Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow

I once listened to a CLE given by a proud liberal democrat plaintiff's trial lawyer.  In the course of his highly partisan remarks, with full southern twang, he made the comment that this nation has always been divided between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, that all of our arguments can be traced back to Hamilton and Jefferson, and that the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians are arguing still today.

In this view of history, Hamilton is the original conservative Republican, favoring the moneyed interests of business and commerce, whose Federalist faction morphed into the Whigs and then, eventually, the Republicans.  Jefferson is the father of the Democratic party, whose Republican Democrats eventually became the modern Democratic party, looking out for the interests of the common man against the evils of corporate greed.

At first blush, there may be something to this view.  Certainly, Hamilton, with his belief that banking, money, and commercial business endeavors should be promoted to allow the nation to prosper, his trust that free trade would allow for social mobility, and his advocacy of  a strong military, sounds like a modern conservative Republican.  Jefferson's unwillingness to fund the military, leaving the nation badly vulnerable when the War of 1812 commenced, makes him sound like a modern Democrat.  Jefferson's adoration of the French Revolution, and his unwillingness to criticize the barbarity of the Terror, and his failure to foresee (as Federalists like Adams, Washington, and Hamilton, all did) that the French Revolution was likely to lead to a dictatorship, make him sound remarkably like a 20th Century leftist, cheerleading for Marxism and an apologist for its murderous tyrants.  (Arguments over the meaning of the French Revolution are with us still.  It was conservative Margaret Thatcher who refused to send congratulations to the French on the 200th Anniversary of their revolution, noting that it led to nothing better than "a pile of headless corpses with a dictator standing on top."  And there seem to be some definite similarities between the ideology of Rousseau and the Jacobins and modern Marxists.)

But the idea that a direct line can be drawn from Hamilton and Jefferson to modern political identities can only be taken so far.  Hamilton believed in a strong and independent judiciary, a stronger Federal government and correspondingly weaker State governments, all positions that are dissonant with modern conservatism.  Jefferson distrusted the unchecked power of the independent judiciary, making him sound like a modern conservative.  And no modern Democrat would ever warn, as Jefferson did, that what the government can do for you is in direct proportion to what it can do to you.  There's a lot of history between us and the founders, and the political beliefs of many of their largest personalities now sit cross-wise to modern political concerns.

The ideological battle between Jefferson and Hamilton is at the heart of Ron Chernow's incredible page turner of a book.  But Chernow isn't concerned with demonstrating which man was the father of which modern political ideas.  Rather, Chernow argues that Hamilton is the more important figure because he turned out to be right about the future of America.  We are living, Chernow demonstrates, in Hamilton's vision of a future America, not in Jefferson's.  For better or worse, we are not a nation of  farmers, as Jefferson had hoped.  We are instead a socially mobile nation of businessmen and tradesmen, dependent on banking and commerce, with a strong military, a strong Federal government, a strong and independent judiciary, and a government which has abolished slavery, as Hamilton fervently hoped it would.  We are still, as we were then, the kind of nation where a man like Hamilton, though of obscure and illegitimate background, can become successful on pure merit and relentless drive.  We are no longer a nation with the kind of caste system that Jefferson enjoyed in the agrarian and slave-holding South, while accusing the self-made Hamilton of favoring an aristocracy.  We have maintained strong ties with the English speaking peoples of the world, including Britain, and that relationship has been far more important to our history than our relationship with France.  In all of this, we are much more of a Hamiltonian nation than a Jeffersonian one, whatever our personal politics.

Hamilton had a knack for making enemies, including among one-time friends and collaborators, and his early demise in a duel with Aaron Burr gave others the chance to downplay his significance to American history.  This biography goes a long way toward rectifying that, and demonstrating the key role Hamilton played in the formation of our Constitution, and in many of the social and political values that, today, make America America.  

A must read.

True Grit

In a preface to one of his editions of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury bemoaned the tendency of schoolbook anthology editors to "shorten" stories by censoring all the interesting authorial asides.  This is a crime, said Bradbury, because, "let's face it, digression is the soul of wit.  Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet and what stays is dry bones.  Laurence Sterne said it once: 'Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine of reading!'"

I loved the book True Grit.  I'd like to see one of the films that has been based on it, but I doubt either one can capture the best part of the book, which is the digressions.

Like To Kill a Mockingbird, True Grit is narrated by an adult female, looking back on events of her childhood.  The comedy in True Grit is all in the narrator's asides.  A never-married, wealthy, irascible, curmudgeon (incontestably the character with the most grit), she is far more exorcised over her modern political and religious and social opinions, than by anything happening in her harrowing memoir of travelling with a Federal Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, and a vain Texas Ranger, to find and capture the man who killed her father.  Just an incredible book.

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand

"Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it." Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand

I've never had as much positive feedback from a book I've recommended to friends and family as I have with this one. I've told a few people I was reading it and how much I was enjoying it and the result has been overwhelming. People come up to me at church and show me their copies or tell me how many days they let their life go to pot because they couldn't put it down. My family members are all reading it. Everybody seems to love this book. And why not? It reads like a novel, but one which would be deemed too lacking in credibility if it were fiction. For athletes, it's an amazing story of what long distance track and field was like when runners were some of the biggest names in sports, before the 4 minute mile had been broken, when collegians would intentionally spike a competitor to keep him out of a race, and when the voyage to the Olympic Games was more fun than being there. For aviation buffs, it's a story of what it was like to fly the planes America might have rushed into production a little too quickly to really ensure they were all airworthy. For WWII historians, it details what it was like to be sitting in a POW Camp in Japan (where 37% of American soldiers would perish, as opposed to only 1% held prisoner in Germany), under unspeakable conditions, but take hope in the realization of how well the war must be going by the sheer number of Flying Fortresses which began to sail unimpeded across the Japanese skies. For people of faith, it contains one of the most dramatic Christian conversion and turnaround stories committed to print since Saul was waylaid on the road to Damascus, as the book's hero recovers from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, and remembers a promise he made in the middle of the Pacific, to turn his life over to God.

This book has so many natural readers, it will likely become more than just a bestseller, but a phenomenon, and an inevitable movie, with the name Louis Zamperini becoming a household name. And deservedly so. I want all of my children to read it. They need to know this history, and this man's story.

The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg

I remember once on my mission being flummoxed while trying to explain, in German, the concept of understanding something spiritually, rather than intellectually.  I was teaching the school teacher of the St. Gallen Gemeinde's Bishop's daughter, in the Bishop's home, near Appenzell.  Bishop Edwin Koch understood the linguistic difficulty I was having and explained to me that, in German, the word I was using ("geistig" if I remember correctly) could refer to both spiritual and mental processes, such that my word choice was obscuring the very distinction I was trying to draw.  He helped me out of my perplexity with some wording which I no longer remember, but which I do remember feeling, at the time, lost something in translation.  It was one of many moments during my time in Switzerland when I realized how important it is, while speaking a foreign language, to try to think in that language, using its own idioms and expressions, without mentally translating back and forth into my native English.  Because the truth of the matter is, when getting beyond communicating rudimentary facts, and when talking about more ethereal concepts or feelings, something is almost always lost in translation.  I always know, for example, when I hear a lawyer demand from a translator an "exact, word-for-word, translation" of deposition or trial testimony, that the lawyer only speaks one language.  There is no such thing as an exact translation from one language to another of any very interesting concept, and some languages are better at conveying certain ideas than others.  (Oh how I miss the German "doch" or swiss-German "mohl".  There's just no pithy English word that accomplishes the same thing.  And "namely" will never do justice to "und zwar". )

The English language is an amalgamation of so many other tongues that its spelling will forever be senseless.  But what it loses in phonetics it gains in richness of expression.  English has so many "near synonyms" taken from different languages over its history, that it allows for a precision in connotation and nuance that I doubt any other language can match.  The Adventure of English, by Melvyn Bragg, tells the story of how this came to be.

A book about the history of the English language had better, first and foremost, be really well written. Its prose ought to exemplify the many stylistic variations the language allows, with memorable similes, metaphors, and turns-of-phrase jumping off the page. This book definitely succeeds. ("The English language by now was a thickly plaited rope, a rope of many strands, still wrapped around the Old English centre, still embellished with Norse, lushly fattened and lustred with French . . . .")  

The chief linguistic tool used by the author is personification, as should be expected in a book subtitled "the biography of a language." Thus, the story of the Norman invaders' impact on the language is told from the point of view, not just of a people, but of a language, which resisted obliteration, while at the same time hungrily consuming new words. The story of martyred protestant reformers and their attempts to translate the Bible into English is told from the point of view, not only of those reformers, but of the language itself trying to assault the citadel of faith (and Latin) which violently fought back but ultimately embraced the invader and left both faith and the invading language richer for the outcome:

"It is impossible to over-praise the quality of Tyndale's writing. It's rhythmical beauty, its simplicity of phrase, its crystal clarity have penetrated deep into the bedrock of English today wherever it is spoken. Tyndale's words and phrases influenced between sixty and eighty percent of the King James Bible of 1611 and in that second life his words and phrases circle the globe."

"English at last had God on its side. the language was authorised by the Almighty Himself."

English has become such a global language today (see another good book on this subject, Globish by Robert McCrumb) that it may start to fragment, like ancient Indo-european, into new languages around the globe. Such new splinter languages would share the common root of a language which is itself made up of many different sources, all contributing to a language which, while phonetically non-sensible, is otherwise, in my opinion (reinforced by this hagiographic "biography") the greatest instrument of communication ever known.