One of the things I like to do in my reading is to occasionally pick up a non-fiction book about something almost completely random. This practice enables me to learn something about stuff outside my normal range of intellectual curiosity. The last week or so I read A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles published by the South Dakota Historical Society about Black Hills tourism in the early part of the last century. When the book showed up on LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, I requested the book precisely because it seemed outside of my normal interests, but still possibly filling in lots of useless bits of knowledge.

Both my grandfather’s and my stepfather’s families hail from the Dakotas. However, I’ve only visited a half dozen times, all when I was fairly young. On one trip, my family first visited southern California where some of mom’s high school classmates lived. Then we drove diagonally to Bismarck where dad’s family lived. Only three things remain of my memories of that leg of the trip: a bit of camping near St. George Utah, camping on top of a mesa in western Colorado, and seeing Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills.

Mount Rushmore is certainly very memorable, and the entrepreneurs of South Dakota designed it, and quite a bit of their whole economy, in an attempt to get people to come to the area and spend money. As soon as the gold rush waned after 1876, folks saw the possibilities of bringing in outside money in addition to their mining, ranching, and forestry interests. The scenic landscape provides a natural draw, and local hot springs were an initial impetus to get health minded tourists to come.

Julin’s book tells the history of the growth of the industry from 1880 until World War II. A large portion of her history concerns Peter Norbeck, state legislator, governor, and U.S. senator. At each level he championed Black Hills tourism, primarily Custer State Park, but also nearby national parks and monuments. But in addition to being a champion of public lands, he micro-managed these lands. He maneuvered to see that people he approved got the jobs running the parks, and not just for patronage reasons. Norbeck had an aesthetic in mind and he wanted like-minded people implementing it. So when he thought burros would be a bonus for the parks, all he had to do was let his hand-picked people know. From World War I until the Great Depression, Norbeck was the driving force behind Custer State Park.

A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles focuses mostly on the movers and shakers as well as the business owners and entrepreneurs. The politicians who feuded over visions of the Black Hills. The towns competing for tourist dollars who would remove other towns road signs. The hucksters and Native American tribes that sold phony and simulated experiences to eager middle-class white people.

I also quite enjoyed the numerous photographs included. I believe all of them are from the period. I’m particularly taken with photos of the landscape as well as photos of the tourists who came to the Black Hills. While most of them are of the stiff overly-posed variety that was required by photographic equipment and then contemporary style, they still give a really view into just what the experience might have been like at the time. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that.

A couple things I felt were missing though. I never got a sense that I understood how the regular people, those not involved in building the tourist economy felt and lived through it. Those who worked as ranchers or mere workers. But more importantly, the experience of the actual tourists really felt like it was missing from this story. They come into the narrative mostly in the context of being sold the Black Hills, not so much as how they experienced it themselves. What was a day trip to the Black Hills like? How did a tourist experience Wind Cave? Why would they come to Rapid City rather than Deadwood? Sometimes the questions are touched on, but mostly so far as how the entrepreneurs catered to these choices.

I’m not too surprised those were missing though. Julin wrote her graduate school thesis about the political foundations of tourism development in the Black Hills. This appears to be the book version of that; the politics is much more heavily covered than anything else.

This well-written history will appeal to folks who already have an inclination for the subject matter, or for those who like me get into random curiosities. I enjoyed reading it. Pretty awesome stuff, particularly the photos. But for a random person, I don’t think there’s enough to grab them if they aren’t already gravitating toward the subject.

Title: A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles: Black Hills Tourism, 1880-1941
Author: Suzanne Barta Julin
Cover creator: Rich Hendel (designer)
Imprint / publisher: South Dakota State Historical Society Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 183 p.
Publication date: October 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-9798940-6-0

South Dakota State Historical Society Press provided me a review copy through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I have donated the equivalent price ($19.72 on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

I know very little about art or art history. I was a bit skeptical that I would enjoy this book, but it came highly recommended. Turns out that I found the book engrossing. Whaddaya know? Jonathan Harr writes about the finding of a Caravaggio painting that went missing for several hundred years. He makes art history, a subject I normally think dreary, into something interesting. Additionally, Harr delves fairly deeply into the people involved, bringing their personalities into the drama. Including that of Caravaggio.

The basic history is this: Caravaggio was an important Baroque painter around 1600 in Rome. He made many enemies because of a violent temper. Some of his paintings were commission by the Mattei family, a prominent and wealthy family. Around 1800 some of them were sold to an Irish nobleman. In the 200 years prior to the sale, one of those paintings, The Taking of Christ, had been misattributed in the Mattei archives as being by a minor Dutch painter. The Irish purchasers didn’t know what they had, and it got sold several times without a paper trail before ending up above the mantle in a Jesuit monastery in Dublin.

Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ

Harr tells the story of three art scholars, none of any prior renown, who managed to figure out what happened to the painting and bring it back to the world. The first two were Italian art history students who managed to get admitted to the Mattei family records when few others had. They were trying to find information on a different painting and stumbled across reverence to The Taking of Christ. From what I understand of the book, the information about the sale of the painting had already been published but wasn’t widely known. They researched the trail and traced it forward in time to an auction in 1921 but lost the breadcrumbs after that.

The third person was an art restorer and also a Caravaggio aficionado. Asked to restore a painting hanging in a local Jesuit monastery, he suspected it was the lost Caravaggio. He worked backward in time to see if it might indeed be the painting. Though with somewhat of a gap, since he and his employers didn’t reveal to the Jesuits that they suspected the painting to be a Caravaggio.

Harr transforms what are actually pretty mundane personalities into something interesting. One of the Italian students is unsure of herself and nervous. The restorer is diffident and has a defensive Napolean complex about his status. Little things come up, like the fact that pre-eminent Caravaggio scholar Denis Mahon prefers to shakes hands rather than embrace Italian style. As several of the historians involved are Italian, it became a nice little nugget to illustrate the personalities. Somehow Harr makes all of this interesting. How exactly, I don’t know. I didn’t dissect it enough to figure it out. I just enjoyed it.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Taylor, Lisa, and David
• Reading Archives
• A Book a Week
• Fyrefly’s Book Blog

Title: The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
Author: Jonathan Harr
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 264 p.
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 0-375-50801-5
Subject: Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573-1610 — Criticism and interpretation
Subject: Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573-1610. Taking of Christ
Subject: Jesus Christ — Betrayal — Art
Subject: John, the Baptist, Saint — Art
Subject: Painting, Italian — Attribution
Subject: Painting — Expertising
LC classification: ND623.C26 H37 2005

The Taking of Christ, created in the early 1600s, is public domain in the United States.

I used to subscribe to the blog of the Library of Congress. It turned out to be of more of a librarian’s blog than a reader’s blog, so I dropped it. However, during the time I did read it the Library published Cartographia, a lusciously mapped coffee table book celebrating the use of maps over the course of history. But I couldn’t see paying a coffee table book price for it when it would mostly sit. Now that I have an active Seattle Public Library card, getting hold of a copy is easy. So I did.

I was both thrilled with the book and deeply unsatisfied. My dissatisfaction came from my expectations. I didn’t realize how much of a survey book this is. Nearly every map in the book makes me want to see more. More by that map-maker. More of that style. More of what’s mapped. Sadly, the book moves quickly on to the next map.

What is there is awesome! Starting with the Mediterranean world and ancient history, Vincent Virga explores the technology and uses of maps by the Eqyptians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans, as well as several less heralded cultures from that time. At the time, there was no way to create accurate maps on a large scale. Surveying technology was limited. Accurate time keeping was unknown, but required to determine longitude. And even more, long travel times and economics limited what people know about the world outside the Mediterranean Sea. Maps of the the world from that era either fade out at the edges, contain magic happens here hand-waving, or are just flat-out wrong. The Indian Ocean is not an inland sea! I kinda wonder why Africa wasn’t explored better. It wasn’t until the late 1400s that the civilized world realized Africa was a contiguous continent. Perhaps navigation wasn’t up to snuff, but why didn’t anyone explore the coast via walking? They got to Asia that way.

Virga groups his sections following the geographic knowledge of history. First was the Mediterranean. Then civilization viewed the world as having three parts, Europe, Asia and Africa. Then they added the Americas. Then came Oceania. Each brings different uses for maps. Virga constantly repeats the phrase Map as &hellip adding a descriptive ending for each cultural use. Map as Plot for Travel Book. Map as Historical Anthropology

Most of the uses Virga describes are political uses. He focuses quite a bit on how kings, nations, and cultures used maps to dominate other kings, nations and cultures. Perhaps it’s because non-political uses (or less political) uses are a fairly recent development, or perhaps because everything has some element of politics, or perhaps some reason I am completely clueless about, but things such as mapping geology or biology or even just plain tourism get short shrift. Sometimes they are mentioned, but usually Virga makes sure to point a political effect rather than the emphasize the use.

That’s not really a knock against the book. One should know the angle is all.

The highlight of course are the 202 maps included. They are a window to other times. I love maps for giving me a sense of what is and how people view it. The maps are predominantly historical. Items not found in today’s atlases, so they are very rare for me. Some people can just sit and look at artwork for hours on end. I stared at many of these maps for hours, just absorbing the people and places that made them.

Other blogged reviews:

• My Life in the Basement
• Cartophilia
• Bookgasm

Title: Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations
Author: Vincent Virga
Cover creator: Map of South Africa from a secret 1630 Portuguese atlas
Imprint / publisher: Little, Brown / Hachette
Format: Hardcover
Length: 252 p.
Publication date: October 2007
ISBN-10: 0-316-99766-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-316-99766-9
Subject: Cartography — History
Subject: Cartography — Social aspects
LC classification: GA203.V57 2006

Fiasco was a very illuminating book, but was also very frustrating. Illuminating because Ricks details exactly how and why the U.S. went wrong in prosecuting the war in Iraq. Frustrating because he supports his narrative mostly with interviews rather than data.

The central tenet of Ricks reporting is that the U.S. military treated the Iraq conflict tactically as a conventional war, when in reality the strategy needed to be that of counter-insurgency. Faulty political assumptions by civilian leaders such as George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld started everything off. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and there wasn’t a unified Iraqi population ready to accept our soldiers as liberators. Militarily nearly every leader got it wrong. Some were simply incompetent, particularly L. Paul Bremer, in charge of the pseudo-military Coalition Provisional Authority (C.P.A.), the nominally civilian temporary occupational government. In addition, infighting between branches of the military and the C.P.A. hampered effectiveness (particularly when all sides were wrong).

I was a lukewarm supporter of the Iraq invasion in 2003. I thought using the U.S. military there was moral for the same reasons I supported Bosnian intervention. Removing a brutal dictator to prevent massive civilian deaths is fine in my book. I was lukewarm because I didn’t believe the weapons claims by the Bush administration, nor did I think the timing was right.

As the war progressed and spiraled out of control, I often wondered what the hell was going wrong. We seemed to change our political plans every six months. The constant spew of feel-good rhetoric from the administration pissed me off. Most frightening was that it seemed like we had no permanent successes. I had lots of scenarios running through my head that I thought would be better than what I saw. After reading Fiasco, I’m pretty sure most of my ideas wouldn’t have worked. But then, neither did most of the ideas tried by the army.

The book is really depressing. With a title like Fiasco that’s pretty much guaranteed. The biggest reason though is that the same mistakes are repeated over and over and over again. Overwhelming force. Round up civilians. Disrespect the populace. Wash, rinse, repeat.

One big thing that frustrated me about Fiasco is that Ricks focused so heavily on narrative, or telling a story. He was a reporter for the Washington Post, part of the main stream media. A media that overly focuses on narrative. In other words, the reporter constructs a story that fits what he sees and tells that. When I’d rather the paper just tell me what it is they see.

As an example, one of the main arguments Ricks makes is that we went in with too few troops to occupy a country. In only one spot does Fiasco cover what adequate troop levels might look like. He does that when he reports what appears to be back-of-the-envelope calculations done by General Eric Shinseki. Fiasco doesn’t provide a timeline of the troop levels we did use either. Scattered here and there are mentions of troop levels, but only when they fit the narrative.

The problem with narrative is that I have no way to tell if it’s the correct narrative. It seems to make sense. His method of creating that narrative is to have lots and lots of interviews. But I can’t go to those people to check, and I can’t be sure they didn’t create the narrative for Ricks themselves out of whole cloth. Without data I don’t know.

The narrative (story) is good though. In a depressing way.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Tiger Hawk
• Jordon Cooper
• CapitalistImperialistPig

Title: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Cover creator: Alex Majoli (photographer) / Darren Haggar (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Penguin
Format: Paperback
Length: 492 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-303891-7
Subject: Iraq war, 2003-
Subject: United States — History, military — 21st century
LC classification: DS79.76.R535 2006

Well, personal events in my life have conspired to prevent me from accomplishing one of my reading goals. If you look at the first week of this month, I reviewed a book a day. My goal was to read a book a day for the entire month. I was already a bit behind, though I had some catch-up plans, when I made two trips to the emergency room over the weekend accompanying other people (I was not ill myself). I was not able to devote enough time to reading, and even my catch-up plans probably aren’t going to suffice to return me to the proper pace. I’m also a weasel for not writing of the goal publicly until now so that this blog’s readers could keep me honest. But I have finished a book, and so I shall review …

I spent twelve years living and working in Idaho, a state very heavily populated by Mormons. The rumor I heard while living there was that the state actually had a higher percentage of Mormons than Utah did. I knew (and know) a lot of Mormons. My acquaintances ran the gamut in personal qualities, much like any other group. I can’t say I ever met a truly unlikable Mormon.

My earliest knowledge of Mormonism centered on their strict dietary proscription against caffeine and alcohol, and my Jack Mormon friends’ failure to adhere to that rule. I was also aware that nearly every Mormon was expected to go on a two year mission, and that most would marry shortly after completing the mission. Beyond that, I knew very little. Many Idaho non-Mormons held an intense dislike for Mormons, which seemed to be mostly about the Mormon mono-culture and near exclusive control Mormons had in the small towns from which my friends came. If you weren’t a Mormon, you didn’t get to be a cheerleader. That kind of thing.

I’ve never been anti-Mormon. I had too many nice Mormon friends for me to fall for that. On the other hand, I was pretty atheist when I first encountered practicing Mormons. It always boggled my mind that anyone would believe a religion whose tenets were supposedly inscribed on gold plates that disappeared shortly afterward, when they supposedly were transcribed in a period where such things are easily verifiable if true. In other words, the L.D.S. Church was started in the mid-1800s, pro-claimed some things that are easily disprovable by the records of the time, and yet people still believe. That’s the atheist and skeptic in me talking. Mind you, I hold all religions to such standards, which is one of the reasons why it’s unlikely I will every become traditionally religious.

According to Jon Krakauer’s afterward, the work that became Under the Banner of Heaven was originally inspired by the same question. How does a rational mind believe this? Along the way, he became entranced and sidetracked by Mormon fundamentalism and a particular murder of a woman and her child by two possibly insane Mormon fundamentalists.

While he gave up on the original focus, that question still seems to get asked multiple times in this true crime story. Krakauer devotes one late chapter entirely to Deloy Bateman, a former fundamentalist polygamist who not only apostatized from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints sect, he became an atheist. I thought his story of being educated and that education slowly eating away his belief was extremely compelling. (Then again, perhaps I that’s just my own bias.)

Krakauer also devotes a chapter to question of the sanity of Ron and Dan Lafferty, the fundamentalist polygamists who killed their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty and her daughter in a bloody attack that by its very nature raises the possibility of insanity. The question explored is this: what differentiates the actions of a Christian who helps someone after receiving the command in prayer from the Laffertys who believe God commanded them to kill? The legal answer in the chapter doesn’t suffice, but the question of belief obviously plagues Krakauer for him to even include the chapter.

Just for exploration of belief alone I have to recommend the book.

In addition, there’s quite a bit of history about the L.D.S. church that is utterly fascinating and which I did not know: the trail of Mormons from Palmyra to Ohio to Missouri to Navoo to Utah, the birth and death of Joseph Smith, persecution the church received, the disdain the church held for Gentiles, details of the Mountain Meadows massacre. Other items I knew more about, but still the book provided me with new insight: the Mormon story of Nephi and Laban, the polygamy doctrine, and the splintering of polygamist sects.

Two criticisms though: I think Krakauer focuses too much on too many fundamentalist L.D.S. sects. I’m not sure why this was done. The stories are lurid, and they do form some of the background of the Lafferty brothers. But the stories of communities in Bountiful, B.C. and in Mexico didn’t seem to add a lot of insight. The intertwined family trees were confusing while being horrifying, and I kept getting lost as to who was who. Perhaps if he had included a diagram.

The second criticism isn’t so much a criticism as a question about which I’ve wondered (and received only bits of information from other sources). What about all the boys in these communities? If you marry all the girls to the older generation, and marry them at a ratio of multiple women to one man, your community is going to have a surplus of boys with no marriage or romantic prospects. Are these boys just killed off? Abandoned? Do they become disillusioned and become mainline Mormons or just wander off the religious road altogether? Krakauer chronicles the horrors the girls undergo as well as their peculiar Stockholm Syndrome adherence to their malefactors, but there’s nary a word about the boys. I wish he had at least given a paragraph or two to the question, but I don’t recall it.

Obviously I think this book is a fascinating and engrossing read that has a lot more depth than most true crime books.

Title: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Author: Jon Krakauer
Cover creators: John Fontana (designer) / Will Funk (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Anchor / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 399 p. (includes extensive supplemental material)
Publication date: 2003
ISBN-10: 1-4000-3280-6
Subject: Mormon fundamentalism
LC classification: BX8680.M54K73 2003

Sometimes I feel bad giving a bad review for a book. This is one of those times, because Yuan-tsung Chen obviously poured her heart into writing the book. But, in her own words, sometimes the things I composed in my mind were very lively; but as soon as I transferred them onto paper, they sounded dull and even not quite intelligible. The author can’t quite decide whether she wants the book to be a history or a biography, jumping between broader issues of the Chinese past and more intimate details of individual people, usually with a transition that left me wondering which was which. It lacks organization. And more than once Chen wrote different facts that logically cannot be reconciled.

Return to the Middle Kingdom is the story of Joseph, Eugene, and Jack Chen. Joseph fought in the Taiping Rebellion, afterward living in exile in the Caribbean. Eugene Chen grew up in the Caribbean, established a law practice, but eventually moved to China to participate in Sun Yat-sen’s republic. There he became a confidant of Yat-sen and served in several regional governments that had designs on ruling China during the warlord period. Jack Chen also grew up in the Caribbean and London, but converted to Marxism during and shortly after a trip to China when his father was foreign minister in the Wuhan government. He became a cartoonist and communist propagandist. The author, Yuan-tsung Chen, was Jack Chen’s third wife.

The bulk of the book, and the most coherent, is the part that follows Eugene Chen. It’s also the period about which I had the least knowledge of Chinese history. So I learned a lot, though I suspect a lot of the inside details written in the book are guesswork. Neither Yuan-tsung nor Jack were present for most of the events of Eugene’s life. The other big problem is that I have no context for the Chinese situation during that period, and the author rarely provided enough. The events in China prior to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat in 1949 were chaotic, so it’s tough to make sense of them. The big picture stuff I got: Sun Yat-sen set up a rival government in Canton opposed to Beijing. His Kuomintang allied with the Communists and with Russia at first, and slowly built up their influence. After Yat-sen’s death, they launched a military offensive and after some success consolidating territory moved the capital to Wuhan. The successes proved to be temporary and the Wuhan government failed. The book includes lots of little details like the menu for some of the dinners between officials. But it neglects more important details like why the Wuhan government fell.

Even more puzzling is that there is little about Eugene Chen after his first stint as foreign minister ended in 1927. There’s brief mention that he served as foreign minister in a Nanjing government, and that he died in Japanese captivity in 1945 after residing in Hong Kong. But pretty much nothing more for the last 18 years of Eugene Chen’s life.

There are puzzling gaps in the life of Jack Chen as well. At a young age his father thrust him into the limelight as a cartoonist and artist to profile the state of the Chinese people. After Russian training he continued this work during the 1930s, but the book barely covers the time from the start of World War II in 1939 until Jack Chen’s arrest in the Cultural Revolution in 1968. He supposedly heads to London to start an overseas Chinese news bureau to propagandize for the Communists, but it’s never said what came of that. Just that the outbreak of war prevented him from returning to China until years later. And no mention of what he did in China after he returned, other than working for the Foreign Language Bureau. Then suddenly he’s on the outs during the Cultural Revolution but there’s no explanation as to why.

For being a family supposedly at the center of three revolutions, it feels quite a bit like they were somewhat big fish only in trash time (to use a basketball term) after the direction of the revolutions were decided. Eugene Chen only moved to China after the overthrow of the royal line, and neither he nor Jack played any part in the key parts of the Chinese civil war of the 1940s.

I just can’t recommend this book.

A publicist for the author requested I review this book and provided me with a free copy.

Title: Return to the middle kingdom: one family, three revolutionaries, and the birth of modern China
Author: Yuan-tsung Chen
Imprint / publisher: Union Square Press / Sterling Publishing / Barnes & Noble
Format: Hardcover
Length: xxx, 401 p.
Publication date: July 2008
ISBN-10: 1-4027-5697-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-4027-5697-9
Subject: China — History — 20th century — Personal narratives
LC classification: DS774 .C3815 2008

At the turn of the century the telegraph connected the world. Messages could be sent quickly between any two places connected by wire. Cable had been laid across the Atlantic Ocean connecting England and North America. But if you couldn’t hook up a wire, you were out of touch. Principally, for this book, the realm of the unconnected was the realm of the sea.

In the late 1890s, Guglielmo Marconi set out to change that. He was a tinkerer, a hobbyist with electricity as a young man on his father’s estate in Italy. But he was one of the first to figure out how to send messages over a distance, though the invention of the technology belonged to others, notably Oliver Lodge. Rather than invent from scratch, Marconi played and experimented with Lodge’s coherer device and antenna configurations of his own devising. After a bit, he had put together a system that no one else had previously done. From that point through the early 1900s Marconi kept refining the system to achieve ever greater distances.

Marconi’s story is one half of Thunderstruck. In 1910, Marconi’s invention intersected with the subject of the other half of the book, Hawley Harvey Crippen. An American living in London, Crippen worked as a homeopathic doctor for a series of patent medicine firms. Snake oil purveyors. His wife Cora performed badly in variety (vaudeville) shows as Belle Elmore. Crippen was mild-mannered and devoted to his wife. She was domineering and treated her medical husband badly, constantly threatening to leave him to coerce his obedience (and monetary support). She even renamed him Peter to which he apparently acquiesced. But in 1910 he had enough, and Belle Elmore abruptly disappeared. Murder was suspected by many. Crippen and his lover fled to America by ship.

And that’s where the stories intersect. The world watched. Everyone knew of the pursuit of the suspect Crippen as he headed toward freedom and Canada. Everyone except Crippen. Everyone knew because the captain of the ship Montrose, having been alerted by Scotland Yard, thought he recognized the fugitives. He used the ship’s Marconi wireless to inform his company and Scotland Yard. Contents of radio waves could hardly be kept secret in those days, and news spread quickly. But the Montrose’s captain controlled the wireless for his ship, and so Crippen did not know he was pursued. Wireless radio technology became indispensable afterward.

Larson writes a riveting tale of Crippen’s life. I found Marconi’s story to be less compelling however. There is no climax for Marconi like there is for Crippen. At the end, it is only Marconi’s technology that intersects with Crippen, not Marconi himself. Larson’s version of the story focuses on Marconi’s trials and tribulations (as well as that of his company), but not the technology. There’s barely any discussion at all of how a Marconi wireless worked. Just Marconi’s dogged pursuit of ever greater distances in transmission. It’s a good story, nonetheless. It’s just that there’s an abrupt switch in the last portion of the book. Marconi drops out and the interplay of his technology with the ship Montrose and Scotland Yard takes center stage. Larson can’t magically make Marconi personally involved without subverting the truth however, so his hands were tied.

After the stories have concluded, Thunderstruck includes dozens of pages of notes and a bibliography. At only one point in the whole thing did I feel like Larson took poetic license with the facts, and that was merely a minor bit of clear speculation. Despite the meticulously factual nature of his work, Larson still manages to write two engrossing character studies as well as a compelling narrative of the plot. This reads like a good novel. I’m quite impressed.

Title: Thunderstruck
Author: Erik Larson
Imprint / publisher: Crown / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 463 p. (includes notes and index)
Publication date: October 2006
ISBN-10: 1-4000-8066-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4000-8066-3
Subject: Crippen, Hawley Harvey, 1862-1910
Subject: Murderers — England — London — Biography
Subject: Murder — England — London — Case studies
Subject: Murder — Investigation — Great Britain — Case studies
Subject: Telegraph, Wireless — Marconi system — History
LC classification: HV6248.C75L37 2006

The Freedom is The Nation writer Christian Parenti’s first-person account of his stints reporting on the war in Iraq from the frontlines during 2003 and the first half of 2004. It’s a moving account, and covers ground I haven’t read in newspapers or magazines. That’s not to say it hasn’t been written, but I haven’t seen it.

For its descriptions of the facts on the ground, I don’t think the book is very useful anymore. While the conflict is still bloody, and still similarly bleak, the people, alliances, and situations no longer exist. That’s the danger in a war such as this. The fronts are fluid. The opponent changes. The political situation morphs. It remains as a testament of the war as it existed in 2003 however.

However, I think some parts are probably still useful for informing Americans about how Iraq operates. I imagine that the requirements for being allowed to report from the insurgency remain the same: a referral from a sheikh influential in the local underground. I suppose as well that the current insurgency is still as disorganized as it was then. While some groups such as the Mahdi Army have some level of control (by Moktadr al-Sadr), most still only maintain loose connections with other groups, preventing the U.S. military from gaining any traction against them. But then, I’m not there. I’m just guessing that this key to their survival then remains why they still survive today. Parenti describes it very well in The Freedom with his interviews with multiple resistance cells.

I have one big criticism though. It’s clear that Parenti spent significant time embedded with a few U.S. military units. He writes a rich picture of the U.S. personnel he describes. But other than his translators, the Iraqis in his book are interviewees. There is only one group with whom he describes spending significant time. The rest are interviewed. Some obviously more than once. But the narratives of the Iraqis in the book are all related by them to Parenti to us. He is not embedded with them the way he was with the military. Not even with Iraqi government forces or apparatchiks. Consequently, those stories are less rich. And they suffer from hearsay doubts.

The other criticism is that the one group Parenti seems to spend any time with is an Iraqi Marxist group. His interpreter relays to him, Iraqis will never follow these people. I don’t know why you’re spending so much time with them. There is a certain old-school class of progressives in the U.S. that clings dearly to Marxism. Iraqis will not follow communists. Americans will not be much impressed with Marxist rhetoric and are not much interested in a failing Marxist ideology or those who espouse it. Maybe he was able to spend time with them simply because no one cared about them on any side in Iraq.

Title: The freedom: shadows and hallucinations in occupied Iraq
Author: Christian Parenti
Photographer: Teru Kuwayama
Imprint / publisher: The New Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 211 p.
Publication date: November 2005
ISBN-10: 1-56584-948-5
Subject: Iraq War, 2003-
Subject: Iraq War, 2003- — Occupied territories
Subject: Iraq War, 2003- — Personal narratives, American
LC classification: DS79.76 .P335 2004

Perilous Times won the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, but I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten wider acclaim, much like A Bright Shining Lie, And the Band Played On, and Hitler’s Willing Executioners have. Of course, those works brought information to light that previously hadn’t been widely known. Perilous Times covers ground that has been tread before, but from much different directions.

Geoffrey Stone’s book is a detailed examination of the United States treatment of free speech during wartime. I put that term in quotes because several of the eras discussed weren’t times of war, declared or otherwise. In the late 1790s, fear of an impending war with France swept the nation, and the Federalists in Congress and President John Adams enacted and enforced the Sedition Act of 1798 as well as several other laws designed to limit the liberty of residents of the United States. Following that, despite several intervening wars, the next period that that saw a significant attempt to restrict free speech was during the Civil War under Abraham Lincoln. Following those two periods, Stone also inspects our record during the first World War and the red scare shortly thereafter, during World War II, during the Cold War, and during the Vietnam War.

In each era, Stone offers a history of the conflict and the U.S. government’s response to dissent during the conflict, focusing on the expression of dissent through free speech in particular. Each section additionally includes Stone’s analysis of the response by three institutions that make up the federal government: the Congress, the executive branch, and the courts. For each, he examines the actions they took and the justifications for each and measures how well the reasoning holds up in hindsight. Far from being knee-jerk criticism of repression, Stone understand the tendency to clamp down on dissent during times of crisis and offers reasoned analysis giving much consideration to the understanding of the First Amendment at the time. In a couple of cases, Stone also examines the responses by state institutions, non-governmental bodies, and individuals.

Abraham Lincoln first rose to national prominence during the Mexican-American War as a result of his criticism of President James Polk’s handling of that war. Just a few years later Lincoln’s own election to the Presidency kicked off the war; Southern States would not accept a Republican as President. If ever there was a war where dissent and free speech could cause danger, it was the Civil War. Loyal subjects and rebels were mixed together, sometimes splitting families. On the other hand, the proximity of the belligerents made it much harder to suppress free speech. At a minimum, smuggling printed materials across the border and the lines was easy. Lincoln also did not want to risk losing more border states by clamping down hard.

However, his military wasn’t quite so deliberative. In the biggest free speech incident of the war, Congressman Clement Vanlandigham violated a anti-sedition order promulgated by the military commander in Ohio, Ambrose Burnside, without consulting Lincoln. Once done, Lincoln felt he had no choice but to uphold his military. Even though he would not have prosecuted the case, he wrote thoughtful epistles justifying the action in response to criticism from his opponents. Generally, he allowed criticism of his policies to appear unabated, and the opposition pilloried him.

One of the most surprising things to me, is that in each period Stone discusses with the exception of the Cold War, there was effective deliberation in government in the handling of free speech restrictions. By that, I mean that Congress and/or the President held back on some of the most extreme restrictions. The Sedition Act of 1798 had an explicit sunset provision. Lincoln only suspended habeas corpus in limited and narrow circumstances, Congress toned down President Wilson’s requests for nearly unlimited power to control dissent, and Roosevelt’s Attorneys General Murphy, Jackson, and Biddle were committed civil libertarians who held in check Roosevelt’s tyrant tendencies. Still, however effective these people were, they were not nearly effective enough and extreme abuses stifled opposition during each of these periods.

I have only one criticism of this book, which was extremely informative and thought-provoking in it’s entirety. And by thought provoking, I do not mean Stone confirms my civil libertarian tendencies. Quite the opposite in fact. After reading the book, I can understand the legal logic that justifies these restrictions, even if I completely disagree with the need to subdue dissent during wartime except in extremely narrow circumstances (e.g., revealing troop movements). My one criticism has to do with the formatting. Stone uses extensive footnotes and endnotes. I’m a habitual footnote reader, particularly when both endnotes and footnotes are used in the same work. If it appears in a footnote, it’s probably interesting to read. Most of the footnotes here were. But the asterisk marking most of them never stood out well enough for me to notice it. So I’d get to the bottom of the page with the footnote, and then need to rescan the page looking for the text to which the footnote related. Really really annoying.

Title: Perilous times: free speech in wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism
Author: Geoffrey R. Stone
Award: 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Format: Paperback
Length: 558 p. (730 p. including notes and index)
Publication date: 2005
ISBN-10: 0-393-32745-0
Subject: Freedom of speech — United States — History
LC classification: JC591 .S76 2004

I confess that I didn’t read this because I wanted to write about history. I haven’t taken a history class since the 1980s, so a guide to writing history term papers is something I very much do not need. I’ve a few books that I acquired after others’ decisions to divest themselves of their collections. I’ll often take the collection lock, stock and barrel. Which is where I got this one. It’s sat on my shelf unread for half a decade. After reading Cannery Village I poked around my book collection and noticed this thin volume sitting there. So I decided to read it to see what rules Cannery Village should have followed to improve the tale.

Now, K. Mack Campbell’s history of upcoast canneries of British Columbia isn’t a history essay. And it’s not something being turned in for a grade. It’s not even someone’s Ph.D. thesis. So the directions in the book probably aren’t going to apply 100% to what I read. But I figured there might be a clue or two. So here’s my two critiques of Cannery Village after reading this guide.

First, the chapter on modes of writing about history would have helped Campbell a great deal. According to Marius, there are four modes of writing about history. And while an essay can use multiple modes, a hodgepodge makes a paper less readable. Those four modes are description, narrative, exposition, and argument. Description is an account of sensory experience. Narratives tell stories, and narratives are the bedrock of history. Expositions explain something. And argument is taking a position on a controversial subject. The biggest problem with Cannery Village was that it centrally was a description, even for things which aren’t centrally a sensory experience, like dates and names. I think Campbell would have been much better off writing a narrative and occasionally breaking off to relate a description of something such as a Saturday dance, or an exposition such as how a cannery worked. In his writing though, there was little narrative.

Second, he didn’t have a thesis. This is the first thing Marius writes about, so my guess is that his opinion is this is important.

Everything in your essay should contribute to your thesis. Don’t meander. Don’t put in interesting information merely because it is interesting. … Readers unconsciously expect every detail in an essay to contribute to the topic the author has announced.

I think a good thesis would have been something along the lines of upcoast canning grew in importance from nearly nothing to peak in year X, and thereafter faded until nothing remained. In that order, and focusing on the who, what, where, why and when of the growing in importance and the fading into nothingness. Deemphasize details that don’t contribute to why the industry was growing or fading. Sure, they should be included, but they shouldn’t be given a prominent role.

The advice in the book seems pretty sound, though it seems to focus a lot on non-history related details like the formatting of the paper, the proper marks for insertion and deletion, and grammar. While important for writing a good paper, it seems very much to me that the important part is mostly the writing about history, and leaving the rest to the English classes. I had to pass English 101 and 102 first thing in college. But it isn’t tough to skip those parts and focus on the meat of the history writing chapters.

One note: I have the first edition. The current edition is the 6th. I have no idea if what’s out now even resembles this one anymore.

Title: A short guide to writing about history
Author: Richard Marius
Publisher: HarperCollins
Series: Short guide series
Format: Paperback
Length: 261 p. (includes index)
Publication date: 1989
ISBN-10: 0-673-39998-2
Subject: Historiography
Subject: History — Methodology
Subject: History — Research
Subject: Authorship
LC classification: D13.M294 1989