Deja Fu

Author: David McCullough
Pages: 768
Year Published: 2001

In April 2008, I wrote a review of the HBO series presentation of John Adams, and as enjoyable as it was, the book is still better. Not only because it adds depth and coverage of events barely hinted in the mini-series, but because David McCullough knows how to write and write well.

The book covers Adams’ entire life, but really concentrates on his career in public service and his relationship with his wife, Abagail. Adams, of course, was our second president, but his career spanned over twenty-five years in some form of public service, including helping to draft the Declaration of Independence and serving as the first Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Along the way, McCullough attempts to bring to light a new interpretation of Adams, as an indispensable part of our revolution and growth as a new nation. However, he also doesn’t shy away from the fact Adams apparently irritated just about everyone with whom he ever worked, including many of the other Founding Fathers.

All this might seem a little dry, but this is where McCullough really shines. As a narrative historian, McCullough doesn’t just give a dry recitation of facts, but rather tells the Adams’ story and does it so well that it’s almost as if it were a historical novel, not a biography. It’s a compelling read and worthy of anyone’s study, even if they aren’t a history buff.

-K

Author: Christopher Moore
Pages: 336
Year Published: 2009

It’s probably bad form to begin a revew asking if you’ve read another of the author’s works, but sod it all, I’m asking. Have you read Lamb yet? No? Go. Click the link. Get the book. I’ll wait.

So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Christopher Moore returns with his latest novel – Fool. Like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, John Gardner’s Grendel and Tom Stoppard’s venerated Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Fool takes a well-known story and inverts it by switching the focus to another character, in this case the Fool from King Lear.

Somehow, along the way, Moore manages to work in characters and situations from other Shakespeare plays (the witches from Macbeth make an appearance), and turn the entire thing into a comedy. A blacker-than-the-devil’s-soul kind of comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. It even follows the dramatic definitions which are usually applied to distinguish between comedy and tragedy.

If you haven’t read Lear, or it’s just been a couple of centuries, the basic plot is this: Lear wishes to retire and divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters. He will keep some knights for himself and sort of shuttle between his daughter’s families and their castles, enjoying his last days. It all goes downhill from there. About as far as it can go and not feature the Devil himself in a cameo. King Lear almost makes Hamlet look like family theater.

That Moore was able to take this play and make it comedic says a lot about his talents as a writer. That so many people seem to enjoy it says a lot about us as a society (and some of it not very nice.) However, it you do enjoy Shakespeare and don’t mind when people create a clever derivative (and hate West Side Story), then you’re sure to enjoy Moore’s latest book. Don’t worry if you don’t get all of the references. The story alone is worth the read. Everything else is just lagniappe.

-K

Author: John Lewis Gaddis
Pages: 352
Year Published: 2005

As I stated in my review of Charlie Wilson’s War, the Cold War seems so long ago. And yet, it lasted for forty-six years, whereas it’s only been just over seventeen since it ended. In that time, an entire generation has grown never knowing what it was like to have the world divided between democracy and communism, between East and West, and between the United States and the Soviet Union. It is with that knowledge that John Lewis Gaddis produced this – a well-written, concise narrative which gives the reader a survey of the Cold War.

To his credit, Gaddis’ book isn’t just a straightforward, linear progression through history. While it naturally follows a progressive arc, from the origins in the end of the Second World War to the conclusion when Gorbachev needed to borrow a pen from a CNN correspondent to sign the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, but in between he examines not only governments and ideologies, but the leaders who crafted the policies and the people who sometimes overrode their leader’s wishes with their own.

Gaddis naturally hits all the highlights of the Cold War: the Berlin Airlift, NATO and the Warsaw Pact; the rise of Communist China, the Korean War, the Cuban Missle Crisis, Vietnam, etc., but he also provides insight into smaller, less-recognized events such as the 1953 East German Uprisings, Khrushchev’s visit to the United States (and subsequent inability to visit Disneyland), the Sino-Soviet split which enabled Nixon to open foreign relations with China and so on. He’s also not shy about both sides policies’ of supporting friendly governments who were anything but friendly with their own people. There’s even a remarkably objective critique of American foreign policy which had begun to take on amoral characteristics without condemning the policies themselves.

As a student of history, especially World War II, a lot of what’s presented here is repetition for me. (Gaddis himself even acknowledges there is no original scholarship in his book.) However, for someone who might have an interest, but never really took the time (or even for people for whom, as Gaddis puts it, the Cold War is as distant as the Peloponnesian War), The Cold War: A New History is a wonderful introduction to a singular event in human history where two great nations challenged each other for dominance, yet never actually fought a conflict with each other for it.

-K

Author: George Crile
Pages: 560
Year Published: 2003

It seems a lifetime ago since the Soviet Union ceased to exist. A lot of that has to do with what happened on September 11, 2001, but even before then, the world had changed drastically in the wake of the Cold War.

However, in 1979 the world was still very much within its grip and shortly after Christmas, the Soviet 40th Army invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to protect the communist government there which had been fighting a civil war against other tribal groups within the country. This got a lot of people’s attention. Jimmy Carter described it as the greatest national security threat since World War II and it apparently moved the normally conciliatory Georgian to a hawkish footing. The United States boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow, ended grain shipments to the U.S.S.R., and, through the CIA, began to fund the mujahadeen – the Afghan resistance.

The original plan was to use the mujahadeen to bleed the Soviets and make Afghanistan their own Vietnam. Provide just enough weapons and support to keep the Afghans at a nuisance level for the Red Army. However, all of that was going to change when a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing, larger-than-life Congressman from the Texas 2nd District was drawn into the picture: Charlie Wilson.

George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War covers the efforts of this representative (and many others) to transform the American action in Afghanistan from a low-level nuisance war to a real guerrilla war with everything needed to force the Soviets out. Along the way, we are introduced to a cast of characters that would be right at home in an absurdist comedy: Gust Avrakotos – an acerbic, street-smart CIA case officer who lands the Afghan assignment while trying to avoid being terminated for insubordation; Joanne Herring – a born-again Christian Texan socialite with personal connections to the president of Pakistan; Mike Vickers – a young ex-Green Beret and one of the CIA’s experts on irregular warfare; the Defense Minister of Egypt, an Israeli arms manufacturer, and others.

And the best part about the entire thing is that it all took place, and grew to become the largest covert war in American history with an annual budget of $500 million (matched dollar for dollar by Saudi Arabia), all without Congress really being involved as a body because of the way money is appropriated for national defense. Remarkably, at the same time all this was happening, the House of Representatives was shutting down the Reagan administration’s every effort to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.

I thoroughly enjoyed Charlie Wilson’s War. It’s an entertaining, well-written, account of a piece of Cold War history, covering an event to which most of us really never paid attention – the only time in its history the Red Army had been defeated.

-K

Americans aren’t big on accolades for the second person to do anything. We don’t remember the second Pope (it was St. Linus); the second man to invent the telephone (Elisha Gray), and never mind the silver medal winners in the Olympics. Gold medal winners get their faces on a Wheaties box. Silver medal winners, not so much.

Much to my chagrin, I would be forced to admit I felt much the same way about our second president: John Adams. Of the first three presidents, he always seemed to be the least interesting when I was a kid. As I got older and studied history more and more, I would find interest in the events during which he lived, but not the man himself.

Well, that’s at an end. Over the last six weeks, HBO has been airing a seven part mini series on the life of John Adams, drawn from historian David McCullough’s book by the same name. The conclusion aired last night, with Adams and Jefferson both dying on the same day, July 4, 1826, the last survivors of those who, fifty years before, signed the Declaration of Independence. So it seems appropriate to write a bit about it.

Paul Giamatti (American Splendor, Sideways) gives a powerful performance as Adams, in turns brilliant and passionate, vain and arrogant, tired and bitter. Laura Linney (Love Actually, Mystic River) gives an equally wonderful performance as his wife, Abagail who also served as his most valuable counselor and friend throughout fifty-one years of marriage.

Both the book and the mini-series draw heavily from the extraordinary correspondence maintained between John and Abagail over the course of their relationship. As fortune would have it, the letters have been preserved and are even available in collected form. It is a singular window into one of the collected minds of our founding fathers. It’s also a prime reason why, although it has its own inaccuracies, John Adams is one of the most accurate depictions of the early history of our country. I have always been fond of quoting a history professor of mine when he said, “Never get your history from a movie.” While the rule still holds, Hollywood could certainly do a lot worse than to use this mini-series as the new watermark of achievement.

John Adams won’t be for everyone. There’s very little in the way of battles or action. It is a biopic, and this particular subject wasn’t a general in an army. He actually spent most of the war in Europe. However, for anyone with a modicum of interest in early American history, it is highly recommended. If your view of Adams is changed as much as mine, that should be counted as a success.

-K