Book Reviews – by Kevin J Hamilton

Category: Seattle Times Reviews

  • 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.”

  • ‘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.

  • ‘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.

  • ‘The Boys in the Boat’: UW team vanquishes Hitler’s crew

    ‘The Boys in the Boat’: UW team vanquishes Hitler’s crew

    ‘The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics’

    by Daniel James Brown

    Viking, 404 pp., $28.95


    Few sports carry the aristocratic pedigree of crew. Long-established teams at Yale, Harvard and Princeton are mere upstarts by comparison to teams with even more refined heritage from Oxford and Cambridge. Few of them imagined that a crew from Washington, of all places, could be competitive.

    But by 1936, that’s exactly what happened. The University of Washington built a team from kids raised on farms, in logging towns and near shipyards. They blew away their Californian rivals and bested the cream of New England to become the American Olympic Team and won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

    In “The Boys on the Boat,” Daniel James Brown tells the astonishing story of the UW’s 1936 eight-oar varsity crew and its rise from obscurity to fame, drawing on interviews with the surviving members of the team and their diaries, journals and photographs. A writer and former writing teacher at Stanford and San Diego, Brown lives outside of Seattle, where one of his elderly neighbors harbored a history Brown never imagined: he was Joe Rantz, one of the members of the iconic UW 1936 crew.

    Rantz was perhaps the most unlikely member of the eight. Literally abandoned by his family as a teenager to fend for himself, he enrolled at the UW and paid his way through school working odd jobs and summers in brutal heat on the Grand Coulee dam. The discipline, coordination and sheer physical demands of crew gave him a chance to prove himself. He was not alone. The team was built from lanky young men winnowed from a large field of curious freshmen. Not many lasted long.

    Those who did were in for quite a ride. Coached by the stoic Al Ulbrickson, the rowers built muscle, coordination and teamwork into an unbeatable machine. Hovering in the wings was George Yeoman Pocock, an eccentric Englishman who became a legend, building racing shells from his UW workshop for rowing programs across the country.

    The young men quickly learned that rowing was synergistic — sheer brawn was not nearly enough to win, nor was synchronization, although both were surely necessary. Only when they perfectly melded trust, determination and optimism did they excel. Ulbrickson continually reshuffled the varsity eight as they grew from awkward freshmen to experienced seniors, seeking the perfect combination.

    The individual stories of these young men are almost as compelling as the rise of the team itself. Brown excels at weaving those stories with the larger narrative, all culminating in the 1936 Olympic Games. Few of these young men had ever left Washington state, much less the United States, when they left New York on the steamship Manhattan to represent their country in Berlin.

    The final race could not have been more dramatic. With poor placement in bad weather, the UW crew faced daunting disadvantages as the race began. But they had something no one could see, a team that worked so closely together that, when it clicked, they were able to soar beyond their apparent capacity. Hitler himself attended the race with his top lieutenants expecting his Nazi team to take the gold medal in the premier rowing event. He left badly disappointed. For the boys in the boat, when hearing the results announced, “their grimaces of pain turned suddenly to broad white smiles, smiles that decades later would flicker across old newsreels, illuminating the greatest moment of their lives,” Brown writes.

    A story this breathtaking demands an equally compelling author, and Brown does not disappoint. The narrative rises inexorably, with the final 50 pages blurring by with white-knuckled suspense as these all-American underdogs pull off the unimaginable.

    The 1936 Pocock shell still hangs in the UW crew house. It’s an icon now, revered by modern day crews. But once, not so long ago, it carried eight kids and a coxswain from Northwest farms, orchards and shipyards to an improbable victory in the greatest of all crew races.

  • ‘How the French Invented Love’: 900 years of living, loving and liaisons

    ‘How the French Invented Love’: 900 years of living, loving and liaisons

    Marilyn Yalom’s lively “How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance” documents the French obsession with love and sex in literature and life.

    ‘How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance’

    by Marilyn Yalom

    HarperPerennial, 416 pp., $15.99
    Few things define the French more vividly than romance and love.

    For hundreds of years, the French have obsessed over love and sex, in art, literature and poetry. From the middle ages to modern day, French culture has played an outsized role in fashioning concepts of chivalry, gallantry, and appropriate (and sometimes inappropriate) relations between men and women. Even in English, we turn to French to speak of love: “French kissing,” “liaison,” or “rendezvous.”

    In “How The French Invented Love” author Marilyn Yalom surveys French literature through the ages, tracing the development of the concept of “love” and “romance.” A French professor working on “gender research” at Stanford University, she is well suited to the task, displaying an easy familiarity with 900 years of French literature.

    To the French, the story of Abelard and Heloise is as familiar as Romeo and Juliet are to Americans or the British. In 1115, he was a 37-year-old cleric, philosopher and famously popular teacher; she was a brilliant 15-year-old niece of a church official. They became lovers, were married, then became victims of an angry uncle who castrated Abelard. She became a nun; he a monk. But their correspondence burned with a passion she could not quench, and 900 years later, still smolders.

    Edmond Rostand’s play, Cyrano de Bergerac, is the most frequently performed French play in history. Cyrano, witty and articulate, but cursed with coarse looks, sacrificed his own love for Roxane to assist his friend Christian, who coveted the same woman but who had no gift for language. With Cyrano’s help, Christian won her to his side, then died a tragic death. Roxane retreated to a convent and only after many long years and on his deathbed does she discover that it was Cyrano all along who spoke for Christian.

    Yalom surveys the delicate art of seduction, perfected by the French royalty who seemingly spent more time focused on the opposite sex than the, ahem, affairs of state. In 1782, for example, Choderlos de Laclos published “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a radically different portrayal of love. Far from a romance, the novel traces the story of two ex-lovers who use sex as a competitive game, leaving their degraded “conquests” in their wake. The book remains required reading in French high schools (imagine the outcry if added to the curriculum of an American high school). But it was an apt critique of the Ancien Régime on the eve of the French Revolution.

    Yalom covers the famous love letters of star-crossed lovers, gay love, republican love in the time of the Revolution, and the “sentimental education” offered by the sexual initiation of a younger man by an older woman. It’s a fascinating short course through French literature, history and changing attitudes toward sex and love, all of which heavily influenced western thought over the last millennium.

    But even so, French and American perspectives remain markedly different. Americans scratched their heads in wonder at the state funeral for French President François Mitterand in 1996, attended by both his wife, Danielle, and his longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot. The French, in turn, were baffled by the impeachment of an American President for an office dalliance with an intern.

    But as Yalom demonstrates, these are the very questions that have been debated throughout history, much of it defined by French literature, culture and language. The French may not have “invented” love but they certainly have spent a lot of time exploring its application.

  • ‘Master of the Mountain’: Thomas Jefferson’s enduring support of slavery

    ‘Master of the Mountain’: Thomas Jefferson’s enduring support of slavery

    ‘Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves’

    by Henry Wiencek

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 319 pp., $35


    Thomas Jefferson towers over American history. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third President, second Secretary of State and Ambassador to France. He engineered the Louisiana Purchase, and commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lionized in American history for his soaring defense of individual liberty, Jefferson’s extensive slaveholdings have been curiously downplayed, dismissed as beyond his control, or excused.

    In his new book, “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” noted historian Henry Wiencek, author of “An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America,” takes on the formidable task of setting the record straight. Jefferson was a lawyer by training and carefully curated his correspondence to portray himself as opposed to slavery and in favor of emancipation. He wrote what he described as “soft” answers to those who questioned slavery, suggesting emancipation at some point in the undefined “future” when circumstances were right.

    But despite enormous power and influence, Jefferson did little to actually end slavery during his lifetime. It was, in fact, the source of his wealth and prosperity. He calculated the profits his hundreds of slaves earned him, even putting the children to work making nails or weaving cloth, under the harsh supervision of his overseers, who routinely beat the children. Slave children were sold or presented as gifts, and slaves’ marriages were destroyed when one spouse was sold or transferred to distant locations.

    Jefferson removed himself from direct involvement in the messy details slavery entailed. He built Monticello itself so that visitors would be dazzled by displays of exotic Lewis and Clark artifacts and reminders of his intellect, while the slave housing remained safely out of sight.

    Curiously, history has conspired to overlook, downplay or excuse it all. While Jefferson powerfully dominates early American history, in our collective memory his slaveholding is different: he becomes a victim of historical circumstance, trapped by social convention, unable to right so clearly a wrong. This is, of course, nonsense. Contemporaries not only could but did emancipate their slaves, including George Washington himself.

    Jefferson fathered several children by Sally Hemmings, one of his slaves. Hemmings, then only 16 years old, accompanied Jefferson to France when he served as Ambassador. She could have remained there, free under French law, but returned with Jefferson after striking a bargain that would free her children from slavery in return for her continued service. The relationship, hotly contested since Jefferson’s own time, is now beyond dispute with DNA proof. But curiously, it has served to only burnish his reputation — as a tormented lover and father of a multiracial family. But such a sympathetic reading requires, as Wiencek notes, an “enormous act of forgetting” — forgetting the hundreds in bondage, hidden from view in Monticello, bought, sold and beaten like animals.

    Wiencek carefully probes the historical record, parsing the enormous body of Jefferson literature. His work is a thoughtful and well-documented contribution, offering a powerful reassessment of our third president. He notes the irony that many “accept Jefferson as the moral standard of the Founders’ era, not Washington.” Perhaps, he suggests, Washington’s emancipation of his slaves stands as too stark an example, demanding that those who claim to have principles live by them. Quite obviously, our young Republic did not — an enduring stain on our nation’s founding. Jefferson offers a more complicated compromise, concealing harsh injustice with soaring rhetoric and promises of a better future. Just like, one might note, America at its founding.

  • ‘What Money Can’t Buy’: putting a price on the public good

    ‘What Money Can’t Buy’: putting a price on the public good

    The Moral Limits of Markets’

    by Michael J. Sandel

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pp., $27


    Michael Sandel, a Harvard University professor, teaches one of the most popular college classes at the university and, perhaps, the world. His legendary “Justice” class has been taken by 15,000 graduate students over the years, serialized on PBS, translated into a variety of foreign languages and viewed by literally millions of viewers. His classes sparked a moral philosophy craze in Japan, and he was named by China Newsweek as the “most influential foreign figure.” It’s quite an accomplishment for a mere political philosophy professor.

    His new book, “What Money Can’t Buy,” explores the consequences and implications for the ever-increasing expansion of markets and market-based reasoning in our society. “The problem with our politics,” he writes, “is not too much moral argument but too little. … A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they don’t belong.”

    Modern economists routinely describe the world as a series of incentives and rewards, ever seeking to expand the explanatory power of the metaphor but without accounting for the transformative power of putting a price tag on everything, particularly in an economy with such widely disparate wealth distribution. Simply put, Sandel argues, reducing human behavior to market-based reasoning crowds out public spirit, moral obligation and similarly noneconomic factors. And some of his examples are compelling.

    In Switzerland, for example, public-opinion surveys measured public opinion in a small town selected for a nuclear-waste repository. A slim 51 percent majority accepted the placement, apparently in a display of civic responsibility. But the same survey asked the same voters if their support would increase or decrease if coupled with an annual payment to each resident in exchange for placing the waste repository. The result? Support went sharply down not up. Only 25 percent would support it with the payment. An economist would be confounded, but not Sandel: Once you introduce the market, it crowds out and displaces what was, until then, a civic duty.

    A second example is even more telling. When day-care centers introduced a “late fee” for parents arriving after closing time to pick up their children, the result was more parents arriving late, rather than fewer. Why? Because parents understood the penalty as a fee for service, which stripped the sense of moral duty out of the equation.

    Sandel’s point is that markets leave a mark, changing the way we look at the world. “Once we see that markets and commerce change the character of the goods they touch, we have to ask where markets belong — and where they don’t. And we can’t answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of the goods, and the values that should govern them.” In a world in which ads are sold on school programs, police cars feature Daytona-style advertisements and cities routinely sell naming rights to civic ballparks, city parks and public spaces, Sandel’s book raises important questions.

    Sandel’s best-selling book “Justice” provided a whirlwind tour through moral philosophy. “What Money Can’t Buy” is a superb follow-up asking many of the same questions. A baseball stadium where the wealthy sit next to the working class and the variation between ticket prices is minimal is a very different place (with very different civic consequences) from one where the rich peer down from richly appointed “suites” and the less fortunate sit across the stadium in distant bleachers.

    There is no more fundamental question we face than how to best preserve the common good and build strong communities that benefit everyone. Sandel’s book is an excellent starting place for that dialogue.

  • Young American in Paris tale is lightweight but amusing

    Young American in Paris tale is lightweight but amusing

    “Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” is young New Yorker Rosecrans Baldwin’s short and often clichéd tale of moving to Paris with his wife only to find it is a lot different from New York.

    ‘Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’

    by Rosecrans Baldwin

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $26


    In his new book, “Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” Rosecrans Baldwin, a young New Yorker, recounts moving to Paris with his wife to take a job with a French advertising firm.

    A thorough Francophile from a young age, Baldwin is ecstatic when he arrives, thrilled to be living in the City of Light, surrounded by the stunning architecture, food and people. But reality soon sets in as it dawns on him that — quelle horreur — the city is actually French, and not only the language but the culture is different from, say, New York.

    You can, of course, imagine the shock.

    Baldwin struggles with mastering French in a business setting (it gave him migraines). As he recounts, “First day on the job, my French was not super. I’d sort of misled them about that.”

    He struggles learning to master the informal kiss that is the typical greeting, even in business settings, and dealing with infamous French bureaucracy. He describes it all as if it were a daunting challenge rather than a rather tame exercise in cultural differences. This is, apparently, a sheltered young man. Think Paris is different from New York?

    The book is an entertaining but lightweight addition to a genre that is already crushed by the number of Americans “living abroad” books (further subdivided into the French and Italian versions). It’s more than a little cliché to describe how terribly difficult it is to move to a foreign country where they don’t speak English all the time. But honestly, this borders on downright silly as virtually everyone in Paris speaks English at some level and most visitors hear almost more English than French on the street. There are McDonald’s everywhere. The difficulty isn’t finding someone who speaks English; it’s trying to escape the expanding American cultural dominance abroad.

    Almost worse, Baldwin spends chapters on how the French dress, their notoriously sexy ads, and difficulties involved in renting an apartment. Yes, all of that is different from what one might find in New York or Chicago. That’s the point of living abroad, isn’t it?

    Ultimately, Baldwin moves past the cliché, but just barely. The book is worth reading only because it’s thankfully short and doesn’t require a lot of serious attention.

    As a friend once said of her sister: “She talks a lot but says so little, it gives you time to rest.” Still, it’s a worthy read, if only to get a glimpse of what it’s like to live on a budget as an overwrought young ad executive in Paris at 29.