This Week at the Library (24 June)

Posted on June 24, 2012 by smellincoffee

To some, the summertime may be a period of activity. In the deep south, however, being out and about from June to August will send you to the hospital. Summer is a time for sitting on the porch sipping lemonade and fanning yourself, because it’s too hot to do anything else: temperatures stay into the 90s until after nine at night. I stayed active throughout the winter, but this summer heat just makes me wilt. So I adapt by waking up earlier and spending the late afternoon resting, not walking.  That leaves more time for reading.

When it comes to books, I’m a big eater: I’ll wolf one down, but I sometimes wonder if I’m not diminishing my experience by approaching them so ravenously. In the last couple of weeks I have practiced deliberation, turning the occasional practice of writing down particular quotations and facts in my journal into a regular habit. The idea is to create further opportunity for reflection.  I’ve also been using the journal to write down books I hear about which sound interesting, which only  intensifies my ambitions: there are so many books out there, so many ideas to be considered and connected together! Just the other night I fell into a veritable gold mine of books using Amazon’s “related titles” section: two titles in the pit were Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and  Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, by Jean Twenge.

Both at the library and in my personal reading, I’m gearing up for the Fourth of July. My personal reading for the occasion will be The Good Citizen, a collection of essays on the meaning of citizenship; Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis; and possibly Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches, an anthology prepared by William J. Bennett.  I have two displays planned to put out this week: a dozen or so titles on the American Revolution, the war, and the early constitutional period, and a larger one devoted to the United States in general. Most of it will be feel-good stuff: the Fourth is a celebratory occasion, after all, and  my theme for the last month has been on environmentalism, ecology, politics, and the future. It’s tended to be a little grim, so I’m looking forward to the lighter mood to come. Once the display is up I’ll post some of the more interesting titles here.  The small display will be replacing my “See the Stars” astronomical display, which I put up mostly to attract interest in the transit of Venus. As it turns out, the day of the transit was marked here by overcast skies.

Finally, at some point in the last week or so, an update from blogger reset my labels gadgets so that no labels were selected to appear in the drop-down menus. I thought the code might need updating, but it turned out to be a simple matter of my simply needing to re-select the various labels for the appropriate list. I don’t know if the problem is entirely resolved, as Books by Category keeps disappearing. I wonder if perhaps I have too many labels.

Pending reviews: The Great, Good Place by Roy Oldenburg, and Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in the 1950s by Laura Shapiro.

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Top Ten Books I’ll Be Reading this Summer

Posted on June 19, 2012 by smellincoffee

As the mercury begins to persistently hit the high nineties, the Broke and the Bookish inquire: what are your summer reading plans?

1. For starters, I intend to keep reading Bernard Cornwell’s Starbuck Chronicles,  his military-adventure novels set in the American Civil War. Although the protagonist is weaker than most of Cornwell’s, Starbuck is supported by a lively crew of characters and I have no doubt that he’ll grow through the books.

2. The Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen just arrived in the post. The subtitle: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Get Better.  I heard it discussed at length on a podcast, though I’m a trifle disappointed in its size: when I received the package in the mail I thought it was my Mills Brothers CD.

3. Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, Laura Shapiro.  Amazon suggested this one to me, and the preview ensnared my interest. Ever since reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan I’ve found an appetite for books relating to food.

4. Star Trek DTI: Forgotten History, Christopher L. Bennett. Second in Bennett’s Department of Temporal Investigations series, the action is set in the original series era and stars that beautiful icon of the franchise, James Kirk’s Enterprise.  Also, Star Trek Typhon Pact: Plagues of Night, David R. George III. First in a new trilogy featuring the Federation’s new foe, Plagues of Night features a much-longed-for return to Deep Space Nine.

5. The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, David Owen.  Part of my on-going reading in urbanism, energy, and transportation.

6. The Seven Wonders, Steven Saylor. Gordianus the Finder returns….as a teenager on the cusp of manhood, on a journey around the world (to Romans, at least) to visit the seven great wonders of antiquity, only one of which stands today.

7. 1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created, Charles C. Mann. The sequel to his astonishing 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, this one tackles the beginnings of the global marketplace.

8.  The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners that Shape Who We Are Today, Rob Dunn.  We’re all hosts to untold numbers of lifeforms…a veritable ecosystem on two legs, as it were.

9. Independence Day reading.  Around the Fourth of July, I like to read something with an appropriate theme. This year I’ve got Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis in mind.

10. Bastille Day reading.  I also like to have a French-themed reading in the middle of July, but I haven’t decided what this year’s shall be. Alistair Horne is an option, but his Seven Ages of Paris left me wanting: it was not quite as brilliant as La Belle France had me worked up to anticipate.  Another possibility is Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, a novel of the Great War, supposedly France’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  On the other hand, I spent my morning sipping coffee and reading reviews for Bringing up Bébé, an American woman’s discovery of parenting in France, which I find oddly fascinating. I suppose it depends on my mood when I go to make my purchases…

These will do for starters, anyway! How about yourself?

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Hot, Flat, and Crowded

Posted on June 16, 2012 by smellincoffee

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Evolution: And How it Can Renew America
© 2006 Thomas Friedman
438 pages

   The world is changing. Regardless of the consoling reassurances of corporations, industries, and the silk-tongued politicians who lobby on their behalf, our environment is deteriorating – and that loss is driven by our actions as a global society.  Our comfortable and relatively carefree days are numbered. But the changes to come need not be our undoing. The challenges of the future may indeed be a boon, forcing us to work hard to meet them, fueling innovation and creating new sources of strength. Such is the premise of Hot, Flat, and Crowded, a thought-provoking work of interest to anyone concerned about the future or the health of their respective nation, or the human enterprise in general.

            Friedman begins by establishing the conditions – hot, flat, and crowded. Global warming is a fact, not media myth or political hyperbole. His account illustrates amply that even minor changes in temperature can cause drastic changes in the weather, spurring on calamitous flood/famine patterns and making the environment as a whole more chaotic, wrecking havoc on our ecological systems. We need those systems to make sense, because we have ever-more people to feed. We are already seven billion strong, but our task isn’t limited to simply feeding those billions. As the developing world continues to mature, more people in the old ‘third world’ are demanding the lifestyle of the first. (“Flat” refers to the elimination of barriers between various populations; the idea is that free trade agreements, globalization, and the Internet are putting more people on even ground.)  And they should get it, says Friedman: it’s simply not fair to deny them the same opportunities the west has enjoyed for the last century and a half.  So how on Earth are we going to meet those ‘needs’?

            Well, we need to figure that out. We need ideas, because our current approach isn’t cutting it. We’re still thinking like 19th century industrialists, but the old ways are defunct. The resources aren’t there to support them, and even if they were, we can’t absorb the damage anymore. Green has gone global: even coal is billing itself as “clean”. But green adverts don’t mean a thing: we’re not putting in an effort, Friedman says, we’re having a party. We have to change the way we live on a fundamental level, not just be content with throwing a can in the recycling bin instead of the trash and patting ourselves on the back. One idea Friedman proposes is an ‘energy internet’, interlinking all of our devices which require electricity, and having them coordinated by a home computer which itself is integrated with the computer system of the power company, so that usage can be managed to minimize waste.

 Today the global economy is slowing down: even China’s momentous growth is finally feeling friction. Some fear that forcing companies to limit themselves in order to maintain the environment will cause stagnation, even depression…but Friedman also demonstrates how ‘going green’ can make companies more financially resilient –  more efficient and stable – as well as competitive, for the company that finds a better way of doing things will  vault over their rivals.  Even so, Friedman acknowledges that we have done a poor job of helping these new companies get their start. Despite already having an easy time of it – abundant resources, little regulation – the old coal and oil companies enjoy comfortable subsidies to boot.  There’s nothing to be gained in propping them up,  especially when those financial resources could be put to work building a future. Friedman speaks for the need for strong, visionary leaders who are willing to face up to the impressive challenges of the future, and his account gives some reason for hope, as it is sprinkled with stories of political and business leaders who have revolutionized their sphere of influence.


Hot, Flat, and Crowded commends itself, but not without reservation. These are ideas everyone needs to consider, at least those who are contemplating being alive within the next few decade. Young people considering their future career plans or just settling into the responsibilities of adulthood and considering civic engagement are the ideal audience here: the “Millennial” have their work cut out for them, and Friedman makes a great many fundamentally good points. In “If It Isn’t Boring, It Isn’t Green”, for instance, he drives home the idea that sustainability has to be foundational, so much the background for what we do that we take it for granted. Right now green is just garnish — decor to entice us to buy one brand of bottled water instead of another. He advocates for “cradle to cradle” manufacturing, for instance, an idea also mentioned in Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture as the polar opposite of our current approach, which is to produce useless garbage (broken fiberboard bookshelves from Wal-Mart) from useful raw materials.Cradle to cradle manufacturing consists of making products which can be completely broken down and either reused by the part, or biodegradable to the point that their materials can break down and be reused atomically. Waste must be eliminated, not lessened. Similarly, Friedman suggests improving what we’ve got when we can: instead of throwing money at projects we hope might work, let’s first devote it toward maximizing the value of what we have. It reminded me of what the town of Littleton, Colorado has accomplished with its “economic gardening” approach.This last idea is especially key, because the amount of work Friedman is suggesting will consume an enormous amount of capital — capital we may no longer have, given the crisis of 2008. Friedman is writing for a popular audience, so naturally he hopes to offer hard ideas with a soft coating to help them go down easier, but the idea that China and India will be able to convert to “western” style consumerism simply isn’t believable to me. By 2050, our energy consumption alone is expected to double. That is a staggering prediction (by the Shell Energy Group).  Something’s got to give.

The great limitation of Hot, Flat, and Crowded is that Friedman still believes we change the outcome by altering what we consume. He praises new cars, for instance, which get better gas mileage, but ignores the fact that marginal improvements in efficiency don’t matter when the entire system is broken. Beyond Friedman lies the American landscape, a nation of parking lots and freeways in which everyone must drive.  Fuel efficiency is a band-aid on a bullet wound. However, the economic gardening approach which Friedman advocates can be used to transform suburban sprawl into communities with economic and social value.  Supposedly his later book, That Used to be Us, addresses transportation matters. If so, I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, I’m still glad to have found this. For its weaknesses, it seems a good starting point for people concerned about the shape of the human future here on planet Earth. The need for a revolution is also a good rallying point for Americans of all political persuasions, whether they are concerned by fiscal or social health. In this age of polarization, Americans need to find common ground in matters like this.

Related:
At One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future. Paul and Barbara Ehrlich
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, David Owen 


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Rebel

Posted on June 12, 2012 by smellincoffee

Rebel
© 1993 Bernard Cornwell
402 pages

Nathaniel Starbuck shouldn’t be in South, but this son of a preacher man is positively hopeless when it comes to the ladies. Love tore him from the seminary, and it led him into Virginia just as the United States was about to be rent in war, as southern aristocrats — having finally lost their domineering influence over the path of the nation — seceded from the union rather than face the prospect of inevitable change. The appearance of a Bostonian in their midst on the eve of war doesn’t sit right with the townfolk, and Starbuck makes his first appearance running from an angry mob set on tarring and feathering him. Fortunately, young Nathaniel is friends with the richest man in Falcouner County — Washington Falcouner, who owns a mansion with its own name. Such influence is handy, for it saves Nate’s life…but in return for his assistance, Falcouner would like Nate to join his fancy new regiment. While some fear war, to Falcouner it’s a marvelous opportunity to dress in uniforms, salute the flag, woo the ladies, and win some glory. So Nate, son of an abolitionist preacher, is thrown by chance where no one would possibly expect to find him: in the ranks of the Confederate Army, where he will find what fate has in store for him.

I never expected to read the Starbuck Chronicles, for despite having been born and raised in the South, I’ve always been a stalwart Union man. The idea of a northern fellow fighting for the rebels did not sit well with me at all. Oh, I grudgingly figured I would try the first book one day, because it was after all a Bernard Cornwell novel, and I am rather enamored of his work — but I didn’t plan on liking it. As it happens, Nathaniel Starbuck is not an idealist.  Frankly, I was off my rocker to suspect that a Cornwell protagonist would be fighting for ‘principles’. No, like Richard Sharpe or Thomas Hookton, Nate is just someone who found himself in the middle of a war, realized he had a talent for soldiering, and decided to play the cards he’d been dealt. Starbuck is no more a states-rights enthusiast than Sharpe is a fan of British foreign policy, but defend it he shall, because he happened to be on that side of the Potomac when the war broke out, and — well, it’d enrage his father, and wouldn’t that be fun?

Rebel is the story of a man finding himself in battle — at the Battle of Bull Run — but he really starts off a boy, and this sets him apart from every other Cornwell hero I’ve yet read. Even when Uhtred of Bebbanburg was a boy, he brimmed over with confidence — his charging the Norse to avenge his fallen father so impressed them that they adopted him. But Nate Starbuck is a fuzzy-faced teenager by comparison. He’s utterly unsure of himself:  only that profound weakness for women kept him from being utterly dominated by his father. I’ve haven’t seen a character this easily or drastically derailed by women since The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.  Nathan was raised Puritan, but he can’t help being a lover…and love will turn him into a fighter and see him change the fate of a nation.

Nate Starbuck amuses me. Of course the novel is superb, filled with little details that make Cornwell’s world seem real, and the characters are as ever fantastic, constantly defying expectations. But Cornwell’s series are known for their larger-than-life heroes, and this one has just gotten his boots on. I’m looking forward to seeing what he makes of himself. As I seem to be sliding into an American Civil War mood (for the first time since 2003…), I may be reading the series this summer.   I’m  interested in seeing what an English author like Cornwell makes of a conflict that involves only Americans.

Related:
The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara
Rifles for Watie, Harold Keith. Meant for teenagers,  set in the west, about a young boy who joins the Union army and has various wartime adventures, including a stint pretending to be a rebel after he’s caught behind enemy lines scouting.

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Teaser Tuesday (12 June)

Posted on June 12, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday once again!

How wide the gates of hell gaped, how searing the flames would be, how agonizing the lake of fire, and how long would all eternity stretch if he did not stand now, fetch his sword, and walk out from this den of iniquity into the cleansing rain. Dear God, he prayed, but this is a terrible thing, and if you will just save me now then I will never sin again, not ever.  He looked into Sally’s eyes, her lovely eyes.
“Of course I’ll kill him for you,” he heard himself saying.

p. 227, Rebel. Bernard Cornwell. 

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Cinderella Ate My Daughter

Posted on June 10, 2012 by smellincoffee

Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
© 2012 Peggy Orenstein
260 pages

When did every little girl become a princess to be bedecked in pink and fawned over? Such is the question posed by Peggy Orenstein, author of numerous books on issues of motherhood and raising women. The answer is at least twofold. First, advertising toward girls in general has emphasized coy, yet overt sexuality, even to the very young: and secondly, in the early 1990s, the Disney Corporation realized there was a lot of money to be had in developing a line of princess goods.  But this isn’t really a book on advertising: Orenstein is more concerned about what the princess culture is doing to the minds of girls. The substance of the book is an examination of  how girls view themselves and each other in society.

 What makes a princess special? There’s no answer. A princess is special just because. She exists solely to be an object of attention: her specialness is not the result of her accomplishments, her skills, her talents, her character, or anything substantial.Therein lies the problem with the princess culture, for it influences girls to aspire to be objects of appreciation. Their sense of self-worth is an external fair, subject not to what girls feel themselves capable of, but how girls feel others respond to them. If they are not regarded as Special, they feel worthless. Distracted by the quest for attention, they don’t bother with the kind of self-growth that would merit attention, or  be fulfilling on its own. Substance is placed by superficiality. This is particularly troublesome in the case of sexuality: in Orenstein’s words, girls learn to aspire to be desired before they have desire (of that kind) on their own. Orenstein sees this as a problem for girlhood in general, because the princess culture has utterly hijacked what it means to be a girl. If a helmet isn’t pink, it isn’t a girl’s helmet. If a mother scorns all the fluff, her inadvertent lesson to her daughter is that it’s not okay to be a girl.  This being the problem, her solution — in addition to reversing Reagan’s deregulation of children’s advertising — is for parents to focus on teaching girls how to live for themselves, and not for the approval of others; to define themselves and not try to fit Disney’s definition of a girl.

Orenstein is a fun author, especially as she covers beauty pageants for four-year-olds and facebook, using phrases like “Sesame street walker”.She’s also one who has to practice what she preaches, for her own daughter Daisy is one of the afflicted: the account conveys her desperate frustration in trying to raise Daisy to be a strong person in an environment swamped by odious messages in the advertising. It shares themes with Consuming Kids and So Sexy, So Soon and covers similar ground. What So Sexy, So Soon referred to as “age compression”, Orenstein calls “KGOY”, Kids Getting Older Younger. This refers to the way kids are attracted to objects advertised to older children, hence kiddie thongs and Barbie in the toddler aisle.  Of obvious interest to the parents and guardians of young women, and quite readable. 
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Why We Get Fat

Posted on June 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Why We Get Fat: and What To Do About It
© 2011, 2012 Gary Taubes
267 pages

The secret of weight, we are told, is as simple as physics, as the laws of thermodynamics. If we take in more energy in eating than we expend in exercise, we gain weight. If we use more energy than we eat, we lose weight. Hence the constant advice to those concerned about their bellies is to eat less and exercise more. Simple, right? …then why doesn’t it work?  Why do millions of people go on diets every January and struggle so mightily to do make any progress? And how can there be so many societies in history and at present where obesity is linked not to abundance, but to poverty? How can obesity and malnutrition exist in the same family at the same time?  Gary Taubes has an answer, one which explains in full the link between obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiac problems while turning everything you thinkyou know about diet on its head.

            Insulin is the key. Taubes writes like a volleyball player, delivering his argument with a bump, a set, and finally the spike. He begins by dismantling conventional explanations about weight control, pointing out that even studies done by institutions which dearly wanted to demonstrate an incontrovertible link between exercise and diet and weight loss have failed to do so. He then prepares the reader by pointing out that we already know that fat is managed substantially by hormones, pointing out the role estrogen plays in shifting body fat around at the onset of puberty. He also points out the way we observe fat utilized in other animals: is a Jersey cow lean because it eats lighter and runs laps around its field? Hardly. Jersey cows are bred as milk cows because their hormones prioritize turning food into milk, and Angus cows are bred as beef because their hormones emphasis turning food into fat and muscle. Calories and exercise have nothing to do with it – not in cows, not in rats, and not in humans.

            In humans, insulin is the chief hormone that manages fat. We’ve known this for decades, but somehow in the WW2 period the United States lost sight of the consequences. Essentially, when insulin is present in the bloodstream, we accumulate fat, and can’t get rid of it. When insulin is absent, our bodies are free to convert fat into fuel. To avoid gaining weight, then, we must avoid foods which stimulate the secretion of insulin, particularly carbohydrates and sugar. No carbs means no grain, no corn, and no rice. The idea of going “carbless” may strike modern readers as positively abnormal, but in truth the diet we’re “used” to is the strange one from the perspective of natural history. Humans evolved eating meat, fruit, and the occasional greens –  our dependence on grains is relatively recent, historically speaking. That dependence is one promoted by the idea which currently holds sway over dietary belief in America, that carbs are good and fat is bad: in most supermarkets, low-fat brands are the only option available. Not only is our love affair with carbohydrates fattening us up, says Taubes, but we’ve declared anathema a vital part of our diet.  We’re supposed to be eating fat, he says. The more fat in our diet, the more efficiently our bodies run — and there’s nothing to the idea that fatty diets lead to exercise, studies indicate.Here he and Michael Pollan concur.

The effective way to losing weight, then, is to avoid carbohydrates and eat heartily the diet of our ancestors – meat and greens. Fruit is more problematic because modern stocks have been bred to be far more sugary than their antecedents. This approach has been advocated by others; the famous Atkins Diet is based on it, for instance, and it’s very similar to the “Paleo” diet which is now gaining in popularity.  Why is there a link between obesity and poverty? Because poor societies rely on cheap foodstuffs – carbohydrate-rich foodstuff like bread and rice. Why is the Fast Food nation an obese nation?  Because carbohydrates are the appetizer, main course, dessert, and drink under the golden arches.
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Why We Get Fat is a book of tremendous importance. In the United States today, diets low in fat are emphasized even as sugary sodas are sold in the public schools. Little wonder that despite the prolonged ad campaigns of the past decades,  obesity and its related diseases continue to become worse. Not only are we missing the point, but our attempts to address the problem only exacerbate it. Consider diabetes, a disease defined by our bodies’ inability to manage its blood sugar. The dominant form (Type 2) of diabetes is caused by our bodies becoming resistant to insulin: that is, it is less effective at moving sugar out of the bloodstream and into cells. Thus, our bodies have to produce more of it to do the job, and naturally the body becomes even more resistant to insulin, rather like we build a tolerance for alcohol. When the body’s demand for insulin product exceeds its ability to do so, we recognize diabetes…but our solution is to inject more insulin into the bloodstream.  This is a ‘solution’ that guarantees the problem will never be addressed at its root.  The lesson of Why We Get Fat is that we become insulin-resistant because our diet demands we produce an abnormal amount of the hormone. Change the diet to minimize insulin demand, and our bodies won’t develop that resistance.If that weren’t enough, Taubes also pins the blame for high blood pressure and heart disease on it, though the latter is only a correlation.


Taubes has written two books in this vein; Good Calories, Bad Calories and this, Why We Get Fat. As I understand it, Good Calories, Bad Calories is the more substantial of the two, while Why We Get Fat is intended for a larger audience (har har) and emphasizes more application of the research. While Taubes doesn’t promote a specific diet, the appendix does list various others (like Atkins) and provides general guidelines to eating. I’ve been doing my homework on Taubes’ work for the last few months, since I first heard him in an extended interview on EconTalk, and I believe Why We Get Fat may be one of the most significant books I have ever read. Definitely recommended. 

Related:

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Cheap

Posted on June 8, 2012 by smellincoffee
Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture
© 2009 Ellen Ruppel Shell 
296 pages 
A few weeks ago I read Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, which is a critical history of  the 20th-century trend in business toward cheaper goods. The history begins in the 19thcentury, with the rise of bulk retailing department stores. The existence of a business atmosphere that didn’t prioritize the lowest prices possible seems surreal to someone like myself, who came of age in the era of Wal-Mart triumphant.  But according to Shell, traditional businessmen were positively scandalized by the ambitions of new retailers, who opted to make their profits by selling an enormous amount of cheap merchandise rather than a respectable amount of more moderately priced items. The new business model transformed the world, but there are consequences to every action.  
Shell covers some of the same ground as was covered in The Wal-Mart Effect: the new model shifts the balance of power in business relationships from suppliers to retailers, which is bad news given that the retailers tend to be more monolithic, concentrating power in the hands of a few. Consumer expectations for cheap goods has disastrous environmental consequences: cheap is an adjective that once meant not just inexpensive, but inferior, and that meaning remains valid. The goods manufactured and sold by Wal-Mart and IKEA are produced as cheaply as possible, using the cheapest – most inferior – materials as possible. Not only do these cheaply-made goods wear out quickly, but they can’t be made into anything else. Although they cost the consumer little, they are a grave waste of resources in an age that can’t afford such waste. The costs that the consumers are spared are paid by cheap, abused labor, and the global environment.  Shell also writes on price mechanisms and the psychology of selling, opining that the retailers’ success in convincing consumers that items can be sold this cheaply has distorted our concept of what things should truly cost, and ends by extolling the virtues of craftsmanship – a value I’m given to share. I despise purchasing items that won’t last, or visiting stores where service is nonexistent because there the only reason people are hired is to restock merchandise and check goods out.
            How convincing this is, I can’t say: The Wal-Mart Effect familiarized me with most of the key concepts. I was struck most here by the notion that we are creating garbage goods from garbage materials. Unfortunately, I can’t see that most people will decide to start buying more expensive goods, even if the discount culture depresses wages and wastes resources. However,  as the 21stcentury progresses, the scarcity of resources will force people to use them more intelligently regardless of their wishes. 
Related:
The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman
Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Revolution, Tom Friedman  
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A Blaze of Glory

Posted on June 7, 2012 by smellincoffee

A Blaze of Glory
© 2012 Jeff Shaara
464 pages

Come all you gallant soldiers, a story I will tell
About the bloody battle on top of Shiloh’s hill
It was an awful struggle; it’ll cause your heart to chill
All from the bloody battle on top of Shiloh’s hill.

  In 1974, Michael Shaara wrote an unparalleled novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, eschewing a traditional narrative and telling the story directly from the point of view of various generals and infantrymen who contended against one another amid Pennsylvania’s rocky hills and woodlands. The novel met enormous critical and popular success, and when it became a movie,  Shaara’s son Jeff was prompted to consider picking up where his late father left off and writing similar novels in the same time. He responded with Gods and Generals, concerning the war’s beginning, and later with The Last Full Measure, making his father’s original part of an American Civil War trilogy. Keeping his father’s style, Shaara followed up on his success with novels set in all of the United States’ major wars – the Invasion of Mexico, the War of Independence, and the two world wars.  The WW2 novels saw Shaara attempting to create his own narrative approach, one focused on fewer characters, but in A Blaze of Glory he returns to both his original style and setting:  1862, the American Civil War. But this time Shaara writes not of Lee and Grant, of the armies of the Potomac and of Virgina. Here, the action begins in the west, and the main event is the staggeringly bloody battle of Shiloh.

            Shaara turning his attention to the little-regarded western theater is most welcome:  although the battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg may have some name recognition,  the eastern characters and battles (Lee and Grant;  Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg) dominate the national imagination.  I also welcome Shaara’s return to his and his father’s former style: the WW2 novels were overly dominated by one or two characters and didn’t deliver the varied substance of The Killer Angels and other works. Here, Shaara’s panel includes Albert Sidney Johnston, Nathan Bedford Forrest,  Grant, Sherman, and a few infantrymen from both sides. This allows Shaara to tell the story from both sides, without demonizing either. Consistently, the generals chide their men for dehumanizing the enemy, pointing out that the “rebs” or the “bluebellies” are just as clever, just as tough, and just as resolute in believing the righteousness of their cause as their respective side is.

            Shaara’s writing in A Blaze of Glory is as compelling as ever: he captures splendidly the utter confusion in the opening day of battle, as the southern troops hammer through a bewildered Union line, and the grisly impact of the bloodshed on the second day. It’s an experience that leaves one stunned, especially when main characters become part of the carnage. At novel’s end, one can’t help but reflect on how much was lost in one battle for relatively nothing, and the epilogue doesn’t improve judgments of the battle’s worth.  Unlike battles covered in other novels, there’s no triumph to celebrate, nothing to redeem the carnage and make it seem worthwhile. And yet even knowing this, I’d read it again, because Johnston is a particularly inviting character, and the suspense and action make it an exciting read even given the subdued ending.

            If Blaze of Glory is any indication of what we have to look forward to, Shaara’s new ACW trilogy will prove quite a treat, for it begins with a battle that is both a thriller and gives opportunity for sober reflection on the costs of the war.

Although we won the battle, my heart is filled with pain
The one that brought me to this life I’ll never see again
I pray to the lord  if consistent with his will
Lord save the souls of them poor boys that died on Shiloh’s hill.

Related:
  • The Killer Angels; Gods and Generals; The Last Full Measure; Gone for Soldiers; Michael and Jeff Shaara
  • Shiloh, 1862, Winston Groom
  • “The Battle of Shiloh Hill”, various artists. The most haunting version I’ve yet heard is Bobby Horton’s. YouTube has a cover by Wayne Erbsen.
Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 7 Comments

Teaser Tuesday (5 June)

Posted on June 5, 2012 by smellincoffee

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “When the wind changes direction, there are those who build walls and those who build windmills.” What will we do? 

p. 24, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why America Needs a Green Revolution. Thomas Friedman.

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly book event in which participants share excerpts from their current reads. Play along at Should Be Reading.

Posted in General | Tagged | 6 Comments