Book Reviews – by Kevin J Hamilton

Category: Reviews

  • 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.

  • Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?’ a witty road map for negotiating modern moral dilemmas

    Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?’ a witty road map for negotiating modern moral dilemmas

    In ‘Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?’ Harvard professor/author Michael J. Sandel provides philosophical tools for hacking through thickets of modern moral dilemmas. Sandel discusses his book Thursday at Town Hall Seattle.

    ‘Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?’

    by Michael J. Sandel

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 308 pp., $25

    Imagine that you are the driver of an out-of-control trolley hurtling at 60 miles per hour down the tracks toward a group of five workers who cannot get out of the way. You notice a side track onto which you can divert the trolley, which would save the lives of those standing on the tracks.

    Unfortunately, though, if diverted onto the side track, the trolley will just as certainly kill a lone worker standing on the sidetracks and he will die solely on account of your actions. Should you turn the trolley? Is that a moral choice even though it certainly means that, through your actions, you will have directly caused the death of the individual on the side track?

    What if the situation was slightly different? What if instead of turning the trolley, you could save the group of five, but only by pushing an extraordinarily overweight individual off a bridge and into the path of the trolley to stop it. Still moral to act?

    Harvard Professor Michael Sandel explores these famous “trolley problems” and a vast catalog of similar moral dilemmas in his new book, “Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do?” Sandel, whose moral-philosophy course is one of the most popular undergraduate courses at Harvard, is a master at using modern-day news to highlight different approaches to justice.

    Using examples drawn from recent experience, Sandel explores a variety of approaches to theories of justice. Sandel reviews the cold calculation of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism (which asks which course of action will lead to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people), to John Stuart Mill’s more humane but more abstract approach to utilitarianism, with examples ranging from throwing Christians to the lions in Rome (hard on the Christian but served as entertainment for thousands and so arguably justifiable to utilitarians) to exploring the morality of torture in ticking-bomb scenarios (our former vice president will find this discussion of particular interest).

    From the sale of kidneys to surrogate mothers, the problems flow from his pen like a numbing catalog of trouble. Taking this justice stuff seriously is hard work with tough choices: Best to trade that latte for a stiff drink if you are working your way through this curriculum.

    Sandel explores the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant (who explored the concept of duty as defining morality), John Rawls (who argued for a system of morality flowing from equality), and even Aristotle.

    But the ultimate aim here, appropriate to any college survey course, is to leave the reader with a range of different perspectives through which to view the world and the moral choices that we make.

    Sandel is at his best in weaving modern-day problems into convincing applications of competing theories of justice. He loses his footing, though, when he detours into the jargon of moral philosophy, at times testing a reader’s patience (at least those not compelled to take notes or face end-of-semester consequences).

    But he concludes with a flourish: “A just society can’t be achieved simply by maximizing utility or by securing freedom of choice. To achieve a just society we have to reason together about the meaning of the good life, and to create a public culture hospitable to disagreements that will inevitably arise.” Quoting Robert F. Kennedy and President Obama, he argues that this approach to moral philosophy can and should have a real impact on our common good.

    For those seeking a short course through moral philosophy from a witty writer, fast on his feet, and nimble with his pen, this thin volume is difficult to beat.

    Still, in the meantime, best to stay off the trolley tracks entirely.

  • ‘The Democracy Index’: Flawed, but thought-provoking, idea for election reform

    ‘The Democracy Index’: Flawed, but thought-provoking, idea for election reform

    Yale Law School professor’s suggestion for monitoring election-system integrity hits some marks, misses others.

    ‘The Democracy Index: Why Our Election System Is Failing and How to Fix It,’

    by Heather K. Gerken

    Princeton University Press, 181 pp., $24.95

    Sometimes seemingly little ideas can have a big impact.

    In “The Democracy Index,” Yale Law School professor Heather K. Gerken proposes that states and local municipalities be ranked based on how well they run their election systems. Such a “democracy index” would evaluate the ease with which voters can register, how long voters have to wait in line to vote, how many ballots are cast but not counted and similar considerations.

    Gerken argues that such a ranking – similar to the U.S. News & World Report college rankings – would provide an incentive for state and local governments to implement reform that has, she argues, been stalled by partisan gridlock and parochial local interests.

    It certainly can seem like our electoral system is troubled. In 2000, George W. Bush was declared to have been elected president despite the fact that his opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore, received more votes nationwide. After weeks of litigation involving scores of lawyers, the outcome was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

    In 2004 it was almost worse. In addition to widespread problems in Ohio, the Washington gubernatorial election was decided only after two recounts and months of litigation. And the 2008 U.S. Senate election in Minnesota sparked the largest recount in American history, followed by the longest and most expensive election contest, which demonstrated that several hundred of absentee ballots for both candidates had been improperly rejected.

    Gerken argues that our electoral system is flawed, but only in close elections do the flaws become apparent. Moreover, she contends, because of partisan interests, reform efforts often fail. She suggests that ranking states or counties on how well elections are run will provide an incentive for reform.

    While a “democracy index” could be helpful, it’s not clear that Gerken has properly identified either the problem or the solution.

    For starters, most election administrators work hard to implement improvements every cycle. But the American electoral system largely depends on senior-citizen volunteers working long hours with impatient voters in crowded polling places. Ranking states or counties isn’t going to change that or the fact that, in every election, errors will inevitably occur. That’s not caused “localism” or “partisanship.”

    Moreover, most elections are conducted fairly and accurately. Could they improve? Of course – just like every other governmental institution. Long lines, unreliable machines and improperly rejected ballots are unacceptable in any fair system, but those flaws are hardly a secret: they are front-page news and that publicity is far more likely to put corrective pressure on election administrators than being ranked 37 instead of 28 in a composite index of electoral performance.

    While Gerken’s index is unlikely to hurt, it’s a proposal better suited for an op-ed than a whole book. It’s difficult to imagine how she could drag out the discussion for 142 tedious pages (not counting footnotes).

    Still, it’s a good idea. Even if it’s a small one.

  • ‘Some of It Was Fun’: A political soldier at the front lines of ’60s turmoil

    ‘Some of It Was Fun’: A political soldier at the front lines of ’60s turmoil

    In ‘Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ,’ Nicholas deB. Katzenbach offers a behind-the-scenes look at the U.S. government’s response to some of the most turbulent years in American history.

    ‘Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ’

    by Nicholas deB. Katzenbach

    W.W. Norton, 320 pp., $27.95

    Nicholas Katzenbach had a front-row seat to one of the most turbulent decades of our nation’s history. As Deputy Attorney General under Bobby Kennedy and then Attorney General and Undersecretary of State for President Lyndon Johnson, Katzenbach played a key role in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In his newly released memoir, “Some of It Was Fun,” Katzenbach details the behind-the-scenes action.

    Katzenbach was hired by Bobby Kennedy as an assistant U.S. attorney general, heading the prestigious Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, which provides advice to the Attorney General and to the White House.

    In that post, Katzenbach worked directly with President Kennedy and with Bobby Kennedy as they confronted the tumultuous 1960s. He describes the perspective of a White House struggling to protect the Freedom Riders, young activists who traveled south to challenge segregation, from violence.

    Kennedy was under pressure from civil-rights activists and northern liberals to send federal troops into the South to protect the civil-rights protesters, and to assist in the desegregation of public institutions in the South, an idea that Kennedy ultimately rejected. Katzenbach points out the tension easily lost in hindsight: Sending federal troops into the South in large numbers would not only have been intensely unpopular in the South, but would likely have greatly exacerbated the racial tension and left troops performing police functions they were ill-equipped to handle – with no exit strategy that would not leave the situation on the ground worse than when they started.

    Katzenbach was promoted to Deputy Attorney General when President Kennedy named Byron White to the Supreme Court in 1962. Bobby Kennedy sent Katzenbach to the University of Alabama in 1963 to monitor the desegregation of the University of Alabama and to confront then-Governor George Wallace, who had famously promised to “block the doorway” to any effort to desegregate the school. As the angry crowds on campus grew, with a belligerent Wallace adding fuel to the fire, Katzenbach monitored the troops on hand, deftly coordinated the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood as students, and confronted Wallace in the doorway. Katzenbach provides a riveting minute-by-minute account as he struggles to avoid a race riot, confront Wallace, get the students admitted and keep Kennedy in the loop. That chapter alone is worth the price of the book.

    President Johnson kept Katzenbach at arms length for months after assuming office, suspicious of his close ties to Bobby Kennedy, but eventually promoted him to become the attorney general. From that post, Katzenbach assisted in drafting and lobbying for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark civil rights legislation. Katzenbach later assumed the post of Undersecretary of State from which he helped to advise President Johnson on the Vietnam War.

    Katzenbach’s narrative begins with President Kennedy’s inauguration and ends with Robert Kennedy’s funeral train, fitting bookends to what many see as the heart of the ’60s. Looking back, despite the violence, riots, demonstrations and assassinations, Katzenbach remembers the ’60s mostly as “a time of hope, of shared aspirations for a better America” and a time when “nations all around the globe [saw] us vindicate our beliefs about human equality and individual worth in the face of opposition and looking to us for leadership to a better world.” The contrast to the present is, as Katzenbach points out, dramatic.

    Although a fascinating firsthand account of some of the most crucial government crises of the 1960s, Katzenbach’s work is, unfortunately, flawed from a somewhat haphazard organization, weak editing and interesting but undeveloped political commentary on more contemporary public policy issues.

    Of course, the whirlwind of a new Democratic administration and the rapidly changing world of the 1960s bears some obvious lessons that could be learned for our own time. There are few of the principal players left to tell the story and teach those lessons. Katzenbach’s contribution should not be missed.

  • ‘Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum’

    ‘Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum’

    In ‘Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum,’ author/paleontologist Richard Fortey takes readers into the inner sanctum of one of the world’s most remarkable collections of natural-history specimens, tended to by a dedicated corps of eccentric scientists who investigate its mysteries.

    ‘Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum’

    by Richard Fortey

    Knopf, 352 pp., $27.50

    Millions of visitors pour through the doors of London’s Natural History Museum every year, and for good reason. The museum houses one of the most complete and remarkable collections of natural history in the world, collected (or donated) by generations of intrepid, pith-helmeted British explorers throughout the world.

    But few will have the opportunity to go behind the exhibit halls, to the cramped and dusty offices, filled with quirky scientists passionately devoting their lives to the study of our natural history. In “Dry Storeroom No. 1” Richard Fortey, an expert in trilobites (small extinct anthropoids with an extensive fossil record) who devoted his career to the museum, takes us on a fascinating tour through this unseen world of scientists with a focus on the most arcane details of the natural world.

    At the London museum, only a tiny fraction of the actual collections are on display. While casual visitors may be forgiven for mistaking the visible display cases for the entire museum, in fact the “real” museum is locked away behind the door, where millions of specimens are methodically described, named, cataloged and preserved.

    There are five working departments: paleontology, mineralogy, zoology, botany and entomology. In each, teams of devoted scientists collect, analyze, describe and preserve specimen examples, cataloging the stunning diversity of life on Earth, the vast bulk of which has not even been identified, much less named.

    Fortey points out, for example, that no less than one fifth of all species on Earth are beetles, yet only a half million species of beetles have been identified and named so far, leaving a staggering volume of life yet uncataloged, described or even named. (As J.B.S. Haldane famously remarked, whatever else one might say about God, he or she surely appears to have “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”) The museum’s insect collection alone has grown from 2.2 million specimens in 1912 to 80 million today.

    But as obscure as the thankless task of cataloging the variations of vole teeth, beetles or fungus gnats might seem, the fruits of that research are far from purely academic. Fortey notes that when Florida’s lucrative orange crop was threatened by an infestation of white flies from Trinidad, entomologists were able to identify a parasitic wasp with a special appetite for this specific white fly. The wasp was bred in vast numbers by the University of Florida, and the knowledge of this obscure branch of the insect world protected a critical resource from destruction.

    Similarly, a parasitic encyrtid wasp from Paraguay was used to destroy a mealy bug that threatened the cassava crop, a critical carbohydrate staple crop in much of the Third World. As Fortey dryly notes, “there is an inherent value in having people who ‘know their stuff.’ ” Knowledge of the Paraguay wasp undoubtedly saved thousands from starvation.

    The museum is, without doubt, a cathedral to Charles Darwin and his enormous contributions to the understanding of evolution and the natural world. Fortey dismisses as absurd the suggestion that evolution is a mere “theory” subject to a creationist critique: “So overwhelming is the evidence for evolution by descent that one could say that it is as secure as the fact that the Earth goes around the sun and not the other way.” But rather than waste the time or energy to debate the point, Fortey instead focuses his attention on the fossil record, which speaks for itself.

    Fortey brings to life not only the science but the quirky scientists, their midnight trysts (who knew?) and personal quirks. Peter Whitehead, the museum’s specialist in clupeoid fish (including herring and anchovies), not only published the encyclopedic 600-page “Clupeoid Fishes of the World” but was infamous for his affairs with younger female staff members. He commuted to the museum every day from Oxford and “always claimed to be able to fix up a date with any attractive waitress by the time he reached Paddington Station.”



    Curiously, Whitehead discovered a lost Mozart manuscript while searching for a 16th-century work on Brazilian herring. As Fortey notes, “it is surprising where the pursuit of herrings can lead.” Whitehead left the museum in the early 1990s and vanished in Mexico; when his wife tried to search his office for incriminating evidence of his affairs, she found herself locked out by the museum staff.

    Fortey compares the scientists to the object of their study – noting his own increasing resemblance of a tribolite as he gained weight, or how fellow scientist Gordon Corbett (a small-mammal expert) had a hesitant manner and nervous way of speaking, resembling small voles, who pause momentarily, whiskers twitching. The author balances academic rigor with entertaining detail – with an ample measure of dry British wit – along with a capable working history of the stewardship of the British museum system.

    The London Natural History Museum, like every other modern institution, has undergone significant changes in the modern era. No longer a bastion of civil servants with an untouchable budget, a more modern administration has changed the culture of the museum to be more consumer friendly; but its rich legacy remains an endowment and critical resource in understanding the world around us.

  • ‘Claim of Privilege’: Trail of ‘state secrets’ followed like an absorbing mystery

    ‘Claim of Privilege’: Trail of ‘state secrets’ followed like an absorbing mystery

    ‘Claim of Privilege,’ a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Barry Siegel, chronicles the story of a fatal 1948 Georgia plane crash; the legal battle of the families of the dead to get the truth about its cause; and how their fight has affected the Bush administration’s efforts to cloak its ‘war on terror’ strategies in secrecy.

    ‘Claim of Privilege: A Mysterious Plane Crash, a Landmark Supreme Court Case, and the Rise of State Secrets’

    by Barry Siegel

    Harper, 384 pp., $25.95

    On Oct. 6, 1948, an Air Force B-29 bomber crashed in a rural field in Waycross, Ga., after suffering a catastrophic engine fire. The plane was loaded with secret navigational equipment, and carried not only an Air Force crew, but three civilian engineers. Only four crew members survived the crash; all of the civilian engineers died.

    Their widows filed a lawsuit against the government and sought copies of the Air Force accident investigation report to support their claim. The government, however, refused to disclose it, claiming it would reveal “state secrets” and that producing it would damage “national security.”

    Sound familiar? It should. This was the landmark case, U.S. v. Reynolds, that established the state-secret doctrine in the Supreme Court that has been invoked with increasing frequency by the Bush administration to cloak its activities in the “war on terror.”

    The government’s argument was rejected by the trial court, which insisted that the government submit the report for examination by the court. But the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision, holding that the government could unilaterally withhold relevant material, without any court inspection, upon the assertion of the “state secret” doctrine.

    Ironically, as it turned out, the Reynolds case itself never did involve anything even remotely resembling “state secrets.” When the accident report was declassified in the 1990s, all it contained was a dry summary of glaring negligence: engine maintenance orders (designed to prevent the fire) that had been ignored, negligent aircraft operation by the pilots, and a failure even to train the civilians on escape procedures or parachute operation.

    In early 2000, Judy Palya Loether, whose father had died in the crash, stumbled upon a copy of the declassified Air Force report on the Waycross accident. Reviewing it, she was stunned to discover not only the government negligence, but the false assertion of a “state secret.” Outraged, she searched out Susan Brauner, who – like Loether – lost her father in the crash, and an elderly Patricia Reynolds, who lost her husband.

    In “Claim of Privilege,” Barry Siegel tells the story of the effort to rectify the misleading assertion of the state-secret privilege. Siegel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, unwinds the story like a mystery novel, with vivid writing that deftly illuminates the legal principles without unnecessary legal jargon.

    Unfortunately, by the time their lawsuit was filed, national security concerns had again reached fever pitch in the wake of 9/11, and challenges to the government’s national-security claims were no more welcome than at the height of the Cold War, when the Reynolds case was decided. The lawsuit to reopen the case was rejected by the trial court and a three-judge Court of Appeals panel that included the soon-to-be-elevated Judge Samuel Alito.

    But on another level, the lawsuit achieved a larger goal by revealing the frivolous “national security” claim upon which Reynolds was based. As Seigel notes, “they had never aimed to repeal Reynolds or attack the whole edifice of national security law. They’d wanted only to call out the abuse of trust. … In so doing, they had changed the terms of the argument. Now when government lawyers waved the Reynolds flag, judges had to consider its genesis.”

    It’s ironic that, at the very time when judicial independence is most needed – at the height of public hysteria, in times of war, and when the nation is challenged with vicious terrorist attacks – our courts appear to fail us most regularly, authorizing Japanese internment during World War II, for example, or condoning overzealous government secrecy during the Cold War (as in Reynolds).

    But then, the real guardians of constitutional liberty are not the courts, but vigilant American citizens willing to stand up to challenge their own government. These surviving family members may not have won their day in court, but surely made a larger point and one by far more valuable.

  • New side to John Grisham: storytelling of substance

    New side to John Grisham: storytelling of substance

    ‘The Appeal’

    by John Grisham

    Doubleday, 368 pp., $27.95

    Few people read John Grisham novels for literary depth, lyrical writing or passionate prose. Grisham, indeed, is known for his powerhouse stories, thundering along at breakneck speed without much of a passing thought to character development, thoughtful writing or even colorful prose.

    Grisham’s new novel, “The Appeal,” is strikingly different. Grisham appears to be bent on not only telling an entertaining tale, but confronting a serious issue to boot. Set in rural Mississippi, the novel centers on a small town devastated by pollution from Krane Chemical Co., which polluted the town’s water supply for years before it pulled up stakes and moved its facilities to Mexico. With a population suffering from cancer at 12 times the national rate, the town of Bowmore had seen more than its fair share of death and suffering.

    The novel opens with the jury delivering a stunning verdict against Krane, including $41 million in punitive damages. The verdict is pure vindication for the small-town husband-and-wife lawyer team of Wes and Marygrace Payton, who have sacrificed everything to pursue the lawsuit. The chemical company, however, is owned by Wall Street financier Carl Trudeau, who is outraged at the verdict and has no intention of paying even a dime. Instead, after berating his raft of well-heeled corporate lawyers for losing the case, he appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court.

    The only problem is that the state court is split, 5-4, with the conservative justices narrowly outvoted by a more liberal majority. With a $41 million verdict at risk, Trudeau is not taking any chances on mere legal advocacy to protect his interests. Instead, Trudeau recruits Ron Fisk, a well-groomed young man with a picture-perfect family, no discernible baggage and a strong pro-business bent to run against Court Justice Sheila McCarthy.

    Trudeau pours millions of dollars into the race, coordinated by a slick organization of political operatives, pollsters, and advertising consultants, all designed to vilify Justice McCarthy as a wildly “liberal” justice bent on protecting criminals, promoting gay marriage, and restricting gun ownership. Sound familiar? With a carefully calibrated campaign, the Justice is buried under a virtual avalanche of televisions ads, radio spots and campaign literature. By the end of the campaign, even Fisk is left wondering who is funding the campaign and, more importantly, why. And the verdict on the appeal? Well, that’s best left for the last few pages of the novel.

    The novel is something of a departure for Grisham. Unlike so many of his prior novels, this one seems pointedly designed to address a serious issue rather than simply to entertain with implausible plot twists.

    Instead, Grisham confronts in stark relief the dangers of electing judges in an era of big-money politics. It is a timely issue and a critical problem facing every state where judges and justices are elected. Judicial races rarely are the focus of a great deal of voter attention and thus are easily manipulated. The justices themselves are rather severely limited in what they can say, how much time or effort they can expend to defend themselves and their decisions, or on their own campaigns. The combination makes them uniquely vulnerable to organized assault by dedicated interest groups, with predictable results, even in states like Washington.

    Grisham illustrates the dangers of such a system with a clever story and thoughtful plot. Of course, much of what makes Grisham’s writing so predictable remains – the bad guys are stereotyped to the point of absurdity. The good guys (Wes and Marygrace, of course) are saintly to the point of straining credulity. Couldn’t they have just one weakness, character flaw or demon to wrestle with? And for most of the book, things unfold just about how you expect them to, when you expect them to and with all too predictable results. But not entirely and that’s what makes this novel different and worth reading.

    In the end, Grisham closes with a scene designed to stay with the reader, and to raise the question whether electing judges is, all things considered in this day and age, an approach worth reconsidering. That question is worth the price of the book.