The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

My son was recently looking at a newspaper article about all the statues being erected in Eastern Europe of Ronald Reagan, and had two questions:  What did this man do that was so great they are building statues of him in Eastern Europe, and why do my son's High School teachers all think Reagan was a terrible President?

Alas, I have no easy answer to the second question.  The political beliefs held by members of our public teachers' union are beyond my understanding.  But for the first question, you could do a lot worse than this book, which explains how Reagan, with some help from Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, took a stand that won the cold war and freed Eastern Europe from communist totalitarianism.  A great read, with a great message of how a religious people (in this case, the Catholics of Poland, finding themselves in a similar situation to the Jews of Babylon) can effect real change by resisting assimilation.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I consider Abraham Lincoln to be our final founder.  I have no patience for those far right libertarians who wish to cast him as a tyrant or who argue the Civil War was won by the wrong side.  Lincoln's success in the Civil War, his Emancipation Proclamation (as politically restrained as it was) and his subsequent advocacy on behalf of the 13th Amendment, finally ended slavery, that heinous institution which so clearly violated the most important principles of America's founding documents.  But Lincoln would have considered his own best achievement the restoration and maintenance of the Union.  That Union, in turn, proved to be the world's best friend in the next century's fight against tyranny, as it clumsily but ultimately effectively fought against and beat back Japanese Imperialism, Nazi-ism, and Communist Totalitarianism.  Thus, Lincoln, who preserved the Union that freed much of the world from slavery in the 20th Century, may truly be called the great emancipator.   That Lincoln was also brilliant and literate, having written, in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, two documents which are a kind of American Scripture, equal to the Declaration, is just frosting on the cake.

I have long wished someone could recommend for me a single volume biography of Lincoln that was engaging and accessible enough for a lay reader.  (Unless you were a History professor, David Herbert Donald's Lincoln was sleep inducing.)  Doris Kearns Goodwin has not only written an incredibly engaging biography of Lincoln, but, for the same price, we get the biography of other political giants of that same era: William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase, two figures I had never even heard of before (except by way of "Seward's folly") who were, prior to Lincoln's election, more well-known than he.  Goodwin also examines, though to a lesser extent, the lives of Edwin M. Stanton and Edward Bates.  These five men (Lincoln, Seward, Chase, Stanton, and Bates), after having competed with each other for the Presidency or in other arenas, came together to form the cabinet that won the civil war.

This is simply an incredible book which every American should read.  One of my favorite books of all time.

Pathfinder, by Orson Scott Card

The thing about time travel stories is that they inevitably have plot holes that don't make any sense.  How does Harry Potter survive the dementor attack the first time, to live long enough to come back from the future and save himself?  If Doc takes Marty and his girlfriend 30 years into the future to save Marty's children, how is it that a 48 year old Marty is there in the future with children to save?  Shouldn't he and his girlfriend have skipped and jumped over the intervening thirty years in the car ride, like the dog skipped one minute when the car was demonstrated for the first time at the beginning of the first movie?  But the biggest problem of all in any time travel story is the lack of believable suspense: if you have the ability to change time, won't you just go back and fix anything that goes wrong to keep the plot from ever being forwarded?

All those problems are probably present in Pathfinder as well, but I enjoyed the story so much I didn't think about them. Indeed, in his afterward to this, the first book in a new young adult series, Orson Scott Card says he deliberately embraced the paradoxes of time travel, just for the fun of it.  Thus, for example, the main characters find that when they get a visit from one of themselves, from the future, with a warning to help them avoid some catastrophe, they don't actually have to make the trip for that visit themselves, in the future.  Rather, some other version of themselves did that and presumably winked out of existence or something.  This gets a little dodgy but you learn to just go with it and suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story.

And it is a really enjoyable ride, a return to form for OSC and one of his best books in a long, long time.  The best parts of this book aren't the time travel bits in any event.  Rather, the book tells two stories (a space travel/colonization story told in brief flashbacks at the beginning of each chapter, heavily driven by ideas and reminiscent of the best old-time pulp magazine short story sci-fi of Bradbury and Asimov juxtapositioned against a vaguely medieval story in the main text) and the fun is in  slowly determining how the two stories will eventually reconcile.  As the puzzle comes together, and you realize how characters in one story are related to those in the other, the plot takes on an extra dimension of satisfaction.

May 15, 2011
Highly recommended.

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Ruins
Book 2

So I just finished reading Ruins, the second book in this series, and I continued to highly enjoy the cool sci-fi ideas that drive the plot-focused story.  In this chapter, those ideas focus on what it means to be human, as Rigg's little fellowship of timeshifters and soldiers visits some of the different "Wallfolds" that were created to subdivide humanity when the planet Garden was colonized over 11,000 years ago, and learn how humanity developed and fared, or failed to do so, in the different worlds.  Are you, for example, still a human if you have joined in a symbiotic relationship with an alien parastic life form that enhances your abilities but also influences your actions?  If mice were bred to have near human intelligence, and, when acting as a group, greater than human ablity, would they have human souls?   These are all the kind of cool sci-fi questions that I used to love when I read books like this in my youth, and, like the first volume, this reminded me of some of the cool mind-altering idea-driven Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov short stories and novels I loved as a young adult.

If the book has a weakness, it lies in the clunky manner in which two of the characters, Umbo and Param, are written.  Card apparently wants us to see these characters "grow" as they seek to overcome their annoying adolescent weaknesses.  But some of their intemperate acts are so sudden and random that they aren't believable and jar the reader out of the narrative.  Card's trademark style of having his characters engage in lengthy inner dialogues also gets a little tiresome.  I wonder if this is how Orson Scott Card thinks.  Does he argue with himself all day and challenge and refine his own assumptions for hours on end, such that he thinks this is a normal way to show his characters' inner lives?  I dunno, but it occasionally devolves into tedious self-parody here.

This is a plot and idea driven story though, not a character driven one, so those issues don't prevent the book from working.  I enjoyed getting to know Rigg, Olivenko, and Loaf, the three non-annoying characters. The stuff with the expendables also continues to be fun and intriguing, as the reader can never quite figure out how self-driven these robots are.  I enjoyed the ideas and trying to figure out the same mystery the characters are dealing with, as they learn of a future destruction of the planet Garden by the people of Earth and try to find out why that happens and how it can be prevented.   If Card gives us satisfactory answers to those questions in the next and final volume, then this series will be one of the higlights of his career.  If he lets the series disspate (as he has with some of his other series), and doesn't wrap it up with a satisfactory conclusion, then it won't be.

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.