Battle Cry of Freedom is widely regarded as the finest single-volume history of the Civil War — and after finally reading it, I understand why. McPherson compresses an era of extraordinary complexity into a narrative that feels both sweeping and intimate. Although McPherson begins in the 1850s to lay the groundwork for secession, the book never bogs down; once the shooting starts, he manages to keep the guns of military, political, and social history firing together in concert. The result is a portrait of the Civil War era that feels alive: battles and generals appear alongside labor unrest, civilian hardships, and the illicit trade that persisted despite wartime edicts. Rather than distracting from the conflict, these episodes show how deeply the war reached into ordinary life. It draws from a deep well of primary and secondary resources, so many that I had to stop writing down books I wanted to look in for fear of making my TBR even more of a goliath than it is. Thorough, diverse, fair, and eminently readable, Battle Cry fully deserves its reputation as a masterpiece.
Battle Cry of Freedom begins in the decades before the Civil War, as sectional divisions grew. This was partially aided by immigration patterns: Germans and Irishmen who arrived to begin working their way into an American life had no experience with slavery, and were immune to the “That’s just the way it is” mentality that functionally maintained slavery for decades after the revolutionary generation declared that all men were created equal. A second Great Awakening also increased religious fervor, and in a direction that viewed slavery as inherently sinful, an offense against the notion that all men were created in the image of God, and deserved accordant dignity. Of course, there had been sectional disputes from the beginning of the Union, because different areas of the country had different economies and interests. Tariffs that protected northern manufacturers did so by raising the overall price of manufactured goods in the largely rural South, where the ease of making money from massive plantations made risky factory ventures far less common. As Americans and immigrants continued to pour west, different economic interests led to armed and bloody conflicts, as in Kansas.
Battle Cry of Freedom’s military portions include both the Eastern and Western theaters, though casual readers should know by ‘western’ we are discussing Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The Texan invasion of New Mexico is not included. This is not purely a military history, though: McPherson focuses on it when momentum is important, but otherwise takes breaks to look at home front issues, changing politics, etc. The book makes it clear from the beginning that the war’s origins are complex: it was caused by slavery, but not necessarily about slavery, save for a vanishing minority of Union soldiers and Confederate planters. The majority of Union soldiers fought to preserve the Union and in outrage that a fort flying the Stars and Stripes had been fired upon; Southerners had viewed the North with increasing animosity for decades and fought to create a new, southern Confederacy that would remain truer to the Constitution as they interpreted it. McPherson’s early chapters do an excellent job of bringing the secession crisis to a boil: the more popular and militant abolitionism grew in the North, the more entrenched the southern elite and southern culture in general became about the slavery issue. A “necessary evil” in 1800 had become a positive good by 1860. Lincoln was extremely cautious about any anti-slavery rhetoric or measure at the beginning of the war, in large part because the loyalties of several states (Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland) were not guaranteed. This meant offering assurances in the early part of 1861 that no anti-slavery measures were contemplated, and even during the first two years of the war Lincoln countermanded the actions of Union officers who attempted to materially weaken the local opposition by declaring their slaves free. This would, of course, become a Union strategy as the war developed: slaves were viewed as material assets of the Confederacy that needed to be removed from the equation. Not only did freeing them diminish the Southern labor pool, but these new wards of the Union could free up soldiers from fatigue duty. The Union’s legal definition of slaves they ‘freed’ at this point tried to side-step the question of emancipation by declaring freed slaves to be “contraband”: seized property. Eventually, Lincoln decided to adopt emancipation as a total-war measure to help speed up the defeat of the rebellion, and it had the double boon of ensuring that Britain and France did not recognize the Confederacy more overtly than they already had, tacitly. Lincoln’s use of the ‘lever of emancipation’ continued to be a problem for him, especially in 1864 when it was revealed he’d rejected several diplomatic forays by the South preemptively because they would not countenance emancipation. (Jefferson Davis was similarly obdurate, but for a different reason: he declared that the South would rule itself, even if slavery vanished and every Southern plantation and city were set ablaze.)
Although I’m fairly familiar with the course of the war from obsessive reading of histories in high school, a book this big could not fail to turn up areas I’d never heard of. The most fascinating unheard of story was the presence of a few political figures in the Midwest who greeted the increasing abolitionist nature of the war with hostility: they proposed to create a new confederacy with other northern states outside of New England where abolitionism was most strident. In addition to racial animosity, they also declared that they were not sending their boys and men to die to free other men who would then drift northward and compete with them for jobs! I also appreciated McPherson’s separate chapters on the coastal and river wars: I didn’t appreciate how many ports were seized by the US Navy from the opening weeks of the war. McPherson also covers bread and draft riots throughout the war: the South’s struggle to feed itself grew worse with Sherman and Wilson’s raids, and many men began deserting to return to their homes to help their wives and children. McPherson does not shy away from the depredations of war, including Sherman’s spiteful attack on South Carolina which had marginal military significance but served to brutally punish the people for secession.
This is, in summary, quite a history. It manages to be comprehensive without becoming overwhelming, and remains surprisingly nonpartisan – recording in the same voice Confederate soldiers focusing their ire on black troops at the Battle of the Crater as the appalling behavior of Union troops marauding through Fredericksburg in 1862, destroying evacuated homes for no reason other than malice. Although I’ve shied away from it for years because of its size, I found the writing so compelling that once I began I could scarcely stop. It is, simply, magisterial.
Today’s TTT is “books set in snowy places”. Well, that rules out anything in Alabama! But first, a couple of Tuesday Teases from The Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson.
“Soon after dawn on February 16, Buckner sent a proposal to Grant for discussion of surrender terms. Back came a blunt reply: ‘No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works.’ Buckner was nettled by these ‘ungenerous and unchivalrous’ words. After all, he had lent the down-and-out Grant money to help him get home after his resignation from the army in 1854.”
“The boost that the battle [of Chancellorsville] gave to Southern morale proved in the end harmful, for it bred an overconfidence in their own prowess and a contempt for the enemy that led to disaster. Believing his troops to be invincible, Lee was about to ask them to do the impossible.”
But mostly [Martin van Buren] eludes us because no one is looking for him anymore. He’s a lost president, floating in purgatory between Jackson and the Civil War, unremembered by most, and doomed to occupy the least heroic categories designed by historians (he has a lock on “average”). Once it was not so. Approximately six generations ago, it was impossible not to have an opinion about Martin Van Buren. And these opinions were not for the faint of heart.” MARTIN VAN BUREN, Ted Widmer
Ten Books for Playing in the Snow…
(1) The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis. Bit of a gimme: the whole premise is that when the Pensevies arrive in Narnia it’s always winter and never Christmas.
(2) The View from the Summit,Sir Edmund Hillary. The first man to mount Mount Everest recalls some of his adventures.
(3) Sunlight at Midnight, a history of St. Petersburg. I first visited St. Petersburg in a bookish way via American Phoenix, in which John Quincy Adams complained of the city being constantly frozen in.
(4) The Saxon Stories series by Bernard Cornwell, which is set in England and Scandinavia in the middle ages and presumably has snow in the winter books.
(5) Winterkill, CJ Box. The natural landscape and weather are usually huge factors in Box’s game warden series, and this starts early with #2, Winterkill.
(6) Winter World, Bernd Heinrich. A look at how animals have adapted themselves to extreme cold.
(7) Winter, Gary Paulsen. The story of a teenager marooned in the Canadian forests in winter.
(8)If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now, Chris Ingrahm. A memoir of moving to the midwest and and having to learn on how to respond to snowmageddon that’s so normal no one realizes they’re coping through a disaster every single year.
(9) A Tudor Christmas, Alison Weir. A social history of Christmastide in medieval England, where there was probably snow. Also, ghost stories, since that used to be a big thing in English at Christmas.
(10) Lost on Purpose, Patrick Taylor. A man’s memoir of trying to follow Lewis and Clark’s explorations in the mountains…..as snowstorms move in.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader opens with one of my favorite lines from Lewis’s fiction, and repeats that achievement toward its close. “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” Said lad is the cousin of the Pevensie children, and he’s a bit of a rotter. One can imagine him getting on quite well with Dudley Dursley, almost. Edmund and Lucy are visiting him when all three are drawn inexplicably into a portrait of a ship at sea: the Dawn Treader. They find themselves three years removed from their last visit to Narnia. Young Prince Caspian is now King Caspian, and he’s on a mission. Now that peace reigns once more, he wants to seek out several exiled lords who were loyal to his father before Caspian’s evil uncle began getting up to mischief. They are scattered throughout the Lone Islands, and so the children and their companions set about visiting different isles, each offering its own dangers and delights.
While this appears to be a straightforward adventure story, it runs on a layer of Christian theology that occasionally makes itself obvious. When Eustace finds himself literally encased in his own vices (in a way I won’t name for fear of spoilers), he tries to tear them off only to find the viciousness still there. Finally, he’s gently told by Aslan that this is something He, the Lion, must do. A secular reader might take this as merely an instance of Aslan being stronger than Eustace, but a Christian sees an overt statement about the need for grace to overcome sin. Aslan is constantly appearing at points where characters are in need of that grace. This isn’t a deus ex machina device; it’s more like Nathan reproaching David after the death of Uriah, or God Himself confronting Jonah after the silly ass pitches a fit when Nineveh is not destroyed.
Although Voyage flags a bit in its last third for me, the first parts of the book are delightful—especially with a good narrator who can bring the Duffers’ inherent absurdity to life. Reepicheep was the only weakness, vocally: it’s hard for a grown man to present both the gravitas of Aslan and a noble mouse-warrior. I loved Jacobi’s Aslan in particular. The book ends with King Caspian having fulfilled his quest and the Pevensies and their cousin on the verge of re-entering our world. Here Aslan tells Lucy and Edmund they are getting too old for Narnia, and that they will never come this way again. The result is one of my favorite passages not just in this book, but in all of the Narnian stories. I am very much looking forward to The Silver Chair and The Last Battle—especially the latter, because it’s narrated by PATRICK STEWART!
“Please Aslan, before we go, will you tell us when we can come back to Narnia again? Please. And oh, do, do, do, make it soon.” “Dearest,” said Aslan very gently, “you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.” “Oh, Aslan!!” said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices. “You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own world now.” “It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?” “But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan. “Are — are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund. “I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
This passage resonates with me the way it is because Lewis somehow accomplishes the task of making Aslan Jesus-like without endlessly quoting the Gospels: he captures Aslan’s dangerous strength, but also his mildlness and compassion, and….gentle knowing. There’s a sweet scene in Prince Caspian wherein Reepicheep the mouse is bemoaning the loss of his tail in battle, and the great Lion settles down and takes him seriously. Reepicheep is so small and his complaint so petty — vain, almost — but the Lion’s love for the mouse is such that he listens and grants the noble warrior his tail back. It made me think of how silly creatures we can be, and yet still receive grace.
Today’s annual remembrance of the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor has an especially salient echo given that it’s a Sunday. I am reminded of Captain Billy Mitchell’s interwar warning, quoted in The Airman’s War by Albert Marrin. By chance, I happened to find some color footage from the Pearl Harbor attack. It’s mostly just buildings burning, but the historian in me is thrilled by seeing one day 84 years ago suddenly alive in any capacity.
The Japanese will not politely declare war . . . Hawaii … is vulnerable to the sky. It is wide open to Japan. Yet we bring our Navy in at Pearl Harbor and lock it up every Saturday night so that the sailors can spend their week’s pay to please the merchants and politicians. . . . And Hawaii is swarming with Japanese spies. . . . That’s where the blow will be struck — on a fine, quiet Sunday morning.” –
“What is the use of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?”
Grover Cleveland may have lost his claim to fame in being the only president to be elected to two nonconsecutive terms, but he is nevertheless a striking and memorable figure. Hailed as ‘the last Jeffersonian’ by another biography, his two terms in office spread across a sea change in Democratic politics: Jefferson’s party of constitutional reserve and deep skepticism of government intervention would be overtaken by populists who were willing and eager to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Cleveland, Troy Senik writes, is the only two-term president to have fallen into the memory hole, despite winning three popular votes in a row. Perhaps this is because his approach to governance was so unlike any that followed him – his commitment to principle over party….or popularity. Although in his second term Cleveland was slightly more willing to bow to that devil of political expediency, he was as H.L. Mencken described, a “man of iron” – one fixed on his values, popularity or success be hanged.
Cleveland is an extraordinary figure: the son of a struggling preacher who became a struggling teenager himself, forced by his father’s premature death to provide for his mother and siblings. He eventually found a place where he could study law while working, and developed a reputation for himself as a man of integrity . This is a rare commodity in politics, and it guided his career in politics from sheriff to mayor to governor to President in relatively short order. Cleveland is in fact the only president who has served all three of those executive offices, let alone serving them in such a consequential order. Cleveland’s reputation as a stiffnicked man of principle came in handy for the Democrats: they had been out of power since the Civil War, when the Democratic party divided into two geographical parts and the Republicans swept elections by default, leading to southern Democrats seceding from the Union until being forced back in by the bayonet and the bullet. Republicans had gotten soft after decades of power: they were corrupt and sore in need of a serious antagonist. That arrived in the mustachioed and rotund form of one Grover Cleveland, whose rise to power was so swift his first home was the Governor’s Mansion.
Cleveland established a reputation for himself in his lower offices as a man who was intolerant of corruption and immovable on principle: he often took actions that weakened his own party (like not filling positions with party-approved favorites, instead choosing the men most qualified), or annoyed his friends. He often chose an unpopular option in the name of principle, as when he vetoed a bill that would grant flooded farmers free seed. Cleveland was not a cold man: he gave generously to those in need, helping support a friend’s widow and child, but he saw no legal authority for disaster relief in Article 2 of the Constitution that concerned his office. That would eventually come to bite him in the end, once his unyielding views on monetary policy caused short-term economic issues that soured the entire country on the Democratic party, but it made his career and made him to be something of a legend. It’s harder for a modern reader to appreciate Cleveland’s policies, in part because the expected powers of the presidency have expanded so enormously – and in part because some policies are simply obscure to us. Monetary policy in general is an arcane subject, even to economists, but at the risk of making too sweeping a generalization – I have gotten the sense that the pure-gold standard was best for sound money, but made credit harder to access for poorer Americans, whereas including silver in the currency tended to risk inflation. We have not been on a gold standard since Nixon, and our constantly inflating prices testify to the fact – but back in Cleveland’s day, the amount of money in the banking system was fairly strictly tied to the amount of available gold to spend. It is an economic truism that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs, and part of Cleveland’s task as president was managing those tradeoffs. As a Jeffersonian, he was for low tariffs, because these kept prices lower for the working man, especially farmers and Westerners — but low tariffs also allowed gold to escape the country, as more specie flowed out buying foreign goods. The chapters on monetary policy will, in fact, be the hardest parts of this book to appreciate.
This is not a book about the policies of Cleveland, though: while they are considered at length, we also get a look at Cleveland the man. His contemporaries claimed he had “Cleveland luck”: Senik writes that if Cleveland were not a political genius, he had a remarkable ability to stumble into situations that made him out to look like one. He is intensely admirable, with a sterling work ethic and sense of moral order that reminds me of John Adams. Another contemporary remarked that the “Cleveland luck” was nothing more than obsessive work. Once G.C. was married, he relaxed a bit: it helped that his wife was younger than him, and so pretty that all of Washington was distracted by her. Senik occasionally comments on the personal scandals that Republicans tried to gin up about Cleveland, but sees no merit in them. Although I’d previously read a Cleveland biography, I found plenty of new information here: I didn’t realize how involved the plot to keep the public ignorant of his mouth-cancer was. He wound up being operated on in a boat, for privacy’s sake. This volume is also girthy enough to include Cleveland the man, not just Cleveland the politician, so we see him taking pleasure in fishing and hunting and being caught in reverie over sunsets and mountains and such.
I enjoyed Man of Iron enormously, and not just because of its subject whom I increasingly admire. Senik did a wonderful job of presenting Cleveland in the context of his times, and making him come alive. Although he’s very complimentary of his subject, Senik doesn’t shy away from him when that is merited – as he does during Cleveland’s second term. Senik sees Cleveland’s defense of an independent Hawaii as more posture than substance, since the expansionist Congress would overwhelm him anyway, and there’s similar criticism during the last gold-vs-silver debates. I took pleasure in reading that although Cleveland’s policies had caused disruption that caused the entire Democratic party to tank in his last election, he was nonetheless hailed ten years later as people recognized his unwillingness to bow before popular opinion, fortified as he was by the facts as he saw them.
[H. L.} Mencken, twenty-five years after the death of Grover Cleveland, opened a column about the former president this way: “We have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, but we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider [sic] and more admirable… [he] came into office his own man and he went without yielding any of that character for an instant.”
As Edward S. Bragg remarked during a nominating speech for Cleveland at the 1884 Democratic convention, “we love him for the enemies he has made.”
There is a long history in American life of bellicose men whose hardness was an essential part of their political appeal. Grover Cleveland, by contrast, was most easily roused to wrath when someone was misquoting Tennyson.
If the story of Mayor Cleveland’s inaugural message to the city council had to be summarized with one fact it would be this: it so outraged his adversaries that midway through its reading there was a motion to prevent the clerk from finishing it.
[Teddy] Roosevelt, whose rhetoric, when exercised, tended toward a curious mix of God of the Old Testament and petulant child, bellowed, “You must not veto those bills. You cannot! You shall not! I can’t have it and I won’t have it!” Cleveland had a trademark tic in moments like this. He would raise his meaty hand in the air. He would clench it into a cannonball. And he would land it swiftly back on the desk in a thunderclap. That sound and Cleveland’s simultaneous declaration—“Mr. Roosevelt, I am going to veto those bills!”—are recorded to have landed with such force that the young bull moose fell back in his chair… before subsequently excusing himself.
No one has endured more to make this project a reality than my wife, Veneta, who suffered through two years of her husband spending most of his free time with an obese, mustachioed nineteenth-century politician.
The Book of Common Prayer is the heart of the Anglican communion, and for my money contains some of English’s best phrasing outside Shakespeare and the Bible. Since 2011, its liturgy has been part of my life, its phrases embedded in my memory. I’ve long wanted to read this history, and recently writing a short story in which words from the liturgy — “Lift up your hearts” — play a significant role made me pick it up and read, to borrow from St. Augustine’s “Tolle! Lege!” Although I found it fascinating early on, when the history of the BCP is bound up with the breakway of the Church of England and its struggles to find footing as monarchs with varying theological views kept dying and changing the rules, it largely stays focused on the original British BCP until the last few score pages of the book, at which point different versions have multiplied with such fecundity, and Anglicanism has fallen so much in influence, that it hardly seems to be a point. What I will remember it for is the chaos of the BCP’s struggle to establish itself — not simply because Mary disrupted the protestantification of the Church of England, but because Henry, Cramner, Edward, and Elizabeth had wildly different interpretations of Protestantism and what they wanted the Church of England to be. It also made me curious about medieval English Christianity in general: Jacobs claims that sermons were rare and that Communion was a rariety, making me wonder what people did when they came to church. Jacobs indicates that laypeople just said their private prayers while the priest observed some service appointed in the missal. I suspect I would need to read Duffy’s oft-quoted Stripping of the Altars, which appraises medieval English religious practice and the coming of the Reformation, for a fuller story. This book is of interest, I think, but I suspect its audience is niche.
Quotes
The historian Peter Brown has pointed out that the cult of the saints arose in a Roman culture in which ordinary people could do little to remedy any injustice they might suffer, or to clear themselves of any charges of wrongdoing. They needed friends in high places. If a local patrician could befriend them, then they had a chance of receiving justice or at least escaping punishment. “It is this hope of amnesty,” Brown writes, “that pushed the saint to the foreground as patronus.”
The regular prayers of monks and nuns are best understood as attempts by the church to assign some of its members to do what the disciples could not do: to stay awake and pray with the Lord. There is therefore a close link between the monastic hours and the sufferings of Good Friday. In their ideal form, as established by St. Benedict of Nursia in the sixth century, they are conducted every three hours and are named as follows: Matins (midnight); Lauds (3 a.m., or, more commonly, dawn); Prime (6 a.m.); Terce (9 a.m.); Sext (noon); Nones (3 p.m.); Vespers (6 p.m.); Compline (9 p.m.).
But thousands of English Christians read their prayer books and used them faithfully for private as well as public worship. The same cadences they whispered to themselves when alone, or read silently, or read aloud in the presence of their household, also accompanied them to church. It was therefore through public rites and private devotions alike that the book’s language “entered and possessed their minds.” The beauty of that language, together with its great debts to more ancient forms of worship—Lewis rightly notes that Cranmer and the other makers of the prayer book “wished their book to be praised not for original genius but for catholicity and antiquity”—made the book venerable in but a few generations.
When, in 1637, James tried to impose on the Church of Scotland a version of the Book of Common Prayer that closely resembled the 1549 book in its embrace of traditionalism, riots broke out. The most famous tale of the conflict involves one Jenny Geddes, who, when a minister began saying the Communion service in Edinburgh’s St. Giles Cathedral, threw a stool at the man and shouted, “Daur ye say Mass in my lug?” Presumably this story got around quickly, because when Bishop Whitford of Brechin read his first service from the prayer book he did so with two loaded pistols placed on the desk before him, in plain sight of the restive congregation.
Once more we see a sixteenth-century pattern repeating itself: as the ascent of Queen Mary had sent many evangelicals fleeing to the Continent with their prayer books, so now a large body of Royalist Anglicans took their books with them to France, where they continued to pray according to the now-familiar rites, but in exile. As Horton Davies has pointed out, this proved to be a vital moment in the prayer book’s history: during this period—variously called the Interregnum, the Commonwealth, or the Protectorate—“the Prayer Book had become the symbol of a secret, exciting, and prohibited worship (like the Mass for the English Recusants), and, even more significantly, the symbol of loyalty to a suffering church. Even in palmier days, it was never to lose this profound respect; as if it was necessary for it to have been prohibited for it to be fully appreciated.”
Among the more striking new prayers in the 1662 book are the “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea,” an indication of England’s ever-increasing sense of itself as a maritime power around the world. These include prayers “to be also used in her Majesty’s Navy every day”—one of which begins, “O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea”—and prayers for particular circumstances, including one for success in naval battle and two for salvation from storms: “Look down, we beseech thee, and hear us, calling out of the depth of misery, and out of the jaws of this death, which is ready now to swallow us up: Save, Lord, or else we perish.” These are accompanied by brief, one-sentence prayers to be used in occasions of great urgency, when the crew cannot gather to pray corporately, and psalms appointed for “Thanksgiving after a Storm.” To read these prayers is to be immersed in a drama, almost as happens to the reader of Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars—novels in which we hear these prayers said many times, with fervor corresponding to the demands of the moment, or lack thereof.
For him, and for many who have felt themselves at the mercy of chaotic forces from within or without, the style of the prayer book has healing powers. It provides equitable balance when we ourselves have none.
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, what is your earliest memory? More on that story in a few minutes! First, let’s check in with….
WWW Wednesday
WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Book of Common Prayer by Alan Jacobs. A history of the English prayer book which only barely mentions the American BCP. Interesting but disappointing. May post a review today, but right now it’s 25% review and 75% interesting quotes.
WHAT are you reading now? Closer and closer to finishing Man of Iron, a biography of Grover Cleveland; halfway through The Battle Cry of Freedom, a history of the “Civil War era”. It’s quite interesting: even before the war begins, the word ‘reconstruction’ is used to refer to the potential reunification of the four-initial seceding states, when Lincoln and Davis were still contemplating their shared problem of “Well, what happens now?”
WHAT are you reading next? Battle Cry is going to keep me occupied, I do believe, but after that I need to focus on science to finish out the Science Survey for this year. One title I have is When the Earth Had Two Moons.
Long and Short Prompt: Earliest Memory
My earliest memory is of hiding in the cupboards as a little thing: looking back, it strikes me as unusual that there was space to crawl, even at 3 or 4, because my parents have always been ones for keeping lots of canned food and cooking supplies on hand. My earliest dream-memory also involves hiding. In the dream there were monster-like people who lived in my neighborhood, and I accidentally hit the son of the monsters when we were playing. In the dream I was scared and ran away to hide under the house, and when the son and his monster-father came looking for me, I started hitting myself on the head and insisting that we were even.
If the story of Mayor Cleveland’s inaugural message to the city council had to be summarized with one fact it would be this: it so outraged his adversaries that midway through its reading there was a motion to prevent the clerk from finishing it.
Today’s TTT is a total freebie, so I am going to go with……My Favorite December Reads of the Last Ten Years. I’ll begin with 2024 and work backwards.
The Last Decade’s December Favorites!
(1) The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife, Anna Johnston (2024). A charming story about a bankrupt and elderly man who literally stumbles into someone else’s life.
(3) The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry, ed. Paul Kingsnorth. 2022. My introduction to Kingsnorth!
(4) Ava’s Man, Rick Bragg. 2021. A memoir about Bragg’s grandfather, Charlie Bundrum. I love Bragg’s writing:
He was blessed with that beautiful, selective morality that we Southerners are famous for. Even as a boy, he thought people who steal were trash, real trash. He thought people who would lie were trash. “And a man who’ll lie,” he said, even back then, “will steal.” Yet he saw absolutely nothing wrong with downing a full pint of likker—a full pint is enough to get two men drunk as lords—before engaging in a fistfight that sometimes required hospitalization. He saw no reason to obey some laws—like the ones about licenses, fees and other governmental annoyances—but he would not have picked an apple off another man’s ground and eaten it.
This past week I have been taking care of animals a county away, and have had plenty of time to make further progress on my Chronicles of Narnia audiobook experience. I am listening to the Audible versions, not the full-cast ones narrated by Paul Schofield (!). In this collection, Alex Jennings reads The Horse and his Boy, and Lynn Redgrave reads Prince Caspian.
The Horse and his Boy is one of my favorites of the Narnian stories because of its quasi-middle eastern setting. We open on a young boy who is a slave in “”Calormen”, an area inspired by romantic ideas of the medieval-Islamic world. It’s very Arabian Nights esque, with a strong emphasis on oral storytelling and despotic kings and the like. The boy, Shasta, believes himself to be kidnapped from somewhere else, and as it happens he encounters a horse, Bree, who can talk and therefore knows he is from somewhere else. Only Narnian creatures talk; the rest of the world’s animals are mere beasts. The two decide to escape together, and strike for “Narnia and the North!”. As it happens, this story happens within the timeframe of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, wherein Queen Susan and her siblings are living out a full Narnian life and are adults. Queen Susan has visited Calormen to investigate the prospects of a marriage, but finds her intended rather ghastly. The spurned beau resolves to kidnap her, and so while Shasta is going north and picking up a sidekick in the form of a young woman (Aravis) who is also running away from an arranged marriage, the stories get tangled up and soon armies are marching. It’s read marvelously by Alex Jennings, who has a gift for vocal characterization, and Horse has some of my favorite Lewisian lines. (One particular one being that Shasta and Aramis, the young woman, got so used to arguing with one another that when they grew up, they married in order to do it more comfortably.) The only vocal quibble is that Rabadash, the evil prince intent on rapine, sounds a bit campy. (Think Prince Charming in Shrek 2.)
Prince Caspian is set after Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: the children are standing on a platform and suddenly find themselves pulled back into Narnia. Specifically, they are in the ruins of their old castle, which confuses them enormously: the castle looks like it’s been abandoned for centuries. Presently, they find out that Narnia was invaded generations ago by another race of men, the Telmarines, who drove out the talking animals and such. The heir to their throne, however, is a curious young lad who wants to know more about Old Narnia, and his wicked uncle decides to knock him off — as wicked royal uncles and stepmothers are wont to do. Caspian flies for help into the deep wood, where he meets Old Narnian creatures who still remember the days of Peter, Susan, Lucy, and Edmund — and they have a horn that can summon help. Turns out the horn summoned not Aslan this time, but the four children after they’d returned to our world. Lynn Redgrave read this one, and while I was surprised at first at a female narrator, I found she did the characters quite well. As I quickly realized when starting The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it’s much easier for a woman to sound like a pompous young boy than a man: the man just sounds silly. (Dawn Treader’s vocal interpretation of Reepicheep is positively irritating.) I think this may have been my first ever audiobook with a female narrator. Not sure why: it’s not as if I’ve been avoiding them. Edit: No, it wasn’t. I listened to Scarlett Johannssen read Alice in Wonderland.
I began the month with intentions of focusing on SF, but….well. Things got weird. Well, to be honest, they started with Xanadu so they BEGAN weird, but you’ll see.
NOVEMBER
Xanadu, 1980. XANADU! *clap-clap-clap* XANADU! *clap-clap-clap* XANADU! Some dude falls in love with Olivia Newton John and meets an old guy on the beach who fell in love with the ageless Olivia Newton John back in the Glenn Miller days, and they decide to open a club that fuses the 1940s and the 1980s together and then they discover that Olivia Newton John is a Greek goddess who is supposed to inspire artists like Some Dude and Glenn Kelly and definitely not fall in love with them. Electric Light Orchestra provides music.
Dune, Part 2, 2024. The shadows of Arakkis hide many secrets…..
This is a continuation of Dune, but now Paul and his mother Lady Jessica are accepting their fated role as leaders within the Fremen. They wage war against the Baldheads and their leader ISCREAMINEVERYSINGLESCENE. Great performances from Timothée Chalamet & Stellan Skarsgård.
Also, parts of this movie are unintentionally hilarious having watched Life of Brian.
“I’m not the Mahdi, you understand? HONESTLY!” “Only the true Mahdi denies his divinity!” “What sort of chance does THAT give me? All right then, I AM the Mahdi!!” “He IS the Mahdi!” “Now bugger off!”
“Hope? We are Bene Gesserit. We don’t hope. We plan.”
Paul: If I go South, all my visions lead to horror. Billions of corpses scattered across the galaxy, all dying because of me. Gurney: Because you lose control? Paul: Because I gain it.
Ghost in the Shell, 1995. An interesting Japanese cyberpunk anime film set in a future where human-machine interfacing is fairly common. Some Japanese detectives are on the trail of a mysterious hacker, but the full story delves into questions of machine intelligence and sentience. It’s existential SF that’s visually rich, though sometimes the voice work was wooden. Unexpected quotation of I Corinthians.
Django Unchained, 2012. This appeared on my radar because I was looking for movies in which Christoph Waltz was a dominating presence. Here, he’s sharing the screen with Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson, but he’s still very much in the game. Well, for two hours, anyway. Herr Waltz plays a German bounty hunter who buys a slave played by Jamie Foxx (Django) who can identify the persons of a particularly lucrative bounty: Waltz’s intention is to set Django free immediately, but he becomes intrigued by the fact that Django has a wife of a German name, one from a powerful German myth, and most of the movie is Waltz und Foxx tracking the woman down and then laboring to free her from Leonardo di Caprio in his first villainous role. Leo kills it as an eccentric dandy, and now I want to see him in The Great Gatesby. (He had my curiosity, but now he has my attention.) I am gob-smacked that he did Django, Wolf of Wall Street, and The Great Gatesby all in a relatively short window of time. Did not like the gratuitously violent ending or the too-frequent intrusion of rap music in the last hour or so. There were quite a few historical anachronisms given that this film is set in 1858: the scene with the “Klansmen” arguing over the efficacy of their eyeholes is hilarious, but nonsensical, as is a later scene with someone wearing a Confederate forage cap. (Lots of language in the aforementioned clip.)
“Oh, monsieur, you can’t imagine what it’s like to not hear your native tongue in four years.” “Hell, I can’t even imagine two weeks in Boston.”
Jumpers, 2008. A teenager plunges into an ice-cold lake while trying to retrieve a gift for his wannabe girlfriend and, approaching death, finds himself in the local library. He has unwittingly realized an ability to ‘jump’, or teleport, anywhere he wants to go. He suddenly transforms into Hayden Christianson, who after eight years or so of traveling the world on money he steals from banks, becomes stalked by Samuel L. Jackson. SLJ is a “Paladin”, someone who irrationally hates “Jumpers” – Hayden is evidently not alone – and wants to kill them because only God can be omniprescent. Nevermind that Jumpers are not omnipresent, they can only be in one place at one time and transfer from place to place with certain restrictions, but whatever. It turns into a thriller with Mace Windu trying to kill young Skywalker before he joins the Dark Side, because he alleges all Jumpers turn to the dark side.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. I watched Terminator some years ago, enough that I’ve forgotten most everything but the basic premise and the haunting percussive soundtrack. Bottom line: in the future, sentient machines are waging war on humanity and they want to destroy the leader of the resistance by knocking off his mother. Terminator 2 reintroduces Arnie as The Terminator, a killing machine, but now his former target (the future human rebellion leader John Connor) has reprogrammed some iteration of him to protect John Connor in the past. This is necessary because the machines waging war on humanity have sent back another terminator, this one a shapeshifter, I didn’t realize how much of this movie has saturated pop culture: I recognized line after line. While going in I had some doubts – movies that are just chase scenes and supermen bashing the hell out of each other and destroying property bore me, hence why I watch very few superhero movies – this proved far more compelling than predicted. There was one scene where I thought “WOW! What a great finale!” and then realized – wait a minute, there’s twenty minutes left in this film. Nice twist. The special effects are crazy for 1991, and it’s replete with badass reloads.
All Quiet on the Western Front, 2022. Bloody hell, don’t recommend watching this on the eve of Armistice Day. Also, the Netflix version is dubbed rather than subtitled, so instead of hearing German we see a lot of blokes speaking RP before they get gunned down by other chaps speaking RP. Bit disorienting, that, it’s like an Arsenal & Tottenham Hotspur match. Fortunately I was able to find a way to switch to the original German audio with English subtitles, as things should be. Alles in ordnung, ja? …pretty grim movie, I will say.
The Great Gatesby, 2013. The first 30-40 minutes of this were dreadful, with so much rap that my original notes include the phrase “someone should literally be caned”, but once I was an hour or so in the story started taking shape. There may have been some mood whiplash from watching this right after All Quiet on the Western Front, because I went from Serious and Tragic to watching a bunch of richie riches act like fools and would have actively despised them even WITHOUT the rap. (I will say, though, that the nighttime shots of NYC were gorgeous, especially the street-level perspectives, and the cars were magnificent.) Do not recommend making a drinking game out of every time Leo says “Old Sport”. While there was a LOT of spectacle in this, I think one of my favorite scenes was a quiet moment where Love Interest drops her lighter, then Leo picks it up and lights her up and everyone is staring like yep, we definitely recognize this allusion to sexual chemistry.
St. Vincent, 2014. Bill Murray is a broke misanthropic ….widower? with a drinking problem. Then the house next door to him gets a single mom and her kid, Oliver. Insert Man Called Ove plot, only instead of being a very functional grump, Bill is more of a dysfunctional lush whose bond with Oliver no one understands. I love almost any movie Bill is in, and of course readers know I am an absolute sucker for the “curmudgeon is recalled to life” trope. This one is more gritty than Ove or say, Frank and Red: Murray’s character is deep in hock to loan sharks and has gambling, prostitution, drinking and cigarette addictions. However….as the movie progresses, we realize there’s more to Bill’s story than meets the eye: it’s a tough, tear-terking tale that turns out wonderfully sweet. A very me movie, I will say.
Priest: I’m a Catholic, which is the best of all religions, because we have the most rules. Me: IS THIS THE GUY FROM THE IT CROWD? I need him to tell someone to turn their device off and back on again. (It was.)
Oliver: I’m small, sir, if you haven’t noticed. Bill: Yeah? So was Hitler. Oliver: ….that’s a horrible comparison.
Mom, watching dancer/prostitute: Is that……[Bill’s] baby? Oliver: I prefer to stay away from the whole situation.
Oliver: What’s [Bill] like when I’m not around? Daka: He don’t like people. People don’t like him. Except cat. And you. Why you like him?
Edge of Tomorrow, 2014.
Me: I’m giving a movie called Edge of Tomorrow a taste. Movie Friend: Never heard of it. Me, 20 minutes later: It’s….Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day.
Europe has been invaded and taken over by hostile alien immigrants. Mad-Eye Moony is sending Tom Cruise and an army of Mechtroopers to do a little reconquista. Cruise is not an action badass, though: he’s a soft-handed PR flak who now gets to prove that with the mechsuits, even an untrained newbie could kill hundreds. I was on the fence about watching this, but when I saw that the late, great Bill Paxton was in this, I had to give it a shot. It gets…..weirder, though. When Cruise (inevitably) gets killed, he finds himself the day before Operation Downfall..again – and again, and again, and with each replay he starts using his foreknowledge to get further. It gets deeper than just “Tom Cruise basically does what video gamers do”, though, as Cruise encounters someone else who has had this experience and works with him. I hadn’t watched any trailers – my chain of thought was “Mm, SF, hmm- oo! Bill Paxton!” – so I was REALLY surprised by the early twist and thoroughly entertained.Interestingly, this was evidently based on a Japanese novel. Loved Bill Paxton in every scene.
Paxton: Private Kimmel, what is my view on gambling in the barracks? Private: You dislike it, Sgt Farrel. Paxton: Nance, Why do I dislike it? West Virginia Nance: Because it entertains the notion that our fate is in hands other than our own. Paxton: And what is my definitive position on the concept of fate, chorus? J Squad: THROUGH READINESS AND DISCIPLINE WE ARE MASTERS OF OUR FATE
Paxton: Haven’t you heard? We’re T-minus haul ass, it’s H-hour!
Cruise: Master Sergeant. You’re an American. Bill Paxton: No suh. I am from Kentucky. Me: ❤ ❤ ❤
Cruise: It doesn’t need to fly. It just needs to get us across that gap with speed. Me: You feel the need. The need for speed. (And…I was imitating Emily Blunt imitating Tom Cruise, to be honest.)
Source Code, 2011. Jake Gyllanhal is an Airborne officer rescued from a disastrous mission in Afghanistan to find himself in a strange cell, where he’s told he has been selected for a top-secret project. The DoD has found a way to cast a personality into an echo of the past so that vital information can be gleaned to understand what happened during disasters, and to pursue those responsible. Gyllanhal repeatedly relives the same eight minutes on a commuter train, each time trying to find where a bomb is, and who the bomber was – because the bomber may very well strike again. It gets much more interesting than that, though, and I can’t say how because of spoilers, but it ends on a sweet note. I was also much amused to see product placement for Bing, and this movie reminds me how much I REALLY miss seeing Jake and Maggie G. in movies.
The Time Machine, 2002. Jeremy Irons!…for like two minutes. There are other actors, and HG Wells The Time Machine happens, sort of, but in New York and with some kind of lunar apocalypse instead of class struggle. The main story, set in 800K or so, had a disappointing execution of the Eloi. The book had them to be small creatures, almost like children – but here they look like Polynesians. The Orcs – er, I mean, the Morlocks – at least look like their ogre-like descriptions in Wells’ original. This is an extremely loose adaptation of The Time Machine, and disappointing on that mark – but it had its visual moments and Jeremy Irons, so all’s right with the world. Nice music, too.
“What are your people called?” “New Yorkers, I guess.” “‘New Yorkers’. Are they friendly?” “Until you talk to them.”
The Last Castle, 2001. Superb drama with James Gandfolini, Robert Redford, and a young Mark Ruffalo. A general (Redford) with a legendary reputation – who was famously tortured in Hanoi but refused early release to remain with his men – is the newest prisoner of a military prison. Gandolfini, the commandant, is immediately torn with admiration for the man, plus his professional need to treat him like any other prison – including abject humiliation. Redford, though, is something of a Stoic, and I am certain Admiral James Stockdale was the inspiration for him. Redford, by personal example and admonition, urges the men to be true to the best in themselves, to comport themselves with dignity. There’s a moving scene where the men gather in formation and sing the USMC fight song in honor of a prisoner who stood on principle and was shot down in cold-blooded murder. Disgusted by Gandfolini’s treatment of the men, Redford moves to take over the prison in an effort have Gandfolini removed from his post as per the Military Code of Justice. (Losing control of your prison = update your resume, sport.) I don’t think I’ve seen Redford in anything else, but I believe I will now. I do have….questions, like HOW DID PRISONERS BUILD A TREBUCHET? One of ending scenes – of Old Glory rising above fire and ruins – gave me shudders. This came out five weeks after September 11, when similar shots could have been taken at Ground Zero.
“Why are you movin’ if I have checkmate in five moves?” “Because I have checkmate in three.”
“Frankly, general, I think he’s losing the plot. He’s become weak and pathetic.” “You may want to watch your word choice. That ‘weak’ and ‘pathetic’ man put these stars on my shoulder.”
Hoosiers, 1986. Gene Hackman. That’s all I needed. This one was a bit of a struggle for me: I had Bill Kauffman’s recommendation, but I know nothing about basketball. I’ve seen plenty of football and baseball games, all the way from high school to the professionals (in the case of baseball, in person), but never a single basketball game. Based on a true story of a small town school winning the state championship, and according to TvTropes the movie’s announcers were the same guys who did the real-world announcing, both in person and on radio.
Student: Progress. Progress is electricity. School consolidation – Me: BOO!
The Taking of Pelham 123, 2009. Continuing my march through James Gandolfini’s works. This film features John Travolta, who takes a subway passenger car hostage; Denzel Washington is forced to transform from transportation communicator into a hostage negotiator; and Gandolfini is the mayor of NYC who was done with this job before psychos threatened to kill a carload of people. The interplay that develops between Travolta and Washington is fascinating character drama. Also, train drama! ”
Denzel Washington: “A good Catholic would know he’s got a trainload of innocent people.” Ryder, with a Y. Ryder: “A good Catholic would know that no one is innocent. And I’m not going to kill all these hostages, I’d give up my leverage!
Mayor Gandolfini: Ten million dollars! Where do they get these numbers? Mook: That’s the limit, sir. You sign a request to the city controller, he forwards it to our lenders, cash gets released by the Federal Reserve. Limit is ten million. Mayor Gandfolfini: Some idiot with a gun wouldn’t know that. I didn’t know that. Mook: ….you’re very busy, sir. Gandolfini: How do YOU know that?
Mook: This is a leadership moment, sir. Mayor Gandolfini: I’m not running for reelection. I’m not running for president. I left my Rudy Giulani suit at home. Mook: You’re being selfish. It will take 30 seconds to reassure them.
Travolta: I told you, man. I told you. We all owe God a death. Washington: I don’t know what you owe God, but you can’t pay it in cash.
The Taking of Pelham 123, 1979. Walter Mathau is grumpy old man who is a lieutenant in the NYPD and has to deal with a bunch of lads with mustaches taking over a train.There’s a Carrie Fisher doppelganger and a young Thomas Sowell doppelganger present as hostages. Some WTC footage, all background. Compared to the 2009 version, I’d say this is a better action movie, even if 2009 is a better character drama.
Walter Matthau: And right in here is our operations manager, Rico Patrone, who on the weekends works for the Mafia. Rico, why don’t you tell them some of our more exciting recent news? Rico Patrone: Well, we thought we had a bomb scare. It turned out to be a cantaloupe.
Passenger: I’m sorry, sir, but shouldn’t we passengers be let in on what’s going on? Gangster: What’s happening, sir, is that you are being held hostage by four very dangerous men. Do what you’re told and nothing will happen to you. Passenger 2: That’s what they told me in Vietnam and I still got my ass shot full of lead.
Mayor: All I know is I am the mayor of the city of New York, the second-most important elected office in the entire country, and you’re telling me I have to suffer like any common schlub?! Nurse: I’m sorry you have the flu, mister Mayor.
Cop: WHY DON’T YOU TAKE A AIRPLANE HOSTAGE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE? Hood: BECAUSE WE’RE AFRAID OF FLYIN!
Cop: I’m only 20 yards away from the train. The supervisor’s been shot with a machine gun. Bigger Cop: Is he dead? Cop: Wouldn’t you be?
Mayor’s Assistant: Everyone’s on the way. But there’s no good running to them, Al. You’re the Mayor, the buck stops with you. Mayor: Oh, ****. Mayor’s assistant: God help us.
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Nonstop, 2014. Liam Neeson is an air marshall on a plane (instead of a boat, that would be weird) who starts getting text messages that threaten the passengers unless money is paid. After sussing how who he thinks it is – his fellow anonymous air marshall – things happen and Neeson finds himself under suspicion by everyone as The Baddie. It’s quite good as character drama, because the viewer’s suspicions and antagonisms will change throughout the film. There are probably technical liberties taken, but I for one was on the edge of my seat. The movie’s end has….quite the twist.
There were a lot of minor actors in this I noticed, like Lady Mary and That Guy From West Wing, Or Was it House of Cards? AND ANSON MOUNT! I didn’t realize it was him without the vertical hair. It was very nice seeing Lady Mary again, especially since she wasn’t constantly spitting venom at Lady Edith. (I’m pretty sure it was House of Cards, by the way: I associate the character with events too grim to have been in West Wing.)
The Commuter, 2018. Liam Neeson just can’t win with public transportation. He stumbles into a conspiracy where again, the conspirators have targeted him specifically so he has no choice but to cooperate. Again, lots of bonus actors: Lady Crowley and Mike Ehrmentraut. “Ehrmentraut’s” appearance is especially funny because he refers to the MC as Walt. Also, Sam Neil from Jurassic Park: I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything besides JP. Unstoppable is a better train mechanics movie, but I liked this. Again, I am sure there are technical errors and silliness galore, but it worked
FBI Mook: He was your cousin? Tell me what you saw. Me: People just spent two hours trying to kill this person, WHY ARE YOU INTERVIEWING [THEM] OUT IN THE OPEN AIR?
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