Book Reviews – by Kevin J Hamilton

Year: 2010

  • Colonel Roosevelt’: Edmund Morris’ superb account of Teddy Roosevelt’s final, feisty years

    Colonel Roosevelt’: Edmund Morris’ superb account of Teddy Roosevelt’s final, feisty years

    ‘Colonel Roosevelt,’ the third volume of Edmund Morris’ trilogy about Teddy Roosevelt, is as good as the Pulitzer Prize-winning first volume. It picks up after Roosevelt leaves his second term as president.

    Colonel Roosevelt’

    by Edmund Morris

    Random House, 570 pp., $35

    Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency after his predecessor was cut down by an assassin’s bullet on Sept. 21, 1901. Over the next eight years, he towered over the political landscape, built an American empire, and through sheer force of personality bent the political world to his will. He was enormously popular, re-elected in a landslide in 1904, but refused to run for a third term.

    Roosevelt left office at 50, turning over the reins of power to his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, and left the United States for an extended African safari, flashing his famous white-toothed smile as he departed.

    The third of Edmund Morris’ three-volume biography of Roosevelt’s life, “Colonel Roosevelt” picks up where the second volume, “Theodore Rex,” left off. Morris won the Pulitzer Prize for the first volume and critical acclaim for the second. Sequels are rarely the equal of their predecessors, but this hefty 570-page volume is the exception to prove the rule: It is a superbly written tribute, part of a trilogy that will stand as the definitive Roosevelt biography.

    Roosevelt plunged into the African wilderness with a charter to collect specimens of African game. Treated like royalty, he preferred life in the wilderness, stalking lions, elephants, giraffes and hundreds of other examples of African wildlife. He was a hunter, to be sure, but a trained naturalist as well, preaching conservation in the same breath as boasting of his latest kill.

    Upon his return, Roosevelt did his best to contain his dismay at the failure of President Taft to continue his progressive policies. The corpulent Taft watched, equally dismayed, when Roosevelt – silent no longer – mounted a primary challenge to his renomination. With competing slates of delegates, the 1912 Republican National Convention became a dramatic showdown, with Taft outmaneuvering Roosevelt to win the nomination. Roosevelt promptly bolted, established the Progressive Party, and ran an aggressive presidential campaign.

    On Oct. 14, 1912, John Scrank, a deranged young man, shot Roosevelt in the chest in Milwaukee, Wis. The bullet was slowed as it pierced Roosevelt’s overcoat, suit jacket, a steel-reinforced glasses case and the thick text of his speech, before entering his chest and coming to rest beside his ribs. With blood spreading across his white shirt, he insisted he was strong as a “Bull Moose” and delivered his 90-minute speech before allowing himself to be taken to a hospital. Although he recovered, the election was a rout and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was swept into office.

    Roosevelt watched with increasing alarm as the world inched closer to war. When World War I exploded, he urgently called for American intervention. He watched, astonished, as German U-boats sank American ships loaded with men, women and children, even as Wilson coolly refused to take action, instead maintaining studied neutrality. To Roosevelt, who embraced action, not words, this was little more than “mollycoddling,” “pussy footing,” if not outright cowardice.

    When it could no longer be avoided, Wilson obtained a declaration of war, which prompted urgent demands from Roosevelt that he be allowed to raise and lead a volunteer regiment to fight. His offer was politely declined, but Roosevelt’s four sons went through military training. One of them was killed in France, and two of them wounded.

    Roosevelt’s boyish energy ebbed as the years slipped past and the world became increasingly unfamiliar. As he put it in a letter, “when it is evident that a leader’s day is past, the one service he can render is to step aside and leave the ground for the development of a successor.” He died on Jan. 6, 1919, at 60, one of the most interesting, colorful and dazzling presidents in American history.

  • The Shallows’: Is the Internet changing the way we think?

    The Shallows’: Is the Internet changing the way we think?

    In ‘The Shallows,’ Nicholas Carr posits that the Internet is making the human brain more prone to surf broadly and less capable of sustaining concentrated thought or analysis. Carr discusses his book Monday at Town Hall Seattle.

    The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”

    Nicholas Carr

    Norton, 276 pp., $26.99

    In 1455, Johannes Gutenberg produced the first major book published with a movable-type printing press, an enormously significant advancement that marked the beginning of widespread publication of books.

    As books proliferated, some observers attacked the whole idea of such mass distribution of information. English writer Barnaby Rich complained in 1600 that one “of the great diseases of this age is the multitude of books that doth so overcharge the world that it is not able to digest the abundance of idle matter that is every day hatched and brought into the world.”

    Change a couple of words and he could have been talking about the Internet, Twitter, blogs and Facebook updates.

    In “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” (Norton, 276 pp., $26.99), Nicholas Carr asks a similar question: What is the Internet and its irresistible invitation to surf broadly but to read superficially doing to our ability to analyze complex problems? Or, as he asked in his article in The Atlantic in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

    Drawing from neuroscience, history and social-science research, Carr reviews evidence that learning how to solve a problem, how to play a piece of music or how to speak a language physically changes the brain. It’s a mistake, he argues, to think of the brain as a hard drive that stores information; it’s far more than that and changes dynamically as it processes information, altering itself as it confronts challenges – for better or worse.

    Reading a book, he notes, is vastly different from reading hyperlinked Internet text. Reading a book is solitary, requiring deep thought, analysis of the text and sustaining a narrative thread for the duration. By contrast, Internet reading invites shallow skimming for relevant passages, incessant clicking to hyperlinked articles and reliance on Google’s search algorithms to determine relevance. But Google determines “relevance” by, among other things, popularity (the number of other sites linking to the text) and how recently the site was updated. That is hardly a proxy for authoritativeness, reliability or trustworthiness.

    Carr argues that the result is an emerging nation of shallow and impatient readers, who are constantly bombarded with breaking news updates, tweets, Facebook updates and a barrage of e-mail, invited to surf links without stopping to analyze the substance of what they are reading. This, he argues, has a lasting impact, making us unable to sustain concentrated thought or analysis.

    Carr’s argument is thought- provoking but a bit breathless. As Rich’s critique of the humble book illustrates, it isn’t difficult to find the same arguments advanced throughout history in the face of change. Books – lauded by Carr – were once derided as flooding the world with idle thoughts and ideas. Magazines and newspapers were, similarly, blamed for their hasty delivery of the latest news. But somehow each generation managed the change and, in retrospect, it would be difficult to argue with a straight face that the world is the worse for it.

    Carr’s contention that the Internet is different is, ultimately, unpersuasive. Even for those of us old enough actually to remember a world before the Internet, it’s difficult to imagine a world without it. The pace of information delivery has accelerated beyond a doubt, but that’s hardly a bad thing. Book sales may be fading but Kindle sales are soaring. Somehow, humanity has endured the technological siege throughout history. Neither books, newspapers, nor Google are likely to make us stupid. Overreacting to change might.

  • Innocent’: Scott Turow’s sequel to ‘Presumed Innocent’

    Innocent’: Scott Turow’s sequel to ‘Presumed Innocent’

    A review of Scott Turow’s sequel to ‘Presumed Innocent.’ The new novel, ‘Innocent,’ is flawed but gripping.

    ‘Innocent’

    by Scott Turow

    Grand Central, 407 pp., $27.99

    Twenty-three years ago, Scott Turow published the runaway best-seller “Presumed Innocent,” a courtroom drama featuring a plot that was clever, chilling and wildly unpredictable. Although he has published several novels since, Turow has never re-created the impact, creativity or depth of his first novel.

    Turow’s new thriller, “Innocent” (in bookstores Tuesday), is a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,”set 20 years after the original. Rusty Sabich, the young prosecutor wrongly accused of murder in the first novel, is now 60 years old and the chief judge of the court of appeals. When Sabich’s wife dies suddenly, county prosecutor Tommy Molto is instantly on alert. Molto aggressively prosecuted Sabich in the first novel and suffered a humiliating defeat. But age has made Molto cautious. Only when a quiet investigation pushed by his hotheaded colleague Jimmy Brand implicates Sabich does Molto indict Sabich for murder.

    Sabich, of course, retains Sandy Stern, his soft-spoken lawyer from the first novel. Stern, too, has aged and is struggling with lung cancer and its treatment. Assisted by his daughter and law partner Marta, Stern wheezes from his courtroom efforts and holds on to a table for support during the trial.

    Sabich had an affair with the victim in the first novel that complicated not only his criminal defense but his marriage as well. Disappointingly, Sabich veers into another affair, this time with one of his young law clerks, Anna Vostic. It is, of course, not a convenient fact for an older man with a dead wife.

    Turow’s writing is thoughtful but something is missing. “Presumed Innocent” featured characters so carefully drawn you knew them and understood their actions. Here, Turow glosses over the detail and the novel suffers for it as you scratch your head and wonder at the motivation for unlikely developments.

    Perhaps older men are just inherently vulnerable to beautiful young women, but it is difficult not to groan when Sabich succumbs to one of his law clerks. Remember, this is the guy who underwent a highly public ordeal in the first novel and is now on the court of appeals, with a son the same age as the law clerk and a wife still suffering from his first affair. People can be foolish, but this seems simply improbable. Sabich is too easily seduced, too careless, too cavalier.

    And Sabich reveals the outcome of an appeal to a criminal defendant. The suggestion that a judge would so carelessly reveal such a confidence is, again, simply difficult to accept. It would be a horrific violation of judicial obligations, and Turow doesn’t offer any plausible explanation for it.

    As a result, one is left struggling to understand or empathize with Sabich. Indeed, Molto – the first novel’s young firebrand who has mellowed with age, a late marriage and a young son – is more sympathetic here, almost flipping the team you cheer for. Perhaps that’s Turow’s larger lesson: that time leavens everything and that innocence is relative.

    Turow’s writing is at its best in the courtroom, with searing cross examinations, surprising revelations and dramatic plot twists. Of course nothing is what it seems and – no secrets revealed here – this trial is far from a mere rematch. Only when the last page is turned do all the pieces finally fall into place with a soft and entirely unpredictable click.

    Even with its flaws, “Innocent” is terrific and Turow remains by far the best courtroom novelist of our time, shaming the far more prolific and predictable John Grisham. This was a book worth waiting for.

  • ‘Louis D. Brandeis: A Life’: The enduring influence of a progressive judge

    ‘Louis D. Brandeis: A Life’: The enduring influence of a progressive judge

    Melvin I. Urofsky’s biography of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis shows that the progressive judge had an impact on American law that few justices have since matched.

    ‘Louis D. Brandeis: A Life’

    by Melvin I. Urofsky

    Pantheon, 976 pp., $40

    Few U.S. Supreme Court justices can compare to Justice Louis Brandeis. As a lawyer, he battled some of the biggest corporate interests of his day, not only earning their respect (and business) but creating the very idea of “public interest” lawyers. He was a key leader of the early Zionist movement. Most significantly, he served as a transformative progressive who turned the Supreme Court from a focus on property rights toward privacy and liberty.

    In a towering new biography, Melvin Urofsky, a history professor from the Virginia Commonwealth University, catalogs a life of monumental achievement. From a small office in Boston in the late 1800s, Brandeis challenged large railroads seeking to raise rates, banks strangling small-business owners, and other large-scale enterprises that used their power to extract ever-increasing profits. He quickly earned a reputation not only for his legal brilliance, but for embarrassing corporate officials in cross-examination by demonstrating a greater mastery of relevant corporate records than the officials themselves could muster.

    Indeed, his style was defined by a relentless focus on the facts. At a time when most legal briefs contained dry discussion of abstract legal principles, he insisted on packing his “Brandeis briefs” (and later opinions) with social science research, believing that understanding the larger factual context was crucial. His approach is now commonplace.

    Brandeis was nominated to the court by President Woodrow Wilson in January 1916, its first Jewish member. He endured a six-month confirmation battle, with progressives standing off against conservatives looking to settle scores (and with a big dose of barely-concealed anti-Semitism). The Los Angeles Times editorialized that the nomination was “enough to make cold chills run down the spine of every patriot of the nation,” demonstrating that Glenn Beck-style irrational rhetoric is hardly new.

    After confirmation, he joined a conservative court. As Urofsky recounts, those who opposed him well understood that he would arrive with “a new outlook and different experience from the old-school justices, and if his ideas prevailed, they would topple the old bastion of property-oriented classical thought.”

    That is, in fact, precisely what happened. Brandeis joined forces with his friend Oliver Wendell-Holmes, and together the “great dissenters” staked out positions in defense of privacy, liberty and free speech. Understanding that the law must evolve to adapt to a changing world, he rejected any attempt to fix the Constitution’s meaning as unchangeable. He would have been no fan of current Justice Antonin Scalia’s wooden “original intent” theory of constitutional interpretation.

    Brandeis retired from the court in 1939, replaced by William O. Douglas, and died on Oct. 5, 1941, but not before seeing many of his dissenting opinions adopted by the Supreme Court as the law. Brandeis, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Marshall and perhaps a handful of others had a profound impact on American law, a standard that few justices – and none of those currently serving – have come close to meeting. Ironically, he was modest almost to a fault, even refusing offices in the ostentatious new Supreme Court building (which he called the “Temple of Karnak”) when it opened.

    In Urofsky, Brandeis finds his match. Urofsky writes beautifully, pivoting between the justice’s private life, legal philosophy, and political and Zionist activism. Running more than 900 pages, including footnotes, this book is no small undertaking, but a rare treat for legal-history fans and worth every page.