Profiles in Folly by Alan Axelrod

What a history book!  Lets just get to it - what is the worst and dumbest decisions ever made, US, World,not the universe - yet.  Axelrod not only writes a book that is easy to read, it is a book that is hard to put down.  My God, what other dumb decision is there?  From Custer to Katrina, from Rasputin to George W Bush we are treated to thoughtful essays that provide us with a great opportunity to see when leadership failed us.

Enron to Edsel the book jumps from politics to economy.  The book looks at some of the worst presidents to some of the best, but it spares no rod when it sees the Gulf of Tonkin and the Dred Scott decisions.

This book is real and thought provoking history.  From "I am not a crook" to the racist refusal to use the African American Troops at Petersburg we are reminded that we do not live with the best decisions, we survive the worst.

The Old Ways

As a walking person I was drawn to Macfarlane's book, but I did not really understand that it was a walking tribute to Edward Thomas who was the writer that influenced Robert Frost and was the basis for the Two Paths Diverge verses.  

It is a book that is rich in references to paths, writing, walking, philosophy.  

These are the folk paths, the journeys by foot that have marked the earth for centuries and the landscape that is encountered when they are walked now.  

Some parts of the book drag and others are too short.  Depending upon your reference, each chapter has a different perspective and collectively they honor the basic experience of walking.. 

 It started out slowly and suddenly it was over.  How did that happen.  Maybe, like a walk, it takes time to get your stride, to feel the landscape and find the stories that are all around. 

A Spy Among Friends

I grew up on I Led Three Lives - a television series based on Herbert Philbrick. It was a series that my vague memory puts as a classic. In Wikipedia it describes the series: "It was loosely based on the life of Herbert Philbrick, a Boston advertising executive who infiltrated the U.S. Communist Party on behalf of the FBI in the 1940s." In this book we go back to that era and find the most notorious of all spies - Kim Philby double agent who single-handedly turned the western spy agents into a joke. A Russian agent, Philby almost became the head of British spies. 

Here is the ultimate of spying, almost a parody of the parody I SPY in Mad magazine. So sophisticated were our spies that we could not figure out when someone in our own agency was causing the people we supported to be caught, captured, and killed by the Soviets.

It has to be an embarrassment to the families of the leading spies in the US and Britain and it is a good lesson for everyone in this clandestine game.

It is a fascinating story and well written.

The Caning by Stephen Puleo

Drama is difficult when the results are known, but in this historic recounting of the famous caning by southern Brooks to northern Senator Sumner there is a tension that you look for in good novels.

Bloody Kansas, a country tired of the horrible institution called slavery and a south comfortable in the inconsistent application of whip, chain, and inhumanity of the institution meant that conflict was inevitable. 

Even religion could not expel or justify this blight on national history, but the results of one man - Representative Brooks - taking a cane to beat another man - Charles Sumner in the halls of congress seemed to be the keystone to the shift in the debate.

No longer was it the dance that Madison had caused around this albatross, but rather it was an open and flagrant conflict that could be embodied in the bloody and invalid Sumner. 

The time for genteel discussion and compromise was past. The caning represented so much more and the bloodshed in Kansas was beyond comprehension as the bullies of Missouri poored across the border.

Ruffians they were but much more, this was a flagrant violation of the right of a state to choose for itself and the emotions brought John Brown and his boys to righteous indignation and eye for an eye retribution.

All in all the act of caning made Lincoln possible and war inevitable. Following the tableau is fascinating and absorbing.

Shantyboat on the Bayous by Harlan Hubbard

 This is the second book in the trilogy about Harlan and Anna HubbardIn this book we find the conclusion of their 7 years living on a Shanty boat.  After reaching New Orleans they and their two dogs went through the Harvey Canal and began an odyssey of life in the bayous and coastal wetlands that make the southern shore of Louisiana so unique and intriguing.

They are floating pioneers, living off the land and waters, they lead a sustainable life and work as a couple in this partnership.  Set in 1950 this is long before we began to see the need for small houses, sustainable living, low impact choices.  This is a voyage that is not based on money, but rather fortitude.

They are not trapped by schedules, but, rather, stop and go as they desire.  Sometimes it is overnight, sometimes a month.  It is leisurely and yet it has the demands of finding food, repairing the boat and keeping themselves stocked with necessities.  

They fish, gather wild pokeweed, and find a way to observe the Cajun People, places, and lifestyles.  The two artists have an eye for life around them and share their keen observations with the reader.  

It is also a historic photo of the land that has now succumbed to the ravages of land loss, oil exploitation and intrusions of our corporate greed into these isolated regions.  Today many islands and lands they saw are no longer there.

But the hint of what will happen in the 65 years since they lived here are in the book.  The flames and sounds of oil rigs, the new road...

Death on the Greasy Grass by C M Wendeloe

This is a really fun series that deserves its own television production, like Longmire.  I enjoy the characters, the sprinkling of Crow and Lakota history and beliefs and the landscape of the Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn).

This is an iconic location and as such it has had lots of history and fiction (sometimes the history is fiction) written about it so it is fitting that the mystery would engage with the Custer legend and impose on current day Crow and Lakota relationships a mysterious diary that appears to be as responsible for current murders as it is a record of historic events.

This is not a big city procedural and it will not be confused with CSI, but it is fitting to this wide open space where the rules of life and engagement seem somehow more tied to historic old-west actions than to the rules of modern law enforcement.

Manny Tanno is FBI from Pine Ridge, imagine that! And he has a case on the Crow Reservation (a Lakota working on the land of the traditional Lakota enemies).  This is a case that crosses lots of lines and the dialogue and the personal issues seem to fit with the storyline and the land.

Empire of Sin by Gary Krist

This was an excellent history of New Orleans centering around Storyville and the Italian and African American prejudices of the time.  Spiced with the story of jazz and the bad reputation that was assigned to this truly American music this book is a page turner.

Written more like a novel than a history; the book describes a variety of crimes and leads us through the events and people associated with these event and allows the reader to make discoveries within the text, but never before it is appropriate.

Madams, musicians, and politicians all have their roles here.  The Black Hand of the Italians, Jim Crow leveraged against the blacks, and, always, the moralizing groups who want to impose their gods and their false set of standards on others appear throughout the book.

There is the tension between those who seek pleasure and those who would deny it.  Between those who are coerced and those who make choices.  It is a morality play with lots of stories to test our sense of what is right and what is wrong.

Larger than life characters emerge and carry us through the various threads and lead us to ask what if?    

Shantyboat - Harlan Hubbard

This classic book is one every river person should read. Harlan and his wife Anna take seven years aboard a shantyboat that they built themselves to go off the grid and explore the land and the waters of the Ohio and the Mississippi River. They are not in a hurry - every spring they pull in, plant a garden, settle into a new community of people, fish, pick berries and show us a wonderful life that is beautiful in both the scenery and the way of living.

He is an artist and both are musicians. They find pleasure in meeting people discovering new locations, gathering wild vegetables, eating from the land and the river they interact with drifters and fishermen as they go.

Moving with the current and no motor they are truly adrift and vulnerable to the whims of the great rivers.   This is after both the 1937 and 1927 floods and before the big box store invasion so the picture of the places is really valuable to our collective consciousness and image of the rivers. 

I just wish I could have met them and gone on board!

The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the story and writing.  McKinely is mostly known for being the man who died so that Theodore Roosevelt could become president, but as this political biography of the man, his assassin and the times proves, he is worth studying too.

It was a turbulent time when we had oversized power in the hands of corporations and the uber rich - a time so similar in some ways to what is happening now that we really have an obligation to look in the mirror of history.

It is a time of anarchists - people who will and did you violence - in response to repression and strike breaking violence.  People like Emma Goldman put to voice important issues and frustrations and an obscure immigrant Czolgosz reacted to both his personal frustration and the anger in Goldman's speeches and kills the president, as a result.

McKinely is portrayed as a very charismatic man, but one thrust into wars in Cuba and the Philippines and struggles in China.  While not a man hungering for war like so many of his colleagues, he is driven by Capitalism to find a way to keep the factories humming and production up which means taking an imperialistic stance to accumulating lands offshore and across the globe.

Hawaii, China, Guam and many other locations appear in this story alongside the Haymarket violence and other domestic stories.  I am delighted that I came on to this book and discovered the depth I did not anticipate.