In “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs,” historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf create a character study of Thomas Jefferson, attempting to explain our third president through his perceived role as patriarch to both his families and to his slaves.
‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination’
by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf
Liveright, 320 pp., $27.95
It’s not entirely clear that the world actually needs another biography of Thomas Jefferson. True, he played a remarkable role in shaping the young American democracy at a time when it was not at all clear that the rebellious colonies would emerge as a cohesive nation.
He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third president, second secretary of state and as ambassador to France. But the library of Jefferson biographies is seemingly boundless and includes contributions such as Dumas Malone’s six-volume series (“Jefferson and His Time”), a work that took more than 30 years to complete and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the first five volumes. What’s more to add?
But perhaps the sheer volume of scholarship is a testament to Jefferson’s enduring contributions and his elusive and contradictory personal life. Jefferson was a master of soaring rhetoric, articulating lofty principles of universal justice and equality while simultaneously not only owning large numbers of African-American slaves, but sleeping with one of them — Sally Hemings — and fathering several children by her. The relationship, long rumored and the subject of fierce debate, is no longer subject to serious question in the wake of definitive DNA testing.
Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf take on the task of explaining Jefferson’s own vision of himself and how he reconciled these conflicting threads in their somewhat awkwardly titled new book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.” Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of the “The Hemingses of Monticello,” for which she won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Onuf, one of the nation’s leading Jefferson scholars, teaches at the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson himself. No insignificant pool of talent here.
The book is largely a character study, organized in sections seeking to explain Jefferson’s understanding of himself and his life through his roles as a “patriarch” or as a “traveller,” both at home and abroad.
It’s an approach that allows exploration of Jefferson, unleashed from a chronological narrative. But perhaps more interesting, the book returns, like a touchstone, to remind the reader that Monticello and all that it stood for was built on the backs of enslaved African-Americans. Jefferson may have preferred to turn his face and avoid the harsh reality of his slaveholding, but neither these authors, nor history, will allow that contradiction to stand unexamined.
Of course, Jefferson’s fraught relationship with Sally Hemings is central to understanding Jefferson. Hemings was just 16 when she accompanied Jefferson’s young daughter from Philadelphia to Paris, where he served as the American representative to France.
Jefferson fathered several children with Hemings and, as Gordon-Reed and Onuf note, he held great affection for both his acknowledged as well as his unacknowledged family. He agreed with Hemings to free their children when they reached adulthood, a deal he honored (even as he simultaneously refused to free the slaves who kept Monticello afloat economically).
In the end, the book is an important contribution to understanding Jefferson in light of his now-confirmed relationship with Hemings. Sex, as they say, changes everything. Even our understanding of Jefferson himself.
Category: Reviews
-
A character study of Thomas Jefferson as ‘patriarch’
-
‘While the City Slept’: must-read accounting of a terrible crime
Seattle writer Eli Sanders’ “While the City Slept” indicts a mental-health system that failed to prevent two Seattle women from assault, rape and murder by a disturbed young man.
“While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent into Madness”
by Eli Sanders
Viking, 316 pp., $28
On July 18, 2009, an unusually warm summer evening, 23-year-old Isaiah Kalebu climbed through the open window of a small house in South Park, a working-class neighborhood in south Seattle. Over the course of the next two hours, he brutally attacked the two women who lived there — Jennifer Hopper and her fiancée Teresa Butz — raping them both and eventually murdering Teresa. Kalebu escaped but was captured within days at Magnuson Park.
In “While the City Slept”, Eli Sanders tells the story of how these three individual lives came to fatefully intersect that evening. Sanders, who writes for Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the murder. Drawing on court records and exhaustive interviews, Sanders compiles an arresting narrative, first of the two victims, then of Kalebu himself. It’s heartbreaking all the way around.
Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz came from different backgrounds. Teresa grew up proud, tough and stubborn in a large St. Louis family. Jennifer was born in the mountains near Santa Fe. They fell in love, moved in together and planned a wedding (technically, a commitment ceremony since same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Washington) for Sept. 12, 2009. Teresa even bought a wedding dress.
Isaiah Kalebu was a troubled young man. He was raised in a household with a distant authoritarian father who had fled a civil war in Uganda and favored corporal punishment with “broomsticks, belts and sticks.” Kalebu started off as an intelligent child who loved to read but slowly began to dissolve into mental illness.
As he grew from a troubled child to smoldering young adult, he appeared in court on numerous occasions. Each appearance was an opportunity for mental-health counseling that could have addressed his mental-health issues. Overworked Superior Court judges with only a partial record before them and grossly underfunded mental- health resources, however, combined to ensure that Kalebu never received the counseling that might have diverted him from the path before him, the path that led to Teresa and Jennifer’s open window and all that followed.
Sanders’ research is meticulous and his writing demonstrates the strength that won him the Pulitzer. He uses vivid imagery to bring the story to life: The polluted Duwamish River snaking through South Park, the neighborhood’s decaying bridge to downtown, and the slumbering mountains in the distance.
As Sanders comments, “Some stories are worth assembling. Some crimes cry out for an accounting. Some offenses indict so much, and reflect so much, that they demand attention — to what was taken, to the taker, to the trials that preceded and followed.” This is certainly a story worth telling with lessons well worth learning.
Unfortunately, the effort is marred by two flaws. First, in recounting Teresa and Jennifer’s life and romance Sanders awkwardly reverts to the present tense, presumably in an effort to infuse immediacy in the telling. The device is more distracting than useful. Second, Sanders devotes the final pages of the book to an extended denunciation of inadequate funding for mental health services. He’s right beyond a doubt, but the discussion seems oddly out of place here, like an opinion column mistakenly tacked onto the end of the book. And it’s unnecessary in any event. Sanders’ superb account of Kalebu’s voyage through the criminal justice system, and its devastating denouement, speaks far more powerfully to our shameful failure to fully fund mental-health resources. -
‘Destiny and Power’: the life and times of George H.W. Bush
“Destiny and Power,” Jon Meacham’s biography of George H.W. Bush, is the compelling history of a man at the center of 20th century events, but it airbrushes over its subject’s failings in key respects.
“Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush”
by Jon Meacham
Random House, 836 pp., $35
George Herbert Walker Bush was uniquely qualified to serve as our nation’s 41st president. He was a Navy pilot during World War II, a two-term representative from Texas, ambassador to the United Nations, an envoy to China, director of the CIA and vice president. Although he served only a single term as president (from 1988-92), he presided over adoption of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a budget deal to manage the federal deficit, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the Gulf War and the end of the Cold War. No small accomplishments.
In “Destiny and Power,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham chronicles Bush’s remarkable life. Meacham devoted more than a decade to researching the book and interviewing the former president, his family and those who worked with him.
Bush moved to Texas after the war to earn his fortune in the booming oil fields of Midland, Texas. Elected to Congress, he was tapped by President Nixon to be U.N. ambassador. He was later appointed CIA director by President Ford at the suggestion of Bush’s rival, Donald Rumsfeld, who considered the job a “political graveyard.” The gambit rather dramatically failed. Bush not only survived but was elected Ronald Reagan’s devoted vice president in 1980.
Meacham is a superb historian and he weaves a compelling historical narrative, drawing heavily on Bush’s own contemporaneous diaries. The result is a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into high-stakes decision making in a rapidly evolving world. Bush was a remarkably modest man who instinctively sought to work with his opponents to accomplish legislative goals, even if it meant compromising campaign pledges for which he would be pilloried (as he was when he raised taxes just two years after pledging, “Read my lips; no new taxes.”)
Meacham won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 biography of Andrew Jackson and wide acclaim for his best-selling biography of Thomas Jefferson. But history at short range is dangerous business, as “Destiny and Power” disappointingly demonstrates. Meacham’s heavy reliance on Bush’s obviously self-serving diaries and years of intimate access to his subject renders this volume at best rather decidedly myopic.
Indeed, it’s remarkable what the book omits. Bush’s involvement in, and later denial of, the Iran-contra scandal is abruptly brushed aside as “unworthy of his essential character,” without any serious review of the record. Bush’s remarkably aggressive 1988 campaign, featuring the blatantly racial Willy Horton advertisements created by Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater, is heavily downplayed, with responsibility passed to others. The book includes not a word about the highly controversial appointment of Dan Quayle as his running mate. Meacham quotes Bush denigrating President Clinton as a “draft dodger,” but remains silent on Bush’s reaction to his son and the future president (George W. Bush)’s decision to join the National Guard in Texas rather than serve in Vietnam. No volume, even at 600 pages, can be complete, but the omissions here are remarkable by any measure.
There is little doubt that George H.W. Bush served his country well and that he has been too frequently overshadowed by his predecessor, President Reagan, or flamboyant successor, President Clinton. But it does him no honor to airbrush history and leave out the very errors of judgment or disappointments that make his accomplishments all the more human — and admirable. -
‘Seattle Justice:’ crooked cops and payoffs in the Jet City
In “Seattle Justice,” author and former prosecutor Christopher T. Bayley tells the engrossing true story of an era of rampant corruption in the Seattle Police Department.
‘Seattle Justice: The Rise and Fall of the Police Payoff System in Seattle’
by Christopher T. Bayley
Sasquatch, 240 pp., $24.95
Seattle has a reputation for clean government, fairness (to the point of near-dysfunction), and progressive politics. Municipal corruption, seedy cops and crooked prosecutors taking payoffs are things that, in our collective memory, happen in decaying East Coast cities. But not so long ago, right here on the shores of Puget Sound, the Seattle Police built a payoff system equal to the worst of any East Coast protection racket. It all came crashing to a stop through the efforts of a band of young progressive lawyers, intent on challenging the system. And, implausibly, they won.
Christopher Bayley, in his new book “Seattle Justice,” tells the engrossing story from street level up. Seattle, over the course of 100 years, developed an ornate system of tolerating illegal gambling, unlicensed bars and prostitution, all in exchange for cash payments from illegal establishments to crooked police. The payoffs were passed along up the chain to the highest levels of the police department.
Then-King County Prosecutor Charles O. Carroll was a 22-year incumbent, deeply entrenched and utterly uninterested in challenging the system or even questioning it. Carroll dominated Republican party politics and in the 1950s and 1960s was considered by some to be the most powerful man in Seattle and King County. The story of his fall and the collapse of the payoff system is as fascinating as it is surprising to modern ears.
Bayley tells the story with historical context and a fine eye for detail. But, of course, he should know. Bayley himself took on Carroll in the Republican primary in 1970 and not only defeated him but promptly indicted him, and numerous others. Bayley was aided by a rising group of young progressive Republicans (yes, there used to be such a thing as a “progressive Republican” in Seattle, now an endangered species, listed just below the spotted owl) including Tom Alberg, Norm Maleng, Cam Hall, Bruce Chapman, Sam Reed, then-Governor Dan Evans and newly-elected Attorney General Slade Gorton.
Bayley mounted an impressive campaign, winning first the Republican nomination and then defeating Lem Howell, the Democratic candidate. It didn’t hurt that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer managed to tail and photograph Carroll secretly meeting with Ben Cichy, the so-called “Pinball King” who operated the Far West Novelty Company. Far West held the county’s sole license to lease pinball machines, which raked in millions. The photograph of the two men meeting in a darkened car, published on the paper’s front page, shocked the city.
After winning the election, Bayley promptly shut down the payoff system and launched a widespread investigation and series of prosecutions. Although he had limited success in obtaining convictions, he turned a page in Seattle history by definitively ending the payoff system and transforming the County Prosecutor’s office from a place of corrupt partisan cronyism to what it is today: a widely admired model of integrity and competence.
Seattle’s modern police department is, at the risk of stating the obvious, hardly perfect. Police beatings, shootings and violence, particularly against minority members of the community, have not only outraged the city but appropriately brought federal oversight. But one problem it doesn’t have is a citywide protection racket and payoff scheme.
Bayley’s short first-person history is a compelling read and a vivid reminder that Seattle wasn’t always the sparkling technological machine that it is now. In fact, not so long ago, it was something quite different. -
‘Vendetta’: Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Hoffa at war
James Neff’s engrossing “Vendetta,” the history of the blood feud between Robert Kennedy and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, is as riveting as any courtroom thriller.
“Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy versus Jimmy Hoffa”
by James Neff
Little, Brown, 377 pp., $28
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, plunged America, and much of the world, into deep mourning for the fallen president. But for Jimmy Hoffa, then president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the most powerful unions in America, it was cause for celebration. Hearing the news, he stepped up on his chair in a crowded restaurant and began to cheer. He commented to reporters: “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”
The hostility was mutual. Bobby Kennedy spent years investigating Hoffa, first as chief counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee and later as attorney general, intent on convicting the corrupt union leader. Hoffa, armed with nearly unlimited Teamster funds and represented by famed lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, was no easy target.
In “Vendetta: Bobby Kennedy versus Jimmy Hoffa,” James Neff brings to life the clash between two of the most powerful men of the early 1960s. Neff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations editor for The Seattle Times, brilliantly weaves this fascinating narrative with newly released material. And what a story: illegal wire taps, jury tampering, corrupt union thugs skimming pension funds, and an ambitious young attorney general intent on getting the bad guy. The result is as riveting as any courtroom thriller, except this is real.
Kennedy and Hoffa could not have been less alike. Hoffa was the son of a coal miner and dropped out of high school at 14 to work in a grocery store to help support his family. Kennedy’s background was, of course, just a little different. Born into wealth and privilege, he only had to worry about how to step out of the shadow of his brilliant and charismatic older brother John.
Kennedy began investigating the Teamsters as counsel to the Senate Rackets Committee. Dave Beck, the Seattle-based president of the Teamsters, famously invoked the Fifth Amendment 117 times during Kennedy’s questioning. Beck declined to seek re-election in 1957, at which point Hoffa took his place. Kennedy’s subsequent focus on Hoffa resulted in serial referrals for criminal prosecution.
But Kennedy’s enthusiasm outran his legal skills and many of his referrals were useless, either because they didn’t actually prove illegal conduct or because Kennedy’s own cross-examinations were so poorly constructed that they left little grounds for prosecution.
When Kennedy became the campaign manager for his brother John’s 1960 presidential campaign, Hoffa used Teamsters funds to undermine the effort. He even hired call girls to try to seduce either Kennedy and then “gather evidence of the assignation with hidden recorders or cameras.” The effort failed, but not for want of trying.
Of course, John Kennedy was elected president in 1960 and controversially appointed Bobby Kennedy as his attorney general. Kennedy’s “Get Hoffa” squad, which devoted enormous resources to try — unsuccessfully — to convict Hoffa, grew more frustrated with every acquittal.
In early 1964, Hoffa was finally convicted of jury tampering and sentenced to eight years in prison. It was cold comfort to a shellshocked Bobby Kennedy, still mourning his brother’s death. Only six weeks later, Hoffa was convicted of defrauding a Teamster-managed pension fund. Hoffa entered prison in early 1967 defiantly, hoping to overturn his convictions. He failed.
But Hoffa was pardoned by President Nixon in 1971 and promptly embarked on an effort to regain control of the Teamsters. He disappeared on July 30, 1975, outside of a restaurant in Detroit. His body has never been found.
Bobby Kennedy was himself shot down shortly after winning the California Democratic primary on June 5, 1968, as he made his way through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Kennedy’s single-minded pursuit of Hoffa was, no doubt, overzealous and likely overstepped legal bounds. But Hoffa was hardly an innocent victim of an unfair “vendetta”: He richly deserved it. Neff’s masterful study of this intensely personal conflict is as engrossing as it is irresistible. -
George Mitchell’s ‘The Negotiator’: a peacemaker’s life
“The Negotiator,” a memoir by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, is less a full autobiography than a collection of vignettes from the life of a man with a tower of accomplishments.
‘The Negotiator: Reflections on an American Life’
by George Mitchell
Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $27
George Mitchell had a remarkable career: lawyer, U.S. Attorney, federal judge, U.S. Senator, Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate and ultimately a special envoy who successfully brokered peace in Ireland after 800 years of conflict. There are few public figures who could even come close to matching that record.
In “The Negotiator,” Mitchell tells stories from his long career. It’s not really a comprehensive autobiography but more of a series of short, mostly self-congratulatory, vignettes. That’s interesting, to be sure, but disappointing at the same time. With a career like this, Mitchell could have provided a far more substantive history of his public service. This is more amuse-bouche than main course.
Mitchell was the fourth of five children. His mother was a Lebanese immigrant; his father an orphaned son of Irish immigrants. He was raised in small-town Maine, and his love of the state and its people shines through these pages.
Mitchell worked for U.S. Senator Edmund Muskie, where he learned politics from a master of the craft. He briefly served as the U.S. Attorney for Maine in the Carter administration before being named to the federal bench by President Carter, at Senator Muskie’s recommendation.
He didn’t serve long in that position. Senator Muskie resigned from the Senate to serve as President Carter’s Secretary of State, opening up a seat in the Senate. Joe Brennan, then the Governor of Maine, appointed Mitchell to the seat in 1980. He served for 15 years, the last six as Majority Leader.
Mitchell’s Senate actually worked to get things done. Senators from opposite parties felt obligated to work together, to compromise even strongly held positions, in order to accomplish things. It’s a far cry from today’s U.S. Senate, largely shut down from accomplishing much of anything significant by partisan bickering.
His inside stories are at times compelling. He fought a bitter dispute with Senator Robert Byrd over amendments to the Clean Air Act, ultimately winning an amendment to strengthen its provisions. The next day, Byrd, then the Chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee, obtained the tally sheet of votes, “had it framed, and hung it next to the door leading into his Appropriations Committee office. For years thereafter anyone who entered his office was reminded of that vote.”
Mitchell left the Senate in 1995 but he was hardly finished. Joining the board of directors of the Walt Disney Corporation, he rose to become Chairman of the Board. He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a special envoy to Ireland and, over the course of five long years, helped to negotiate the “Good Friday Accords” that achieved a lasting peace in Ireland. He served, as well, as a special envoy to the Middle East during the Obama administration, where he tried but failed to negotiate peace between Israel, the Palestinians and others in the region.
One of the most hotly debated issues in the Senate today is immigration reform. George Mitchell’s story, a son of immigrants on both sides, provides eloquent testimony to the power of the American dream and the strength — not weakness — that immigration has always provided the United States. His story is worth reading for that reason alone. -
‘Days of Rage:’ the long-ago war between the left and the FBI
Bryan Burrough’s “Days of Rage” chronicles an era when leftist American students used bombs and other forms of violence in an attempt to convert the working class to their cause.
‘Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence’
by Bryan Burrough
Penguin Press, 585 pp., $29.95
Terrorism today conjures images of Islamic militants horrifically crashing planes into buildings, detonating bombs on crowded subway trains or exploding devices specifically designed to kill or maim large numbers of people. But not so long ago, as the 1960s wound to a close, the idea of “revolutionary violence” was embraced not by religious zealots, but by left-wing radicals, certain they were on the vanguard of the coming revolution.
In “Days of Rage,” Bryan Burrough, author of “Public Enemies,” provides a fascinating look at an almost forgotten era of homegrown terrorism. Groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) routinely bombed post offices, military installations, and corporate facilities in a wildly naive and self-indulgent effort to lead the “oppressed” American working class to revolt. “Days of Rage” relies not only on historical research, but on interviews with some of the principal activists, living in obscurity but still defiant about their underground activity. The book is utterly captivating, coupling careful historical research with breathless accounts of the bombings and the perpetrators’ narrow escapes.
The sheer numbers are astounding. During one 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings, nearly five a day. Yet, as Burrough’s notes, “less than 1 percent of the 1970s-era bombings lead to a fatality; the single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people.” Most of the bombs were placed in restrooms and were followed by ornate “communiqués,” filled with Marxist jargon.
This was not an anti-war protest movement. The underground radicals were, instead, committed to righting what they perceived as wrongs in American society and fighting back against racism and police brutality.
Bernadine Dohrn, the stunningly beautiful and promiscuous leader of the Weather Underground, who J. Edgar Hoover called “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” famously celebrated Charles Manson’s horrific murder of Sharon Tate in 1969. The SLA grabbed attention by kidnapping 19-year old Patty Hearst in 1974. Neither action led to a tide of sympathy or support. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, the country had moved on, embracing much of the hippie culture, music and style — but emphatically rejecting its violent rhetoric.
The FBI, pushed hard by the Nixon administration, formed “Squad 47” to investigate. The squad conducted widespread “black bag jobs,” opening mail, breaking into homes, and installing thousands of wiretaps — with full knowledge that what they were doing was patently illegal.
When the FBI’s abuses came to light, only three individuals were indicted: Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, Acting Associate Director Mark Felt and Assistant Director Ed Miller. Felt and Miller were both convicted. Felt was fined $5,000, Miller was fined $2,500 and both were quickly pardoned by incoming President Reagan. (Felt, it was revealed years later, was the “Deep Throat” source for The Washington Post reporters breaking the Watergate scandal).
Within weeks, Dohrn turned herself in. At one time the most wanted fugitive in the underground, she was fined a mere $1,500. The Weather Underground had conducted hundreds of bombings but the only individuals convicted were the FBI agents — not the leadership of the organization.
When Ray Levasseur, one of the last violent bombers, was finally arrested in 1984, the world had so completely changed that, as Burrough’s notes, he was the “radical equivalent of the aging Japanese infantrymen found in Pacific caves well into the 1970s, men still fighting a war everyone else knew only from history books.” -
‘Weed the People’: The highs and lows of legal marijuana
In “Weed the People,” Bainbridge Island author Bruce Barcott delivers a thorough and entertaining survey of the burgeoning legalization of marijuana in the U.S. Barcott appears April 15 at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co
‘Weed the People: The Future of Legal Marijuana in America’
by Bruce Barcott
Time, Inc., 400 pp., $22.95
Every year between 2005 and 2010, nearly 800,000 Americans were arrested on marijuana charges, most of them for possessing small amounts of marijuana. That was a threefold increase since the early 1990s. Those arrested and incarcerated were overwhelmingly black or Hispanic, and poor. By 2012, the United States imprisoned a greater percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. Louisiana’s rate of incarceration is five times as large as Iran’s.
Whatever else one might think of the virtues, or dangers, of marijuana, the rate and scale at which we have imprisoned young black and Hispanic men for its possession is nothing short of an outrage.
In “Weed the People,” Bainbridge Island author Bruce Barcott (“The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw,” “The Measure of a Mountain”), surveys the remarkable transformation of marijuana from an outlawed illegal drug to a legalized adult intoxicant in several states. It’s an outstanding review of the history of marijuana regulation, the remarkable political history of its decriminalization, and its rapidly unfolding impact on modern life.
The regulation of marijuana has a long and tortured history. Marijuana was treated as a relatively minor nuisance until it was banned in 1937 and later scheduled as a dangerous drug under the Controlled Substances Act. With the proliferation of tough mandatory sentencing schemes, marijuana became the gateway drug to long-term prison sentences and the imprisonment of a generation of young men and women.
Barcott traces the roots of the medical marijuana movement from the ravaged gay communities suffering from AIDS to widespread acceptance of the benefits of marijuana for those suffering from cancer, AIDS and a variety of other illnesses. But it took serious political organizing efforts to move marijuana from a fringe alternative therapy to open legalization. Alison Holcomb, a lawyer working with the ACLU of Washington, provided that push.
Barcott is no cheerleader for legalized pot. He takes a hard look at serious questions about the link between marijuana and schizophrenia, the hazards of ingesting THC, the active ingredient in pot, by smoking it, and its rather dramatic demotivating effect. But the statistics on public health are compelling: 440,000 Americans die each year from cigarettes; 46,000 die from alcohol-related causes; 17,000 die from prescription drug overdoses. There are no reported deaths from marijuana overdose. Zero.
Barcott spends the bulk of the book interviewing and profiling the curious business community that has exploded in Washington and Colorado, rushing to fill the demand and seeing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish leading brands in an emerging and highly lucrative trade. The contrast between Harvard-trained private equity business operatives and their more rustic Grateful Dead-listening predecessors is hilarious.
Marijuana is now “legal” in Washington and Colorado. Voters in Alaska, Oregon and Washington, D.C., have similarly voted to legalize marijuana. California appears poised for similar reform. But pot remains illegal under federal law everywhere, and it’s only through the forbearance of federal law enforcement officers that these state-level experiments have been allowed to proceed.
As its playful title suggests, Barcott’s writing is casual and breezy, perhaps befitting his subject, but jarring at times. But it’s a study long overdue, and Barcott thoughtfully examines the coming social revolution. Marijuana stores now openly operate in Washington and Colorado. Skiers visiting Colorado’s resorts routinely stop along the way to stock up. Professionals used to send bottles of wine to clients as a thank you for their patronage. Will little vials of high quality pot be next? -
‘Napoleon’: supreme strategist in governing, love and war
Andrew Roberts’ spectacular new biography, “Napoleon: A Life” shows how Napoleon Bonaparte won his battles, engineered his own political ascent and left an enduring imprint on the modern world.
‘Napoleon: A Life’
by Andrew Roberts
Viking, 926 pp., $45
Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s early 19th century self-declared “emperor” was certainly extraordinary. But whether he was an extraordinarily talented executive who laid the foundations of modern France (and beyond) or an extraordinarily egotistic despot responsible for death and destruction on a scale almost unmatched in European history (until the rise of Nazi Germany) is a debate that continues to flourish to this day.
Andrew Roberts’ “Napoleon: A Life” is a stunning 920-page overview of Napoleon’s rise and almost as dramatic fall. Although there surely are as many biographies of Napoleon as years since his death, Roberts is the first biographer to utilize the recent publication of Napoleon’s 33,000 surviving letters. His careful scholarship is breathtaking. He researched the book in 69 archives, libraries and museums in 15 countries and personally walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields. That meticulous research pays off in a fascinating study of Napoleon’s contributions to the modern world (for better or worse).
Born on Aug. 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica, Napoleon won a royal scholarship to a military school in France and ultimately was commissioned into an artillery regiment in 1785. He embraced the French Revolution and won recognition by recapturing Toulon from French Royalists. He rose quickly through the military ranks, ultimately taking command (at 26 years old) of the French Army of Italy against the Austrians, crushing them with a brilliant display of strategic deployment of his forces.
He led the French invasion of Egypt and, aided by a decidedly one-sided propaganda campaign, returned to Paris to a thunderous hero’s welcome. With unmatched political finesse, he engineered a coup that installed him as one of three members of the ruling Consulate, then as First Counsel, and ultimately as Emperor.
Along the way he married Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of a guillotined royalist. She was older, far more sexually experienced, and neither loyal nor discreet. But Napoleon adored her anyway and forgave her, even after he discovered her numerous affairs. Napoleon enjoyed the company of more than 22 mistresses, so he hardly had grounds to complain.
Napoleon’s staggering impact on the modern world is difficult to overstate. As Roberts notes, “the ideas that underpin our modern world — meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on — were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon.” He rationalized local government administration, encouraged science and the arts, abolished feudalism and codified the law.
But above all, Napoleon was a warrior. Although often criticized for his boundless ambition and ego, war was declared on him far more often that he declared war on others. His military campaigns and strategy are studied to this day. His decision to invade Russia in 1812 was a fatal mistake, but hardly irrational. The French had defeated the Russians three times between 1799 and 1812, he had fought and won in blizzard conditions, and had won battles at the far end of long lines of communications at Austerlitz and Friedland. But he lost 400,000 of his men in Russia, more than 100,000 of them from a typhus epidemic. It was the sheer size and ferocity of his army that led the Russians to strategically retreat, avoiding battle and drawing Napoleon and his army ever deeper into the Russian heartland — and winter.
This book is simply spectacular. Roberts writes beautifully and, aided by meticulous historical research, brings Napoleon alive before the reader, with grapeshot and cannon fire splattering across the page.
Napoleon never lacked confidence. After his defeat at Waterloo and banishment to St. Helena, he was asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he was in Russia. He replied, “Because I had my own.” -
‘Just Mercy’: fighting injustice in a broken legal system
‘Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption’
by Bryan Stevenson
Speigel & Grau, 336, $28
In 1985, Bryan Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law School and moved to Alabama to establish the Equal Justice Initiative, a law practice dedicated to representing the poorest and most marginalized people in the country: those suffering from excessive or unfair sentences, or facing the death penalty. He had no shortage of clients.
One of his first cases involved Walter McMillian, a black man from Monroeville, Ala., convicted and sentenced to death for a notorious murder that he insisted he didn’t commit. The evidence was remarkably thin but the hostility toward McMillian was palpable. As the execution date approached, Stevenson and his legal team worked furiously to save McMillian before time ran out, frustrated that the Monroeville legal community seemed more enthralled by its local hometown author (Harper Lee) and her towering novel (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), than obvious racial injustice occurring in its own courthouse. It’s a terrific novel, Stevenson notes, but most readers fail to remember that Atticus Finch, the virtuous lawyer in the novel, failed to save his client from the death penalty. Unlike Finch, Stevenson and his team were able to save McMillian, in a dramatic victory earned through long years of work.
The bomb threats started not long after Stevenson’s appearance in the case.
Stevenson, a McArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, recounts heartbreaking stories from over two decades of representing the most hopeless convicts, sentenced either to death or to life without the possibility of parole. His writing is dramatic, arresting, and filled with telling detail. It would be easy to dismiss the effort as just another self-righteous denunciation of the American criminal justice system, but this book is far more valuable and compelling than that. It ought to be required reading in law school. Not for how the system should work, but for how the system often does work. And it is a horrifying sight.
One of Stevenson’s areas of focus was on children convicted in a brutal criminal justice system. The United States, when Stevenson began, was the only country in the world where children at age 13 could be sentenced to life in prison and placed in an adult prison population. One of Stevenson’s clients, Ian Manuel, was charged at age 13 with attempted homicide and sentenced to life in prison. He had been in solitary confinement for 18 years, living in a concrete box the size of a walk-in closet. Stevenson challenged that law and ultimately won a ruling from the Supreme Court overturning life sentences for children 17 or younger as unconstitutional.
Stevenson, himself a relatively young black lawyer, confronted obvious hostility to his work and his presence. At one point, returning from his office late at night, he paused in his car outside his own apartment listening to the end of a song on the radio. He quickly found himself surrounded by police and only after a long, patient discussion was he released.
Stevenson tackled cases involving the mentally ill, abused spouses, and the homeless. In each chapter, he introduces the reader to heart rending cases of seemingly clear injustice and an unforgiving criminal justice system. The United States today has the highest incarceration rates in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 in the early 1970s to over 2.3 million today. Spending on jails and prisons has increased from $6.9 billion in the 1980s to nearly $80 billion today.
Stevenson’s contributions to social justice have been remarkable. But his efforts, on top of his continuing legal practice, to provide this inside glimpse of the criminal justice system are priceless.