Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man / Mary L. Trump -- New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020

I've not been particularly enticed to read any of the books coming out about Donald Trump and his administration.  I guess I get enough of him reading the daily news, but Mary Trump's memoir showed up in the Little Free Library outside my condominium complex.  It looked like a quick and easy read and my brain was in a down-cycle, so I took it home.   

Mary Trump is, of course, Donald Trump's niece.  She was part of a the close knit family born of Donald's father, Fred Trump.  She also received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Adelphi University.  The combination puts her in a unique position to comment on Donald Trump's thinking and behavior.  There was a time when psychologists and other media pundits were "diagnosing" Donald as exhibiting a narcissistic personality.  Caution required us to recognize that a proper diagnosis would require more than observing Donald's public behavior.  It would require a more in depth examination by a qualified professional including personal interviews.  Mary gives us the closest thing we'll ever get to that.  Not only has she known Uncle Donald from countless private, family gatherings, she grew up knowing his father, mother, his siblings, children, nieces, nephews, personal friends, and employees.  For the book, she conducted numerous, sometimes taped interviews with these people.  Her professional conclusion is not surprising:  Donald is not just narcissistic, he's a sociopath. 

But the main thrust of the book is not Donald.  It's the Trump family.  The two figures that loom largest in her narrative are Fred Trump and his eldest son "Freddy."  Freddy was Mary's father.  He was what some might call "the black sheep" of the family, much maligned by his father and often ostracized by his siblings.  He struggled with alcoholism and eventually died of a heart attack at the age of 42.  Much of Mary's book reads as an effort to restore her father's reputation.  

As the eldest male among the Trump siblings, Freddy was expected to carry on the family business, but he had little interest in this.  He preferred a more relaxed and social lifestyle: boating and fishing with friends.  He eventually earned a pilot's license.  For a short time, he was a commercial pilot for Trans World Airlines.  Still, his reputation in the family was so low that even his mother disparaged him, saying to Mary, "Do you know what your father was worth when he died?  A whole lot of nothing."  

The comment "a whole lot of nothing" gives a pretty good clue to the family values extant in the Trump family: a person's worth can be measured by their wealth and what they are willing to do to acquire it.  According to Mary, these values stemmed from her grandfather's single-minded pursuit of money.  Mary describes Fred too, as a sociopath, distant and uncaring, concerned mostly that he have a male heir to whom he could bequeath a fortune and who would then expand it. The family's patriarchal values are exemplified in the family's tradition of naming the eldest son "Frederick" (or "Friedrich," if you trace the sires back far enough).  In Donald, Jr.'s case, "Donald" lives on.  The Trump family seems to think of itself as a royal dynasty.

When Freddy failed to live up to his father's expectations, Donald became the new heir apparent to the family business.  Donald was an unruly child that had to be sent to the New York Military Academy to try to learn a little discipline.  Unfortunately for the world, the discipline he learned was how to manage his amorality in a way that would allow him operate effectively in the world.  Most of all, Donald cultivated the "killer" personality that his father so highly valued.  On Mary's assessment, Donald is a chip off the old block if there ever was one.  He has been, however, not nearly as adept in business as his father was.  Instead, Mary claims that Donald merely cultivated an image of success which was his only real talent.  His actual fortune was a product of his inheritance and the assistance that his father gave him along the way.  Fred even participated in the creation and maintenance of Donald's image.   

As Fred aged, Donald became something of a tyrant among his siblings.  In his father's declining years, he even attempted to have his father's will changed to give him basically the whole fortune.  Luckily for the siblings, the attempt was made during one of Fred's more lucid times, so it failed.  The siblings were especially lucky as they were concerned mostly about remaining in the good graces of their father to avoid being disinherited.  Mary herself was disinherited for simply being the child of a deceased son.  Fred had no concern for his grandchildren.  Had Donald succeeded in gaining control of the estate, the siblings' bondage to the will of a sociopath would have continued for the rest of their lives.  

Mary's book only lightly touches on the unscrupulous (even illegal) business activities of Fred, but as a grandchild, Mary was more or less unaware of them until she was contacted by reporters for the New York Times.  They were working on a massive investigation of the Trump business and hoped Mary would provide them with some documents and insight.  It is somewhat surprising that Mary does not make more use of what their investigation discovered.  The article they finally wrote (NYT, Oct. 2, 2018) provides clear and unassailable evidence of the chief motives and methods of Fred and Donald.  They conform to Mary's assessments.

Very little in Too Much and Never Enough is surprising in what it says about Donald's personality.  All that Mary writes is entirely consistent with his public behavior.  Even his supporters are likely to recognize the character traits she describes, but instead view them as virtues or as lamentable quirks.  Still, it's worthwhile to see an account from someone with a deep, personal connection to Donald and with professional credentials confirm what the lay public at large can see.

One final note, the documentary evidence and public behavior of Donald's three eldest children seems to indicate that the kind of relations within Fred's family have been reproduced in Donald's family.  Both are rich family units with children subject to an authoritarian, sociopathic father.  What seems to hold them together is mainly the family's wealth.  It makes me want to re-watch the 2003 documentary film Born Rich which interviews several children of phenomenally wealthy parents.  Ivanka Trump is one of those children.    

Yoga and the Quest for the True Self / Stephen Cope -- N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1999

Stephen Cope's book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self is a combination of memoir and an account of Cope's understanding of the essence of yoga, particularly the form of yoga that he experienced in his ten-year residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.  The result is an idiosyncratic interpretation of yoga, shaped by Cope's history as a psychotherapist.  On the whole, the work is well-written, presenting composites of characters from his years as a therapist and yoga practitioner. 

Cope decided to take up residence at the Kripalu Center for a one year "sabbatical" shortly after his partner of fifteen years left him for a very much younger man.  It appears his own motivation was less spiritual and more psychotherapeutic.  Consequently, it is no surprise that he interprets yogic practice (his own and others) as a means to deal with personal psychological turmoil.  It is only at the end of the book that he gives any indication that the "true self" for which he is searching is without the empirical characteristics that are the objects of psychotherapy.

Much of the book describes various residents and visitors at the Kripalu Center and the psychological motives behind their yogic practice.  Cope at least initially presents yoga to be the effort to recall the self from exile and create a "royal road home."  Search for the "true self" often means coming to terms with unconscious motivations and psychic states that make one's life painful, unfulfilling, inauthentic, or simply lacking in some respect.  Among the insights that Cope finds helpful is that one's mind and body are importantly connected.  The practice of yoga allowed Cope to understand that his false constructions of his identity were reflected in how he experienced his body.  He often makes much of how yoga practitioners will find a pain or tension in some specific part of the body and draw the conclusion that it is there because of some mental or psychological unease.  Undoubtedly, there are connections between ones mental states and physical states, but the connections that Cope often asserts seem highly speculative.

Cope admirably recognizes that one should approach claims made by yogis with not only an open mind, but also with a skeptical mind, and true to a pragmatic approach to psychotherapy (and spiritual liberation), whatever succeeds for the practitioner/patient should not be denigrated; however, for anyone steeped in 20th century scientific realism or pretty much any moderately exacting criterion for the justification of beliefs, much of what is "successful" seems a bit like so much snake oil.  It's great if a placebo works, but if it involves accepting unfalsifiable claims about the empirical world, it's hard not to listen to one's skeptic mind.

Toward the end of the book, Cope provides an account of a crisis within the Kripalu Center, when the Center's spiritual leader is discovered to have been having sexual relations with some of its residents.  Cope's account of the explosive anger among the residents indicates that the submissive guru-follower relationship that often characterizes spiritual seekers could not contain the individualist, egalitarian, and free-thinking attitudes among the Center's residents and visitors.

By the end of the book, Cope comes to resolve for himself a question that he raises throughout the book.  In the face of the trials and tribulation of the world, how can the assertion by his guru that "everything is OK" be correct.  The answer comes from Cope's realization that his true self is not the empirical self that experiences trials and tribulations. It is an eternal self that embraces all the universe, or at least all consciousness.  He writes, "For several sublime moments, the boundaries that separated us [Cohen and his friends], our complicated personalities, our struggles, our tragedies, all receded into the stillness of Lake Mahkeenac.  We were together on the ladder, in the meditation hall, on the mountaintop.  We were young.  We were old.  We were successful.  We were failures.  We were at the end of our lives.  We were at the beginning of our lives. And everything was absolutely OK....In the shimmering stillness, the world of space and time became transparent, revealing a hidden world in which we were all parts of one another."  It is this identification with a transcendental self that is different from, or at least indifferent to, the self that suffers the trials and tribulation of the empirical world that offers spiritual liberation and one is pleased that Cope appears to have reached beyond his fixation with psychotherapy to understand this.

Yoga and Quest for the True Self concludes with an informative appendix on the "metaphysics of yoga" which describes a number of important ideas in various schools of the Indian philosophical tradition.  Many of these ideas are divergent, even contradictory.  Consequently, Cohen calls it a "stew."  According to Cohen, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health synthesizes many of the elements of the stew.  He notes, however, that it is heavily influenced by the nondualism of the Vedanta and Tantric traditions, the eight-limbed path of Patanjali, and hatha yoga techniques, a raja yoga context.  Most of all, Cohen is impressed with the idea of the "sacredness of the moment."

In all, Yoga and Quest for the Ture Self is a worthwhile account of one man's experience with yoga, but the reader will need to have a high tolerance for reading about the psychological trials of Cohen's characters, not all of whom are well enough drawn to earn one's sympathy and sustain one's interest.

Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream / Neil Young -- N.Y.: Blue Rider Press, 2012

I'll never forget the first time I heard Neil Young.  It was 1972.  I was riding in the back of our family car and his song "Heart of Gold" came on the radio.  At the time, I thought it was the most heartfelt, soulful song I'd ever heard.  I found more of the same on "Harvest" -- the album that contained "Heart of Gold."  Upon receiving CSNY's "Four Way Street" as a Christmas present, I became an undying fan.  I snatched up every album I could find by him.  Over the years, I have continued to follow his career, but by no means religiously.  I finally saw him in concert in 1988 when he toured with "The Blue Notes." 

For me, the single most apt description of his music is that it is honest.  Young is certainly in the music business, but he seems to treat it more as means to distribute his music to whatever audience might appreciate it.  The music comes first, and if there is no audience, then that's unfortunate, but not a disaster.  Disaster comes when he betrays his muse which I don't suspect he has done very often.  There is also an appealing innocence and vulnerability in his voice that comes through even in his most angry and aggressive songs of which there are more than a few.  Of all the recording artists of his generation, Neil Young seems to have remained true to the best elements of the contercultural sensibility.  Once upon a time, that sensibility tore the mask of hypocrisy from the face of a complacent and degenerate society.

Given my admiration for Young, I picked up his book Waging Heavy Peace with trepidation.  Somewhere in the course of its 497 pages, I knew I'd find a few reasons to be disappointed in him.  Fortunately, the disappointments were minor and few.  Moreover, they paled in the presence of his characteristic honesty.  Waging Heavy Peace is a random compilation of Young's memories of family, friends, and events.  It is as though Young is spontaneously conjuring the roots of his past and bringing them to mind in whatever order they happen to appear.  He jumps from stories about his days with Buffalo Springfield to days just one year ago, back to his childhood in Canada, and then to his days with Crosby, Stills, and Nash.  Some passages are about the very present situation in which he is writing. The chronological disorder is at first disorienting.  He is rather like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim who became "unstuck in time," but eventually one comes to understand that Young's past (like everyone's) is always present if we care to remember.  When an event ocurred is less important than the effect it had on us and its significance in its own time.  The seemingly random order of Young's stories underscores that who we were in our teens is not merely a prelude to who we will become, but it is we ourselves in a unique time and place.

Waging Heavy Peace is a meditation on a life, seemingly written more for the author's benefit than for ours.  In that way, it is a lot like Young's music.  Young obviously is cherishing his memories and the people who have been part of his life.  At one point he writes, "Old memories are wonderful things and should be held on to as long as possible, shared with others, and embellished if need be."  The passage says a lot about what is behind his writing.  It is loaded with small recollections of events that are not likely to be of much interest to a fan of his music (though many of his recollections certainly are).  Instead, his recollections appear to be written as a letter to the friends who appear in the story.  Young is sharing his memories with the people who were with him over the years and sometimes with people who crossed his path only briefly.  It is as though he is telling them, "I may be a big star now, but I still remember you and I remember you very fondly." 

Young seldom has a bad word to say about anyone and he usually has a torrent of good words.  At another point he writes, "I don't want to write some damning thing here about someone and have to live with that for the rest of time.  I don't think that would be a very good idea."  While the observation seems like he's protecting himself from guilt or remorse, there is enough in Waging Heavy Peace to understand that his real concern is for the feelings of the people he's writing about.  In the rare instance when he does criticize someone, he is careful not to name them.  They are merely "the two AP reporters" or "the record company executive."

His language is simple and direct.  It is sometimes confessional and sometimes it sounds like he's paying off a debt or making amends, but it always rings true.  A cynic might say that it is all for effect, but that's hard to square with his lifetime of artistic authenticity and his more or less unchanging stage persona that appears to be no different from what can be seen of his private life. 

By the end of the book, Young becomes remarkably self-revealing.  For example, he writes,

Changing the person one has evolved into is not a simple process, to be sure, but I know with Pegi's love and suppport [Pegi is his wife] and my family close, I will be able to reach out and learn to live life in a more caring and conscious way.  Maybe I've never been good at that, and that's why it's so hard to find it in myself. It may never have been really there.  I may be starting from scratch.  I've always been told that what I'm doing is right.  Maybe it isn't.  Maybe just some of it is.  I need to dig deep and discover some things along the way.

How do I avoid being short with those I love and respect?  How do I try to make people feel good about what they are doing for and with me?  How can I respect others' tastes while retaining my own?  This is the knowledge I'm searching for.  I can remember so many times in my life when I hurt others and hurt myself.  I really need to find a way to change those patterns for good.

One is left with the sense that Young is a deeply introspective man whose search for a heart of gold is really about finding the strength to be compassionate and now that he really is getting old, his search has become more urgent.

Some might find all of this a little self-indulgent and maybe it is, but no one is compelled to read his book, just as no one is compelled to listen to his music.  For my part, it was an enjoyable bit of voyeurism.  Waging Heavy Peace gave me the feeling that one of my musical heroes took the time to write me a long letter, telling me about his most memorable experiences and confiding some of his most personal thoughts.  I'm certain I know Neil Young better for having read his letter and I appreciate him all the more.  Long may he run.

The Consolations of Philosophy / Alain De Botton -- N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 2000

The Consolations of Philosophy is a curious introduction to philosophy, if that is what it is intended to be. The subject matter is at least ostensibly philosophy and the writing style is certainly introductory, but it is certainly not a good choice for an introductory philosophy course, unless one would like to assign a chapter or two as "recommended reading" left on reserve at the library.

The title is, of course, derived from Boethius's great work The Consolation of Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy was written while Boethius was in prison, waiting to be executed. It remains perhaps the greatest piece of death row literature of all time. Its literary form is a dialog between Boethius and a lady figure personifying philosophy. Philosophy makes the case that Boethius's condition does not justify complaint and that nothing has been taken from him that is the basis for true happiness. It is through the thoughtful examination of one's circumstances (through philosophy) that one can come to this realization and be consoled in the face of misfortune.

De Botton's Consolations of Philosophy, broadly speaking, attempts to make roughly this case, but it does so through the examination of the thought and works of six philosophers: Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. De Botton attempts to show how the thought of these philosophers can help us overcome (respectively) unpopularity, poverty, frustration, inadequacy, a broken heart, and difficulties in general. The structure of the work and the selection of the philosophers has some reason behind it, but at times it appears that de Botton has cobbled together a string of mostly lesser philosophers and mined their works for passages that fit his purposes. This is not to say that he has misread these philosophers, but that his project was mostly to write a book -- not to explore an important theme or thesis among philosophical debates. By the end of the book one is left wondering, "so what?" Certainly there were a number of interesting anecdotes (along with some clever illustrations), but was it really worth the time?

The Consolations of Philosophy is less an examination of the philosophy of six (mostly minor) philosophers and more a curio cabinet of objects collected from their biographies.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the OED / Simon Winchester -- NY: Harper Collins, 1998

The Oxford English Dictionary is one of the truly monumental literary achievements of all time. Not only did it purport to define every English word (past and present), but it provided quotes from a wide variety of sources, exemplifying the meanings of those words and tracing the changes in their meanings over time. Furthermore, we are given the etymology of each word. The final publication of the first edition was completed forty-nine years after its primary editor, James Murray, took responsibility for the effort, but those years were preceded by approximately two decades that saw preliminary work on the dictionary by others.

The first edition was completed in ten volumes in 1928, but reprinted in twelve volumes plus a supplementary volume in 1933. In the 1970s and 1980s, four more supplements were added to the work until in 1989, the second edition was published in twenty volumes. The work was the unique product of a rather post-modern project. The first editors put out a call to the English-reading public, asking for volunteers to send in quotations that included any word that was interesting or used in an unusual way. From these contributions, sub-editors would compile promising quotations for the editors to chose from to compile the final entries. The work was, in essence, a Victorian wiki, finally composed of 414,825 words and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations.

Among the most important volunteers was William Minor, an American doctor living in England. Along with Murray, Minor is the subject of Simon Winchester's book, The Professor and the Madman. Minor, the madman, was incarcerated for a murder he committed in a delusional fit. His detention began in 1872 when he was 37 years old and continued until months before the end of his life in 1920. During this time, Minor indexed the words of a huge number of books, particularly eighteenth century books, and sent quotation to Murray and his team as they compiled the dictionary. Although he did not submit the most quotations for consideration by editors, Minor's quotations were especially well chosen and timely in the publication process. As particular words were being prepared for inclusion, Murray would contact Minor for his assistance and Minor would respond by examining his index and sending off the necessary quotations. Consequently, his efforts were perhaps the most important of any single volunteer.

Winchester's account of Minor's life and contribution to the dictionary is sympathetic and touching without excusing Minor's murder. Along with an informative account of the composition of the dictionary, Winchester vividly describes Minor's mental illness. As such, The Professor and the Madman is as much a case study of paranoid schizophrenia as it is an account of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The descriptions of Minor's delusions stand in fascinating contrast to the systematic work of the dictionary's editors and Minor's own meticulous research.

If there is a weakness to Winchester's account, it is that it focuses too narrowly on its two protagonists and gives short shrift to the wider community of philologists, lexicographers, and volunteer readers. Granted, Winchester clearly set out to present the extraordinary story of William Minor, with James Murray in a supporting role, but Minor's contribution to the dictionary cannot be fairly assessed or even understood without placing it in its proper context.

Tolkien: A Biography / Humphrey Carpenter -- Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977

J.R.R. Tolkien didn't understand why anyone would want to know about the life of an author. He thought the facts of an author's life would tell you little about what was important in an author's work. Nonetheless, he and his close friends and family permitted Humphrey Carpenter numerous interviews and other assistance in writing Tolkien's biography. The result is consistent with Tolkien's gloss on biographies: it tells us little about the significance of Tolkien's writings. Now and again, a fragment of Tolkien's life appears to have echos in The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion, but mostly the biography is an interesting peak into a somewhat ordinary life of a British academic.

Clearly, Tolkien was an enormously talented linguist and philologist, but it was as much his foibles as his talents that made him the important figure that he became. His early academic successes secured him his position at Leeds and later Oxford, but he never generated a huge mass of academic writing that he might have been expected to publish. Instead, he directed his energy into teaching, marking papers, and writing the literary work that made him famous. Carpenter's biography of him leads one to think that his literary work was mostly a way of avoiding the work that he might have expected to do in his academic position, but undoubtedly in this case, the fruits of procrastination and diversion turned out to be much sweeter than what he otherwise would have produced.

We can be thankful that Tolkien's publisher, George Allen, applied what pressure he did to ensure that Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings. Without such pressure, not only would we not have this masterpiece, but Tolkien's larger legendarium, the Silmarillion and other works may never have seen publication. The world would have known Tolkien for a quaint children's novel, The Hobbit, and for revolutionizing Beowulf studies with his lecture Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics. Instead of numerous volumes of his manscripts being edited and published by his son Christopher Tolkien, Tolkien's genius probably would have languished on slowly decaying paper in a forgotten archive.

Carpenter's biography is alternately generous with Tolkien and unflatteringly frank. In many respects, Tolkien comes off as a likable though unambitious man. In other respects, he seems a bit self-absorbed. It isn't clear just how accurate any of this is, but in all, Carpenter presents a believably three dimensional personality. There is, though, little to recommend this biography, except to Tolkien's most committed admirers.

Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr / Nancy Isenberg -- NY: Viking, 2007.

Nancy Isenberg's biography of Aaron Burr Fallen Founder will change what we think of Burr. Known primarily for three notorious acts, Burr's life has never been seriously studied by dispassionat historians -- at least this is Isenberg's plausible contention. Instead, what we believe we know about Burr has been given to us by his political enemies and has passed into history without careful scrutiny.

Isenberg's investigation of Burr's life prompts her to tell a far more sympathic story and rewrites what is thought to be known about the Election of 1800, Burr's duel with Hamilton, and Burr's alleged plot to conquer Mexico and separate the Western States from the Union. Isenberg's research into these and other events is meticulous. Her 521 page book includes 107 pages of notes, referring the reader to crucial primary sources that not only paint a different picture of Burr, cast doubt on the motives and testimony of his accusers.

It is commonly thought that during the constitutional crisis that threw the Election of 1800 into the House of Representatives, Burr worked to defeat his running mate, Thomas Jefferson, and secure the Presidency for himself. He might have been able to do this by persuading the Federalist members of Congress to join his own loyalists and win a majority of the states voting. According to Isenberg, Burr made his intentions clear: he had no desire to defeat Jefferson and that remaining a candidate for president was necessary to avoid electing the Federalist John Adams Vice President. Given Burr's youth, it seems quite plausible that he would be satisfied with serving as Vice President under Jefferson and then inherit the Presidency eight years later. However, Jefferson's animosity toward Burr would indicate that he was not able to gain Jefferson's trust, providing further circumstantial evidence in favor of a Machievelian reading of Burr.

Isenberg's description of Burr's duel with Hamilton leads one to see Hamilton as the most culpable member of the pair. Isenberg describes Hamilton's volitile and sometimes abusive personality in contrast with Burr's even genial temper. She writes that Burr was involved in only two duels in his life, while Hamilton was involved in 11 duels. Dueling was common in 1804, and given the abuse that Hamilton heaped on Burr over many years, one might not be surprised that Burr would issue the challenge. Isenberg's scholarship gives ample support to this reading.

Finally, Burr was famously tried by John Marshall and the Senate for treason. He was charged with planning an invasion of Mexico to establish himself as King and then inciting the Western United States to separate from the union to join his empire. In the course of the trial, he was also accused of plotting the assassination of Thomas Jefferson. What seems clear is that Burr intended to recruit a private army to invade Mexico. The invasion would, apparently only take place in the event that the US first declared war on Mexico. Raising private armies was, again, not unknown at the time. After two trials, one in Mississippi and one in the US Senate, Burr was cleard of the all charges against him. Isenberg persuasively argues that Burr's enemies fabricated the evidence against him and that the verdict of the courts were completely accurate.

Isenberg's rehabilitation of Burr is a splendid piece of history. Whether it is completely accurate or not is not as significant as the fact that she has opened an new field of study that will surely correct the unfair treatment that Burr has received for more than 200 years.

The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition / Anne Frank -- NY: Doubleday, 1995.

I never had a strong desire to read Anne Frank's diary. Despite its popularity, I expected that too many entries would be the mundane musing of an adolescent girl. I was moved, however, to pick up the diary after visiting the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. Simply occupying the space that once hid the Frank family and their fellow refugees made me curious about their lives.

I quickly found that the diary's reputation as a semi-sacred testament to the genocide of European jewry was overblown and that entry upon entry was markedly ordinary. I suspect that this would not come as a surprise to anyone more familiar with the work than I was. On only a few occassions did Anne write about the plight of Jews beyond her own conditions. At best, the diary is provides the tiniest glimpse into what Jews were experiencing through out Europe. Certainly, Anne's diary made it possible for people around the world to see deeply into the life of one of the millions of victims of the Nazi crimes, and to that extent, it humanized what might otherwise have been a bewildering story of unfathomable numbers and abstract horrors. Nonetheless, I was surprised at how divorced I felt from the holocaust while reading the diary.

I was, however, drawn into the work in a way that surprised me. More than a primary source for the study of the holocaust, Anne's diary is a fascinating look into the mental life of an adolescent girl struggling with her relationships with mother and father. Her entries deal largely with subjects that might preoccupy any young girl in 21st century America, though her thoughts and feelings were most likely heightened by the constant proximity of her fellow refugees. Nearly as interesting as her difficult relationship with her parents was her slowly developing romantic relationship with Peter van Dan.

In all, I was happy to have finally read a work that has come to be such an important part of the literary history of World War II, but it will remain low on my list of works to recommend for understanding the times in which Anne lived and died.

What is the What / Dave Eggers -- NY: Vintage Books, 2007.

What is the What is the most extraordinary book I have read in quite a while. Dave Eggers novelizes the astonishing experiences of Valentino Achak Deng. Achak, born in a small village in southern Sudan, was made a refugee at the age of six. Torn from his family when genocidal horsemen descended on his village, he fled alone until meeting up with a group of boys led by Dut Majok, a young teacher from his village. Apparently, Dut is leading the boys to safety in Ethiopia, but in time it is revealed that he may be delivering them to the Sudan People's Liberation Army to become child soldiers.

The structure of the novel provides further interest to the story and insight into Achak's psyche. Achak narrates the story by imagining himself recounting his events to Americans he encounters once he has emigrated to Atlanta. Achak has a desperate need to tell his story, but without a venue for doing so, he recounts it to himself. We, the readers, are the beneficiaries of his reflections.

Among the most striking features of the book is the role that sheer luck played in Achak's survival. He is often placed in a situation where he must choose between two or more courses of action without any basis for knowing what is best. One path leads to survival, the other to disaster or even death. On his journey, many of his fellow travelers die of malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. Some are attacked and eaten by lions and hyenas. At one point, Achak is running through the forest with another boy and a lion "takes" the boy. The lion comes so close to Achak that he can smell it. It's clear to the reader that survival is entirely a matter of chance.

While the novel recounts horrors and hardships, it also recounts Achak's adolescent urges, his friendships, his school-day triumphs, and romantic passions, allowing the reader to not merely feel sympathy for him, but to empathize with him. Other characters are also well constructed. His friends are multidimensional and his fellow Sudanese refugees are engagingly diverse, leaving the reader to understand that the horror of the civil war beset real people and not merely generic African victims.

More than anything, What is the What provides a clearer understanding of war and the personal cost of war than any political or military history that could be written.

The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz / Carl Schurz -- NY: McClure Company, 1908.

I knew Carl Schurz was among the most influential German-Americans in our political history, but I had no idea how engaging his writing was until I read his Reminiscence. After a long life at the heart of German and American politics, Schurz retired to write over a thousand pages describing his life from his childhood to 1869. His three volumes of reminiscences are remarkably engaging.

The first volume is an account of his life in Germany (1829-1852). The highlight of which was his involvement in the failed 1848 revolution. Schurz was trapped by Prussian soldiers in the siege of Rastatt. As a Prussian citizen, Schurz correctly expected to be executed when the the town surrendered. Consequently, he and two Prussian companions attempted to escape through a storm water pipe that led out of town past the Prussian troops. Finding the exit guarded, they returned to the town to hide in the loft of a shed. With the help of a sympathetic neighbor, they managed to escape later, through the storm water pipe, and then to France.

Not long after, he returned to Germany under a false passport to free one the leading revolutionists, Gotfried Kinkel, from Spandau Prison. The events Schurz recounts are vividly told and as exciting as any piece of good fiction.

The second volume recounts his life in America. Settling in Wisconsin, Schurz became the leading German language orator advocating the abolition of slavery. His efforts led him to participate in every presidential campaign, save one, from 1856 to nearly the end of his life in 1906. Upon Lincoln's election, Schurz became the US Ambassador to Spain, but quickly was allowed to resign from the post for a commission in the Union Army.

Brigadier General Schurz led troops in numerous important battles, including Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. At Chancellorsville, his troops bore the brunt of General T.J. Jackson's crushing attack, and he spent much of the subsequent months (even years) refuting scurrilous criticisms of his "Dutch" soldiers. His defense of the performance of the German troops in the Civil War raises interesting questions in light of the nativist criticism of them.

Following the War, Schurz became a Senator representing the State of Missouri and worked hard in defense of equal rights for freedmen. In volume three of his Reminiscences, Schurz describes the political battle surrounding the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Schurz shows himself to be a staunch defender of what he thought would be Lincoln's reconstruction policy, steering a course between the Radical Republicans and Johnson's policies. He joined with the Liberal Republicans opposing Grant's nomination. He was also instrumental in defeating President Grant's efforts to annex the Dominican Republic.

Later, Schurz became Secretary of the Interior in the Hayes Administration. These later years (1869-1904) are described in a 140 page essay by Frederick Bancroft and William A. Dunning which concludes the third volume of his Reminiscences. By the end of his career, Schurz had essentially left the Republican Party to become an Independent. He worked particularly hard against the spoils system and in favor of good government. He also strongly resisted the imperialist policies of later Presidents.

Schurz's Reminiscences make for delightful reading and offer an interesting lens through which to view 19th century American politics.

Fanny Wright: Rebel in America / Celia Morris Eckhardt -- Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

I first read about Fanny Wright (1795-1852) in Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger's description of her was intriguing, but sketchy. His occasional references to her as a champion of the working class led me look for a more thorough biography which I found in Eckhardt's Fanny Wright.

Indeed, a champion of the working class, Wright also held many views that placed her easily a century ahead of her time. In a time when "respectable" women could not allow their names to be published with their own work, Fanny Wright became a well-known author, and well-received by prominent progressive figures of her time. She maintained a long and close relationship to Jeremy Bentham, Lafayette, and Robert Dale Owen. She was respected by Jefferson and other prominent American politicians. However, her radical views on marriage and education eventually left her personally and politically isolated.

Wright was born in Scotland, raised in England, and lived for some years in France. She later travelled three times to the United States and became an American citizen. Her first significant social enterprise was to form a community in Tennessee on a plantation she called Nashoba. The community was to be modeled roughly on Robert Owen's community at New Harmony, Indiana, but Nashoba was intended foremost to emancipate slaves and prepare them for colonization in Haiti or Africa. Wright believed slavery could be gradually and peacefully abolished by establishing plantations that would out-perform those based on slave labor. Nashoba and other plantations would be based on the indentured servitude of slaves purchased by or donated to these new plantations.

Nashoba turned out to be a financial failure, due in part to Wright and her partners' inexperience in running a plantation. Furthermore, scandals related to the treatment of the Nashoba slaves and the sexual relations on the plantation compounded the obstacles to success. Eventually, Wright took her slaves to Haiti where they were freed.

The vilification of Wright by the newspapers and journals of her time was stunning. It is hard to imagine anyone standing up to such criticism, and eventually it took its toll on Wright. While publicly rejecting marriage as oppressive to women, Fanny moved to France and was secretly married after she became pregnant. Eckhardt's portrait of this period in her life suggests that she was in a deep depression which lasted several years and resulted in the end of all of her previous friendships.

Wright did eventually return to public life, touring and speaking in the United States during the late 1840s and advocating the re-election of Martin Van Buren. Her reputation, however, had spoiled any real opportunity for her to be effective. As crowds dwindled and those attending were more curious than committed, Fanny eventually retired into a private life, struggling to retain her financial solvency in her conflicts with her husband. Suffering a nervous breakdown in her last years, she died estranged from her daughter and attended only by maids.

Eckhardt's portrait of Wright goes well beyond a factually reliable account and details Wright's inner life and motivations. While this make the book extremely interesting, it sometimes slips into speculative psychologizing. It isn't clear from the end notes how well founded this speculation is. Over all, the work is a sympathetic -- but not uncritical -- examination of an extremely interesting historical figure. Clearly, Wright's talents and determination to advance the cause of liberty everywhere allowed her to achieve more than women could ever hope during her lifetime. Her actions, while damaging to herself, broke seemingly impenetrable ground for women in Europe and the United States.

The Life of Charles Sumner: The Scholar in Politics / Archibald H. Grimke -- NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1892.

Charles Sumner is probably best known as the Senator who was bludgeoned on the Senate floor by Rep. Preston S. Brooks in 1856. The attack followed Sumner's speech, "Crime against Kansas," in which Sumner criticized assaults on free soil settlers by proponents of slavery. In the course of the speech, Sumner attacked South Carolina and its senator, Arthur P. Butler. This prompted Brooks, a relative of Butler and also from South Carolina, to attack Sumner unawares, beating him with a heavy walking stick until Sumner was unconscious. The attack was a landmark event in the years preceding the Civil War and spurred Northern hostility toward the South and slavery.

But Sumner's career is memorable for more than his victimization. Grimke's biography of Sumner, in the style of the times, is a glowing account of the Senator's career. Sumner is described as the most vocal and effective political opponant of "the Slave Power," comparable to William Lloyd Garrison's effectiveness as a moral critic of slavery. Nonetheless, Grimke rightly makes the bludgeoning of Sumner the climax of the biography.

Sumner is portrayed as a reluctant politician, who is drawn to office by his passion to end slavery. His contribution to Abolition is well recorded in the biography. I was, however, left wondering if Sumner was ever occupied with other issues than what brought him to be a leader of the Massachusettes's "Consceince Whigs." Grimke does indicate that Sumner was an early proponent of women's sufferage, but he says little about Sumner's attitudes toward economic questions that were significant prior to the War. Sumner's Whig background and close relationship to Joseph Story would indicate that he was no friend of the Northern working class, but instead an aristocratic Massachusettes politician, defending the intersts of the incipient power of corporations. However, Grimke does point out that Sumner was not sympathetic to the Whig position on banking and tarrifs. Furthermore, Sumner's undogmatic relationship to the Whigs made him acceptable to the faction of Democratic Party that joined the Free Soil Party.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Grimke's work is his descriptions of the potential for violence that lay just below the surface in the halls of Congress. Besides a detailed description of the attack on Sumner, Grimke quotes a paragraph from Henry Wilson's History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America illustrating the climate in Congress. According to Wilson, in 1845, during an anti-slavery speech by Rep. Joshua R. Giddings of Ohio, Rep. E.J. Black of Georgia, "approaching Mr. Giddings with an uplifted cane, said: 'If you repeat those words I will knock you down.' The latter repeating them, the former was seized by his friends and borne from the hall. Mr. Dawson, of Louisiana, who on a previous occasion had attempted to assault him, approching him, and, cocking his pistol, profanely exclaimed: 'I'll shoot him; by G-d I'll shoot him!' At the same moment, Mr. Causin, of Maryland, placed himself in front of Mr. Dawson, with his right hand upon his weapon concealed in his bosom. At this juncture, four members from the Democratic side took their position by the side of the member from Louisiana, each man putting his hand in his pocket and apparently grasping his weapon. At the same moment Mr. Raynor, of North Carolina, Mr. Hudson, of Massachusetts, and Mr. Foot, of Vermont, came to Mr. Gidding's rescue, who, thus confronted and thus supported, continued his speech. Dawson stood fronting him till its close, and Causin remained facing the latter until he returned to the Democratic side." A near gun battle on the floor of the House of Representatives puts our present "partisanship" in perspective.

In all, Grmike's Sumner is a wise and selfless paragon of justice, but such sympathy for the subject of a biography is typical of 19th century writing. Grimke's portrait of Sumner is engaging and entertaining, but should be augmented by more recent critical scholarship.

The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology / Simon Winchester -- NY: Harper Collins, 2001.

The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester is really about the man who made the map that changed the world: William Smith. It's an illuminating biography of an 18th century miner and canal builder who hailed from the working class. Smith comes to recognize the repeated sequences of rock lying just below England's topsoil. From these observations, he develops a theory of the history of rock formation and sets out on a long project to map the geology of the British Isles.

Winchester's prose is often repetative and sensational. The early pages read like a poorly written trailer to a movie that you know can't possibly be as good as the trailer suggests. In the end, though, Winchester portrays Smith's life well enough for the reader to understand Smith to be a complex character, incapable of writing the book that would establish his place in the history of science. Instead, Smith's place is established by his authorship of a magnificent map. Even here, the map is only produced when it is sponsored by the leading map maker of the time.

The book combines biography with accounts of class relations in late-Georgian England and a smattering of the fundamental principles of geology. The main story is centered on Smith's life-long struggle to make a living and his roller coaster relationship with his patrons in the English aristocracy. Smith comes off as a gifted geologist and hydrologist, but a pathetic business person and academic scientist. All in all it was not the page turner I had desired, but it was interesting enough, especially for how it illuminated the circumstances surrounding the foundation of the science of geology. I would have appreciated a bit more geology (or even the technicalities of map making) and a little less biography.