JANUARY
The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive Volume I) by Brandon Sanderson (Tor 2015) Hardcover, 4 stars out of 5. One of my friends, Matthew Buxton, described this on his Facebook page as a 1,000 page leadership manual disguised as a fantasy novel. I'd say that's pretty spot-on. Seemed a little too over-the-top at first for me to get into, but don't let the comic book touches, invincible swords and tinkerbell sidekicks fool you, Sanderson's magic systems invariably have rules that keep his books grounded in something more compelling than "anything can happen" scenarios. And his focus on interesting characters learning difficult moral lessons transcend what might otherwise be simply a really fun page-turning plot.
Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill, by Candice Millard ( 2016) Hardback, 3 stars out of 5. Everybody's favorite imperialist finds youthful fame and fortune by breaking out of a POW Camp and then somehow making it to the border of a neutral country in turn-of-the-Century Southern Africa. Millard fleshes out the fairly straightforward narrative with lots of historical context and anecdotal asides about other important figures whose lives would be impacted by the outcome of the Boer war, from Mohandas Ghandi to Nelson Mandela to Winston Churchill's mother. It's that extra context that makes the book worth reading, even more so than the interesting story of the capture and escape of Winston Churchill, war correspondent, and the lucky breaks that helped him make it out of the Transvaal alive, so he could return to take up arms on behalf of his government, and secure the glory his fledgling political career needed.
FEBRUARY
Words of Radiance (Stormlight Archive Volume II) by Brandon Sanderson (Tor 2016) Trade Paperback, 5 Stars out of 5. Who doesn't love a big, thick, engagingly page-turning fantasy novel, full of plot twists, ingenious magic systems, cool world building, and characters who are averting the end of civilization? But Sanderson makes you care even more about averting the death of a character's soul. Not just really engaging fiction, but also a 1000 page meditation, rich in metaphorical meaning, on how we are strengthened by our connection to our ideals, and to our love of fiction and the arts. May the cognitive realm live forever.
MARCH
Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, by Gordon S. Wood (Penguin Press 2017) Hardback. 4 Stars out of 5. Shortly after David McCullough's book, John Adams, had become a national bestseller, Gordon S. Wood was being interviewed by Charlie Rose, and the subject of McCullough's book came up. Wood, perhaps America's foremost academic historian on the revolutionary era, was clearly confounded and annoyed by the admiration the book had generated for Adams. Wood was not a fan. Jefferson didn't fare well in McCullough's book, which highlighted Jefferson's duplicity as a member of the Washington administration, and his foolish admiration for the French Revolution, which Adams and other founders rightfully predicted would turn into a bloodbath. This book is clearly Wood's attempt to restore Jefferson and Adams to their traditional roles in the American pantheon, with the portraits of the two men chosen for the cover art providing an extremely reliable preview of the contents: Adams as a dour, envious, sourpuss, who should be consigned to historical oblivion, and Jefferson as an optimistic, forward-looking, intellectual sage.
The truth of McCullough's version of Adams and Jefferson, vs. Wood's version, is probably some where in between. McCullough is interested in lives lived, and is stirred by Adams' abilities in defending the British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre, and his courage in crossing the Atlantic Ocean during a time of war, when capture by a British vessel would certainly have meant Adams' death for treason. Wood is interested in ideas, and appreciates how Jefferson's writings influenced Americans' views of themselves and their place in the world, while Adams' political theories, formed in his youth and while living abroad (especially his beliefs about the inevitable rise of an aristocracy, which must be constrained within a bicameral legislature, and checked by a strong executive), came to be increasingly removed from, and irrelevant to, the ideologies which a younger generation of Americans were adopting in support of the constitutional checks and balances of the federal and state governments, in which the executive, and both branches of the legislative, branches of government, were seen as representative of the whole of the sovereign people.
But for anyone who has ever read Thomas Sowell's masterpiece, A Conflict of Visions, there is a much more fascinating way to read this book than as a polemic argument asserting the superiority of one founder over another. For Adams and Jefferson are fascinating examples of the two personality types discussed at length in Sowell's work. Adams, especially as described by Wood, is the prototypical example of Sowell's conservative personality type: with a constrained view of human nature, pessimistic about the adverse unforeseen consequences of radical changes to traditions (religious, social, and political) which have organically developed over time to keep the human animal in check, wary of social innovations, appreciative of the need for checks and balances in bicameral legislatures, and convinced that the same societal classes which have always existed in every society on earth, would come to exist, once again, in America, and need to be dealt with via checked and balanced political institutions. Jefferson is the prototypical liberal, optimistic about the future, quick to abandon tradition as so much hokum, and reliant on mankind's current and most up-to-date wisdom and reason as clearly superior to religious and other traditions from the past. Jefferson's fundamentally liberal mindset doesn't always translate into modern left-right American politics. Jefferson championed a small federal government, with limited powers, and was wary of judicial usurpation. But these positions were essential to any Virginian looking out for the interests of the South, and concerned about a possible future abolition of slavery. On other points, such as his disdain for religion, for commerce, and for military spending, his rose-colored view of the future and dim view of this past, his willingness to see revolutionary movements drench themselves in blood for the possibility of a Utopian tomorrow, Jefferson was almost as radical a leftist as Thomas Paine.
Whatever one thinks of these two men and their views of America, and whichever portrait of Adams and Jefferson one finds most accurate, this is fascinating reading. But it should not be the only book a person reads about these founders. They are too complex and too whole and too important to be grasped by just one author with one point of view.
