President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

 

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier – C.W. Goodyear

Several years ago I made a goal to read at least one biography of every United States president.  I soon became aware that many of the lesser-known presidents had very little, if any, volumes devoted to them.  For every Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln that literally had hundreds of volumes devoted to them, the minor chiefs such as Franklin Pierce or Benjamin Harris had little to nil.  James Garfield, being somewhat inconsequential, did actually have one biography written about him around 1978, and because he was one of the lesser-known presidents, I was a bit surprised.  So I was even more surprised when there was yet another biography written about 45 years later.  Did we really need another one? And if so, is there enough interest about the man to actually warrant one?

Being a dedicated reader to the subject, I obviously had no problem picking this one up and adding to my collection.  But I’m in the minority. I have a hard time understanding why many would want to read a bio of the 20^th United States president.  That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy reading the book.  I enjoyed reading it immensely.  This book was well written and captivated my attention.  I have to honestly say that I wish EVERY U.S. president had such a volume devoted to them.  I would rapaciously snap it up and quickly devour it.  But for the masses of other readers?  Perhaps I’m overthinking things.  There’s an awful lot of books out there, and there are hundreds of millions of readers with a diverse set of tastes.

Like all well-written biographies, this book does what it should in the sequential department. We read about James Garfield as a child, a young man, a teacher, a local politician, a soldier in the U.S. Civil War (he achieves the rank of General), a U.S. Congressman, and eventually a President of the United States.  The main source of appeal that I found in this book wasn’t really about James Garfield the man, but rather the detailed paint strokes that the author gives us when creating a canvas of the time period in U.S. history.

I enjoyed reading about what life was like during Garfield’s 50 or so years of life (from about 1830 – 1880). I love the images of colonial America, the sweats and smells of the rather putrid city of Washington D.C., and most of all, the language of the educated populace that has been preserved through the multitudes of correspondence and diary entries.  The American language had not quite been infested with slang, so reading very astute observations by key political figures of the time always seemed more as though they came from the mouth of a William Shakespeare as opposed to a cable tv talk show host.

But Garfield the man, well, there simply isn’t that much here that is very interesting.  He was a rather quiet man who was thankfully an abolitionist, yet he never craved the spotlight nor had any searing ambitions to hold a high political office.  In fact, even though he achieves the rank of general in the Union army during the Civil War, I can’t really recall too much about anything vastly historical that Garfield ever achieved on the battlefield.  Yes, we do read of some important decisions he made and battles he fought, but it really does sort of have a rather a ho-hum feeling when discussing the escapades.

Once Garfield is elected to congress, the real joy in this book is reading not about him, but about the political system that exists.  This book is a reminder that politics has always been corrupt and politicians were mostly about power and rarely selfless altruism. For people disgusted with the political climate of the 2020s, please don’t think that things are now “much worse” than they ever have been.  No, the wretchedness has always been there, but in the days before sharing libelous Facebook posts and re-tweeting obvious lies, it took much longer for ignorance to breed and grow.  The real appeal of this book was to see Garfield interact with some of the more wretched elements of U.S. politics such as the infamous New York City power boss Roscoe Conkling.  Let’s just say that if you’re somewhat innocent like James Garfield, you need powerful friends to help you get elected.  Once you’re elected, the expectation is reciprocation, and if it doesn’t happen there are problems. Big problems.

What most modern readers don’t know is that the actual presidency of James Garfield was very short. He only held office for about six months before an assassin’s bullet cut his life short.  Because of this, the author spends a tad too much time talking about the primaries, the general election, and the attempted recovery of Garfield after he was wounded.  It seems as though Garfield remained alive (with heavy suffering) for about the same amount of time as president as before the assassination happened.  So read a LOT about Garfield on his sick bed, the nauseating details of the prolonged suffering, and the countless primitive medical techniques applied to him to try to keep him alive.

I did feel as though there were many parts of James Garfield’s life that were skipped over a bit. We don’t read a whole lot about his family life. Most of what we read about his wife ‘Crete’ we read from Garfield’s correspondence to and from her.  It rarely seemed as though the two were ever in the same room.  Their marriage didn’t seem to a particular joyous one either. In fact, we briefly read about an affair of Garfield’s fairly early in the marriage, yet the details provided in this book are incredibly sparse.

Speaking of incredibly sparse information, although we read ad-nauseum about the slow death suffered by Garfield after he his shot, we read almost nothing about his assassin, his background, nor his motives. In fact, we only read his name once.  (As you’re reading this review, do YOU know the name of Garfield’s assassin? I didn’t think so.)  So although this book was very well written, I confess that I thought maybe there should be more attention paid to some of the details that seemed a bit thin.

I should also point out that I did also read the biography of James Garfield that came out 45 years or so earlier (by Allan Peskin), but I read an awful lot, so I honestly can’t say that I remember much about it, nor can I give any sort of fair comparison.  If you like history, though, and do have the urge to read about James Garfield, this book will more than adequately scratch your itch.

Holly

 

Holly – by Stephen King

This is one of those books that I knew I wouldn’t like before I ever picked it up. I read it because I’ve read just about everything that Stephen King has ever written.  But I knew I wouldn’t like it.  I don’t like Holy Gibney.  This is the 6^th or 7^th book (or short story) that features her.  Stephen King likes her, and to be fair, so do many of his readers, so I guess I need to accept the fact that I’m in the minority.  After (finally) finishing this thing, I really really hope we’ve seen the last of her, but somehow I find that doubtful.

Holly is a private investigator.  We first met her in Stephen King books as an assistant to Bill Hodges.  Now that Bill Hodges has died (after a trilogy of books), Holly is the main investigator and also the main character.  Being that these stories are Stephen King stories, there’s a lot of weirdness in these tales, but this really isn’t the issue.  I just don’t like Holly Gibney.

It’s not that she’s nasty, ugly, or unlikeable. The big problem I have with her is that her obsessive compulsive disorder behaviors drive me up the wall. It also seems as though Stephen King feels as he has to become an obsessive compulsive writer when writing about his obsessive compulsive protagonist.  Quite often, we read several paragraphs of what Holly is thinking or doing when one or two sentences would suffice.  The biggest annoyance in this book around Holly and her tendencies is COVID.  This book was written during the COVID pandemic, and we have to read far too much about its residual effects on everyday life in this story.  It’s highly annoying, stupid, unnecessary and completely unrealistic.

I must say that I agree with the authors treatment of the virus, which has idiotically become ridiculously political.  Note to readers everywhere: if you’re one of those people who prefers to ignore science and get your COVID information from conspiracy videos, you will not like how the interactions go in this book.  The fact that I agree with Mr. King and still found the constant idiotic references annoying tells you just how far off the deep end King goes.  EVERYTIME Holly enters a room, she has to first have a conversation with whomever she encounters about COVID.  We hear whether or not they’re vaccinated (usually they are, but we have to be subjected with a character telling about an moronic relative who is not. This moron relative, of course, is a Donald Trump supporter), we have to hear about all the intricacies of the wearing of masks, all of the lore about the vulnerable, the sick, the uneducated, and on and on.  Had I enjoyed the book (remember I didn’t) then these detours would have brought down my enjoyment a notch.  Since I didn’t like the book, these ridiculously repetitive elements just made a bad story worse.

Now, normally when I write reviews of novels, I don’t like to reveal much about the plot.  But I thought this thing was so stupid, I feel it’s my duty.  The story that Holly gets intwined with has to do with disappearing individuals.  Why are they disappearing?   Because there’s an older couple who kidnaps them and eats them.  Feel free to read that last sentence again.  I didn’t mistype that.  Apparently this older couple is getting real old, they’re in a lot of pain, so eating certain fresh human organs can briefly relieve their aches and pains.  At least until it’s time to kidnap and cannibalize the next victim.  It almost made reading about COVID over and over again somewhat desirable.

There’s a few diversions within this story that seem to do nothing but make the book unnecessarily longer. We read a lot about a young person’s entering poetry contests, and about Holly’s obsession with her recently deceased mother.  I found the whole thing extremely long and unpleasant.

The only bright spot is that the e-version of this book that I read had a “bonus” novella that is part of an upcoming Stephen King book titled “You Like it Darker”.  The story “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream” is featured in its entirety (odd since usually these bonus features only include a chapter or two) and it was incredibly enjoyable.  Since it was part of an e-reader, I have no idea how long page-wise the story was, but I would guess 100-125 pages.  The fact that I enjoyed it so much cemented my opinion that I wasn’t “just grouchy” while reading the main book.  I managed to get through the bonus story in about two or three sittings.  So I’m happy to say my time wasn’t completely wasted.

Again, there are a LOT of readers that like Holly Gibney, so don’t just go by my review.  If you’re not crazy about her in the other books though, take heed that this story is pretty much like all the other ones.

Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius

 

Billy Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius – Bill Pennington

This is probably the best sports biography I’ve ever read. It’s certainly the most detailed. Author Bill Pennington is a former beat writer that covered the New York Yankees, and I’ve learned that these guys are usually the best when it comes to writing about the game of baseball.  After all, they did (or still do) it for a living, and they’re also privy to an awful lot of information that the public doesn’t possess.

As the subtitle of this book states, Billy Martin was definitely flawed, and he was definitely a genius.  Unfortunately, whereas he was a genius when it came to knowing and managing the game of baseball, he was pretty much flawed in everything else in his life.  The ratio isn’t always obvious since Billy was pretty much involved in baseball throughout his whole life.  As long as he had a uniform on (he played on 7 teams, and managed a total of 5), life was overall good. So the alcoholism, constant brawling, and multiple failed marriages tended to get somewhat dismissed as being a tad irrelevant within his very active life.

After the preliminary “early childhood” part of this biography, we see what makes Billy tick as a young ball player.  He was never the type of player that overwhelmed lovers of statistics when reading a box score, but his personality more than made up for this. He had an infectious personality that made his teammates love him and his opponents loathe him. During the 1950s, we also read an awful lot about his off the field carousing with teammates such as Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle, yet the author mainly keeps the nightlife stories PG-13 rated.  Of course, the times were different, and when ballplayers lived a hard nightlife during this period in history, the understanding was that the antics were kept out of the sports page and out of the public’s view.  In addition to Billy’s wild lifestyle, there are several fights he gets into with opponents during his playing career as well.  It’s somewhat ironic that some of the nastiest brawls that he would engage in would somehow lead to everlasting close friendships with this one-time adversary. A strange man indeed.

As you would expect, the best parts of the book are once Billy becomes a Major League manager. We read about how astute Billy is when it comes to knowing the idiosyncrasies of every player and every situation during the game. We also read how studied he is of some of the more obscure rules of the contest (who could ever forget the “pine tar” incident?)  If we’re honest, Billy Martin was a great manager. His personality, though, seems to always get him in trouble. He seems to lose his managerial jobs quite frequently.  Before he wears his ubiquitous Yankees jersey, he first manages the Minnesota Twins, the Detroit Tigers, and then the Texas Rangers.  Throughout these stints, he never falls below second place in the divisional standings. Since these were the days before the Wild Card was introduced to the sport (the author writes too much about this fact throughout the book; one of my minor grievances), a lot of Billy’s teams are somewhat forgotten in the annals of popular sports history. We’re reminded that these teams may have been better remembered at they had a chance and made to the playoffs as many teams do today.

Then he starts managing the New York Yankees. If you’re reading this book review and are somewhat a fan of the Yankees, can you recite how many times Billy was hired and fired as the New York Yankees manager by the irascible owner George Steinbrenner within a 13-year timeframe?  I couldn’t.  In fact, I even lost track while reading the book.  Every time you turn the page it seems as though Billy is hired, fired, or hired away from his manager job for a “special role” for the ballclub.  It’s a bit much.

In fact, it does become wearisome reading this book after a while. This isn’t the author’s fault. He’s telling it like it was. It’s just we get tired of the constant patterns and episodes that seem to replay over and over again. Every time the cycle begins anew for Billy Martin, it seems we read that:

Billy is rehired to manage the Yankees
Billy drinks a lot
Billy’s wife is mad at him because he spends too much time with his girlfriend
Billy’s girlfriend is mad at him because he spends too much time with his wife
Billy fights with his players
Billy drinks more
Billy gets in fights with strangers in bars
Billy fights with players on other teams
Billy fights with George Steinbrenner
Billy drinks even more
Billy fights even more
Billy is fired as manager of the Yankees
Billy misses baseball
Billy is rehired by George
Billy drinks and drinks and drinks

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I should also point out that the author never paints Billy as some sort of obnoxious monster, but I thought he treated his subject matter with more kid gloves then he deserved. I guess we must remember that once Billy was managing the team (any of his teams) he was widely loved by the fans of that team and most of his players. And he mostly won, which is the point after all.  I still can’t honestly say that I admired the man, nor I would have wanted to live his life in his shoes no matter how popular he was.  There’s more to life than baseball. 

Well, sadly that probably wasn’t true for Billy Martin.