David McCullough’s 1776 is a masterpiece of writing and historical study. 1776 continues McCullough’s string of excellent books.

The book generally covers the time period from when King George III addressed Parliament on the rebellion (October 1775) to the Continental Army’s victories at Princeton, New Jersey (January 1777). McCullough does not provide a blow-by-blow account of each battle, but he gives enough of a description of each battle in this time period to allow the reader to understand the reasons for why the battles ended as they did. He captures the desperation and courage that the Americans had in some of the darkest times of the war. For instance, McCullough describes George Washington’s daring raid to defeat the Hessians at Trenton as a gamble to provide the Americans with some type of victory.

In addition to the Americans’ will to never give up, McCullough explains that the Americans were often just plain lucky. A well-timed storm twice allowed Washington to lead the Continental Army out of the grips of the Recoats’ grasp, thus preventing the ending of the “Glorious Cause.”

McCullough’s strongest writing is in his excellent descriptions of the individuals who played pivotal roles during this time period. These individuals include King George III, General William Howe, General Nathaniel Greene, and General George Washington. His portrayals of these individuals are balanced and fair. For instance, many historians have portrayed King George as a bumbling idiot, but McCullough describes him in a softer light - as an intelligent ruler who believes that his American subjects have no cause for rebelling.

McCullough thoroughly captures the feelings and beliefs of both sides. He interweaves his narrative with excerpts from letters and diaries of the participants. He frequently quotes Washington in his letters to various individuals. In addition to providing quotes from the major historical figures, he often cites common soldiers from both sides. He frequently quotes Lieutenant Jabez Fitch, an officer from Connecticut, who spoke plainly of the experiences of the Continental Army in the early stages of the war.

In short, 1776 is an instant classic.

Last week we were talking about futuristic novels that posit “what if” type scenarios and then allow the reader to watch them play out. I noted that this is tricky business. If you push things too far you may lose the reader, but if you don’t push things the resulting plot won’t raise interesting questions or stretch our imaginations.

Well, the same can be said of satire. The best satire seems to be that which isn’t afraid to skewer anything and anyone. The best writers seem to be able to push things to the absurd and yet pull it off. This literary reductio ad absurdum not only makes us laugh, but often opens our eyes and makes us think.

In his latest book, simply entitled Company, Max Barry offers up another dose of corporate satire. Not having read his previous works I can’t tell you how this fits in with his previous books. In fact, I was first attracted to it by the large donut on the cover. I am on a low fat and low sugar diet these days (don’t ask) and so the donut called to me from across the bookstore. If I can’t actually eat one maybe I could read about someone who does.

The company involved - Zephyr Holdings, Inc. - doesn’t make donuts but rather serves them at meetings on occasion. The book does, however, start off with a mystery involving a donut. It seems someone ate more than one donut at the office meeting and this sets off a series of recriminations that reverberate throughout the book.

But what exactly is Zephyr and what does it do? What does it produce, sell, trade, or design? This is the mystery that business school graduate and newly hired “Jones” is faced with after just a few days at this typically maddening corporate behemoth. As it turns out, this is the string that will unwind the sweater and Jones just won’t quit pulling. I won’t spoil the plot twist that is central to the book, but it turns out Zephyr is not your typical corporation after all.

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Before she was a blogger and author Joanne Jacobs was a journalist and columnist. She covered the education beat for over twenty years. In 2001 she began to volunteer at Downtown College Prep (DCP) a San Jose charter school just getting off the ground. DCP’s mission was to take failing area students, predominantly poor Mexican-American families, entering high school and help them qualify for a four year college or university. Jacobs decided that this was a story worth telling so she quit her job to write a book about this amazing place.

Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds is the result. And if you have any interest in education or the charter school movement you will want to read this book. It is a unique blend of human interest story and public policy journalism that tells the story of the leaders, teachers, students, and families of one particular charter school, but also offers insights and recommendations into this critical component of education reform.

In Our School Jacobs introduces the DCP’s founders, Greg Lippman and Jennifer Andaluz, and describes what led these two young teachers to undertake such a imposing challenge. She gives you a sense of what running a charter school is like day-in-day-out and outlines the hurdles and barriers such a school faces. Interspersed within this narrative are glimpses into the lives and feelings of individual students.

Each chapter not only tells the story of DCP but also highlights the challenges of charter schools and education in general. Jacobs provides the political and personal back-story (including key data and statistics) so the reader can understand the larger context of the education system in California and the role of charter schools. In an appendix she even provides key lessons she has learned along the way for those looking to start their own charter school.

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- Robert Birnbaum has a fascinating interview with Andrew Delbanco over the Morning News. Here is a snippet I found thought provoking:

RB: You say that the world that Melville came into was close to a medieval world and the world that he left was a world that more closely resembled a modern world.

AD: That’s a fast and loose use of the world “medieval.” But the huge changes he lived through did strike me, as I was rummaging around about Melville’s world, [that] he was born in 1819 in New York City. It was a place then where there were no mechanical form of transportation, no suspension bridges, no tall buildings. But by the time Melville died in New York 72 years later the place had come to feel like the New York that we love and love to hate today. And the way I tried to express this was to say that when Melville was born, the fastest way you could send a message more complicated than could be sent via drum beat or smoke signals or semaphore was to write it down and send it by a messenger on a horse. And that has been the case throughout human history. But by the time Melville was 25 we had the telegraph and then the transatlantic cable, and before the end of Melville’s life, the telephone and electricity, and the Brooklyn Bridge. So the way I tried to represent this, I had one map from 1817, a year or so before Melville was born, and it has all these empty streets, and New York City consisted mainly of the tip of Manhattan. Another map of New York from 1890, a year before he died, and that map is so crabbed and crowded. I put the two maps side by side at the beginning of the book, and they tell the story, I think.

- Richard Brookhiser takes on the future of the book in the New York Observer:

Writing is an unkillable impulse. It is like second sight or a blood disease, a gift or a state beyond our control. Writing is older than writing, as the songs and stories of the illiterate attest, and will go on, in whatever should be the prevailing technology, as long as intelligence thinks in language. But the book, the bound collection of written or printed pages that has been the main vessel of writing for 1,500 years, may be on its last legs. So those who tout the e-book tell us.

[. . . ]

In sum, the e-book loses, or at best ties, any one-on-one competition with an existing traditional book. But when books are considered en masse, in libraries or even in multi-volume sets—encyclopedias, legal codes, the standard edition of Sigmund Freud, the complete Harry Potter—the e-book begins to look like a future that will happen, because it serves a need.

Count me in the camp that likes physical books. The aesthetics of books are too big a part of it for me to see myself going electronic anytime soon. I love the look, and feel, and I confess the ownership of books - there is something about having bookcases full of books that gives me pleasure.

“What if” or futuristic scenarios are often difficult things to pull off. Plausibility can be tricky thing. I would imagine that deciding how much you can trust the reader to suspend their disbelief is challenge for authors. In order to make people think, and to entertain them at the same time, you have to push things, exaggerate elements to a greater degree than you might wish in a more conventional story. But push things too far and you run the risk of losing the reader.

The reason behind these musings is Robert Ferrigno’s latest book Prayers for the Assassin which is set in the year 2040 and imagines part of America as an Islamic Republic. In large part, your enjoyment of the book will be dependent on how much you are willing to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the story. Seen as an action/thriller with “what if” cultural and political components, Assassin is entertaining and at times thought provoking. If on the other hand, you are looking for a fully fleshed out view of what the world might look like in 2040, or a completely believable political scenario for an American Islamic Republic, you might be disappointed.

Here is how the book flap sets the scene:

SEATTLE, 2040. The Space Needle lies crumpled. Veiled women hurry through the busy streets. Alcohol is outlawed, replaced by Jihad Cola, and mosques dot the skyline. New York and Washington, D.C., are nuclear wastelands. Phoenix is abandoned, Chicago the site of a civil war battle. At the edges of the empire, Islamic and Christian forces fight for control of a very different United States.

[. . .]

After simultaneous suitcase-nuke attacks destroy New York, Washington, D.C., and Mecca — attacks blamed on Israel — a civil war breaks out. An uneasy truce leaves the nation divided between an Islamic republic with its capital in Seattle, and the Christian Bible Belt in the old South. In this frightening future there are still Super Bowls and Academy Awards, but calls to Muslim prayer echo in the streets and terror is everywhere. Freedom is controlled by the state, paranoia rules, and rebels plot to regain free will…

The story follows two characters: Rakkim Epps, a former elite warrior, and Sarah Dougan, a young iconoclastic historian. Dougan is researching the nuclear blasts that led to the conflagration and the formation of the American Islamic Republic. What she begins to find out about these world changing events calls into question the history and rationale of governments around the world. It also make her a fugitive. Epps is called on by her uncle, the head of state security, to find her. Epps does manage to track her down but rather than simply return Dougan to her father he helps her run down the clues to solve the mystery at the heart of these world changing events.

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- George H. Nash, author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, reviews Rod Dreher’s just released Crunchy Cons. Dreher seems to be going for the longest subtitle record:

How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counterculture conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).

Nash gives the work a favorable review:

And therein lies the significance of “Crunchy Cons.” It is a reminder of the enduring tension on the right between those for whom the highest social good is freedom–the emancipation of the self from statist restraint and oppressive custom–and those for whom the highest social good is virtue: the formation of character, the cultivation of the soul.
[. . .]
Because Mr. Dreher offers no detailed blueprint for cultural renewal, some may dismiss his book as just another lifestyle manifesto. This would be a mistake. Like it or not, Mr. Dreher raises concerns that will not go away. America today is more broadly free and prosperous than any society in human history. We are gloriously “free to choose.” But choose what?

- Over at Books & Culture Kenneth G. Elzinga reviews a fascinating book I would at to my list if it wasn’t so long: The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth by Benjamin M. Friedman. Elzinga recommends the book to both sides of what might be called the economic culture wars:

But let me state what I trust is obvious: The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth is an important book on an important subject. Alfred Marshall, the great Cambridge economist of an earlier generation, left the study of mathematics as a young man and turned to economics because he wanted to help the poor. Benjamin Friedman continues in this grain. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth deserves to be widely read, and no doubt will be. The next time the world’s capitalists and the anti-capitalist protesters gather in Davos, Freidman’s book could be distributed and read with profit by those in the streets and those in the conference rooms.

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Nelson’s Trafalgar: The Battle That Changed the World by Roy Adkins is a fresh and enlightening look at one of the most studied and discussed naval battles in history. The book is a relatively concise history of the battle and its aftermath.

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The Devil’s Halo by Chris Fox

Kirkus:

A hair-raising spy thriller chock full of plot twists, paranoia and political intrigue.

As in his first novel (L.U.C.I. in the Sky, 2001), Fox enlists the services of industrial spy Terry and rocket scientist Maria Weston, now husband and wife, to defend U.S. interests against a virulent threat from extremists in the newly-formed Greater European Union. Set in the near future, the story unfolds at a time when Germany has gone bankrupt, NATO is dead and the former EU, led by France, has incorporated Russia to tackle the U.S. as a military and economic superpower. Anti-Americanism is rampant, with the greatest bone of contention being the American goal to dominate space. The trouble begins when the digitized master of a film extolling U.S. military prowess is stolen, and Terry is hired by Hollywood’s most powerful producer to retrieve it.

Because the film was encrypted using the same technology designed to protect U.S. military assets, Maria, who happens to be the daughter of the CEO of a large space contractor, soon follows Terry to Russia to use her unparalleled knowledge of quantum theory and some nifty surveillance equipment of her own invention to unravel what swiftly proves to be a much larger plot. The warp-drive action—space travel, grim assassinations and continent-hopping—as the Westons try to outwit their pursuers and convince the American authorities of imminent peril, will certainly keep readers hooked. (Jerry Bruckheimer, take note.) But the narrative also serves up a thematic stew that should leave Americans—particularly the defenders of “freedom fries”—with ample food for thought.

The sky’s the limit in this tour de force thriller of 21st-century espionage and technological warfare.

The Not Knowing by Cathi Unsworth

Jon Jackson, the famous film director, is found savagely murdered under the railway arches of Camden Town in a gruesome re-creation of a scene from his hit gangster film Bent. His death strikes a chord with many, including the staff at Lux magazine in possession of the last-ever interview with Jackson. Journalists Barry Hudson and Diana Kemp knew Jackson in the old days before he was a celebrity-Diana having known Jackson a little more intimately than most. As Diana is drawn ever closer to the killer, The Not Knowing vividly captures the seamy side of London life.

Time to Say Goodbye by Pat MacEnulty

Publishers Weekly:

Patsy Palmer, a happily married suburban mom and successful Charlotte, N.C., real estate agent, has a secret. A really, really big secret. Over two decades ago, when she was known as Vera Lee Gifford, she was convicted of three murders: the owner of the bar where she worked as an exotic dancer, the owner’s bodyguard and the wife of her boyfriend’s lawyer. After breaking out of prison, she transforms herself into a solid citizen by taking a new name, graduating from college and eventually marrying good-guy Tom Palmer. When younger sister Fancy Lee decides to find Vera, Patsy’s picture-perfect life begins to unravel. An old prison pal of Vera’s, Thelma Jackson, has been murdered, and Gainesville, Fla., police detective Rodney Ellis, who years ago arrested the teenaged Vera, is called in to investigate. Patsy fights to keep her early years a secret, but soon the past comes back to bite her, and she’s fighting for not only her own life but her young daughter’s as well.

Leave it to Paul Auster to pull a fast one on his readers. When one thinks of Auster multi-layered and intertwined stories with a touch of the surreal come to mind. Meta-fiction, stories within stories, stories about stories, however you want to describe it Auster is usually anything but straightforward.

But Auster’s latest novel, The Brooklyn Follies, leaves most of that behind. Not all of it, however, as the main character is still a writer (at least in an amateur sense), the book is still about the power of stories, and there is a twist at the end aimed at forcing you to rethink what you just read. But even with these Austerian touches the book is really rather simple. It is about finding happiness in community; in the family and friends that surround you with all their faults and frailties.

The central character and narrator is Nathan Glass a retired and recently divorced insurance salesman who moves to Brooklyn looking for “a quiet place to die”. Glass has been diagnosed with lung cancer and the chemotherapy, his ugly divorce, and an estrangement with his daughter leaves him a dark mood. When Nathan beings a project entitled The Book of Human Folly - described as “An account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man.” - the reader thinks Auster is off on one of his traditional novels where unexpected chance events change people’s lives forever and where the story Auster is telling and the story the main character is writing/telling become intertwined and blurred. But the central focus of Follies never really shifts in that direction. Instead it concentrates on how Nathan goes from stoical despair to a busy and fulfilling life centered in his, and Auster’s, beloved Brooklyn.

This comes about, as is typical of Auster, by chance. Nathan runs into his nephew Tom Wood in a local bookstore. The once promising academic is now a lowly book clerk, a step up from his previous job of taxi driver. Soon nephew and uncle are eating lunch together and waxing philosophical about everything from the meaning of life to Edgar Allen Poe. Nathan’s interaction with Wood brings in a host of additional characters: Harry Brightman, Wood’s boss with a complicated past; Lucy, Wood’s niece who mysteriously shows up and refuses to talk; Aurora, Lucy’s ex-porn star mother who is trapped in a marriage with a religious fanatic; “The Beautiful Perfect Mother,” a gorgeous neighborhood women with whom tom is infatuated; not too mention a number of other side characters. Each character adds a little to the story.

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Good interview up at NRO with Jennifer Roback Morse. Morse is the author of a book that has been in my TBR pile for awhile: Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World. Morse presents some interesting arguments because she comes at it from more of a libertarian economist perspective than a strictly moral or spiritual one. Seems like an appropriate topic for Valentines Day.

Here are some snippets I thought were interesting:

Lopez: What is your biggest beef with the women’s movement, vis-à-vis how it has hurt marriage?

Morse: That is a tough question, because the women’s movement is so deeply culpable. However, if I had to name one issue, it would be the truly perverse view of equality that so much of the women’s movement embraced. Like much of the modern Left, the women’s movement insisted on “sameness” as their definition of equality. The fact is that the human species is a gendered species. We come in two sexes, male and female, that can never be made fully equal. This is one of the most basic biological facts of our species. You’d think our modern scientific age could accept this.

Yet in its desire for equality, or maximizing the reach of government, the Left has put every individual at war with their own sexuality, our own nature as male and female beings. This causes unbelievable heartache in married life, especially around child-rearing.

Social scientists have repeatedly observed that couples committed to gender equality find the arrival of their first child to be very disruptive and upsetting. Why should that be? Because parenthood is not a gender-neutral activity. Men and women behave, feel and desire differently, where children are concerned. Heck, even the babies react differently to their mothers than to their fathers. When the babies arrive, all that gender-based hormonal stuff comes roaring out of our bodies. We feel cheated, angry and confused. Couples who can’t let go of a radical gender equality ideology are headed for trouble.

The Left hates sex. Do not be deluded by the fact that the Left is hyper-active about sexual activity. Far too many on the Left are profoundly uncomfortable by any evidence of sex differences between men and women. They won’t be happy until we all believe that gender is an irrelevant category, for marriage, child-rearing, and even sex itself. Of course, we will make ourselves miserable trying to achieve this wrong-headed ideal.

And:

Lopez: So what counts as Smart Sex?

Morse: I take my motto from Sherlock Holmes, who once told Watson, “after you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” After eliminating all the forms of dumb sex, hooking up, cohabiting, divorce, and remarriage, what is left? Life-long married love. Although it seems improbable to the modern mind, the truth is that married couples have more and better sex, and have a far better track record at dodging the dumb sex that has caused so much misery.

Married sex is smart sex.