Review: Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy

Mr. Jefferson's Hammer: William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy by Robert M. Owens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I continue my exploration of American Midwestern pioneer history with this biography of William Henry Harrison, and I am pleased to find it a thoughtful and generally well written, It also recontextualizes some things I knew from different perspectives.

Above all, I am struck by the way in which Harrison himself was both of and not-of the Midwest. He was born in Virginia to a father prominent enough to have been a signer of the Declaration. In fact, the family remained prominent for generations. I knew that his grandson Benjamin was also elected President (though I always have to check whether it’s his son or grandson), but I didn’t realize that he was cousins with Carter Harrison, Sr. and Carter Harrison, Jr., two mayors of Chicago whom I’ve encountered in my Chicago and gangster history work.

At the same time, Harrison was largely a self-made man – self-made with the benefit of strong connections. His father died when he was still young, he made foolish decisions about the real but not overwhelming inheritance, and joined the army at a time when it was on the dangerous side.

He didn’t seem initially to imagine a future for himself in the Northwest Territory but, like second sons of the Britain at the time who volunteered for duty in India, the remote location amplified both the risk and the reward.

So, he landed in the region as a mostly broke but well-educated young man among generally more rough-hewn colleagues.

Those contradictions seem to have followed him as he rose in the military and then the proto-state government of the region. As I read it, he was enough of the Eastern establishment to get the blessings of Washington for his political rise and yet ensconced enough in the Midwest to retain legitimacy.

More interesting to my own research questions, though, is the way he understood Native American conflict as part of the larger global conflict. Owens argues that he generally saw Native conflict as an extension of the war with Britain. Others may have been fundamentally racist – and there was real barbarity in the way some Ohioans and Indianans butchered Natives – but Harrison saw them as legitimate allies of the British power that he feared. (Owens reads Thomas Jefferson the same way.)

Harrison’s most famous military victory came at Tippecanoe when he scattered the confederacy that Tecumseh was attempting to build across sometimes warring Native tribes. Owens sees it as a not-quite-impressive bit of generalship, but what strikes me in particular is the language Harrison used to describe Tecumseh (who was not present at Tippecanoe – he lived another couple of years and was then killed and shamefully desecrated after death at another battle). He saw Tecumseh as a great orator and politician, a man very much to admire who just happened to be on the other side.

It’s fascinating stuff, and, while it doesn’t diminish some of the ugliness of Harrison’s anti-Native campaigning, it does remind us that the total victory of Manifest Destiny wasn’t always the obvious outcome. Harrison had reason to fear the Native armies that he faced, and he rose as he did in part because – however nearly inept he might sometimes have been – he was a brave man himself.

We get a glimpse of Harrison’s notoriously short time as President only at the very end of this book. Then, famously, he ran as “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” playing on a later generation’s nostalgia for a time when Native power really was strong enough, in theory, to arrest Western expansion of the U.S. (Note that Andrew Jackson rose to prominence from similar success in wars against the Natives…which were often simultaneously wars against Britain.)

That Harrison sounds, again, like a man of the East, a President, no less. But he became famous, and utilized that fame, from his time helping to build and defend the Midwest and – as the title here says – for shaping the way the East would see the threat (and eventually the bravery and honor) of the very Natives he was also often killing and exploiting in treaty negotiations.


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Review: Playground

Playground by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a great book. I don’t know whether it will still be great in a decade – some of what seems cutting edge and provocative today may turn out to be obvious or cliched – but, as they say, get it while it’s hot.

Powers often works with multiple perspectives in his stories, letting us see pieces of the narrative from different angles and bringing them together as part of a slow-boiling, usually satisfying conclusion.

Here, we have the first-person narrative of Todd Keane, a Mark Zuckerberg-like figure who reveals somewhat early on that he is suffering from Lewy Body dementia and knows that he will die soon.

Todd’s earliest memories have him dealing with his parents’ acrimonious marriage. His father had been a successful trader on the floor of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, allowing them to live in a “castle” off Lake Michigan. He dealt with his father’s competitive, maybe Oedipal-fearing teaching him of chess by imagining himself underwater, walking on the floor of Lake Michigan – an experience informed for him by a book written by the pioneering scuba-diver Evie Beaulieu.

When he’s at school – first at a Jesuit high school and then at the University of Illinois – he becomes close to Rafi Young, a poet from a tough African-American neighborhood. The two bond over games, especially chess and go, and it’s Rafi’s suggestion that Todd ‘gamify’ his new social media platform that distinguishes it from its competitors and turns Todd into a billionaire.

Todd falls in love with Ina, a Pacific Islander, and they form something of a triangular relationship until, in a well-intentioned effort to repair a lover’s quarrel, Todd inadvertently betrays a secret of Rafi’s. Todd refuses to forgive him, eventually demands money for his contributions to Playground, and the two remain distant throughout their adult lives.

(view spoiler)[We learn eventually that Todd has no heirs and that he is narrating his experiences to an AI that, he hopes, will “bring back” from the dead the people he has loved, permitting him the chance at a reconciliation he never experienced. Although we don’t realize it for most of the novel, the AI narrates the events on the island of Makatea – where Evie has gone for a blissful final season of diving in unspoiled waters and where Todd and Ina, inexplicably together again after their fight, are raising two orphaned islanders.

Makatea faces an existential threat…or opportunity. A major consortium wants to use it as a base for building sea cities, floating spaces that will not be subject to national laws. (The idea seems to come from a Peter Thiel-like billionaire.) The islanders have to vote whether to accept all that will bring, and matters come to a head when Rafi realizes that Todd is the lead investor.

The great twist of the novel comes in the closing pages when we learn that almost none of this has happened. Rafi died long before, alone, in a small room. He did leave the money he got from Todd to Ina, but they never reunited. We don’t know what happened to Evie (or, if we do, I missed it in the tumult of so many revelations), but it seems likely that she’s another figure Todd has taught the AI narrator to imagine as part of his happy ending.

The bitter truth of the novel is that Todd is dying alone. He’s lived his life immersed in the world of social media, becoming a detached and lonely billionaire in the process, and he’s hoping to fulfill his lost best friend’s dream of using poetry to bring the dead back. (Rafi early on lost a beloved sister, and that drives much of his art.)

The implications of all this are stunning, but, as I suggest, they may turn out to be dated. One way or another, we will resolve some of how artificial intelligence relates to the creative process. We will also come to recognize – as pathology, lifestyle choice, or strategy for particular success – what it means to live a virtual life over a real one. (hide spoiler)]

For now, Powers is asking questions we are just wrestling with. Like his protagonist Todd, he’s on the ground floor of a social media world that’s shaping how we are coming to shape our own art.

I should add that much of this is beautifully written. That’s a Powers’s trademark, something I say having now read his four most recent books.

Weirdly, the one I like least is The Overstory, the one that’s gotten the most attention. Other than this, I also think that Orfeo is stunning.

Anyway, the guy is definitely worth reading, and this one may be – for the next few years at least – the best place to see him at his best.


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Review: The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was drawn to this one for a few reasons, but it didn’t quite add up for me.

First, McCullough is a big name in American history. I haven’t read his work, but I know his name, and I figured this would reflect that.

Second, it details the pioneering of Ohio, the state where I grew up, and I have come to realize I learned only a part of that story in my schooling and that I didn’t have context for much of what I did learn.

And, third, the settling of Ohio was a prelude to the settling of Indiana which is a part of the memoir project I’m swimming through. I want as much background for that as I can find.

To be fair, there is a lot of good information here. I was glad to hear more of the career of Arthur St. Clair – famous in my family because my brother was punished in 8th grade to write a 20-page research paper on the man – and somewhat amused to learn he was more of a disaster as a governor and general than I had realized. And it was helpful to understand that Anthony Wayne’s subsequent victory at Fallen Timbers – a battle I did recall from 8th grade – came as a consequence of St. Clair’s earlier defeat.

I appreciated as well the attention to the burial mounds, making this the third book I’ve read in the last couple months to mention them. (I grew up around some of those mounds, and I have admired them most of my life.)

And I’m glad for a fuller context of the settling of Ohio out of the original capital city of Marietta. I have known that fact, again, since 8th grade, but the geography didn’t make sense to me (why put the capital in a corner of the state?) until now.

What doesn’t add up, though, is McCullough’s methodology. He seems inclined to tell much of the story through the lens of journals and letters of father and son Manasseh and Ephraim Cutler and their contemporary General Rufus Putnam. It’s occasionally striking to get very specific observations from the men, but it doesn’t come together as a full narrative. Manasseh, for instance, helps organize the settlement, but he’s not really on the ground. Putnam doesn’t keep the same sort of journal and, while serving as the first mayor of Marietta, stands for most of his career as a wise elder rather than a continuing actor. And, while Ephraim was purportedly the first settler ashore when they founded Marietta, his story doesn’t exactly dovetail the others.

As a result, much of that personal account seems disconnected from the larger story of the settlement of Ohio. This comes to feel like two separate books with the Cutler and Putnam story – already somewhat disconnected from its separate parts – almost a distraction from the larger political, military, and demographic history.

I’ll be curious sometime to read some of McCullough’s more famous works, and I can imagine a way in which the method of weaving individual testimony into larger narrative works well.

As much as I am grateful for the material here, the method doesn’t quite pay off in this one.


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Review: Lush Life

Lush Life by Richard Price
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As advertised, this is literary fiction meets noir.

As a confession, it took me a while to get into this – and I mean that in two ways.

More recently, as I read it, I found it hard to focus for a long time. I felt (and still feel) as if this is narrated with the textual equivalent of a hand-held camera. The whole perspective is fast-moving and up-close. It feels wobbly, and it leaves me somewhat queasy. I’m not a fan of hand-held cameras in cinema – I like them intellectually, but they give me a headache with their rapid movement – and that made it tough to get into this.

Still, over time, I recognized this as a powerful procedural. It opens with the senseless murder of Ike Marcus, and we get immersed in the perspectives of several people, but three in particular.

There’s Eric, a sort-of friend of Ike’s who panics during the murder and looks for a time like a serious suspect.

There’s Matty, a seasoned detective who refuses to let the case die as the politics and short-attention span of New York City threaten to look away.

And there’s Billy, Ike’s father whose grief keeps him following every step of the investigation while inadvertently interfering in it.

(view spoiler)[There’s also Tristan, the young gang-banger who panicked and pulled the trigger. (hide spoiler)]

No one really knows anything, which contributes to the claustrophobia of the hand-held sensibility, but each wrestles with his conscience and proves himself marginally better than he thought he would be.

There’s another dimension in which it took me a while to get into this, though. I remember, with eerie clarity, hearing an NPR review of this when it came out…18 years ago.

In the radio piece, Richard Price read an excerpt of Billy talking about the shock of his grief over his son’s murder. It was so painful to hear that, as a relatively new father, I couldn’t imagine reading the book.

I also couldn’t forget the impression it made, though, and I gradually dared myself to get to it as I came to learn more and more about the noir tradition. I’ve picked it up many times since then, but it took this coming on sale when I was hungry for something like it. Next thing I knew, I was a quarter of the way through it – and I’d gotten over the distraction of the hand-held-camera style.

By the end of this, I was immersed. It’s not a spoiler to say that justice in the New York of the aughts is hazy, but it still feels like a resolution. There’s real grief here, and there’s real heroism, but it’s all in a space of moral ambiguity – a kind of ethical hand-held-camera display.

It took me 18 years to get into this. I’d say it was worth the wait.


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Review: Life of M

Life of M by Rachel Cusk
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected to dislike this book. And I did dislike it.

But I disliked it for so many different reasons – and with the sense that maybe Rachel Cusk wants me to dislike it as a commentary on contemporary selfhood and fame – that I think it turns out to be a peculiar kind of success.

There’s a lot of notoriety around this one. Several reviewers have noted that the title character, “M,” bears consistent indicators that she is the actor Natalie Portman. M was in several movies as a young woman where she was put into sexually charged moments. She starred in a movie about ballerinas. She is the face of a major perfume ad campaign. And she presents herself to the world as a well-read, thoughtful person, someone very much part of our artistic and entertainment world.

In the book, our unnamed narrator – who speaks in the first-person plural most of the time – befriends M briefly and their lives mostly split. The handful of scenes where they spend time together give way to a flatly narrated series of scenes where M presents herself to the world.

The M who comes across in interviews and performances is as admirable as any star might be. She listens to others. She shares credit. She commits to causes worth supporting.

But our narrator paints her as ultimately an empty vessel. The trappings of fame – in particular the time-resistance of film performance (since film exists in a ‘forever state’ even as its actors age) – have hollowed her. When she is in the world at large, she has to remind herself to perform as if she is a “normal” person even as waiters and security guards, catching a glimpse of her, bend over backwards to accommodate her whims. (And she doesn’t recognize them as whims, just as things ordinary people do even as she loses sight of all that’s involved in giving her such ordinary pleasures.)

In one memorable scene, M encounters a saleswoman who looks, at first glance, a lot like her. She even has the same facial expressions. As a result, we get the fleeting sense that someone else, this saleswoman, might have experienced the (seemingly) great fortune of her career. Then, when the woman walks away, M sees that she is chunky with heavy legs, and she gets the chance to recollect that she is herself an unmatchable beauty, and that’s what has brought her such fame.

All that said, many of those same reviewers have asserted, or maybe just implied, that Cusk actually knew Portman and that this is an attempt at something like a real biography – even if it is, as M casually suggests at the start, our narrator has chosen to invent everything in it.

I understood that to be the case before I picked this up, and that’s what made me anticipate not liking it. There’s a cruelty in befriending someone and then, on so little evidence and with so deliberately one-sided an approach, to paint her as an incomplete human.

And, as part of that approach, Cusk writes in a monotone, drawing heavily on flat, stative-sentences with verbs of being rather than active ones.

And, nothing happens. There’s nothing at stake and no narrative (unless you count the little-explored fact of the narrator’s husband undergoing a frightening surgery).

As I reflect on this, though, I realize I have no way of knowing whether Cusk knows Portman – or, if she does, whether she knows her as the narrator knows M: as two women whose daily lives briefly intertwined enough for them to share a few intimacies.

In that case, I can see that Cusk might be using Portman as a lens to explore what it means to be a person – a self – in a time when so much of our lives is filmed and therefore performed. In that light, M is a powerful doorway into what fame means in a world that Andy Warhol foresaw.

M might be empty, but she is no more empty than the rest of us, just far more present.

I’m still not sure I like that message, but I like the way Cusk is asking us to play the game alongside her. Her idea of self-ness is harrowing, and her sense that fame – even fame granted to someone whose surface reactions are unimpeachable – exacerbates that idea is all the more troubling.

In asking us to think of Portman who, for all we know, may be in on the literary joke or may simply be the paragon Cusk has chosen to work through, we’re asked to read this with the possibility of it as a roman-a-clef and with the possibility of it as a serious philosophical novel.

I can’t decide what it is, and I don’t its message or its style.

But I do enjoy that Cusk has made me think about it, and, for that, I am surprised to find myself recommending it.


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Review: The Land of Laughs

The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a great premise, one that’s hard to talk about without a (view spoiler)[

Thomas Abbey is the son of a one-time famous movie star, and that’s made him the product of stories that others tell about him. People are constantly asking him what his father was like and how it felt to be his son. As such, he has a hard time defining himself – telling his own story, if you will.

The exception to that came in his passion for work of the C.S. Lewis-like writer, Marshall France. Reading those books entrances him, and he feels fully himself when he’s immersed in the writing. Early on, he has a meet-cute with a fellow fanatic, and the two of them embark on a mission to try to write the definitive biography of France. To do that, they relocate to the small town where he lived and where his daughter still lives.

Eventually – and here’s where the real spoiler comes in – we learn a strange and beguiling truth about the town. Other than Anna and a man named Richard, everyone there is a living, breathing person…but also the fictional creation of France. That is, sometime after France wrote his early best-selling books, he discovered that the things he wrote about the town began to happen. When he wrote of births, the kids were born, and the deaths he described happened just as he described them. When he decided he didn’t like a couple he’d invented, he had them transform into Bull Terriers and become beloved pets.

What’s compelling in all that is the way the characters appreciate living in a universe that’s all been written for them. They don’t fear random death. Since they’ve all read what France wrote about them, they know when they will die and how. Without that surprise, they don’t have the existential dread of the rest of us. They know the end of the story someone else has written for them, so they can live and appreciate every moment they have.

In recent months, though, something has changed. People are dying outside their prescribed narrative, and it’s profoundly unsettling. France had warned them it might happen after he died, but now they’re on the brink of having to confront the uncertainty of real mortal lives.

But the even deeper spoiler comes toward the end when we learn why Anna has given Thomas permission to write the book. France has warned his creations that, in such an event, they will need to find someone who has something of his writerly gift – someone who can write his biography in such a way that he will return as a character that biographer has written.

I loved – really loved – the clever conclusion, which, while taking place in the final two pages, is the biggest spoiler of the, all. Thomas has escaped the town (they have killed his girlfriend Saxony) and, on the run from Richard who’s been assigned to kill him, he has written his own book: a biography of his father.

Then, just as Richard has cornered him with gun drawn, Thomas’s father – brought back to life by the biography – distracts Richard long enough for Thomas to pull his own gun.

I’m retelling it too quickly to give the full effect, but it’s satisfyingly clever and worth hanging onto this until the final pages. (hide spoiler)]

All of that is a great and creepy premise, and it’s lingered for me as a tightly and originally plotted story. Very original.

There are a few dated references here that take away from the edginess of it all – it’s a product of the pop culture of its moment rather than a timeless story. And there are stretches where the narrative seems to drag more than necessary. (Including, for instance, a mostly gratuitous first chapter.) So, I can’t quite give it the full five-star rating.

But this is definitely a pleasure to read, and I have Carroll on my list of writers to come back to.


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Review: Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas by Jennifer Raff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In some ways, this book is a bait and switch. The title and back cover copy tell us it is an account of how North and South America came to be peopled by prehistoric pioneers from – probably Asia but maybe from South Sea islanders – who became the ancestors of the vast and varied New World peoples.

It is that book, but only after it’s another one first.

That book is, it seems to me, Rath’s grappling with the ethics of European-descended white anthropologists doing work that can fly in the face of Native American origin myths. Who are any of us, she asks, to recover long-buried bodies, test their DNA, and then hypothesize about their distant origins.

Her answer is that we have to be respectful at all times, not simply asking for permission but entering into the work with the recognition that Native perspectives are even more valid than our scientific ones. If they tell us that Kenewick Man deserves to be reburied – despite his body’s capacity to tell us so much about nine millennia for which we have no other souce – then he deserves to be reburied.

She is right, of course, but it sometimes feels a bit heavy-handed, and it comes as introduction to the scientific work she has promised us. I’d be open to that other book, but I’d want it to be the acknowledged center of the work rather than something that, as here, comes as a long prologue – and repeated refrain – to the work she has promised us.

As far as that work, her unpacking of what the latest ancient DNA analysis suggests about the peopling of the New World, things can get a bit clunky.

I’ve read a lot of excellent science writing lately, and Raff doesn’t quite have the same facility with translating the frontiers of her field to a lay reader. She falls back a lot of acronyms which, even though she defines them, come to feel like buzzwords. She refers often to the theory that the last great ice age, which lowered sea levels to the point that there was a “land bridge” across the Bering Strait. (I put the term in quotes because, as she explains, it was not a slender piece of dry land but rather a vast space in which prehistoric humans lived rather than simply passed over.)

So, even the promised parts get hard to follow,

There are some redeeming elements, though. She does paint a good outline of the competing theories in her field, noting that she is part of a younger generation contesting the previous consensus that the New World was peopled by the Clovis group with its high-tech stone arrow- and spearheads.

She also has a nice sequence on how it feels to do the actual bench chemistry work of extracting ancient DNA. It’s laborious, and even trained scientists fail in as many attempts as they succeed in.

So, this is something of a mixed bag. I learned some from it, but I don’t find it as successful as some of the other recent work on the subject.


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