New York

 

New York – by Edward Rutherford

The seventh novel by Rutherford, and the seventh I’ve read (I’m reading them sequentially). This one was, for me, easily his best.  Now, if you’ve managed to come across my other reviews of Rutherford’s works, you’ll note that I tend to say pretty much the same thing in every one of my reviews.  This one won’t be any different.  The “goods”, though, are much more prevalent this time around, and the “bads”, while still present, are minimal.

Like the great James Michener, Rutherford’s books are centered around places.  The characters in the book within the stories all have the particular place within the backdrop of the stories, and whatever happens to be occurring during the particular time in history, the geography plays a major part.  Maybe it’s because this is Rutherford’s first (and so far only) book that takes place in the U.S. is why I favored it (I reside in the U.S. as well). 

Yes, it’s always nice to learn about a city, country, or location, but Rutherford does sometimes lay the history on a bit thick and forgets to tell an actual story. One recurring theme in Rutherford’s books (it’s here, but not as often) is when he’ll have characters, say, eating dinner. Their conversation during the meal is nothing but the political climate of the time.  These conversations tend to be long and quite boring.  This is basically how Rutherford “quickly” teaches his readers about all of the politics about the place and the time.  It’s a bit much.

Also, in some of his books, the novel begins thousands of years ago, and each chapter jumps ahead at random intervals.  When you read some of his books that start out in, say 1000 BC, and then jump to 100 AD in the next chapter, and then 600 AD right after that, etc.  it can be a bit of a whirlwind and it’s hard to keep all the characters straight in your head.  Most of the time, each main character in a new story is a descendant of the early characters that we just read about, although the particular ancestor “existed” hundreds of years ago.

This isn’t so much the case with New York. He starts the history “late” for his standards, in the 17^th century, when the Europeans first settled the area. So the whole novel takes place over a span of about 350 years. That sounds like a lot, but not for Rutherford.  This was a huge advantage.  What’s common for Rutherford is to introduce us to 3-4 families in his first chapter or two, and as mentioned, we read about the descendants of the original families in latter chapters. So we’re getting several huge family trees to process, so to speak.  What works well in this novel is that the author really only focuses on ONE family throughout the entire book. This is actually a huge relief. He doesn’t even feel the need to include a ubiquitous family tree diagram at the beginning of the book that the reader has to constantly flip to and keep their bearings.

Yes, there are other families in this book, but many don’t get introduced to us until well into the overall narrative.  For example, there’s one family of Italian immigrants in this book, the Carrusos, that get quite a lot of focus, yet they don’t show up until the early 1900s when they arrive on Ellis Island. This actually worked very well and I hope Rutherford continues this practice with his future works. One doesn’t feel that their brain is quite as scrambled with so many related characters throughout the centuries.

So, yes, the star of this novel is New York (not the state, the city) and like all novels of this sort, it really does make one yearn to learn more about the city’s history. Sometimes, though, the storytelling is so good, that one forgets about New York altogether and becomes engrossed in the tale.  A good thing.  A problem with a novel that focuses on such a grandiose place, is that the author has to really limit some of the stories due to space constraints.  This book is almost 900 pages, but it could have easily been longer.  Some parts of New York’s history get a lot more page space. The Revolutionary War in the late 1700s, for example, easily commands about 150 pages, but other times, we’re forced to quickly skim through small chapters and we’re not allowed to focus on certain periods as much as we might like.

In fact, the last 100 pages or so (which details about 1950 onward) seems awfully rushed. My guess is that the author simply didn’t want to tack on several hundred more pages, so he did the best that he could when forced to be concise.  One almost wishes he would have stretched this book over two volumes. (He did this with a story on Ireland, and to be fair, those two books did end up a bit bogged down with detail.)

His best in my opinion, and a must if you’re a native of New York, or if you just want to learn more about the place.

The Steal

 

The Steal by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague

“I’m not going to lose my f*cking law license because of these idiots.” – former White House council Porter Wright

 

As I write this review, the United States is in the middle of the hearings of the January 6^th Committee as they unveil evidence upon evidence that Donald Trump was a lying crooked boob.  I’m somewhat baffled by how obtuse many of his disciples remain to be.  In fact, I’m convinced that if Donald Trump held up a banana and told his moronic multitudes that he was NOT holding up a banana but was, in fact, holding up an apple, the majority of these individuals would believe him.  In fact, if any of these individuals decided to side with truth and say “No. That’s not an apple, that’s a banana” the majority of the devoted mob would threaten to harm, and/or kill the individual who dared speak the obvious.

Think I’m being extreme?  Well, let’s look at one example in this book. During the 2020 presidential election, it has been well documented that Trump discouraged mail-in ballots.  Despite his claims about potential fraud, the real reason is that mail-in ballots tend to favor the Democrats. Enter Rohn Bishop, a GOP chairman in the state of Wisconsin. Bishop is a Republican. Go back and read that last sentence 100 times.  Well, Bishop concludes that by discouraging mail-in ballots for his area of Wisconsin, it will actually HURT Donald Trump. He’s rightly aware that by dissuading mail-in ballots in his particular neck of the woods, his candidate will be harmed by the overall result.  So what does Bishop do?  He tells the voters the obvious: They should vote via mail if it suits them.   So enter the Trump devotees. Do they praise Bishop for thinking outside the box and helping their candidate?  Oh no.  It doesn’t matter what the reason Bishop has for his thinking. What matters is that Bishop had the nerve to contradict their God (i.e. Trump) and for that, he must be punished.  So threats are made against him and his family ad nauseum. The poor guy ends up in the hospital due to an anxiety disorder. All because he had the nerve to state an opinion.  An opinion, ironically, that would have helped the 45^th president.

This book is full of such anecdotes; starting on election day and going all the way to January 6^th. There are too many to mention, and all cause one to want to angrily heave the book against a wall in frustration while reading. Such as the story of Lynie Stone of Arizona, another Trump worshipper and election worker, who sees a spreadsheet of possible duplicated ballots with the number 6,660.   Well, gosh, she concludes, that number contains the digits “666”. So it MUST be a sign. It must be evil. It’s from the devil! And Donald Trump must prevail at all costs!  The real tragedy is just how common this thinking tends to be with this frenzied bunch.

I recently became familiar with author Mark Bowden’s work after reading the excellent “Guests of the Ayatollah” which documents the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.  He’s well respected and is by no means some “librul hack.”  If the book seems biased against Trump and his claim, it’s simply because there wasn’t ANY evidence to support Trump’s claims. Other than a bunch of angry screaming louts who seem to believe if one is loud and violent enough, that can be then called some sort of objective truth. The events in the book are told in a rather sardonic, condescending tone, but what else can an objectional author do?  There were at least 63 (that’s a “6” followed by a “3”) frivolous lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign, and every single one was thrown out.  In fact, many of the smarter lawyers refused to go near such a claim.  It’s easy to scream at a television camera that there was “fraud”, but no respectable lawyer would bring these unfounded accusations before a judge of any respectable court. Doing such a thing would cause a lawyer to lose their credibility awfully quick.

There have been a plethora of books already written about this sad, horrific event, and this one is more geared towards “the little people” - the Americans who volunteered to help the election process, and yet found themselves in the cross-hairs of the ignorant underlings of the worst president in the history of the United States. Their crime? They simply were trying to tell the truth. It’s a brief book, and the focus goes from state to state – highlighting where the votes were the closest and where Joe Biden prevailed. Obviously, this is because these areas are the obvious breeding ground for the many slimy losers who refuse to accept reality.

I don’t think this book will win many converts. I can say the same thing about the January 6 Committee, but one hopes that it might just budge the needle ever so slightly away from idiocy and over to some sort of normalcy. Contrary to what Trump’s mantra was, America never was really “great” (just ask a Black person), and it has plenty of faults during its young history.  But if more can simply acknowledge that this man is full of it, it would be nice to drift back to when the problems of yesteryear seemed oh so insignificant.

Mayflower

 

Mayflower – by Nathaniel Philbrick

So first thing’s first. This book really isn’t about the Mayflower – or specifically about the famed Mayflower voyage that is embedded in every American’s brain by the time they’re six years old. The first half of the book is, but then the narrative strays.  That’s too bad because the first half of the book that does deal with the famed voyage is outstanding. After that, the author essentially changes focus and we read about the conflicts between the newly arrived Puritans and their Native American neighbors.  That in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but the problem is that this portion of the book becomes very tedious and uninteresting.

I really wish the author would have stuck with and focused on the Mayflower voyage throughout the whole book. Maybe he simply ran out of things to write?  Could be, as what we read is, in fact, very detailed.  We begin several years before the voyage in the countries of England and Holland and read about the events that led the individuals to set out on such a treacherous voyage.  And it was quite treacherous.

When these individuals finally arrived in the new world, they were a far cry from the neat, smiling, well-scrubbed faces that we saw in the illustrations in children’s books back in school.  This was a haggard, motley crew, and more people died on the voyage due to disease and starvation than survived.  Once the lucky survivors disembark, they quickly discover that they’re not alone in this new land, and the transported Europeans and Native Americans are awfully cautious towards each other.  They meet from time to time, nervously sniffing each other like strange dogs in the road. Today, many have been led to believe that these “Indians” were peaceful people and yet the white man took advantage of them and took their land away from them through bloody conflict.  This is a bit of a stretch, and we read here that the eventual skirmishes weren’t quite as cut and dry as that.  We forget that there wasn’t only one tribe of “Indians” and the different tribes didn’t always get along with each other either, so the new colonists essentially are entering a hotbed of conflict when they first arrive to their new home.

Well, once that story is done, we switch to the ongoing conflicts between the colonists (not only those who arrived on the Mayflower) and the many Native American tribes. It should be pointed out that the majority of this takes place a good fifty years or so after the Mayflower arrives.  The biggest antagonist for the relocated Europeans is an Indian named “King Philip” and the book proceeds to then tell the story of “King Phillips War”.  The problem here is that it just isn’t very interesting. Apart from the reflections from the work of Mary Rowlandson, a 38-year-old Christian captive of the Indians during this time, it’s very hard for the reader to stay focused and the book really did become a chore to finish.  This is such a shame since the first part was so interesting and informative.

I’m not sure what other works to recommend around the Mayflower voyage. I did notice that the bibliography for this work was rather huge.  I wish the author would have kept his focus on the title of the book. Maybe had he not consulted so many sources, the narrative wouldn’t have drifted too far off course.