Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure by Julia Flynn Siler - 2012

 

Lost Kingdom: Hawaii's Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure by Julia Flynn Siler - 2012

200 to 350 AD - Polynesian Settlers Arrive

1778  - arrival of British explorer Captain  James Cook was 

 the first documented contact by a European explorer with Hawaiʻi

1795, all inhabited islands were subjugated Under one ruler who established a dynasty that ruled the kingdom until 1872.

June 15, 1898 - Hawaii becomes a US Territory 

August 21, 1959 - Becomes a US State

An Autodidactic Corner Selection 

I am very glad I read this highly educational book.

If it has a flaw it would be in lacking an account of day to day governing of Hawaii before it was annexed by The USA.  I already knew sugar has caused imperial expansion and slavery so I was not surprised to learn 

the role owners of big sugar plantations played in the fall of the ancient monarchy of Hawaii.  

Siler goes into the settlement of Hawaii about 200 AD by Polynesians, pre-annex social customs, the disastour impact the arrival of Western Whaling ships had in terms of letting out plagues, rats, mosquitos had on indeginous populace.  She also details the attempts of Christian Missionaries to turn people away from tradition beliefs.  Many

 white settlerx saw 

the Hawaiians as savages, cannibals living a sexually promiscous Life Style.  Descendents of Missionarries, often with Hawain mothers, often became very wealthy.  Siler goes into a lot of detail on how this happened, including information on financial take over  of the royal Family.

Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her latest book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” and a finalist for a California Book Award. She is also the author of the bestselling nonfiction books, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure and the The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty.

As a veteran correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek magazine, Ms. Siler spent more than two decades in Europe and the United States, reporting from a dozen countries. She has covered fields as varied as biotechnology, cult wines, puppy breeding, and a princess’s quest to restore a Hawaiian palace’s lost treasures.

A graduate in American Studies at Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Siler began her career as a staff correspondent for BusinessWeek, working in the magazine’s Los Angeles and Chicago bureaus. She wrote stories on everything from White Castle “sliders” to the roiling futures markets for the New York Times. By taking classes at night during that time, she earned an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. - from

https://juliaflynnsiler.com/biography/

I am respectfully republishing this post in observation of the tragedy in  Hawaii 

Mel Ulm 

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twity - 2017

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty. 2017 -464 Pages - narrative non-fiction.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of The Year

An Autodidactic Corner Selection

This is an essential book for anyone interested in African American culinary history but there is so much more awaiting readers of Michael W. Twitty’s book.  It is an exciting account of how he employed DNA based ancestral testing to uncover the ethnic background of his ancestors.  He goes into a lot of details on the challenges found in attempting to do ancestral research for persons whose ancestors were slaves in the old south.  He found himself about 25 percent European and 70 percent from various parts of Africa with The rest Native American.   He faces directly the rape of slave women that produced this.  We see How he accepts himself as Gay and converts to Judaism.

Among the many food crops that came from Africa as detailed by Twitty are okra, corn, various types of rice, yams, sweet potatoes, collard greens, kale, turnips, field peas and black eyed peas.  Slave traders brought seeds for these crops to feed the slaves on items they were familiar with.  Enslaved women cooked not just for themselves but their owners.  Thus these crops became the staples of southern whites.  Slaves were commonly allowed vegetable gardens.  Some rich plantation owners sent male cooks to France to be trained.  Slaves skilled in Rice farming were highly priced.

Chickens followed by pigs were a big part of The cuisine.  Through hunting, aligators, possum and deer were part of The diet. Fishing was very important.

Twitty talks about The impact of heavy consumption of so called “Soul Food” on health, leading to high blood pressure diabites.  He explains How greens, peas, sweet potatoes can be very healthy.

I learned a lot about The different African kingdoms from which slaves were taken in The largest forced migration in history.  Using examples from his own Family history he shows us The horror of life as slave.  Most of The book deals with The old south but sugar plantations are covered also.

Twitty includes a number of recipes.  He goes into Gullah culture also, one of my interests.  

There is so much of interest in this book.  It is a history of The culinary history of the old South.

Twitty loves his subject and it shows.  I give this book my complete endorsement.

“Michael W. Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacies. He has been honored by FirstWeFeast.com as one of the twenty greatest food bloggers of all time, and named one of the “Fifty People Who Are Changing the South” by Southern Living and one of the “Five Cheftavists to Watch” by TakePart.com. Twitty has appeared throughout the media, including on NPR’s The Splendid Table, and has given more than 250 talks in the United States and abroad. His work has appeared in Ebony, the Guardian, and on NPR.org. He is also a Smith fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance, a TED fellow and speaker, and the first Revolutionary in Residence at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Twitty lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.” From The publisher

Mel u

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah - 2020

 

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah - 2020

An Autodidactic Corner Selection 

“The militarized borders that bar human movement  today are not sacrosanct. They’re not fundamental to our cultures or histories. People in Europe started drawing borders around their countries only a few centuries ago. The British lawyer who established the borders around India and Pakistan marked them out over the course of just a few weeks. Even the highly contested border between the United States and Mexico was mostly permeable until just a few decades ago. Throughout much of our history, kingdoms and empires rose and fell with blurry edges, each culture and people shading gradually from one to the next. It’s not that borders were open or closed. They didn’t exist at all. If we were to accept migration as integral to life on a dynamic planet with shifting and unevenly distributed resources, there are any number of ways we could proceed. The migration ratio will continue its inexorable approach, regardless. People like Sophia and Jean-Pierre and Ghulam will continue to move. We can continue to think of this as a catastrophe. Or we can reclaim our history of migration and our place in nature as migrants like the butterflies and the birds. We can turn migration from a crisis into its opposite: the solution.” - from The Coca of The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move by Sonia Shah 

After Reading this amazing, profound and beautiful l work I was completely convinced this was the truth.  Shah’s book proves it.

This book should be required reading for all government officials who set Immigration policy.  Sonia Shah’s book demonstrates beyond any doubt that anti-immigrant policies espoused by leaders are based on long ago refuted science and completely false Ideas about the impact of mass Immigrations of people from so called third world countries into Europe and America.  It exposes total the ignorance and cruelty of much of American and European Immigration policy.

She begins her narrative with an account of her parents, both medical doctors, moving from Mumbai to New York City in a time when America needed more physicians.  She talks about her feelings growing up.  From this in chapter two, Panic, she talks about how a fear of immigrations became an important part of American foreign policy, first popularized  when national security expert Robert D. Kaplan wrote about in a 1994 Atlantic magazine article called “The Coming Anarchy”, in 

which he suggests events brought on by climate change  and the end of the cold war will  cause massive inflows of immigrants, with darker skins, to lighter skinned countries, taking jobs, causing disease, increasing crime and a mixing of the races.  This article became required reading in the American state Department.  Shah totally reduces Kaplan’s Ideas to intellectually clothed racism with no factual support.  Here was Kaplan’s thesis

“The magnetic poles of the United States and the Soviet Union, he explained, had held a number of destabilizing forces in suspension. Nobody had noticed, because we’d been so preoccupied with the stockpiles of missiles and the creepy binational taunting. Now, with those two poles deactivated, suppressed elements would be unleashed. Instead of improving the prospects for peace and security, the end of the Cold War would do just the opposite. The problem: people would start to move. As deserts spread and forests were felled, Kaplan wrote, masses of desperate, impoverished people would be forced to migrate into overburdened cities. With no great power regimes to prop up weak states, the tumult caused by migrants would result in social breakdown and “criminal anarchy.” There’d be bloody conflicts. Deadly diseases would rage. Already, across West Africa, he said, young men moved in “hordes,” like “loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid” on the verge of ignition. Others would soon follow. A new era of migration, he wrote, would create “the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate.... There’d likely be 50 million on the move by 2020, experts at the United Nations University projected. Two hundred million by 2050, the environmental security analyst Norman Myers announced. One billion the NGO Christian Aid projected. People moving around, in their telling, was an exceptional and future threat, “one of the foremost human crises5 of our times,” as Myers put it. In fact, as any migration expert could have shown, migration was just the opposite: an unexceptional ongoing reality. And while environmental changes shaped its dynamics, they didn’t do so in a predictably simple way.”  

Americans  saw the impact of these theories in the political rhetoric of trump screaming about a wall along the southern border to keep out dark hordes of rapists, murders, future welfare mothers.  Americans, 70,000,000 of them believed this nonsense.  Shah details what does happen when a large number of immigrants entered an American City.  The immigrants have less crime than natives, get and keep jobs, start businesses, rely less on Public Assistance after a brief transition and educate their children.  

In a fascinsting chapter “LINNAEUS’S LOATHSOME HARLOTRY” we see how The idea that animals, plants and people belong where they are was dervived from his religious idelogy.  A bias against migration became part of the  idelogy of western thinking.  One of the most fascinsting aspects of Shah’s book is the  numerous examples she gives of birds, butterflys and mammals moving in mass due to climate change. Linnseus’s theories, for a very long time excepted as gospel are completely destroyed.  Sadly long after scientists saw this Linnseus’s s Ideas were used by politicians to suggest people should stay where they belong. 

She employs a two pronged attack on anti-mass inmigrations.  Going back into the scientific theories she refutes them step by step.  She also looks at  immigrants to see if they destroyed their new countiries and finds just opposite.  

In a very powerful chapter, “MALTHUS’S HIDEOUS BLASPHEMY” she shows How his viewes on the horrors of population growth in non-western societies are still being used by demogogues preying on fears of immigrant hordes.  Historically she shows us idea of national borders  is itself a relatively recent construct.

She gives us numerous examples  of migrants, explaining why they are motivated to leave their birth  countries. We see the hardships immigrants take for their children, risking death. She talks about her own experiences as a volunteer helping recent immigrant mothers.  

This is an elegant briiliant  book I am very glad I read.  

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author of critically acclaimed books on science, politics and human rights. Her latest book, The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, explores our centuries-long assumptions about migration through science, history, and reporting, predicting its lifesaving power in the face of climate change. A finalist for the 2021 PEN/E.O Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, it was selected as a best nonfiction book of 2020 by Publishers Weekly, a best science book of 2020 by Amazon, and a best science and technology book of 2020 by Library Journal. Author and activist Naomi Klein calls it a “dazzlingly original picture,” “rich with eclectic research and on-the-ground reporting,” and a “story threaded with joy and inspiration.” From https://soniashah.com/

Her website has numerous valuable links. 

I have added her prior books to my Amazon wish list.

Sonia Shah, Thank you for this wonderful book.

Mel u

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin - 2009

 

  

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin  - 2009

Nominated for National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for History

An Autoditactic Corner Selection

Essential Reading for all into 20th Century American History

Henry Ford 

Born - July 30, 1863 - Springwells, Michigan 

Founds Ford Motor Company on June 16, 1903

October 1, 1908 - Introduces Model T - by 1918 over half American cars were model Ts

1926 - Initiates a $5.00 minimum wage (equal to $130.00 a day now - established forty hour work week and gave health insurance to workers

1928 - established Fordlandia on 14,268 square Kilometers in N. E. Brazil- the purpose was to produce rubber

N

1934 - Fordlandia abandoned 

April 1, 1947 - Dies - Dearborn, Michigan 

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin  - 2009

Nominated for National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for History

An Autoditactic Corner Selection

Essential Reading for all into 20th Century American History

Henry Ford 

Born - July 30, 1863 - Springwells, Michigan 

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin gets my 2021 reading life year off to a wonderful start.  Grandin elegantly tells the story of Henry Ford’s riise from a mechanic, the child of an Irish immigrant,to 

one of the richest people in the world.  We learn that Ford did not invent  the assembly line but perfected it.  He was the

first automobile manufacturers to produce a car millions could afford, the Model T, costing $850.00, buyable on credit, coming only in black.  Ford did pay very well, he wanted the best workers. Many African Americans moved up from the south to get a job in his factory.

Ford paid everyone the same but Grinder does say he gave them low skill jobs and did not advance them.  Ford turned his employees into cogs in his process.  No one was allowed to sit down.  As his work force topped 100,000 he began an internal security force which made sure there was no talk of unions.  Dissenters were at risk for physical harm.  He sent inspectors to employee houses trying to enforce a no drinking regulation.  

I learned a lot about the development of The 

 automobile business.  Soon Ford had factories in many countries as well as franchised sales offices.Ford was a pacifist, very against Franklin Roosevelt.  As Japan expanded the international supply of rubber Ford needed was in danger of being curtailed.  He knew he had to do something.  Once WW Two began Ford did turn his factories to the war effort.

Grinder also goes a lot into the rubber industry.  Ford knew once rubber was grown only in Brazil but seedlings were smuggled out and rubber was grown more successfully in S. E. Asia.  Brazilian rubber tappers were normally in debt bondage to a local merchant.  It was very interesting to learn why rubber trees did better outside of Brazil.Ford, aided by a loyal management team, decided to revitalize the Brazilian rubber industry.  In order to do he acquired a huge parcel of land in N. E.Brazil, on rivers that were part of the Amazon system. We learn of the interactions of Ford’s representatives and the Brazilian government people, both sides wanted to personally profit.  Ford wanted to recreate a Michigan town, minus the bars,brothels, deep in the Amazon using as workers the people in the area.  Logistically it was hard to get supplies there as ocean going vessels needed to bring in requirements could only reach the area half the year.  Grinder goes into a lot of fascinating detail about the problems getting the workers, who were well paid, to accept strict regulations.  All sorts of side businesses sprung up to service the workers, including of course bars and brothels.  Often a Ford employee would bring his extended family with him.  Ford employees, many young single men, would often quit their jobs once they had enough cash to live a few months.  Ford tried to make employees eat in a company cafeteria 

serving food very unlike home cooking.  Grinder describes a violent strike of Ford employees that required the intervention of the Brazilian army to restore order.

Grinder very clearly lets us see why the project was doomed from the start.

We learned of Ford’s mental decline, his troubled relationship with his only child Edsel

Grinder closes the book with a grim account of what Ford did to The Brazilian Amazon in cities like Manus.  Grinder convinced me that Ford helped turned people all over World into near corporate cogs and near slaves

Greg Grandin

Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Greg Grandin has been appointed as the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Grandin, who holds a Ph.D. from Yale (1999), won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for his book “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America” (Metropolitan Books). The book explores the meaning of the frontier from the American Revolution to the presidential election of 2016. It was also a finalist for both the Pulitzer’s history category this year and the 2019 National Book Award.

The Yale professor is the author of seven books. His “Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City” was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of “The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World,” which won the Bancroft and Beveridge prizes in American history and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in the United Kingdom. His first book, “The Blood of Guatemala,” won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for best book published on Latin American in any discipline.

Grandin has co-edited, with Gil Joseph, “A Century of Revolution,” and, with Deborah Levenson and Elizabeth Oglesby, “The Guatemala Reader.” He has published widely in The New York Times, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, The Nation, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, The Hispanic American Historical Review, and The American Historical Review, among other places,.

A graduate of Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, Grandin studied for his Yale doctorate studied under historian Emilia Viotti da Costa. He joined the Yale faculty in the fall of 2019, having previously taught at New York University.

Grandin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians.”  From Yale University

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin is a very powerful book.  

All teachers of history, not just American history as Ford changed World, should read this book.

.

Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany by Edward Westermann

Drunk on Genocide:Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany by Edward B. Westermann -forthcoming March 15, 2021 from Cornell University Press 

An Autodidactic Corner Selection

In Drunk on Genocide:Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany Edward B. Westermann seeks to demonstrate a close connection between alcohol, male bonding, a compulsive need to prove one’s masculinity and the tremendous enjoyment involved in the killings during the Holocaust.  

He cites cites a copious number of incidents where ordinary citizens joined in watching events of mass shooting as one might a soccer game. Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Romanians and others flocked to watch Jews being shot, often taking pictures of them abusing the bodies for keepsakes.  Massive amounts of alcohol was typically consumed as part of the celebration.  The more joy with which  a German took part in killing and the more he could “hold his liquor” the more of a man he became in the eyes of others.  The killers were not drinking to hide shame but to make it all more fun.  

Of course alcohol lowers inhibitions, many concentration camp guards were most feared when they were drunk.  In the camps guards would have lots of marksmanship contests using Jews as targets.  Female and male inmates were routinely raped.  There were official Gestapo rules against sex with Jewish inmates  and drinking while on duty but the penalties were trivial.  I was shocked to learn women who played in the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz were regularly raped by drunken guards because they received extra food rations and were more attractive targets physically because of this.  Pregnancy was terminated with a gun shot.

Much sport was made of throwing babies in the air and shooting them fueled by alcohol. 

. 

Westerman details the ritual drinking parties of SS men.  Female SS guards were often the cruelest, trying to show that they were even more masculine than the men.  

I closed this book totally convinced by Westerman.

From Cornell University Press 

“In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe.

Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated "performative masculinity," expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself.

Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination.”

Edward B. Westermann is Professor of History at Texas A&M University-San Antonio, a Commissioner on the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, and author, most recently, of Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars.

This book should be in all school libraries.  It is a very valuable addition to Holocaust studies.

Mel u 

 

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich - 2018

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich - 2018

An autodidactic corner selection.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich is as fascinating a work as I have read in a long time.  If you have any serious interest in understanding how the human species evolved and spread all over the  in diverse forms, you will be spellbound by this book.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past was to me a challenging read.  I have very little formal training in science and none in the intricacies of DNA.  The book focuses on the results of the application of genome-wide testing of ancient DNA to human prehistory and genetics.  Doctor Reich is a leading researcher in this field.  Much of his work develops insights based on comparisons of ancient DNA from remains and modern groups.

He describes the book as intended to be both an introduction to this field for those new to the area and an overview for professionals in various impacted areas.  I left this book seeing how ancient migrations and mixing of groups produced the world today.

Using cutting edge technology Reich is able to deduce migration of human groups from many thousands of years ago.  Reich is acutely sensitive to the uses racists including the Nazis made of bogus genetic claims of race based genetics.  He talks about resistance to  Ancient DNA studies based on this.

The book is in part a memoir of his career.  He began his post doctoral research focusing on why members of some races are especially prone to certain diseases.  From this he began to study ancient DNA, how it lingers on in modern humans.


A look at the table of contents shows the broad scope of this book.

Part I The Deep History of Our Species
1 How the Genome Explains Who We Are
2 Encounters with Neanderthals
3 Ancient DNA Opens the
 Part II How We Got to Where We Are Today
4 Humanity’s Ghosts
5. The Making of Modern Europe
6 The Collision That Formed India
7 In Search of Native American Ancestors
8 The Genomic Origins of East Asians
9 Rejoining Africa to the Human Story Part III The Disruptive Genome
10 The Genomics of Inequality
11 The Genomics of Race and Identity
12 The Future of Ancient DNA

The website of Professor Reich is a great resource

https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/

Professor David Reich, of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a pioneer in analyzing ancient human DNA to learn about the past. In 2015, Nature magazine named him one of “10 people who matter” in all of the sciences for his contribution to transforming ancient DNA data “from niche pursuit to industrial process.” He has received numerous awards, including the 2017 Dan David Prize in the Archaeological and Natural Sciences for the computational discovery of intermixing between Neanderthals and modern humans.

I hope to read through this book a second time this year.

Ancient DNA studies has really only being truly in process since 2010.  It will change as it develops and change our world view as it does.  The book is a celebration of the love of knowledge and the diversity of humanity.

Mel u

TOM PAINE A Political life JOHN KEANE - 1999 -676 pages

As of now I Will for a while only be posting on Short Stories but for myself I Will do very Short posts on longer works for my records.

I highly endorse this book to any one interested in The American Revolution and The years up to Paine’s death.

Born January 20, 1737 Thetford, UK

Died June 8, 1808 New York

I am, as are many, fighting The mental impact of events.  

“More than any other public figure of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant world." So begins John Keane's magnificent and award-winning (the Fraunces Tavern Book Award) biography of one of democracy's greatest champions. Among friends and enemies alike, Paine earned a reputation as a notorious pamphleteer, one of the greatest political figures of his day, and the author of three best-selling books, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. Setting his compelling narrative against a vivid social backdrop of prerevolutionary America and the French Revolution, John Keane melds together the public and the shadowy private sides of Paine's life in a remarkable piece of scholarship. This is the definitive biography of a man whose life and work profoundly shaped the modern age. "Provide[s] an engaging perspective on England, America, and France in the tumultuous years of the late eighteenth century." -- Pauline Maier, The New York Times Book Review "It is hard to imagine this magnificent biography ever being superceded.... It is a stylish, splendidly erudite work." -- Terry Eagleton, The Guardian from Amazon.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - 1856 - translated by Lydia Davis - 2010

Gustave Flaubert

December 12, 1821

1856 - Madame Bovary

1869 - Sentimental Education 

May 8, 1880

This is my fourth  reading of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, the first was decades ago, the second just before I began The Reading Life eleven  years ago. The last prior to this month was five years ago.  My reading of the universally praised translation by Lydia Davis, including her introduction, will not, I hope be my last.

Madame Bovary is as high a canon status work as exists.

Here are some of my thoughts from May, 2014.


"I think I first became aware of the cultural importance of Madame Bovary around 1960 through reading of it in The Life Time Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman.  I still have, in a newer edition, Fadiman's book (which I endorse strongly to those seeking to be literary autodidacts, especially isolated young readers as I was)so I reread his remarks on the novel.  Admist the obligatory praise, he describes it as "cold and depressing".    Is there anyone in the novel we can admire at all?  The answer seems to be no.  Madame Bovary is a vain, totally self-centered fool, a terrible wife and worse mother.  Dr. Bovary is pretty much a dolt.  The secondary characters are either out to have sex with Emma or trick her into signing promissory notes for merchandise she can use to seem "high society".  Emma is ruined through credit purchases for fancy clothes and such designed to make her appear high society.  The supposed theme of my blog is a focus on books about characters that lead reading centered lives.  It was reading romance novels that made Emma bored with the simple life she lead as the wife of a country doctor.   These books helped to ruin her life, her husband's and that of her daughter.  

So is this Pantheon status work "cold and depressing"?  Ask if the murals of Anghor Wat depicting horrible battles are depressing, if Picasso's Guernica is cold.  Maybe it is chiily on Mount Parnassus but the climb is exhilarating and maybe if one wants to counter Fadiman, to be able to contemplate such works, in which I include Madame Bovary, while knowing we are of the species about which Flaubert writes is an exhilarating experience."

The lengthy depiction of the suicide of Madame Bovary is incredibly powerful, almost overwhelming.  The spiral to an early death of Charles Bovary after this is the work of a master. Davis has produced high art.  

Sentimental Education is perhaps a more "likeable" book.

Aspiring novelist, literary autodidacts must read this Madame Bovary.  If you cannot read French, by all means read the Lydia Davis translation.

I have her translation of Swann's Way and hope to read it soon.

Mel u

Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow -2010 - 930 pages. - Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography

George Washington:A Life by Ron Chernow

February 22, 1732

1775 to 1783 - Commanded Continental Army during the American Revolution

1789 to 1797 - First President of The United States

December 14, 1799. 

If you love American history and have not yet read Ron Chernow's biographies of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington you have a marvelous experience awaiting you.

Last month I posted on his Alexander Hamilton - http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2019/09/alexander-hamilton-by-ron-chernow-2004_21.html, made into a Broadway musical.  Hamilton was Washington's Aide de Camp as well as a military commander during the American Revolution and was the first secretary of the treasury.

I will in this post not recap Washington's life, just talk a bit about some of the many things that struck me.

Chernow brought Washington very much to life for me.  Long long ago my family and I visited his home in Mount Vernon, from Chernow I felt the great sadness Washington experienced during the eight years the Revolution kept him away from his home and his business.  

Chernow faces square on a fundamental issue, one must say, a flaw in the character of a basically highly principled man, Washington's attitude toward slavery.  He did see the contradiction in leading a war for liberty while owning hundreds of slaves.  Washington is portrayed by Chernow as treating his slaves better than most Virginia plantation owners, he respected slave marriages, he did not sell of spouses or children, he did not rape captive women, he made sure older slaves who could not work had food and medical care.  However, he did have slaves whipped and if a slave would not work and obey the rules he did on occasion sell them to West Indian sugar plantations, which was about a three years to death sentence.  Washington thought a slave should want to do their best for his or her master.  He sent slaves out to work in subfreezing weather.  Forty seven slaves attempted to escape from his ownership and he never seemed to understand why.  He did come to see that perhaps it would be better business to free the slaves thus relieving him of the burden of feeding them and just hire  workers.  He freeded about half the Mount Vernon slaves in his will but half were actually owned by the children of Martha from a prior marriage so he could not under Virginia law free them.  He also knew if he opposed slavery, the southern states might not join the union and might in fact side with the British.

We learn how Washington obtained wealth through inheritance and from his marriage.  Washington did enjoy the company of attractive women but seems in all probability never to have cheated on his wife.

We go along during his leadership in the French and Indian War.  His successful experience during this lead to his selection as leader of the Continental Army.  We meet his generals as well as the British leaders.  Chernow explained how the reluctance of British generals to press early advantages was a great break for the rebels.

Chernow goes into detail about the terrible hardships at Valley Forge.  The farmers in the surrounding areas had lots of food for sale but most would not accept American paper money.  Washington would not allow his soldiers to just take supplies, knowing this might turn the population against the 

revolutionary efforts.  We also see that as the war moved to the southern states, Washington's Quarter Master general did confiscate livestock at the point of a gun on occasions.

A big problem in the eight year war was keeping the army in tact.  Soldiers enlisted normally for one year and got very tired of being hungry and not getting paid.  Both the British and the Americans induced slaves to fight with promises of freedom after victory.  The prospect of slaves with guns caused many plantation owners to fear a slave uprising.

Washington went as long as three years without seeing action. He was focused on taking New York State and the Philadelphia area but the British moved the war to Georgia and the Carolinas, taking advantage of their unmatched in the world fleet to move their troops.  The Brotish generals were used to fighting pitched battles on open fields.  American militia volunteers adopted a style of fighting, partially learned fighting Indians, better suited to American terrain. Chernow showed that Washington's best military field commander was Nathaniel Greene. He goes into a lot of fascinating detail about his relationship to Alexander Hamilton.

The entrance of the French in the war was very valuable.  We learn a lot about Lafayette's life, role in the war and his close friendship with Washington.  I loved learning about the probably gay German officer who turned the Continental Army into a professional fighting force. Friedrich Wilhelm August Heinrich Ferdinand Steuben 

After the war ended it seemed like Washington just wanted to get back to Mount Vernon.

This post is long already.  Chernow brilliantly narrates Washington's time as president, many wanted to make him president for life.

Many know Washington as the father of America, he had no children most likely as a consequence of either his small pox or injuries to Martha during childbirth.  He was very close to his step children and lots of nephews and nieces.

Every American schoolchild used to be taught Washington was called the father of his country.

If you want to know why can also be called the father of the American mule, read this book!

I read last year his book on the Warburg banking family.  I have kindly been given a review copy of his latest book, a biography of Grant which I will read next year, I hope.

Mel u