Chad Comello

Tag: books

  • Twelve Years A Slave

    I recently saw the above trailer for Steve McQueen’s upcoming film 12 Years a Slave and immediately got excited to see it on the merits of the trailer, cast, and director alone. But then at the library the following day I happened to see the memoir upon which the film is based and decided to read it.

    Twelve Years A Slave is the Solomon Northup’s first-hand account of his kidnapping into the cruel slavery world of the antebellum South and his long-awaited deliverance. Great Scott is his story breathtaking. The book is short yet wonderfully written, so I’d highly encourage you to read it before the movie comes out so you can read for yourself Northup’s concisely poetic narrative.

    One particular passage that stood out was his description of Christmas day, one of the few days all year that the slaves didn’t work:

    That morning [the slave] need not hurry to the field, with his gourd and cotton-bag. Happiness sparkled in the eyes and overspread the countenances of all. The time of feasting and dancing had come. … There were to be re-unions, and joy and laughter. It was to be a day of liberty among the children of Slavery.

    One of the few ebullient passages in what is otherwise a dark and suffering-filled story, I like how it shows the slaves drawing their own joy and tangible meaning out of a holiday that was also celebrated by the very men who unjustly enslaved Solomon and his brethren.

    Read the book. (And while you’re at it, check out the director Steve McQueen’s film Hunger, which chronicles the harrowing prison hunger strike of IRA rebel Bobby Sands.)

  • The Pleasures of Whim

    Brett McCracken was right to name Alan Jacobs’ The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction one of the five books recent college graduates should read. A quick yet deeply insightful read, this book was written, in the words of the author, for “those who have caught a glimpse of what reading can give—pleasure, wisdom, joy—even if that glimpse came long ago.” Jacobs writes not to those who have never liked reading, but instead to those who have grown accustomed to academic (i.e. obligated) reading or to “checklist” reading, whereby only “classic” or “important” books are deemed worthy of a reader’s time.

    Jacobs provides some guidelines for how to read for fun:

    • Whim: read what you want, when you want to, without shame…
    • Aspiration: …but don’t get stuck reading the same stuff—branch out
    • Upstream: seek out the older works that inspired your favorites and be challenged to “swim upstream”
    • Responsiveness: don’t be afraid to take notes and respond to the text
    • Slow: you’ll miss the little things if you view reading as simply uploading information; slow down and you’ll absorb more

    Though I read a lot as a kid and through adolescence (if mostly in school), I didn’t start reading for fun again until after college graduation. Faced with an entire life ahead of no-requirements reading (save for the brief graduate school detour), I plunged head first into reading books that greatly interested me. My palate has consisted mostly of history (specifically the presidential kind), nonfiction, and cultural topics, though I try to throw in a novel once in a while.

    Like many people, I’m sure, I struggle with the concept of “so many books, so little time,” wanting to read as much as I can so I can get onto the next book. But in our distracted age, it’s important to practice mindfulness and deep thinking in order to buoy our increasingly attention-deficit brains. I want my mind to be strong and agile now and forevermore, if only so I can still shout out Jeopardy! answers when I’m an old man. Taking notes helps in that regard. Since I mostly use library books and can’t write in the books themselves, I keep a notebook nearby to jot down key points, new words, or cool names for future reference. I don’t take notes on everything; some books, like novels and memoirs, I think should just be enjoyed without the interruption of notes.

    But whatever your strategy, I encourage you to read and read a lot. Jacobs’ book is the perfect defibrillator for those who have fallen off the reading wagon but want to get back on. As a formerly indifferent reader, I’m glad I rediscovered some literary locomotion. I can’t wait to see where it takes me.

  • Rutherford B. Hazy (In History)

    Rutherford B(eardly) Hayes.
    Rutherford B(eardly) Hayes.

    Marching onward in my quest to read a biography of every U.S. president, I finally made it through Ari Hoogenboom’s Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior and President. I confess to having held the same vague notions of Hayes that Hoogenboom writes he’s commonly known for: that he won the disputed 1876 presidential election, ending Reconstruction, and that he was just another forgettable (yet unforgettably bearded) president who fell through the cracks between Abraham Lincoln and the twentieth century.

    But Rud, as he was known, is a perfect exemplar of the purpose of my biblio-presidential journey: to fill in the gaps of my U.S. history knowledge and give the lesser-known figures a fairer shake than high school textbooks give them. In the end I found Hayes to be a fascinating figure, whose presidency was as bland as his pre- and post-presidency years were compelling.

    Hayes was raised in Ohio by a widowed mother and a strong-willed sister who both felt very protective of him. When twentysomething Rud was in Boston attending Harvard Law School, both women would constantly needle him about studying and finding a woman. I’m sure he was glad he took his time looking for a mate because the woman he married, Lucy Webb (the first First Lady to graduate from college), helped sway him away from his social-issue indifference toward support for abolition, temperance, and Christianity (though he could only latch onto very liberal Christian orthodoxy).

    His newfound moralism continued into the Civil War, which he entered as a major in the Ohio 23rd infantry (fighting alongside future president William McKinley, who was a private in the 23rd, and James Garfield, a brigadier general and another eventual POTUS). In the Battle of South Mountain, Hayes led a charge and got shot in the left arm, fracturing his bone, but in a total Teddy Roosevelt move he stanched the wound and continued on in battle, eventually getting stranded between the lines. Seeing the end, he left notes for his family with wounded Confederate soldier nearby, only to be scooped up by his troops and brought to the hospital. Later in the war, Hayes earned plaudits from General Ulysses Grant that Hayes would brag about for the rest of his life: “His conduct on the field was marked by conspicuous gallantry as well as the display of qualities of a higher order than that of mere personal daring.”

    After the war, Rud served in Congress and then as Ohio governor for two non-consecutive terms, the later of which he parlayed into the Republican nomination for president in 1876. Support of the 14th and 15th amendments and reform of the civil service/appointments system were Rud’s bread and butter during the campaign, which culminated in the “Compromise of 1877,” a.k.a. the most controversial election before 2000. The compromise boiled down to this: If Hayes were awarded the disputed presidency, he would agree to remove all remaining federal troops from the former Confederacy, thereby abandoning the fledgling Republican state governments in the South to the reemergent (erstwhile Confederate) Democrats. In exchange, the Democrats wouldn’t violently storm the inauguration in protest. Some deal. However, Hayes and the Republicans chose the presidency over the already withering GOP governments in the South and have earned scorn for ending Reconstruction ever since.

    Rud’s presidency continued on, mostly filled with drama over Hayes’ attempted reform of how political appointments were dolled out (Hayes: “The president should make appointments instead of Congress!” Congress: “No.”) and more drama over returning to the gold standard, in addition to the drama over the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. (Two fun bits of trivia: Lucy Hayes hosted the first White House Easter Egg Roll in 1878 after Congress banished it from the Capitol grounds, and Rud hosted the 30-year-old Thomas Edison and his new phonograph.) But why the flippancy over Hayes’ single term? Because what he did after it was way more interesting.

    In a nod to the third act of John Quincy Adams’ storied career, Hayes unleashed his very progressive views on race, education, and big business and became social justice crusader way before it was trendy. Among other things, he advocated for universal education as a means to ensure the suffrage and advancement of the recently freed yet woefully unsupported slaves. He served on the National Prison Reform Association board with the young New York state assemblyman Teddy Roosevelt and railed against  income disparity and the plight of the poor that corrupt monopolies exacerbated. He was a trustee of Ohio State University (a school he helped to found as Ohio governor) and endorsed the 24-year-old W.E.B. DuBois for an educational scholarship.

    Judged strictly on his presidential tenure, Hayes doesn’t inspire much praise. He came about during a time when the party bosses held as much if not more political power and  control than the presidents did. I don’t think all forgotten presidents deserve to have their low reputation reconsidered (I’m coming for you, John Tyler), but viewed holistically I’d say Hayes deserves more than the middling (and slowly dropping) rank he often gets.

  • Action Andrew Jackson

    438px-78yo_Andrew_Jackson
    Photo of Jackson at 78 years old.

    When I look back on my nearly 19 years of classroom education in elementary, middle, high school, college, and grad school, I think I’ll remember my junior year AP U.S. history class in high school as my favorite. What I loved about it was what probably bored most other students in class: it was a data dump of historical facts and anecdotes; a pure, unadulterated stream of Americana. Mr. Friedberg would spend each class throughout the semester explaining persons, places, dates, key events, and political concepts from the Revolutionary War to the Clinton presidency, and I would gleefully take notes.

    I had a buddy in this class who shared the same affection for the subject matter, and more importantly, the detailed note-taking thereof. We would compare notes outside of class and discuss what we were learning, so much so that after the semester we planned to create a website where we would maintain an archive of our notes in narrative form as a resource for other Web denizens, but also because we just enjoyed writing about it. I recently found one of the documents we created for this endeavor titled “Jacksonian Democracy,” which detailed the politics and people of the period between 1824 and 1848 that was defined by the attitudes, actions, and aftermath of Andrew Jackson.

    Re-reading these notes from high school was a kick because they retrod the same narrative of Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, a biography of the seventh president by H.W. Brands that I just finished reading. In my quest to read a biography of every U.S. president (eight down, 35 to go), I recently tackled John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s presidential predecessor, bitter rival, and polar opposite. I knew after reading the JQA biography (John Quincy Adams by Paul Nagel) that I would need to read Jackson next, so I could give “Old Hickory” a fair shake after having read about him from JQA’s perspective, which, unsurprisingly, isn’t very adoring.

    What I knew about the tempestuous Tennesseean before this was what most other people knew: he turned a hardscrabble upbringing into a career as a soldier, famously defeating the British at New Orleans in the War of 1812 and parlaying his fame into the first man-of-the-people election in the young nation’s history, which ushered in a new era of democratic reform. But seeing that life story rendered in detail by Brands gives me a new (qualified) appreciation for the General.

    Brands’ take on the man, who was left fatherless before birth, shows a young boy deprived of formal education, adequate adult supervision, and a decent standard of living, the lack of which conspired to create a pugnacious, immature, and defiant ruffian who often (and sometimes purposefully) got in over his head. One such instance occurred during the Revolutionary War when as a 13-year-old courier he was captured by the British and implored to clean the boots of an English officer. When Jackson proudly refused the officer gashed his hand and head, leaving him with lifetime scars and a hatred of all things British. He later acquired more wounds from the countless duels he either initiated or was compelled to engage in. Seriously, I lost count of all the duels he was in one way or another involved in.

    A huge part of Jackson’s life and identity was his wife Rachel. They married in the 1790s under scandalous circumstances: Rachel had divorced an abusive knave named Lewis Robards and apparently shacked up with Jackson before the divorce was finalized. Jackson’s fierce loyalty for his friends and intense hatred for anyone who betrayed that loyalty or besmirched his or his wife’s honor were revealed in this situation, in another during his presidency, and throughout his life.

    Jackson’s insatiable defense of honor is what provided such a stark contrast with his predecessor Adams. Both men were children of the Revolution, though with extremely different upbringings. While Jackson was orphaned early on and as a teen fought British regulars in South Carolina, John Quincy was getting schooled at Harvard and traipsed around Europe with various Founding Fathers. JQA was self-loathing and depressed, which constantly stymied his intellectual ambitions; Jackson was a man of action, basically seeking out conflict and unabashedly fighting his way through court cases, wars, and political scandals, even while suffering through lifelong debilitating ailments. While Adams defended Jackson at times, the 1824 election imbroglio, its subsequent political skullduggery, and Adams’ Federalist leanings inevitably made him Jackson’s natural enemy.

    There’s a lot not to like about Andrew Jackson. He was brash, bordering on unhinged, especially when dealing with an adversary. He could be annoyingly obstinate, like when he refused to honor or even acknowledge various Supreme Court decisions (mostly due to his ire for the federalist Chief Justice John Marshall). And, oh yeah, he owned a bunch of slaves. This, along with his involvement in the removal of Native American tribes, is usually the deal-breaker for people when considering his presidential greatness.

    But his failings could also be interpreted as his strengths. His obduracy paid off for his democratic and anti-elite ideology in his fight against the banker Nicholas Biddle (yet another hated rival) and the National Bank. When faced with a tariff-induced constitutional crisisthat was spearheaded by his former VP John Calhoun and his South Carolinian brethren, Jackson brought the hammer down on his home state in favor of preserving the Union. Add to all this the fact that he narrowly escaped becoming the first assassinated president due to two pistols misfiring at point-blank range. God must have loved Andrew Jackson.

    He wasn’t a lovable guy, but he was important for his time. He was the first president not from Virginia or Massachusetts, or from the elite establishment that until then had essentially dictated the course of public policy without a whole lot of input from average citizens. Jackson carried to Washington the mantle of idealized agrarianism and equality for the common man that was established by Jefferson, and from which the Jacksonian brand of democracy was sowed for future generations.

  • The Summum Bonum Identity

    Someone on the Internet once said something to the effect of: “I’m not a writer; I write.” Writing, for example, is something you do, but it’s not who you are. You might really love writing and consider it integral to your life, but it isn’t your very essence–at least, it shouldn’t be.

    I’m re-reading Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. In a section about the social consequences of sin, Keller argues that when societies and individuals cling too strongly to any belief or entity other than God, that ultimately broken belief will become the essence of their identity and will let them down. He quotes Jonathan Edwards’ The Nature of True Virtue, which argues that a human society fragments when anything but God is its highest love: “If our ultimate goal in life is our own individual happiness,” Keller summarizes Edwards, “then we will put our own economic and power interests ahead of those of others. Only if God is our summum bonum, our ultimate good and life center, will we find our heart drawn out not only to people of all families, races, and classes, but to the whole world in general.”

    The question then becomes: What is your summum bonum? What is your utmost identity? Our recently endured presidential election season provided ample proof that many people cling so tightly to their political views that it basically becomes who they are instead of merely what they believe. When that happens, civil discourse becomes impossible and anything approaching compromise is deemed impure and even cowardly. Keller sees the problem with this: “If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about politics, it is about us. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we must despise and demonize the opposition.”

    I think it’s especially easy for religious people to fall into this trap, despite good intentions. It understandably becomes hard not to transfer the ardent passion attached to a deep-seated belief in God or whomever onto other less divine issues. But as Stephen Colbert said, the road connecting politics and religion runs both ways; if we insist on forcing our religious identity into our politics, our muddied and corrupt politics will come right back into our religion.

    Walt Whitman was right: I contain multitudes. I act as a son, brother, friend, significant other; I study, I write, I read, I work, I create… I identify with all of these roles, but any one of them doesn’t define me because I don’t rely on one to give my life meaning. I can argue with people who disagree with my views on politics or music or religion because my views aren’t me. They’re just the tools I use to try to make sense of life. They can be beautiful, inspiring, enraging, or intriguing–but they can’t be everything.

  • Courage Under Fire Hoses

    EYESONTHEPRIZE

    I just finished reading Hampton Sides’ Hellhound On His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr., a recounting of the assassination of the famous civil rights leader through the perspectives of the people involved in the run-up to and aftermath of King’s slaying. I highly recommend this book for its extensive background on King’s assassin—the hermetic convict James Earl Ray—and its fast-moving report of the events in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

    Meanwhile, I have been watching the 1987 miniseries Eyes On The Prize, which chronicles the Civil Rights movement from Brown vs. Board of Education to the Selma-Montgomery marches. It tells a gripping narrative of key events in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in the South, through news footage and first-hand accounts by marchers, activists, politicians, and other figures involved in the struggle for freedom, for better or worse. It’s interesting learning about the development of the Civil Rights movement while reading about the MLK assassination, which in retrospect became the nadir of the movement and end of a transformational yet tumultuous chapter in civil rights history.

    Watching the progression of the movement up close, via the documentary-style footage in Eyes On The Prize, has been fascinating and a bit distressing. The violence and unmitigated bigotry of the white communities that black citizens had to face every single step along the way never fails to bewilder me.

    Maybe it’s my modern bias speaking here, but only one generation in the past, fire hoses and attack dogs and police brutality and miscarriages of justice met anyone—mostly black freedom fighters but also sympathetic white activists—who sought equal protection under the law. That troubles me greatly.

    Those freedom fighters needed a hefty load of courage to face that persecution and risk of death for the sake of the Cause. Men and women like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Minnijean Brown, Medgar Evers, James Farmer, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and countless others risked life and limb (and often lost them) in an uphill battle for rights we take for granted today.

    It makes me wonder what I as a white middle-class male would have believed or done if I were transported to 1960s Mississippi. Would I have linked arms in an anti-segregation march, or would I have been one of the townsfolk lining the street cursing out the marchers for upsetting the peace? More likely, I probably would have been in the middle—sympathizing with the pursuit of basic civil rights but not outwardly acting on or against that pursuit’s behalf. Moderation is key, the saying goes, but in this case it wouldn’t be enough.

    The people featured in Eyes On The Prize decided to fight for their lives and the lives of others but without resorting to violence, facing an opposition that was armed and very invested in keeping the status quo. Those men and women chose liberty over life. How many of us could make that choice?

    I ask these questions because I’m trying to sort through them myself. I’ve written before about how the orthodoxies we have today may be considered antiquated or even pernicious to future generations looking back. With this in mind, I think it’s important not to judge previous times too harshly without fully understanding the context and realities within which they lived. Since what I know of the Civil Rights movement generally consists of the remnants of a few years of history courses, I hope I will continue to learn about it in order to better understand the struggle of the people it involved.

  • Science Blows My Mind

    Like many English majors, science and mathematics were two subjects that gave me trouble throughout my primary, secondary, and college education. I think it was geometry class sophomore year of high school where I hit a wall and everything after that was a blur. Ditto with chemistry that year (what in the name of Walter White is a mole anyway?). But that didn’t hinder me from being wholly fascinated with science and nature, and more particularly with the people who know way more about those things than I do.

    I just finished reading Jennifer Ouellette’s Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics, a collection of short essays on various topics within the world of physics. Ouellette, also a former English major and self-professed “physics phobe,” adapted the essays from her column in APS News, a monthly publication for members of the American Physical Society. She tackles scientific topics from the earliest and most fundamental – like DaVinci and the golden ratio, Galileo and the telescope – to more recent discoveries like X-rays, wireless radio, and thermodynamics.

    True to her writing roots, Ouellette manages to take what can be very esoteric and labyrinthine scientific concepts and make them fascinating by linking them to things we regular people can understand: how Back to the Future explains Einstein’s theory of special relativity; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde representing the dual nature of light; induced nuclear fission as seen in Terminator 2: Judgement Day. These connections are lifesavers for right-brained humanities majors like me, who instead of seeing “SCIENCE” blaring on the cover and fleeing get to experience an “A-ha!” moment nearly every chapter.

    But here’s the thing: I love science. I don’t love it like a scientist does, by learning theories and experimenting. I don’t love it because I understand it – Lord knows that’s not the case. Rather, I love it because of what it does. I am consistently flabbergasted by what have become quotidian occurrences in our 21th century lives. Telephone technology is so quaint these days, but the fact that I can pick up a small device, speak into it, and instantaneously be heard by someone thousands of miles away blows my mind. The fact that I can get inside a large container that will propel itself through the air and arrive at a destination relatively quickly blows my mind. The fact that we can send a small, man-made vehicle into outer space and have it land on another planet blows my freaking mind.

    Science has improved our lives and advanced our knowledge of creation in a million ways. I’m simply grateful for the multitudes of geeks who have labored in that noble cause of discovery. Because of you, we have cell phones and airplanes and cameras and Velcro (did you know that term is a portmanteau of the French words velours [velvet] and crochet [hook]?) and Mars Curiosity and lasers (an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) and automobiles and Xerox machines and countless other inventions, many of them engineered by the men and women Ouellette spotlights in her book.

    And that’s just physics. Think about what we know of biology, chemistry, geology, astronomy, and every other sub-category of science. If my mind hadn’t already been blown away earlier, it would have exploded now just thinking about what we know about our Earth and the things that it contains, and also what we have yet to discover.

    Though our country is in turmoil, the Curiosity roves a distant planet. Though we often disagree about basic scientific principles, we still seek to discover. As Carl Sagan said: “For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.” As a sci-curious liberal arts nerd, I can’t wait to see what else we can achieve.

  • Bringing Old Orthodoxies to a Boil

    I just finished reading Fergus Bordewich’s Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, a history of the Underground told through a series of vignettes. I enjoyed learning about the unheralded individuals of all stripes who served on the Railroad as “stationmasters” or support staff along the way. But one particular passage stood out for its relevance in today’s tempestuous times.

    Some context: The Fugitive Slave Law, passed in 1850, was part of Congress’ infamous compromise of that year and was arguably the most controversial part of an already contentious piece of legislation. The Act imposed legal consequences upon those who aided in the escape of fugitive slaves to the North in order to support Southerners’ legal right to their slave property. But the Act’s draconian measures perturbed even non-abolitionists outside of the South, so much so that the law, according to Bordewich, “became a virtual dead letter” in the North.

    This spirit of civil disobedience was not unique to the 1850s, as the book thoroughly illustrates; rather, it was who was being disobedient that was novel after the Act passed. Benoni Fuller, a county sheriff in Indiana—a nominally free state with a proslavery bent – had this reply for proslavery citizens who complained to him about the hundreds of fugitives coming through: “Let ’em!” What made Fuller’s response unique was that he wasn’t an abolitionist nor Underground Railroad stationmaster, but a Democrat, a member of the party of the South and of slavery. Bordewich’s conclusion: “Old orthodoxies were boiling away.”

    That last line is what stuck out to me. Even then, before the Civil War had even been fought, the antebellum orthodoxy that said slavery had been and ought to remain a protected social and economic institution was beginning to crumble. While in many ways the orthodoxy continued for decades after slavery was constitutionally disallowed through Jim Crow laws and state-sanctioned discrimination, the idea that a Democratic sheriff who most likely disagreed with abolitionism in a state that was sympathetic to slaveowners would openly balk at implementing a proslavery law demonstrated that the culture was being changed, at least partially, by the Underground Railroad and its lofty ideals.

    This is significant because culture changes very slowly. Perhaps it was the animus produced by the Civil War and the events that preceded it that accelerated the culture change, or perhaps it was the overarching sense of divine destiny promulgated by the Quakers and evangelicals who founded and propelled the abolition movement. Whatever it was, it all contributed to the heat that, as per Bordewich, was boiling away the old traditions.

    Which got me thinking: what are the beliefs and conventions our culture holds today that are in the process of being “boiled away”? The attitude toward gay marriage is the first one that comes to mind; like the slavery proponents of old, opponents of gay marriage often cite Biblical precedence and the importance of tradition as reasons for keeping the status quo (as Fox News’ [!] Megyn Kelly recently pointed out). But old assumptions about gay people and marriage, especially in the last decade, have been slowly boiling away.

    On the issue of slavery, things began to change when regular people, who were neither abolitionists nor slaveholders, started becoming exposed to the horrors and humiliations of slavery (often because of the fugitive slaves that came through their towns on the Underground Railroad). Similarly, opposing gay rights likely becomes more difficult when you merely know a gay person as a friend and can empathize with their struggle to win basic civil rights.

    I wonder if the average slaveholding Southerner, knowing now in hindsight that the institution for which he fought and died would crumble and that he would be viewed dismissively as an enemy of what we now consider basic human rights, would still cling tooth and nail to his (at the time) legal right to own a slave. With this in mind, what are the chances our great-grandchildren will look back on this decade and cultural era and judge us harshly for clinging to unjust or flat-out wrong beliefs and dogmas for too long? What sort of blind spots can we see, without the benefit of hindsight, in our own lives?

    Will we, for lack of a better phrase, be on the right side of history? For some, that won’t matter: They believe what they believe and that’s that. But for others, it’s an important question to keep in mind when pondering what you believe, why you believe it, and what societal good you do to support those beliefs.

    If you consider all of these things yet are not satisfied with the answers, perhaps that which you hold dear—for better and for worse—will one day be boiled away.

  • History Crush: Theodore Roosevelt

    I recently stumbled upon the National Archives’ “History Crush” series, wherein archivists confess their undying love for certain historical figures like Susan B. Anthony, Charles Sumner, and Alexander Hamilton. This got me thinking about who mine would be. As a certified history nerd, I have many. But with a gun to my head, I’d probably have to say Theodore Roosevelt.

    Roosevelt with preservationist John Muir at Yosemite in 1906.

    Edmund Morris’ three-volume trilogy (comprising The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt) about the 26th president of the United States is teeming with surreal stories and facts about TR, like how he wrote a best-selling book The Naval War of 1812 during college and became a New York assemblyman at 23; or how in Dakota he single-handedly chased down and captured three outlaws who stole his riverboat and escorted them back overland in a forty-hour marathon with no sleep while finishing a Tolstoy book; or how as NYC police commissioner he patrolled the city at night to shape up the city’s cops and along the way met poor people who would later partly inspire his progressivism; or how he bonded with John Muir at Yosemite and later single-handedly created the national parks system; or how he was shot in the chest while giving a campaign speech in Milwaukee but finished the speech anyway; or how he blazed down the Amazon River, acquiring a deadly amount of abscesses, dysentery, and malaria along the way and lived to write about it.

    Of course, so much of the pomp surrounding TR’s legacy was partially created by TR himself – he had an insanely swollen ego that would have gotten him in a lot more in trouble had he not been beloved for most of his life. But I would argue that he earned the acclaim he craved for many reasons, not the least of which being he was brilliant, a voracious reader (a book a day (!) on average—sometimes I can barely muster the energy to read a chapter a night), and renowned historian who wrote constantly and could talk to any dignitary, scholar, or layman about literally any subject.

    But the most interesting thing about TR, to me, is he was a walking contradiction. He was a sickly boy with chronic health problems, but basically said Screw it and let his unbounded energy drive himself to a full live but an untimely death. He was a wealthy Harvard aristocrat yet happily fraternized with the poor people whom his buddy Jacob Riis called “the other half” of society. He was an ardent environmentalist before there was such a thing, but had an insatiable lust for battle and killing—yet even when he went on a safari and slaughtered hundreds of wild animals, he donated a lot of them to museums for scientific study. Or he just dissected them himself, having acquired biology and ornithology as hobbies at a very young age. He distrusted and helped break up the big-business monopolies that had close ties to his very own Republican Party. He remade a paltry navy into a world-class fleet, but avoided war during his presidency and even won a Nobel Peace Prize.

    Both Democrats and Republicans try to claim TR as their own, but he defies a label. In spite of his weaknesses and failures, he was his own man who made an indelible mark on the presidency and the country. For that, Theodore Roosevelt is one of my history crushes.

  • Cool Civil War Names: a preamble

    Awhile back I read James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the sixth volume in Oxford University Press’s ongoing series of American history. (The full series list is worth checking out if you’re ever in the mood for thousands of pages of U.S. history—and who isn’t?) I learned a lot of things from McPherson’s tome, but most salient was that the men who fought the Civil War had really, really cool names.

    I noted my favorites from the book, found a few more, and decided to write a little about each of the men they’re attached to in a miniseries called Cool Civil War Names. Many are soldiers, others journalists or public figures. Together, they tell the story of the era that gave this nation its most fiery trial—and its most fantastical facial hair.

    The Names

  • Doing Unspeakable Acts To E.T.

    I stopped by Half-Price Books the other day hoping to get lucky. After perusing the record collection as usual, I ventured into the clearance section. I’m a bad book buyer because I’m so indecisive and there are so many classics I have yet to read that I eventually get overwhelmed and end up not buying anything. But this time I managed to cross the bridge and buy some books.

    I picked up Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies and a collection of Langston Hughes poetry. I’ve been on the lookout for a cheap Hughes collection ever since I read him in an American Literature class and fell in love with him. But Lamott’s book was a surprise and a bit of an impulse buy for me because I rarely buy anything without researching it before hand to avoid being disappointed and regretting departing with my cash.

    I’d heard of Anne Lamott before. I think she visited my school to speak but I couldn’t go. But I decided to take a chance on her 1999 memoir because I heard that she was a liberal Christian. You don’t hear from them often.

    I loved Traveling Mercies. I cruised through it, and I don’t do that often. Even though I’m an English major I have to really try to finish books. Most of the time I don’t even finish the assigned readings for my lit classes unless they catch me. But I clung to Lamott’s humor and sincerity and no-bullshit view on life. I can only hope to see the good in every part of life she does in spite of (and because of) the suffering she’s endured.

    I loved how she can be so freaking funny in moments of complete confusion or distress. She describes the feeling of hitting your child: “It’s so awful, attacking your child. It is the worst thing I know, to shout loudly at this fifty-pound being with his huge trusting brown eyes. It;s like bitch-slapping E.T.”

    Anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading at camp, which is over this week. To make a big life lesson so very concise: I’ve learned a lot about humility and patience.

    I’ve got the new Coldplay album on steady rotation. Check it out. Also the song “You’ll Always Be My Best Friend” by Relient K off their new EP/B-sides record The Bird and the Bee Sides.

    On a less happy note, what’s the deal with Favre? Notice I blame him and not the Packers for this soap opera. I’m starting to wish he never retired, despite what I wrote shortly after he did so. Oh, well. Rodgers is our man. Get used to it Cheeseheads.

  • The Things They Carried

    “A true war story is never moral,” writes Tim O’Brien in his book The Things They Carried. Indeed, if there ever was a hard lesson learned by the United States, its citizens and, most importantly, the soldiers during the Vietnam War, it was that war was without morals, no matter how Hollywood depicted it. The stories that came out of the war, therefore, could teach no uplifting lesson nor create heroes without being a complete farce.

    O’Brien’s collection of short stories about his war experience that became The Things They Carried has no unifying purpose, no gallant protagonist, and no respect for the fall-back traits of a ‘war novel’; he simply tells his story as he knew it. Whether his stories of war and its aftermath are factual realities makes no difference. But when thinking about what effects the Vietnam War had on its veterans after they returned home, one must first understand how it affected them even before they arrived in the dense, sweaty jungles of Vietnam.

    To the millions of young American men in the late 1960s, a draft notice seemed imminent. Some readily accepted their conscription as a patriotic duty; others vocally and violently protested it. But all of them—the doves and hawks alike—feared it in some way. The teenage Tim O’Brien was no different. However, in his youth and naïveté, believed that “if the stakes ever became high enough… [he] would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside [him] over the years…in preparation for that day when the [courage] account must be drawn down.” It is a common belief among young men, which for O’Brien, sadly, did not hold up.

    In the chapter “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien describes in fascinating detail the deepest and darkest secret he had kept completely to himself until he wrote it down. He received his draft notice in the summer of 1968, during the height of the Tet Offensive, and was thrown into a moral and psychological whirlwind; should he flee to Canada or resign to his conscription? “It was a kind of schizophrenia. A moral split. I couldn’t make up my mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile.” Already, before he had picked up a gun and shot at another human being, he was at war with himself.

    He lists off every reason why he thinks he shouldn’t have to go to war: he was too smart, too compassionate; he hated camping out and the sight of blood. Though, in reality, the secret account of courage he thought he had was short on funds. This becomes evident when he decides to bolt for the border, eventually making it to a small motel in the wilderness directly across a lake from Canada. He stays there for nearly a week with the innkeeper, stuck in his very own purgatory.

    He gets the chance to jump from a boat and swim to the Canadian shore, to live a life of physical freedom but moral handicap. But he can’t do it. “[It was] a moral freeze. I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.” He tries to force himself to jump, but the thought of embarrassment overtakes him. He would go to war.

    O’Brien acknowledges up front that he waited so long to tell this story simply because of the embarrassment of not being able to act heroically when it mattered. It was a coming-of-age moment in his life, which reflected the same process the country would go through during its decade long engagement with Vietnam. The classic heroics and sturdy platitudes of World War II—that America was inherently good and right and honorable—faltered because of Vietnam. O’Brien’s personal crisis, a crisis of moral confliction rather than simple cowardice, embodied every other fighting man’s.

    The Things They Carried could be considered a post-modern novel. There is not one main character that the reader follows throughout the book, nor a single narrative arc that connects each character and each plot point, and no chapter is necessarily dependent on another. It is important to consider this style of writing because the way O’Brien chooses to write about Vietnam reveals how he values and what he feels about his Vietnam experience.

    Writing about his pre-war life, O’Brien stays more or less on a clear, singular path. But when he describes the war itself, the writing structure becomes disjointed, like fragments of memory mashed together. In this way, the content informs the structure. His pre-war days were smooth and straight. Then, he enters Vietnam, and his life’s structure and path are blown off course. Once he leaves Vietnam and continues his life, things slow down and take form again, but not without bumps in the road.

    With that idea in mind, the stories from the war zone make more sense. Everything O’Brien knew as an ordinary young man was scrambled in with the chaos of Vietnam. The personal crisis he fought through before he became a soldier was nothing compared to the deeper dilemmas that soldiers experience. He describes his reaction to killing a man: “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty.” He didn’t weep softly or have a nervous breakdown after killing the man; he wasn’t so mentally disturbed that he couldn’t function as a soldier; he simply slips into a vast, unquantifiable gray area.

    Within this gray area, what really happens becomes jumbled with what seems to happen. This is why, O’Brien explains, war stories should never be trusted with the truth. “The angles of vision are skewed…there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.” Because of this dichotomy, O’Brien admits to a loss of firm, absolute truth in war stories and, consequently, the war itself: “Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate…and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.”

    The veterans carried this feeling with them from the swamps of Vietnam all the way back home to America. This disillusionment with the old ways—the eternal truths taken for granted—defined the era. The lives the soldiers lived before the war, before their draft notices, was black-and-white, but no more. The overwhelming ambiguity of war became the controlled chaos of civilian life. O’Brien writes about Norman Bowker, his comrade in the war, who returned home and found that his life had no particular purpose. Bowker drove aimlessly around a lake as if he was caught on a broken record. He was idling, literally and figuratively, between his former life as a soldier and his uncertain future. He wrote O’Brien to describe the feeling: “[T]here’s no place to go… My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam.” Whatever part of him Bowker felt was killed in Vietnam was soon joined with the rest of him; he hanged himself a few years after returning home.

    O’Brien had a different post-war experience. He wasn’t driven to suicide, but the over-whelming ambiguity he described stayed with him. When he returned to Vietnam with his daughter about twenty years after the war, he visited the place where his best friend Kiowa died —the one event that haunted him and that he blamed himself for. He waded into a lake and dropped Kiowa’s moccasins in the place he thought was where Kiowa died. He was trying to find some sort of emotional solace, and found it: “In a way, maybe, I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d finally worked my way out.” O’Brien found the peace Norman Bowker and many other Vietnam veterans could not find.

    The pre- and post-war experience of Vietnam veterans like Tim O’Brien and Norman Bowker were intrinsically linked by the war itself. Like a magnet, Vietnam pulled those young men away from their home, willingly or not, to battle; likewise, Vietnam in the theoretical—the lifelong physical and mental battle scars—kept its unbending and unseen hold on the young men as they returned home. They, along with the rest of the country, would not be able to shake off the uneasiness of the times. Everyone from the shores of Maine to the streets of Los Angeles, in a way, carried the same weight O’Brien and Bowker and countless other veterans carried through the “ghostly fog, thick and permanent” that was Vietnam.