THE WAR BEFORE the WAR: FUGITIVE SLAVES and the STRUGGLE for AMERICA'S SOUL from the REVOLUTION to the CIVIL WAR (audiobook) by Andrew Delbanco

Published in 2018 by Penguin Audio.
Read by Ari Fliakos.
Duration: 13 hours, 40 minutes.
Unabridged.

Simply described, The War Before the War is an in-depth look at the slavery controversy in the United States from its very beginnings through the Civil War. I am an avid reader of books that explore American slavery and the Civil War. Anyone that denies that slavery wasn't THE issue that pushed America to Civil War is deluding themselves and simply has not read the statements that five of the seceding states (Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia) issued in 1860 and 1861. Slavery was the most discussed item in four of the five declarations (Virginia's brief declaration does not mention many specifics but does refer to "the oppression of Southern Slaveholding states").

As the reader goes through this book it is easy to see that slavery was always a difficult problem for every generation of Americans to deal with. The Founders wrestled with it and ultimately kicked it down the road for later generations to deal with. By the 1850's the problem had come to a head. Interestingly, the thing that brought it to a head was a problem that rarely happened - what to do with runaway slaves.

When compared to the total slave population, very few slaves actually escaped and almost none made it to a free state. But, when a slave was caught in a free state, the media made a story out of it. Who can blame them? It was a riveting story. What was more important - property rights of the individual slave owner or the rights of a man to have his day in court to prove that he was actually a free man in court before he was taken away into bondage? What was more important - the right of a state to protect the property rights of its slaveholders throughout the country or the rights of a free state to declare slavery null and void within its borders?

When a slave was caught in the north and the process started to take him or her back to slavery the political system would often boil over. Both sides came to out, protested, wrote letters to the editor, gave speeches in Congress and generally used the occasion to rally their bases. The author makes a valuable point when he points out this is the same thing that modern political movements do (Black Lives Matter, Pro- and Anti-Abortion activists, immigration, etc.).

The book also looks at what individuals did when confronted with these problems. I was particularly struck by the judge that returned slaves in his courtroom but allowed his home to be used as an Underground Railroad stop by his grown children. He didn't actively help - he just actively ignored the extra people sleeping in his house from time to time.

This is an amazing book. I didn't think I could really learn a lot more about this topic. This will be my 108th review of a book that will be tagged "civil war" and the 77th book that will be tagged "slavery". But, seeing it all laid out in one big sweep is powerful. A great follow-up would be this book: Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865.

The audiobook was read by Ari Fliakos who did a fantastic job.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. Strongly recommended.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE WAR BEFORE the WAR: FUGITIVE SLAVES and the STRUGGLE for AMERICA'S SOUL from the REVOLUTION to the CIVIL WAR by Andrew Delbanco.

DECLARATION: THE NINE TUMULTUOUS WEEKS WHEN AMERICA BECAME INDEPENDENT, MAY 1 - JULY 4, 1776 by William Hogeland

Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster

When you read the history books, it seems obvious that the colonies steadily worked their way up to declaring their independence without much of a hitch.

The beauty of William Hogeland's Declaration is that he shows that it was a lot closer than the history books usually portray. Samuel Adams and his cousin John Adams maneuvered many of the representatives to the Continental Congress into voting for independence and certainly manipulated the government of Pennsylvania. In fact, you could make the case that they toppled the government of Pennsylvania through a powerful media campaign combined with timely advice and political pressure and installed a pro-independence government just in time for the fateful vote.

But, this new (to me) information was marred by a difficult to read text. The book just bounced around - the writing style just never got into a flow. I found it hard to read more than a page or two at a time.

Samuel Adams (1722-1803)

On top of that, there are 56 pages of end notes with commentary. If this book were published back in the "bad old days" when typesetting was labor intensive, I would understand why it was done as end notes - it was a pain to work out all of the foot notes. But, in today's world, almost all of the complicated work of footnotes is done by a computer. If it is worth the author's time to make 56 pages of commentary in your end notes, it is worth turning them in to foot notes so that people will actually read them.

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5 - interesting information, poorly presented.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1 - July 4, 1776.

AN AMERICAN SUMMER: LOVE and DEATH in CHICAGO (audiobook) by Alex Kotlowitz

Published in March of 2019 by Random House Audio.
Read by by the author, Alex Kotlowitz.
Duration: 9 hours, 53 minutes.
Unabridged.

Journalist Alex Kotlowitz has written several books about race, crime and life in the Midwest rust belt. An American Summer focuses on Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. How violent are they? In the past 20 years, 14,033 people have been killed and another 60,000 have been injured by other people shooting guns. Just to compare, it is as if the entire population of Scranton, PA or Ogden, UT or Napa, CA were all killed or wounded by gunfire.

But, it's not like all of Chicago experiences this violence. It is really just a few neighborhoods - so the impact is a lot like a civil war is going on in a medium-sized city. Everyone knows someone who has been shot and most people know someone that has been killed. That takes a toll on the survivors and that is what this book is about. 

Kotlowitz follows nine stories from these neighborhoods. Some were victims, some hurt others and some did both. Most of these stories are unrelentingly sad. Some were a little hopeful and one was downright inspiring.

The reader learns about the cycle of violence, how city officials have tried to help and fail and how the police can become just another violent part of a violent neighborhood. Chicago Police Department has paid out $662 million in damages for police misconduct since 2004.

This is a sobering, well-written book. Not an easy listen, but an important one.

This book was read by the author, Alex Kotlowitz. He did an excellent job.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  AN AMERICAN SUMMER: LOVE and DEATH in CHICAGO by Alex Kotlowitz.

Please check out this book as well: ALL the DREAMS WE'VE DREAMED: A STORY of HOOPS and HANDGUNS on CHICAGO'S WEST SIDE by Rus Bradburd.

THE LITTLE PRINCE by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Illustrations by the author.
Translated from French to English by Richard Howard.

The Little Prince is a classic novel, voted the best French book of the 20th Century. It is written in deceptively simple language - so simple that a French teacher colleague of mine has her advanced French students read it in the original French every year.

But, don't let the simple style fool you - this book packs a lot of big ideas about the foibles of modern living and adulthood into this small book about a space traveler who lands in the Sahara desert. The space traveler (the Little Prince) meets a crash-landed pilot and shares the story of his travels.

I read the book easily over a weekend while on a camping trip. I read it on my Kindle phone app. Because the author's illustrations are just as iconic as the book itself, the folks at Kindle decided to scan the pages in the way they are published. I have no problem with that, but my phone app did not let me enlarge the pages in any way with a zoom feature. At times, the text was pretty tough to read. Because of that, I am going to deduct a star from my overall score - I am reviewing the Kindle version and the Kindle version has a weakness.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Little Prince. 

THE SECRET LIFE of BEES by Sue Monk Kidd

Originally published in 2002.

The Secret Life of Bees is set in the summer of 1964. Lily Owens is a young teenager living in small town South Carolina on a peach farm. Her mother died when she was very young, her father is abusive. Her best moments at home come when she is with the housekeeper, Rosaleen. 

The story starts immediately after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Rosaleen, who is African American, decides that she is going to go into town and register to vote. Rosaleen meets some resistance, reacts and gets arrested. Then, she gets a beating and ends up hospitalized. Lily breaks her out and they flee to another small town - Tiburon.

Why Tiburon?

Lily only has a few trinkets from her mother and one of them is a piece of paper with an African American Virgin Mary with Tiburon, SC written on the back. She is determined to find out more about her mother and save her stand-in mother.

When they get to Tiburon, they are directed to "the pink house" and discover a thriving honey business ran by three African American sisters. Lily and Rosalee learn about bees and family as Lily tries to figure out her mother's connection to this place...

There are obvious connections to other Southern "coming of age" stories like A Member of the Wedding or Huckleberry Finn, but this book is unique. The religious angle alone sets it apart (for both good and bad). It is certainly worth your time to read.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 4 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.

THE FUTURE of CAPITALISM: FACING the NEW ANXIETIES (audiobook) by Paul Collier

Published in December of 2018 by HarperAudio.
Read by Peter Noble.
Duration: 9 hours, 26 minutes.
Unabridged.

Paul Collier is an award-winning economics professor at Oxford University. His name is symbolic of how he approaches this book, The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties. Collier has been knighted for his work as an economist. This means that he could have listed his name as Sir Paul Collier, but he does not. Collier may be a big shot professor who holds three positions at Oxford University (possibly the best university on the planet), but he is also the guy from Sheffield, England. Collier repeatedly compares it to Detroit because they are of a similar size and both lost a great deal of their industrial base over the last 50 years.

This book is intended to be read by the layman. Collier could certainly bury the reader with obscure terms, but he does not. Instead, he uses plenty of real world examples of well-known companies (Toyota vs. GM, for example) and well-known situations (how Johnson and Johnson reacted to the Tylenol poisoning scare in 1982, how Bear Stearns investment company put themselves into a completely ridiculous financial situation that helped kick off the worldwide Great Recession in 2008) to make his points. I am a licensed high school economics teacher, which means that I know enough economics to sound smart to people who don't know anything about economics and enough to sound dumb to actual economists. I followed about 97% of what Collier was saying. I will blame the parts that I didn't follow on the audiobook format - sometimes you get distracted when you listen and I did not rewind and re-listen. 

The author, Sir Paul Collier

Collier points that the industrial Western world is splitting itself into two economic regions. In the United States we have mega-cities (NYC and Silicon Valley, for example) that are prosperous and the rest is "flyover country". Even local "big cities" like Detroit are struggling. In the UK, it is London and, well, everything else. These two regions are experiencing the modern economy quite differently. For example, President Trump points out (correctly) that the American economy is growing at a good rate. And Bernie Sanders points out (also correctly) that the benefits of this growth is largely going to certain groups and certain regions. The rise of these two men in the top ranks of the American political system are discussed in this book as a reaction to this type of economic growth. He points out that similar moves to more extremism in politics have happened across multiple modern economies.

Collier has considered various ways to re-structure tax policy to help even out this growth. He also advocates a move away from the business theory espoused by Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman which can be written in shorthand this way: the sole purpose of a business is to generate profit for its shareholders (within the rules). Collier does not discount profit, but argues that making it the sole goal is shortsighted because it can make management shortsighted (especially since a lot of CEOs move after just a few years) and will choose to make quick cash rather than long term growth. He provides several examples and cites data that says that corporations that are privately held tend to do better than publicly held corporations precisely because the leadership of the privately held corporations are in it for the long haul.

But, this is not just a book about corporations, it is also a book about immigration, public policy, how the government can change the way it educates its young people, the way it retrains displaced workers and the way it approaches the chronically unemployed. He is a very big fan of the German approach to post-high school education, and if he describes it accurately, I cannot disagree.

This book was well read by Peter Noble, a gifted audiobook reader. It was a joy to listen to him read, but I suggest that the traditional book (or even e-reader) would be a better way to go through the material in case you want to take notes or re-read passages.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE FUTURE of CAPITALISM: FACING the NEW ANXIETIES by Paul Collier.

Collier mentioned this book in his book. I read it last year: JANESVILLE: AN AMERICAN STORY by Amy Goldstein.

I thought this book went very well with another book that I was reading at the same time: THE CORROSION of CONSERVATISM: WHY I LEFT the RIGHTby Max Boot. 

THE CORROSION of CONSERVATISM: WHY I LEFT the RIGHT (kindle) by Max Boot

Published in October of 2018 by Liveright.

2016 was a moment of reckoning for political writer Max Boot. Boot wrote for all of the well-known Conservative publications - The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, etc. He appeared on TV shows and radio shows and describes himself as a "movement conservative". But, the rise of Donald Trump and his subsequent election made him change his registration from Republican to Independent in protest.

Why? In his own words: "In March 2016, I had written that Trump was a 'character test' for the GOP: 'Do you believe in the open and inclusive party of Ronald Reagan? Or do you want a bigoted and extremist party in the image of Donald Trump?' To my growing horror, most Republicans were failing the test."

I picked up The Corrosion of Conservatism because I felt the same way. There is no point in laying out all of arguments against Trump - everyone has heard them. Like Boot, I was dismayed that "...most Republican leaders showed that they were willing to discard their principles as mindlessly as a Styrofoam fast-food container if by doing so they could enhance their own positions and avoid the wrath of a powerful and vindictive leader."

So, like Boot, I find myself a Republican "in exile" - I have left the party. Like the Cuban exiles, I find myself on the outside looking in and wondering what the hell happened.

Over the last two and half years Mr. Boot and I have come to a lot of the same conclusions. One of them is that President Trump has brought to life a strong nativist and racist strand that was always a part of the Conservative movement, but a part that we had always assumed was a tiny and shrinking part. Instead, he has exposed it to have been just hidden away out of politeness. Boot points out: "No, not all Trump supporters are racist. But virtually all racists, it seems, are Trump supporters."

Also: "It is hard to know who is worse: Trump or his enablers. I am inclined to think it is the latter. Trump does not know any better; he has no idea how a president, or even an ordinary, decent human being, is supposed to behave. But many of his supporters do know better, and they are debasing themselves to curry favor with him because he controls the levers of power." Boot does not go into the Evangelical support of Trump. Boot is not a Christian, so it is not his fight. But, I am so you can take that same quote and apply it to the big name Christian leaders that attach themselves to this man and make excuses for him and see how my frustration is doubled.

In the end, this book will not change any minds. But, I found it helpful to find someone as well-written as Max Boot has come to so many of the same conclusions that I have have.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE CORROSION of CONSERVATISM: WHY I LEFT the RIGHT by Max Boot.