What have you read lately?

[apl68]

From the library: Sixteenth Street NW by John DeFerrari and Douglas P. Sefton (NF)
Local history about DC's 16th St., NW from its origins to present; this is one of the major traffic arteries in DC. Plenty of archival images and photos.

When well done, local histories of this sort can be fascinating.  My passage through Cincinnati last spring left me with a book on the history of long-ago city transportation projects that promises to be interesting, when I finally get around to reading it.

[apl68]

The British Are Coming, by Rick Atkinson.  The first of three volumes on the American Revolutionary War.  This one covers the origins of the war and the developments up through the Trenton-Princeton campaign in the winter of 1776-77.  It's the sort of history where the historian (and unsung research assistants and interlibrary loan staff) applies details with a fire hose.  Each time a town appears, its major buildings are cataloged and described.  Each time a military unit appears, we learn what color its uniforms were and what sorts of gear they carried.  Each time a well-documented personage is introduced, we get at least several paragraphs of that person's life history up to that point.  The result of this prolix approach is lots of vivid word-pictures.  It can get to be a bit of a slog to pass through nearly 600 pages--not counting the notes!--of it.

The great virtue of a big, detailed, yet still readable history of this sort is that it doesn't over-simplify things.  The American Revolution gets oversimplified a lot.  Although it was, as wars/revolutions/struggles for independence go conducted, overall, with remarkable restraint by both sides--just take a look at what happened in France after 1789, or Russia after 1917, for comparison--it was still a war, with elements of civil war and a couple of campaigns in an inherently brutal frontier environment.  Traditional histories have often glossed over a lot of this.  Atkinson doesn't gloss over the awfulness of the war.  At the same, time, he also doesn't fall into the current vogue of portraying the American Revolution as nothing more than an evil plot to make the world safe for slaveowners and pave the way for genocide.  Investing in reading through a work like this is a good corrective for efforts to reduce the complexities of the nation's history to partisan arguing points.

But fewer and fewer people seem willing to profit from an exercise like that.  Professional historians who haven't turned into mindless partisan activists themselves must get terribly frustrated at seeing parts of their works weaponized, like everything else, by these activists in their culture wars against each other.  It must make them wonder sometimes whether their efforts to educate have been in vain.

[mamselle]

The American Revolution gets oversimplified a lot.

Tell me about it! If the writer balances all those details with comparative ideas and conclusions, it can work very well.

Where people get into trouble (having just reviewed a book that does just this) is in getting lost in the weeds of whatever details interest them the most and forgetting to write a summary chapter, or make chronological comparisons across the categories they've covered, etc.

I'd say, having for 40 years worked to balance this in my writing and tours, that it's possible to maintain lines of reference to, say, the gravestones for those who were enslaved, the homesite markers for Native Americans who represented their own cultural ideas and achievements well (even if, unfortunately, constrained by ideas at the time about the structures in which those contributions could be made) and others, so that the narrative is fairly discussed, with both the grievous errors and the occasional triumphs pointed out and set into conversation with each other in a generously framed arena of inclusivity and honesty.

Just curious, also: there was a writer of (long, but fascinating) children's books on the early 19th c./Northeast Territories frontier named Atkinson, I think...when I saw your reference, I thought of them, first...I'd have to look them up to be sure, of course.

I wonder if they're related.

M.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: Life on the Mississippi: an Epic American Journey by Rinker Buck (NF)
The author builds and voyages on a flatboat down the Mississippi River. There are maps of the author's river route and pencil drawings throughout the book.
I'd read and enjoyed Buck's 2015 book The Oregon Trail about retracing the famed trail with his brother in their own covered wagon.

[Puget]

From the library: Life on the Mississippi: an Epic American Journey by Rinker Buck (NF)
The author builds and voyages on a flatboat down the Mississippi River. There are maps of the author's river route and pencil drawings throughout the book.
I'd read and enjoyed Buck's 2015 book The Oregon Trail about retracing the famed trail with his brother in their own covered wagon.

Thanks, I'll have to get this one, I really enjoyed the Oregon Trail one.

[mamselle]

Looked for the Atkinson I had in mind, there are several others, maybe that's not it.

They were thick, 2-3" books, with a lot of scenic detail (now, I'd say, they were a descendent of Francis Parkman's interest in verbalized landscape descriptions) and I read them all.

Hmmm....Altmeyer? Could that have been it?

More looking, after I get my own writing done...

M. 

[apl68]

Veteran Cars, by F. Wilson McComb.  In automotive circles, a "veteran" car is one produced prior to World War I.  The cars in this 1970s book are thus now well over a hundred years old.  This is an accessible overview of automotive development from early experiments in self-propelled transportation to the early 1910s.  There are lots of illustrations--old b&w photographs, nice modern color shots of museum pieces, and the occasional vintage illustration or advertisement in color or b&w.  The margins include numerous contemporary quotes about automobiles, some meant to be humorous, some humorous or ironic in hindsight.

In the final chapter, the author describes his experiences of driving two actual "veterans."  One was an early mass-produced vehicle from 1903.  Just getting the thing started sounds like a major undertaking, and it seems to have had the highway performance of a riding lawn mower.  The other was a high-end vehicle from ten years later that is quite capable of running on a modern highway.  Given the extraordinarily rapid progress in the development of gasoline vehicles that occurred during this period, it's not at all hard to see why steam and electric vehicles fell by the wayside.  No need to assert, as I've seen recently, that electric vehicles were willfully eliminated by the patriarchy because they were deemed too feminine, and not noisy and violent enough for male tastes.

Speaking of electric cars, one of the marginal quotes, from 1905, observes that when a sufficiently powerful portable electric power supply is perfected, the automobile "as we know it" will become a thing of the past.  It took about another century for that condition to be met, and is now taking decades to make the actual transition from internal combustion to electric.  The old technology is just too strongly ingrained into the fabric of society to be swept away overnight, however badly it may need to go away for the environment's sake.

An uncle gave me this book as a present for my eighth (IIRC) birthday.  Although the text is fairly brief and accessible by grown-up standards, it took years for me to master the whole thing.  In the meantime I spent hours coming back to it to enjoy the pictures and captions, and dip into the text here and there.  I still notice new things when I re-read it every few years.  One of my all-time favorite books.

[mamselle]

Someone in my neighborhood must have a small collection of early cars, I see him out on Saturday AMs giving one or another of them an airing.

It's usually at a stoplight that's about to change, so I don't always have time to get their info....one I 4ecognized from the 1950s, though, and he said something about 1932 before tooling off in another one day.

There are parade groups in a couple towns in the area, and I played for a party once in which the most-requested sing-along title was, of course, "In my Merry Oldsmobile."

M.

[hmaria1609]

From the library: The Embroidered Book by Kate Heartfield
A historical fantasy novel about Marie Antoinette and her favorite sister Charlotte. The cover is lovely!

[Juvenal]

Words in Air, the complete correspondence of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.  The art of a good letter is seen in this massive collection.  I'd guess good letters (you know, with stamp, etc.) still get written.  Bishop mostly typed; Lowell never learned script.  His printing looks like what an elementary school student would do.

I like to think my e-mails are fairly good in the letter sense (I try to paragraph--and I always have enough for at least one paragraph).  Some people (there are a few) on my e-mail address list do write what I'd call letters, but some people I know who could write a plump e-mail now text.  A fifty-word text is apparently considered enough.  Well, I have recently gone the iPhone route and will text one or two folk, but they will also get long (rambling?) e-mails.  I continue to thank Mother for insisting, sixty years ago, that I take typing in HS, nearly the lone male in the class.  Now typing is keyboarding, and I use what is about the best keyboard, a replica IBM Model M, full-size and noisy.  I like the clatter.  I can keyboard nearly as fast as I can speak--if I speak really slowly....

The only person who gets a real letter from me is an imprisoned relative, although I think there is a certain access to the Internet nowadays where the person is put away.  Writing a real letter, a really-real one, is relaxing.  How nice it looks on a crisp white page.  The inmate gets a two-pager about once a month.  That's about it for my physically real letters.  And I get to put a peel-off address sticker.  Every other mail pleading for me to open my purse includes a sheet of address stickers.  I've got over a hundred in a box.  The collection grows.  I wonder who uses the sticker storm?  Real letters are so few; so many bills are done on-line.  Cards seem the likely use of these stickers.

[mamselle]

I think the New Yorker did an article on that collection,  a month or more back.

M.

[ergative]

Kirsteen, by Margaret Oliphaunt. I really quite like Oliphaunt's work. They have that mid-Victorian veneer of sentimentality, but with Oliphaunt there's quite a hefty chunk of chewy commentary underneath. This one is about a 'Scotch family 70 years ago', so regency-era Scotland: A young woman, Kirsteen, is disowned for refusing to marry according to her family's wishes and makes her way down to London to become a dressmaker. There's a great deal of discussion of social pride and standing, and how in Scotland it's all about family names and clans, and how in England it's about rank and peerage. A very proud Scottish man with nothing but his name cannot understand that his social class is insufficient to interact with English aristocracy on equal grounds: He thinks that his name is all that is needed, and can't see that, to the English upper crust, it's worthless.

Indeed, one theme running through is how all the decisions made on the basis of family clan pride can really shoot you in the foot. An older sister is disowned for marrying a very nice doctor because he's not good enough for her father's family pride (even though he's skilled and successful and eventually they build a very, very comfortable life together in Glasgow); and when her younger sister, likewise disowned, is looking for friends to help her live, she hesitates to approach her sister, because she herself still clings to that same pride that has cast both of them out.

Another theme is about the goal of marriage: How much is about making yourself happy, and how much is about providing for your family? Oliphaunt engages with this unflinchingly in a way that I don't think many Victorian authors can do, given the sentimental veil that usually ensures the eventual success of twu wuv. The marriage that Kirsteen runs away from is a very, very good marriage: The man is kind and good, wealthy, and able to provide a position and home that would allow Kirsteen to ensure the comfort of her mother and sisters, who are oppressed under a horribly abusive husband/father (not violent, but abusive nonetheless). She thinks to herself that she would willingly die for them to rescue them from fire and flood, so why won't she do this thing, which also provides me with a secure, comfortable life? It's common enough to see young women run away from bad marriages; it's much less common to see them run away from very, very good ones.

Oh, also, this book explicitly acknowledges the role of slavery in how families made their fortunes, which is again something I haven't seen in these types of Victorian or Regency era novels. You have to squint and do a lot of special pleading to infer Austen's opinions on slavery from the text of her books. No need to put on the spectacles here: the text is flashing lights at you from the page.

[apl68]

I've never read one of "Mrs. Oliphaunt's" novels, just one or two stories.  Guess I'll have to do that sometime as part of my occasional series of Victorian novelists.  I like Victorian prose well enough, but their novels have a strong tendency to give the reader...rather too much of it.  If I can choke down something by George Meredith, I suppose a good work by Margaret Oliphant shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

Recently read another by Josephine Lawrence--Remember When We Had a Doorman?  It's about the inhabitants of a New York City apartment building that has seen better days.  The narrator, who knows everything that goes on in the building because she walks everybody's dogs, is the best thing about it.  A sharp observer without being cruel or cynical.  It's set in the early 1970s, in a world that already seems far, far away.

[ergative]

I've never read one of "Mrs. Oliphaunt's" novels, just one or two stories.  Guess I'll have to do that sometime as part of my occasional series of Victorian novelists.  I like Victorian prose well enough, but their novels have a strong tendency to give the reader...rather too much of it.  If I can choke down something by George Meredith, I suppose a good work by Margaret Oliphant shouldn't be too much of a challenge.

Ooh, if you haven't read a full Oliphaunt novel, let me recommend Salem Chapel. It's about a minister who takes a position at a dissenting church (i.e., one that is not part of the church of England infrastructure and rather than getting vicars appointed by a bishop or local magistrate or landowner, instead hires independent clergy), and discovers a huge disconnect between expectations and realities surrounding the job. Think, like, an Ivy League grad who wants to revolutionize the English department at a very small community college. And, simultaneously, it is a novel about mothers and the steps they'll take to protect their children--but not in a sentimental Victorian way (although there's that, too), but in other ways, too. For example, the minister's mother starts taking over the book around the 2/3 mark or so.

Anyway, I loved loved loved this book. I have often thought that all those Trollope and Oliphaunt noels about the clergyman's job search, and the misery of being a curate and the breath of relief when you finally get a vicarage, which is a living for life, has a lot in common with the search for an academic job, the misery of adjuncthood, and the glories of tenure. (Oliphaunt even has a book called The Perpetual Curate, although it's not as good as Salem Chapel, I think.) But most of those books presume you're staying within the Church of England. This is the only one I know of that looks at those same issues outside of mainstream academic clerical jobs.

[mamselle]

Which Salem, in the UK, or one of the other ones?

M.