In this novel, the culture itself is against the lovers, and Ye does a marvelous job showing how oppressive that culture is. We can wonder why these people couldn't get together, but we're approaching it from a different cultural perspective. As we read, Ye makes it clear why this romance is so difficult for the two of them. It's a tragic story, yes, but it's also somewhat inspiring. Nanjing in 1937 wasn't torn by war until the very end of the year, so it's not like Ding and Yuyuan are struggling through violence, but they are struggling to find something more than war, and almost everything is against them, including everyone they know. As we move toward the inevitability of the ending, we can't help be caught up in the nobility of Ding's feelings toward Yuyuan and Yuyuan's struggle to accept them. It's a wonderful romance and a powerful novel about a desperate time in Chinese history.

What I've been reading

Pontius Pilate by Ann Wroe. 412 pages, 1999, Random House/Modern Library.

I've always been a sucker for Pilate, so when I saw this book, I had to have it! Wroe doesn't write a biography, as such, because there's hardly anything that we actually know about Pilate, but it's still a fascinating book.

What Wroe does is write an imaginary biography of Pilate. She delves into what the life of a Roman soldier and gentleman of the early first century would be like and extrapolates from that. Of course, we can't know if Pilate was like that, but given that Roman men rarely broke the mold, we can easily believe that Pilate's life followed the track she lays out. Another thing she does is examine the legacy of Pilate through the writings of the Church Fathers and especially the medieval mystery plays. It's an interesting way of illuminating the life of a man about which we know hardly anything but played such an important part in the history of Western civilization.

Wroe basically lays out Pilate's life in chronological order, but with plenty of asides to delve into legend. She uses the Gospels liberally, naturally, but she also uses the Apocrypha as well. As she moves through Pilate's life, her tangents often become esoteric, but that's part of what makes the book so interesting. She psychoanalyzes Pilate to a degree, but she also gets into why we are so fascinated by him. It's difficult to understand what Pilate was thinking, of course, because the Bible doesn't get into that, but Wroe deftly takes the brief passages that deal with him and spins a tale of a man struggling with several different pressures as he tries this rebellious minister. She never absolves Pilate, but she does try to understand why the governor would allow himself get involved in the trial. As she tracks the trial, she puts us into his palace and into his heart. She shows us how different the Roman and Jewish cultures were and why Pilate could not understand this difference at all. Pilate might have been a cruel and inept man, as is implied in various sources, but that doesn't mean he didn't try to rule the colony in a way consistent with Roman values. That he failed, Wroe claims, is because he failed to appreciate the uniqueness of the Jewish way of life. This extended to the trial of Jesus, where Pilate allowed himself to be outfoxed by Caiaphas and the priests. Wroe takes her time with the trial, looking at Judas and his role, the Sanhedrin and the way it used Pilate, and how Jesus himself manipulated the governor. Pilate was a failure, but he wasn't a failure because he didn't care about governing well. He was a failure because he was in an impossible situation.

The most fascinating parts of the book is when Wroe takes off and imagines how Pilate acted based on texts written long after the fact. The English mystery plays are a big source, and Wroe shows how those writers, along with others, used Pilate to further their own ends. Pilate was useful to writers who wanted to cast Jews in a bad light and who wanted to prove that the governor was part of the divine plan. Pilate becomes a patsy who is twisted to suit God's plan, but Wroe makes the point that it was his very spinelessness that made him the perfect foil for Jesus. She gets into a complex discussion of the nature of faith itself, and how Pilate had none, so he was doomed in his battle with Jesus. But as Wroe points out, later writers became enamored of the idea of Pilate as the first witness to Christ, the first to proclaim Jesus as the King of the Jews (ironically-titled placard or not), and the first to understand the Resurrection. Pilate becomes us, every person who did not believe but saw the light. Later writers wanted to show that even someone as obtuse as Pilate could come around to the light of Christ, and some churches have made Pilate and his wife Procula saints. Pilate's struggles with Jesus become humanity's struggles to learn about Christ, and later writers wanted desperately to believe that he won. If Pilate couldn't see the light, what hope do any of us have?

Pontius Pilate is an extremely readable yet complex book. It's a fascinating journey through an almost completely imagined landscape, and although Pilate is in the middle of it, he's also a passive observer to so much history it's somewhat astounding. Pilate is the universal human, and that's what makes him so compelling. This book is extremely interesting, because it puts us in Pilate's place. What would we do? That's the question, and it's not an easy one to answer.

What I've been reading

In Search of Myths and Heroes: Exploring Four Epic Legends of the World by Michael Wood. 272 pages, 2005, University of California Press.

This book was published in conjunction with a film documentary that was broadcast on the BBC. It's an interesting book, but it's fairly superficial, and I wish Wood had gone into some more detail about these myths. He examines four myths: Shangri-La, Jason and the Argonauts, the Queen of Sheba, and King Arthur. But he never goes into them too deeply, and the book suffers a bit for it. The best part of the book is the fantastic photographs that Wood takes as he travels around the world seeking these myths. As a documentary introducing people to these myths, this is probably fine. As a book that goes deeper, it fails.

That's not to say it's not entertaining. Wood wants to examine the historical bases behind myths, and so he travels to where their origins are and tries to trace the folklore back in time. This works rather well in the first two chapters, especially the first one, in which he heads to Tibet to find Shangri-La. This is a marvelous chapter, because he does a fine job of not only tracing the legend but making an actual pilgrimage. For many of the same reasons, his chapter on Jason and the Argonauts and the Queen of Sheba is fine too, but as the book progresses, he seems to spend less time on the actual folklore. With something like Shangri-La, it's easier to focus on the legend, because there's very few new stories being generated. With Jason and the Argonauts, the legend is also somewhat calcified, and therefore Wood can simply track the story along the Black Sea coast. It's more difficult for him to trace the Queen of Sheba, simply because there's less literature. His trek across Yemen, however, is fascinating, and, like the journey into Nepal and Tibet, makes me want to visit there (my cousin recently spent some time in Yemen, and I hope I can talk to her about it soon). It's far easier for Wood to travel with those three myths, as they are rooted in specific places.

When he reaches Arthur, however, the book becomes less interesting. The biggest problem is that King Arthur still commands so much of our attention, so the story is still being written, plus the geography is quite sketchy. Wood takes a much more generic approach to the Arthur chapter, basically surveying the literature. It's unfortunate that he chooses to end the book with it (not surprising, given that this was produced for a British audience), but it's not completely awful. If you've never read anything about King Arthur, it's not a bad chapter, but it's not as inspired as the first three chapters. With Shangri-La, Jason, and the Queen of Sheba, we get adventure stories in exotic lands. With Arthur, we get recitations of medieval literature. Wood even seems a bit bored by it.

As a primer on these myths, this is an interesting book. The photographs are spectacular, and Wood does make comments about what myths mean, but he never goes to far into that aspect of the legends. What he does best is make these places that many people are unfamiliar with - Tibet, Georgia, Yemen - and make them more real. That's a very cool part of the book, and it would have been nice to see the documentaries, just to see the scenery. I didn't learn much about legends from this book, but I did get to see some cool places and learn a little about modern cultures where the myths occurred. There's nothing wrong with that.

What I've been reading

Napoleon and his Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship by Isser Woloch. 281 pages, 2001, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

If you've never read anything about Napoleon, this is not the book to start with, as Woloch freely admits in his preface. He ignores pretty much everything that we think of as "Napoleonic" history - his military victories, his coronation, his law code - to focus on the men around Napoleon who helped him take power and ease his creation of a dictatorship. In fact, after the first chapter, detailing the coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), which made Napoleon the first consul, Woloch rarely brings the emperor into the picture very much. He always lurks in the background, and he shows up for Senate debates and the like, but Woloch implies at some places and baldly states at others that Napoleon was too often off engaging in military expeditions to be too involved in the nuts and bolts of government. Napoleon was very keen on governing, and when he was in Paris, he was a dynamo of activity, and even when he was at the front he insisted on dispatches that would keep him abreast of what was happening, but Woloch shows us that his collaborators were working hard to implement his program even when he wasn't around.

This is a serious work of history, so it's somewhat dry, but for someone who has read a little about Napoleon but usually only in the context of the great conqueror as one-man empire, it's a neat book. Woloch basically goes chronologically through Napoleon's reign, and he makes clear that Napoleon didn't do it alone. He was a genius in making people believe they had a say in how France was run, even though after about 1802 (when he became consul for life), there was really no way to stop him beyond assassination (which came on 3 Nivôse - 24 December 1800 - and really catapulted him even more toward authoritarianism). So the people he surrounded himself with - the Senate, the Tribunate, the Legislature - were allowed to believe that they had some input, and Woloch is unable to say whether they really believed they did, or if they simply deluded themselves. Probably a bit of both.

Woloch devotes one chapter to Jean-Jacques-Régis Cambacérès, the second most important man in Napoleonic France. Cambacérès was the second consul and later archchancellor, and as Woloch himself admits, perhaps second most important man in the country "is not saying much, given the absolute grip on power that Bonaparte eventually established" (page 123). But Cambacérès gives the reader an interesting focus, because of his credentials as a revolutionary. In Napoleon, the revolutionaries thought they found a culmination to what they had worked a decade for, and many were unwilling to admit they had been betrayed by Bonaparte. Cambacérès is one of these people, as Woloch shows that he tied himself into knots trying to justify his service to Napoleon, just as he had tied himself into knots in 1792 when it came time to vote for the death of Louis XVI (technically, Woloch points out, he could be considered a regicide, but with less enthusiasm than many of his colleagues). As Napoleon became more secure in his power, he began to phase the older revolutionaries out, perhaps because he feared they might actually remember their past and do something about him as they had to the king.

Woloch goes over several key topics concerning the later empire, including the creation of a nobility in 1808 and the return of press censorship. What he does nicely is show how many of Napoleon's edicts were heartily endorsed by his government. They didn't do this out of fear for their life, Woloch argues, because with the spectacular exception of the duc d'Enghien, people did not lose their life for speaking against Napoleon. He exiled them, sure, but didn't kill them. With very few exceptions (Tallyrand the most notable, perhaps), the men in Napoleon's government didn't resign in protest. Napoleon created a dictatorship, as Woloch makes clear, but he did it with the full endorsement of the men who overthrew the last oppressive government, that of the Bourbons.

This book isn't a page-turner by any means. It's well written but not particularly lively. It's for people who like history books (hey! that's me!), but not for someone with only a passing interest in the past (and that's nobody, right?). If you've read a book or two about Napoleon and want to learn more about his rule, I'd certainly recommend it, because it sheds a lot of light on how Napoleon was able to carve out a dictatorship when the French had just gotten rid of one. In many respects, this book is more valuable to the present than a straight history of Napoleon. This shows us, in chilling bureaucratic detail, how a government can take away rights if they do it "the right way." Good thing we don't know any president who tries to do that, right?

What I've been reading

Jeeves and the Tie that Binds by P. G. Wodehouse. 189 pages, 1971, Simon and Schuster.

This is the first Wodehouse book I've ever read, and I wouldn't have ever read it if I hadn't borrowed this book from someone with whom I no longer speak and simply forgot to return it. It came time for me to read it, though (I read my books in alphabetical order by author - most of the time - and I'm on the "W"s), so I plopped down and zipped through it. It clocks in at less than 200 pages, after all, and Wodehouse's style is extremely breezy and fast.

It's a fun book, but I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. This is one of Wodehouse's last books (he died in 1975), and maybe he had gotten so good at the "Jeeves" stories that he mailed this one in. That's a bit harsh, I guess - for what it wants to be, it's a nice little read. I zipped through it, laughed a few times, and enjoyed the strength of the book - the affectionate relationship between Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, who always pulls Bertie's fat out of the fire. The plot of the book is largely inconsequential - it involves a book in which butlers are supposed to write about their employers, which is stolen and can cause some embarrassment to Bertie and one of his friends if it comes out into the open. There's also a political campaign, and Bertie finds himself almost engaged a few times to women he does not want to be engaged to, and it all works out in the end. It's a clever enough plot, but not anything to get worked up about.

Mainly, the charm of the "Jeeves" stories seems to come from the banter of the characters. Bertie is supposed to be a bit dim, and he is, and Jeeves is a magic valet who solves every problem, no matter how intractable. He is, after all, Super-Butler. There are some odd things about the tone of the book - it's obviously set in a "modern" era, as there are cars, and a brief search shows that this is supposed to be 1930s England. It reads, however, very Wildean, as if this was some kind of Edwardian drawing-room comedy. It's a weird dissonance between the way the people act, which is from an earlier age, and the actual time frame. Perhaps that's what Wodehouse was trying for; I haven't read enough to know. But it's weird.

The biggest problem with the book in terms of plot is that because Wooster narrates, we often miss Jeeves at work. Again, I suppose that's part of the point, but when the problems that the principals face in this book are at their most binding, Bertie decides he needs to flee to London for a day. When he returns, Jeeves has solved everything, and we only find out what happened second hand. If you've seen No Country for Old Men, you know one of the criticism levelled at it is that we don't see the final deadly confrontation. This is similar in that we only hear about the solutions Jeeves comes up with second-hand. It's odd.

Despite that, this is a charming book. Although I linked to a place where you can buy this, I would recommend getting it out of the library. It's not something that's going to change your life, and it's somewhat forgettable (which is why I wouldn't buy it). But it's a nice book for an afternoon read or two. It's far more amusing than a lot of "summer" books that you're supposed to take to the beach.

Everyone's favorite stuffed bull, Bully, does a far better job with Wodehouse than I do. Check out his posts here! I'll probably try to find some more Wodehouse eventually. He's fun to read.

What I've been reading

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester. 416 pages, 2003, HarperCollins.

I read one of Winchester's books (The Professor and the Madman) a while back and enjoyed it, and I've always been fascinated with Krakatoa, so getting this book was a no-brainer. Winchester is a very good writer; he keeps things lively and engaging while going over a ton of information, and although I don't know enough to know if he's getting all the facts right, his bibliography is quite extensive and I haven't seen anyone challenging his conclusions. It's a fascinating book about a horrific event that, Winchester argues, was more helpful to our understanding of how the world works that it might seem, and also may have sped up the independence movement in Indonesia.

Winchester circles around the eruption, as he goes over the long history of the Dutch in the East Indies and their government in Batavia, which is now the city called Jakarta. The Dutch empire was a weird entity, and Indonesia, their crown jewel, was a major entrepôt for them. We then jump to the history of geology, as scientists discover such strange anomalies as the Wallace Line, named for biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, who discovered something odd in Indonesia: in the western half of the archipelago, the flora and fauna was distinctly Asian, while to the east, the plants and animals were Australian. Wallace was one of the first to realize that this was because the continents were once further away from each other, but in his time, he was excoriated for his beliefs. Winchester takes us into the twentieth century and the development of the continental drift theory and plate tectonics, which finally redeemed Wallace (but not until the mid-1960s, when the theory was finally accepted). Winchester brings up things that are amazingly apparent today, like the creation of the Hawaiian Islands and the way South America and Africa fit together, but blinded scientists for decades, mostly because they were Christians and couldn't conceive of a world that changed, because that's not how God made it (to be fair, Winchester doesn't belabor this point; it's my interpretation). Winchester's chapters on geology are detailed but not confusing; he goes over the research well and takes us back to Krakatoa, showing how this volcano could have exploded so violently - it was a combination of location on the border of two plates, but also in a spot where it was being squeezed between the two islands of Sumatra and Java, which created even greater pressure.

The longest chapter in the book, not surprisingly, is about the eruption itself. Krakatoa began to rumble in May 1883, and Winchester uses the many eyewitness accounts of the minor eruptions throughout the next months. Throughout Sunday, 26 August, the eruptions got more and more intense, until the mountain exploded at 10.02 a.m. on Monday, 27 August. Winchester not only goes over the astonishing statistics associated with the explosion, but provides a nice context to them as well. The facts are quite amazing: a boat lifted by the tsunami and deposited two miles up a Sumatran river; the explosion heard 3000 miles away; the sound wave traveling seven times around the planet. His account, surprisingly, is remarkably bloodless: he tells us that 30,000 people died, but there are few gruesome stories, possibly because most of the dead were washed out to sea. The one horrific detail he adds is that corpses embedded in pumice arrived on beaches for weeks after the explosion, but that's mentioned almost in passing. It's not that I wanted gruesome details, because it would trivialize the book, but it's odd that they're missing. Again, perhaps there just weren't any.

Winchester explains how Krakatoa vanished and then how, in the past century, it has been reborn. There's a new island at the location, and it's not terribly stable. Winchester's final chapter takes him to the island, and he does another good job showing how life has returned to Anak Krakatoa - "son of Krakatoa" - and how it has given biologists a living laboratory to study. He also goes into the most controversial part of his thesis. In the aftermath of the explosion, he argues, militant Islam grew in strength in the country. Fundamental Muslims in the latter half of the nineteenth century argued that the end of the world was coming, and this led to, among other things, the Mahdist movement in Sudan. It also led to, he argues, the fomenting of revolution in Indonesia. One of the signs of the end was an eruption of apocalyptic proportions, and radical clerics used it to preach rebellion. There was an uprising against the Dutch in 1889, but Winchester stretches the connection a bit. Luckily, he doesn't really push it too much. It's an intriguing idea, but I'm not sure if there's enough for Winchester to make his case. I wonder if someone else wants to pick up the ball and run with it!

Even with that odd idea, Winchester writes confidently and forcefully, and he does a very good job bringing in his own experiences to help personalize the story. It's a broad-reaching book, and Winchester is on top of everything and makes sure we can keep up. It's a fascinating book about one of the most traumatic events in recent history, and Winchester does an excellent job with it. Even if you don't care about mountains blowing up, I still recommend this book. But who doesn't love mountains blowing up?

Top Ten Day: My favorite science fiction books

In the wake of Arthur C. Clarke's death, I thought I'd list my favorite science fiction books. Yes, I started this post last week, but his death is still recent enough to make this relevant. So here they are, in chronological order!

1. Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969). This is not only one of my favorite science fiction books, but one of my favorite books, period. It's very funny and very tragic, and Vonnegut comes up with pithy phrases that encapsulate so much horror. Vonnegut skips back and forth in time, as his hero, Billy Pilgrim, has become "unstuck" from time and is able to travel to any point in his life. We get the weird period he spends on Tralfamadore with Montana Wildhack, the porn star, and we get the horrific bombing of Dresden, but it never feels disjointed. It's a masterpiece, and I should probably go read some more Vonnegut, shouldn't I?

2. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974). It's been a long time since I read this, but it's still an excellent book, harrowing and tragic and a nice allegory about soldiers fighting wars they don't understand. It's probably not too big a leap to think that Haldeman was thinking a little bit about Vietnam when he wrote this. The main character is fighting a war against an alien species, and despite his tours of duty being relatively short, because of time dilation, he misses decades on Earth and finds that society has changed so much the only thing that keeps him sane is returning to the army. It's an exciting war book, which made my teenaged self happy, but at its core, it's a devastating examination on the effects war has on soldiers. I recently bought it - I really ought to read it again.

3. A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle (1978). A Wrinkle in Time is better-known, but this, written about twenty years later, shows L'Engle's growth as a writer - it's far more mature, subtle, interesting, and powerful. Charles Wallace, the young boy from the first two books of this trilogy (A Wind in the Door is the second book), is now a teenager, and he flies a unicorn through time to avert a nuclear disaster. L'Engle introduces several characters from throughout time, linking everything together very elegantly, and the story becomes one of love through the ages and its power in overcoming evil. It's written for teens, as are most L'Engle books, but it's a book that adults can enjoy as well.

4. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1979). I like a lot of Clarke novels, but this one is spectacular. An engineer conceives of a "space elevator" linking an island in the Pacific (it's called Taprobane in the book, but it's basically Sri Lanka, where Clarke spent most of the latter part of his life) to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. Vannevar Morgan believes this will allow spaceships to dock without using rockets to get off the ground, which is much more cost-effective. Clarke also tells the story of an ancient king, Kalidasa, whose drive mirrors Morgan's. It's a wonderful book, the kind of science fiction that not only offers a plausible vision of the future but also explores the human condition. Clarke often does this, but rarely with such aplomb. It's magnificent.

5. Job: A Comedy of Justice by Robert Heinlein (1984). This was the first Heinlein book I read, and still remains my favorite. I've never been a big fan of his other stuff, although Time Enough for Love is quite good. Job tells the story of a minister who somehow switches realities, always with his newfound love, Margethe, by his side. He soon learns that it's a build-up to the Rapture, and when that occurs, he has to make a choice between his religion and his love. It's a fairly raunchy book (nothing too hardcore, but quite lewd nonetheless), it's wildly funny and very satirical. At its core, however, it's a nice love story.

6. The Messiah Choice by Jack L. Chalker (1985). This is, I suppose, not quite true "science fiction," in that it deals with demonic possession and a war against, well, Satan, but I consider it science fiction because of the vast telecommunication system that plays such a crucial part of the book, which in 1985 was still in the realm of fantasy. This is an exciting book, one that has a lot of nice Christian touches without being a Christian tract. Satan does indeed attempt to bring about the Apocalypse, but the hero has a more generic kind of faith than a true Christian one. Despite the fact that it's a ripping page-turner, it still manages to explore the problems of technology gone mad and how to stay human in an increasingly mechanized world. (It's also out of print, which kind of sucks.)

7. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (1987). Dirk is one of my favorite fictional detectives, and this, the first book starring him, is marvelous - a mishmash of genres, with ghosts, aliens, time travelers, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge all playing important roles. It's very funny, in an altogether more mature humor vein than the Hitchhiker books (the first of which would have made this list, except I tried to limit myself to one book per author, and I like this more than the book that made Adams a superstar), and it's also an very interesting mystery. It's convoluted but, unlike the next book with Dirk (The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul), makes perfect sense once it's all explained (the follow-up still puzzles me a little). Adams returned to his cash cow after writing two Dirk Gently books, and of course died prematurely, but I do wish he had been able to write a few more.

8. Liege-Killer by Christopher Hinz (1987). Hinz doesn't seem to be a big name in sci-fi, and that's a shame, because his Paratwa trilogy, which begins with this book, is fantastic. This is the best of the three, because the next two got a bit too esoteric. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but this book manages to balance strange philosophy with rip-snorting action, and the mystery of the book is compelling as well. The story takes place after Earth's nuclear destruction, when mankind lives on hundreds of satellites orbiting the dead planet. In the frenzy of technology before the end, mankind created the Paratwa, deadly assassins that are two separate bodies governed by one mind. They can function as independent beings or as a single entity, basically a killer with four arms and four eyes, making them very hard to kill. In this first novel, a Paratwa is awakened on the colonies, and two ancient Paratwa-hunters are revived from stasis to find it. Hinz makes trenchant points about genetic engineering and political machinations, as we learn that one of the ruling caste of the Paratwa - an Ash Ock - is living in the colonies and manipulating humankind, but he also makes sure that the book is a thriller. I absolutely love this book.

9. Xenocide by Orson Scott Card (1991). Card is one of my favorite sci-fi authors, despite his rather rightist political leanings. I met him once, in 1986, at the World Trade Center in New York. His Alvin Maker books are my favorite, but I can't think of a single volume that's better than any others, and they stretch the definition of speculative fiction into fantasy fiction anyway. Xenocide is the third book in a quartet that began with Ender's Game, which is probably his best-known novel. Xenocide is a far more mature work, however. It's a book about genocide and how human arrogance leads to destruction and how people need to overcome their basic instincts to co-exist. It's also a fairly interesting mystery, in that Ender must discover how the lifeforms on Lusitania (the planet at the center of the book) live. It's a nice balance, too, between the harder science fiction of Card's earlier work and the wildly esoteric stuff he does later in the final book of the series, Children of the Mind. I may not like Card's politics, but he's a very good writer.

10. Imajica by Clive Barker (1991). Imajica is a massive book, and to attempt to summarize it, even a little, would be pointless. It's the first (and so far, only) Barker book I've read (I own a few others, but haven't read them yet), and it left me breathless. It's a Quest novel, full of magic and sex and violence and ruminations on religion. It's often tough to follow, because Barker packs it with so many characters and worlds, but it's a wonderful experience reading it. If you've never read any Clive Barker, start here.

I see that in recent years I have tended to move away from science fiction a bit. It's not that I don't like it anymore, I just got interested in a lot of other stuff too. It's also hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to science fiction (like a lot of pure genre fiction). I mean, have you been to the bookstore recently and checked out the sci-fi section? Holy crap, it's huge! How can I tell what's good and what's not?

Anyway, what's on your list of favorite science fiction novels! Embrace your inner geek and let it out!

What I've been reading

Recently, I decided to get two new books about that greatest of all medieval kings, Charles the Great, Karolus Magnus, Charlemagne. I've dug Charlemagne for years, so it was fun to read two relatively short books back-to-back. Enjoy!

Charlemagne by Derek Wilson. 226 pages, 2005, Vintage Books.

Despite my love of the Merovingians, the dynasty that preceded Charlemagne's and the last king of which was deposed by Charlemagne's father, the emperor has always been fascinating to me. If you're at all interested in medieval European history, Charlemagne is fascinating. He's that magnetic and that important to the study of European history.

This book is rather odd, as it purports to be a biography of Charlemagne, but it really isn't. Charlemagne dies on page 130, and the final 70+ pages deal with his legacy. The actual biographical section of the book is interesting, but Wilson doesn't uncover too much that's new. He goes over the major events of the king's life, which are fascinating enough, with a great deal of focus on his empire-building. He does get into the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, but not to the extent that it probably deserves. He is far more interested in showing how Charlemagne, through his use of Christianity to unite the disparate ethnicities in his empire, created an idea of "Europe" that outlasted both him and his descendants. This is the crux of his argument, and once Charlemagne shuffles off this mortal coil, that's when his book actually takes off.

Wilson tracks the way Charlemagne became a myth, a process that began almost as soon as he died. This was made easier by the fact that the emperor's heirs were nowhere near as competent as he was, so whether it was Einhard writing during the reign of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, or Notker the Stammerer writing during the reign of Charles the Fat, Charlemagne's great-grandson, the propaganda machine began making the empire-founder larger than life. Later in the Middle Ages, of course, the Chanson de Roland made Charlemagne (who doesn't appear very much in the poem) a godlike figure, and in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the romances flourished in France, Charlemagne became a paragon of knightly virtues and a supreme Crusader, even though he never went on Crusade. Wilson also tracks the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century, when Maximilian tried to emulate the great king and his son Charles V became ruler of a vast tract of territory even larger than Charlemagne's. Both of these men consciously looked back to Charlemagne in order to justify their actions, especially with regard to the Catholic Church and the new Protestant movement.

Wilson also looks at Louis XIV and Napoleon, two men who also consciously emulated Charlemagne, Napoleon more than most. As we move into the nineteenth century, it's interesting how Charlemagne becomes both a French and German hero, despite the fact that the two countries developed a fierce rivalry and Charlemagne wouldn't have distinguished between the two. This division between Romance-speakers and Germanic-speakers goes back to the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the empire was split between Charlemagne's three grandsons and it's unlikely that Lothar I, as ruler of the "French" portion, and Louis the German even understood each other anymore, but in the 1800s, the division became even more pronounced. Germany had been reluctant to embrace Charlemagne, but under Bismarck and Wilhelm I and later under Hitler, who proclaimed the Carolingian Empire the "First Reich" (hence his "Third Reich," which followed the "Second Reich" of Wilhelm), the emperor was embraced as a paragon of Germanic values. Wilson shows the contradictory attitude of Hitler toward the king who fought for most of his life against the pagan Saxons, as on one hand he condemned the emperor for being a pawn of the Papacy, and on the other hand praising his martial virtues. Such was the myth of Charlemagne.

The examination of the myth is what makes this book so fascinating. It's not a horribly scholarly book, but Wilson does do a nice job with the survey of Western history since Charlemagne, and if he doesn't get too in-depth, he still gives us a good portrait of what Charlemagne meant to Europe. He reaches the modern world with his thesis intact, pointing out that Churchill and de Gaulle both spoke of a United States of Europe, and that the original European Economic Community was created from the countries that made up Charlemagne's empire: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Charlemagne's legacy lives on!

Becoming Charlemagne: Europe, Baghdad, and the Empires of A.D. 800 by Jeff Sypeck. 284 pages, 2006, Harper Perennial.

Moving on, we get to a book with a tighter focus than Wilson's book, as Sypeck focuses on the five or so years around 800, when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome. Sypeck examines the justification of this act, which was a bit of a breach of "international law," such as it was. In 800, the Byzantine Empire, as weak as it was at that period in its history, was still technically the "Roman Empire," nominally exercising suzerainty over the lands of the Roman Empire, which included Western Europe. Charlemagne's coronation was therefore a coup d'etat, theoretically.

Sypeck argues that part of the reason why Charlemagne took this dramatic step was because the "emperor" in Constantinople in 800 was a woman named Irene. Irene was not a good empress and apparently not a nice woman, as she had her own son blinded so that he could no longer rule (as Byzantine custom dictated) and took over. Sypeck has a low opinion of Irene, but it's perhaps a bit undeserved - her son, Constantine VI, was universally reviled, and Irene had few options when dealing with him. She also tried to solve the Iconoclast controversy, which came close to tearing the empire apart. Iconoclasm was a movement in which people destroyed icons of the church because it was too close to worshipping graven images. It was partly inspired by Islam's rejection of representations of Muhammed. Irene was a factor in squashing the Iconoclast movement, which had upset many citizens throughout the empire who, frankly, enjoyed their icons! So perhaps the judgment of history on Irene is a bit harsher than the reality. But Sypeck does make a decent case that because of the fact that a woman was on the throne, technically nobody was on the throne, and that helped Charlemagne make his case.

Another point that Sypeck makes is that, in the 790s, Charlemagne was powerful enought to shape international policy, and that meant dealing with the Abbasid Caliphate ruled by Harun al-Rashid from Baghdad. This was another spur to his establishment of the empire - the need to deal with the caliph as an equal, especially as the Abbasids were, as it turned out, natural allies to the Carolingians, despite their religious differences. One of the most interesting points of Sypeck's book is how he explodes the myth that these Christians and Muslims were so ideologically opposed that they couldn't work together, which is absolutely false. In Spain, the original Arab Caliphate, the Umayyads, still ruled, which made Harun nervous. The Byzantines were still trying to enforce their rights in southern Italy, which made Charlemagne nervous. It was much better for Charlemagne and Harun to ally, although neither man made much practical use of the alliance.

Sypeck does a good job explaining the role of the small Jewish population within Charlemagne's empire (another example of the Christians ignoring religious differences, as the Jews were allowed many rights under Charlemagne) in bringing about the alliance with the Abbasids, and he also does a nice job with Alcuin, the British monk who served as Charlemagne's mentor for years before retiring to Tours. Alcuin was a driving force behind the coronations, and Sypeck uses his letters from the late 790s well to show how he shaped Charlemagne's mindset in those crucial years.

Finally, Sypeck nicely shows how the situation in Rome led to the coronation. In 799, Pope Leo III was attacked in the streets by factions hostile to his rule, and he managed to escape and flee north. He reached Aachen, Charlemagne's capital, and convinced the king to return with him to Rome and hold a trial exonerating him of various charges laid against him. Charlemagne obliged, and Sypeck makes it clear that his price for this assistance was a crown. The scene in St. Peter's on Christmas Day, 800, is fairly familiar, as later propagandists proclaimed that Charlemagne didn't actually want to be emperor and was surprised when Leo crowned him, but that's simply a tale to lionize the emperor and has no basis in fact - Charlemagne knew what was going on, as did everyone else in the building.

The aftermath of the coronation is handled less well, as Sypeck appears to lose interest in everything but the famous elephant that Harun al-Rashid sent north to solidify the alliance. The elephant is a fascinating piece of history, but in the grand scheme, it's not that important. Sypeck does go over Irene's downfall and the fact that it took over a decade before a new Byzantine emperor would recognize Charlemagne's new title, but again, it's a bit of an afterthought. For a book that is called Becoming Charlemagne, he spends too much time with the "becoming" part and not enough time with what it actually meant. He does skim the impact this event had on both the present and the future, but not enough. He also doesn't spend enough time in Constantinople and Baghdad. He spends more time with Irene than Harun, but it seems odd that he doesn't place Charlemagne in more context. He sets up the book as if it will be much more balanced among the three empires, but he quickly abandons the Abbasid and Byzantine states, which makes me wonder why he introduced them in the first place. The actual text of this book is only 206 pages, and it's in fairly large print, as if Sypeck was assigned a 200-page essay to write and he wanted to stretch out his 150-page essay to fit. This could have been a much more in-depth book without being much longer in terms of page count. It's a very readable book, I'll admit, and not a bad piece of purely popular history, but it's a bit disappointing that it lingers too often on trivia.

So those are the two Charlemagne books I read recently. If you've never read anything about the man and are interested in a quick read, Sypeck's book is probably fine for you. Wilson's isn't a dry tome, but it does get a bit more into what Charlemagne's impact on Europe is, and his focus on Charlemagne's life is a bit broader. Wilson's is certainly a better book. (Sypeck's blog is pretty keen, though.)

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917-2008

I'm sure you've probably heard already, but Arthur C. Clarke has died at the age of 90.

I was always a huge Clarke fan, which is perhaps not surprising. I'm male and slightly nerdy. It seems like Clarke's books would be much more interesting to men than women - I'm have no evidence that that's true, but it seems like it would be. He was my first favorite author - I first discovered him in the mid-1980s, when I was 13 or so. The first Clarke book I read was Rendezvous With Rama, and I quickly devoured more of his work: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, The Songs of Distant Earth, The Ghost of the Grand Banks, Childhood's End, The Fountains of Paradise, plus a bunch of short stories. I fell behind reading them when I moved on to college and discovered other great authors. Clarke kept writing, and he died with over 100 books on his résumé. I think Rendezvous With Rama and The Fountains of Paradise are my two favorite novels, but his books from the 1950s, '60s, and '70s are excellent. My absolute favorite Clarke works are two short stories - "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "The Star." (You can read them at those links - they're short!) Those are two of my favorite short stories by any author, by the way.

Clarke was a true visionary, and it's amazing to see how much of what he predicted seems possible now. Read an Arthur C. Clarke book today in tribute!

(This just in: Ivan Dixon has died at the age of 76. Dixon, of course, starred in Hogan's Heroes in the 1960s, but I occasionally see his name as the director of some Magnum, P. I. episodes. I always liked Kinch. He always seemed to be the most competent of the prisoners. LeBeau, Carter, and Richard Dawson were buffoons, but Kinch knew what he was doing, man!)