Book Reviews – by Kevin J Hamilton

Category: Reviews

  • ‘Indonesia Etc.’: an island nation of remarkable contrasts

    ‘Indonesia Etc.’: an island nation of remarkable contrasts

    Elizabeth Pisani’s book “Indonesia Etc.” is a personal tour of a country of extremes, from the urban hive of Jakarta to the remotest of the country’s 13,500 islands, where people still live without electricity or water.

    ‘Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation’

    by Elizabeth Pisani

    W.W. Norton

    304 pp., $26.95


    Indonesia is perhaps the most overlooked country in the world. When it declared independence in 1945, it famously declared that it would “work out the details of the transfer of power, etc. as soon as possible.” It’s been working on that “etc.” ever since.

    In “Indonesia Etc.,” Elizabeth Pisani takes us on a very personal tour of the world’s fourth most populous country. Pisani lived and worked in Indonesia as a journalist, and then later as an HIV epidemiologist. But to write this book, she took 13 months off and traveled 26,000 miles throughout the 13,500 islands that make up Indonesia, living with locals and traveling by every conceivable means of transportation, from overloaded commercial ships to rickety buses following their own schedule.

    Indonesia is a study in remarkable contrasts. Jakarta, its capital on the island of Java, could not be more different from its far-flung islands. It was home to 600,000 people at independence and has grown 17 fold since that time, now hosting more than 28 million — the second largest urban center in the world behind Tokyo. Jakarta tweets more than any other city on Earth. Yet 40 percent of the city is below sea level and the entire city floods every year.

    By contrast, more than 80 million more remote Indonesians live without electricity or water. The island nation is home to more than 300 ethnic groups, many with strong independent traditions and little contact with the slick amenities of modern life. Although Indonesia is the largest country in the world to consist entirely of islands, the Word Economic Forum ranked its port infrastructure 104 out of 139 countries. And that’s only the start of a massively crumbling or insufficient infrastructure and a government structure riddled with corruption and inefficiency.

    Indonesia was a Dutch colony, but declared its independence after liberation from the Japanese occupation during the war. Sukarno, Indonesia’s founding president, balanced the military against the Communist Party of Indonesia, but ultimately lost control after an attempted coup was violently crushed by the army and General Suharto seized control. He ruled the country until his resignation in 1998.

    Indonesia’s far-flung islands host a remarkably diverse range of subcultures, languages and ethnic religions. But in each, although an utter stranger, Pisani was warmly greeted and made to feel at home, often invited to stay with the family of whomever she happened to meet on the ramshackle bus or crowded boat deck.

    Pisani does an excellent job of describing her travels with colorful detail and interesting stories. Her first-person focus, with interesting statistics thrown in for good measure, ultimately limits her book’s potential. Like a long letter home, “Indonesia Etc.” gives you an excellent sense of how Ms. Pisani spent her year abroad, but one is left longing for a larger focus on this unique country.

    Maybe that’s precisely because Indonesia is so elusive, even after 13 months’ study. Looking back on her year, she observes that “I waited for boats that were eighteen hours late with little more than a shrug … When I did ask questions, I often settled quickly for the most common answer: Begitulah. ‘That’s just the way it is.’ Over time, I grew to accept that there is a very great deal about Indonesia, the world and life in general that I will just never know.”

  • ‘A Court of One’: Judge Scalia, sociable friend, formidable foe

    ‘A Court of One’: Judge Scalia, sociable friend, formidable foe

    Bruce Allen Murphy’s biography of U.S. Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia, “Scalia: A Court of One,” brought back memories for Seattle lawyer Kevin J. Hamilton.

    Bruce Allen Murphy

    Simon & Schuster

    644 pp., $35


    U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said that “the longing for certainty … is in every human mind. But certainty is generally illusion.” Justice Antonin Scalia would assuredly disagree. Certainty is, and always has been, his defining characteristic.

    Justice Scalia has been on the Supreme Court since 1986. Over nearly three decades, he has confronted a variety of difficult decisions, but rarely has admitted uncertainty as to the outcome. As he likes to say, “anyway, that’s my opinion. And it happens to be right.” In “Scalia: A Court of One,”(Simon & Schuster, 644 pp., $35) Bruce Allen Murphy, a Lafayette College professor, provides a compelling biography of one of the most conservative, combative, and bombastic Supreme Court Justices in our nation’s history.

    In 1985, then Judge Scalia served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, generally regarded as the second most powerful federal court in the nation. It was, at the time, closely divided between liberals and conservatives. Aside from Judge Scalia, it featured Judge Robert Bork (who lost his own confirmation battle to the Supreme Court just a few years later), Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg (later appointed to the Supreme Court), and Judge Kenneth Starr (later the infamous prosecutor in the Monica Lewinsky trial). On the left, Judge J. Skelly Wright anchored the liberals, who included Chief Judge Patricia Wald, Spottswood Robinson, and Harry Edwards. Judge Wright had enforced desegregation of the Louisiana schools after Brown v. Board of Education and had been appointed to the D.C. Circuit by President Kennedy. Protesters burned crosses in his yard to protest his opinions.

    I clerked for Judge Wright in 1985 and, from that vantage point, watched as Judge Scalia worked his personal charm on a closely divided court. It was overture, as it turned out, for the larger opera to come.

    Two seemingly inconsistent traits defined Judge Scalia. First, he was, and remains, one of the best writers on the Court. His opinions, whether read in disgust by his detractors or embraced as well reasoned truth by his supporters, are always entertaining. Second, he is gregarious almost to a fault.

    On the D.C. Circuit, he wielded both weapons to advantage. Judge Scalia would frequently socialize with the swing members of the court. His easy demeanor, quick laugh, and razor-sharp arguments often pulled wavering judges to his side.

    He dominated oral argument, showering the lawyers with difficult, and sometimes impossible, questions. Lawyers gripped the podium in panic and often left the courtroom shaken.

    His writing was even more pointed. Law clerks often write early drafts of court decisions which become the focus for debate by internal memoranda between judges. But debating with Judge Scalia in writing was not for the faint hearted. Years later, as a practicing lawyer, I learned to appreciate his antagonistic writing style, not as a model, but as a bracing lesson in the value of careful writing. Loose ends, one quickly learned, were ammunition for blistering counterattack.

    Judge Scalia did not hesitate to ridicule and belittle arguments — or judges — which strayed from his rigidly conservative viewpoint. Judge Scalia promoted an “originalist” theory of constitutional interpretation, seeking to discern the public understanding of the constitution at the time of its ratification. The constitution, he likes to say, is “dead” and means what it meant when adopted. He has nothing but scorn for those who viewed the constitution as a “living” document, changing with contemporary understanding of, for example, “cruel and unusual” punishment.

    This style is bracing and hardly one likely to build collegial relationships. Only a year after my clerkship with Judge Wright ended, then-President Reagan nominated Judge Scalia to the Supreme Court. He was easily confirmed. But in that forum, his caustic style has been corrosive. Supreme Court justices have to work together, sometimes over decades. He was, as Murphy calls it, a “court of one” and he lost power struggles to Chief Justice Rehnquist, then to Justice Kennedy, and later to Chief Justice Roberts. But even so, his views have often prevailed in key decisions, including Bush v. Gore.

    “A Court of One” is a terrific start to understanding Justice Scalia and his impact on American constitutional law. Murphy, though, is hardly a neutral observer, and his hostility to the justice is transparent. As a result, this biography is likely to be as controversial as its subject. Perhaps that’s inevitable. Certainly Justice Scalia of all people should appreciate strongly held opinions.

    Justice Scalia is now in his 80s, but age has neither softened his rough edges nor moderated his views. For those of us who knew him before his Supreme Court appointment, that’s hardly a surprise.

  • ‘When the United States Spoke French’: Five eminent Frenchmen come to the aid of a young America

    ‘When the United States Spoke French’: Five eminent Frenchmen come to the aid of a young America

    François Furstenberg’s new book “When the United States Spoke French” follows the fortunes of five eminent Frenchmen who fled to this country after the French Revolution and aided a young America.

    “When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped a Nation”

    by François Furstenberg

    Penguin Press, 498 pp., $36


    In 1789, inspired in part by the American experiment, the French Revolution rocked Europe. A handful of Frenchmen who led the Revolution in its early days watched in dismay as it devolved into chaos. They escaped across the Atlantic to find refuge in the United States. Quickly integrated into life in Philadelphia, the new capital, they were warmly welcomed by Americans who enthusiastically celebrated the French revolutionary fervor.

    In “When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees Who Shaped A Nation,” (available at booksellers July 14, Bastille Day) Johns Hopkins University history professor François Furstenberg recounts these tumultuous years from the viewpoint of five highly influential Frenchmen: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (later a foreign minister under Napoleon), the duc de Laincourt, Louis-Marie Vicomte de Noailles, Moreau de Saint-Méry, and Constantin-François Chasseboeuf de Volney.

    They were quite the collection. Talleyrand, it was said, “brings with him all the vices of the old regime, without having been able to acquire any of the virtues of the new one.”

    At the time, the fledgling United States was crippled with debt, excluded from many ports in the British Empire (particularly in the Caribbean) that had been key trading partners, and had few financial resources to invest in its struggling economy. The French émigrés, with connections to European capital, were able to assist their new hosts in securing lines of credit.

    For the Americans, the French were the source of endless fascination. Volney tutored the daughters of William and Anne Bingham, two of the most prominent Philadelphians, in French. Noailles, a former Versailles dancing partner of the French queen, Marie Antoinette, gave them dancing lessons.

    At the time, the United States looked to their Revolutionary allies, the French, for support. But it was not to last. In 1794 the United States signed the Jay Treaty with England, signaling neutrality in the war between France and England, which the French considered nothing less than betrayal. An undeclared naval war with France ensued, followed by French efforts to control New Orleans, the key to the vast Mississippi watershed.

    Had they succeeded, much of the territory west of the Appalachian Mountains might well have become French. But the army sent to secure French claims stopped first to quash rebellion in French colonial San Dominique (now Haiti), where it suffered grievous losses, mostly from yellow fever. With few options, the French Emperor Napoleon settled for selling the Louisiana Territory to the United States (rather than see it fall into English hands).

    The 20-year period covered by the book saw profound changes — for the United States and for France. As Furstenberg notes, “The United States had gone from a small group of states huddled between the Appalachians and the Atlantic coast to a continental power stretching across the Mississippi Valley to the Rocky Mountains.” France had gone from monarchy, to republic and finally to empire. Wars had started, ended, and erupted again.

    Furstenberg opens a window into a lost world of glittering Philadelphian dinner parties, rough backwoodsmen speaking French and homesick émigrés. It’s a fascinating portrait of the diplomatic intrigue between France and England for power and position, with the United States displaying a disconcertingly astute aptitude for playing them off against each other.

    “When the United States Spoke French” is essential reading for understanding the complex relationship between France and the United States that, to this day, endures.

  • Kai Bird’s ‘The Good Spy’: a lost link to peace in the Middle East

    Kai Bird’s ‘The Good Spy’: a lost link to peace in the Middle East

    Kai Bird’s new book “The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames” tells the story of Ames, a U.S. diplomat killed in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut who was actually the CIA’s most informed and valuable operative in the Middle East.

    ‘The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames’

    by Kai Bird

    Crown, 448 pp., $26


    On April 18, 1983, a truck bomb exploded in front of the American Embassy in Beruit, killing 63 people and marking the emergence of Hezbollah as a lethal political force in the Middle East. Among those lost in the explosion was Robert Ames, a CIA operative who had developed extraordinarily close ties to the PLO. Ames was an old-fashioned spy, relying on personal relationships, deep knowledge of Arabic culture and language, and shared values. His life (and death) had a profound impact on the Middle East.

    Kai Bird, the co-author of “American Prometheus,” a Pulitzer-prize-winning biography of nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, spent years researching this terrific biography of one of America’s most important covert operatives. It was worth every minute.

    Ames joined the CIA early, assuming the cover of a State Department trade representative posted in various embassies. He quickly learned Arabic and became immersed in Arabic culture and history. But his most important breakthrough was his friendship with Ali Hassan Salameh, an intelligence operative who rose rapidly through the PLO ranks to become Chairman Yasser Arafat’s chief intelligence officer and heir apparent.

    To the consternation of his CIA superiors, Ames never formally recruited Salameh as a paid informant, correctly understanding that Salameh was motivated by a devotion to the Palestinian people, not personal wealth. His superiors twice tried to explicitly recruit him, once passing him a blank check and telling him to fill in whatever number he wished. Salameh, insulted, refused the cash and broke off communications for more than a year.

    At a time when the United States prohibited all contact with the PLO, Ames understood that any prospect of a lasting peace in the Middle East would require an accommodation of Palestinian interests. Israel, of course, had a different perspective.

    Ames was an old-fashioned spy, Bird writes, “who spent years acquiring foreign language skills and learning to understand the history and cultural intricacies of a foreign society.” Today, with reliance of enormous electronic surveillance programs, sweeping vast amounts confidential data, operatives like Ames are “all too rare. In his time, Ames was accused of having ‘gone native.’ ” That, of course, was precisely the point.

    Of course, the delicate balancing couldn’t last. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and the rape and brutal massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees by Christian militiamen, while Israeli guards stood guard, in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps radicalized a generation of Palestinians. Violence and retribution escalated and, within a year, Salameh was assassinated by Israeli special forces.

    Ames followed his friend within four years. Ames’ six children were shattered by their father’s death, and even more surprised to learn that he had been a CIA operative.

    No one from the CIA was invited to the White House on Sept. 13, 1993, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Arafat met and famously shook hands. More than anyone, Robert Ames set the stage for that meeting. But by that time, he had been in his grave for a decade. Frank Anderson, the CIA’s chief clandestine officer for the Arab world, instead took a group of 30 officers to Arlington National Cemetery to pay respects to the man who helped move the world one step closer to peace.

  • ‘Little Demon in the City of Light’: a hypnotic murder

    ‘Little Demon in the City of Light’: a hypnotic murder

    Steven Levingston’s “Little Demon in the City of Light” chronicles a 19th-century murder in Paris and the sensational trial of the accused killers, which pitted the leading experts on hypnotism against one another.

    ‘Little Demon in the City of Light’

    by Steven Levingston

    Doubleday, 352 pp., $26.95


    On July 26, 1889, a well-to-do Parisian gentleman, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, quietly slipped into an apartment for a liaison with his mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. He was barely able to say hello when his paramour deftly tied her silk waistband into a noose, clipped it to a rope, and signaled her accomplice, Michel Eyraud. Eyraud hoisted Gouffé into the air, strangled him, and stuffed his body into an oversized trunk.

    The next morning, Bompard and Eyraud loaded the trunk onto a train to Lyon, where they selected a remote location, threw the body over a bank, smashed the trunk to pieces and fled.

    The unraveling of the crime, apprehension of the killers, and the dramatic trial is retold in Steven Levingston’s “Little Demon in the City of Light.” Levinston, the nonfiction book editor of The Washington Post, put several years into researching this fascinating book.

    Eyraud, an abusive 39-year old con man, caught the attention of Bompard, a misguided young woman drifting on the Parisian streets without means of support. It was not an auspicious combination.

    After the crime, the pair fled to San Francisco, where they stumbled upon Georges Garanger, a wealthy French businessman who became their next mark. But Garanger fell hard for Gabrielle, and she for him, and the pair slipped away together instead of waiting for Eyraud as they had promised.

    Gouffé’s rotting corpse, in the meantime, was discovered and, using then ground breaking forensic techniques, identified as Gouffé. The trunk was reassembled and slowly the crime was reconstructed. Gabrielle returned to Paris and confessed to the police, but claimed that she had been hypnotized by Eyraud.

    Eyraud was ultimately arrested in Mexico City and hauled back to Paris, setting the stage for the sensational trial, pitting the leading experts on hypnotism against one another.

    The description of the trial itself is priceless. Thirty six jurors were selected, but then all were disqualified when it was learned that reporters had interviewed the lot on whether they favored conviction (or execution) before any of them even heard any evidence. (An efficient, if perhaps misguided, approach to justice, one has to admit). As the San Francisco Chronicle commented at the time, “one defendant is allowed to contradict the other in court, and even to terrify her into hysterics, and it is considered as proper and tending to further the ends of justice. It may be that the system is more effectual, but it is revolting to our ideas.”

    It’s a terrific story and one well told. Gabrielle Bompard enjoyed every minute of her fame, reveling in the crowds that awaited her in the streets. As Levingston notes, she “set the stage for further criminal stars and gave the world a taste of what was to come — the tabloid excess, the public fascination with famous murderers and the exploitation of brutal crimes as popular entertainment.”

  • ‘The Martian’: Stranded on Mars, botanist battles to survive

    ‘The Martian’: Stranded on Mars, botanist battles to survive

    Andy Weir’s “The Martian” is a nail-biting science-fiction thriller about a botanist stranded on Mars, racing against time to survive until a rescue mission arrives.

    ‘The Martian’

    by Andy Weir

    Crown, 369 pp., $24


    Mark Watney awoke with a headache, a chest wound and a torn spacesuit. But that wasn’t the worst of it. He was alone. On Mars.

    It wasn’t supposed to work out this way. Watney was a botanist and the lowest- ranking member of a landing party on Mars. All was fine until an over-the-top sand storm forced the team to abort the mission. But before they could evacuate, the wind destroyed a radio tower, the debris tore Watney’s suit and nearly impaled him, and tumbled him out of sight. As the storm worsened and threatened to destroy the escape ship, and the readings from Watney’s spacesuit indicated he was dead, the crew was forced to leave.

    But he survived. Now, he has a habitat with medical supplies and plenty of air, but food that will run short years before a rescue mission can reach him and no way to communicate with Earth. Maybe worse, he has an inexhaustible supply of crappy 1970s television reruns and disco music. Against those odds, he’s not ready to give up. Using potatoes included for a Thanksgiving feast and earth soil brought along for experiments, he turns the habitat into a giant potato field.

    Back on Earth, a bored satellite technician monitoring her site at 2 a.m. realizes Watney is alive and electrifies the world with the news. But on Mars, Watney faces an unremittingly hostile environment and equipment designed to last days, not years, as he puzzles out, with gallows humor, how to travel over 3,000 kilometers to the landing site of the next Martian expedition. And stay alive for two years to make it there. It’s a sort of gigantic math story problem.

    “The Martian” is a superb science-fiction thriller written by first-time author Andy Weir, a self-professed lifelong space nerd. Weir began writing the book in 2009, trying to make it as scientifically accurate as possible. Watney, for example, produces water by reacting hydrazine with carbon dioxide over an iridium catalyst, then burning the resulting hydrogen. He’s elated: “This was the best plan ever! Not only was I clearing out the hydrogen, I was making more water! Everything went great right up to the explosion.”

    Rejected by publishers, Weir self-published the book on his own website, then as an Amazon Kindle version and, after 35,000 downloads in three months, he finally was signed to a contract. The book has been optioned for movie rights by Twentieth Century Fox. Like his main character, Weir just wouldn’t give up.

    But this is not merely a science-fiction geek fest. Moral choices abound. Should the returning crew be told while still in transit that they left Watney behind alive? At what cost should a rescue mission be mounted? Is it worth risking the lives of several people to save one? And who should decide?

    Relief turns to horror as one catastrophe after another befalls Watney. The pace quickens as he races against time, the nonnegotiable absolutes of physics and distance. Weir infuses the book with enough science, math and physics to infuse the story with awful plausibility. It’s a first novel worth every minute of lost sleep you’ll suffer reading it.

  • ‘One Summer: America, 1927’: America at a turning point

    ‘One Summer: America, 1927’: America at a turning point

    Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America, 1927” is a once-over-lightly look at several watershed events of 1927, when one achievement after another convinced Americans that the future was bright.

    ‘One Summer: America, 1927’

    Bill Bryson

    Doubleday, 527 pp., $28.95


    America had one heck of a summer in 1927. Charles Lindbergh became the first person to cross the Atlantic by plane. Babe Ruth shattered baseball records.

    Al Capone was at the height of his power. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed. Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney in one of the most celebrated and controversial boxing matches of all time. Television was created. Radio came of age. And the entire country celebrated the remarkable stock market, blissfully unaware of the coming economic apocalypse.

    In “One Summer: America, 1927,” Bill Bryson, author of numerous popular works of nonfiction (“At Home,” “A Walk in the Woods”), surveys America at a turning point. Although the Wright Brothers might have launched the first flight, it was the European countries who first commercialized aviation.

    When the Orteig Prize was announced for the first nonstop transatlantic flight, it was anything but clear that an American pilot would win the prize. Yet Charles Lindbergh, an unknown kid from Minnesota, did precisely that, piloting an astonishingly flimsy “airplane,” largely covered in fabric, to land at Le Bourget Field, near Paris. He was greeted with a hysterical reception from the more than 100,000 Parisians who met his plane, and fame that far surpassed anything he could have imagined.

    Babe Ruth, meanwhile, smashed no fewer than 60 home runs that year, in a duel with his teammate Lou Gehrig. Gehrig briefly pulled ahead of Ruth during the season but stalled at 47 homers (no small feat in itself) while Ruth set a legendary record that stood unmatched until Roger Maris, another Yankee outfielder, broke it in 1961. The duel, and Ruth’s astonishing power, changed baseball forever.

    Off the field, though, Ruth enjoyed his celebrity and all that it brought him — sleeping with innumerable young women and feasting with few limits. It was an era when private indiscretions remained private.

    The Mississippi flooded in 1927, in an enormous human disaster, with federal-disaster relief coordinated by the capable but impossibly pompous Herbert Hoover. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants who had been convicted of a double murder during an armed robbery in Boston, finally went to their death in August 1927. The controversial trial outraged civil libertarians and made Americans highly unpopular throughout Europe.

    But in America, the seemingly unstoppable stock market fueled everyone’s optimism. Investors borrowed capital to invest in the stock market “on the margin,” never imagining that a market crash might require them to repay the losses. At the time, the only unreasonable position was not investing at all.

    But, of course, nothing lasts forever. Ruth’s record was eventually eclipsed. Lindbergh’s fame vanished overnight with his pro-Nazi speeches. And the market crashed in 1929, launching the Great Depression. “Nearly nine decades have passed since the summer of 1927, and not a great deal survives,” Bryson writes. “So it is worth pausing for a moment to remember just some of the things that happened by that summer.”

    It’s hard not to be captivated by this compelling portrait of America at a crossroads. But Bryson’s writing is sadly incomplete. There’s a lot that could have been said about the summer of 1927 — the launching of an aviation industry that would dominate the world to come, the blindness that stock-market mania seems to induce, or the difference between steroid-induced “sluggers” and the real thing.

    But unfortunately Bryson explores few larger lessons, instead weaving together these vignettes with little more than quick transitions. Bryson’s lightweight history is certainly amusing, but little more.

  • ‘The Bully Pulpit’: a president’s clash with his successor

    ‘The Bully Pulpit’: a president’s clash with his successor

    ‘The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism’

    by Doris Kearns Goodwin

    Simon & Schuster, 928 pp., $40


    Theodore Roosevelt became president in September 1901, with the assassination of his predecessor. It was, to be sure, hardly what the Republican conservative wing had in mind.

    Angered by his progressive politics as the governor of New York, they hoped to bury him in the most useless of offices: U.S. vice president. Less than one year later, he was the president. Oops. For eight years he dominated the landscape, promoting conservation and progressive causes with relish. He was re-elected in a landslide in 1904 but refused to run for a third term. He left office at 50.

    Roosevelt had a complicated relationship with his successor, William Howard Taft. Roosevelt relied heavily on Taft’s judgment and helped install Taft as his successor, only to be sorely disappointed by Taft’s backsliding on Roosevelt’s progressive agenda. Ultimately, Roosevelt challenged Taft in his 1912 re-election bid and, after losing the Republican nomination in a tumultuous convention, bolted, formed the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party and aggressively ran against Taft in the general election, all but ensuring the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

    Roosevelt pushed for a variety of progressive causes: limiting working hours, breaking up monopolies and trusts, and expanding government power over rail, energy, telecommunications, food and medicine. All this as a Republican.

    He was helped immeasurably by the rise of “muckraking” journalists Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens and William Allen White, led by editor Sam McClure, who published groundbreaking investigative stories in McClure’s Magazine (and later in the newly created American Magazine) detailing sordid working conditions, filthy meatpacking plants and abusive monopolistic trusts. The journalists helped to mold public opinion, forcing the hand of Roosevelt’s opponents.

    Author Doris Kearns Goodwin has profiled several American presidents, including Franklin Roosevelt in “No Ordinary Time” (which won the Pulitzer Price in 1995) and Abraham Lincoln in “Team of Rivals.” Here, she focuses on the Progressive Era. “There are but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a molt seems to take place, and an altered country begins to emerge,” she writes.

    Goodwin writes beautifully, but it’s difficult to imagine what she was thinking here. Roosevelt’s life has been the subject of numerous biographies, including most notably Edmund Morris’ definitive three-volume biography, the last volume of which (“Colonel Roosevelt”) was published just three years ago. Roosevelt’s complicated relationship with Taft is certainly fascinating but was dealt with far more comprehensively in the Morris biography. Goodwin’s effort to combine a short-form biography of Taft and Roosevelt in one volume (with short profiles of muckraking journalists tossed in for good measure) is interesting but ultimately falls short of its objective.

    For starters, Taft is rather decidedly given the short shrift here, in favor of his more colorful predecessor. Taft in fact had an astonishing career — as U.S. Solicitor General, 6th Circuit judge, secretary of war, president, and then as chief justice of the Supreme Court. (Goodwin repeatedly identifies Taft as serving on the “Sixth District Court of Appeals,” not the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, an unfortunately glaring error). But here, Taft is left little more than an overweight foil, good-natured, but no Theodore Roosevelt. That’s unfair to a remarkably talented man trying to fill impossibly large shoes.

    Ironically, Roosevelt suffers the same treatment. His life and ascent to the presidency are covered in rushed detail. Goodwin omits any significant discussion of Roosevelt’s extended post-presidential trip to Africa, his later nearly fatal trip to South America, and his relationship with Woodrow Wilson.

    In fairness, Goodwin likely never intended a comprehensive biography of either man, seeking instead to focus simply on their relationship. But without the larger context, it is difficult to understand either, much less the relationship between the two. That is, unfortunately, a rare miss from a talented author.

  • ‘Lawrence in Arabia’: blueprint for disaster in the Middle East

    ‘Lawrence in Arabia’: blueprint for disaster in the Middle East

    Scott Anderson’s new nonfiction book “Lawrence in Arabia” is a dazzling work of history that reads like a courtroom thriller, about T.E. Lawrence and the World War I-era political double-dealing that created the modern Middle East.

    ‘Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East’

    by Scott Anderson

    Doubleday, 592 pp., $28.95


    World War I is most often remembered as a horrific mélange of European trench warfare, mustard gas and staggering losses, all triggered by senseless imperial alliances between inbred royalty. But in the Arabian Peninsula, a sideshow played out between the Arab population, their Turkish colonial rulers and western European powers that defined the modern Middle East. A young English officer — T.E. Lawrence — stood in the middle of that maelstrom, and seized control through initiative, political insight and derring-do.

    Scott Anderson’s newly released “Lawrence in Arabia” is a brilliant review of the shifting alliances and cross currents in what most considered a secondary theater of conflict. Based on years of intensive research, the volume provides an overview of the war and how its resolution created the disastrously unstable modern Middle East. It is a dazzling accomplishment that combines superb historical research with a compelling narrative equal to any courtroom thriller.

    Anderson, a former war correspondent and author of both novels and nonfiction, weaves together four separate stories. Curt Prufer was a German embassy attaché in Cairo, fomenting jihad against British rule in Egypt. Aaron Aaronsohn was a committed Zionist running an anti-Ottoman spy ring. William Yale was a young American employed by the Standard Oil Company, which cared a lot less about who won the war than it did about extracting immensely valuable oil concessions. (Some things never change). And, of course, at the center of the story was T.E. Lawrence, a young British officer with a notoriously bad attitude about appropriate attire and his superiors.

    Rather than even attempt to understand the local Arab population or to focus on winning the war, the British and French devoted years to haggling over how to divide up the spoils of a war rather decidedly not yet won.

    Lawrence, by contrast, had a deep understanding of Middle Eastern geography and history on arrival and seized every opportunity to expand that formidable knowledge. Lawrence ultimately rode with Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, the third son of Hussein bin Ali, the Grand Sharif of Mecca. Faisal was a leader of a pan-Arab coalition of fighters hoping to establish a postwar independent Arab state.

    Betraying his own country, Lawrence revealed that, despite promises to Faisal, the British and French had secretly agreed (in the Sykes-Picot Treaty) to divide between themselves the entire peninsula. As a realist, Lawrence understood that the Arabs would have the strongest claim only to that territory that they liberated from Ottoman rule and, with that insight, helped lead an improvised Arab army across deserts in a series of improbable victories.

    Lawrence gained celebrity but, as Anderson recounts, everything he “had fought for, schemed for, arguably betrayed his country for, turned to ashes in a single five-minute conversation between the prime ministers of Great Britain and France.” With the war ending, the two great powers not only affirmed the Sykes-Picot Treaty but went further, taking more and giving their ostensible Arab allies even less.

    Lawrence died in a motorcycle accident in 1935. He was 47 years old. The pan-Arabian independent nation Lawrence fought for likely would not have survived its own internal differences, nor is it likely that such a nation would have been any more receptive to the establishment of an independent Israel, but it’s difficult to imagine how events could have turned out worse.

  • ‘The Terror Courts’: rough justice at Guantánamo

    ‘The Terror Courts’: rough justice at Guantánamo

    ‘The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay’

    by Jess Bravin

    Yale University Press, 448 pp., $30



    The United States has long prided itself on the strength of its judicial system and its respect for the rights of criminal defendants. For more than 200 years, our justice system has withstood war, economic depression and even foreign invasion. Until Sept. 11, 2001.


    In the aftermath of those horrific attacks, both anti-Taliban groups and American troops in Afghanistan rounded up hundreds of detainees. President George W. Bush signed an Executive Order authorizing the establishment of a prison camp at Guantánamo Bay where they would be tried by military commissions. Drafted by conservative ideologues from Vice President Cheney’s staff, the Order established a commission system almost entirely under Presidential control. Worse, the President secretly authorized brutal interrogation techniques. In hearings before the commissions, neither the rules of evidence nor the safeguards applicable in military courts martial would apply. Indeed, hearsay and even confessions produced from torture would be admissible if deemed “reliable.”

    In “The Terror Courts,” Jess Bravin vividly recounts the struggles both inside the administration and with the U.S. Supreme Court over the Commissions and its operations. Bravin, a lawyer who covers the U.S. Supreme Court for The Wall Street Journal, provides a fascinating, if depressing, overview of the Bush administration’s approach to the detainees.

    Guantánamo was intended to serve as the “legal equivalent of outer space,” where the prisoners would have no recourse to outside lawyers or courts. But military lawyers assigned to represent the detainees immediately challenged the commissions’ jurisdiction. The case ultimately was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

    The young Georgetown law professor who argued the case, Neal Katyal, was an odd choice, having never appeared in any significant litigation. He was so nervous that he used a “litigation coach” to calm his nerves by holding hands and practicing before eight stuffed animals before the argument. Despite his inexperience, however, the Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. United States, struck down the effort to try the detainees before commissions.

    Congress quickly passed the Military Commissions Act to reauthorize the commissions and to provide at least some due process rights. But the problems were only beginning.

    The abuse of the detainees, including waterboarding and brutal interrogation techniques, complicated many of the cases. Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Couch had joined the prosecution team after one of his former squadron buddies, a United Airlines pilot, died on 9/11. But sorting through the files, he was disgusted by the horrific abuse rained down on the detainees, spoiling any chance of fairly trying them.

    After several false starts, the administration settled on Salim Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden. Hamdan’s trial, though, hardly turned out as the administration hoped. The commission acquitted Hamdan of “conspiracy” and convicted him instead of the catchall “material support for terrorism” charge. The Commission then rejected the government’s request for a 30-year sentence and, after credit for time served, sentenced Hamdan to only five months. Even that conviction was overturned on appeal.

    In the end, of the 778 detainees once held at Guantánamo, only 166 remain, the government quietly conceding that the vast majority could not be convicted. As a nation, we suffered an incalculable loss on 9/11. But the sacrifice of our constitutional principles in reaction did nothing to avenge that loss. Bravin’s thoughtful history teaches a painful lesson. It should be required reading.