Peter Sean Bradley

What Great Artworks Say by Christopher P. Jones

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This is the docent tour I should have taken before.

The author, Christopher Jones, looks at various great works of art, ranging from The Scream to Great Wave off Kanagawa to Sunflowers. Jones explains what is in the artwork - things which I missed without them being called out - and why the artwork affects us the way it does. We learn something about the artists and their times. I certainly came out the other end with more knowledge and a thirst to learn more about art, which is saying something since I am a philistine.

What Song the Sirens Sang (Gideon Sable 3) by Simon R. Green

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I am a fan of Green's Night Side series. I understood that halfway through the series, the stories became formulaic and hostage to fan service. However, I was a fan and wanted to see Razor Eddie and Shotgun Suzie come onstage and be put through their paces. Green is creative and clever with his naming and deft construction of fairly two-dimensional characters.

Green's subsequent series seems to be an effort to strike the Dark Side magic. This is the first book in the Gideon Sable series that I've read, but the main character - a man who calls himself Gideon Sable - is a kind of John Smith character. He's not a detective; he's a thief. He doesn't have the gift of finding things, but he has a compass that points unerringly to what he needs. He resolves problems by invoking friends, having a plan, and pulling information out of his arse.

Nonetheless, the Sable world inhabits some offshoot of the Night Side in Green's metaverse. Not canonically, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Sable wander into the Night Side in some future book. The characters would fit into the Night Side quite easily. We have Annie Anybody, who switches personalities, Switch-it-Suzie, who can will something to be replaced with something else, and Lex the Damned, who killed an angel and a demon and fashioned perfect armor from their halos.

The story is pedestrian. Green's writing style involves a lot of exposition and information dumps. He will spend a lot of time building up how awful or powerful some person is, we will meet the person, he will either be much nicer than we imagine or Sable will call in a friend or invoke a favor to neutralize the person, and we will move on to the next obstacle.

This is all good fun but it doesn't have a high calory content. It is enjoyable for a few hours of diversion, which is not a bad thing.

Passengers by Robert Silverberg

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Spoilers

I read this for the first - and most recent time - in my early to mid-teens back in the 1970s. I remember mostly the weirdness of a world where people can become possessed by alien mental invaders and caused to do things they don't remember afterward. I remember the protagonist trying to form a relationship with the woman he had been caused to have sex with while under possession and I remember his suddenly becoming possessed again. I don't remember the homosexual angle at the end.

At that age, I don't think I really got the sexual angle or what I imagine would be the horror of the heterosexual, womanizing protagonist heading out with a man. I don't know that I feel the same horror I might have felt back in the 1970s.

On the other hand, the horrible weirdness of an alien invasion that is purely mental definitely stands out this time. It occurred to me that the world of Passengers is under Occupation. People go around with their eyes turned to the ground lest they come into eye contact with one of the Occupiers. They are totally passive before the conquerors.

This story won the Nebula Award in 1969 - back when that award meant something. It maintains its impact.

Acadie by Dave Hutchinson

I was initially turned off by the facile “hippies paradise” start to this book, where everyone is cool, laidback, doing their own thing, but everything is running just great. It is the vibe you get from your ganja smoking friends before the arguments start about who has to replenish the refrigerator.

The focal character is “Duke” Faraday. Duke had been working for the Bureau of Colonization before he realized how it was the home of corrupt, narrow-minded hypocrites. He was shanghaied into a secret colony of “Writers,” who can rewrite the genetic code. It seems that 500 years ago, the Writers had stolen a Colonization ship to flee a theocratic right-wing government that wouldn't allow them to promote human flourishing through science. Since that time, the Colony has remained on the fringes of human space inventing scientific miracles, but always ready to pick up and leave if the Bureau stumbles onto them.

Finally, the Bureau has with a lone probe.

Then, a larger and stranger probe arrives and Duke has been left behind to deal with it.

Or has he?

I thought this story was a very fine science fiction story with just the right twist at the end.

The Peripheral (Jackpot 1) by William Gibson

This book mixes the usual tropes of cyberpunk - out of control capitalism, virtual reality, class division, crime, etc. - and mixes in new ideas - time travel. The book flashes between an impoverished rural setting set perhaps a decade where people are surprisingly sophisticated in their technology, and a setting in England about eighty years in the future after a historical event called the “Jackpot” which has removed 90% of the world's population. The two time zones are connected by a mysterious Chinese server in the future that enables the future to contact the past via the internet. (When this happens, the past diverges from the future, thereby obviating any paradoxes.)

The book opens with a chapter that is pure cyber punk. It is very complicated with terminology and ideas that are not explained and are basically incomprehensible. The story then flips to the “present” where we are introduced to a bunch of Hillbillys with internet connections and mad military skills. The setting here is obviously rural and steeped in poverty, although the Hillbillies seem to have virtual reality equipment and other gewgaws lying around. The chief Hillbilly character is Flynn. She is talked into a job by her brother. The job involves operating a drone to keep paparazzi from photographing an event.What she doesn't know is that the event is in the future and that a future group of friends/investors has been opening businesses in their past/Flynn's present for what were to me very obscure reasons.

In any event, Flynn becomes a witness to a crime in the future. The future is therefore interested in having Flynn identify someone who might have been involved in the crime. Flynn is accommodated in the future by a “peripheral” - an android controlled remotely like a drone. From this vantage point, we get to see more of the future world, which is dangerous in its high tech way.

Flynn's world becomes embroiled in the politics of the future crime. There is another faction with the same technology connected to the same past. In the “present” chapters, there are serial attempts to kill Flynn, which are frustrated by her military friends.

I liked the story, but it had its flaws. It started out incomprehensible and kept a large fog factor throughout. In addition, the character list is far too numerous. I had problems keeping track of who was who and it seemed that Gibson kept adding new characters when there was a plot turn. On the other hand, Gibson does provide a view of a different future than we are used to. The incomprehensibility of the cyber future is a necessary feature of a future we haven't experienced. While the story does unravel many of the main plot points, there are many plot points that weren't resolved. For example, who the heck is the other faction that seems set on killing Flynn? Of course, this is just the first book of a trilogy, so we can expect that these questions will be answered in later books of the trilogy.

I read this book because Amazon is giving this book the mini-series treatment. It may work better as a tightly written television series with fewer characters than it does as a book. I am not saying that this book is not worth reading, but it could have used some editing in my opinion.

The Comanche Empire (Lamar Series) by Pekka Hämäläinen

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Native American history/the history of early America is a topic I've mostly skipped. I was induced to read this book because the recent fad for “land acknowledgments” left me with a few questions. For example, what is the likelihood that the Native Americans we are acknowledging were conquerors of the land we acknowledge them as owning? That may be an unpopular and heterodox question, but I assume that Native Americans were humans like everyone else.

This book pays dividends on that question and more. The author explains that the Comanche started as a small band associated with the Shoshone who moved through the mountains of southern Utah onto the plains of north-eastern Texas/northern Mexico. They arrived at a fortuitous moment when the Indian/settler culture of New Mexico had temporarily lifted the control of Spain from its shoulders. As a result - or coincidentally - New Mexicans allowed the exfiltration/trade/looting of horses to the Indians north of New Mexico.

Within the space of 50 years, formerly pedestrian Indian tribes became full-fledged horse nomads. That topic is worth anthropological exploration by itself. I've read some books on Steppe nomads. The parallels between the Mongol/Turk steppe nomads and the Indian horse cultures are remarkable. Both cultures inhabited a central position against surrounding civilizations, which could be exploited through raiding and trade. For the Mongols, it was China, Central Asia, and Russia; for the Comanche, it was the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas, and the French territories of Louisiana.

The author claims that the Comanche constituted an “empire.” While this is debatable in the classic sense of “empire,” it is definitely the case that the Comanche served as a cork in the bottle of European expansion. It is also remarkable how few Comanche were able to control so much territory. At their height, the Comanche population probably numbered around 20,000 individuals, yet they were able to throttle and threaten the Spanish colonies with extinction. Admittedly, those colonies never numbered more than a few thousand.

Eventually, of course, the Europeans - specifically, the English/Americans - would build up their population to the point where the Comanches could be pushed to the side with little problem.

The Comanche were the reason that Americans became situated in Texas. The Mexican government was concerned with the lack of population in its Texas territories. In order to correct that issue, the Mexicans opened the borders to Anglo immigration. Moreover, because the Mexican government could not control the Comanche problem, the Anglos and Hispanics in Texas decided that they would be better served with liberty.

The Comanche strategy of raiding did to Spain and Mexico what that strategy did to the neighbors of the steppe nomads (and their descendants, such as the Turks.) Northern Mexican territory was repeatedly raided and smashed. Slaves were taken. Property was looted. Confidence in the ability of the central government plummeted. It can be argued that the American victory over Mexico in 1848 was due to Comanche plundering.

Author Hämäläinen shows the appropriate empathy for understanding his subject. However, he certainly does not white-wash the darker aspects of the Comanche legacy, which are often forgotten in virtue signaling about “land acknowledgments,” such as slave-raiding and genocidal wars on other Native Americans. Because this will be the controversial bit, here are some excerpts from the book:

“Comanches had raided other Native societies for captives long before European contact, and they became in the early eighteenth century the dominant slave traffickers of the lower midcontinent. It was not until after 1800, however, that human bondage became a large-scale institution in Comanchería itself. Comanches conducted frequent slave raids into Texas and northern Mexico during the second and third decades of the new century and soon emerged as the paramount slaveholders in the Southwest.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 250). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

“It was here, at the advancing edge of the world's largest empire, that the Comanches launched an explosive expansion. They purchased and plundered horses from New Mexico, reinvented themselves as mounted fighters, and reenvisioned their place in the world. They forced their way onto the southern plains, shoved aside the Apaches and other residing nations, and over the course of three generations carved out a vast territory that was larger than the entire European-controlled area north of the Río Grande at the time.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 1). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

“But the Apaches' main weakness was their mixed hunting and farming economy, which now, when they were at war with the Comanches and Utes, turned from an economic asset into a military liability. Tied to the soil at exact times of the year, Apache farmers were defenseless against their mounted rivals who turned the once-protective farming villages into deathtraps. Capitalizing on their long-range mobility, Comanches and Utes concentrated overwhelming force against isolated Apache villages, raiding them for crops and captives or obliterating them with devastating guerrilla attacks.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 32). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

“Beaten by the Comanches and Utes and abandoned by Spain, the Apaches vacated all the lands north of the Canadian River, which became the southern border of the Comanche-Ute domain.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History) (p. 36). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Please understand that this book is not a diatribe about the Comanches or Native Americans. Far from it. It is an honest and fascinating history. I am providing these excerpts for future reference in dealing with the anti-historical, anachronistic philosophy that underlies modern romantics who want to guilt Americans with “land acknowledgment” and similar nonsense.

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

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This is a hard book to evaluate. It is even harder to decide whether it is a book I would recommend to anyone. The first thing pertinent to thinking about this book is that literature - as opposed to genre fiction - is about characters. Literature doesn't put plot, action, or conflict into the driver's seat. Instead, it allows characters to marinate, sometimes, it seems, pointlessly. This book pretends to be literature, which is initially confusing. Coming to this book after reading Station Eleven, I wanted to put this book into the science fiction genre with all its tropes and expectations.

But it isn't science fiction or any genre. It almost makes a nod at science fiction as a kind of alternate universe story, specifically, one where the Georgian Flu never happened. One character muses on that other world where the Georgian Flu was not stopped. Also, we meet two characters from Station Eleven - Miranda (the comic book writer) and Leon (her logistics boss) - who don't survive the outbreak of the Flu but have a bit but inconclusive role in this book.

It is “literature.” So, we have to pay attention to the characters.

I was forty percent of the way into this book when I tried to recap and realized that I didn't know what it was supposed to be about. We start with Paul, who is recovering heroin addict, failing at school, and wanting to get into music. Paul seems a little sleazy and aimless. There is a bit where he buys drugs, gives them away to a member of the band, who dies of a heart attack.

So, the reader notes all that. That's pretty interesting. Maybe the story is going to be about Paul and this bit about bad drugs? File it away.

But that is a waste of time and a distraction because after it happens, it is never mentioned again. It's just a moment, an interlude, in Paul's life that has absolutely no significance.

Next, we snap into a situation where Paul is working at a swanky hotel in the middle of the forest near his hometown. He's working there - the “Glass Hotel” presumably - with his half-sister Vincent, named for the author Edna St. Vincent Millay....and we wonder about the similarity to the author of the subject book, Emily St. John Mandel, whom perhaps we should call “John.”

Well, we are at the “Glass Hotel,” but understand that the Glass Hotel has little to do with the story. It's a location for a few chapters, and we learn that the former manager lives there alone as the custodian for a bankruptcy trustee, none of which advances the story. It's like the deadly drugs - an interlude or filling.

At the Glass Hotel, Paul apparently etches the words “You should eat glass” on a window. None of this is explained as to motivation, until about 80% of the way in the book. It's not very important, but I guess this kind of thing could happen. Paul is fired and we don't interact with Paul again, except a brief glimpse of him twenty years later as a successful avant-garde composer.

Cut to Vincent. Paul is not the glue that holds the story together. Maybe Vincent is? She has a relationship with Jonathan, the owner of the Glass Hotel and a titan of Wall Street. Jonathan's core business is a Ponzi scheme that collapses. This is sad because Vincent like being wealthy - wealth is a different country - so she goes back to being a bartender and gets snubbed by her former friend.

The Ponzi scheme story was an interesting part of the story. The reader gets acquainted with the fraudsters who seem to be cowardly, small people, and their victims, who lose everything when they are on the verge of retirement.

This book is not about the Ponzi scheme, although that might be the most interesting part of the book since it has inklings of conventional conflict and tension. But it doesn't go anywhere.

Jonathan's story concludes with him in jail where he starts having paranormal experiences. He starts being visited by people after they've died, but before he would know that fact. In one case, he is visited by Vincent, which turns into the last part of the book, which re-introduces us to Miranda and Leon from Station Eleven.

But the paranormal experiences of Jonathan go nowhere either.

No one in this book evolves, grows or learns from their experiences. In some way they feel like programmed non-player characters who don't react to their experiences except in a limited patterned way. You gave deadly drugs that killed someone? Never mind; doesn't matter.

When I think about this book as a book, I feel short-changed.

On the other hand, I liked the book. I liked the game of trying to figure out what was going on. I felt engaged by the book. It wasn't a book that I finished like a bag of chips to move on to another nearly identical book.

The writing is well done. The format involves a lot of time hops and perspective changes that make it difficult to follow.

I suspect that this would have been a better book with editing, but my love-hate relationship with this book gives it an odd value.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

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This is a surprisingly good book. I purchased it thinking that the story would be based on the legal activities of a British lawyer in Hong Kong. I expected legal action, perhaps something like Rumpole of the Bailey.

It's nothing like that. This book is a character study of Sir Edward Feathers, an “orphan of the Raj.” The book is structured around alternating paragraphs. One series is set after Sir Edward, the eponymous “Old Filth” has retired from his active legal life. The other series follows Sir Edward from his birth through his education and, ultimately, the opportunity that takes him to Hong Kong. [“Old Filth” is not an insult; it stands for “Failed in London - Try Hong Kong.”]

We don't directly get any part of the Hong Kong story, although there are callbacks to that period. Presumably, the Hong Kong episodes are found in volume 2.

This book was fascinating for me because of the historic setting. English bureaucrats spent their time away from England, but they wanted their children to be English. So, they developed a habit of fostering their children with English families at an early age - in Old Filth's case, when he was around five. They would then be taken through the English school system and, presumably, in their twenties they would return to imperial service. During this time, they were effectively orphans, rarely seeing their parents. Author Jane Gardams makes the point that Rudyard Kipling was an orphan of the Raj and wrote his memoirs of that experience in “Baah, Baah, Black Sheep.” Naturally, I picked up that text for a read.

I also liked that the part of the story that featured the Blitz and Edward's trip to Singapore, which was ended by the Japanese invasion of Singapore (and the threat to Colombo, Sri Lanka.) (I question the timing of the two events, which were separated by a year and a half, but seem to be within the same year in the book.)

At the other end of his life, Sir Edward is a crotchety retired lawyer living with his wife. When his wife dies, he seeks to tie up the loose ends of his life, including his nominal cousins, and an old Hong Kong rival who improbably moves in next to his rural English retirement estate. There is a lot of pathos and introspection in the story of a man declining into old age.

The writing was good. I found Old Filth to be endearing.

Shelter by Dave Hutchinson

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On some unspecified day in the near future, humanity is going to have a bad day. According to Dave Hutchinson, civilization will end when the “Sisters” - the pieces of a comet - impact the Earth out of left field. No one saw it coming. It ringed the Earth in destruction. In the aftermath, many people never knew what happened.

What they knew was that civilization was over and that they had to flee the cities, taking disorder with them.

This book starts approximately one hundred years later. The setting is southern England, which in 2230 (approximately) has reverted to a level that would have been recognizable to Alfred the Great. Small distances are vast distances regulated by the speed of horses and the actions of highwaymen. For people on the coast, Oxford is a place known only through rumors.

On the other hand, some places did better than other places. The naval base at Portsmouth kept its assets and has put itself together as a regional power. Portsmouth is beginning to reach out to rest of the world and find out what is going on in southern England through infiltration agents.

What I particularly liked about this book was the setting. Hutchinson does a great job of showing what a civilization knocked to its knees and rebuilding would look like. Technology includes guns and other items scavenged from the prior world. Human communities are holding on by their fingernails. Starvation is a constant threat because the Sister generated a long term “nuclear winter.”

Hutchinson divides his attention between a farming community in southern England and the actions of a Portsmouth infiltrator. The reader watches the farming community spiral into a factional war as one murder is paid back by another. A human monster stalks the killing field getting revenge for his marginal existence.

Hutchinson is an excellent writer, and I enjoyed the ride, but I wondered what this book was all about. I think the problem is that we don't see the story through to its end. We see the cycle of violence in the farming community ended - along with an external threat - and there seems to be the intimation the Portsmouth will include the community in its sphere of influence. However, we don't go there completely. Likewise, we don't get closure on the external threat or the deranged killer.

This is voume 1 of what appears to be a two part series. Perhaps these problems will be addressed in the next book?

How to Think About God by Marcus Tullius Cicero

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This series provides a reader with good quality. The individual books offer a nice introduction to the featured philosopher and the subject of the book. The book takes a portion of an ancient philosopher's corpus of writing devoted to a particular subject and offers that selection. The selection usually constitutes a short read that can be accomplished in a few hours. The quality of the selection is well worth the read.

In this case, the selection is Cicero's De Natura Deorium and the Dream of the Scipio. The first selection provides Cicero's explication of the Stoic philosophical understanding of the divine. What I found interesting was how much of the Stoic perspective informed subsequent religious philosophy. For example, Cicero argues to the existence of God from the design and purposefulness of Nature. Cicero also has his Stoic character (this is presented as a dialogue) take a pantheistic position, namely, the universe must be alive and wise because there is life and wisdom in the universe and the only place such things could come from is from the universe. This reminded me of the Thomistic axiom that the effect cannot be greater than its cause.

For Cicero's Stoic interlocutor, the prime matter of the universe is heat. Heat is the vital force of the universe that causes motion. The sun presents a good heat that gives life and the stars must be living things because they also represent heat. I wonder at the ability of some ancients to equate the sun with the stars. I wonder how they came to that conclusion. For other ancient people, I believe, the stars were pinpricks in the dome of the sky.

For anyone doing a comparative analysis of religious arguments or tracking through the development of philosophical arguments, this is an excellent book.

Fascism: 100 Questions by Oswald Mosley

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Mosley's British Union of Fascists (“BUF”) always seemed like a moronic idea, hard to take seriously, lampooned by Evelyn Waugh as the Blackshorts. The lampooning has stuck. Mosley seems now to be more a clown than a threat.

The reality, though, is that Mosley was an intelligent man and Fascism was a viable option in the 1930s. It was certainly as viable as Communism, albeit both were clown ideologies based on pseudo-scientific messianic lies.

This book is interesting because it presents the BUF side of the issue. We are trained to hate everything that is labeled “fascist” in an unthinking, reactive way, but Mosley's presentation is not cartoonish hysterical ranting. His writing is educated and classy. It is hard to imagine many American Democrats disagreeing with Mosley's ideas stated in this paragraph:

:35. What is the difference between Fascism and Capitalism, since both admit the system of private enterprise ? In brief definition, Capitalism is the system by which capital uses the Nation for its own purposes. Fascism is the system by which the Nation uses capital for its own purposes. Private enterprise is permitted and encouraged so long as it coincides with the national interests. Private enterprise is not permitted when it conflicts with national interests. Under Fascism private enterprise may serve but not exploit. This is secured by the Corporative System, which lays down the limits within which industry may operate, and those limits are the welfare of the Nation.

Mosley, Oswald . Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered (p. 30). Kindle Edition.

There is no question that Mosley's philosophy was antisemitic. Mosley makes no bones that in his view, Jews were not Britons, that the businesses they owned were foreign capital, and that Jews in Britain had the position of resident alien.

Mosley was a Socialist before establishing his fascist movement. Mosley's example is part of the proof that fascism was a socialist phenomenon, albeit one built on nation rather than class. Mosley explains:

“For seven years in the Labour Party before founding Fascism in Britain, I fought for a National Socialist Policy in contradistinction to the International Socialism of that Party.

Mosley, Oswald . Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered (p. 13). Kindle Edition.

Another difference is Mosley's embrace of the leadership principle.

“We believe everywhere in the Leadership principle and the functional differentiation which allocates definite responsibility to the individual. This principle rests on an obvious fact of human nature which Socialism ignores. Men and women are born with varying gifts and capacities.

Mosley, Oswald . Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered (p. 16). Kindle Edition.

Mosley's plan involved breaking society into various corporations, each of which would be represented in Parliament. The fascist government would be given power to make such laws as they thought good, but Parliament could dissolve the government. There seems to have been quite a bit of modeling on the German constitution of the period.

I gave this review a four as a historical document. I am opposed to Statism and antisemitism in any form or any era.

North American Indians (A Very Short Introduction)

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After I read “How the Indians Lost Their Land,” I became interested in the range of Indian tribes and languages and their migration patterns during the European settlement of North America. I was interested in phenomena like the Sioux going from being a woodland tribe in Minnesota to a horse warrior culture. The period must have involved epic migrations like that of the Germans into Europe or the Mongol subject people into surrounding territories, kicking off a domino effect of subsequent migrations. Why would we think it wouldn't be this way in North America?

Yet, I've never read anything on the subject.

This book provided me with some of the information I was looking for. The Very Short Introduction series provide what they promise. A broad overview in a short number of pages. There was a lot in this book that I was not interested in, such as Native American literature, but, clearly, that might be fodder for another day. I also did not like the standard leftwing moralizing about history.

The funny thing, though, is that for all the moralizing, this book offers data that could allow for a multi-dimensional view of history in the description of Indian genocide and conquest committed against other Indians.

“Probably, this “law of blood” rarely applied within the community—the people did not kill one another. But it was central to foreign relations because foreigners were outside the kinship system, uncontrollable and potentially dangerous. This meant that the normal relationship with foreign groups was war.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 13). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

The Westos were the most important early suppliers of captives. Refugee Eries who fled south from the Great Lakes to escape Iroquois armies, they established relations with Virginians and pioneered a trade that persisted in the South until the early eighteenth century. Although the Westos accepted a range of goods in exchange for captive Indians, they were most eager to receive guns. Having been victimized by gun-toting Iroquois warriors, they fully understood the military advantage guns provided. Well-armed Westos spread terror and death as they rounded up victims for their Virginia partners.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 32). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

mills. Cherokees also owned more than 1,200 African American slaves. Cherokees did not share equally in this wealth. For that reason, their council passed laws protecting the private property that civilization had taught them to acquire and value.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 52). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Interaction rested on the realization that Pueblo people and Spanish colonists needed each other in defense against horse-mounted enemy Indians. Horses had spread from the Apaches to the Utes in Colorado and then to the Comanches, who had come on foot from the Great Basin through the mountains and onto the buffalo plains during the seventeenth century. Their large numbers and a flexible and efficient political system enabled the Comanches quickly to dominate the southern plains. Despite various efforts to negotiate with the Comanches, not until 1786 did Spanish officials manage to conclude a peace with them. By this time, thoughts of renewed hostility between Spanish settlers and the Pueblo people were long forgotten.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 62). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

The astonishing thing about this story of the diffusion of horses throughout the plains is that it unfolded in no more than fifty years. Horses had entered a well-established exchange network that their presence expanded.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 63). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

But the Chippewa, armed with guns by their French trade partners, worked to expel the Sioux from their beaver grounds. The Sioux gradually gave way, pulling back to the west in search of new beaver streams and out of the way of the Chippewa. The Tetons, the westernmost tribe of the Sioux, led the way and ultimately reached the prairie country east of the Missouri River. There they found buffalo.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 66). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Tribes raided each other for horses, necessary because many horses died during the winter and Indians without horses could not hunt. Tribes also invaded the countries claimed by their neighbors and tried, sometimes successfully, to displace them. No group was better at this than the Teton Sioux. Their numbers constantly replenished with relatives from the East, they took advantage of the near eradication of the Arikaras to burst across the Missouri River and fan out into the country north of the Platte River. Some groups, such as the vastly outnumbered Cheyennes, concluded an alliance with the Tetons. Some, such as the Crows, retreated. Others, like the Pawnees south of the Platte in Nebraska, remained close to home.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (pp. 68-69). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

plains. While it is true that after the U.S. Civil War professional non-Indian hide hunters killed the buffalo to near extinction, at the pace they were going Indian hide-hunters likely would have done the same. It would simply have taken them longer to do it.

Perdue, Theda; Michael D. Green. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (p. 71). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

These points are not the theme of the book. For the most part, this information is buried. Someone reading this from the standpoint of white guilt would not notice that North American Indians were not peaceful people rolled by the Europeans. They were warlike people who would have gleefully done unto the Europeans what was done to them. The tragedy of North American Indians was that there was a cultural conflict with the Indians being entirely outclassed in technological and social capital. When that kind of conflict develops the weaker will be exterminated or transformed.

Beyond Tears by Irmgard Litten

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This is a historical time capsule about somebody who has been largely forgotten today. Interestingly, even in this memoir, the subject appears only in cameos as someone being acted upon, rather than as an actor.

The subject of the memoir is Hans Litten. Litten was born in 1903, and, so, was too young to participate in World War I. He came from a well-connected, upper-class Protestant German family. His father was the president of the Konigsburg law school and was well-known as an arbitrator. Despite his desire to become a philologist, Hans went to law school as a more pragmatic career choice. He alienated his father by working on the edge of Communist politics by representing working-class defendants - probably, Communists - in criminal trials.

Litten seems to have had a heavy dose of youthful idealism. In his mid to late twenties, he represented workers in various lawsuits and criminal proceedings involving the crimes of the Nazis. His biggest claim to fame came in a 1931 trial where he subpoenaed and cross-examined Adolph Hitler to show that the Nazis were violent as a matter of policy.

Hitler did not forget this experience. When he obtained plenary powers after the burning of the Reichstag, the Nazis took into “protective custody” their enemies. One of those enemies was the twenty-nine year old Hans Litten. Litten was arrested before he turned thirty.

Litten never saw freedom again. Litten was taken from jail to prison to a concentration camp. He was repeatedly tortured. He sought to commit suicide on several occasions and was ultimately successful in 1935.

This book begins when Litten is arrested. These are the memoirs of Litten's mother as she deals with Nazis, the Gestapo, prison officials, concentration camp officers, released prisoners, and others to keep track of her son. She describes her visits with her son where she saw how he had been beaten and crippled. She also commemorates the testimony of released prisoners who spoke to her about her son's courage and compassion.

This book was written for an English and American readership in approximately 1940. It's obvious from the forward and afterward that the purpose of the book was to spark American outrage at the atrocities of the Nazis. I don't think that Irmgard Litten had to embellish those atrocities; a simple recitation of the facts was sufficient.

This book can be a valuable historical artifact. Irmgard provides a worm-eye view of the Nazi state prior to the war. Irmgard's social prominence put her in contact with high-level Nazis. She didn't deal with the major Nazis, such as Hitler and Goering, directly, but she had dealings with people who ran in those circles and could share what they knew about the views of such Nazi eminences concerning her son.

She also offers a glimpse of the lived experience of the average German during the Nightmare Years. For example, when we see Nazis extending their arms in the Hitler salute and shouting “Heil, Hitler,” we may think that they are enthusiastic supporters, but the truth is that many Germans were tortured into such performances:

“Once I met a woman there who was leaving the town without having obtained an interview. She was crying bitterly, and was followed by the curses and abuse of the man to whom she had appealed. An SA man asked him: “What have you been up to with her?” This was his reply: “The carrion can't open her mouth enough to say ‘Heil Hitler,' so I gave her what for. She'll learn soon enough.” I myself could not open my mouth wide enough; hitherto I had got off with a silent lifting of the arm. After this I always opened it when I visited the office of the Gestapo or any other premises of the kind. But although I did my best to speak the words quietly and inconspicuously, it always sounded like a war-cry, and the person thus greeted always looked at me with a startled expression; except that Captain H., who was so kind to me later on, used to smile amiably when I roared the words “Heil Hitler” at him, responding with a friendly “Heil Hitler, gracious lady!” If I ventured to omit the greeting he would say, still pleasantly, but in a tone of distinct admonition, “Heil Hitler, gracious lady!” and smiling his acknowledgment of my war-cry: “Heil Hitler, Herr Hauptmann!”

Litten, Irmgard. Beyond Tears: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Son in Nazi Germany . Uncommon Valor PRess. Kindle Edition.

Irmgard mentions that a “company of homosexuals” was treated with extreme severity at Dachau. She also offers this observation:

“I told him that I needed the help of a courageous clergyman who would visit my son in order to bring me news of him. Perhaps he could visit him on the pretext of hearing his confession. My son, it was true, had been baptized a Protestant, but he always had a leaning toward the Catholic faith. (His friendship with Father Stratmann obviously made a good impression on the priest.) I was appealing now to a Catholic because I knew of many cases in which the Catholic clergy had been most helpful and courageous. He told me of the best man for my purpose, but would not give me anything in writing; only a verbal message, which I had to repeat exactly.

Litten, Irmgard. Beyond Tears: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Son in Nazi Germany . Uncommon Valor PRess. Kindle Edition.

That passage raises an interesting omission. Irmgard mentions several times that Hans was a Protestant, but that he was attracted to Catholicism. She mentions several times that she was asked if she was Jewish, which she wasn't, and that she was outraged when Hans was clothed with the insignia for Jewish prisoners and kept with Jewish prisoners. I thought that this might have been a particular “screw you” to Hans because of the cross-examining Hitler. Irmgard never once mentions or implies that the Nazi categorization of Hans as Jewish was accurate under the Nuremberg laws because her husband had been born Jewish and had converted to Protestantism to advance his career. Hans was therefore half-Jewish under German law.

Why didn't Irmgard mention this? It seems puzzling. Perhaps, she was concerned that anti-semitism in America might dilute the appeal of her memoir? I don't know.

Here is one passage on this subject:

“After I had been talking to him for some five minutes, during which he had observed me with peculiar interest, he said: “Excuse the interruption, but aren't you then a Jewess? No, you can't have any Jewish blood in you! That's out of the question!” “I have already told you,” I said, “that I am not a Jewess.” “But how is that possible?” “You say that, I suppose, because Herr Goebbels is always speaking of the Jew Litten? Herr Goebbels is doubtless powerful enough to stifle any refutation of his statements, but his power doesn't extend so far that he can alter the blood in my veins!”

Litten, Irmgard. Beyond Tears: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Son in Nazi Germany . Uncommon Valor PRess. Kindle Edition.

Another one:

“During this interview I made one more reference to the Jewish question. I told König: “I must once more express my indignation that my son should be placed in the Jewish company. Not because I think it dishonoring; in this matter I absolutely repudiate the views of the Third Reich. I object to it for quite other reasons: namely, because I know that in all the camps, and especially in Dachau, the Jewish company is shockingly ill- treated.” I explained that my son should not properly have been placed in the Jewish company. It was a flat violation of the law, and I should make an appeal to the Reichsführer if the Gestapo could do nothing about it. “That wouldn't be much use,” said König. “I can tell you beforehand what the Herr Reichsführer would reply: the Gestapo is above the law. And the Gestapo has decided that in the camp a man is a Jew if he had only 25 per cent—indeed, if he has a single drop—of Jewish blood.”

Litten, Irmgard. Beyond Tears: A Mother's Fight to Save Her Son in Nazi Germany . Uncommon Valor PRess. Kindle Edition.

Interesting.

If you are interested in getting an overview of Litten's Weimar legal career, this book won't help you. On the other hand, if you want a taste of what it was like to be on the Nazi enemies list, this book is more than adequate. For my part, as a lawyer, I am in awe of what Litten accomplished at such a young age. I am also in awe of his personal courage and integrity. It is a shame that he lived during the Nightmare Years and was denied the opportunity to see his talents fully develop.

Legal Sabotage by Douglas Morris

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Some of us are made of sterner stuff than most of us. Being a Socialist Jewish lawyer, and opponent of the Nazis, in Nazi Germany, Ernst Fraenkel, was made of the sternest stuff one could imagine.

Fraenkel was Jewish but had the blue eyes and blonde hair of a proper Aryan. He had also served in the German army during World War I, which made him the beneficiary of some privileges not available to younger German Jews. When the Nazis threw Jews out of the legal profession, those who had military service (or who had joined the profession prior to prior to August 1, 1914:

“Jews could continue as judges and lawyers if they fell under one of three exceptions: (1) Jewish judges who had entered the civil service or Jewish lawyers who had been admitted to the bar before August 1, 1914; (2) Jewish judges or lawyers who had fought on the front in World War I; or (3) Jewish judges or lawyers who had a father or son who had fallen in the war.20 Fraenkel could continue practicing law in Nazi Germany because he benefited from the exception for veterans.”

Morris, Douglas. Legal Sabotage (Cambridge Studies in Constitutional Law) (p. 16). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Although this state of affairs afforded some Jewish lawyers a period of time when they could continue their profession, the Nazis incrementally restricted the scope of permitted Jewish activity. By 1937, Fraenkel was barred from all court activity. He made a scant living as a consultant. However, this gave him time to write his masterwork, “The Dual State.”

Fraenkel specialized in labor law which put him in touch with the Social Democrat socialist element of German politics. Fraenkel's commitment to the situation of the working class was not a pose. After the Reichstag Fire, Fraenkel chose to stay in Germany to represent those who would be oppressed by the Nazis. Eventually, in 1938, he did choose to leave Germany. By that time, the Nazis had killed, tortured, imprisoned, or driven to commit suicide a good number of leftwing lawyers. Fraenkel managed to survive by carefully playing his role as a legal advocate. So long as he was serving as an attorney, he did not make Nazi hostility a personal matter, as had Hans Litten, who had cross-examined Hitler during one murder trial.

Nonetheless, Fraenkel's role as an attorney for socialists and the working class kept him on the edge of Nazi tolerance. In addition, Fraenkel engaged in more direct forms of resistance, such as writing a handful of essays in opposition to Nazi policies and practices. One of those essays involved the question of why anyone should engage in “illegal work.”

That is some good advice, even here and now, when we see an unhealthy Gleichschaltung between social media and the government.

Fraenkel allowed himself to participate in a plot to publish opposition pamphlets, which was unraveled by the Gestapo. Fraenkel was warned and managed to flee Germany.

The kernel of the present book is the relationship of Fraenkel's experience as a resisting German lawyer to his masterwork. The author provides the reader with the facts and “qualia” of the experience of being oppressed and persecuted as a lawyer. I found this aspect of the book sparked my empathy as a practicing lawyer myself. Morris starts his book with the sad death of Max Alsberg, the greatest criminal lawyer in Berlin, whose practice was destroyed when he was evicted from the legal profession as a Jew, whose partner dissolved their practice because he was a Jew, and who committed suicide out of despair on September 13, 1933, at the age of 56. (Alsberg was too old to have served in World War I and get the benefit of the exemption that Fraenkel received.)

Morris spends a lot of time on the background and experience of other leftwing German lawyers to contrast with Fraenkel. Any reasonable reader has to admire the courage and fortitude of these people. Very few were able to make a successful escape from Germany before the net closed as Fraenkel had. One such victim was Hans Litten.

Litten was arrested and imprisoned when he was 29. He was never free again.

This is the background for “The Dual State” (“TDS”). In TDS, Fraenkel described Nazi Germany as composed of two states: one state consisted of the Nazi party and its institutions who were given unfettered room of movement. This was the “Prerogative State”(“PS”). The other state was the older order of law and legalism composed of the judiciary and other traditional government institutions. This was the “Normative State” (“NS”). The NS was used to assure the average German that their contract and property rights would be respected so that the economy could function normally.

However, the NS was not immunized the PS. The PS could at any time step in and obviate the decisions of the NS. Further, the PS warped and twisted the NS into accepting and instantiating the perversions of the PS. For example, the NS ruled that Religious Youth Organizations could be eliminated under a law that gave the German state the legal right to eliminate the Communist Party. The NS reasoned that anything that distracted the Nazi state - such as Catholic youth organizations - necessarily benefitted the Communist Party and, voila!, applying the law to an area clearly outside its intended scope was legal.

In recent days, as an American, I have found Fraenkel's theory to be useful in thinking about the modern distortions of constitutional law. Thus, we see that the partisans of one party can violate the law - such as fabricating evidence for the FISA court - and suffer no consequences (the PS, in truth), whereas a law that was never intended to furnish a basis for criminal prosecution (the Presidential Archives Act) is distorted as the grounds for a search warrant of the property of the current president's most likely political opponent. It seems that we are seeing something akin to the division between the NS and the PS.

If you have read TDS, this book provides excellent insights.For example, Morris has an extensive discussion of the role of Natural Law in Fraenkel's thought. As a socialist influenced by Marxism, Fraenkel did not have much use for Natural Law before the TDS. However, positive law placed the authority to make the law in the State, which did not provide a great deal of room to oppose the Nazi state. Rational Natural Law promised to give anti-Nazis a rational basis for opposing the Nazis and a way to unify a broader anti-Nazi coalition.

This is an excellent book. It is well-researched. The writing is exemplary. The scope of interest may be limited, although it may have some appeal to those with an interest in the early Nazi period.

How the Indians Lost their Land by Stuart Banner

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History is complicated because people are complicated. No one is pure evil or pure good; the virtues and vices are unevenly distributed among all people. Thus, it may come as a surprise that Indians weren't entirely victims and settlers weren't entirely villains, although not surprisingly given the relative power imbalance over time, things tended to incline that way over time.

I am woefully ignorant about American frontier history. My attention has always been focused on Europe. So, I probably subscribed to the “conquest theory” of American settlement, i.e., settlers simply took what they wanted and Indians retreated.

This book, therefore, was eye-opening in outlining the complexity of the Indian policy of Great Britain, initially, and America, subsequently. The most eye-opening aspect of this survey is that from the earliest point in history, the settlers - Great Britain and America - recognized that the Indians owned the land that the settlers moved into. Indian conveyances were the foundational title documents of American property law. Although there was a dispute initially about whether people without a state could own property, and whether, according to Locke, they had mixed their labor with the land to support a title claim, settlers pragmatically realized that it was good policy to deal with the Indians.

The Indians had their own reason to deal with settlers. As Banner points out, Indians were land rich and artifact poor. Metal pots, axes, and tools were hard to come by in North America. On the other hand, Indians had lots of land and didn't need it all. Although we might think that giving up the permanence of land for “trinkets” is insane, at that time and place, it was not irrational. Moreover, this dynamic would remain true throughout the history of settler-Indian interaction.

Banner makes the point that most of the land lost by Indians to settlers was through sales transactions. In fact, all acquisitions were structured as sales or other voluntary transactions. That is not to say that some transactions - many transactions - were tainted by fraud and oppression. This is hardly surprising given the strain of concupiscence found in human beings. Interestingly, the law was against that kind of overreaching in principle, and there were occasions, where Indians were able to obtain justice, but the judicial system was the settler's judicial system and the political system was responsive to its constituents, not to the aliens residing within its sovereign borders.

In a series of purchases over two centuries, the Indians found themselves penned into smaller and smaller territories. Some, like the Cherokee in Georgia, were transitioning into an agricultural society along European lines. Their success attracted the attention of speculators and settlers who coveted their now-improved lands. Georgia pioneered a policy of harassment as a stick while the federal government offered land out west in Oklahoma as the carrot. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the remaining eastern tribes “removed” themselves past the Mississippi. Banner explains that “removal” was sometimes used as an intransitive verb - the Indians had been removing themselves for decades before the Trail of Tears.

In the later 18th century, the tradition of private purchases changed with the federal government adopting a British policy of refusing to allow sales without its authorization (“Preemption.”) Subsequently, all sales occurred in the form of treaties between Indians and the federal government.

It took hundreds of years to acquire the east; it took only sixty years for the same thing to be accomplished in the west. Western expansion happened far more rapidly than anyone anticipated. The vehicle of acquisition was the treaty (or treaty-like process.) It is true that treaties were frequently abrogated or had their terms changed by Congress, but Banner explains that this is a feature of treaties between nations.

The treaty process was tainted by the same fraud and oppression that occurred in private sales. Moreover, by creating a “monopsony” where the federal government had a monopoly in purchasing power, the bargaining position of the Indians was undercut.

The interest of the Indians in bargaining, however, remained. Banner describes annuities to small bands of Indians in the amount of thousands of dollars per year. Under the circumstances, this must have represented a substantial amount of money for the time.

Banner debunks the claim that Indian economic development was retarded by the absence of private property ownership. He explains that many Indian nations did have a system of ownership based on the use of property rather than control of land. This system acted rationally to encourage economic development. In addition, between 1880 and 1930, a system of “allotment” was tried, where individual Indians were given private property in fee simple absolute. As with most reforms, this reform did not work, made the Indian position worse, and opened up the possibility for speculators to acquire the land that would be left over after the apportionment.

Banner dispenses with the notion that there was a doctrine of conquest. There was not. Even in Marshall's decision of Johnson v. M'Intosh, Marshall acknowledged that the Indians had a right to the land that could not be taken away without their consent. This was a “right to occupancy” and not a fee title right. Banner offers a nice bit of legal/intellectual history to explain how this right of “occupancy” came to supplant the earlier belief that Indians owned property in fee simple absolute. The change both reflected a conceptual weakening of the understanding of Indian rights and the basis for weakening the Indian legal position.

The treatment of the Indians was execrable. It was understood as abominable by many people throughout the period, mostly in the east, where their Indians had been cleared out by their ancestors. I particularly found Georgia's treatment of the Cherokee to be outrageous. On the other hand, it is worth keeping in mind that it was rought time. Banner points out that property acquisition was no bed of roses for my ancestors in Ireland:

“The English government embarked on colonization with the optimistic tic view that land in North America was unowned and available for the taking. The charters by which the Crown granted rights to establish colonies in North America almost uniformly purported to convey property rights to their recipients, without any hesitation over the possibility that Indians might already possess property rights in the same land. The first charter of Virginia granted to four men “all the Lands, Tenements, and Hereditaments,” to be found in Virginia, a formula drafted to mimic conveyances of property in England. If the drafters of this clause had any model in mind it would have been Ireland, where English colonization was already well underway, and where the English were taking land by force rather than purchasing it. Most of the subsequent charters included similar clauses.

Stuart Banner. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Kindle Locations 207-211). Kindle Edition.

Banner concludes with the observation that Indians in modernity have been successful in making legal claims for restitution because what happened to them was against the law. The law always recognized that Indians owned the land and had a right to voluntarily exchange their property and to receive the compensation promised to them.

I found this book to be well-written and surprisingly captivating, perhaps because it avoided the trap of being a morality play instead of a history.

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Skulduggery Pleasant (Book 1) by Derek Landy

This is an amusing if somewhat derivative young adult urban fantasy. It features a world of magic just under or along our own world, barely concealed among those who can work magic.

Stephanie Edgely is a tween girl innocent of the hidden world until her uncle dies. She meets the eponymous Skulduggery Pleasant. Skulduggery is aptly named since he was killed an ancient magical world but came back as an animated skeleton, who wears sunglasses, a floppy hat, and a scarf when he walks among mortals. Skulduggery and Stephanie are tossed into the mystery of the uncle's death. It turns out that the uncle had rediscovered a magical artifact that a particularly loathsome magic user wants.

Then, we are off to the races with action and adventure. Stephanie learns about the magical world, including the important rule that she must not give out her name and should take a magical name. There is much action and adventure. Skulduggery serves as mentor and cynical observer.

This is an enjoyable book that makes for quick read. The characters are sympathetic. The magic system is simplistic. The plot has been done before, but it is still enjoyable.

The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy by Robert F. Turner

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An “anti-racist” article condemning Thomas Jefferson as an undoubted and unquestionable pedophile rapist sparked an interest in me to dig into the vexed question of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It's hard to say what my mindset was before I read a few books on the issue. I probably thought that there was more evidence for the relationship than there was, mostly thanks to the confident tone of those who fall on the side of “Relationship? Yes.” What I learned was that the evidence for “the Relationship” is surprisingly weak - not non-existent, but nearly so.

Also, I was surprised to discover that Sally Hemings (“SH”) was white. The closest African or African-American that she could point to in her family was a grandmother on her mother's side, which made her 75% white. (In Nazi Germany, a Jew would have passed as German with that pedigree.) When Sally was given her liberty, she was subsequently listed as “free white” on local census rolls.

That is, parenthetically, a fascinating point. Race is defined as much by social status as ancestry. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves who were racially white. One wishes that someone would follow up on this from a social history perspective. (BTW - this is not the only place this fact appears. The mystery in Puddinghead Wilson by Mark Twain involves the mix-up of a slave child with a master's child. Apparently, this kind of thing was not something unbelievable.)

This book was written by a consortium of scholars who took upon themselves the burden of reviewing and analyzing the evidence. The diversity of voices adds to the power of this book, although the same evidence and arguments are recapitulated because of the scarcity of evidence. Virtually all of the scholars came to the conclusion that charge of a sexual relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson was not more probable than not on the basis of the evidence, although one did think the evidence rose to that level. That scholar - Paul Rahe - was impressed by the timing of SH's pregnancies with TJ's sojourns at Monticello, which normally occurred within the first month of his visits. Rahe acknowledges that we don't have affirmative evidence that SH was even at Monticello on those occasions, but also that we don't know that she wasn't. Ultimately, Rahe concludes:

“What we do know, however, is damning enough. Despite the distaste that he expressed for the propensity of slaveholders to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man.

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 352). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

This is a fair point, but, again, I would like to know more about the attitudes of the culture. Would TJ not have known about his white slaves having whiter children? Was there a concern about the sexual behavior of slaves? Were trysts among masters and slaves something that Jefferson knew about? Who knows. A lot is presumed rather than explained.

In the same vein, Rahe's conclusion has a scent of woke moral condemnation, which is not evidence and not a basis for weighing evidence. Even if Jefferson was self-indulgent, that doesn't make inadequate evidence more probable than not.

A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area is redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ's records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ's younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, which is where her immaturity was commented upon by Mrs. Adams, but nothing is known from the Paris period. We know that SH had six children. This is essentially the sum total of everything that is known about SH.

There are four bits of evidence in support of The Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a “defeater,” sometimes several.

First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a “more sable” son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is the bias of Callender and the fact that there was no Heming's son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of being descended from TH, but a DNA analysis from his descendants showed that they were not related to the Family Jefferson. If we can't trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?

Second, SH's son Madison Hemings in 1873 told a reporter that he was the son of TJ. The problem here is that other Hemings had a family tradition of being descended from an “uncle” of TJ (although probably TJ's younger brother.) Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH's room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison's credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn't get the message, plus who was this other guy visiting mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory, which also happens when memory is involved.

Of course, he could have been right, but we don't know.

Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ's paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.

Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, so were his Jefferson-gene carrying relatives.

The bottom line is that we don't know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for The Relationship is more probable than not and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.

One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there is background evidence I would like to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don't know. Where was SH's room in relation to TJ's room? Don't know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don't know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem or was it ignored? Don't know.

These are all issues that I would like to know more about.

Nonetheless, at the present time and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that The Relationship might be something that actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation on the evidence we have.

I want to call special attention to the contribution of David N. Mayer who observed:

I write my own separate report to state my views on the matter and to discuss the Jefferson-Hemings controversy in a broader context. As I see it, belief in the paternity allegation—which, to me, is quite literally a myth—is a symptom of a disturbing trend in the history profession in recent years, discussed below.

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 285). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

We are now 20 years on and this trend has gotten worse.

Obviously, I sensed that there was a deep political game involved in this issue. I assumed that it was on the level of Marxists undermining American traditions. What I didn't realize was how banal and puerile the political partisanship was. The traction this new trend obtained was due to the momentary need to salvage a particularly lusty president from his own scandals, i.e., Clinton was being impeached:

“Thus began the “spin” on the DNA test results—and the most recent telling of the Jefferson-Hemings story. No doubt referring to his own book which portrayed Jefferson as an enigmatic “sphinx,” Professor Ellis wrote, “Recent work has also emphasized his massive personal contradictions and his dexterity at playing hide-and-seek within himself. The new evidence only deepens the paradoxes.” And, further evidencing new uses for the Jefferson image in modern American politics, Professor Ellis concluded, “Our heroes—and especially presidents—are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all the frailties and imperfections that this entails.”20
The timing of the Nature article's publication—on the eve of the November 1998 Congressional elections and just weeks before the U.S. House of Representatives' vote to impeach President Bill Clinton—was not purely coincidental. Professor Ellis' accompanying article also noted, quite frankly, “Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton's sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role.” In television interviews following release of the article, Professor Ellis elaborated on this theme; and Clinton's apologists made part of their defense the notion that every President—even Jefferson—had his “sexual indiscretions.” (It should be added that Ellis was among the so-called “Historians in Defense of the Constitution” who signed an October 1998 ad in the New York Times opposing Clinton's impeachment.)
Others besides Clinton apologists seized upon the alleged DNA “proof” of Jefferson paternity to advance their own ideological agendas. British journalists and commentators used the story much as they had in the 19th century, to denigrate American Revolutionaries by associating them with slaveholding. Thus, for example, Christopher Hitchens suggested in The Nation that Jefferson henceforth be described as “the slave-owning serial flogger, sex addict, and kinsman to ax murderers.” (One is reminded of reviews in the British press of the Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot,” last summer. The Express noted that the real Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” on whom Gibson's Benjamin Martin character was based, “raped his slaves and hunted Red Indians for sport.”) And for many scholars of race and race relations in America, the Jefferson-Hemings story and reactions to it (particularly by those who continued to be skeptics) provided further evidence of the racism they say permeates American society. Indeed, for many, acceptance of the paternity thesis has become a kind of litmus test for “politically correct” views: those of us who continue to question it have been denounced as racially insensitive, if not racist. (For more on this, see the discussion of Annette Gordon-Reed's views, below.)

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 291). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.


So, a partisan defense by a partisan masquerading as a scholar - one being fired for his own lies because he was so useful to the partisan left - and - voila!!!! - we mint new conventional wisdom that can't be questioned on pain of cancellation by “anti-racists.”

The monopolization of the academia by the Left has paid loathsome dividends.

The Life of Cicero by Plutarch

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I read this for the Online Great Books program.

Cicero has held a conflicted position throughout history. He was a gifted orator, writer, and thinker. His lost text, Hortensius turned St. Augustine towards the direction of philosophy. His philosophical writing have inspired generations. Yet, Mortimer Adler left his writings completely out of the Great Books. Cicero was close, but didn't make the cut.

Cicero's life in Rome was like that. Cicero was another prodigy of the terminal stage of the Roman Republic. He was the advocate people went to when it mattered. Cicero was an outsider - a new man - who made his way up the slippery ladder of Roman offices to the position of consul. Cicero's time as consul coincided with the Catiline conspiracy. The Catiline Conspiracy was like January 6, but real, or maybe it was as real as January 6, according to some takes on the issue. Plutarch does not seem to think that the Catiline Conspiracy was anything other than a real threat to the Roman Republic. Forces within Rome planned on murdering the Consuls and members of the Senate at the same time that Rome was threatened by a Roman-led military force. Cicero used all of his powers of persuasion to protect the Roman Republic for one last moment. For his efforts, at the behest of Cato, Cicero was named “father of his country.”

After that moment of glory, Cicero's quest for glory made him something of a joke. All factions wanted him on their side, but he would give himself to no faction. He would side with Pompey and then Caesar. One side or the other was going to win, but all Cicero got out of the situation was a reputation for being irrelevant and indecisive.

At the end, his fate was determined by the fact that his indecision had made him irrelevant. When Antony and Octavian got around to the serious business of proscription lists, Antony wanted the head and hands of the orator who had so viciously denounced him. Octavian initially defended Cicero, but ultimately gave Cicero up in a petty trade.

Life of Caesar by Plutarch.

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I read this for the Online Great Books program.

The OGB group I attend voted Caesar the Great Life they would most like to have a beer with. I'm not sure it would be a beer, probably a glass of wine, but the conversation would be phenomenal.

Caesar was descended from a god, but in Rome, at that time, that kind of thing was expected from the great families. Caesar certainly took his divine ancestry to heart and set for himself the goal of being the first man in Rome. Not necessarily the only great man, but certainly the greatest among everyone else. He would be the person whom people would come to if they wanted patronage and positions.

Caesar had grown up endangered during the proscriptions of Sulla. There was a good chance that he would not survive childhood as a relative of Sulla's enemy Marius. It is noteworthy that when he had power, Caesar did not himself put up proscription lists. Perhaps he wanted to be Sulla without the killing.

After surviving Sulla, Caesar's life was the life of a trapeze artist, swinging from one position to another, staying barely ahead of falling to his death. Every step up the ladder of success required money, and Caesar was not one to stint on spending money to keep his name in the minds of Romans. He made enemies, but was fortunate up to the end. At one point, the Senate under Cicero was contemplating killing Caesar for his opposition to the execution of the confederates of Catiline, but because Cato spoke in support of Caesar, Caesar escaped that mortal danger.

Caesar's fortune was a result of preparation, skill, and vigilance. He was all-in for the game of Roman politics. He also turned out to be a brilliant general which put him at the head of an army that owed him exclusive personal allegiance. Caesar's army was better than Pompey's, or maybe, Pompey was getting on in years and did not have the vigor or agility he had in his younger days.

Plutarch could have taken the end of Caesar's life from Shakespeare....which is a joke since it was vice versa.

Caesar's life was a prodigy in a time of prodigies. He expanded the empire, survived a conspiratorial environment, and became the first man of Rome. He did not end the Roman Republic - that honor would go to his nephew, Octavian.

The Life of Alexander by Plutarch.

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This is another text I read for the Online Great Books program.

Alexander has had great press. In our OGB Zoom seminar, Alexander was picked as “favorite” by a plurality of the group. The general consensus was that he was “awesome.”

Alexander certainly was awesome. He started his world-conquering career as a teenager. He died of either a fever or poisoning in his early thirties. In between, he beat the Persian Empire in three straight-up battles that resulted in the decapitation of the empire, which was then replaced by the Macedonian elite. Alexander took his army from one end of the empire to the other - Egypt, Afghanistan, and India.

The impression I got in my reading was that the Macedonians were like a motorcycle gang and Alexander was the leader of the gang. The Macedonians descended on the largely peaceful Persian empire like Marlon Brando's motorcycle taking over a sleepy rural town. The next thing you know, they are tearing up the gardens of Persopolis and sleeping with Persian women. The Macedonians were the barbarians at the gates in that reading.

Of course, to hear the Greeks tell it, they were the carriers of high culture, including philosophy. Alexander was depicted as the scion of that high culture. Aristotle, after all, was one of his instructors.

And, yet, Alexander was a thug. Aside from courageously throwing himself into tight situations in battle, he was not above killing Macedonians, e.g., Cletus the Black, in drunken fits. Alexander was responsible for the death of thousands for his personal glory, particularly in his gratuitous invasion of India.

A new thing I learned from Plutarch was the disputed issue of Alexander's death. Was Alexander poisoned or did he die of fever? Further, what was Aristotle's involvement in that death? Did he recommend the poison? Plutarch doesn't give any firm answers, and it isn't something I had heard before, but it is an interesting angle.

The Life of Cato the Younger by Plutarch.

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I read this for the Online Great Books program.

For me, Cato has always been a background character. In books on the late Roman Republic I've read, Cato gets mentioned, usually as part of a group, and, yet, there has always been a sense about him of apartness and respect. Mentions are always made that Cato is a paragon of Roman virtue, but apart from that not much detail is given.

Plutarch's Life of Cato makes up for this omission. We learn that Cato was an exceptional, although odd person. My OGB group felt that he might be hard to associate with because of his starchy adherence to Roman virtue. However, Cato was serious about Roman virtues, and he put his money where his mouth was. In an age of prodigies, he was a prodigy because he was not corrupt in a culture where corruption was expected but still paid lip service to integrity. Cato did not use his public offices to loot. He gave punctilious accountings. He returned more money to the treasury than he took.

The Romans did not know what to do about him other than hold him up as the icon of virtue they wanted to be on lazy afternoons when they had looted enough from the public fisc to temporarily satiate their greed.

Cato's integrity made him unpredictable. The predictable thing for him would have been to put the Catiline conspirators and Caesar to death when the political winds were blowing in that direction, but that kind of violation of due process was not done, at least it was not done to the ruling class of Rome and Cato would not agree. Because Cato would not agree, the lynch mob did not go after Caesar after satiating their blood lust on Catiline's confederates.

Death is important in Plutarch. We have the irony of world-conquering control freaks being killed by others, maybe close associates, in the case of Alexander and Caesar, but with Cicero and Cato we find them controlling the manner and time of their death. Cato famously committed suicide before submitting to the tyranny of Caesar. Caesar would have spared the life of Cato because he was Cato, but being Cato, and perhaps remembering Sulla's proscription lists and the thousands of minor betrayals he would have to engage in to avoid winding up on such a list, Cato decided that life was not worth living on those terms.

Framing a Legend by M. Andrew Holowchak

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An “anti-racist” article condemning Thomas Jefferson as an undoubted and unquestionable pedophile rapist sparked an interest in me to dig into the vexed question of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It's hard to say what my mindset was before I read a few books on the issue. I probably thought that there was more evidence for the relationship than there was, mostly thanks to the confident tone of those who fall on the side of “Relationship? Yes.” What I learned was that the evidence for “the Relationship” is surprisingly weak - not non-existent, but nearly so.

Also, I was surprised to discover that Sally Hemings (“SH”) was white. The closest African or African-American that she could point to in her family was a grandmother on her mother's side, which made her 75% white. (In Nazi Germany, a Jew would have passed as German with that pedigree.) When Sally was given her liberty, she was subsequently listed as “free white” on local census rolls.

That is, parenthetically, a fascinating point. Race is defined as much by social status as ancestry. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves who were racially white. One wishes that someone would follow up on this from a social history perspective. (BTW - this is not the only place this fact appears. The mystery in Puddinghead Wilson by Mark Twain involves the mix-up of a slave child with a master's child. Apparently, this kind of thing was not something unbelievable.)

This book is written by a philosophy professor who takes the charge against Thomas Jefferson (“TJ”) very personally. Holowchak does a solid job of attacking the Relationship position. His personal investment is based on his respect for Jefferson as a thinker who was instrumental in founding the United States. At times, I found this zeal detracted from his arguments since much of his argument turns on an argument from character, namely, TJ did not have sex with SH because he was not the kind of man who would do that. Perhaps, but we have a history of people acting against type. People fall from grace. It's sad but true. So, perhaps because I don't share the same intimate relationship with TJ through a lifetime of study, I am more agnostic.

Holowchak defenestrates the Relationship Revisionists - Fawn Brody, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Andrew Burstein. Brody wrote in the 1970s from a Freudian perspective. Her thesis was properly derided as unsubstantiated at the time and largely was forgotten. Unfortunately, Annette Gordon-Reed is a black lawyer who managed to catch the wave of Wokeness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She was helped by the Dark Arts of woke propaganda, including mischaracterizing a DNA study in order to declare the debate over and accusing dissenters from the new orthodoxy of being racists.

A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area is redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ's records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ's younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, which is where her immaturity was commented upon by Mrs. Adams, but nothing is known from the Paris period. We know that SH had six children. This is essentially the sum total of everything that is known about SH.

There are four bits of evidence in support of The Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a “defeater,” sometimes several.

First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a “more sable” son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is the bias of Callender and the fact that there was no Heming's son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of being descended from TH, but a DNA analysis from his descendants showed that they were not related to the Family Jefferson. If we can't trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?

Second, SH's son Madison Hemings in 1873 told a reporter that he was the son of TJ. The problem here is that other Hemings had a family tradition of being descended from an “uncle” of TJ (although probably TJ's younger brother.) Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH's room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison's credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn't get the message, plus who was this other guy visiting mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory, which also happens when memory is involved.

Of course, he could have been right, but we don't know.

Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ's paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.

Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, so were his Jefferson-gene carrying relatives.

The bottom line is that we don't know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for The Relationship is more probable than not and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.

One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there is background evidence I would like to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don't know. Where was SH's room in relation to TJ's room? Don't know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don't know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem or was it ignored? Don't know.

These are all issues that I would like to know more about.

Nonetheless, at the present time and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that The Relationship might be something that actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation on the evidence we have.

In the Suicide Mountains by John Gardner

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This is a charming and easy-to-read light “fantasy.” It bears the same relation to the fantasy genre that “Schreck” has - anachronistic, absurdist, silly, and humorous. The story's plot features three misfit characters - a powerful, magic-using dwarf who is considered evil but is actually very nice, a beautiful young woman with the strength of a blacksmith, and a prince who prefers playing the violin and writing awful poetry to feats of daring-do.

The three go into the Suicide Mountains to end their problem with fitting into societal expectations with extreme prejudice. They meet each other and recognize kindred spirits. They have several adventures and the story ends happily ever after.

The writing is crisp and clear. Gardner writes some wonderful lines. There is one paragraph-length sentence in the book that is worth its own study.

Honestly, from the title, I expected something Lovecraftian, but this story was enjoyable and light. It is well worth reading as a light diversion.

The Life of Lycurgus by Plutarch

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I read this for the Online Great Books program.

In general, I have found Plutarch's Lives to be a difficult slog. His biographies are so packed with detail that Plutarch feels compelled to offer without much of an overriding narrative that it is difficult to pick out the particularly important bits. Perhaps, it takes an effort of stepping back and considering the life as a whole.

So, we have Lycurgus, who founded the Spartan state. A guiding principle of Lycurgus' life was the elimination of luxury. He wanted his Spartans to be simple and uncorrupted so that they would be the military state par excellent. Plutarch explains that this principle determined what Sparta would use as money:

“Not contented with this, he resolved to make a division of their movables too, that there might be no odious distinction or inequality left amongst them; but finding that it would be very dangerous to go about it openly, he took another course, and defeated their avarice by the following stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in, and that only a sort of money made of iron should be current, a great weight and quantity of which was but very little worth; so that to lay up twenty or thirty pounds there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen. With the diffusion of this money, at once a number of vices were banished from Lacedæmon; for who would rob another of such a coin? Who would unjustly detain or take by force, or accept as a bribe, a thing which it was not easy to hide, nor a credit to have, nor indeed of any use to cut in pieces? For when it was just red hot, they quenched it in vinegar, and by that means spoilt it, and made it almost incapable of being worked.

Clough, Arthur Hugh. Plutarch's Lives (Volumes I and II) (p. 97). Digireads.com. Kindle Edition.

That will do it.

We also end up with a few stories of the insane adherence to duty that was said to have motivated the Spartans:

“To return from whence we have digressed. So seriously did the Lacedæmonian children go about their stealing, that a youth, having stolen a young fox and hid it under his coat, suffered it to tear out his very bowels with its teeth and claws, and died upon the place, rather than let it be seen. What is practiced to this very day in Lacedæmon is enough to gain credit to this story, for I myself have seen several of the youths endure whipping to death at the foot of the altar of Diana surnamed Orthia.

Clough, Arthur Hugh. Plutarch's Lives (Volumes I and II) (p. 111). Digireads.com. Kindle Edition.

I've read that story before, but it seems that it comes from Plutarch.

Then, there is this:

“Hitherto I, for my part, see no sign of injustice or want of equity in the laws of Lycurgus, though some who admit them to be well contrived to make good soldiers, pronounce them defective in point of justice. The Cryptia, perhaps (if it were one of Lycurgus's ordinances, as Aristotle says it was), Gave both him and Plato, too, this opinion alike of the lawgiver and his government. By this ordinance, the magistrates dispatched privately some of the ablest of the young men into the country, from time to time, armed only with their daggers, and taking a little necessary provision with them; in the daytime, they hid themselves in out-of-the-way places, and there lay close, but, in the night, issued out into the highways, and killed all the Helots they could light upon; sometimes they set upon them by day, as they were at work in the fields, and murdered them. As, also, Thucydides, in his history of the Peloponnesian war, tells us, that a good number of them, after being singled out for their bravery by the Spartans, garlanded, as enfranchised persons, and led about to all the temples in token of honors, shortly after disappeared all of a sudden, being about the number of two thousand; and no man either then or since could give an account how they came by their deaths. And Aristotle, in particular, adds, that the ephori, so soon as they were entered into their office, used to declare war against them, that they might be massacred without a breach of religion. It is confessed, on all hands, that the Spartans dealt with them very hardly; for it was a common thing to force them to drink to excess, and to lead them in that condition into their public halls, that the children might see what a sight a drunken man is; they made them to dance low dances, and sing ridiculous songs, forbidding them expressly to meddle with any of a better kind.

Clough, Arthur Hugh. Plutarch's Lives (Volumes I and II) (pp. 122-123). Digireads.com. Kindle Edition.

What we end up with is a kind of warts and all approach to history.

The People of the Ruins by Edward Shanks

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This is an oddball book that reminded me of Jack London's “The Scarlet Plague” and “The Iron Heel” or Milo Hasting's “The City of Night.” This book was written in 1920, shortly after the Great War, during a period when England was facing labor unrest. Shanks hero - Jeremy Tuft - is a scientist, who is bathed in experimental “rays” by a friendly scientist in1920. The rays freeze Tuft for 150 years.

When he escapes stasis, he discovers that the labor unrest he witnessed grew in global scope and disrupted civilization. The world he discovers is feudal and science has been forgotten.

One interesting aspect of the book is that Shanks posits a breakdown of society without nuclear weapons. In two decades, there would be a growth industry in collapse-of-civilization stories caused by nuclear wars. Shanks imagines it happens through labor unrest, which seems unlikely, albeit having gone through the Great War, it must have seemed plausible.

Another interesting aspect is how future history morphs into alternate history. When Shanks wrote this book, he was imaginatively projecting into the future. Now that we are one-hundred years on, it seems more like an alternative history with a point of departure in 1920.

The book itself is engaging. I was curious about how the story would play out. There are problems with the writing. Tuft seemed a lightweight character who was thrust into an important position. The story is ultimately a downer. If you were expecting Tuft to reignite the world of the future with forgotten science, and I was, you will be disappointed.

Nonetheless, it might be worth a read for anyone interested in early 20th century imaginative fiction.