Today’s TTT is “Top Ten Bookish Discoveries Made in 2025”, which is not a topic I feel confident I’ll be able to fulfill, but we shall see. First up, the Teaser Tuesday.
Abigail [Adams’] biting words only prompted John Quincy to come to [his fiancée] Louisa’s defense. He and he alone, he responded, must be accountable for his choice of a wife. If he waited until his mother approved of his selection, he would certainly be doomed to perpetual celibacy. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
(1) The delight of game warden stories. CJ Box’s Joe Pickett series consumed my reading for 2.5. months and led to not only another game warden series, but to game warden nonfiction. CJ Box is a proper menace.
(2) I’m getting to be a bad Star Trek fan. Not only did I only read two ST novels last year, but I didn’t even finish watching the long-awaited season 3 of Strange New Worlds. I am slowly remedying that: I am halfway through.
(3) 2025 would be remembered as the year of Paul Kingsnorth (an ecological/social critic who is also an Orthodox mystic who lives on an off-grid farm) were it not for my CJ Box obsession. I read through all of Paul’s nonfiction works in 2025, including his most recent release and alleged magnum opus, Against the Machine.
(4) Donald Honig as a baseball historian. I’ve read three of his books detailing baseball from the 1920s to the 1950s.
(5) A YA novel series I read in high school is a lot ‘spicier’ than anything I’ve read as an adult.
(6) Most of James Gandolfini’s filmography, thanks to a biography I read of him, Gandolfini. I watched as many of his movies as I could find last year.
(7) Bell Irwin Wiley as a Civil War social historian. I’d read Wiley before but really got into his works back in 2025.
(9) HARRY POTTER FULL CAST AUDIO EDITIONS ARE AS WONDERFUL AS CHOCOLATE FROGS. I listened to one in December and two this month; I intend to listen to the rest as they come out. Yes, I’ve read the series multiple times; yes, I’ve watched the movies multiple times; yes, I’ve listened to Jim Dale and Stephen Fry both read audio books of the series; yes, I’ve watched CallMeKevin play all the games (a bean!!). It doesn’t matter, I love these productions.
(10) Dead presidents. So…..finding an interesting chap on youtube led to my dormant Civil War obsession from high school being reignited, which led to me reading about the prelude to the Civil War, leading to me reading a lot about the presidents from the 1830s to the 1850s, leading to me reading antebellum history for one, two, three months now. Ah hah hah.
What do I know of Jimmy Monroe? I retain from Founding Rivals some notion of Monroe as a fundamentally military man, in opposition to his strictly-political allies like Jefferson and Madison, and that he was the last of the “Virginia Dynasty”. As it turns out, while Monroe did not theorize about politics as much as his more literary predecessors, he was quite good at practicing it. An early biographer argued that Monroe was unique among the founding generation in that he did not have a ‘retiring’ idea of America; he saw navigating European relations a vital part of creating a future for the fledgling nation. Managing both the departments of State and War during the War of 1812 made that grimly clear. Navigating relations could take different forms, of course — working with his Sec. State John Quincy Adams to propagate the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the Americas off-limits to future colonization — as well as navigating Russian claims along the West Coast, and figuring out how to respond to the burst of Bolivarian republics as South America began driving the dons out. Given how acrimonious relation had been between the Federalists and Republicans, Monroe’s ability to work with men like Adams and Jackson is a pleasure to witness. Monroe and Adams were rivals, but accomplished collaborators — prompted by Monroe’s realism and Adams’ inherited sense of duty and responsibility. Monroe strikes me in this book as an independent actor: despite being a soldier devoted to his commander in chief, Monroe was not afraid to push back against some of Washington’s policies, and he exchanged letters with Jefferson, another mentor, arguing about foreign policy. After leaving office, Monroe was greeted with tragedies — the deaths of his wife and son-in-law — and died in near poverty some five years after Thomas Jefferson — but, like Jefferson and Adams, on July 4th. All told, this is a very compact but readable and fair guide to Monroe’s presidency, and it has some fun surprises like Jackson seizing Pensacola just because he could, and Monroe having to break up a duel between two men whose spat began with the apparent quoting of Shakespeare.
Quotes
Though an ardent revolutionary, Paine had complained to the Directory against the execution of the French king and had been incarcerated in the Luxembourg prison for his troubles. Monroe secured his release and gave him lodgings on the condition that Paine refrain from pamphleteering against U.S. policy. Paine returned Monroe’s hospitality by promptly using confidential conversations with Monroe as grist for his anti- Washington mill.
The story is told of a ministerial dinner at which the British minister Sir Charles Vaughan saw the French minister Count de Serurier, directly across from him, bite his thumb every time Vaughan made a remark. “Do you bite your thumb at me, Sir?” Vaughan finally challenged. “I do,” was the Frenchman’s reply. They promptly withdrew and were at sword points in an adjoining hall when President Monroe arrived and threw up their swords with his own. Their carriages were called, and Monroe sent them, separately, away.
John C. Calhoun perhaps best described the workings of Monroe’s mind: “Tho’ not brilliant, few men were his equal in wisdom, firmness and devotion to his country. He had a wonderful intellectual patience, and could above all men, that I ever knew, when called on to decide an important point, hold the subject immovably fixed under his attention, until he had mastered it in all of its relations. It was mainly to this admirable quality that he owed his highly accurate judgment. I have known many much more rapid in reaching a conclusion, but few with a certainty so unerring.”
I’m trying to figure out if thumb-biting was legitimately offensive, or if these guys just took Romeo and Juliet very seriously. For those who don’t get the reference:
ABRAHAM: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON: I do bite my thumb, sir. ABRAHAM: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON: [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay? GREGORY: No. SAMPSON: No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir. GREGORY: Do you quarrel, sir? ABRAHAM: Quarrel sir! no, sir. SAMPSON: If you do, sir, I am for you: I serve as good a man as you. ABRAHAM: No better!
Ross: Inter arma enim silent leges. Bashir: “In time of war, the law falls silent.” Cicero. So, is that what we have become – a [new] Rome, driven by nothing other than the certainty that CAESAR CAN DO NO WRONG?
Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light was a fairly flattering biography of Lincoln, seeing him as a visionary who checked his hatred of slavery only for politics’ sake, and who was finally allowed to lean in to and even weaponize it during the Civil War. The Real Lincoln takes a far more critical approach, firing two barrels: the first shot argues that Lincoln was far more interested in saving and consolidating the Union than he was bothering with slavery; the second argues that Lincoln committed gross abuses of power in service to said saving and consolidation. Cleverly, DiLorenzo draws on sympathetic sources to feed his charge of Lincolnian tyranny — putting men who argued that Lincoln was a benevolent tyrant on the stand, rather than Southern critics who could be unthinkingly dismissed. While I have absorbed knowledge of Lincoln’s wartime abuses over the years, I was intrigued by the prospect of Misesian criticism of Lincoln’s economic opinions. Though at times this book functions purely as a hit piece, with no quarter given, the economic angle remains novel enough — and the abuses of civil liberties remain serious enough — to warrant serious consideration. I’ll confess my interest in this book was ignited somewhat by learning of Lincoln’s treatment of Clement Vallandigham, who was exiled to Canada for daring to attack ol’ honest Abe, while studying the life of President Pierce.
Key to understanding The Real Lincoln as more than a catalog of “Lincoln behaving badly” factoids is DiLorenzo’s emphasis on the” American System”. Championed by Henry Clay—Lincoln’s lifelong political idol—this program combined a national bank to manage the money supply, heavy spending on internal improvements, and high protective tariffs intended to foster domestic industry. Lincoln embraced this agenda early, declaring himself for Clay’s system even before he had been admitted to the bar. DiLorenzo argues that Lincoln’s devotion to the American System helps explain both his economic views and his willingness to concentrate power at the federal level. The aims of the system were not difficult to sympathize with: canals and railroads promised progress, and a young nation sought economic independence from Britain. But as later experiments with protectionism and import substitution would demonstrate, such policies often carry severe trade-offs. An economic program can be reasonable in its goals while proving deeply destructive—or inhumane—in its consequences, a tension DiLorenzo sees at the heart of Lincoln’s political legacy. DiLorenzo argues that the American System proved dysfunctional from the start: numerous northern states who tried kindred policies found themselves grappling so much corruption that they adopted amendments to bar the state government from monkeying around with improvements and state-controlled banks. One of Lincoln’s chief critics, Clement Vallandingham, attacked not only Lincoln’s civil liberties abuses, but the ‘great emancipator’s’ consolidationist, Clay-driven economic policies — policies that passed a Congress largely empty of critics, either because those dissident voices had seceded or were in prison, in the case of New York and Maryland. These included the National Banking Acts and increased tariffs that would shelter northern industry for decades after the war. These economic policies marched along with the bullet and bayonet in service to make these United States into one dominion controlled by DC.
And now, the spice. War is the health of the state; its mothers milk, its sweet succor. Nothing expands the state like war: if we applied Stephen Jay Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution to the evolution of the state war is most certainly those ‘punctuation’ marks where suddenly a great deal of change happens all at once — and contra to the hopes of the people and the claims of the politicians, power once seized is rarely laid down. At best, some of it returns — but the government has still grown, and its appetite remembers the feasts-days of war’s horrors. Much of the book is given over to documenting the long train of abuses Lincoln committed in the name of ‘saving’ the Union — of dismantling those freedoms that the young were dying en masse to protect, if I may borrow from Dr. Bashir. Where do we begin? The arrest of legislators in Maryland to ensure they do not vote the wrong way? The mass imprisonment of those who dared to criticize Lincoln or the war. The attacks on New York newspapers that did not follow the Lincolonian line, outright closing them down? These are not criticisms raised by that dreaded spectre, the ‘neo-Confederate’: they were raised by men at the time, including President Franklin Pierce and men like Clement Vallandigham, a man accused of treason and exiled to Canada. DiLorenzo finds and corrals so many crimes committed by Lincoln or in his name that it is easy to think his statue in DC ought to included him gripping a fasces and feature depictions of the vanquished bowing at his feet, as in Rome. This is a hard section to evaluate, to be honest: I would counter DiLorenzo and say that the Constitution does allow for the suspension of habeas corpus in times of rebellion and insurrection — but DiLorenzo fires back, arguing that the Supreme Court ruled during the war that such suspension is not the president’s to conduct: only Congress could. (Congress did, after the fact.) There is a great deal, though, that cannot be explained — and Lincoln’s ‘iconic’ status means it will never really be addressed, only ignored. The Civil War, DiLorenzo writes, was the final triumph of Hamilton over Jefferson — of the Union over the Nation, of the State over the people.
Can a reader give this a fair appraisal? My basic preference for decentralization and libertarianism is thirteen years old at least, and my distrust for the centralizing preferences of Hamilton, Whiggery, and Lincoln is reflexive. All the same, I think the argument suffers for its sheer zeal: DiLorenzo throws charge upon charge upon Lincoln, does not admit the defense into the well, and uses the war crimes of others to attack Lincoln on the basis that as commander in chief, their behavior was his responsibility. I doubt that most admirers of Lincoln would have their minds changed by this: they will come away sputtering, “But — but — but!”. I can understand that viewpoint: I once used to argue with someone more libertarian than I, who saw in Lincoln nothing but a devil: I could at least understand that Lincoln, voted as president of the Union, could not countenance allowing it to fall apart while he was steward. That does not mean I condone what he did in that effort: I was and remain a deep critic of Lincoln, even if I find much to admire about him. I am the same way about other figures, like Napoleon. And I yet I come away from this book more sure in my own conviction that the postwar Union was as different from the prewar Union as the prewar Union was from the Articles of Confederation. A new thing had been created, and it was a thing that would, only within a few decades, become first a world empire and then a world superpower. That road, I think, begins with Lincoln’s creation of a new union as he tried to ‘rescue ‘from the fires of war the old.
Vallandigham’s “crime” was making a speech in response to Lincoln’s State of the Union Address in which he criticized the president for his unconstitutional usurpation of power. For this he was declared a “traitor” by Lincoln and imprisoned without trial. The Democrats in Ohio (a loyal Union state and home to Generals Grant and Sherman) were so outraged that they nominated Vallandigham for the office of governor even though he had been deported.
LINCOLN PURSUED the peculiar policy that it was necessary to destroy constitutional liberties in order to preserve the Constitution, redefining “the Constitution” to mean “the Union,” which is not at all what the founders intended.
I hope readers will forgive me the Deep Space Nine at the beginning of this post. I’m fairly certain that episode was when DS9 started making me think critically about politics: it was the reason that when the War on Terror began, I became a civil libertarian, and then later a regular cranky (and sometimes uncivil) libertarian. The scene for your consideration:
Given that I’ve listened to all three of the full-cast audio productions in the last month and have active plans to enjoy the rest as they’re published this year, I greatly enjoyed this. If you’ve been intrigued by the reviews, it may give you some idea of the vocal talent at work. I haven’t heard any of the ‘older’ actors yet — the children change actors beginning in book 4 — so it was fun to hear a preview of them — and to SEE these voices in my head. I knew Mark Addy’s voice was familiar, but I’d rather thought it was because he was trying to stick so close to Robbie Coltrane — not that I’d known him from Still Standing. (Also, Hugh Laurie looks distressingly old. I always imagine him as Bertie Wooster, never Dr. House…..and now he can do a very good Dumbledore. I actually like him more than Richard Harris or Gambon, to be frank.) If nothing else, click here to experience Kit Harrington as Gilderoy Lockhart. He was such fun to listen to.
Harry Potter is in a bit of trouble: he’s accidentally blown up an awful woman, his uncle’s sister, and now he’s on the lam and expecting to be expelled from Hogwarts. (She’s blown up like a balloon, I should say, not like C4.) When ministry officials find Harry at the Leaky Cauldron, they’re surprisingly relieved – and not at all wrathful. There’s a serial killer on the loose, it seems, and one who has a connection to the awful night that Harry Potter’s parents were killed and Harry himself was left with a strange scar on his forehead. Although there are many funny bits here, Azkaban starts the series’ ramping up of drama and seriousness – or should I say siriusness? There’s an increasing feeling of forebodingness and besiegement here, as the spectral ghouls who are ‘guarding’ the castle from the killer Sirius Black drain joy and hope from the kids, and fear soars when Black appears to have been able to find a way to sneak inside the school regardless.
Reviewing this title almost seems a pointless exercise, following so closely on the heels of my other full-cast audio reviews. We have some new voices now, of course, primarily Remus Lupin and Sirius Black. Lupin’s casting is excellent, I think; Black took some getting used to, but part of his ‘roughness’ may owe to the story itself. Ditto the casting of Trelawney: her breathy voice, varying tone and inflections are all profoundly irritating, but given her interactions with the trio – especially Hermione – I think that’s intentional. Snape’s voice actor continues to underwhelm, especially when he’s being emotional: this is funny in one scene, where he’s positively whining to Fudge that he simply doesn’t appreciate what a nuisance Potter is. I think the ambient or atmospheric sounds – characters reacting in the background, trunks being opened, crickets chirping – has been raised a bit, but I am not positive. I listened to the previous books while driving in my car, so they were contending with the motor, the highway, and so on, whereas I listened to a lot of this book from my PC soundbar. There were a couple of scenes in which the amount of simultaneous audio (effects, music, and dialogue) pushed into interfering with one another, but only to a minor degree. Music, as mentioned in my first review, is used sparingly and typically to good effect..
All told, this was another wonderful entry in the full cast series. The books are going to get darker and longer, but even so — I look forward to the upcoming releases — one a month from February until May.
Today’s Long and Short Reviews blogging prompt is funny book titles. I sometimes begin drafts for posts weeks in advance and accidentally posted this week’s last week — so, now I have to post last’s week’s topic this week! But first, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? James Madison by Richard Brookhiser; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, full-cast audio edition. (SO GOOD.)
WHAT are you reading now? Three Philosophies of Life, Peter Kreeft; With Malice Towards None, Stephen B. Oates. The former is a study of Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Song of Solomon; the latter is a biography of Abraham Lincoln. I’m mostly done with The Real Lincoln but am trying to investigate some of its claims, so I haven’t finished it yet. With Malice is also huge, so place your bets on if it appears next week. Believe it or not, I am tiring a bit of the mid-19th century…
WHAT are you reading next? Your guess is as good as mine! I got an early birthday present from the ladyfriend, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, but I’ll probably wait on him until I’ve finished the pre-Civil War presidents. (Remaining: Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Polk.)
L&S review’s prompt is an interesting one for me because I grew up in a Holiness church that did not allow televisions: they were “worldly entertainment”. The strictness of this rule, though, varied by the preacher, so my parents had a TV when I was very young, got rid of it when I was around 5, accepted a black and white set from a cousin when I was a bit older, got rid of that set when the preacher changed, and so on and on until at some point computers and the internet overwhelmed those strictures. (I left that church at 20 and do not have a TV: my parents now constantly watch tv or tv programs on their phones. Go figure.) Anyhoo, I have very dim memories of watching Rescue 911 when I was young and we still had a tv, but they’re hazy. I know for sure I watched a lot of Full House as a young kid, because we’d literally drive to a family member’s house to watch it with them.
Daily writing prompt
Write about your first name: its meaning, significance, etymology, etc.
My name is Stephen, which translates to something like ‘crown’. I was named after the Biblical personage of St. Stephen, who is regarded as the Church’s first martyr — stoned to death for preaching. (Or, as one jokster-pastor put it, ‘rocked to sleep’.) I’ve known STEPHEN means ‘crown’ since I was a kid, though in St. Stephen’s case I wonder if that’s not a crown of martyrdom. According to Etymonline, only monks used the name in Anglo-Saxon England: the name became more broadly popular after the arrival of the Normans. According to that same source, Stephen and ‘nephew’ are tied together in a particular way, as their use of ‘ph’ is atypical in English usage. I spell my name the traditional way, of course, or as I sometimes say — the right way.
Today’s TTT is “goals for 2026”. Hmm – well, I’m sure I won’t get to ten. But first, two teases from James Madison by Richard Brookhiser:
Madison showed intelligence and humor. One evening he proposed an experiment to see how many bottles of champagne it would take to induce hangovers the next day. (No result was recorded.)
“The wine,” wrote one dazzled Federalist senator, “was the best I ever drank, particularly the champagne, which was indeed delicious. I wish [Jefferson’s] French politics were as good as his French wines.”
(1) Finish my second Classics Club. It should not be difficult: only a couple of of the books on my current list are girthy challenges (The Shahnameh and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America). The trick is getting started.
(2) Do proper justice to my America @ 250 challenge for this year.
(3) Complete The Bible in a Year challenge following Fr. Mike Schmitz’s program. I am currently on track. Fr. Schmitz’s approach isn’t a straight read through; instead readers get different books concurrently (Genesis and Job, for instance) with a splash of Psalms or Proverbs at the end of the day for flavor. It keeps one from getting bogged down in laws and “begats”. I think there are also some liturgical calendar considerations at work: right around Easter, for instance, there’s an abrupt switch from the book of Judges for a “Messianic Checkpoint” week spent in John.
(4) Continue to avoid reddit. I’ve never been a compulsive user of social media — I use facebook and instagram very sparingly — but when I “stumbled on” reddit a few years back I found it had the same addictive and poisonous effect on me that other social media platforms have on others. This year I decided to quit it cold turkey and am so far holding out.
(5) More writing. Given how active this blog is, I realize that may sound like a strange goal, but I have a local history blog I created a few years ago and have done little with – including publicizing it, because I haven’t been able to post there consistently enough to justify promoting it – and last year I began to share a series of local-drama short stories I’d written. I don’t know that anything will come of the later, aside from my own joy, but I’d like to continue exploring that as ideas come to me.
(6) I’ve been wanting to expand my role as a local history expert for a couple of years now: to a degree, this is working insofar as I’m the go-to person for people writing books that touch on my town, but I’m wanting a more integrated expertise – one that incorporates our surrounding counties, since my town’s prominence came from having been an ‘in-gathering’ site for the region: we were the place everyone else sent crops to sell, and the place that received goods from outside for people to purchase. Expanding this role would entail me attending historical societies meetings in those counties. I’ve begun networking with people in a couple of counties but have yet to attend a proper meeting, let alone establish myself as a regular, predictable presence there.
(7) Read Johnny Clegg’s autobiography – or rather, the first part of it. Unfortunately, we lost Johnny before he could properly finish it. Clegg’s music was literally the first time I ever watched a movie’s credits because I wanted to find out who sang that song. (“Dela”, from George of the Jungle. Yes, I was in middle school – but I still love it.)
(8) Return to purposeful tech training. I used to be fairly intense about staying up to date with tech, but then near-death, dialysis, and transplants happened and I got thrown off — despite constantly studying during my transplant recovery. I just saw the CompTia A+ is doing 1201/1202 tests and I haven’t even reviewed all the new stuff on their 1101/1102- gen material. It wasn’t just medical issues, of course: COVID + bitcoin mining really disrupted tech prices and I don’t know that they’ve ever normalized.
(9) Re-reading. I began trying to make this a habit last year; there are books I’d like to revisit just to see how I respond to them 10-15 years later.
Madison among the rest, Pouring from his narrow chest, More than Greek or Roman sense, Boundless tides of eloquence.
Interestingly enough, it was James Madison who prompted my interest in reading presidential biographies. Early in the blog’s history, I happened upon Founding Rivals, a history of the dynamic between Madison and Monroe: both were members of the Revolutionary generation, both were Virginias who later became president, but they were often rivals. I’ve since read one other book on Madison, but it was closely focused on his connection to the creation of the Constitution; this is the first proper biography I have tried of him. I found it a readable if sometimes overly casual review of Madison’s political life, if not the man himself.
Brookhiser’s account skips past Madison’s upbringing, though we find this modest planter quickly found himself running in the best of circles through his intelligence and obsessive work ethic. Not even a fifth of the way into the biography, we find Madison already in the role we expect to find him — the politician, serving Virginia in various capacities from the Governor’s Council to the Philadelphia Convention that created the Constitution. Madison formed close friendships with Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton — though he and Hamilton would fall out over Madison’s opposition to the big-government policies adopted by the Federalists. (Brookhiser refers to Madison’s criticism of Hamilton as ‘nuts’, which brought out my John Adams glare of disdain. Call me a snob, but I dislike that sort of informality in a history book.) Brookhiser names Madison as the creator of America’s first political party, the Republicans — sometimes called the Democratic-Republicans to differentiate them from the modern party that was created in the mid-19th century. In their opposition to consolidated government, these Republicans were not unlike Jacksonian Democrats. I have to admire Madison as a man of principle: in the Federalist papers he and Hamilton argued in theory that there need be no fear of the state becoming overmighty, but when the Constitution went into effect Madison took the evidence before his own eyes seriously and struck back against it. He was author of the Virginia Resolution, with along with Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolution argued that the States were the ultimate arbiters of constitutionality. This was written in response to the Alien and Sedition acts of the Adams administration; when president himself, Madison exercised the power of the veto to strike down bills he regarded as unconstitutional. Probably the most memorable part of his presidency is the eruption of the War of 1812, which Brookhiser argues Madison planned poorly for. After leaving office to another Virginian, Monroe, Madison stayed up with politics, sharing opinions with his peers and eventually outliving all of the other founding generation.
This was a fair read; Brookhiser is an accessible author, but as mentioned the focus is entirely on Madison’s political life — as founder, framer, party organizer, public servant — with comparatively little about the man himself. Potential readers may take that as they will: I found it a useful review of the Founding generation’s attempts at working out govenment.
Quotations
Heroes can aspire to perfection, especially if they die young, through the purity of an action, or a stance. But the long haul of politics takes at least some of the shine off almost everyone.
We pay much less attention to James Madison, Father of Politics, than to James Madison, Father of the Constitution. That is because politics embarrasses us. Politics is the spectacle on television and YouTube, the daily perp walk on the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report. Surely our founders and framers left us something better, more solid, more inspiring than that? They did. But they all knew—and Madison understood better than any of them—that ideals come to life in dozens of political transactions every day. Some of those transactions aren’t pretty. You can understand this and try to work with this knowledge, or you can look away. But ignoring politics will not make it stop. It will simply go on without you—and sooner or later will happen to you.
As Madison read, he wrote down his own thoughts, first by copying thoughts he liked into a commonplace book—“The Talent for insinuating is more useful than that of persuading. The former is often successful, the latter very seldom” (Cardinal de Retz, a seventeenth-century French politician). As he grew older, he wrote essays that digested what he had learned. Writing extended Madison’s bookish discussions—it was a form of talking with himself.
I solemnly swear I will not write this review lovingly mocking Will!iam SHATner’s cadence. But an understanding reader will grant me at least the title? Yesterday I finished listening to Together Tonight, an audio play in which the writings of Mssrs Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson were used to create a fictional conversation between men who in real life were sharp rivals. After discovering that it was a contemporary recording of a play called No Love Lost, which ORIGINALLY featured William Shatner, Jack Lemmon, and Martin Landau (!!), I had to see if the original recording was out there. It is. And it’s fun. The level of acting talent here is both a blessing and a curse: it’s MARKEDLY easier to tell who is speaking and who! is not, but at the same time my familiarity with Lemmon and Shatner disrupted immersion. However, the sound design in general is far easier for a listening audience, with a narrator describing things that cannot be heard. The script was more streamlined, through, only 2/3rds of Together Tonight, and the voice actors were distractingly…old. I could not listen to “Burr” talk without seeing Jack Lemmon sitting at the table in Twelve Angry Men, his white hair shining, rustling through papers. At the time of this conversation, the narrator informs us these men were all in their forties — but they sound like the silver haired retirees who gather in my city diner every morning to drink coffee, flirt with the waitress, and discuss the affairs of the world. Ultimately, I much prefer the modern Audible version, even if its versions of Hamilton and Jefferson take more time to tell apart — their actors do not overwhelm the roles, and the Audible version had some elements I enjoyed (like the characters’ interior thoughts) that were not present in this one.
Jefferson: I think the whole commerce between master and slave is despotism on the one hand, and degrading submission on the other. Burr: But don’t you own slaves yourself? Jefferson: I do. Burr: No inconsistency there? Jefferson: Not at all. I do not treat my slaves like a despot, nor are they degraded by me. Hamilton: In fact, you love your slaves, don’t you? ….some more than others?
After listening to The Rivalry, a play based on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and delivered with aplomb by the Los Angeles Theater Works Productions company, I wanted to experience more of LATW. Then I saw this, another play based on debate and dialogue. Together Tonight draws on the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr to put the men into direct debate together, moderated by a Mr. Pickering. Corwin originally titled this No Love Lost, and such a name is warranted: Jefferson and Hamilton were archrivals, and Burr was commonly regarded as a craven opportunist, dismissed by his peers. The initial topic of discussion is relations with France, the “Quasi-War” — but the conversation wanders all over the place. Hamilton even remarks on it — “Remarkable! One minute we are talking about the Masons and principles and children’s books, and the next about the variations in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms! ?”. One potential issue is that it is sometimes difficult to pick out who is speaking, at least between Hamilton and Jefferson: it took me about twenty minutes before I could reliably tell them apart. They’re both good voices — lots of gravitas — but the differences are subtle to an untuned ear or a casual listener. Aaron Burr was easier: he sounded exactly like a weasel.
The conversation’s life was quite good, to my ears, flowing naturally — hence some of the randomness — and Corwin smartly engineers space for intermission by having the chatter shift to an issue on which Alexander Hamilton takes such offense that he demands a moment to cool down. (At one point, Hamilton is so furious with Burr that I wondered if the historic challenge to duel — which killed Hamilton and excised Burr like a cancer from the body politic — would be issued there and then.) There is, in fact, an extended discussion on the merits of dueling — one that would surely have anyone with knowledge of how their relationship ended sitting on the edge of their seats with an anticipatory grin. Blessed are those with foreknowledge, for they shall be rewarded. While not as stellar as The Rivalry, this history major was thoroughly entertained by it. I may have to give that curr Burr a fair shake — there’s an interesting book called Fallen Founder I can take a look at.
Additional Note: When “No Love Lost” was originally performed, it featured WILLIAM SHATNER AND JACK LEMMON.
Reading Freely 