Book Reviews

Tue, Sep 20: Fighting Chance: The Struggle Over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America
20 September 2011, 2:00 am

For a moment amid the ferment after the Civil War, it seemed possible to at least some Americans that women would win the right to vote. The abolition of slavery put broad questions of voting rights and citizenship on the table, and legislators were eager to act. Women suffragists hoped their time had come. Instead, they saw their "fighting chance" evaporate with the ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, which outlawed disenfranchisement on the basis of race but not of sex. Women would have to wait half a century before they secured the vote in 1920.

Faye E. Dudden, a professor of history at Colgate College, attempts to shed new light on this episode in Fighting Chance. Hers is a tale of the ideological, political, and often intensely personal disputes that pitted former political allies in the abolitionist cause -- including Wendell Phillips, Lucy Stone, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony -- against one another. As they organized and campaigned for suffrage reforms around the country, these ardent activists eventually divided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which Stanton and Anthony did not support because it failed to give women the vote.

Indeed, the two women ended up espousing a racist agenda that denigrated African-American and immigrant men in order to advance the cause of white womanhood. "Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung," Stanton wrote in her newspaper, The Revolution, as she editorialized in 1868 about the folly of allowing such ignorant men to make laws for educated women. Dudden seems interested in at least partly exonerating Stanton and Anthony, portraying their racist rhetoric as a response to those she believes were most to blame for upending the fighting chance for women's suffrage -- chief among them Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips, who in 1865 succeeded William Lloyd Garrison as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Money is a central thread in Dudden's story. In a legal and economic system that limited women's access to property and wage-earning opportunities, women reformers encountered onerous financial obstacles in funding their campaigns. Phillips was the trustee of an important bequest that both women's rights and antislavery activists could potentially draw upon. Believing that "antislavery" work would remain unfinished until blacks were accorded the ballot and full rights, he directed the money toward that goal and froze the women out.

Lack of funding was indeed an important factor in women's failure to secure the vote, but Dudden's focus on it constrains her analysis. Did Stanton really launch racist diatribes because Phillips deprived her cause of money? Surely the pervasive racism of 19th-century America had something to do with Stanton's attitude, as did her position of relative privilege and her distance -- she lived in New York City -- from the turmoil of the postwar South. Dudden insists that Phillips, in making the antislavery cause primary even after chattel slavery was declared dead, upheld a "pretense that 'slavery' was still at issue." But she acknowledges that immediately after the war President Andrew Johnson "warned that emancipation was only an experiment." Can Phillips honestly be accused of upholding a mere "pretense" in the face of what appeared a genuine threat to the cause he and others had worked so hard for?

In her eagerness to play down Stanton's racism, Dudden emphasizes Stanton's lawyerly tendency to argue "in the alternative" -- her penchant for trying out different arguments, even conflicting and racist ones, so long as she could gain some ground. And Dudden recounts other expressions of racial intolerance, including those of Lucy Stone, a supporter of black suffrage, perhaps in an effort to make Stanton and Anthony's bigotry appear less conspicuous.

All this gives readers a vivid sense of the intensely emotional and rancorous political landscape in which reformers worked immediately after the Civil War. Yet too much in this account hinges on highly personal developments that cannot be considered the most telling aspects of the story. Ultimately, the "fighting chance" for winning women's suffrage was lost not because of Wendell Phillips's arrogance or Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lawyerly style of argumentation, but because Americans remained immersed in a climate of intense racial conflict. This volatile atmosphere convinced Phillips and other reformers that a campaign to advance voting rights for women was a liability in the critical work of securing, in the fullest sense, black emancipation.

Nina Silber, a professor of history at Boston University, has written extensively about gender relations in the Civil War era.

Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day

Sun, Sep 18: In Red
18 September 2011, 2:00 am

This is the story of Stitchings, a small town to be found in the Republic of Poland, although it might not show up on any of your maps. "Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings," Magdalena Tulli writes in In Red's first line. It's a wary introduction to a town that behaves as no town should. Sure, there is the salt mine and the porcelain factory. There are strapping young soldiers and fair maidens. There are businessmen and oligarchs and a lucky star hovering over the town hall. But Tulli's hesitation is soon understandable.

Stitchings' wealthy businessman, who can never seem to pay for his dinner because no one has enough cash to make change for his high-denomination bills, is killed by a bullet that circles the Earth for years until it finds its target in the great man's heart. There's another man who can't sleep, who exists somewhere between unconsciousness and full wakefulness, and he's in love with a girl whose heart has stopped. They would get on with her funeral, but she keeps walking around and complaining that no one will let her go dancing. Another woman, in love with the insomniac, accidentally marks the town's soldiers for death with a fraying red silk thread. These are things that should not happen, in a place populated with people who should not exist.

Magdalena Tulli is one of Poland's most celebrated writers, and with In Red there is much to treasure. She plays with the line between unexpected and quirky very well. Despite the more fantastical elements, there is nothing twee about Tulli. A gritty darkness shadows Stitchings, as the occupying German army marches in, or as the Hussars disappear in the night, or as drunken soldiers freeze to death in the snow banks on the way home from the brothel. There is desperation and poverty and starvation. She creates an atmosphere reminiscent of the dark Polish forests of older fairy tales, the ones with the high body counts.

Yet, through it all, Tulli remains welcoming. "Anyone who makes it to Stitchings appreciates ... the moist warm breeze in which desires flourish so handsomely." And that visitor will feel so at home that he'd be "quite unaware that he'd already been relieved of his wallet." It's a sinister welcome mat she lays down. Still, you can't help but to want to return again and again. Just a friendly word of warning: If you come to Stitchings on a tourist visa, keep your valuables locked safely at home.

Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day

Fri, Sep 16: Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent
16 September 2011, 2:00 am

There is no more tragic vegetable than the potato. Originating in the Peruvian Andes, it was first domesticated by the Quechua-speaking peoples, who could not help but become reliant on a highly nutritional foodstuff that could be grown in large quantities on small plots in regions inhospitable to grains. John Reader, in his ambling new history of the "propitious esculent," calls the potato the "best all-around bundle of nutrition known." Without any help from other products, it can provide a "filling, wholesome and nourishing meal." But the "innocent" potato, Reader admits, "has facilitated exploitation." It enabled the Quechua to maintain strong bodies while suffering the deprecations of the Incas (and their system of forced labor). The Incas were followed by Spanish colonizers and then by Spanish and Peruvian hacienda owners, whose "feudal stranglehold on agriculture and farm labor" remained in place until just a few decades ago.

When the Spanish brought potatoes to Europe in the sixteenth century, the locals were skeptical. Churchmen denounced the tuber, noting that potatoes were not mentioned in the Bible. Potatoes were ugly, coming in red, black, and purple varieties and looking like "the deformed hands and feet of the leper -- the shunned outcast of the Middle Ages." Potatoes could even make you a leper. "I am told that the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating of them causes leprosy," wrote the English botanist John Gerard in 1633. But Europe was gearing up for a few centuries of warfare, and the put-upon population, as in the case of the Quechua, would find sustenance in the potato.

As happened everywhere the cultivation of the potato became widespread, their numbers grew -- and just in time to serve as a vast workforce for the Industrial Revolution and its inequitable system of low wages and brutal working conditions. In Das Kapital, Marx cites a pamphlet declaring that "if the labourer can be brought to feed on potatoes instead of bread, it is indisputably true that more can be exacted from his labour." In non-industrial Ireland, the potato was able to maintain a huge army of perpetually near-starving paupers on large estates owned by absentee landlords who had little interest in improving the general welfare. The plant was so ubiquitous that a succession of crop failures in the mid-nineteenth century -- which became the Great Irish Famine, from 1845 to (roughly) 1850 -- reduced the nation's population by a third (half from death) and provoked an outflow of emigrants that would last for a century and a half. Ireland has never come close to matching its pre-famine population of 8.2 million. In 1904, the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt called the "accursed" potato the "enemy of the poorer Irish peasantry."

Reader does not flinch from telling this side of the story, but he is not writing a tragedy. The potato, in his words, was "Peru's gift to the world." He devotes many pages to celebrating important figures in the modern history of the potato, its greatest champions, men who saw the derided vegetable as a force for good. There is Nicolay Ivanovich Vavilov, a Soviet agricultural botanist who was so seared by the loss of life from the Soviet famine of 1921 that he sidled up to Trotsky on a breadline and told him how "his program of research and plant breeding could eliminate food shortages and bread queues for ever." Trotsky passed the word to Lenin, who decided to provide funding for Vavilov's research institute. Despite his scientific acuity (or perhaps because of it), Vavilov eventually ran afoul of a regime that was fixated on grain, and he was thrown in prison, where he died in 1943. (Given the potato's history, this counts as perhaps the only instance of the Soviet Union passing up a valuable instrument of tyranny.)

The greatest hero of the tuber was Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a Frenchman who was fed exclusively on potatoes during his time as a prisoner of the Prussians during the Seven Years War. He emerged from captivity determined that "all of France should enjoy the benefits of this hitherto despised crop." He introduced it as a salve against hunger for the poor masses; and he presented it as a curiosity to the aristocracy, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in a private audience in 1785. "Now that the potato was served at court, and had achieved respectability among the aristocracy," Reader remarks, "Parmentier began promoting its virtues with the panache of a modern-day public relations consultant." He hosted dinners that included nothing but potatoes. Benjamin Franklin was said to have attended one of them. The same was said of Thomas Jefferson, who, as president in 1802, served potatoes "in the French manner" at the White House, thus (it is claimed) introducing french fries to America.

Bringing us up to the present, Reader describes the considerable efforts in place to combat "the world's worst agricultural disease" -- the pernicious "late" blight that destroyed Ireland's potato crops so many years ago. The developing world spends upward of $750 million a year on fungicides to combat the disease. Reader also tells -- inevitably -- of how China has utilized the potato during its explosion of growth over the past few decades. China is not only the world's largest producer of potatoes -- they are grown in huge numbers in remote regions of Inner Mongolia -- but it is also a mass consumer of them in the form of french fries. Reader even wonders if the world community could achieve the vaunted Millennium Development Goals with the aid of new disease-resistant strains of potatoes, although he is forced to concede that "while the potato was good at keeping people alive it did not lift many of them out of poverty."

All of which makes you wonder why he begins his book with the triumphant observation that NASA astronauts will be bringing potatoes with them when they eventually reach Mars. Given the history that he subsequently relates, I can only think: God help the Martians.

Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York.

Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day

Mon, Jul 25: Walking the Dog's Shadow (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)
25 July 2011, 2:00 am

In his foreword to Walking the Dog's Shadow, Tony Hoagland writes that the poems of Deborah Brown's debut collection "make thinking look easy." As this assessment and the title itself suggest, these poems are full of ideas; they pursue not so much things as the impressions things have left on the speaker in a lifetime full of memories.

Brown's speaker is mature and wise, fully stocked with experiences to recount and reconsider. These remembrances and reflections lead to abstraction, as in "Proof": "Where 'duck' meant / a domesticated aquatic, not a sniper's bullet about to deafen / your ear. When did the innocent part of the country become one / with the rest of the violent world?" But proof is always secondary to experience, and abstraction must be earned; once earned, it might grant one the privilege to view history from a remove, as when the speaker discusses "racism's latest masquerade / in the flag."

Of course, the mind's impulse to create stories ("Narro, narrare, drifts overhead"; "I read how the brain is structured / to make us believe, or want to") and to compress information for meaning means details are squeezed from memory. Sometimes those details are withheld, as in "Don't Ask," when soldiers "knew what could be said after dinner sixty-five years later, / stories scrubbed clean of blood and pain," leading the speaker to wonder, "How do you know what you've left out of any story you tell?"

Brown's poems are sharply attuned to absence: things missing, words unspoken. Many of the recurring images here focus on what's not present: in the title poem the speaker doesn't walk a dog but a dog's shadow, in another poem the moon "plans to move off course," has been driven "away from home," and has deserted the sky. The attention to absence/presence is summed up neatly in "On Not Knowing Your Father": "I am trying to imagine the pain of a phantom / limb, but the pain I imagine is a phantom, too."

Little in this world is real, and what is might be made unreal at any moment: "how could there / be a whole and happy life...when we have no idea when / antimatter might say enough's enough and take over / and turn us all into -- nots?" The appeal to physics reappears in "The Graviton," where we discover just how fragile our existence is:

It's bad enough

not being able to find good fish and chips,

or true love, or an immigration policy

everyone agrees on. But the graviton

has to exist, since everything else exists,

more or less, so the argument goes.

And so, we infer, we must stick with what is real. These are big, empirical poems that tell us to pay close attention. The book's section titles are an instruction set for how to read the poems: "Don't Ask"; "Listen"; "Read Between the Lines." Brown's speaker hovers around the familiar, and if you ask you will already be looking in the wrong direction and miss the turn toward the unfamiliar. Instead, listen to everything she says -- and to everything she doesn't say. It's only in learning to pay attention to what's here and what's not that we can go along with the wisdom of the speaker: "In the middle / of the night, the sky lowers towards me. / It has a mind of its own, / but no secrets from anyone listening."

Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day

Sat, Jul 23: Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror
23 July 2011, 2:00 am

Horror movies have had a long a curious history. Early on, there were silent features, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which used an expressionistic style to convey psychological torment. In the 1930s, Universal's adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein used sound and special effects to scare audiences. When the 1950s arrived, Godzilla, King of the Monsters strode upon the earth as a metaphor for the anxiety of the atomic age.

Sometime after Godzilla, however, horror films lost much of their ability to shock. The classics from Universal were sold to syndication and became weekend fodder for UHF stations, and newer films, with minimal production values, made sure that teenagers weren't missing much while they were busy making out at drive-in theaters.

In the book Shock Value, author Jason Zinoman traces the renaissance of contemporary horror films to Robert Evans and his production of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. The film, featuring Mia Farrow as the mother of the antichrist, spends most of its running time exploring urban angst and the terror of new home ownership, saving the devil for the very end. Where Evans was canny was that he got arthouse director Polanski to direct the film instead of William Castle, who owned the rights to Ira Levin's novel and intended to direct it himself. By eschewing Castle's penchant for cobwebs, fog machines, and cheap gimmicks (like buzzers in the theater seats), Evans was able to release a horror film that was in step with an audience whose tastes were being refined with sophisticated variations on traditional genres (such as Bonnie and Clyde as a take on the gangster genre).

Shock Value takes the same approach as other recent film-history books (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Pictures at a Revolution): find a group of filmmakers, declare year zero to be when a certain picture was released, and follow their trajectory from obscurity to success to artistic mediocrity. And, while it's a predictable formula, it's difficult to argue with Zinoman's thesis, in which Polanski's success with Rosemary's Baby makes horror respectable, paving the way for The Exorcist, and at the same time (and same year) George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead made the world safe for cheap, bloody thrills.

Each of these successes (Polanski and Romero) clears the path for several young filmmakers to make their marks, and Zinoman deftly fleshes out the stories of how Wes Craven, Brian De Palma, Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter, and Sean S. Cunningham (who directed Friday the 13th, but never achieved the name-above-the-title success of his peers) created groundbreaking and influential horror movies through the '70s and early '80s.

However, if there is a hero in Shock Value, it is John Carpenter's USC schoolmate and early collaborator Dan O'Bannon. While O'Bannon may not be a household name, he wrote the screenplay to one of the most influential science-fiction/horror films of the last 30 years, Alien. What is heartbreaking about O'Bannon is that while he was a fascinating and imaginative person, his most famous creation was spawned primarily from his hideously prolonged affliction with Crohn's disease, which affects the intestines and digestive system (and eventually killed O'Bannon in 2009). This chest-busting extraterrestrial is more frequently associated with the various artists who brought it to life on-screen, from creature designer H. R. Giger to directors Ridley Scott and James Cameron, than it is with the man who genuinely suffered from its creation. The amount of attention Zinoman lavishes on O'Bannon is both welcome and long overdue.

Source: Powell's Books: Review-A-Day