The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War by Carl M. Cannon


A Truly Enjoyable Meandering History

Published in 2003 by Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

Publishers Weekly criticized this book The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War for not truly exploring the meanings behind Jefferson's famous phrase from the Declaration of Independence that lists among the rights of all people the rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." To be fair to Cannon, he does explore that and both explicitly and implicitly tells the reader that the genius of the phrase is that it is so hard to define. It can be used by people from all over the political landscape to define their goals and they are all using it correctly (I think he does this rather brilliantly in the chapter concerning anti-war protesters vs. George W. Bush.)

 The Publishers Weekly review correctly points out that Cannon's focus is, at times, lacking. However, the text is still informative and well-written. I would compare it to a pleasant conversation that strays a bit from its original focus but eventually does return.
Franklin, Adams and Jefferson editing 
the Declaration of Independence.
Cannon pulls quotes from a great multitude of sources and he correctly, in my mind, expounds on his thesis that one of the Great Themes of the American Experience is expanding the concept of the "pursuit of happiness" and making it apply to more and more people within our own society and also throughout the world. His view that this is one of the goals of the invasion of Iraq is so consistent with Bush's own statements and my own observations that it shocked me to read it in print. Why was I shocked? I was shocked because this was the first time I read it in print - he is the first journalist I've seen to analyze it in this way and I feel that he is one of the few who actually has an intellectual grasp of what Bush's goals are in Iraq (be they successfully reached or not and Cannon really does not address the correctness or not of the war in Iraq - he is merely looking into motivations.)

 His quotes from leaders of nations that were once part of the Soviet Bloc and are now part of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq are so concise and insightful that I was struck dumbfounded in many ways.

 On a pet peeve note, Cannon has lots of end notes - many with excellent additional commentary. I wish his publisher had seen fit to make them footnotes so that I would not have had to keep two bookmarks in the book and continually have to flip back and forth.

 I rated this book 5 stars out of 5.

 This book can be found on Amazon.com here: The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War by Carl M. Cannon.

 Reviewed on September 22, 2004.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

KING RICHARD I: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of AMERICA'S GREATEST AUTO RACER by Richard Petty with William Neely

Image
Originally published in 1986. Richard Petty is NASCAR's winningest driver, with 200 wins. He raced from 1958-1992. He won seven championships, he won the Daytona 500 7 times and is one of the few drivers to win at every track he competed on during the course of his career. In 1967 he won 10 races in a row (!) on his way to winning 27 races for the season.  He also won the very first NASCAR big time car race I ever saw at Michigan in 1981.  I was already a fan - and I was sure that he would win every race I attended from the point forward (he didn't). The Petty family raced in stock car races back when they really were stock cars - you could buy replacement parts at local dealers or in junkyards. They raced when you could drive the car to the track - but that was a bad idea if you were caught up in an accident and couldn't drive it back home. They got in on the ground floor of NASCAR, with Richard Petty's dad winning 3 of the early championships and Richard, his brother,...
Read more

LINCOLN'S GENERALS (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Collection) edited by Gabor S. Boritt

Image
Published by Oxford University Press in 1995. Lincoln's Generals is a collection of 5 essays written by scholars of various aspects of the Civil War. In this case, they focused on how Lincoln worked with his various generals, mostly the generals of the Army of the Potomac. They are organized in roughly chronological order. The first essay was very well-written. It was by Stephen W. Sears and concerned Lincoln and McClellan. The weakest, for me, was the second essay, ostensibly about General Hooker. It's focus was really the macho culture of the time that required men to prove themselves manly by exposing themselves to fire. It wasn't a bad essay, but it really was not about the relationship between Lincoln and Hooker. The other three essays were about Meade, Sherman, and Grant.  I got an appreciation for the difficulties of Lincoln's political position, especially as the election of 1864 approached. Viewing things from 161 years later, it seems like it was all pre-orda...
Read more

2 B R 0 2 B (audiobook) by Kurt Vonnegut

Image
Originally published in 1962 in  the magazine If: Worlds of Science Fiction. Published in 2017 by Author's Republic. Read by Phil Chenevert Duration: 19 minutes. Unabridged. 2 B R 0 2 B is set in a future world where the population is kept at a strict limit so that the living can live in a clean and safe environment. When a new person is born into the world, someone must volunteer to leave because aging has pretty much been cured. The Federal Bureau of Termination keeps track of all of the births and deaths to be sure that the math works out. The phone number for the Federal Bureau of Termination is 2 B R 0 2 B - pronounced "two be or naught to be." The story is about a father whose wife is about to give birth to triplets. One of the grandparents of the triplets has agreed to die. Unless something changes, the future parents will have to pick out two babies to kill... This is an intentionally provocative short story that had a quick and brutal ending that surprised me.  ...
Read more

I FIND YOUR LACK of FAITH DISTURBING: STAR WARS and the TRIUMPH of GEEK CULTURE (audiobook) by A.D. Jameson

Image
Published in May of 2018 by Macmillan Audio. Duration: 6 hours, 58 minutes. Read by Holter Graham. Unabridged. A.D. Jameson is a student of cinema - not just science fiction and fantasy movies, but of cinema in general. I used the word "student" in the previous sentence carefully because he is not just a fan of movies, he studies the directors, the movements and the ideas behind the movies. Photo by DWD But, he is also a proud geek - a fan of sci-fi and fantasy literature and movies. Like me, he was really into those genres in middle and high school, moved away from them for a while during and after college and then came back to them in a big way when the Star Wars "Special Edition" movies were released. My own children do not believe me, but there was once a time when the mere sight of a Star Wars t-shirt or bumper sticker was worthy of comment. Now, they are everywhere. My family probably owns more than 20 Star Wars -related t-shirts alone. A.D. Jameson...
Read more

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

Image
  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was ...
Read more

GHOSTED: AN AMERICAN STORY (audiobook) by Nancy French

Image
Published by Zondervan in April of 2024. Read by the author, Nancy French. Duration: 9 hours, 56 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Ghosted is an autobiography of Nancy French. Nancy French had a career as a Conservative political columnist and ghost-writing for people in Conservative circles. She helped Conservative politicians write opinion pieces, helped them come up with clever lines for radio and TV interviews, and even books. She worked with such Conservative stars as Sarah Palin and Ben Sasse. She even worked with the Romney campaign.  The book starts with her childhood in Kentucky, including an awful story of sexual abuse at the hands of a manipulative youth pastor and how that sent her life into a spiral into she met her future husband while she was in college. Nancy French is married to David French, a well-known Conservative political columnist, commentator, and attorney. He worked for two organizations that defended the rights of Christian groups and Conservatives on co...
Read more

ABRAHAM LINCOLN by James Daugherty

Image
Originally Published in 1943. The edition I read was a re-print published by Scholastic in 1966. While not a terribly deep dive into Lincoln, Daugherty's (1889-1974) very readable small telling of his life has some of the most poetic prose I have ever read in a biography.  There are a couple of factual errors in the book. One example that I noted is the assertion that Robert E. Lee replaced a wounded James Longstreet at the head of what became known as the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862. It was Joseph E. Johnston. That bears very little bearing on the story of Lincoln, even though I am sure he would rather Johnston would have been in the fighting rather than Longstreet.  Here is an example of Daugherty's excellent prose (concerning Lincoln's early days as a lawyer):  For the long, bony, sad man who was Billy's partner, the law office became a sanctuary and a refuge and a workshop, where through the years he slowly grew and learned and thought out the dark meanings an...
Read more

The Red Heart by James Alexander Thom

Image
This is one great book. Originally published in 1997. The Red Heart  is based on the true story of Francis Slocum, a 4 year old Quaker girl who was kidnapped by Delaware Indians in the 1770s on the Pennsylvania frontier near Wilkes-Barre. (There are recreation areas named for her in both Pennsylvania and Indiana) A painting of Francis Slocum that is part of the collection at the Indiana State Museum It is also the story of her family's 60 year search for her across the Midwest and even into Canada. It is also the story of the relentless westward movement of the Americans and how the Indians dealt with it. The reader also gets a fantastic lesson on daily life among the Delaware and Miami Indians. If you're a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan you'll remember the episode entitled "Inner Light" in which Picard is "attacked" by the alien probe from the long-dead world that makes him live an entire lifetime among their people in his mind in ...
Read more

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by P.J. O'Rourke

Image
Originally published in 1991. I read the 1992 Vintage Books paperback edition. Dated but still has teeth. P.J. O'Rourke goes after the ridiculousness that is the federal government with his trademark irreverent style in his 1991 book Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government . Some of the commentary is dated (lots of talk about the forgettable 1988 presidential election with Republican George H.W. Bush going against Democrat Michael Dukakis. Also, the first one I voted in) but some of it is incredibly relevant. For example, the story of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA) looking into the mystery of suddenly accelerating Audis 1n 1986 was reminiscent of the same problem with Toyotas that filled the news channels in 2009 and 2010. Perhaps O'Rourke's most famous line comes from this book: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." (pg. xvii in th...
Read more

STAR TREK: TIMETRAP by David Dvorkin

Image
Published in 1988 by Pocket Books I used to be a gigantic reader of Star Trek books. In the mid-80's I had a rather large collection. In fact, my cousin and I had a complete collection if we put ours together (we would share back and forth so we wouldn't miss any book). I was quite the fan. I ran across this book when I was picking through the stacks of a used book store that had lost its lease and picked it up for old times sake. I don't remember the plot of Timetrap at all so this must have been published after I had stopped making sure I had EVERY Star Trek that was printed. Synopsis: The story occurs in the same region of space as The Original Series episode " The Tholian Web ." The Tholians had the ability to make an area of space phase in and out of alternate universes. Or, maybe it was natural - who knows? After all, the Tholians are a mysterious species and no one knows much about them. In that show, a federation ship was trapped and phasing back and fort...
Read more